Party on It

Hoy hoy,

On the 30th of this month, this blog – along with the entirety of Charm City Current – will be sucked into the ether forever, pulling up a patch of virtual turf next to Geocities, Netscape and whatever’s left of Xanga. Instead, the Sun will be relying on a network of “community bloggers” to add some ground-level context to what’s going on in the news. I don’t imagine they’ll be writing much about the insides of men’s gas station bathrooms or the hierarchy of budget motel chains, so my opinion will be sorely unconsulted.

When that happens, Party On It will migrate over to the band’s website, where it will hopefully be updated more than five times per year. I got an external hard drive for Christmas so I was able to liberate four years worth of band photos off my old desktop, and…wow. I’m pretty sure if Vince Bugliosi was so inclined, he could convict me as a member of the Manson Family on the strength of those pictures alone. We’ve had weird times to be sure. Plenty of them.

In the meantime, we’re hard at work writing and demoing songs for our next record, which we hope to have recorded by early-Summer. Thus far, the process is already much different than how we made our last two album. Those were culled from big batches of songs that we had written over the intervening two (in the case of the self-titled album) to six years (in the case of Hail Mega Boys), and we sorted out the favorites. You can hear different eras of Rod’s songwriting butting up against one another because of how wide the swath of time between the oldest and newest tracks were. For this next record, most everything will have been written over the last six months and arranged by the band in a eight-week frenzy of activity. On January 1st we didn’t have a single song ready for the next record. By February 29th, we hope to have twelve. We’ll see.

And none of this begins to speak to when the album will actually be coming out, who’ll be producing it, who’ll be releasing it and whether the Mayans are going to wreck this whole thing in the end. Things for another time.

But in just a few weeks time, we’ll be leaving for our Annual Pilgrimage to South by Southwest in Austin, TX. Along the way to and fro, we’ll be stopping in a collection of our favorite cities, joined by our good friends The Features from Nashville. All of these shows will rule.

3/5 – Richmond, VA @ Strange Matter
3/6 – Athens, GA @ 40 Watt
3/7 – Chattanooga, TN @ Rhythm and Brews
3/8 – Birmingham, AL @ Work Play
3/9 – Baton Rouge, LA @ Chelsea’s
3/10 – New Orleans, LA @ Maison
3/14 – 3/18 – Austin, TX @ SXSW
3/21 – Nashville, TN @ Exit/In
3/23 – Louisville, KY @ Headliner’s
3/27 – Minneapolis, MN @ 7th Street Entry
3/30 – Chicago, IL @ Double Door
3/31 – Columbus, OH @ Super-Secret Radio Thing (Details to be revealed soon)

Then, after a scant rest of two weeks, we head out with Lucero for a two-week run that will test whether our livers – or any livers – can long endure. This will mark our first foray into Eastern Canada and we’re very excited for the poutine and close proximity to manageable socialism.

4/14 – Toronto, ON @ Lee’s Palace
4/15 – Montreal, QC @ Les Foufounes Electriques
4/18 – Northampton, MA @ Pearl Street
4/19 – Boston, MA @ Paradise Rock Club
4/20 – New York, NY @ Webster Hall
4/21 – Pawtucket, RI @ The Met Cafe
4/22 – Philadelphia, PA @ Union Transfer
4/24 – Harrisburg, PA @ The Abbey Bar at Appalchian Brewing Company
4/25 – Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club
4/26 – Richmond, VA @ The Hat Factory
4/27 – Asheville, NC @ The Orange Peel
4/28 – Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade (Heaven Stage)

If I don’t see you again in this space before it all disappears with a click of a few small buttons, I hope you’ll stay abreast of our travels elsewhere. I’ll always remember this as the two years where Billy Ripken was my co-worker.

Lastly…

RAAAAAVVVVVVVVEEEENNNNNNNNSSSSSSSSSS!!!

Driving home from Charles Village the other night, I had an out-of-body experience.

