Alrighty, folks – Now that we’ve played our new song, ‘Scoop’, live I figured I should write a blog to explain things since the song only gives half the story (It would be a long-ass song if it told the whole story.)…

    So…  It all starts with JADED52 on tour in Japan.  Mark, Corey, Andy (our roadie for the trip), and I got into Japan a couple days early to adjust to the time difference, go to Tokyo Disneyland, and drink a whole lot!  We stayed in a suburb of Tokyo called Kanda because (I think) it was near our first show.  Now, most of you probably know that Corey and I have a slight taste for the booze – if you know what I mean…  Turns out, Japan has NO LAST CALL!  That’s right – bars are literally open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!  Needless to say, this caused us to get into more than a little bit of trouble…

    The night in question started out just like any other while we were over there.  Corey and I were wandering the streets at 4:00 in the morning looking for a place to drink (turns out bars aren’t very clearly marked in Japan).  We had just run into a fat man standing in an alley dressed in a Pikachu costume – that was pretty bad-ass!  We finally found some ‘English’ pub that was about the size of a standard U.S. guest bathroom and decided to settle in for our 20th giant Asahi of the day.  The wall of the Pub was covered with a seemingly random collection of English items – I think there was a picture of the band Nazareth, maybe a couple newspaper articles, a couple coasters from U.S. bars and some other stuff – I’ll have to check my videos to see if I actually have the display chronicled.  So…  Of course Corey decides to contribute his expired North Peninsula library card to the wall.  He was very careful to scratch his name off the back so someone wouldn’t take the card and go steal the book from the Sequim library – Good move, C-Murder!

    Anyway…  It was about this time that we noticed what we identified as the absolute drunkest Japanese man we had ever seen!  This guy was staggering, stammering, and barely conscious!  He didn’t seem to be malicious, though, so we had a chuckle at him and turned back around to mind our own business.  After a couple minutes of chatting with Corey, I noticed someone was standing behind me waiting to get my attention.  Lo and behold – it was the super-drunk guys who will henceforth be known as ‘Scoop’.

    Noticing I have a super-drunk Japanese man behind me, I turned to speak to him and this is what I remember of our conversation:

Ryan:  “Hey, What’s up, man?”
Scoop: “Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”
Ryan and Corey: ..
Scoop: “Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”
Ryan and Corey: ..
Scoop: “Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”
Ryan and Corey: ..
Scoop:  (In VERY broken English combined with drunken slurring) “You….  Y….  You….  You… Speak… English?”
Ryan and Corey: “Yeah!  We’re American – how’s it going man?”
Scoop: “Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”
Ryan and Corey: ..
Scoop: “Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”
Ryan and Corey: ..
Scoop: “Do….  Do…. D…. Do…. You… Know… Ichiro?”
Ryan and Corey: “ICHIRO!  Yeah – we’re from Seattle!  Go Mariners!”
Scoop: “Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”
Ryan and Corey: ..
Scoop: “Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”
Ryan and Corey: ..

    Well…  I’ll spare you the rest of the transcript since it’s mostly shushing on Scoop’s part, but the gist of the conversation is that Scoop was a newspaper reporter for a Tokyo paper (the Tokyo Times-Picayune, I think) and he spent time covering Ichiro when he was in high school in Japan.  We couldn’t pronounce or remember his Japanese name so we just called him ‘Scoop’ which, as everyone knows, is the default nickname for any newspaper reporter.  At some point he stumbled away towards the bathroom, ostensibly to die of alcohol poisoning or, more likely, fall asleep in a puddle of his own pee!  Either way, he was never seen or heard from again (although I did get his business card and I swear I’m gonna E-mail him the song once we have it recorded.).

    Anyway, the next day Corey and I were severely hungover and super punchy due to all the strange circumstances and we decided we really missed Scoop.  Since there was literally no chance of seeing him again, we decided to start making up stories to answer all of the questions we had about him.  In our minds, Scoop is a hard-drinking, womanizing investigative reporter who breaks up international crime syndicates by day and then gets bombed off of whiskey at night and always heads home with a different lady.  He’s good friends with Tommy Shaw from Styx, ya’ know!  After uncovering a terrorist plot to plant a bomb on the set of he-haw, he spent the rest of his vacation driving an 18-wheeler hauling rocket fuel!  Well…  you get the picture.

