My Belated, Yet Totally Fuckin' Awesome, Tour Diary Concludes
Cover of "Yes" or an artist's concept for the new Caustic CD. Look; I don't ask questions.
Friday, May 11th, 2012
We fly from San Francisco to Seattle. [OK, I guess that's kind of obvious, unless you thought we hitchhiked from show-to-show the way the Monkees and the Mansons used to]. We arrive in the late afternoon, so we have to
go directly to the El Corazon club for sound-check. As we load in I spot a poster featuring the smiling face of Daniel Graves, AKA Aesthetic Perfection. Alright, this place might not be the Copa, but at least someone whose music I really like will be playing here. That's a good sign. Following sound-check we drop our instruments off at the hotel and go looking for food. This goes pretty damn poorly for Dave, our manager, Dean, and I, who ended up spitting off from everyone else after 20 minutes of fruitless wandering. The three of us end up getting booted out of a Starbucks (yes, we were that hungry) because nothing in downtown Seattle is open after 6 PM.
Back at the hotel I meet up with my friend Sandy whom I haven't seen in nearly 20 years or, as she puts it "The last time I saw your band play, you were sponsored by Fuji audio tape. My kids don't have any idea what the Hell audio tape was."
Here's an article about the show which is surprisingly positive despite imply, in the title, that we are a pack of drooling idiots: Dead Milkmen Are as Bratty and Adolescent as Ever at El Corazon. And here's another review from Live Music Seattle. Yes, the club was hotter than whichever Hell Rick Santorum would forever burn in if there were such a place as Hell. You should also know that I consider the El Corazon show to be one of the best we've ever played.
Now, for m, there were two highlights to this show, both of which actually happened after the show itself. The first happened immediately after the show. I had begged the band to play our cover of VNV Nation's Control in Seattle because I've heard it's a pretty Goth/Industrial friendly town. We played it, and after the show Dandrew ran into the dressing-room (such as it was) to tell me that Gabriel Shaw who plays keyboards for VNV at their live shows was downstairs and wanted to say hi. [I'd also told a true story, onstage, that night about meeting a young lady at a VNV after-party who was sent to a psychiatrist as a teenager. The psychiatrist instantly proclaimed her normal and handed her a bunch of Dead Milkmen CD's]. Gabriel turned out to be a really nice guy who didn't seem to mind me butchering his keyboard lines.
The next highlight came a few days later when I received a very nice email from Tom Shear AKA Assemblage 23. If you look closely at the pics in the article above, you'll notice I'm wearing an Assemblage 23 t-shirt.
A Rant: Do I sound like a total babbling fanboy? If so, good; because I always hope I'll be floored when I get to meet someone who makes great music - or a great artist, or a great writer, for that matter. Oh, and few things in life make me as happy as meeting someone whose music I respect and hearing "The teenage me is flipping out." When you're a musician, particularity a musician in an obscure punk band, you often wonder if any of those people who grew up on your music went on to make music themselves. And finding out that they made music you love makes a decade of riding in a smelly van and sleeping on sticky floors worth it. And when you meet a musician whose work you respect and they turn out to be a really decent human being, well...it reminds me to make an effort to be less of a dick.
According to my friend Joe, who knows a lot of useful stuff, there are at least two members-only late-night Goth Clubs in Seattle. We, however, don't think to ask for an invite to either of these, so my friends Brian and Sandy and I all end up having a nightcap (I have half of a class of beer, so this doesn't technically count as a trespass upon the "No drinking before a show rule") at a place called Vito's that was (unintentionally) more Goth than the backstage area at a Bauhaus concert.Saturday, May 12th, 2012
We fly from Seattle to Portland on prop plane -first one I've ever been on - and get an incredible view of Mount St. Helens. This is another first for me as I'm usually seated on the side of the plane that for some unknown reason only offers views of trailer parks and Superfund sites. While the passengers on the other side of the plane get a spectacular view of the Grand Canyon, I always seem to be looking down upon a drive-in showing Stop or My Mother Will Shoot.
The Portland show is great, but the crowd is a little overly rambunctious when it comes to stage-diving as well as wandering around the stage aimlessly, and I start to get pissed as people come dangerously close to Joe's pedals and my laptop. This is my fault, really. What I should've done was take a minute between songs to say "Look folks; if you absolutely must stage-dive, there's a lovely area right here at the front of the stage where you can land without interrupting the show." After all, it's hard to get angry at a 40-year-old man who has waiting to stage-dive to one of our songs for seventeen years.
It wasn't hard to get angry with the guy who threw excellent examples of the wimpiest punches in the world at our manger, Dave, after Dave tried to politely tried to move him away from Joe. The "What's with the weird flailing, uncoordinated hand motion? Is this guy trying to hit me?" look on Dave's face was priceless. And even Spastic Rocky couldn't ruin the the evening.
Here's a review of the Portland show: Dead Milkmen @ Hawthorne
Oh, I had planned to go to the Lovecraft Bar after the show but, by the time I'd made it back to the hotel, it was too late, so opted for sleep instead. This means that the only "club" I managed to visit during the entire tour was Vito's. Therefore, it is my great honor to declare Vito's "The Best Gothic/Industrial Club in the Northwest!"
See you this Fall on the Kingslanding, Pyke, Winterfell Tour!
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