Crossing the 29th Street bridge over the Jones Falls, I came up behind an all-black Ford Econoline 15-passenger van with Connecticut plates pulling a similarly black trailer with a crude red eagle painted on the side, marking them as either a touring metal band or an unfortunately well-advertised Satanic cult. The leftmost lane split off for I-83 South, while a sign above the center and right lanes two pointed towards Druid Park Lake Drive. The driver hesitated in the middle lane, seemingly unsure of where he was supposed to go, and for a split second I could nearly hear the discussion that was surely going on in the front seats: Wait – where in the hell did 83 North go? That sign back there said it was straight ahead, but that one just says 83 South, and those two say Druid Park Lake…was that in The Wire?

Meanwhile, he’d slowed to 15 miles an hour and the right brakelight on the trailer had gone out, so as he pumped his foot while trying to make sense of this Gordian Knot of Direction, it looked like he was trying to summon the courage to take the interstate south, to at least head somewhere. But instead, he crawled past the southbound ramp, resigning himself to the Unknown, possibly about to drive off the face of the earth, or into the middle of the Barksdale-Stanfield War for all he knew. Until just then, as he slowly came around the bend, he caught sight of the nearly-hidden I-83 North exit ramp, picked up speed, and dove onto it and into the Night beyond. Until GPS took all the guesswork – and some amount of adventure – out of driving in unfamiliar cities, we’d been there in those same front seats in St. Louis, Detroit, Atlanta, even Washington, D.C. Hyde Park – does that sound nice, or dangerous?…Biggie always rapped about the Marcy Projects, so we probably want to get off Marcy Avenue as soon as we can…Are you sure Davison Freeway was the right exit? This looks bad. Lemme see the map… Our own personal driving tour of inner-city America, navigated by dome light.

On to more pressing matters…

We just confirmed the last dates of our 2011 calendar, and they amount to a whopping four shows on either end of December. They are:

Thursday 12/1 – New York, NY @ Mercury Lounge (early show!) Tickets
Friday 12/2 – Baltimore, MD @ Ottobar (Tickets go on sale 10/21 here)
Saturday 12/3 – Philadelphia, PA @ Kung Fu Necktie Tickets

Support for each of these dates still being hammered out, and we hope to announce it soon. All three of these will sell out, so lock ‘em down early…

And, lastly, the Big One:

Friday 12/30 – Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club (supporting the Drive by Truckers!!) Tickets

We’re thrilled and honored to be joining Patterson and Company for one date of the Trucker’s three night Farewell to 2011 and Welcome to 2012 that will also include Lucero on the 29th, and the Alabama Shakes and Booker T. Jones – of Booker T. and the MG’s fame – on New Year’s Eve. (We won’t all be on the same date, unfortunately.) Tickets for all three of these shows are going quickly, so by all means make haste in buying them if you intend to attend.

The unfortunate corollary to these shows is that we will not be doing a New Year’s Eve show in Baltimore for the first time in three years, which is a huge bummer all the way around. This felt like a good year to take a rest and have some personal adventures, or just get blind drunk in the privacy of our own homes watching Ryan Seacrest. Or whatever Telemundo has on that night.

I leave you with this:

Mikita’s Manager, Glen: Anything wrong, Davy?
Davy: Yeah, I got paid today.
Glen: Yeah, I know what that’s like.
Davy: No. You don’t understand. They laid me off. I got one of these. (holds up pink slip)
Glen: Yeah, I know how that feels.
Davy: Know what I’d like to do?
Glen: Yeah, I know what you’d like to do. You’d like to find the guy who did it, rip his still-beating heart out of his chest and hold it in front of his face so he can see how black it is before he dies.
Davy: (blinks) Actually, I was thinking of filing a grievance with the union.
Glen: Well, the world’s a twisted place.

True that.

