From The Edge of Civilization

Goat's house, or rather his housing complex, overlooks what I like to call the edge of civilization. Some of his neighbors have come back and there is some construction in the neighborhood and I swear that shortly before we left town I actually saw garbage men working (though they don't really seem to have made much of a dent in the piles), but for the most part it seems as if there is an endless expanse of abandoned homes as far as the eye can see. I stayed at Goat's place for a little over a week while we practiced and got ready for this summer tour. Each day I woke up and went running and at this point my throat and lungs are killing me. Could be allergies or something but I think the air there is just terrible. My friend Rebecca said that one huge mound of garbage by her house is bound by a single thin strand of caution tape which simply says "asbestos". Breath deep. We headed out of town a few days ago on the way to our first show in Tucson with stops in Austin (to hang with friends and eat good food) and El Paso (because there's no where else out there to stop). The desert was pretty fucking hot. Definitely hotter than 110 but I think not so hot as 120. At one point the van was getting pretty hot (the engine that is) and Neal started running the heat which he says lowers the engine temperature. It got a little toasty there for a minute. Eventually we made it to San Diego last night and I have to say it was a breath of fresh sea air. The Pacific is beautiful and the beach there is not half bad. The show went pretty well (though not as well as Tucson) though we played for a long time and my face is a little out of shape and this morning my lips are a little chafed and sore. After the show we discovered that in the entire city of San Diego there was not one open hotel room. The city was officially without a single vacancy. Crazy. Especially because there are not a shortage of hotels there. We (or rather I) had to drive quite a while north before we found a hotel which had an available room which was a smoking room but at that point of night who cares. Took me a while to fall asleep 'cause I had consumed a little bit of coffee so I didn't fall asleep at the wheel. That brings us to Sunday (today) in Los Angeles. We'll be bouncing around the west coast this summer, not playing too many shows but out here for most of the summer. We're trying out the whole play some shows and then fly places thing. Plane flights can't be any more expensive than gas here in California. At the end of the tour we're gonna finish recording an album and then take a step back touring. Put the album out there and see what happens. It's been a while since we played a show where the latest album actually has songs we still play.

Been Far Too Long

It's been far too long since we last wrote something here. We're currently in Cincinatti at our friend John's place which is great. We'll be heading to Toledo soon for the fifth night of twenty straight nights of shows. Then a sunday off and six more shows and we're back in New Orleans to record some of the new songs we've been working on in this tour. The goal was to go out on this trip and play an entirely new set. We more or less done that sprinkling in a song or two from the past on occasional nights. We're pretty excited about things right now. The music has undergone a transformation that we've been shooting for for quite a long time. The next step is to put out an album (or actually an EP) of some of the new stuff and get it out there. We definitely get some confused hippies complaining on occasion about the vocals and how we used to sound much better (see jammier), but for the most part everything is going over well and the people who are interesting to us are getting it. Some people can't deal with change but frankly Drums and Tuba has always been about change and evolution and never being complacent or conventional. We definitely put a lot of thought to changing the name and symbolically wiping the slate clean but after hundreds and hundreds of name ideas and much deliberation we decided not to become just another band (as in the kings of the wolf stripes of montreal) with a conventional name and to just stick with who we are which has always been a little bit confusing for people to put their hands on. The hope is that we can change the perception of what we are (which is not a jam band I'm sorry to say) without changing what we are. I'm sure this makes little sense to someone else 'cause frankly I barely understand things myself. In a nut shell, make music which has meaning to you, book yourself some shows, make some records, work hard, and keep the bullshit to a minimum.

I'm an idiot but...

