Hey Everybody!

Two bits of news. One good. One bad.

Good first:



We've got a show this Saturday at the Charleston! Its going to be a killer night. We're playing two sets, with a variety of guest performers, sweet tunes and face-melting jams.

Its a free show and everyone's invited. Summer's here and the time is right. Lets do this thing.

Alright, now here's the bad:



Rothbury is not happening.

Well, I guess more specifically, its happening but we wont be there to see it.

Our Rothbury date, through powers beyond our control, has been canceled. Dylan and the Dead will have to carry on without us I'm afraid. Apologies to all our potential fans in Michigan. Maybe next year.

PART 3 - THE FRIENDLY FACES OF JAM ON CAFE



This is Jam On Cafe and its incredible staff. I'll take a minute now to introduce some of the characters that inhabit this story.

From left to right in the picture above we have Gabriel, Drew, Stafford, Ed and Naomi.



Gabriel and Naomi are a badass mother and son duo from Minnesota who travel from festival to festival throughout the summer, working with vendors like Ed or with their own vending booth featuring body painting. (I didn't snap a photo of any of their body painting in action, but I'll try to get that later in the summer.)

These are honestly two of the nicest people I've ever met. They've have been on the festival circuit for a long time, and helped your author a great deal in acclimatizing to this strange new world which I had entered. Because they hit so many festivals any given summer, they are big time insiders in this world.

The vendors, as I've come to discover, tends to know each other and many of the bands that travel on the circuit, because they are all the faces that repeat at all the shows across the country. Because of that I've gotten introduced to a slew of bands from all over, including Home from Colorado, Cornmeal from here in Chicago and many others.



This is Drew, a friend of ours from Oak Park. He went to high school with Ben and my old college roommate Pat Fee. I met Drew for the first time last summer and we'd hung out throughout the winter in Ed's garage. He was there through the recordings of Frisky Business, offering spiritual guidance to the record.

Drew is a musician and great songwriter unto himself, and he's joined us on some of our jams playing harmonica and rapping.

Later in this story, my old high school buddy Bryce will describe Drew as "the chillest person I've ever met", but we'll get to that later.



This is Stafford, a friend of Ed's and the best damn plumber this side of Mario. Stafford lives a little to the west of Chicago, and we had met him during the winter as well, when he and Ed would have "apocolyptic movie" nights and watch "Soylent Green", "12 Monkeys" and a few others back to back.

In addition to being an incredible asset to the restaurant (that Stafford's plumbing skills allowed this full kitchen to materialize in the middle of nowhere still amazes me, and his 24 hour + shifts at the restaurant amaze me even further), Stafford's wit and witticisms provided some hilarious reality checks allong the way. I'll try to recall as many as I can in future blogs.



And here's a nice close-up of Ed at work. This is probably my favorite photo I've taken this summer thus far. Note the t-shirt. And yes, those are rainbow striped suspenders.



One of the things that Ed said before we all took off together this summer was that we in the band should get used to "doing a lot of nothing". By this he meant that in the off hours, when the band was not playing because other acts were going, there would be a lot of sitting around a waiting.

There are far worse places to have to wait around than a massive music festival, and we got to catch an incredible list of performances, but in the time that we were just chilling around the tents, hanging out with these guys was a privilege and a pleasure. I couldn't imagine a group more fun to hang out with on our first tour.

(to be continued in "PART 4: THE SHOW MUST GO ON"...)

PART 2: HOW WE CAME TO HIT THE ROAD WITH ED



For the past 9 months or so, Peacekeeper has been practicing out in Oak Park in the garage of Ed D'Orio, the neighbor of our once-and-future-bassist Ben Grimes. We'd practiced out there, honed our chops and gotten to be friends with Ed over the winter.

Every once in a while Ed would bring out a some new snack that he'd been cooking up, with a new recipe he'd been tinkering with. They ranged from homemade frozen yogurt, to matza ball soup to variations on the classic shrimp cocktail. It was always fantastic and one of the major perks of practicing out at Ed's.

Cooking is Ed's passion, and we found out through chatting with him that during the summers, Ed goes on the road with a traveling restaurant, formerly known as Tipping Cows, but now label Jam On Cafe, which he goes to major music festivals all over the Midwest with. He's been doing this for about five years now, and has, over the years honed his technique.



Every year Ed likes to have a little something different though. Something new about the menu, something new about the layout etc. And mid-April this year, Ed decided that the new thing for the 2009 season would be (as can be seen in the sign above) blue corn pancakes and Peacekeeper. Ed made us an offer to travel on the road with him, and play renegade style at all the festivals he would vend at for the summer, and we took him up on it.






Ed used to produce music events, so he had a garage full of all the high power equipment required to put on a show. Four massive speakers, moniters, mixing boards and everything else. So all we had to do was get a tent, a drum riser and some carpets, and we were in business.