We’re waking up in Chattanooga this morning to the sound of wet streets and a torrent of sneezes that are either the result of Tennessee ragweed coating our nasal passages, or a brief moment of reckoning with the dusty bedding of the Rivergate Days Inn, where we’ve been camped out for the last two nights, catching up on sleep, catching up on Breaking Bad, and eating nearly every meal at the 24-hour City Cafe diner downstairs, which has shockingly good beans and rice and huge slabs of Butterfinger cake. After breakfast – at City Cafe, most likely – we’re headed to Charleston, seven hours to east, where we’ll be playing the Pour House with the Explorer’s Club tomorrow night, and running around with Cary Ann Hearst and her husband Michael Trent in the meantime. Most importantly, we’ll be checking out Deer Tick on Letterman tonight, who are sharing the show with BILL CLINTON! They have a new record that’s dropping two weeks from today, and when we passed through Providence in the Spring, we lent backing vocals and a tasty cowbell track to a song called “Love is a Four-Letter Word” (or something along those lines) that last I heard made the record. I’m hoping they get a chance to teach him how to inhale tonight.

Tomorrow will be the fourth date in this week-long run that began last Friday in Knoxville, passed through Nashville and Chattanooga on Saturday and Sunday, and visits Raleigh on Thursday before wrapping up at the “Fall for Greenville” festival in Greenville, South Carolina on Friday evening, along with Dawes, Kopecke Family Band and Dirty Dozen Brass Band. This is one of our last tours of the Fall and of this entire record “cycle” that began with the release of the album in July of last year, and once we get back home, it’ll be a winter of writing and demoing, broken up only by a brief run up the East Coast in early-December, and a show at the 9:30 Club with the Drive by Truckers on December 30th. We’ll be scarce until the Spring thaw, but when you do see us again, it’ll hopefully be with most of a new record in tow. Or several 7″. Maybe a Phil Collins covers EP. You’ll just have to wait and see.

Van summons has been issued. “Once more into the breach…”

In June of last year, we went on tour with Will Hoge and American Bang for a couple of weeks. I wanted to write more about it as it was happening, but I didn’t, and at the time, enough weird unexpected things conspired during that tour that it felt like laying Timberlands to toes talking about it. But a year later, it’s just funny.

So, if you want to know how that tour went for us, here’s a belated recap:

6/29/10

Logan, Zalamia and I are somewhere in southwest Virginia, hurtling homeward on I-81 up the spine of the Blue Ridge, with a bag of freshly purchased fireworks on the shotgun seat – including something called Frog Prince that was a Must Buy on sight. Earlier today, our river rat friend Matt, who works on the Ocoee outside Rod’s hometown of Cleveland, TN, took us on a whitewater rafting trip that turned into a three hour Clarence Carter sing-along everytime he asked us to paddle. Z got so caught up in the moment that when we hit the last rapid, he clambered up onto the nose of the raft and led us into the maelstrom, using one hand to hold himself to the craft and the other to taunt the roiling waters. It was a sweet taste of adrenaline at the end of a tour that could have used some.

That is not to say that we haven’t had fun, but that the shows just…haven’t quite gone as expected. The past weekend is a fine example.

On Friday night, we played the Orange Peel in Asheville, NC, a charming college mountain town that’s populated by outdoors-y, dreaded, vaguely Fraggle-ish folks. I’ve been to Burlington, VT and Portland, OR and I thought either of those two would qualify as the apotheosis of “green” – and burlap – culture. But then I came to Asheville, where in the span of a ten-block walk, I passed four vegan cafes, three outdoor supply shops, two organic grocers and a drum circle.

The show was a bit of a bust – less than 100 paid in a room that holds over 1000. At times, it reminded me of gigs my 9th grade band would play at Christian Youth Organization dances in gigantic cafeterias…only if said dance was populated almost entirely with people old enough to be my parents. This has been a recurrent problem for us on this tour: Hoge’s crowd skews older, and by that I mean that on any given night fully two-thirds of his crowd is over 50. And to a 50-year-old who came to see Will Hoge, we’re like battery acid in the metamucil. On some nights, when we took the stage, I could physically feel the audience wishing they were in a Shoney’s buffet that accepts AARP discounts. We’re a band that thrives on the give-and-take with the audience, but there was nothing coming back. As the night would go on, every song was met less by stunned silence than simmering, cranky rage, and the sound of dentures rattling in cavernous, unfilled rooms. It got to all of us, at times. I loved watching Rod’s introduction to “Don’t Get Old” morph from “This is a song about Baltimore” at the beginning of the tour, into the second-to-the-last night’s “This is a song about how much I hate old people.” If it hadn’t been for the American Bang guys, I could have almost sworn we had flipped the van and ended up in purgatory without our knowing it.

