Day 2

We all wake up at about 11:00, and head across the street to the minimart for "breakfast". I realized that we are now out of "Arizona Iced Tea" territory and into "3 Liter Pepsi" territory. I grab myself the wateriest hot chocolate I've ever had, but I melted a Hershey's Bar in it so it wasn't so bad. John is convinced that our bad luck is the result of this small plastic skull that was given to us by Middagh, the guy that operates Plea For Peace in Stockton. He takes it and hurls it into the tree that we relocated the car under last night. With that, we take off for Portland.

The drive was spent sleeping by most everyone, except me who was writing first of the tour journal. I don't know why I decided to start one, I usually don't document the crazy crap that I get myself into, but this time it felt appropriate. The drive to Portland was long, but uneventful.

Portland was how I remember it, beautiful city and big long bridges. We make a b-line to Pizza Shmizza which we all shelled out 7.50 for 2 slices and a drink, and quickly realized that we should have all split an extra large pizza and saved 20-30 bucks. And it wasn't even that good. Having a few hours to kill before we head to the house show, we make our home base Peet's Coffee (for the free wifi) and hang out there and in some of the surrounding areas. I get bored and try to hack the Peet's Coffee Wifi, but to no avail, they have it pretty well secured, go Peet's! The Atom Age article is up on the AMP Magazine website, and it looks really good, but I didn't take a really good look at it, mostly because I'm not in it. Heh.

It's just a short drive to the "Camel House" where we're playing, and Brendan and I are on venue recon again. We knock on the front door, and are greeted by a hipster looking guy who tell us to load in through the back door. We pull up to the back of the house, enter in and go down to the basement. It's a pretty decent setup, I suppose. The rest of the band is pleased, they say it's more sizable than most house shows. Good. We start loading our stuff in through the back door (which is up some steps) and then down the flight of stairs to the basement and store our gear in the bedroom of one of the house's occupants, which is back behind the "stage area" where we'll be playing. It becomes immediately apparent that we aren't going to be able to get the gigantic bass cabinet down to the basement, so I'm issued the task of finding something to play through. We get there pretty early, and the other bands (and any attendees) aren't there yet. We hang out, talk to the housemates, and channel surf the TV until we find this hilarious Mexican TV game show that is so outrageous it contends Japanese game shows.

People start slowly arriving, and from the looks of it, there seemed to be a nice turnout. I mean, anything is better than the night before, but there were maybe about 30-40 people there before the first band went on, so I had high hopes. While the first band was setting up, I asked the bassist/keyboardist (in retrospect, I wonder how you can have a bassist/keyboardist) if I can borrow his bass amp for our set. He says "Uh... sure! But I'm running my bass and my keyboard through the same amp, which is a keyboard amp, so I don't know if you want to use it or not..." I, ungratefully, roll my eyes a little, but then thank him and say that it would be great. We set up the merch table, and one of the house people said that most bands don't try to sell merch, but we made do. We set the table up in the corner with a lamp on the table, but the lamp bulb broke off when Brendan tripped over the cord, so I scavenged one of the light bulbs from the nearby bathroom and we were good to go again.

There seemed to be an alright crowd for the first band’s set, but then the second band went on. Probably one of the most, if not THE most, obnoxious bands I've ever seen. It was 4 extremely white high school kids on guitar, bass, drums, and very very loud synth. They ran out of original songs to play in 10 minutes, and resorted to another 20 minutes of covers that maybe one of them knew and the others just goofed around for. Covers included such showstoppers as Time After Time by Cindi Lauper and I Saw The Sign by Ace of Base. They would play half of that song before they got bored and then moved onto the next awful song. They cleared out the room except for 5 drunk guys who mockingly shouted for an encore, which the kids excitedly obliged. I almost felt bad for them, except we were slated to play next, and we all just wanted them to GTFO the stage. They finally stopped playing after about 45 minutes, and were in no hurry to break down their gear, so we "helped" them by moving most of it for them. I plug into the keyboard amp, and it's not very powerful, so I turn the volume, gain, treble, mid, and bass all the way to 10. It's a muddy mess, but at least I can hear myself alright.

It was the best show I'd played with the band so far, we killed it. People thanked us and bought a bunch of merch, and Ryan said it was maybe the best house show the band's ever played. We were also about 5 times louder than any other band that played that night, and at one point I saw flashing red lights outside the top window of the basement. I kinda hoped we played loud enough for a noise complaint, but no such luck. A few people after the set said that we could crash at their place for the night, but we wanted to stay here at the Camel House, because it was raining like crazy outside and the last thing we wanted to do was haul gear up the stairs and into the rain. The ceiling of the house was leaking in some places, but not into the basement, and pretty much everyone but us had gotten completely hammered. I don’t think that I’ve seen that many PBR containers in my entire life, and that’s saying something. I looked up the PBR Wikipedia article later on, and it explicitly mentions Portland. Funny. Peter came up to me at one point and said “Matt, you HAVE to check out the hippy jam band that’s playing in the shack behind the house.” And if you know me, you know that I HAD TO. It was an organ, piano, harmonica, trombone, and some guy banging big sticks on an upside down recycling bin. They all played in different keys and different rhythms. It was awesomely terrible. They invited me to join in on banjo, and I couldn’t pass it up. Hysterical.

Ryan, Peter, and I started walking down the block to the 24 hour Mexican food restaurant, and we found out that some asshole had tagged the side of our trailer with a paint pen. The burritos at the place were dirt cheap and pretty solid. Some random guy at the table next to us kept butting in on our conversation with bizarre commentary. Of course I egged him on a little bit, and when we left Ryan said that I’m going to get my ass kicked one day. Thinking about it, I really have no idea why I haven’t gotten my ass kicked for provoking strangers as much as I do. I’ll probably never stop until I do.

We got back to the Camel House completely soaked from the heavy rain to the point that I was able to wring my shoes out in the bath tub. We brought our bags in, and half of everything was completely soaked because the back windows of the van don’t close all the way. This included my sleeping bag, so I resorted to sleeping on my airbed with my heavy jacket on and my sweatshirt covering my feet. It was actually completely comfy, and I fell asleep pretty quickly.