We got a late checkout, but even still, I woke up 20 minutes before we had to checkout, and no one was awake yet. Whatever, I took a shower and shaved. I got out and most people were up and packing. Ryan was still asleep, and he woke up and got up when the cleaning lady came and asked if we were checking out. We had the whole day to kill in El Paso, so I read this little El Paso travel guide thingy which told me pretty much nothing at all, except that if you want to go into Juarez, you must be some sort of fucking retard. This is my first time in Texas, so that’s pretty cool.
We pack up and leave. We don’t really know where to go or what to do, so we default to a mall because they have teh webernetz, and we’re the punkest band in existence. Driving over there was a trip because on the left side of us was the United States and on the right side was Mexico. You could definitely tell which was which. The river was right next to the freeway, and beyond that was a bunch of buildings that looked all shitty and poorly made. We get to the mall. Ryan is feeling like shit still, so he sleeps in the van. We go to this little Tex-Mex place that’s in the parking lot of the mall; it’s not a chain or anything. We go inside and we’re the only gringos in the joint. We sit down and get menus, except for John who sits there with a Cup O’ Noodles. The waitress actually comes and gives him some hot water without him asking, which was cool of her. Burritos are $2 here, which is outrageous. Free chips and decent verde salsa, too. John has to do a little translating for me to make the waitress understand that I didn’t want any meat in the fajitas burrito I ordered. We get our food and holy shit, it was quite possibly one of the best burritos I had ever had in my life. It was just fajita vegetables, but they were so god damn good I was really losing my shit over it. John, after finishing his Cup O’ Noodles, gets really excited at the salsa bar, and makes himself a condiment salad. And, he ate it. All of it. Astounding. All the waitresses at this place were latinos except for one black waitress with an afro that made her seriously look like she was out of the 70’s.
Afterwards, we went over to the Atom Age embassy, and I sat and wrote in the tour journal and tried to jailbreak my iPhone until I realized that I couldn’t with the newest iPhones. Lame. I guess I’ll tether when Apple says I can tether. Hopefully that will be in June, but probably not. We’re there for awhile, but then we leave to go to Guitar Center and then to the venue. We’re playing at this place called Zen-Miesters, but when we get there, it’s closed. That’s ok, we were there early. We drive around and then go back to Barnes and Nobles, because we’re super cool.
At Barnes and Nobles, I sat next to this guy, and looked over at his computer and saw that he was bittorrenting like 20 downloads. I do a quick speed test on my computer and get 100kbps. For those of you who don’t know what this means, it’s less than 2x dial-up modem speeds aka real fucking slow. I walked over to him and gave him a bit of attitude and told him to maybe max his download speeds to maybe 30-40KBps so that he’s not throttling public wifi like an asshole. He doesn’t really respond, but whatever. We eventually head out and go back to Zen-Miesters.
We get there, and it’s open and the promoter is inside. We talk to her, and this show sounds like it’s going to be the first legit show we’ve played this tour. She said she promoted this show all week, and that she has a strict schedule for bands, and then she introduced us to the sound guy for the night who gave us a detailed rundown of exactly what was going on. It was nice to have it a little bit pro for a change. The only weird thing was that he said that bands would have an hour to play, and that if we went any longer, we would get kicked off the stage. Who seriously plays for an hour? We were playing 3rd which was fine, and the first band loaded in. I stepped outside and called Danny and talked to her during the first band’s set, which was like a half hour. We loaded in to the designated area, and watched the second band.
The guy on one of the guitars had a Screeching Weasel shirt on, so that was a good sign to me. Both of the guitarists had Line 6 half stacks, which are the masters of tone. They also seemed to have a trumpet player, so this could get interesting. They went on, and the first chord this band played had so much Phaser effect over it that I kind of threw up a little. Did I mention Line 6’s many built-in effects? It really makes them the most versatile amp out there. The drummer was the lead singer, and was totally crazy and had a jew-fro. He also couldn’t really play at all and lost the rhythm frequently, but he was very fun to watch because he was being so nutso.