All that aside, this was a weekend of bookends for me. On Thursday, we played The Square Room in Knoxville, TN, which is the city where my first ever out-of-state show happened, back in 2000. My band at the time – Callow (look us up on Amazon used) – drove ten hours through the mountains to play this single show, then packed our gear up and drove those ten hours straight home. At the time, it seemed like what bands did – we had to start somewhere, after all. I remember sitting in the hotel room and staring at the national satellite image on The Weather Channel, completely incredulous that I had made it a third of the way across the country. It was the farthest I’d ever been from Baltimore. I was 20.

But Thursday showcased a different band and a different Knoxville – it’s a little seedier, a little more forward about it’s rough edges. The Old Town section that housed the vintage stores and biker apparel shop that had the best bumper sticker collection in the world is mostly gutted, and the Market Square district that we played in shined like a diamond in a septic tank. We actually got a good response at the Square Room, thanks to some folks that had driven up from Chattanooga. The next day, before we left for Asheville, we paid a visit to Yee Haw Industries and I could have spent $1,000 in there without blinking an eye.

The next day we played in Birmingham…well, more correctly, we played in the suburb of Hoover, about twenty minutes east of downtown, at a spot called Cafe Firenze, a strip mall sports bar nestled between a UPS store and Blockbuster. While loading in, I noticed we had lost top billing on the joint’s enormous vinyl calendar to “ALL YOU CAN EAT CRAWFISH $15.” At this point, I was wishing I used larger drumsticks so I could more easily beat myself into a coma. The Hoge guys backlined all their stuff on a 10′x15′ stage, so I had to climb back between the pedal steel set-up and their drum set and build the kit around myself, entombing me in a 2′x2′ square because there wasn’t enough room to leave an exit path. When Rod sat at the piano, his left elbow was about three centimeters from my ride cymbal. We took the stage and played to the backs of dozens of people, who were turned around watching the Braves game on the far wall. (This is why rock stars do drugs.) We made it mercifully quick and then did enough rounds of pickleback shots with our friends Drew and Ratty from Oxford, MS that I persuaded the Bangers to sign one of their posters that their lead singer Jaren had emblazoned with choice epithets above each of his band members’ heads (“Piss Star” may be the only printable one).

The next night, and the last night of the tour, was the second bookend – Chattanooga and Rhythm and Brews, where I played my first show with the Business almost four and a half years ago. [Editor's note: Five years ago last month] I had been in the band for all of three weeks, and hardly knew any of them. They had only been in Baltimore for eighteen months at that point, and the Chattanooga crowd – The J-Rowdies, as they called themselves – were fierce, with nearly-choreographed dance moved. I was scared witless in front of several hundred of them, but I had one of the best times of my life playing to that kind of crowd for the first time.

This most recent time was not like that – Passable, but completely unremarkable (except for getting to hang out our friends Matt and Marty Bohannon, of The Bohannons). Forty people showed up, we played, they clapped, Hoge played, then we all went home and said we made a night of it. I wish I could say we made a more romantic night of it than that, but the tour had officially taken the legs out of from under us and we were all just glad to see it in the rearview.

Then it was on to Cleveland and the Ocoee, and now this stretch of highway somewhere past Roanoke but not quite to Lexington.

SXSW was another week-long experiment in testing the limits of the central nervous system. We didn’t sleep very much, but we had a ball. We met Rachael Ray, played a song with Andrew W.K, we sort of kind of played within 300 yards of Duran Duran, and I conducted a five-hour fantasy baseball draft (I kept Matusz, and drafted Hardy). Our friend Andrew Reilly came along and brought his camera for the week, and we’re sifting through the piles of shots he snapped of his first SXSW.