Look, I’m an idiot. I don’t know much about the world and politics and business and I’m certainly not privy to any top secret knowledge. I read the papers every day. So how is it that I appear to have a better idea of foreign affairs than the leaders of our government who purportedly are some of the keenest minds in the world. I was arguing in my mind today over whether these people are really as dumb as they appear to be or whether they’re just constantly feeding us whatever it takes to make us feel better and go along with what must be plans or which we have no idea. What I’m referring to right now is the war in Iraq which has taken a turn for the worst this week. Not that things were going that well previously. It seems like a mess but we’re told constantly that things are actually going really well. How is it that someone as ignorant as me could be pretty sure that there were no weapons of mass destruction and yet Dick Cheney was sure there were. How can someone driving around in a van all day like me know that the cost of the war would be astronomical (and actually even more than I thought as I just read that every individual in the U.S. Has basically spent $2,000 in taxes to fund the war efforts) and yet the Bush administration claimed the war would cost less than a billion dollars ($250 billion so far and counting). How can an idiot like me know that we’d be stuck in that country for years and years with no end in sight and that we’d be facing constant threats of the collapse of that country as the sunnis shiites and kurds constantly threatened to destroy each other and yet Donald “Duck” Rumsfeld said we’d be out in under a year after having been welcomed with open arms. How can someone as ignorant of military tactics as me know more than these guys about how you need overwhelming troop numbers in order to occupy and control a volatile country. We’re either dealing with an overwhelming level of ignorance and incompetence or there’s simply something else going on behind the scenes and if that’s true the color back there must be green. Who knows? Not sure if I want to believe that these guys mean well but are incredibly stupid or if they’re actually really smart and there motives are incredibly dubious. I did just see in the paper that Kellog and Brown the Haliburton subsidiary had promised 250 million in services which were never supplied but that the government said it was okay since they’ve more or less (the less being the 250 million) done what they were contracted to do and you certainly can’t break a contract. Was Chaney involved in the decision to pay an incompetent company a huge sum of tax payer money for botching the job they were hired to do? Once again is it just incompetence or nefarious plotting. We’ll probably never know as the NSA has been reclassifying documents at a furious pace in an attempt to hide any criticism of what our government does. I just can’t believe the way when Bush actually says stuff to the public with meaning that it’s as if it’s something we’ve never heard before. Like we’re beholden to foreign oil. No shit? Didn’t Carter mention that in 1978? John Stewart had a great line in reference to Chaney shooting a guy in the face and being so powerful that the guy apologized to him, “It’s not so much you couldn’t make this stuff up, rather that you wish you had to.”

On the road again...

Back on the Road…
It’s been a long time (for us) but we’re back on the road playing shows for a select few people out there. We’ve taken a couple months off after the last tour to gather our lives and our sanity. Tony’s been down in New Orleans fixing up his place and helping our friends out. In one now infamous instance he cleaned up our friend’s Valerie and Joe’s yard without even telling them. Valerie brings it up every time I see her still with astonishment still ringing in her voice. We’ve been doing the North Carolina, South Carolina thing the past couple days. Last night we played a show with our friends The Greyhounds. It was great to see those guys. Andrew Trube is one of a kind. We’ve been practicing in New Orleans the last ten days or so writing some new songs. We’ve got three more close to done but unfortunately not quite ready for this weekend and next. That is unless we make judicious use of Monday and Tuesday which we have off. We were going to head from Huntsville, AL back down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras but since the next show is on Wednesday in Knoxville and the price of gas is about $454 dollars a gallon we might be better off just staying in the area for those couple days. Since we hate days off the plan is to rent a practice space for a couple days and possibly work up a few of those tunes to be tested out live. We can never quite tell where a song is at until we actually play it in front of some people (never too many with us). Otherwise we just have one more show on March 13 before SXSW where we were planning on playing all the new stuff. We had a good show last year there but the newer stuff (see singing and more rock) wasn’t ready and we were having equipment problems so we played, for us, a more conservative set. Sort of a shame. This year we’re gonna kick it new school. A lot has gone down in the world since we last blogged so there are pretty much endless things to talk about politically. The new supreme court is about to begin the process of dismantling roe vs. wade. A civil war is apparently breaking out in Iraq contrary to all that Bush had told us about how great things were going there. Ports in the two cities I live in are going to be controlled by a company owned by the UAE which is one of three governments in the entire world that recognized the Taliban and where two of the 9/11 highjackers came from and where some of the money to finance 9/11 went through. And finally, Dick Chaney shot an old man in the face and proved that he is so powerful that the victim apologized profusely to Chaney for all that he had put him through. Tony pointed out to me that everyone refers to the “Bush Regime.” I don’t think it was ever the Clinton regime it was just Clinton did or said whatever. It’s never just Bush it’s his regime (see the guy who shot the other guy in the face perhaps…).

