Youth Group

In the SF Fillmore there’s a room with a 16 foot ceiling where they’ve kept and mounted the original bill posters from the venue’s 35 year existence. They served the bands and crew lunch in this room the day we were there. As we ate we scanned the posters on the walls. The posters from The Fillmore’s heyday, from when it opened in 1965 to when it first closed in 1971, are particularly remarkable. There’s, say, a poster for Fleetwood Mac playing with Creedence in ‘69. Or The Doors opening for The Grateful Dead in ‘67….man. Or what about this one – Love and The Dead from ‘66! Wes and Danny, in particular, hopped up and down from the dinner table to get a better look at this, that or the other poster.

The Vines and Youth Group have a poster up from their appearance in 2003, although it’s in a different room – upstairs on the balcony. This means, at least, that The Vines must have sold out their Fillmore show because (so I heard) that they only keep posters from sold-out events. Unfortunately it’s a shitty image of a mosquito:

So not every band gets their poster mounted on the Fillmore wall for all time. The Get Up Kids already had a couple from their own heyday around 99/00/01 but tonight’s event (some tickets unsold) was marked only by a one-off magic marker drawing of a mother waking up her two kids. The Get Up Kids – get it? After load-out Wes and I were talking to the doorman, who looked like he’d been on the door since 1971, and he said we could meet the poster’s artist if we wanted. I just wanted to know if it really was the show’s poster – it just didn’t seem very good.

“That’s the poster.”
“I can’t tell if you’re joking or not.”
“I never kid,” he replied, and with that, perfectly illustrated the death of the hippie spirit.

The doorman was part of The Fillmore’s local crew. This consisted of about half a dozen slow-moving, sandalled, grey-ponytailed relics from the Fillmore heyday. After the gig, as we loaded out in the alley next to The Fillmore, we found what amounted to the burn-out’s clubhouse. There was a collection of junk: a hash pipe, a ripped tarpaulin, a Halloween costume, some newspaper clippings about Hitler, amongst other “stuff”. Cameron recreated the cacophany in a drawing which he then turned into a poster for the Get Up Kids show in the bubbly-lettered Fillmore style:

I was joking with Joe from GUK crew about these acid casualties on staff and he told me how he’d been having a cigarette in the alley and one of the old guys came up to him and asked, “What are you doing?”
“It’s cool, I’m with the Get Up Kids,” Joe said.
“I guess you can smoke in my alley then” he replied. Like a sixty year old first grader taking umbrage but unprepared to duke it out for his turf.

The San Francisco show ended up being one of our all time best shows I thought.

The tour left Mountain Time and we entered Pacific Standard Time in Eastern Oregon. Our van (that Cam has illustrated, above) crossed and re-crossed the tufted grass and scree in the canyons of the Snake River in Idaho on the I-84. Famously, Evel Kneivel plummeted into the Snake River in 1974 during an unsuccessful stunt jump. In Eastern Oregon we were sensibly cautious as we crossed the pine-lined Rogue River. Due to road works in the Washington State mountains we progressed at snail’s pace thru the beautiful snowless passes near a town called Cle Elum. At rest stops on the journey we got out and tossed around the mini American football we’d bought from Walmart. We threw it between pine branches (in Oregon) and shiny SUVs (in California). It’s hard to get the ball to spin properly, torpedo-wise, but Toby is the most skilled at this. Then leaving the Pacific Northwest we drove past the massive Mt Rainier and Mt Shasta, two awesome glaciated volcanoes that abut the I-5.

West Coast Junk Food Blitz: In Seattle hotdogs come with cream cheese. Wes ate two in succession out on the street from the venue. Fletcher (from Wes’s band the Devoted Few) had warned us (via Twitter) to keep him away from Cheese In A Can and Double Doubles but we had to let him loose on the Seattle Dogs. Then in Southern California we all ate Double Doubles at In ‘N Out at every opportunity, sometimes Animal Style, sometimes not.