While we were sleepwalking down Sixth Street, plans for the rest of the year were shaping up. In June, we’ll be playing Bonnaroo in Manchester, TN, and then making our way west for a run up the far coast, via a four-night stand at the newly-opened Cosmopolitan Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas from June 22-26th (where I’ll either lose my shirt or be able to afford a much nicer one betting on O’s games). The run concludes with a show at the Movie Party for the 10th Annual Lebowksi Fest in Louisville, KY on July 15th, and a performance at the All Good Music Festival on July 17th in Masontown, WV. A few weeks later, we’ll be playing Lollapalooza in Grant Park in Chicago on August 6th, and then the Hot August Blues Festival here in Cockeysville on August 20th. In mid-September, we’ll be traveling down to Austin again to play the Austin City Limits festival. And that will be a 600% increase in the amount of festivals we’ve ever played.

But in the meantime, beginning next week, we’re starting The Rotating Residencies, as we’ve been calling them. Starting on the 20th, for four straight Wednesdays we’ll be in Washington, D.C. at the Rock n’ Roll Hotel; for a Friday and then three consecutive Thursdays, the Northstar Bar in Philadelphia; and beginning on May 2nd, we’ll spend five straight Mondays at Brooklyn Bowl in Williamsburg. We have a slew of great bands lined up for all of these shows, so it’s going to be alot of fun and since we’ll be doing other regional dates around the residencies, it’ll be like a big cyclical tour…but not quite.

The calendar thus far:

4/20 – Washington, D.C. @ Rock n’ Roll Hotel (w/ Johnny Corndawg)
4/22 – Philadelphia, PA @ Northstar Bar (w/Local H)
4/26 – Charlottesville, VA @ The Southern
4/27 – Washington, D.C. @ Rock n’ Roll Hotel (w/ Deleted Scenes)
4/28 – Philadelphia, PA @ Northstar Bar (w/ Matermathu)
5/2 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Bowl (w/ The Features)
5/3 – Hoboken, NJ @ Maxwell’s (w/ The Features)
5/4 – Washington, D.C. @ Rock n’ Roll Hotel (w/ The Features)
5/5 – Philadelphia, PA @ Northstar Bar (w/ Features and Toy Soldiers)
5/6 – Lancaster, PA @ The Chameleon Club
5/9 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Bowl (w/ These United States and the Features)
5/10 – Pawtucket, RI @ The Met Cafe (w/ John McCauley from Deer Tick)
5/11 – Washington, D.C. @ Rock n’ Roll Hotel (w/ These United States)
5/12 – Philadelphia, PA @ Northstar Bar (w/ These United States)
5/13 – Morgantown, WV @ 123 Pleasant St
5/14 – West Chester, PA @ The Note
5/16 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Bowl (w/ These United States)
5/23 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Bowl (w/ Gunfight)
5/30 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Bowl

We’ll be finishing off the run with a two-night stand we have planned for the Ottobar on Friday May 27th and Saturday May 28th. We’ll be joined on the first night by These United States and on the second by Jonny Corndawg. Tickets are on sale for each.

After the Summer touring schedule ends, we’re taking a few weeks off before the Fall slate begins to start sifting through songs towards the next record. We don’t have any recording plans just yet.

At the hotel the other night, our merch man Zalamia and I stayed up watching an informercial for the Time-Life “Body and Soul” collection. It contained Kool & The Gang’s “Joanna.” Am I wrong in thinking this is the best video ever, even if it doesn’t make a lick of sense?

It’s that time of year again.

In a little under two weeks, we’ll start making our way down to Austin, Texas for the annual Marathon to Promote Liver Damage that is South by Southwest, or “SXSW” as it is commonly know. It takes place over five days in the middle of March, and though you never know exactly what you’re gonna get down there, you can be pretty sure it’s going to include about 8 cumulative hours of sleep, and at least one hangover that leaves you questioning reality. And bar-b-que.

