Roger was telling us (fairly innocently) how he’s had a lot of luck with the ladies over the last year and I thought to ask when he’d had his prominent biceps tattoo done.
“A year ago I guess.” began the Rog. Aha! “The very first night I got it I went home with this girl and she was obsessed by it. She kept on saying ‘I know I can’t touch it but I just want to touch it‘. Yeah, but then the next morning she said ‘Usually I don’t like people like you. People like you usually disgust me. I like, like, burly guys.’  She was completely crazy. I always attract the crazy girls.”

That he only got the crazies was a bit of a refrain for poor Rog.

“The only good thing about her was her tits. She had great big tits.” said Roger. He turned away like he was leaving then came back and added, “Yeah I usually I don’t say things like that….” and he paused….”yeah, usually I go for girls with small tits.”
Danny and I laughed till – literally – tears came to our eyes.

The Rog (whose twitter name is iamtherog if you want to follow him) stands 6′4″ or thereabouts. He wears tight T-shirts that typically have kittens playing keyboards printed on them. The Get Up Kids took to calling him Jermaine, but he was more like Jermaine wearing Brett’s clothes combined with an All American teenage exuberance. Roger is a man bursting with development as Danny said. He has a few pimples and prominent voice-box and too-tight clothes and a tendency to thrust himself into the fray each night after the Pretty and Nice set. A very memorable person.

After San Diego our compadres and us left the Pacific coast and drove inland, along the intersate following the trail of In n’ Out burger joints that are inexorably marching eastward along the freeways out of California. We drove thru the woebegone eastern tip of LA’s Inland Empire that lies in the desert between San Diego and Las Vegas. I noted the catchy naming of “The Steer n’ Stein Steakhouse”. It’s competition a mile down the road was the grisly-named “Cask n’ Cleaver”. There wasn’t, but there should have been, a Slurp n’ Turf or something, for comic relief from the mental image of a steer butchered with cleaver.

The show in Vegas was at the fabulous Mandalay Bay Casino, in the Vegas House of Blues. The amenities at the House of Blues are excellent as Jim Suptic from the GUK claimed. The casino gave us a buffet dinner and the A/C was a triumph, 100 degrees outside, 60 inside. But the House of Blues voodoo kitsch decor lacks a little in authenticity. Also drinks were a bit pricey. Out front as I watched Pretty & Nice play I bought a Jameson’s on the rocks and was stunned it cost $14. My only recourse was to tweet about it. Take that! But apparently the arm-and-a-leg prices are The Mandalay Bay style a Las Vegan told me. “Don’t worry, wait till you get to Texas” The Get Up Kids said “Beer is cheap there”. Before our show all four members of Youth Group were very tired after having stayed up late to watch the AFL grand final live on ESPN in a Kiwi bar in San Diego followed by an 8am awakening for the desert drive. If I had to take a spirit-level reading I’d've said we’d given up on having a good show. But a strange thing happened. We killed that night! It was exhilarating.

To celebrate the show Danny and I went out to a bar called The Double Down, way back from the strip. It was meant to be a locals only type bar. Not that we met any locals. While Danny drunk an Ass Juice cocktail with Joe (GUK merch guy) he met and befriended a whole lot of Mancunians wearing T-shirts that said “Steve’s 40th  Birthday”. I met a band called “Two Timin’ Hussies” who were from San Francisco. After the GUKs left the bar to make their 2am bus call Danny’s charm let him down, somehow, for a second (I didn’t see it), with the Mancunians. He had to scoot out of the bar for a minute at about 2:30am because, as he patched together a story for me, one of the Manc lasses got very up in Danny’s face, challenging him to a fight for some reason that we never did get to the bottom of. As we idly watched the entrance two blokes were dragged out, one after the other, onto the footpath, unconscious. Maybe the Northern battle-axe did em’, who knows?

Slunk into skunk territory in Arizona the next day on the way to Phoenix. Every ten miles or so the marijuana-like scent of skunk-squirted musk filled the air in the van. The road itself in AZ seemed unusually covered with shredded tyres from truck blow outs – never tidied up and ominous as we drove the next 1000 miles thru the desert without a jack. If we’d gotten a flat tyre it would’ve been a long wait in the desert for roadside assistance. Come to mention it, all through California and Arizona and Texas it was as hot as hell on this tour – I broke out in a heat rash.