Is it all luck?

Is it all the luck of the draw? I think sometimes we don't appreciate how lucky we are. I was reading today about a man named Robert Clark Jr. who served twenty four years in prison for robery, rape, and kidnapping. DNA evidence just proved that the women who testified that a 5'7" black man raped her and that man was 6'1" Robert Clark was in fact wrong and her actual rapist went on to commit multiple acts of sodomy and child rape. Oh well. I was thinking about this from everybody's perspective and so often articles of this kind don't investigate the things I'm wondering. What does the victim feel. Is she aware that not only did she send an innocent man to jail for life but that this allowed the real perpatrator to stay free and do horrible things to many people? Can one ever imagine what Robert Clark went through the past twenty four years and what it feels like to have missed your life and one day the state says oops we got caught fucking up so you're free to go. The judge in his case actually admonished him in court for proclaiming his innocence. Is our system so fatally fucked. Why in life does one man have his life taken away from him while I have been lucky enough to play the tuba. Look around the world and there are so many ways in which life could be worse and different and why are we who we are and why can we live the lives we do while another person is who they are and lives their life. Is it all luck and chance? Is that all life is...

Always press record...

We broke down yesterday on our way from flagstaff to Tucson. We didn't make it very far. Just half way to Phoenix. We're in the middle of the desert and we hear some band whining and grinding sounds from the engine and then smoke starts coming out the air vents. Turns out something has seized and a belt is just grinding itself up and we're smelling burning rubber. Fortunately we're right by an exit and we can pull over but as our luck would have it there is nothing in sight. We're pulled over in the middle of nowhere with nothing but cactus as far as the eye can see. We can barely get signal on the cell phone but we climb to the top of a small hill and are able to reach AAA. The tow truck driver that comes to pick us up is what one might refer to as a character. He throws us on his bed and we take off all four of us cramming in his cab and we plot a scheme whereby with both Mr. Pokey's AAA and mine we can get towed all the way to Tucson and make the show. Then we can try and get the van fixed the next day which is unfortunately a Sunday so we're screwed. Eventually we'll be saved by folks who are nice enough to lend us their van so we can play tonight in Phoenix as we're coming back to Tucson tomorrow to record for a few days but that's another story. We're basically with this tow truck guy named Bob for about four and a half hours and he does not stop talking for one moment the entire time. The more he gets comfortable the more he starts letting loose. Telling us off center jokes and going on about Bill Murray comedies and eventually really digging in and spewing all his conspiracy theories about Bush and about how Kennedy killed Marilyn Monroe, and about how he hauled choppers to Brad Pitt and had to threaten his personal manager and about how he had to break a guys leg when he was reposessing his hummer. At a certain point I realized I just couldn't even follow a word the guy was saying. Entertaining but completely exhausting. It was like his overwhelming and constantly ramping up energy was literally sucking the life out of us like a vampire. As the trip went on he got more and more chummy slapping me in the arm to make a point and swerving from side to side on the highway as he used both hands to make a point leaving the van to steer itself. Half way to Tucson we stopped so that we could call in the second tow to AAA and in the parking lot Mr. Pokey met his brother who lives nearby and took off with him. That was a bizarre parking lot where immediately one group of golf bag toting people wanted to pay Bob to fix their flat tire because they didn't want to get their hands dirty and another group of people wanted Bob to haul a stolen car back to Phoenix for them. By the time we arrived in Tucson we were starting to lose it and as we got within blocks of the club after Bob had been talking like a machine gun for almost five hours straight he turned to us and he said, "so what about you guys? What kind of music do you play? Do you get wasted after the shows?" Our exhausted answers didn't excite him and he told us we were boring. Bob dropped our van in the parking lot of Plush and we had to unload and sound check and play a show. Tony and I exchanged a look as if to say how exhausting the whole thing was and how could we possibly find the energy to play a show but we were unable to actually find the energy to voice the words. We've been touring for nearly three months and we're right at the end and we did not realize how exhausted and worn down we were until Bob and his stories of growing up in long island and going to the Nassau Colleseum to see the Wall and The Who and Led Zepplin and beating people up and hating rap and smashing his kids rap records just broke our backs and crushed our spirits. Now we're trying to suck it up and get ready for one more show tonight and then three days of recording and then the killer drive from Tucscon to New Orleans and a final show on Saturday at DBA. Can we make it? Stay tuned...