    So…  We wrote a song about him.  In our minds he’s out there right now busting criminals through his undercover research work and then getting hammered at night – all the while bringing happiness and joy to fellow bar-goers.  We hope we never get into serious trouble, but if we ever do, we believe Scoop will once more appear to save the day!

-    Ryan

P.S.  Did I mention I had enough wits about me to have Corey snap a picture of me and the now-legendary man?

"Hey Jaded, why don't you guys update your blog?". Fine, here you go!

We had two shows in Eastern Washington this past weekend. Friday night was at The Cretin Hop in Spokane, and Saturday was in Pullman at The Moose Lodge. The Cretin Hop is an all ages place and it's a pretty rad place. If there are any bands looking for a place in Spokane to play you need to check this place out. Contact Nemesis Booking - they book all the shows there. The next night was at The Moose Lodge and it was off the hook! The crowd was pretty into it, even though it was cold as f*ck! I don't know about you, but I am TOTALLY done with the cold weather. Thanks to both T.C./The Cretin Hop and the staff at The Moose Lodge, everyone was awesome! We were happy to play with our friends in P36 again (one of our favorite "local" bands). If there are any of you who haven't heard them, go check out thier MySpace for some tunes. We also got to play both nights with Random Noise. This weekend was thier CD Release, so both nights they played tons of new material. Catchy, fun, and a great bunch of guys. The other bands we played with, Stupid In Stereo, Reason For Existance, Cheap Escape, The Grocery Boys - awesome stuff. We need to book more shows on the Eastside of the state because we had a blast. A big thanks needs to go out to all the people who came early, stayed late, and stuck around for our set. We appreciate it, and we hope you had as much fun hearing us as we have playing the music for you (I know some of you did...."SCOOP"!!).

"Hey Jaded, when's that new CD coming out???".
We've recorded 13 songs so far, with maybe four more we could add. All the drums and guitars are done, and we just need to finish up the bass and vocal tracks. Around Thanksgiving of 08' we hit a snag - our bassist Corey decided that he needed a change and left the band. Nothing scandelous to gossip about, but until we announce our replacement we can't really finish things up just yet. But I would expect to make some further announcements soon about all of this. Stay tuned!

Okay, that's it for now. We'll try to be better about updating the blog once in a while (it's only been six months since the last update!). Oh, and you may have noticed the www.jaded52.com website is missing - we're trying to find a cheap web host that'll do everything that we need to do without too much hassle. Okay, that's it, thanks again for everything and we hope to see you at a show soon!
-Mark (JADED52)

We've been asked by a few people what's going on with JADED52. No shows, no tours, - have you guys broken up? No way! We're trying to get out next CD done and it's just taking forever. We finally figured out that when we book shows that's all we do - we havent' spent too much time writing new stuff over the past few months. So we took ourselves out of the game for now. It looks like we'll spend the rest of June in pre-production mode, and then start recording in July. We've got 7 new tracks ready to record right now, and probably another 7-9 part way ready. Now, we do have ONE show lined up for Thursday July 3rd (who's working on the fourth? No one! Come out and see us!) at the J&M in Seattle. We're going to preview the new tracks, play some of the old favorites, geez, there's a slight possiblity that we'll have a horn section too (new songs, wait and hear!). For the Jaded faithful you may have heard a few of these songs if you've been to one of our last two shows, but there's more new stuff coming. We're excited to finally debut some new stuff, and to get the recordings done. So there you go - new news.

In other news that I'm not going to go into - I've been bugging Ryan to post a blog after our "Punks And Pints" show a few weeks ago. To sum it up real quick Corey and I had our hoodies jacked by some hobo during the show, then Ryan ran across the guy in the streets at 2 am, almost got stabbed, punched the guy in the head and I got my hoodie back. Of course it smells hobo-rific! Yup, never a dull moment with us!

See you guys at a show! -Mark

Hey everyone!  We had such a blast playing with The Vandals last Sunday that we figured we’d type up a blog for all those curious about how everything went.  Here goes:

The day started early for us, 3:00 PM to be exact, with load-in at El Corazon.  The Vandals were using our gear, so we wanted to make sure we had everything ready for them to have a great show.  Their manager and sound engineer showed up early and we quickly realized that having some professionals tweak our gear for optimal sound was well worth the price of admission alone!  Things sounded great!

The Vandals showed up and sound checked - they played ’I Have a Date’ with Warren on vocals - one of my favorites!  It was very comforting to hear that we’re not the only band who forgets things about our songs - they had a few funny discussions about how things were supposed to go on stage!