The city of Phoenix rises from the desert as a provocation to good sense. At this time of year, the end of summer, it’s existence seems perverse. Deserts are meant to be uninhabitable – it’s their nature. I ask you, what sort of mental illness would lead all these people to want to shelter nine months of the year in air-conditioning? It so happens that Youth Group had cancelled two Phoenix shows in the last couple of years, both times because the AZ shows were scheduled at the tail end of grinding 6 week tours and we couldn’t face the 10 hour drive there and back from LA through the desert. This time there was no doubling back to fret over. Unfortunately this show was fairly uninspiring (perhaps we’d never needed to make it to Phoenix ever?) mostly due to us inadvertently having the same monitor mix as Pretty and Nice who obviously like to deafen themselves on stage with truly mind-scrambling levels of vocals and guitars coming through the monitors.

The American free-pour can knock you on your arse. This is particularly the case if a friendly bartender likes your band and pours you a monster drink. In Phoenix, at this punk rock club, after the show I bought a(nother) Jamesons on the rocks in a round and figured I’d only paid about $7 for an entire tumbler-full of spirits. Like a quarter of a bottle or something in one cup! In alcoholic-pride showed it to Cam and Jim from Jimmy Eat World who’d come to the show. Jim was good enough to humour the Aussie moron in me “Oh you’re going to feel that tomorrow,” he said.

Cam was impressed by the size of my drink and went straight to the bar and ordered one for himself. Turns out he paid $7.50 but he too came away with a cup full to it’s little plastic brimmy-brim-brim with delicious Jamesons. And so next Danny went looking for this huge mug of spirits. But alas he got the wrong bartender, he got the bar manager, who poured him out only a finger of whiskey.

“No I wanted the $7.50 whiskey” Danny tried to wink. This bartender was having no truck with the idea of bigger drinks for the bands.
“That is a $7.50 whiskey.”
“But that’s only a shot” Danny complained.
“That’s way more than a shot”
“But my friends bought one and they got a full glass.”
“No they didn’t.”
“Yes they did.”
“Who served them?”
“I’ll go find out,” said Dan, not wanting to look like he was trying to pull a swifty.
Danny came over to where Cam and I were standing and explained the situation.
“There’s no way I’m going over there to finger the culprit” laughed Cam.
“I’m not going either,” I said. “Tell him it was a girl.” This was sort of a joke – there was no girl behind the bar – but unfortunately Dan went back and repeated the story.
“They won’t come over but they said it was a girl”
“There’s no girl working” the bar manager correctly pointed out. The jig was up.
Those bastards, Danny must’ve thought, as he snatched up his measly nip.

The band has been our lives for the last five years.  Pretty much from the release of Skeleton Jar, through the recording/release of Casino Twilight Dogs and The Night Is Ours, to the accompanying tours it has been our furious, intense and fulfilling job.

We poured everything we had into The Night Is Ours. Maybe it wasn’t exhausting, but it was exhaustive and we are just not ready to venture into that again in a hurry. We’re a band that has always valued the process of making a record as much as the end product. We need some time before the next one.

And well, we are just looking forward to having a good slice of time to do other, non Youth Group things with our lives.

We would like to thank all those that have been to a show, bought a record, bought us a drink, shared their couches, floors and lives with us. Until the next chapter…

…an epilogue: those in New York have one more chance to see us play before the break. We are playing at Littlefields, Park Slope, on Sunday 25th October. Goodbye Brooklyn. Someone will cry.

Toby, Danny, Cam and Pat
YG

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.

We’re playing Fontanas on the LES on the 22nd Oct and Littlefields in Park Slope, Brooklyn on the 25th.

The remaining shows in the Northeast are:

Oct 13    Hoboken, NJ @ Maxwells
Oct 14    Philadelphia, PA @ Silk City Lounge
Oct 15    Hamden, CT @ The Space
Oct 16    Cambridge. MA @ T T The Bears
Oct 19    Baltimore, MD @ Fletchers
Oct 22   New York, NY @ Fontanas
Oct 25   Brooklyn, NY @ Littlefields

Look, the leaves are turning gold and red!!

