After a hard day’s work for some of the band members and travelling for other band members, as well as a working day for our roadie extraordinaire Craig, all of us got together at our rehearsal space at about 6pm Tuesday evening to load our new tour van (comically named “Tiny Elvis” after an old SNL sketch) and prepare for the long road to SXSW 09 in Austin TX.

Loading up is never any fun; I mean hell, who wants to carry gear? But as we sweated and tweaked things, we found a way to make it all work…save one very important item. As we loaded everything into the van, all the luggage on top and crammed everything we could into the cabin we realized we couldn’t fit our PA speakers in with all the other stuff! A little explanation is in order…normally we don’t need to bring a PA with us, however we had an upcoming in-store performance at an FYE store at the mall in TX and we needed to lug a PA out for that one show! We also had a show in Queens NY at 10pm, so we were trying as best we could to keep things moving. We pushed, pulled and reconfigured, but alas we had to accept that the speakers just weren’t going to make it, hell, the roof was caving in from the weight of what we put on top and we were all already coping with having to sit Indian-style for the upcoming 35 hour voyage…Time to go to work !….”Gimmie a phone and a couple of minutes guys..” said Oren as he raced for the phone knowing that we didn’t have much time to spare, and after a couple of phone calls to Alexia  at Musicgorilla.com and the good folks of Rock n Roll Rentals in Austin, TX, we had a PA waiting there for us for a whopping $10.83 rental fee…Up and running again, with the hour being 740pm and our gig (which was a 40 min drive) at 10pm approaching, we all breathed deeply and got in to hit the road….20 minutes later, we inevitably remembered we forgot the laptops and had to turn around to go back one last time…Time to text the promoters that we may be late to that nights show and high tail it back to grab the laptops! Whew…on the road and only 25 mins late…..

Pearl – Queens NY – 3/17 10pm St Pats day 2009

We get to Pearl with around 15 mins to spare, just enough time to illegally park the van and get all our shit into the club for an acoustic set. We definitely enjoyed the company that was awaiting us inside, a surprise appearance by some family members, co-workers and friends greeted us as we walked in…we played for about an hour, all the while bitching to the crowd about the $587 gas bill we were about to incur. Times are hard but we put the tip bucket out anyhow and urged everyone to buy a CD so we would have enough gas money to at least get us ½ way home! Pearl has a great kitchen, so after some burgers and hugs (and a bunch of burst sugar packets in my coat pocket!) we got ready to hit the road again… Oren and Ed were up for the first leg of driving and at about 6am we stopped for a shift change somewhere in VA or West VA, hey it’s like 6am and Id been up for 20 hours…who knows where we really were! The hum of the road all around us, the GPS on the dashboard counting down from 1797 miles and thoughts of childhood car rides – are we there yet? – bounced in our heads. I awoke dizzy and disoriented somewhere around noon to find Doug behind the wheel, tired, veering onto the rumble strips built into the shoulder of the highway…time for another switch! We drive in shifts like maybe the military does, one driver, one navigator and a shift change means a good 10 minute break of rest area, ammonia filled bathrooms and a leg-stretch, the likes of which you cannot truly appreciate until you spend 10 hours with your feet balanced on top of a snare drum or road case of some sort. With newborn legs and bloodshot eyes, we make our way back into Tiny Elvis for the next thousand hours of driving…a sticker on every toll booth, every toilet, rest stop, gas pump and anything we could reach through the front window, miles to go before we sleep – soundly anyway!