As we are driving back to his house, Opie shoveling down those tasty little squares of bowel-liquefying goodness and hucking the cartons out the window onto the interstate, the conversation turns to my recent birthday.
Opie- "You guys are all 18 now, so you should go to a strip club. You won't get laid, but you'll get a $40 boner."
Jess(Opie's fiancee)- "That is an excellent name for a band."
It turns out that Jess was very right. Whenever I talk to someone and the topic shifts to my hobbies and interests, things usually turn out like this:
Me- "Oh, I write, draw, play in a band, make hemp jewelry..."
Hypothetical Conversation Partner- "Oh really? What's your band called?"
Sometimes, this is a hard question to answer. Not that I've forgotten the name of my band, but how do you tell your grandma that your band is named after a stiffy you get at a strip club?
Me- "...40$ Boner."
Which provokes one of two reactions.
Thankfully, most of the people that my group of friends and I seem to attract display the latter reaction. Once you make someone laugh, generally you're on their good side. And it is this that led us to travel five and a half hours to Danbury Connecticut on Black Friday, 2008.
We were booked to play a mini-festival of sorts called Punkskaving. It was a one-day thing featuring at least 18 bands, most notably Bomb the Music Industry, Sonic Boom Six, and Big D and the Kids Table(who ended up not showing for personal reasons, I'm told). It was the first out-of-state gig any of us had ever been offered, and if not for all the turkey we had gorged ourselves on at our respective Thanksgiving dinners, I don't think any of us would have slept at all that night.
As it was, we all got a few hours of sleep at La Casa Boner, woke up at 2:30 AM and piled into unofficial band mother Suz's Hyundai for the long trip ahead of us. We were told that the music started early, and we certainly didn't want to miss our time slot. Mostly, the ride was dark, cramped, and hazy, though we did stop at a gas station where I found a doorknob at the gas pump and the patrons inside remarked upon seeing us "Oh, look, it's some rock band coming through town." Here is a video of us in the car after daylight finally broke, though I can't remember if that was before or after we got free coffee and donuts from boy scouts at a rest stop:
Soon enough, we found ourselves at the venue. We unloaded the equipment from our rickety black trailer, then went down the street to a parking lot with a pizza parlor, liquor store, and one of those "Everything's a Dollar!" places full of useless, one-time-use-then-it-breaks merchandise from China.We lock up the car and with plenty of time to kill before the gig starts, we walk up the block in the golden early morning sun that only shows itself properly in the cold months of the year. Before we knew it, we were walking past taller buildings and plenty of store fronts with signs only in Spanish. This should not have surprised us, yet coming from the backwoods of Pennsylvania, it was a tad unexpected. Deciding it was a good idea to head back before we got lost, we went back to the parking lot to eat pizza and check out the crappy merchandise at the dollar store.
I believe it was around noon that our friends Winks and Autumn arrived. We met them in the parking lot, and pretty soon we came to a very unfortunate conclusion: Someone had locked the keys in the Hyundai. It was also around this time that Autumn bought Suz a bottle of rum. Perhaps these events are related? Either way, we called a locksmith, mixed up some Danbury Brew(rum and Gatorade), and waited. And drank In an open parking lot. At 12:30 PM. Underage. Out of state. Clearly, we thought we were pretty hot shit.
Eighty five dollars and one random video of the locksmith on my camera later..
..and all is well again. Crisis averted, we trudge our way back to the venue to wait. It was a little hole in the wall kind of place named Billy Baloney's, their myspace page declaring that we had just arrived at the "rock capital of Connecticut." There was a stage, so for once we finally felt like a legitimate band. Considering most of our previous gigs had been in the basement of a pizza place about six miles out of our hometown, it really was an exciting step up. The music started at 2, and we played at 3:30. I knew immediately that this was bad news. I looked from the gatorade bottles, to my bandmates, to the clock, then back to the gatorade. Whoo boy. Well, we've played drunk before, so maybe it won't be so bad?
Two bands played before us, both comprised of I would guess fifteen year olds. One was Loud Youth, who played songs like "Let's Get Famous and Sell Out to Guitar Hero." Up next was Killing Pit for Decadence, who wanted so bad to be a hardcore band, but also wanted to use a set of bongos as a snare drum. As Allie would put it, incongruity detected. Still, it was kind of nice to see the younger generation trying to enter the scene and form bands of their own, even if it wasn't quite so nice to hear. I remember when we were like that. Submitted for your viewing pleasure, the only music video any of my bands have ever put out, What Would Fonzy Do, by my first punk band, the late Necropolis.