Due to the renegade nature of our performances (a.k.a. we were not formally listed on the line-up) we would play early mornings "breakfast jams", late night jams after the official festival acts had finished, and any other lull times between the major acts that we could muster.



So the end result of all this is what you see above. To the left, a fully functional, awesome restaurant, serving coffee, breakfast burritos, blue corn pancakes, steak and guacamole sandwiches, freshly made pasta and endless other delights. To the right, a rock and roll tent featuring Peacekeeper.

Here's one of our very first performances, caught on tape and posted on YouTube by someone passing by (many thanks to the poster, by the way!). This was one of our very first jams of the summer, a breakfast jam.



Over the course of things we wound up drifting more towards the late night jams, since it was easier to get people to hang around and listen then. But this was the very beginning.

(to be continued in "PART 3: THE FRIENDLY FACES OF JAM ON CAFE"...)

One short month ago, I had never been to such major music festival. Now I have been to and performed at three of them.

We hit "Summer Camp" in Chillicothe, Illinois, "Mountain Jam" in Hunter, New York, and "Wakarusa" in Mulberry Mountain, Arkansas back to back over the course of three weeks.

All I can say is ... wow.


Kevin here. Peacekeeper just got back from the first leg of our summer tour, and in the following series of blogs, I'm going to do my damnedest to recount to you what just happened.

 PART 1: LAUNCHING THE SHIP



We left Chicago Tuesday May 19th in the late afternoon. We were supposed to leave in the early afternoon, or even noon itself, but, as we were soon to discover things tend to run a little late when you're traveling with three vehicles and three trailers.



I can't quite remember what that first bit of vehicular trouble was, although I know Jack had to replace a few fuses in his car to get the trailer lights to work. But after some fretting and sweating, all three cars were good to go.



Here's us arriving at the campsite in Chillicothe, IL. We pulled in around midnight to the Three Sisters Park that hosts Summer Camp, and despite our delays we were still some of the very first to arrive. The concert goers didn't start showing up until Thursday, and even the vendors didn't start arriving until Wednesday afternoon, so when we pulled into the park, what we found was a giant dark empty field.

As odd as it may sound, after a long dark winter in the concrete jungle of Chicago, this was one of the most exciting giant empty fields I had ever seen.

It had been a full long day of packing, auto maintenance and driving, so we and the restaurant crew celebrated our arrival by cracking open a twelve pack of Budweiser and going to town on it in the dark. That's around the time I snapped the photo above.



The next day when we woke up, ever so slightly hung over, it was time to unload the trailers and set up the two tents: one for the restaurant and one for us rockers.

At this point I suppose I should breakdown how this whole tour thing came to be.

(to be continued in "PART 2: HOW WE HIT THE ROAD WITH ED"...)

Thanks to everyone who came out to Phyllis' last Saturday! It was definately our best show there to date. Come back and see us there on August 21. Thanks also to AKA the Eye and Katie Scrantom for playing.

- The Peacekeepers

Hey Everybody! I’ve got news much bigger than I have time to write, so I have to make this quick, but long story short, Peacekeeper is leaving on its 3 month summer tour tomorrow at noon.



The dates are as follows:

Summercamp ......... May 23 - 24 .......Chillicothe, IL
Mountain Jam .........May 29 - 31 .......Hunter, NY
Wakarusa .............June 4 - 7 ..........Ozark, AR
Red Line Tap ..........June 17 ............Chicago, IL
The Shamrock........ June 26 .............St. Louis, MO
The Charleston .......June 27.............Chicago, IL
Rothbury ..............July 2 - 5 ...........Rothbury, MI
West Fest .............July 11.............. Chicago, IL
Goose Island ..........July 11 .............Chicago, IL
Camp Euforia......... July 17 - 18.........Iowa City, IA
10000 Lakes ..........July 22 - 25 ........Detroit Lakes, MN
Mulberry Mountain ...August 12 - 15.....Ozark, AR
Phyllis' Musical Inn .. .August 21..........Chicago, IL
Bucktown Arts Fest...August 29 - 30.....Chicago, IL

In conjunction with Jam On Café Productions, we’re going to be playing nightly on a small stage at these outdoor festivals all across the country. In addition to that, we’ll also be playing club shows here in Chicago and two street festivals. Its gonna be a long strange trip.

So if you’re in Chicago, we’ll be coming to play for you a few times over the summer, and if you’re elsewhere in the Midwest, maybe we’ll be seeing you out there! Either way, Peacekeeper is hitting the road and living the dream.

AND AS IF THAT WEREN’T ENOUGH Peacekeeper has also released its sophomore album “FRISKY BUSINESS”, which is now available on CD in bright sexy packaging at our shows, and also IN ITS ENTIRETY FOR FREE DOWNLOAD at this link: http://www.stokedstudios.com/Frisky_Business_MP3.zip




Check it out. It’s really quite marvelous.

Anyway, I have to go pack, but keep checking in at www.Peacekeeperband.com for updates. There’ll be photos, blogs and videos emerging from our journey throughout the summer.