They played for an hour. It was unbearable. I guess they were slotted for that amount of time, so the club really didn’t care. They finally left the stage, and we loaded our gear on. It was nice having a sound guy, but I think he was doing a little too much, because the bar wasn’t that big. But, it was still cool, and it was good playing on a stage for the 2nd time on tour. We did a sound check, and it was nice to hear the sax for once and Ryan was really clear. The bar had lost some of its people because of the massive set the last band played, but it was still a good show’s worth of people. We started up.
I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was the fact that I actually got a mic for the first time on tour, or that we sounded completely different because we had monitors for the first time on tour, but I played like a fucking idiot the first few songs. I wasn’t screwing up a lot, but I just felt disconnected from my instrument and I made more mistakes than I usually do. I told the band this later on, but they didn’t seem to notice, and Ryan said that he could hear me fine. We played less than a half an hour, which is how long you should play, god dammit. Before the set, I mentioned to Ryan that he should ask the audience for a place to spend the night, because we didn’t have a place to stay, and he did. The crowd reacted well, I think it was mostly guy pumping drinks into girls. Later on that night I saw this muscley guy with this really drunk girl and she fell backwards off of the bar stool and hit the ground pretty hard, but then got back up again, no problem.
We loaded our stuff off the stage and some kids came over to the merch table and got some stuff. This one guy started saying how he loved the Queers and was totally into pop punk. I tried to talk to him a little bit about pop punk, but besides Screeching Weasel and the Queers, he seemed a little lost, which is what usually happens when I try to talk to people about pop punk. He got the 7”, and wanted me to sign it. I got a sharpie and did. Autographs are lame, but I had never given one before, so that was interesting.
The last band played, and it had the promoter singing lead on it. They did a cool cover of Goodbye To You, and she came out in the crowd and sang with people, but I was the only one who knew the song. I think that she was kinda drunk, but she was a lot of fun to watch. The guitarist had a Marshall MG100DFX, which is my amp at home, and my band made fun of me on more than one occasion because it’s solid state and kinda lame, but I knew that already. The lead singer’s son was there, apparently, which surprised me, because she looked like she was in her twenties and her son looked like he was a young teenager. At one point the guitarist of the band dared the kid to say “blowjob” in front of his mom, and he pussied out and didn’t do it. They played for about an hour or so, and at the end she made her son go up and play a song solo. She said “You’re going to have to get used to this sometime.” He was surprisingly good.
After the show ended, we still didn’t know where we were spending the night. The promoter came up to us and said that we could crash at her place, but we had to be out by 11 and there wasn’t a lot of space there. That was fine by us, we didn’t care, and it was cold as hell in El Paso. She gives us her address and tells us to meet her there. We hang around for a bit, and then head over to get some food at Taco Cabana which is like a chain fast food place along the border that has Mexican food. It was extremely vegetarian friendly, which was nice. We headed back to the venue because Ryan said that this rockabilly chick said that the promoter lived on a shady part of town, and that we could crash with her instead. She said that she has 3 couches and that we could leave whenever, so that was incentive enough for us. Ryan called the promoter and said that we were headed somewhere else, and we followed this lady to her place.
We get there, and it’s this apartment on a small hill in a residential area. We get our stuff out of the van and when I cross the street, I almost get hit by this car going 80 mph down the hill and doesn’t even slow down. Seriously, I almost died, I jumped out of the way. We go up to this lady’s house, and her apartment is pretty cool. She has the walls decorated with vinyl, and some rock and roll stuff. She also had a 3 month old Chihuahua puppy that was seriously the smallest dog I’ve ever seen. It was pretty cute. We get settled in, and we talk to her for a long time about all sorts of crap. The Juarez drug wars, her accent, music, other stuff. We finally got to bed, though.
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