It used to be that you went to SXSW to get discovered, but nowadays, you go to promote and the festival has become, essentially, the independent music industry’s largest networking convention. Everyone is down there trying to enlarge their sphere of influence, and how well you do is largely dependent on how well the team you already have around you is working to get you on the right showcases and in front of the right people – and, of course, how well you play once given those opportunities. By the end of the five days, just from the buzz on the street, you’ll have a pretty good idea of who is going to make some noise that year. It’s part talent show, part P90X for company credit cards – it’s like Bohemian Grove for the unwashed set.

So we’re going down there to promote. Specifically, we’re hoping to find some UK and Australian promoters to help bring us over to each by the end of the year. We’re also hoping to get in front of as much press as possible. Beyond that, we want free clothes.

Last year, we only played four shows during four days, but they were all fairly high-profile. This year, we’ve got a much fuller plate with seven shows in four days, as of this writing, and a batch of acoustic performances and interviews lined up. (Unfortunately it’ll be a few more days before I can announce the details of those shows…they’re all a bit secretive down there this time of year.) The week should provide an interesting contrast with last year, and give a chance to assess how much ground we’ve covered in the last year. An despite the hectic schedule, it should be a wild blast. Our entire team will be in town, which means late-night strategy sessions over enchiladas or the whirl of a hot tub, and twice as many people with ins to the best parties. SXSW is also great for running into everyone we’ve ever met as a band, including loads of friends we haven’t seen in years. And like I said last year, running into friends at SXSW has this great “It’s all happening!” vibe, where the night just feels like it’s gonna go on forever, and you’re all about six weeks from being famous. Maybe it’s the tequila, maybe it’s the desert air, maybe it’s the raw pheromones emanating from almost two thousand bands in the midst of an extended mating ritual, looking for partners.

Whatever it is, it’ll be here again soon. So if you’re going, watch this space for updates on where we’ll be playing; and if you’re not, there will be a photoblog before very long.

The rest of our equally fun run:

3/7 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Cafe AE
3/8 – Harrisburg, PA @ Appalachian Brewing Company
3/10 – Columbus, OH @ The Basement
3/11 – Newport, KY @ Southgate House
3/12 – Chicago, IL @ Double Door

3/14-3/20 – SXSW

3/22 – Little Rock, AR @ Whitewater Tavern
3/23 – Oxford, MS @ Proud Larry’s
3/24 – Nashville, TN @ 12th & Porter
3/25 – Atlanta, GA @ Star Bar
3/26 – Athens, GA @ 40 Watt (w/ Mike Watt!)
3/27 – Raleigh, NC @ King’s Barcade
3/28 – Richmond, VA @ The Camel

We have some special plans for April and May that are days away from being unveiled. Check it…

On Friday February 18th and Saturday the 19th, we’ll be opening for Drive by Truckers’ two-night stand at the 9:30 Club. This is thrilling news. My folks would cart me down there for shows before I was old enough to drive, and the whole place just felt larger than life. It still embodies The Big Time as far as I’m concerned, and this will be our first chance to be able to play there, under incredibly rad circumstances to boot. Tickets for the 18th are here, and for the 19th here.

A couple of live sessions that we taped while on tour in September made their way into the world this week. The first is a taping we did for the illustrious Daytrotter, who’s engineer, Mike Gentry, reminded us that it’s all been downhill since the invention of slap-back echo. The recording came two years to the month after our first stop through their studios – which can be found here – when we were only halfway done writing the record and still working out kinks on the road. The uber-sweet marker rendition of us this go-round is notable on a few levels, not the least of which is for finally capturing Billy’s Queen “Hot Space” t-shirt for posterity. (It’s job done, the shirt was promptly summoned up to t-shirt heaven on a whirlwind, like the Prophet Elijah.) Aside from giving away all four of these songs as free Mp3 downloads, they’re also giving away an autographed Polaroid taken of us that day – we’re about two-thirds of the way down the page, between the dude from Iron & Wine and our good bud Johnny Corndawg. [Tangent Central - Here's footage of John McCauley from Deer Tick joining Corndawg onstage in New York last week, performing the raucous Corndawg-penned title track from McCauley's upcoming record with the lead singers of Dawes and Delta Spirit, entitled "Middle Brother. Here's the first track - "Me Me Me."]