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.

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.

Songwriting.
I have finished four songs and half-finished a few others in New York.  Most of this happened while staying in our friend’s apartment in Brooklyn.  She has a ‘meditation room’ which I co-opted as a ‘music room’.  It was good in the meditation room.  I got a lot done.

When she got back from holidays she wanted to know whether I thought the vibes of the room had helped the songwriting, whether I had noticed the energy in the room.

I couldn’t honestly say that I had, but I did tell her that I thought that a new environment sometimes helps release something that may have been pent up for sometime.  Energies?  Possibly.  It was certainly a relief to have my own space for a while after touring and travelling for three months.
The other thing that helps me finish songs is a looming solo show.  I rarely play by myself as I get distractedly nervous and find them impossible to rehearse for (try rehearsing by yourself, it feels ridiculous).  But they are bracing, like a dip in a winter’s ocean, and best of all they make me finish songs.  Its discipline for the undisciplined.

Solo Shows.
I did a month-long residency at The Living Room, New York, in July.  It’s a sweet little venue, with a good piano they let you play.  Apart from nerves it was fun.  And even nerves can be fun when transformed into relief.

At least half the audience on any given night seemed to be Australian.  This was unexpected as Youth Group shows in New York tend to attract mostly locals.  The Australian flavour was encouraged by Nick the doorman’s Aussie obsession.  Although a New Yorker himself, dressed in fabulous outfit of shorts and cowboy boots and a cheeky grin, he would always greet me with a string of downunder band names, ie “Skulker, Superjesus, Powderfinger. Disgusting!” One night Nicolai from 78 Saab was in town which coincided with his outburst “Saab 78! Disgusting!”.  His day job at Wholefoods provided a wealth of invective material – one night he told me that Naomi Watts had found herself at his checkout and so naturally he asked her whether she and Liev Schreiber had met while smoking crack at the Big Day Out.  When she replied “I beg your paaaardon” in a plummy accent, Nick thought she might actually be English.  I said probably a New Zealander.  He said “Disgusting!”  Everything was disgusting with Nick.  Coincidentally, The Grates were also doing a residency just next door at Pianos.  In keeping with the ‘Australians in New York’ theme of the night we tended to check out eachother’s shows, to Nick’s obvious disgust.

Not Paying Money
New York is great in summer.  Everything is free and everything is outdoors. If you pay for a gig or a movie or a performance you’re a schmuck.  In the city of hustlers and $24 deals it’s the ultimate legal scam.  You sit in the grass, under the Northern stars and the half-twisted moon, drinking a can of PBR, listening to music and you do it like they do in a city that is frozen for half the year.  You get to understand the big deal about summer here.

I’ve seen some fantastic free shows:
Built To Spill played at Coney Island and every time the Cyclone went past the screams of the passengers drowned out Doug Martsch’s guitar solos.  Later, lying back on the beach in the fetid, weirdly misty air a man walks by and sells us icy cold Coronas from his mobile esky (“sorry, no lime”).  I get his number in case we need anymore.
The Dirty Projectors played in Williamsburg, right on the East River, the New York skyline as their backdrop.  What can tend to sound like a complex mash on record is crystalline parts and charisma live.
The next week at Williamsburg is the Black Lips and Trail of Dead.  Towards the end of their set The Black Lips start to actively incite kids to storm the stage, flail their arms around and stage dive.  This pisses off the burly Brooklyn security guys who have to clump onstage and awkwardly wrestle with indie kids between microphone stands, guitar leads and a band who continue to jump up and down, grinning piratically, their golden grilles glinting in the stormy light.
Meanwhile, up the back of the park, Danny has enroled in a half-court basketball tournament.  His team puts up a good fight but they are almost single-handedly beaten by a semi-midget who smokes between games.  He is some sort of freak.  Like Phil Smythe reincarnated as a pocket-sized Dennis Leary.  There is some underlying violence to this game.  At one point a hot-head Ginger overacts to a hustle from behind and places a cannily directed elbow in the guy’s face.  There’s a moment of pause, time stops, everyone wonders “what will happen now” but incredibly nothing does.  It’s a miracle.  The Fairytale of New York.
Not long after the game finishes, the storm hits.  The Empire State Building is crowned in cloud.  Someone comes on stage and announces that the Trail of Dead set will have to be cancelled because of the lightning, and indeed the area cleared.  “State park rules” apparently.  I am secretly glad because I would rather go to the pub.  And you can’t really complain because it’s free.
They have free outdoor movies too.  But these are popular.  I went with The Grates to see Edward Scissorhands but it was too jammed to even get into the park.  Instead we sat under the Manhattan Bridge with the other latecomers and had a beer and hummus picnic.  My favourite part of the night was when everybody around us left when the movies finished, even though you couldn’t really hear/see from where they were sitting.  New Yorkers.  They just want to be at the centre of the world all the time.

