Day 8

A construction worker woke me up, and I heard him saying “Hey you! You on the floor!” and I sleepily said “Huh?” “I'm taking the extension cord that you're things are plugged into.” “Ok, sure. Go for it.” And then I fell back asleep. I woke up later and realized that I probably should have asked the guy which outlet that extension cord was plugged into, because almost none of the outlets in the building worked. I went around plugging random things into the outlets around the building, and none of them worked. So I guess we were without power, which was fine; all my stuff was charged.

I decided that I should take pictures of this place, because it was pretty bizarre where we were sleeping. There were people passing by on the sidewalk, and my sleeping bag was in full view of the front windows, so I wondered if anybody had seen me sleeping in an empty store. I woke up past noon, so it was probable. I haven't used my camera yet on tour. I don't know why; I just never bothered to pull it out of my bag. So I snapped a few photos.

I was being a little loud (something that was easy to do given the massive echo chamber we were in) when I was trying to find an outlet and taking pictures, so some of the other band members woke up. Ryan is always the last one to get up, and Brendan was in the van, so Peter, John, and I got our stuff packed up. Peter was getting a little anxious because he would rather hang out in Sacramento than a construction site, so he wanted to wake up Ryan and leave. I went out to look for a coffee shop or something where I could eat something and wake up. I wandered around and found Heavenly Donuts, so I bought a box of a dozen donuts and brought it back to the band who were more than excited to have them. Ryan woke up and we headed out of there.

Sacramento wasn't that far away, so we got there pretty quickly. We were set up to play R5 Records, which was a regular looking record store. Brendan and I went in, and we looked around, not knowing exactly where they were expecting us to play. We asked the person at the front desk, and they said that they were going to move some couches out of the way or something. Ya, ok. The rest of the band finally came in, and Ryan was wondering where the local bands were that were supposed to open for us. He made some calls and found out that they had dropped off. Bummer. There was no one there, so we just decided to save Ryan's voice and not play.

But we had a backup plan. Ryan had been contacted a few weeks prior about playing on the UC Davis college radio station. He thought that it wasn't going to happen, until he got an email today from the DJ saying that we could play today if we wanted to. So that was pretty convenient, and we drove out to Davis, which wasn't that far away from Sacramento. We had some time to kill, so we got some food at Del Taco (a place I've never been before. It was pretty gross).

Finding a way into UC Davis was a pain in the ass. It's a college campus so there are bikes everywhere, and we almost hit a few of them in our big van plus trailer. We were given a gate code that we were supposed to punch in, but we searched and found several gates which all apparently had different gate codes than the one we had. We eventually found the right gate and went in to the campus. Finding the radio station building was equally difficult and frustrating, so I hopped out of the van and asked students for directions. We finally found the building and I went in to see what we were expected to do. College buildings and usually all labyrinths from hell and this one was no different. I found the radio station which was in the basement of the building, and it was the biggest college radio station I had ever been in.

I searched the place and found “Calamity Janie,” the DJ who was having us on her show, and she followed me out of the station to the van to tell us all where to load in. We pulled around the building, and we told to load our gear down stairs. This wasn't as bad as I thought, but still a bit of a pain. We got all our gear in, and sat down on the couches in the station office. There were 2 DJs doing their show while we were hanging out, so I decided to smear my face on the DJ booth window while they were trying to banter on air. They both started cracking up and I ran back into the room where the rest of the band was sitting before the 10 second delay hit.

The station had stickers and posters of punk bands all over the place, so that was cool. We put up some stickers, too. We were all sitting on the couch killing some time, when Atom Man came on the radio, and the band's faces all lit up a little bit. I've had a bunch of experience with college radio (Miranda, my ex that was living with in Tacoma, had her own punk show on her college station, and I've had a few other friends with shows), so it didn't really phase me that much, but the band thought it was kind of weird. After the song ended, the DJs introduced us as a “pop punk” band, which is something we don't really feel we fit into, but it's better than “ska” band, which we get almost as often.

Their show ended at 8, and Calamity Janie's show started. I asked her what the schedule was, and she said that we would be playing from 9-10. I didn't think that we had nearly enough material to do a full hour's set, so she said that we could play for as long as we wanted and then maybe do an interview for the remainder of the time. She didn't really seem like she cared too much or had any idea, so neither did we. We setup our gear in “Studio A,” and the soundguy did a thorough check of the mix, so it seemed like we were good to go. We were told that we would have to censor the songs on the air, which really wasn't a problem for us, but a few of our songs have some pretty blatant swear words.

We started at about 9:15, when the people in the sound booth kept giving us thumbs up signs, which we weren't really sure if that was the “go” sign or not, so there was a good 10-15 seconds of dead air, which I'm sure is about on par with regular college radio. We went into our set, and Ryan broke a string in the first second of the first song. My instrument cable also cut out for about 10 seconds as well. I had tuned my bass just before we went on, but for some reason my A string was way way off. I checked it on my tuner pedal in between songs, and the pedal said that my open A was fine. It was lying to me; there was no way in hell that string was on tune. So I played the next 2 songs only on my E string, something that I was a little proud that I could pull off. Before the set, I had raised the bridge a bit because of my bass' neck problems, but that shouldn't have affected an open A string. Ryan told radioland all about how my intonation was off, but it was my tuner pedal that was broken. I tuned to Peter's A string, and played the rest of the set fine. On “Kill Surf City,” Ryan usually says “When no one gave a FUCK” when there are no instruments playing, but he said “When someone licks your BUTT” instead, which was extremely great. Peter said “fuck” a few times in the backup vocals, but I don't think that anyone caught it but me, so hopefully no one gets a violation.

We finished at about 9:45, because we wanted to maybe get some interview time in, but Calamity Janie didn't seem to want us to do that. I know that college programs have to throw in a few PSAs and announcements during their show, so she probably had to cram all those in at the end. They handed us a CD of our performance, and told us that it would be available online as well. Calamity Janie came out after her show and said thank you and that we did a good job and blah blah blah. The next show that was going to be on that night was going to have a live bluegrass band on, so naturally I was curious about who they were. It was this family band, one of those traditional bands where everyone in the family plays an instrument. I've seen some stuff like that before, and usually the kids are extremely talented because of pressure from their parents. We're talking child talent like child chinese violinist talent. I asked them what they were playing, and they handed me a set list, thinking that as a punker I wouldn't know any. I knew a few of the songs, and then I brought up some bluegrassy stuff and wondered if they had heard of my dad's show. They hadn't, and I think at that point they were getting tired of chatting with me. After the conversation, I kinda pieced together some things from what they said, and I concluded that they were probably playing bluegrass to promote the master race.

We started loading our gear up the stairs. I picked up Peter's amp case, and after about 3 steps, the bottom completely fell out of the case because it wasn't screwed on correctly, and his amp head dropped about 3-4 feet onto the linoleum floor and bounced. I looked at it, and it didn't seem like any of the tubes were broken, and there was no rattling inside, so it seemed fine, and I went outside to tell Peter what had happened. He was a little mad, but seemed to be OK.

We made a quick drive back home, and dropped John and Brendan off at John's house where they were both staying for the night. Ryan and Peter dropped me off at home, and I went in my room and Danny was asleep in my bed, and as far as all of you people know, I crawled in bed and fell asleep.