See ya.

-Kevin

Hey everybody!

My last blog about the upcoming tour was rushed and lacking in any sort of detail, so now I'm going to rectify that and give you the juice on what's going on.

Basically this summer we're going on the road with Ed D'Orio and Jam On Cafe to festivals around the country, from New York's Mountain Jam to Minnesota's 10,000 Lakes. Through Ed we've been able to set it up so we can play on a small stage near the campgrounds, as a sort of house band for these festivals, rocking out every night and bringing just a little bit of extra juice to these already awesome festivals.

I've posted a breakdown of where we're gonna be when on the main page of our myspace, and you can ask us personally about any questions you might have. This is an incredible oppurtunity for us though, and we're looking forward to hitting the road in a big way and playing for the attendees of these festivals night after night, hour after kickass hour.

To document this journey, I've bought a digital camera of my own to help with blogging (before i had always rudely borrowed steve's), so here's the first little batch to give you a sense of what we're up to.



We'd been pulling lots of late nights finishing "Frisky Business" , so needless to say, our sleep schedules had been a little of the traditional "being awake during the day and sleeping at night" thing. Today was our day to start changing all that though, with us heading out to Oak Park to help Ed set things up at the very reasonable hour of 10.

Coffee was definitely in order though, so we stopped by my old home-away-from-home Dunkin Donuts to get our day started with some coffee and dotuts. (that isn't a misspelling, i'm just trying to get a little cute here for a second.) Steve, as I recall, went for the "old fashioned" style donuts, while I had a jelly donuts and a glazed. Can't remember for the life of me what Jack ordered...




So this is one of the trailer's we'll be taking with us on the road. It's orange.



This is, believe it or not, the same trailer as above, but with great focus to its wheel. I guess I was trying to get artistic about the whole photographing-the-trailer things. I'll let you be the judge of how that came out.



So today we made an inventory of all the equipment we're bring out with us. The speakers that you see Steve lying on so sensually here are going to be blasting our music at high volumes in a matter of days at this point.

This notion excites me.



Here's Steve taking inventory of all our stuff and charting out stage plots and the like. Its a beautiful thing to see him go.




This is Drew. He's going to be coming out on the road with us and working with Ed and Jam On Cafe. Drew is a cool dude, as is evidenced by his nonchalant handling of straight up cash dollar bills right here.

Seriously though, Drew is a grade A dude. I look forward to hitting the road with this guy.



This is Ed's dog Norton. I think he's a french bulldog or something. He's a cool little guy, and was very excited by the goings on today with moving all the equipment around.

Not as excited as during our lunch break though, where he stared intently at me as I ate a sub in front of him. I told him he was barking up the wrong tree (no pun intended) but he didn't hear me, because despite his big glorious ears, Norton is deaf as hell.

I know what you're thinking, but No, it wasn't from us practicing out in Ed's garage. He was deaf before we even got there. I swear!



This is just a really emotional action shot. Jack's on the phone, probably handling some major business of some sort, while Steve enters pensively, unsure as to what to expect from the moments and hours that await him.

Man, show business is hardcore.


And here's me. Just chilling. Thought I'd take a picture of myself or whatever.

So anyhoo, that about wraps it up for now. But now that I've got this camera I'm gonna start blogging like crazy, because I've got visual aides.

Ta ta for now. Listen to Peacekeeper.

-Kevin

I have just posted "Two of a Kind" and "Pearls", samples from the forthcoming "frisky business" on the myspace.

listen and rock out.

On May 19th, Peacekeeper is launching its first summer tour.

We'll be playing at festivals and venues all across the Midwest, starting with Summercamp in Chillicothe, IL, then sweeping across the country, from New York to Arkansas to Minnesota.

We're traveling with Jam On Cafe and playing on a small stage near the campgrounds of many of the major festivals across the country, rocking out and promoting for our new album, "Frisky Business", which drops right before we leave.

Our current summer schedule is as follows:

Phyllis' Musical Inn        May 16        Chicago, IL
Summercamp            May 20 - 24        Chillicothe, IL
Mountain Jam            May 2 - June 1        Hunter, NY
Wakarusa            June 2- 8        Ozark, AR
Red Line Tap            June 17        Chicago, IL
St Louis            June 26        St. Louis, MO
Rothbury            June 29 - July 7    Rothbury, MI
West Fest            July 11            Chicago, IL
Goose Island            July 11            Chicago, IL
Camp Euphoria        July 14 - 18        Iowa City, IA
10000 Lakes            July 20 - 27        Detroit Lakes, MN
Mulberry Mountain        August 10 - 17        Ozark, AR
Phyllis' Musical Inn        August 21        Chicago, IL

More dates may be added soon, as we are still booking venue shows around the festivals to fill in the gaps.

Alright, maybe I exaggerated. Although these videos are fantastic and our performances were passionate, madness is a strong word. But I got your attention, didn't I?

Here they are!