Blogs
May 06, 2008
3EB Spring Tour pt. 1 - New Jersey Vampires and Tight Security!
So I was type type typing away, and realized that this whole synopsis was just going to be way too long, and I didn't have the mental capacity nor the required cartilage in my finger joints to complete such an epic story in one sitting. Parts and pieces would get left out and thrown away, and that's just something I can't abide. My blogs are ultra-long for that reason, the aversion to which was caused by my experiences on Christmas day. I would always get some amazing toy that I really really wanted, for example, the GI Joe Hovercraft. The thing was supposed to be water tight, and have a little one man attack boat that would fire out the the front of the hovercraft through a spring loaded door. Good in theory. However, as with most toys and high school dating experiences, there was some assembly required. Well, the trap door of my hovercraft somehow ended up in the trash pile of paper and boxes, leaving a gaping hole in the front of it that negated it's already questionable watertight properties. Now I always have to have all my parts and pieces, that way I'm not the laughing stock of the summer pool parties/military assault maneuvers when my hovercraft and batallion of GI Joes are sitting on the bottom of the 4 1/2 foot above ground swimming pool....Regardless.
I just looked over at the clock, and it said 12:34. I’m a bit clock superstitious, truth be told. If you look at a clock of the digital species and it reads 11:11, you know something strange is afoot, and you should beware. 12:34 seems on a whole less evil, or less suspicious, but perhaps it’s because it has a bit of a sing-song quality to it. It might even lean to the high school cheerleader chant for touchdowns or help cheating with science homework or something. But most of all it makes me think of that vampire from Sesame Street, that liked to count numbers in a way that suggested that the person doing his voice had probably done two hits of Blue Magic right before the taping (See: American Gangster). Speaking of Vampires…Let’s get on with this blog. Be sure to tuck your section of the table cloth into your shirt collar to avoid spilling anything on your pants.
At the beginning of April, Absentstar was on the precipice of an epic journey that would last the entire month, heading out on the road with Third Eye Blind. This tour would be hitting mostly the upper North East, the exception being a southern excursion to Durham NC to play at Duke University. Our first show would be in New Jersey, a place we had seemingly just been only days before. We were lucky enough to get to spend a few days at home to relax and wash our clothes after the March dates with NTB/Inine. As is typical with any band from Chicago, just as we were rolling out, a snow storm was rolling in! Luckily we missed it by a few hours, but still, we were pretty excited to be heading away from the snow. Why does winter always seem to chase us around like the girl with cooties when we were in Kindergarten?? (Keep in mind that Derek, Andy and I all attended the same Kindergarten, though each a year apart. However, the same girl with cooties was in each of our classes, and I have no doubt she is still there.)
We started out the tour with a double stand of shows in Sayreville NJ, at a venue called The Starland Ballroom. Must say, after having spent a week with 3EB back in February, we were really excited to be sharing the stage with them once again, as well as meeting their fans. Stephan, Leo, Brad, Tony and the whole crew and their rabid fans…best people ever.
So we are on the road, again mindlessly trusting our perpetually less than trustworthy Garmin, the Mis-leader of our silver skinned rabble, who as you may recall is voiced by a British tart that we have named Greta (though I still believe she sounds like Catherine Hepburn.) Apparently we had her set for Consistency, but unfortunately "Accuracy Sensitivity" is set to "Ignorantly Low". Gosh, even if she had a setting for "Completely Lost" that would be better than how she had been typically directing us. You see, in the Midwest, Greta seeming to be fairly spot on with her GPS targeting, leading us to the correct destination most of the time, or at least close enough to see a sign of where we should be. But anywhere east of Ohio, forget about it. I don't know who to blame for all the directional indiscretions and inclinations to take us on dirt roads with suspended bridges made of planks and grapevine thatching instead of smooth super-highways, but most of the time the British lady takes the brunt of our anger. So in NJ, once again, she leads us astray, and then has the nerve to get bitchy with us. Starland Ballroom, she knew the address, and somehow we end up in front of a wooded hill and a dirt road that was probably used for logging or and escape route for the Continental Army in the fall of 1778, but no way was there a music venue there. So we drive on, the whole while Greta screaming at us "RECALCULATING! Drive .4 miles and make a Uturn when possible...Recalculating, drive .2 miles, and keep left." They should just put a comment in her that says "Recalculating. Drive .5 mile to nearest gas station and ask directions.".
Now, I love Quentin Tarantino movies and sometimes it’s fun to try and apply scenes from his movies into your everyday life. It’s also absurdly simple, even though I’ve managed to take it an extra step (I have this stupid looking pair of blue lens sunglasses that I wear sometimes to help set the mood, and I call them my "Quentinvision Goggles"). So you know what I’d really like to do? I’d like to recreate that scene from Pulp Fiction where Vincent Vega and Jules are driving down the boulevard in the red Malibu and Vincent is telling him all about the differences between America and Europe being the little things. Only my conversation would go like this "You know they they call a Quarter Pounder over there? A Royal with cheese. And you know what the call a Garmin GPS over there? A Royal piece of shee-it."