The second set is from a Chicago outfit called Hear Ya! that we met at SXSW last year. They have a really swank studio set-up, and there’s video involved, so you can see us looking marginally constipated. But this was a ton of fun and sounds amazing, and as an added bonus, they gave us huge tubs of Beer Nuts that lasted us through the end of tour.

We’ll be announcing a slew of dates on our headlining run down to SXSW in March, in the coming days…

Today’s my birthday. In honor of that, I spent the morning in my long johns picking through old blogs from our last tour that I never got the chance to finish. Here’s one of them about a late morning on the Wolfmother tour back in August.

About an hour past St. Louis and into the wilds of rural Missouri, Billy noticed the gas gauge had buried itself so low beneath the red line it might as well have been somewhere in the steering column. On a good drive over flat ground, we’ll get around 10 miles to the gallon out of The Diaper since the addition of the trailer – even less with hills involved – so there’s really no room for error when it comes to gas. One missed exit and we’re five idiots sitting along the side of the road waiting for AAA.

We need a gas station, but the first exit we passed had no mention of gas anywhere on the “Attractions” sign…then we passed a second without a gas station…then a third…then a fourth, a fifth, and a sixth, with our sphincters closing ever-tighter around the idea of being stranded somewhere in backwood Missouri, and Logan probably having his shirt off (which is the case 23.5 hours a day, like he’s a roofer or something). In a panic, and with the air conditioning turned off and the windows rolled down, we hopped off the interstate at a random exit and used the Fuel Search function on the GPS we had bought that morning in a fit of a pique after having gotten lost getting out of Louisville. It located a general store a mile up the road. We believed it.

When we got to the address, all that was there was a decrepit, aging storefront with a passenger van backed against the front door. No pumps in sight. I scrambled out, and a small, nervous Hispanic man peeked his head out from behind the back door of the van.

“Do you know where the nearest gas station is?” I asked him. He stared at me blankly.

“No work,” he said, pointing inside the building. I looked through the shattered front window and saw a dirty kitchen with children’s toys scattered across floor. Frantic, I pushed harder.

“Is anyone else here? Habla Ingles?” I pleaded. I didn’t imagine I looked much like an INS agent. Someone bellowed something in Spanish from the bowels of the building. I saw this was a dead-end, so I ran back to the van.

We frantically redialed the GPS’s fuel search, and it found Casey’s General Store in downtown Highland, five-and-a-half miles away. We got back on the road and as we started up a small incline, the engine sputtered, then rallied, then sputtered again. Logan started rooting around for his running shoes, and we began calculating how long it would take him to get six miles roundtrip with a gas can in his hand.

The engine righted itself once more as we began a gentle decline, and it hummed quietly at thirty miles an hour as we passed Kubota dealers and kerosene filling stations, and even a rusted oil derrick bobbing listlessly in a field. Everything but actual gasoline. Our surroundings were mocking us.

With less than a mile to go, we crested a small hill and the red awning of the General Store loomed on the horizon. The GPS began calling out distances like Mission Control. “Point-eight miles…point-five miles…point-three miles…”

With a quarter-mile to go, Billy’s foot sunk to the floor and the engine grew silent. We were out of gas. After never having run out of gas or blown a tire in the history of the band (to that point) it was finally going to happen here, in Highland, Missouri, and we were going to be pushing two tons of van, gear and trailer into a gas station in 95 degree heat. I was wondering if this was at all related to my having laughed when my mom offered me a St. Christopher’s medal for the van before we left.

The Diaper slowed to a near crawl and it was a seeming eternity as we crept closer and closer to the red awning. “Arriving at destination” the GPS intoned, and Billy cut a slow arc into the station entrance, nearly cutting off a car coming the other direction so we didn’t have to lose what was left of our momentum by braking. We drifted underneath the awning, and with one eerily silent swoop, came to rest directly astride one of the two working pumps. Billy didn’t even have to use the brakes to bring us to a stop – we had made it literally as far as we could. And with mathematical precision, it was exactly far enough.