Portland was a town overrun by hipsters the night we played the Music Festival North-West (MFNW). After our gig we watched a band called Portugal The Man play our stage. They were like Dr. Dog but more cosmic. Their keyboard player Ryan and his buddies took Danny and I to watch this powerful indie-metal band called Red Fang. As metal as they were, The Fang’s lead guitarist, weirdly, played a Thinline Telecaster which is the guitar that Jonny from Coldplay uses and the guitar that Toby plays on Forever Young ie: the most indie of guitars. We were mightily impressed, buying a T-shirt each. When they played their song Prehistoric Dog it was obvious they had a hit. Danny stuck the CDs in his knapsack which he promptly left at a party that Portugal The Man put on. This Ryan guy was nice enough to post it back to him the next day along with the T-shirts and a CD of his younger brother’s band.

San Francisco we stayed on Divisadero in Lower Haight, not the grimy Tenderloin at the Phoenix Hotel as usual. Both nights in SF we went to a great bar right across the road from the hotel, peeking through the SF fog, called Page Bar. The second night, after the gig at the Fillmore (which fucking ruled in mine and Toby’s opinion – more on that later) we got royally flogged on the Page Bar’s monthly special, Finian’s Irish Whiskey – $4.50 a glass – and staggered back to our hotel. Roger from Pretty & Nice either was too drunk to walk home or couldn’t fit into their band’s doss house so we offered him a space on our floor. As repayment he showed us a really cool cat video . We declined his offer to show us some youporn.

We were greeted in Southern California by a heat-wave, conducted royally on the Fahrenheit scale. After six gigs in seven days and a thousand miles we could’ve done with a rest. But when we turned up at our hotel, a back-packer’s hostel in Hollywood, I was on edge as we tried to check in, surrounded by “them”, drunken backpackers braying at each other 1am.

“It’s karaoke night so it’s a bit crazy,” the guy at the desk shouted to me over the din. The next morning the “craziness” had been stultified as the young guests sat around smoking cigarettes with their feet up on the balcony rail in the mindless time-wasting boredom that passes for relaxation at the backpackers.

Big news. Toby now sports a twirled moustache. Cameron has drawn a little cartoon of him for your amusement.

This tour we’re opening up for The Get Up Kids. Their guitar player Jim is wont to refer to himself, on and off stage, as “old” which is kind of annoying cause we estimate that he’s younger than us. But they’re not kids anymore and we sure ain’t youths. The two shows so far the audience have been great for us. Also, they sure do appreciate The Get Up Kids and have memorised a lot of their song-words.

The first show of the tour was Denver. It seems you can get dehydrated, sunburned and muscle-exhausted if you fly straight into the altitude of the Mile High City like me and Cameron did. And on East Colfax St, where our hotel was, you can be accosted by any number of meth-heads, crack-heads and general miscreants that line the pavement. Seriously, it’s a zombie movie.

Denver people tend to say “Oh, the Rock-mada” when you tell them you’re staying at this particular Ramada Hotel. It’s a universally acknowledged joke, like “Bris-vegas” for example, that’s still in circulation unlike, I don’t know, The Big Apple, which got too boring to bother with.

Also in Denver we met the first on band Pretty & Nice. They are nice as it happens. They’re from Boston, Massachusetts. The bass player Roger tries it on with any girl who crosses his path – nice work. And they can hold up their end of a conversation which is always…nice.

A sartorial observation/generalisation: boat shoes are rife in young America -  I blame Vampire Weekend for steering that misguided pleasure craft back to civilisation.

I bought 6 Australian navel oranges at Walmart. I didn’t think it would be worth it to send fruit grown, picked and packed in Australia to sell at the supplier-crushing prices Walmart gouges. But there you go.

I love Salt Lake City for a visit. The difference is courtesy. When I got out of the car in Boise a pedestrian crossing the road yelled “motherfucker” at a passing car that didn’t slow down enough for his liking. A situation like that with those two protagonists doesn’t exist in Salt Lake.