Anyway……
In about 3 miles we come up on a junkyard, thousands of relics of old cars. Now if you didn't know this, lemme tell you, there are more junk car lots in NJ than anywhere else on the planet, which can be lots of fun when you have a van filled with automobile guys like us, playing the vintage car version of "I Spy" as we roll along. Maybe there aren't more junk car lots, but NJ just doesn't do as good of a job hiding them from public view, or maybe they don't care. i don't know. So there we are, rolling up to a field filled with thousands of old cars in various states of rust, and it looks like the parking lot of Woodstock, only the hippies never drove off. Derek made a comment like "Hey guys, look at all the people who came to see us! Check out the parking lot, it's full!" Then we looked at the address, we were here. Derek was "nearly" correct!
The junk yard kind of made a horseshoe shape around a brick building that turned out to be the Starland Ballroom. Once again making use of my Quentinvision goggles, I immediately script a rock band version of "From Dusk Till Dawn". In my version there’s a building full of enterprising vampires led by Cheech Marin who have set up a profitable concert venue in NJ, while simultaneously sucking all the blood out of their concert goers. In turn they are making a tidy little profit by selling the quarter panels and rear bumpers from a crashed 1985 Chevy Celebrity SL to someone else. They are helping to keep many terrible cars on the road, ensuring ever higher gas prices and insurance rates to their cousins that also run the Oil and Insurance industries. You see, the first rule in running a successful business is knowing your customer base and your product.
But literally, the venue was surrounded by junk cars in various states of rusted decomposition, or as a shrewd advertising agent or craigslister might say "they are luxuriously pre-aged". Whatever your thoughts on that, you should know one thing, and take it to bed with you. There were kids trying to line up in the front of the building that had to play junkyard frogger with this massive crane-type of front loading yellow beast of a wreck-hauling machine. It had the remnants of it’s totaled Dodge Durango dinner still hanging from it’s iron-toothed grinning chomper like so many slivers of sauteed bratwurst onion that cling to the mustache of the guy that runs the Sky Whirl puker at the Indiana State Fair. Wally Stancomb I think is his name.
Anyway, as we pull into the center of the crashfest horseshoe, I see the 3EB semi trailer sitting near the rear load-in door, but their busses are no where to be seen. I look for some kind of ridge or cropping of trees that the vampires could have hid them behind, but I find nothing. Not to mention the sun is still out. In NJ, being a vampire is certainly a union trade, and they don’t have to work before sundown. It’s in the bylaws. I kicked at the dirt around the foundation of the building to see if it’s actually sitting atop an Aztec pyramid or some other form of mausoleum, but finding nothing, I decide to go ahead inside and have a tea. The fact that it started raining probably had something to do with me giving up my fact finding quest. If it comes down to battling my wet hair or battling creatures from the netherworld, I’ll take the creatures every time.
A huge smile came across my face as I spied Glenn and Lawrell from the stage crew, bantering about how to use and Ipod and whether or not Apple controls the world.
It was more than spectacular to see the 3EB fellas again, and we picked up basically where we left off in February. It was Tony’s birthday, and some of the most diehard fans of 3EB, I think we can call them friends now, brought him some cakes shaped like guitars and threw a nice lil birthday party after the show. I saw Leo trot by carrying the whole bottom half of a Les Paul chocolate cake. Derek walked over by me with what had probably been the bridge humbucker pickup smeared across his face. I’d never seen him more happy. I ate the frets off of one of the confectionery axes, which I believe were Kit Kat bars, at least I hope they were, and I’m not even certain what the strings were made of or if they were even edible, but I took a chance and downed some anyway.
We survived both evenings, thankfully without any serious dust-ups with beings of the night, though the Garmin did try to lead us up that damn log road again. What is her deal???? You know, taking a cue again from Dusk Till Dawn, if I had a revolver built into the front of my leather pants, I would shoot it at her….directly in her geographically-retarded pie hole. (Author’s Note: Absentstar does not condone nor recommend the mounting of revolvers into the front of your leather pants, not shooting them at your dash mounted Garmin. No Garmin devices were injured in the writing of this blog! Well, maybe just one.)
Those two shows were a fun kick off to the tour.
Now, it can be said that every crowd at every show was amazing, but they were just amazing for different reasons. I think that every guy in Absentstar would agree that by far, and I mean like MILES, the rowdiest crowd we played for was at Penn State in Erie PA. I’ve seen a lot of rough crowds in my day, but Lord, not even in the hayday of crowd roughness could this crowd have been topped. My benchmarks are shows such as X-fest in Indianapolis in 1996 when Sponge was onstage and they were playing their stellar rock sing-along "Raining". The crowd, 20,000 strong, which was already hot, thirsty and pissed off, started throwing anything they could get their hands on in the air. It was all flying. Shirts, hats, shoes, rocks, human excrement….a bottle smashed into the lighting control board. I saw one dude run up and overhand pitch a hamburger like Roger Clemens, directly into another kids surprised face. One of my friends got nailed in the head with a projectile in the form of a vanilla ice cream cone, with the cone landing upright so that it sat on his head like a dunces cap, which he probably deserved truth be told. One nerd kept throwing junk straight up in the air, hitting himself and us, which we let him know about with fists full of mulch. But that kid got his in the end when out of nowhere a gallon jug half filled with water (or urine, or worse) came soaring in with the velocity of a scud missile, planting him on his ass. Even I could see the stars and birdies that were circling his now flattened yet still empty gourd. About 20 minutes later some long haired stranger wearing no clothes at all pranced up through the crowd professing to be the "second coming" and eating all that nasty mulch we had just used as dork repellant.