I don't blame you if you couldn't sit through the whole thing.
Next, we took the stage. Surprisingly, for most of us being drunk at 3:30 PM, we played a half decent show. We have some pictures up on our Myspace, but they're kind of dark. There are also two videos from that day on there, but the sound quality is "meh" at best. Everyone was dancing and a good time was had all around.
After we played, the next band asked to use my drum set. I decided to go check out the other venues at this point. It was dusk now, and here we were, in a strange town full of new people, all participating in this big orgy of music. I can still see myself walking out of Billy Baloney's into the sunset soaked street, a wistful nostalgia for this day already beginning to develop. I don't remember any of the other bands that I saw that night besides the Un Posse, who were like Streetlight Manifesto if it were being played at a pep rally.
After they were finished, we loaded up our equipment into the trailer and I left my band mates behind as Suz, Winks, Autumn and I took off in search of a hotel for the night. We stopped in a barber shop up the street to ask for directions to a hotel. The nice man inside sent us on a quest for a Denny's, where they have those traveler guidebooks full of coupons, and informed us that we would find the hotels on that side of town. His advice proved invaluable, because otherwise we would have been sleeping in our cars.We stop and pick up two cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon, then pull into a Wal Mart parking lot to pick up swimming suits because are you kidding me? Of course we're going to find a hotel with a swimming pool!
Brief aside: For at least two years, I had this one particular hat that I wore every day. This was towards the end of its life when it was very dirty, and finally I just embraced the fact that my hat was soon to be filthy enough that the germs on it would develop a highly organized society and potentially gain sentience. So I stopped caring. I wore my hat to work, while playing shows, tossed it on the ground, and even started ashing my cigarettes in it when there was no ashtray available.
Walking out of Wal Mart ahead of some of my friends, I notice this awful smell. I look around, and in a brief moment of racism, I connect the scent assaulting my nostrils with all of the Mexicans I see in the building. I shuffle back to the car and take my place in the backseat and light a cigarette.
Me- Jesus, Danbury smells like garbage. Have you gotten a whiff of it yet?
Winks- Haha no, is it bad?
Me- Absolutely terrible.
Pretty soon everyone else comes back, and I'm ashing in my hat like usual. Then the exact same stench returns, even stronger than before. I wrinkle my nose in disgust.
Me- See, there it is again! It smells like burning rubber and enchiladas!
I look down as I'm ashing my cigarette again, and I notice that my hat is on fire. I have no idea how long it had been burning since my cigarette smoke covered up the smoke drifting out of my disgusting dirty hat, but it had almost burned the whole way through. I quickly swat at the embers so my pants don't go up in flames as well, and everyone in the car starts laughing hysterically. And that's how I learned that you shouldn't ash your cigarettes out in your hat.
We return to Billy Baloney's to pick up the rest of the band. By now it was totally dark and we were all pretty ready to go to the hotel and swim and drink beer and generally feel like rock stars. The guys were raving about one of the acts we missed, a man who calls himself The Emotron. Since I have no first hand account of his act, just watch this video.
Even that cannot completely capture the essence of the Emotron, but it does a much better job at explaining his position than I could ever hope to. We snagged this photo in front of the venue, then took off for the hotel.
Left to right: Andy Wyant-guitar, Paul Sherry-Bass, me with the gross hat on, Mike Bailey-guitar, Mason Cramer-vocals
We go back to the hotel, secure our rooms, and set up shop. The only place we had to put the beer was the bathroom sink. Pro tip: You can fit four buckets of ice and thirty cans of PBR in a hotel sink. I took this picture and sent it to Pabst's advertisement department, but I never received any response. I don't know why.
We decided to swim before drinking, figuring we would probably drown if we got drunk first. And I swear to Christ that was the saltiest, nastiest pool water ever. What did they fill it with? The tears of orphans who watched their parents die? Run off from the gym next door? It was frankly disgusting and repulsive and we still swam around in it for about 45 minutes.
We went back to the rooms too tired to drink more than a couple of beers apiece. We woke up and ate the awful continental breakfast, then started the agonizingly long drive home. It was a cold, clear Fall day where everything has a tinge of gold to it. I laid in the back of Suz's Hyundai almost the whole time, playing Pokemon and trying to make my iPod block out In The Decemberwrist by The Emotron which was playing on repeat most of the way home. We stopped at a truck stop for some food, fixed a broken hinge on the trailer door with a piece of wire and a screwdriver, and finally returned home sometime around 6 PM a few hundred dollars poorer, worn out and cramped up from the car rides, yet still feeling like we were on top of the world.
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