We exploded out of the van in a shower of whoops and high-fives, the likes of which Highland had probably never seen since V-J Day. I made the case that with a display of luck on that cosmic level, we ought to buy at least buy a couple of scratch-offs with band money.

But instead we gassed up, reset the GPS for Kansas City, and got right back on the road.

Tonight, rehearsals begin for our big New Year’s Eve Bash at Ram’s Head Live. We’re digging out some of our “classics” – emphasis on “class” – that Logan hasn’t even had time to learn yet, and working up a tasty cover or three that seem appropriate for the occasion. But more than anything, we’re trying to hurriedly round in to shape after a month of hardcore lounging, so that none of us pass out on stage during a 90-minute set. There was a momentary scare yesterday afternoon when we found out that the lead singer and guitarist of Beard – Baltimore ex-pat Jason Dove – had his flight into Baltimore cancelled by the blizzard in New York. After a frantic couple of hours, Jason, like the True Champion he is, rented a car in Nashville and drove twelve hours overnight to be here in time to get ready for the show. (This is where you feel immediately compelled to go here if you haven’t already.)

Outside of this, plans for the Spring are starting to congeal. One thing we know is that we’ll be making our way to Austin again for South by Southwest in March, which promises to not only be a lot of fun, but should be an interesting barometer for how much progress we’ve made over the last year (as well as, hopefully, a nice table-setter for a busy Summer festival season). Beyond that, it’s alot of waiting for us right now, with the industry on break until after the New Year. But that’s fine with us at the moment, as we’re comfortably ensconced in four cocoons of absolute sloth and relaxation, hibernating before the Spring thaw throws all over the country again.

Just when I was getting settled into a nice routine of napping and covering myself in crab chip crumbs like some primitive camouflage, we’re hitting the road again. This weekend we’re heading to Orlando, FL to play a sold-out show with the Black Keys at the House of Blues on Saturday evening. This is going to rule. Then we’re turning around and driving 14 hours right back home to try and catch the fourth-quarter of the Ravens-Steelers game. Then I’m gonna pick right up where I left off with those chips.

[As an aside - I would love to hate playing at House of Blues venues, because the basic premise - a series of spotless megalithic tributes to the "blues" with frescoes, plush couches and ticket prices so high it'd be cheaper to see an opera - seems a bit tacky. (George Carlin once called it "The House of Lame White M***********s.) But after having the chance to play a few of them, I have to admit: They really rule to play at. The operations are well-run, the stages sound great, they help us load our gear in, and the recipe for their rosemary cornbread must have come down from Mt. Sinai with the stone tablets. Bing Bong.]

On our way to Florida, we’re playing in Chapel Hill, NC at the Local 506. (You can look at this as a quasi-make-up date for the November 2nd show in Raleigh that we had to cancel.) And any night in that part of the country means another night questioning our lyin’ eyes, thanks to our friend Magic Mike, the World’s First – and maybe Only – Rock n’ Roll Magician. Mike has become a veritable institution around Raleigh and Chapel Hill, coming to the shows and holding court around the merch tables with a deck of cards, a ring or two and a handful of rubber bands. He’s become so legendary, it seems like he’s left his mark on nearly every band that passes through town, and we all trade Magic Mike stories when we meet someone else that’s seen him too. He’s a Rite of Passage. I was reading “You Can’t Win” last tour, and talking with Dead Confederate about our Magic Mike encounters reminded me of the way the old hobos would trade stories of mythical Grand Hobos while seated around the trashcan fire…weird little transient landmarks. If you’re ever in Raleigh and have a chance to look him up, by all means buy the man a drink and let him disabuse you of your disbelief. Tell him Colmus says to do the “spit-it-out” one.

Lastly, we are going to be throwing our Second Annual New Year’s Spectacular – snazzier name to come along one of these years – at Ram’s Head Live this year. Tickets are $20 and can be had here; the rest of the line-up will be announced soon. This will be our first show back home since our CD release in July, and we are anxiously awaiting it. I’ve been trying to convince the guys to cover “Lights,” but I’m pretty solidly outvoted at the moment.