Tour Diary #1: Timeshares
Downstate, NY-based Timeshares are currently out on an east coast tour that's taking them to Stay Sweet Fest and back. Guitarist/vocalist Jonathan Hernandez will be sending AP updates from the road. Check out the first one below.
April 6th to April 9th, 2012. Teaneck, NJ to New Paltz, NY, with further away stuff in between. Open Your Folding Chair Next To Me.
It's been a while since I've distanced myself from the fun things going on around me to hide away and type about them on my laptop, so why don't we catch up? It's been a weird couple months. We made a record, it came out about half a year ago, and it was called Bearable. We swore with starry hopeful eyes to shove it down every willing throat we could reach, and trekked our way down to The Fest and back, with a rejuvenated love for the smell of this beautiful hunk of rusted steel, the greatest van to ever tackle the highway and piss all over it, our beloved Hate Game.
Then something funny happened; we just sorta didn't do all that. Our time in ol' Home Sweet Hate Game just seemed to diminish. We would get in her and take a trip or two, sure, but you could just hear it in the old girl's purr that she was dying to see the sights, spread her shitty wings, and roll it's way into the sunset, butthole and armpits of the country's semi-notable cities and towns. It seemed we had to oblige her. Oh, and that wasn't some awful rock and roll metaphor about pissing on the highway before, Mike Natoli installed a fucking toilet in this thing.
And I want to tell her it wasn't her fault. We know we belong in here. There are so many factors that mold and change and evolve in trying to keep us out of her cold embrace. We're all pretty broke, and this isn't so conducive to helping us out in that regard. In fact, we all owe Natoli a substantial amount of money. We all seem to keep aging as well, and we should probably be wearing ties five days a week by now or whatever you do that makes money. Not only that, but those close to us are always getting real fucking mad at us when we do this. Seriously man, a lot of them just don't like it. But there are more important things at hand. We like doing this, this makes us happy. Like, right now, Eric Bedell is using an alligator puppet to eat farts out of Mike's butt. And life is short. It's real short. This is a point that has recently been driven home to some of us very sharply, sadly due to very unfortunate circumstance.
On Saturday we arrived in Keene, NH for the second day of Get Better Fest 2. Alex, formerly of Young Mountain, currently of Burning Bridges, put the whole thing together. We got to see and hang out with a lot of great people we really don't get to see a lot in this little sect of this community that feels like a natural extension with a lot of the same people of what we used to do in Lexington, KY. We had a buddy down there named Anthony, and he booked us more than anyone in New York probably ever did, even our old band that he told us he hated. In Keene that weekend everyone was wearing t-shirts with a drawing of his face on them, some people toting postcards featuring his likeness, many more saying his name into microphones. He used to put together Crucial Fun Fest every year, and a lot of these same bands were regulars. He used to book all these people the same way he booked us, and put us up for the night, showed us the town, played pick-up ball in the middle of the night, and regularly told you things about himself that made your jaw drop. But he got sick a while ago, and now he's not around anymore. You see a lot of these friends you make through all this nonsense sporadically, not in their day-to-day, and you see them in this lost boys setting where we're away from all the shitty things at home and surrounded by like-minded people for once, and constant good tunes. You never imagine that real problems, much less mortality can penetrate that. Life is short, and weird.
Get Better Fest is a treat though. We get to hang out with our good buddies in Weak Teeth, who absolutely demolished the place. Weak Teeth are one of those bands I've seen be the best band on the bill in front of a shitty apathetic audience too many times, and seeing the whole room going off for them felt great. Amongst many others, we got to enjoy a van drink or two with the members of Rubrics, with whom we discussed the health benefits of hydro colonics. That's where they stick a hose in your ass, and it gets all the old feces that's turned into weird igneous shitrock inside of you out. I think subconsciously, that conversation is why myself and Jason have been wearing our Rubrics shirts ever since. Yeah, and they play music too. And they're real good at it.
Our set is a lot of fun that night. The night before that we'd played with I Am The Avalanche (the wildly lovely gentlemen of Banquets and Hostage Calm as well) in Teaneck, NJ. While the show was a total blast, and everyone in every band was, as always, delightful to spend the night kicking it with (Vinny let me and Eric grill him for a while on not losing your voice on tour, a chronic Timeshares dilemma), it was a very…professional show. Having a sick sound guy making us sound better than we are is lovely, and I geek out when we play in front of big flashing stage lights (Natoli and I took a break from playing for a little bit to trip out and get our rave on), but all that stuff still sorta intimidates me a little I think. It was comforting to get our stink on atop a “stage” made out of what I think were pieces of tables at Get Better.
