On the Road: Tour Diary with Shivery Shakes (Part 1)
The blog world can get a bit stale from time to time. Listen to this song. Go to this show. So, I wanted to do something a little bit different, but something that still reflects the music. I got in touch with our friends Shivery Shakes, who were just setting out on their first big tour as a band, going from Austin to NYC and back. I asked them to do a little tour diary, give some insight into a young band on the road. We’ll be checking in with them throughout the tour for a little tour diary action. Plus, they’re traveling with our good friend, and excellent photographer (though no Brian Gray!), Pooneh Ghana. You can check out more of her work HERE. Without further ado, here’s a look into life on the road.
Guitarist/Lead Vocalist, William Glossup
For about an hour this morning, I felt completely carefree, and excited to throw myself into a whirlwind of excessive drinking, and awkward sleeping situations, and then the terror sunk in. The terror that I would be hundreds of miles away from my own bathroom, refrigerator, and bed; the terror that some crackhead in Philadelphia would take a crowbar to our rented minivan to steal all of our gear, in turn, ruining everything we’ve worked so hard for. I was terrified largely because I am ridiculously sleep deprived; however, I was sleep deprived largely because setting up a DIY tour consists of so many details, that it is almost impossible to be confident that your plans are concrete.
At 10am, we met up to load up all of our equipment and luggage into a minivan that our friend Sam rented to us. It was muggy and our equipment barely fit into the van, and we kept teetering on asking ourselves the question “can we actually pull this off?”. The rest of the guys were a little more rested and level headed than I, exchanging jokes and getting excited, while I was sweaty and scared that we would have to leave behind something vital to the tour. We ended up getting creative enough with packing that we made everything fit, and after several failed attempts to lock up and take off, we finally hit the road. Once my panic was diluted by the excitement of approaching the countryside, with Wowee Zowee cranked, I managed to stop second-guessing myself on our capability to launch this tour successfully.
Because we got a late start on hitting the road, we didn’t stop on our way to New Orleans except for gas. We went through some pretty eclectic playlists, ranging from Tame Impala’s record store day release ‘Live Versions’ (upon recommendation of our friend/badass photographer Pooneh Ghana who is traveling with us up to New York) to Francoise Hardy to some deep cut 90’s hip hop.We arrived in New Orleans after 8 1/2 hours, a short 20 minutes before our load-in time at Circle Bar. Most of us hadn’t eaten more than a couple handfuls of trail mix all day, so we quickly ran down the street to a wood-fired pizza joint called Dolce Vita. It was decent, to say the least, and we managed to slam two of their pies in about 15 minutes before running back to the show.
It was a pretty dead night at the club, and the line-up was a pretty odd hodge-podge of bands. First up were two members of the psych band Bipolaroid, doing an acoustic set, because their full band line-up had some difficulties after their last tour. Their songs sounded simple acoustically, but it was obvious that those guys would sound massive and awesome with a full band. After their short set, a band called Hairy Lamb played. Their drummer, who was an incredibly pleasant, portly, older (60ish?) gentleman, had been talking to us a bit while we were loading in, explained to us that they had to play second, instead of third, because they had a “clogger” (yes, like tap dancing in clogs) who had thrown his back out and needed to leave early. While they were setting up, I kept waiting to see the clogger, but he never showed up. However, the older man we had been talking to put a head band that had MANIMAL written on it, in addition to a Backstreet Boys style headset mic, which he used for a lot of “YEAHHHHH”s, and the occasional “I LIVE FOR THIS SHIT”. Hairy lamb sounded like a slightly less melodic Melvin’s by way of Primus’ instrumentation (two basses and the drummer).They were pretty fucking pumped considering there were about 12 people in the room, and 8 people smoking outside.
After they finished, we rushed on without a soundcheck to try to start playing, before the bar had emptied out. We blasted through our set without pauses, and the folks who did stick around to see it seemed pretty fond of it, and we tried to make the best of it despite the weak attendance. After the show we went to meet an old friend of mine, in the Bywater area, which a few locals at our show warned us of being very dangerous. Five minutes after we parked a drunken straggler decided to take a nap on the hood of our minivan. He looked big and muscular, and was most likely able to take all of us down, so we moved him from the hood to leaning slightly on the tire. After we all got a few beers in us, half of us wanted to go home, and the other half wanted to see the sun rise at a bar, so we dragged him to the next car and took off. We watched the sun come up at a bar in the marigny, and accepted our future 15 dates, no matter the circumstances….