Well, the Erie crowd needed no dork repellant. They were just a gym full of institutional rowdies looking for a good time an a respite from the winter in the form of a rock concert. This was the first time we had ever had crowd surfers or a mosh pit!! Right in the middle of our set, the crowd started packing in really tight and doing that swaying thing, where the drunkards are starting to lean, and the non-drunkards are leaning away, then some drunkards lean the other way….back and forth, too and fro….and something I had NEVER seen before happened. The whole crowd, at least most of the center section, it just collapsed into a human heap onto the floor. I didn’t know whether to stop and look for survivors or ready my story for the Channel 9 evening news or just keep playing. I just kept playing. Then we tried to take it down a notch, going into our slower song If What You Mean Is Harm…and the crowed went CRAZIER!!! After our set the venue had to come out and ask the crowd to settle down….HAHA! Wow…..
I’ll end this story with my recollections from a show that I wanna give you a little more detail about later on, but it comes from Muhlenburg college, which if you’ve talked to me at all during or since the tour, you know they are notable for having the most amazing dressing rooms ever, ours being fitted out as looking something like a Chinese brothel would look if it had been a movie set in a 1950’s Disney movie. It was AWESOME!!! Check the pictures. Kudo’s to the girls that built it.
I’ve mentioned previously that 3EB toured in two massive busses, one for the crew, and one for the band. Absentstar, still a small band working it’s way, travels in a really nice van/trailer combo, named Brimley. Well, at Muhlenburg, in addition to having top notch hospitality, also had the tightest security staff I’d come in contact with. Professionals that had been hired in, and they were on the ball. I sensed that they were most likely off-duty officers, or more likely CIA hitmen on vacation. They were good. So the night is over, and we had done our meet n’greet with the people who had worked the event and otherwise made our visit comfortable and pleasant, and I’m heading out the back loading dock to find Brimley and get ready to head home. A security officer that we will call Sgt. Joe Rockhammer stops me for a moment, with the full-on "HALT" motion of his hand. I start thinking about what I had done wrong. I know I’d snagged a loaf of wheat bread from the catering table, and I hadn’t hung up my towel properly after I’d showered. What else could it be? I had no contraband on me to speak of….Umm…nope. He has a little radio piece on the left shoulder of his polo security shirt and he says something into it with that half headcock maneuver, keeping one eye on the talkie, one eye on me. He says "We have one here, waiting to proceed." I’m wondering what in the heck is going on, maybe they are upset that I’d done laps on their track earlier in the day…I just couldn’t think of anything. Then Sgt. Rockhammer gets the garbled verbal reply to "PROCEED". Having seen Shawshank Redemption and Alcatraz, I know the routine for a contraband search, so I start by removing my shoes. He looks at me quizzingly, then proceeds to ask "Ok big guy, which bus are yea goin to?"
I stand in more shock than if he had proceeded with the cavity search.
"Twas that?" I ask. "Which bus y’on there? I’m your escort."
I say, head still reeling like it would if I’d just been hit with a 32oz liquid meteor, "Um. Yeah…..I’m in the small silver one, with the trailer attached."
"OKAY!" He says, grabbing my shoulder, briskly hustling me through the doorway and out into the parking lot.
My mind runs rampant at what kinds of evils lurk on this campus that I need the full on Secret Service treatment. He started heading towards the Third Eye Blind busses.
I say, "No, seriously man, I’m in the opening band, we are in that van over there with the trailer."
Rockhammer gives me a look that is so thick with "I know, no shut up." That even in the pitch black I can see it. He whispers to me, "Yeah guy, this is just a procedure to throw people off."
He drags me towards my van, opens the door and no sooner deposits me inside than he is back on his radio saying "He’s OK, I repeat he is OK! Do you have more to come out? Over."
I figure there probably wasn’t even anyone else on the other end, and the guy was the trying to either:
- Save face in front of me, which seems highly unlikely, or
- Save my feelings of idocy over the needless display or heroism on his part.
Either way, it was appreciated. I guess things can get rough in Muhlenburg.
That’s all I have for now, hope you enjoyed. More in a bit, after I’ve slept. These Quentinvision glasses are cutting the bridge of my nose.
-Heath.absentstar
I'm currently listening to the song Long Time by the Roots. It makes me feel very, well, cool.
posted by Derek Ingersoll on 5/6/2008 2:59:48 AM