Then again, Get Better was also day one of a tour from Get Better to Stay Sweet Fest in Richmond with Spraynard, and I coulda sworn that meant we were breaking into the arena circuit. People are losing their shit for Spraynard these days, and deservedly so. Those 'nards have put out home-run record after home-run record and they never stop busting their asses. If you haven't heard Funtitled yet, you fucked up, and I'm starting to think the songs on Exton Square (their new 7-inch) are even better. We've been playing show with Spraynard since the beginning of this band, and it's really great to watch the crowds keep growing bigger and bigger for them. Hope it keeps up.
We stayed in a packed hotel room that evening with said 'nards, as well as Ed and Mimi from NONA who are also an alarmingly wonderful band. I got out of bed to pee, and I knocked Mark's (Spraynard, bass) water bottle on Jay's head. Jay yelled at me, and I harbored a deep resentment towards him until continental breakfast when we watched a bear dance on the morning news. I still believe Mark planted his water bottle halfway off that counter in an attempt to end Timeshares. He couldn't have guessed that we've already hated each other for years.
The Handsome Woman in Willimantic, CT was our next destination. A caravan of the bands from Get Better made the trip as well. Included amongst these were The World Is A Beautiful Place And I Am No Longer Afraid To Die (I didn't look it up first! I totally remembered that on my own), Glocca Morra, and Run, Forever came for what would be the second of three consecutive dates. This is the second time we've “accidentally” done three or more dates with Run, Forever, and the three of them are such nice people in such an intensely good band. Anthony has a knack for hooks and melodies you can't fuck with, and Cassie wrenches her bass around with her fingers like a mad woman. She told us once that she was taught to play real young, so she only knows how to play with her fingers. She does this thing where she wrenches back the low E string while she's muting it and I don't know if anyone notices it but me, but it looks like she's trying to make her bass tap out. All this is before she nearly makes me completely break down, but we're not up to that yet.
The housemates of the Handsome Woman fed us like kings. Truly an incredible spread of delicious food. This is the first in a series of vegan homemade dishes we've been eating that are doing numbers on our colons. Jarad Needham, our favorite person who has accompanied us once more for this jaunt, has affectionately dubbed our diet “The Vegan Brown n' Gray.” Now, don't get me wrong, this isn't shit talk. When you make a band a real home cooked meal, much less a whole house of hungry dudes from out of town, you should have a street named in your honor. All these vegetables and whatnot though, are making our asses play sets of their own in the van. Jarad has touted his flatulence as The Bagpipe. Natoli's starting to be able to pick out who each blast belongs to. I know I keep talking about butts and farts and stuff, but I swear it's just a coincidence due to the nature of this trip, and we're not just stupid infants but well-read intelligent adults. I don't really swear that.
We were pretty early on in the bill, and this seemed like a really good thing. I always thought we could handle ourselves on a stage, but we've made a focus out of being a lock-tight live act, and not getting too drunk and seeing what happens next. Glocca Morra doesn't make this easy, though. We end up spending a lovely portion of our evening getting to hang out with these slops, and it's a shame we haven't sooner. Great band, and much like us, a bunch of trainwrecks that I hope we get to do this with a lot more. The infinitely patient Lisa of Kind of Like Records is putting out their record, which in a sense makes us labelmates, and I hope we can use that as an excuse to act stupid together in the future.
We wrap the weekend along with Spraynard and Run, Forever in New Paltz, NY. Getting to watch those two bands in the same night could put anyone in a good mood, even someone with as crappy an attitude as my own. Travis Sewalk, another longtime friend of the band and singer of Trenchfoot puts this one together. I'll gladly play anything Travis wants to put on, because it always rules. Natoli and I grew up playing in the tiny closed-in box of a music scene in Rockland County, NY, and I'm so thrilled lately when Travis brings really good out of town bands (Spraynard, for example) into his garage in Nanuet and packs it out for them. That sorta thing woulda made 16-year-old me drop all his copies of Full Circle by Pennywise and go nuts. Hats off. The Lovely Matadors played, and their drummer Jordan has been so cool to us and standing in the front of every crowd he's a part of that we've played for, ever since we snuck him into a bar close to four years ago so he could see our old band, the Knockdown, play. They absolutely killed it, I'm sorta proud of him, and I hope we get to play with them more. After the show we go hang for a little while at Travis' apartment with a couple other friends. Things get a little wacky and they threw a TV off the balcony. Somehow, they even managed to do this responsibly and ran downstairs to pick up the mess while their Turkish downstairs neighbors looked on horrified. Good stuff. I think while this is going on some of us have our minds elsewhere though.
At the show that night, Cassie takes a minute between songs to say something, and probably has no idea exactly how it affected some of the room's inhabitants. She tells a story about having a conversation with Anthony before he was sick, about what kept them excited about this music as the years begin to try and pull you from it. She says that Anthony told her that two of the bands that kept him stoked about what's going on are Spraynard and Timeshares. She says it as a quick nice gesture in passing, but when she finishes, to my core, I am utterly shook.
Life is short. Spraynard's home turf, West Chester, PA is next.