California

That title is supposed to be pronounced with that Arnold articulation of every syllable and even what's between those syllables. We've had a great run here in California. We should probably get out here more than once every two or three years. Last night in LA was a blast although a little crazy sounding. The PA could barely deal with us and I'm guessing we were loud as fuck. Intimate though. The crowd was tons of fun. I know being from New York I'm supposed to dislike this city but I really like it out here. Everybody we meet is great. San Francisco was another great show. That city I could live in. We had a couple trips to El Faralito which is just about my favorite burrito in the world and That1Guy took us to get pastrami which for not being in New York was actually pretty good. Props to Kate and Jamie for being such wonderful hosts and putting us up in what is just about my favorite abode in the world. You can't beat a view like that. Santa Cruz was surprisingly good as well, as was Nevada City which is actually in California. Everybody at those shows was cutting some serious rug which really helps us play well. Our show in Tahoe was technically not in California. We were actually a few feet into Nevada which allowed for the smoking and gambling. Technically that was our first casino gig. I suppose someday, years from now, we'll be washed up and doing the entire casino circuit but for now it was pretty novel. Not that those washed up acts don't rake it in compared to beat up old van driving us. I actually gambled a tiny bit. I wanted to bet ten bucks on the roulette table but only had a twenty so I cashed it all in and placed a ten dollar bet on black and promptly lost. Then I walked over to the Blackjack table and played two five dollar hands and won my money back. Back to the roulette table and another ten dollar bet on black which I lost again. Then back to blackjack where two hands later I was again back to even. Over to the roulette table and a third and final bet on black which I actually won. Ten dollars up and it is all over. There will be no rematch...

How do they get away with it...

How the hell do they get away with it? It was election time in San Francisco while we were there. That's a city I really love, and frontAnd if al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead." Only the right in America could possibly get away with this kind of statement. If someone who leaned left said this they would be destroyed. This was in response to what was not a big ballot deal. They voted to limit military recruiting tactics. Big fucking deal. In the same issue of the san Francisco Chronicle there was a thing about Pat Robertson and how he was basically calling for the destruction of Dover Pennsylvania for voting out school board members who favored intelligent design. "I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover. If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God. You just rejected him from your city. God is tolerant and loving but we can't keep sticking our finger in his eye forever. If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can ehlp them." What kind of God is he talking about. A petty pathetic vindictive jackass who needs his ass kissed constantly? What is up with these guys. These are not obscure fringe people. These are prominent people of extreme power in this country. It definitely makes you wonder. A lot of this stuff is sold innocently. Don't you believe that there's more to life than science can explain. All we want is to include that in what the school teaches. The subtext is of course believe in Jesus or go to hell and that's what we're going to teach in the schools because this is a christian country and to hell with anyone who believes otherwise. Let me tell ya, it wears ya down...