:: Music As Social Agitation Records::

:: Saturday, January 15, 2005 ::

Jan 14th (Salt Lake City, UT)

the family took me to the seattle greyhound station around 7pm last night after a sleepless and hectic couple of days of trying to tie things up on the work and home front and trying to get things ready for the tour. I wound up not being successful enough at all that and will have some home-work to do from the road. as far as merch things. I did not get stickers made. I was able to burn about 25 copies of Dawn Treading and I brought about 30 copies of the A Sandcastle Still album “From Penrose To Montrose,� which I had just been sitting on. Neither of the album cases/design were done for the records, minus like 10 Dawn Treading albums. gonna have to do that from the road as well. got to the bus station, said goodbye to the fam and got in line for a 21 hour bus ride to Salt Lake City. I was set to arrive at 6pm. the ride was long, obviously, and I wound up sitting to this interesting lady from Arkansas named Jacqueline. we didn’t really get to talking until the morning time, and see was a chatter mouth the whole way out. we first talked about her health, as she was a 50 year old lady who had 2 to 3 brain aneurisms and whom the doctors, after riskily poking and prodding at her brain for a few year, had told that she could die at any time. she had the type of aneurisms that are almost always fatal. she also had two boys who were a little less than my age and we were soon talking at length about her feisty upbringing and her family and husbands and such. she was still a smoker. she had her shoulders reconstructed. and many more details. I was not much in the talking mood most of the time, but we wound up being friends and as we approached Utah she began to slide in religion to the mix. though not tide down to one church, she belongs to the “end of times� crowd and considers herself a devout student of the bible. she is against abortion and against gay marriage, though one of her sons is gay. as we stumbled through our held beliefs and passions, I discovered that she was pretty open mind about things and adhered to the “god is the only judge� slash “it is not for me to say� crowd. she was surprised, due to how silent I had been I guess, at how much I myself was a student of the bible, though in a different school, and about my political and religious beliefs in general. Jacqueline wants to be cremated and, though she’s a bush supporter, wishes me luck in DC. she gave me her address and said to contact her if I get stuck in jail. she would not be the only one to be bringing up the end of times. it seems to be on the minds of a good many greyhounding folk these days, in part due to the recent tsunami. I myself, realized (and was surprised I hadn’t come across it in my religious studies, since it is not a new idea) that it seems fitting that if one is to admit a symbolic chronology to the creation narratives (ie, seven days is not seven days, etc) than one would have to admit that the the end of times narratives most likely had symbolic chronologies as well. perhaps the apocalypse started a few thousand years ago…

tony was there to meet my late bus and it was good to see him. we were on our way. he had already stopped by Kilby Court. we got in his car, which apparently needed a break job due to the screeching breaks, that was okay though, it was a good backdrop to my introduction to Joanna Newsom whom Tony had become obsessed with. I could see why. she was very refreshing. fucking brilliant. I knew that she would be the soundtrack to our tour. Kilby is not that far from the temple and the bus station, and we parked on the main street outside the Kilby alley. what an amazing alley it is too, tucked away in a small industrial part of SLC. who would think that a bunch of quaint little houses with small yards and lazy old dogs and old wooden garages with orange light glowing out would be down the road. it felt good there, especially as we approached Kilby court. I had no idea what to expect, really, and it is probably in my top two all-ages venues I have ever known aesthetically. with its courtyard and fire pit and nice, rustic fencing. the only thing I knew to expect was the green-lit backdrop on the stage, which turned out to be that wavy green fiberglass stuff that people use for make-shift roofing, lit behind with fluorescent office lights. the night was set to be busy, as there were four acts outside of us. drew danburry, one of the nicest dudes out there, had set the show up and built the bill and did an excellent job overseeing the whole affair. he played first with his charisma and his breathy alto croon. good songs, good man. next up was The Glendale Rabashaw, which was actually just one dude whose name happened to not be glen or Glendale. his songs were really good, breathy alt-country singed folkpop. he was a nice chap to boot. the next band was The Annuals, who were a five piece with drums, bas, guitar, keyboards and slide guitar. It was hard to pinn down exactly what they sounded like, as each new verse or choruses seemed to remind me of another indie act I liked and respected. in the end, that lead to them basically just sounding like themselves and they were really good at the indie pop with a country tinge and prog-chicago style and on and on. I went on next and bust through four or five songs horribly. simply horribly. later I said it was my worst show in a couple months, but it was probably my worst show in a year. which sucked cause there were lots of kids there and some of my older Utah friends and I wanted to have a good set for drew.

I guess I should mention here, that my rib has been fucked up. I fucked it up while loading my shit into Tyson and Jenn’s car after our show together the week before at Stuarts. basically, I slipped hard on the snow and my left ribs landed right on the corner of my suitcase. it took my breathe away for a minute and worried me pretty quickly. the next couple of days I took small doses of some leftover pain killers and it seemed to be getting better, though it hurt to breathe in deeply, to sneeze/cough, to laugh hard and to stretch. turns out though, that when I decided to not take the painkillers for a day that the pain came back even worse. I decided I would bring some painkillers with me. so I have been taking them a bit, but it is hard to belt it out and to sing loudly, at the Kilby show I was running out of breathe towards the end of such lines.

anyways, my set sucked, but the show and the kids and the bands were rad. drew was able to give us 120 bucks, which was a great start financially to the tour, and my share doubled all the money I had (to my name). afterwards we went to this pizza place with the kids in the annuals and ate some pizza had a few beers. me and tony had been really worried where we were gonna stay that night cause our bus left at 6am in the morning and karl in provo was the only one to offer a house up, but that was too far away to get to the station in the morning. we asked around a bit before the show and then asked drew and he quickly asked his friend Stephanie and she agreed, without knowing us or having heard us, to let us crash and to get up butt-fucking early to drive us to the station AND to left tony park his car outside her house for three weeks (tony is coming back through town at the end of the tour). nice lady, that Stephanie. so, yeah. we crashed for a couple hours in her basement with a dog she was sitting and washed up and at 6am we were on the road again. these four hours were to be the only time till DC that we crashed at someones house. the greyhound was our home now…

:: brs 5:38 AM [+] ::
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