To Be Continued…

Youth Group, the Australian four-piece who released their third full-length, The Night Is Ours, this past April, will have barely had time to rest from their three-month North American stint before they’ll head back across the ocean to support emo heroes the Get Up Kids on their 2009 Fall Reunion tour. The fun kicks off in Denver on September 15, after which the two groups (plus Boston trio Pretty & Nice as the first opener) travel through Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, Dallas, and Omaha before finishing up together in Iowa City, IA. Youth Group will then continue eastward, headlining shows in Chicago, Columbus, Pittsburgh and Hoboken (with more dates TBA).

YOUTH GROUP FALL 2009 US TOUR DATES

w/the Get Up Kids
Sep 15    Denver, CO @ Marquis Theatre
Sep 16    Salt Lake City, UT @ In The Venue
Sep 18    Seattle, WA @ Neumos
Sep 17    **YOUTH GROUP ONLY 5pm INSTORE** Boise, ID @ The Record Exchange
Sep 19    Portland, Oregon Music Fest NW @ Roseland Theatre
Sep 21    San Francisco, CA @ The Fillmore
Sep 22    San Luis Obispo, CA @ Downtown Brew
Sep 23    Pomona, CA @ Glass House
Sep 24    Hollywood, CA @ Avalon
Sep 25    San Diego, CA @ House of Blues
Sep 26    Las Vegas, CA @ House of Blues
Sep 27    Tempe, AZ @ Clubhouse
Sep 29    San Antonio, TX @ White Rabbit
Sep 30    Dallas, TX @ Granada Theatre
Oct  01    Oklahoma City, OK @ Diamond Ballroom
Oct  02    Omaha, NB @ Slowdown
Oct  03    Iowa City, IA @ The Picador

Headlining
Oct 04   Urbana, IL @ The Canopy
Oct 06   Chicago, IL @ Schubas
Oct 07   Columbus, OH @ The Basement
Oct 08   Akron, OH @ Musica
Oct 09    Pittsburgh, PA @ Smiling Moose Upstairs
Oct 10    New York, NY @ Pianos
Oct 13    Hoboken, NJ @ Maxwells
Oct 14    Philadelphia, PA @ Silk City Lounge
Oct 15    Hamden, CT @ The Space
Oct 16    Cambridge. MA @ T T The Bears
Oct 19    Baltimore, MD @ Fletchers

More dates TBA

What the press is saying about The Night Is Ours:

“If melodic indie rock is your go-to player, then Aussie foursome, Youth Group, are definitely your winning team.” – Filter Magazine’s Good Music Guide

“The Night Is Ours’ sonic splendor shines like a beacon” – Alternative Press

“Prepare to be enthralled.” – Hear/Say

“Youth Group is a terrific indie-pop quartet from Australia that may remind you of a good many good things: The melodic power-pop of mid-to-late-period Teenage Fanclub; the refined art-rock of the Church; and the jangly dream-pop of a slew of Flying Nun bands from the ’80s and early ’90s (the Chills, the Clean, Volcano Suns, et al.).” – Seattle Weekly

“The band really puts it all together on the album’s centerpiece, ‘All This Will Pass,’ the perfect single, featuring catchy reverb-y guitars and a straight-forward memorable hook, with Martin using his whole range, to excellent effect.” – Absolute Punk