Tour Notes #2 (Nobody has was Tate has -NO SIR! - Nobody has was Tate has.)

Dateline - August 30th, 1:29 p.m., somewhere outside Louisville, KY

I'm lying in the bed of a man named Donald McDonald (for real). His daughter let us stay here while he's out of town and Zalamia and I - after marveling at the crucifixes everywhere and then discovering his sizeable VHS porn collection - stumbled across a magazine with his name on the mailing label. Sometimes life throws you a comedy bone.

Tour is picking up speed. I routed this one is a big counter-clockwise circle so that we'd hit our less solid markets (the Northeast and Midwest) early on, and then make our way down to our Southern wheelhouse. Thus far, it's looking a great idea. Chicago on Monday was good, although due to a fuck-up by the club booking agent, we went on an hour before he told us we'd go on and all the press our PR guy brought out to the show missed our set. But the crowd loved it and we got some banging-ass free vegetarian chili mac out of the deal. Then we played Columbus, OH on Tuesday to a mess of 17-year-old emo Christians who weren't much game for what we were selling, but the locals - Wing and Tusk - kicked major ass. Very Pedro the Lion-ish but much more fun...check 'em out of if you can find 'em.

But Thursday and last night were where things finally ramped up. We played a dive bar in Lexington, KY called Al's, after city planners saw fit to demolish our all-time favorite club (The Dame) last month to make room for a monster convention hotel. We crammed 90-some people into a Talking Head-sized club and things were crazed all night long...Zach played without his shirt on, Rod collapsed at the piano and had to be helped up, the crowd turned "Go Malachi" into a massive sing-along, and we closed with "Baby Jesus" for the first time in about a year. At this point, it's almost impossible for us to tell one show apart from another aside from crowd reaction, and this felt totally triumphant.

Last night was Louisville and a mess of people made the hour-long drive over from Lexington. Things played out like a slightly less-wild version of the night before, but the crowd was awesome and we got to do an encore again. Then we came back here and ate moonshine cherries and drank aged bourbon til 6:30 a.m. (Everyone's in remakable shape this morning, given those circumstances.)

Tonight we've got Cincinnati, and that'll be the last show with Junior Revolution, who have been with us since Tuesday. It should be pretty bangin' and I'm hoping the hot sauce salesman we met at our Cincy show in May comes out and hits me up with another free bottle. Then we've head back to Chicago to do a live taping for Daytrotter.com on Monday, and then finally return to our ancestral homeland in Fayettevile, AR on Wednesday and then spend the remaining two weeks criss-crossing the South. I got a chubby just typing that.

I probably can't do this story justice without the video that I shot, but we got to hang out at Bam Margera's place in West Chester, PA last Sunday. We stayed with Ryan Dunn after our show in Philly the night before and Bam came out to lunch with us the next day and invited us back to his place to see his collection of murals painted when his art director lived him. One features a zombie Reagan that says "Fuck Reagan - He's a Fuck Ass"; another has Lance Bass in an astronaut outfit with a rainbow over him as a space shuttle leaves him behind; a third has a bald Brittany Spears swinging an umbrella at the viewer while Osama Bin Laden peels out on her in a dune buggy; while the last has Osama in a Sixer's uniform spinning a basketball on his finger. And his driveway is a gigantic rainbow. And he has two skateparks. And he and Dunn are both cat people.

Alright...time for breakfast.