It was about that time that Jake, our friend who was working merch duty for us, showed up.  Poor kid...  He had some crazy infection in one of his teeth which had his face swollen like he’d been in a fight with George Foreman!  I guess he was in quite a good amount of pain as well...  He powered through it like a champ, though - We owe him for that one!

We ran out for some lunch and pre-show beers and then it was time to play.  We had quite a few of our friends show up so I’d like to say thanks to all those who were there - we had a great turn out!  Our set went great - we even had a pit break out a couple of times!  We played our new song, temporarily known as ’The Ska Song’ even though there’s only one little ska-ish part in the whole damn thing, and got some great feedback on it.  Hopefully that’ll become a permanent fixture to the JADED52 set.

The Vandals took the stage and, as always, blew us away.  Those guys are awesome!  Unfortunately, half way through the show something happened where my guitar amp that was being used by Warren completely blew up!  Luckily Mark was there to save the day by swapping in his own amp.  It was quite surprising, though, since I had just paid $500 to have that amp serviced the week prior!  We took the amp back to the shop today and, oddly enough, everything works fine...  I guess we’ll never know what actually happened - I blame the government and their secret black helicopters...

Backstage after the show I decided to play a little joke on Warren and storm up to him threateningly while yelling "what the hell did you do to my amp!!!???"  It kinda backfired, though, when he actually looked a little scared that I was seriously going to give him a beatdown!  I explained that it was a joke and that I was embarrassed that the damn thing broke - I think we were OK after that...

We drank for a while with the guys after the show and had to do everything possible to not launch into severe fan-boy geekdom on them by asking all the questions we’ve always wanted to ask!  We had some fun and then got out of there since we didn’t want to hound them too much.

The highlight - The drummer (who is also the drummer from Alkaline Trio) came out from backstage wearing a JADED52 shirt after the show!  I have a picture of him and Bob - I’ll be posting that once I grab it off my camera.

So...  that’s that!  Big thanks to The Vandals and Lori from Infinite Productions for having us out.  Check back for pictures from the show soon!

- Ryan (JADED52)

 

 

 

Hey everyone, we're finally back home from our Japan tour. Sorry for the total lack of updates while we were gone, but our schedule didn't leave much time to update the website at all. We've got a ton of photos and video to sort through from our trip, and it looks like we'll start updating the Jaded52.com website this weekend. We owe a super big thanks to Masa and Yutaka from our label, KICK ROCK MUSIC! Without them our trip to Japan wouldn't have been possible, or nearly as enjoyable. A big thanks also goes to WiTH MY FOOT for touring the first half of the dates with us, and for hauling our gear. They are an amazing band and even better friends (and we can't forget to mention Yoko, WMF merch girl in Kobe!). More big thanks goes out to our new friends and label mates SPICY SOCKS. Those guys are down to earth and freakin' rock it hard! We want every one of our My Space friends to check them out - you won't be dissapointed! A big thanks also goes out to IQ20 for touring the second half of our dates with us, and for hauling our gear. They remind me of early Strung Out or Pennywise (hella cool guys too). Those fuckers have toured in the US before, and they're coming again this year - look for them at a venue near you! And a very special thanks to all the bands we played with on all of our shows - DOLL, NEW STRIKE ZIPPER, HONEY SUGAR MILK CHOCOLATES, THE STACKERS, FAM, TRUST BLAST, ORTEGA, TURN UP THE STEREO, SIDE-3, MASTERPLAN, FERTILE FOUR LEAF, ERECT JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, STONE LEEK, NO SPEAK ENGLISH, SCREAM, ALLEGIANCE, NED KELLY, THE PISTONZ, NOTHINGFACE FROM COLUMBIA, RASPUTIN, THE KNOCKERS, CRASH DOGS, SOMETHING RIOT, COME AGAIN - holy shit that's a lot of bands and those are just the ones I can remember! We didn't play with one shitty japanese band while we were there, they all rocked! Last but not least, a heartfelt thank you to all of our new friends and fans who came out to our shows -  Eric from SF, Jimmy and Ferris and the other military guys we drank with in Yokohama (The Buffalo!), Misa and Minoru from DOLL (sorry we didn't meet up in Kanda), the crazy Brazillian guys in Shiga, the three girls we met at GIG-ANTIC who had our CD on thier iPOD (somehow we never got your names!), and so many more.

We had an amazing time thanks to you all, and you'll see us for sure next year! We miss you already!
-Mark (JADED52)