Episode 2: Ralphonso Lives!
Wasted Festival, Morecambe, England - 05/20/05

Who the hell, I’m sure you’re asking, is Ralphonso? Well, I’ll tell you: he’s a car.

A 2004 Fiat Multipla, to be exact.

If you’re not European (or Canadian, I’m told), you’ve probably never heard of this particular vehicle – none of us sure as hell had either, but nevertheless, we ended up with one, and Ralphonso was his name. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “your first trip overseas as a group, playing a huge festival with countless legendary bands, and you’re writing about your fucking rental car?”

Well, yes, I am. Remember, I said in our first blog that I didn’t want this to be your average, run-of-the-mill “tour diary” that we’ve all read a million times; if I’m a reader, I don’t really care that you unloaded the van 3 hours early and wandered around downtown Cleveland looking for weed (unless there’s a good story in it, then I’m all ears). It doesn’t matter to me at all that you played a kick-ass show in Pittsburgh last night and that you crashed on some chick’s floor afterward – tell me why it was a kick ass show, and what happened at that chick’s house. Couldn’t sleep ‘cause her cat kept stepping on your nuts? Fantastic, let’s hear about that. You had a revelation in the middle of your set that maybe, just maybe, this is what you want to do for the rest of your life, and by God you’re gonna tell your boss where to shove his $7.50 an hour factory job just as soon as you get back? No doubt, man, tell me all about it!  That’s the good stuff, the stuff that makes your story unique – not the fact that you got done at 12:45, packed up and drove to Cornhole, Indiana the next morning.

Which brings me to Ralphonso.

I’ll save the details of the traveling and of the town of Morecambe for another time (suffice it to say that any time we mentioned to a British person that we were en route to Morecambe, they invariably looked vaguely mystified and asked, “Why?”). What I want to tell you about is our car, which quickly became the central aspect of our entire weekend. The car was acquired at an Avis location in Lancaster, the Capitol City of Lancashire County in northwest England, and was easily one of the strangest vehicles any of us had ever seen.

It was as if someone had taken a Dodge minivan and boiled it in hot water just a little too long. Proportionately it was perfect; it just looked shrunken. Part of the appeal however, we soon discovered, was that despite the weirdness of the car’s appearance and the oddity of driving on the “wrong” side of the road, the Multipla turned out to be a perfectly-suited vehicle – all seven of us could fit inside quite comfortably. It was like one of those old Sinbad movies where there’s a full-sized luxury condo inside the Genie’s bottle.

This is what the dashboard of the Fiat Multipla looks like, reversed so that you get the full idea:

Remember that we had just gotten off a 7-hour international flight with little to no sleep, and you’ll understand how it didn’t take too long before the left-side air vent started to resemble a face.

I was in the passenger-side (left side in the UK, remember) front seat, and I soon became disconcerted by this thing staring at me. I tried ignoring it, but my gaze was inexorably drawn back to it. “What are you gonna do?” it seemed to be asking. In my jetlag-addled brain, it didn’t take long for it to go from an innocent but amusing air vent to this:

and then to this:

and, finally, to this:

“Guys,” I said, “this air vent is kinda freaking me out. It looks like a face.”

The general consensus was that it did, in fact, look like a face – I guess everyone was as tired and disoriented as I was. Being a group of responsible, mature adults representing American music in a foreign country, naturally the first thing we did was to make the little guy talk by wiggling his “mouth” – or, if you prefer (as I do), Ralphonso chose that moment to make his authority known.

“I am… Ralphonso!”

You’d think that a talking British car would sound, well, British, but for some reason Ralphonso sounded like James Earl Jones doing a bad impression of a Mexican wrestler, which made it even funnier when we would say something like, “hey, Ralphonso, what did you think of that last band?” and Ralphonso would answer,

“they sucked.”

Usually, though, Ralphonso was prone to much more dire warnings, like

“Drive me well, and you shall be protected. Mistreat me, however, and you shall feel my wrath!” Clearly, Ralphonso was a force to be reckoned with.

The scope of Ralphonso’s powers soon became clear – other cars instinctively moved aside upon catching a glimpse of Him in their rearview mirrors. Service station lights dimmed respectfully when we pulled in. Ralphonso even knew his way around the English countryside. When we’d get lost on our way back to the hotel at 1am after a day at the festival, consulting with Him would invariably put us back on the right track. “Which way should we go, Ralphonso?”

“Left.”

Ralphonso was a bad mofo.

***

Okay, I know that it seems silly, but a lot of the time when you’re out on the road, and especially when you’re at an event that’s as chaotic and overwhelming as the Wasted festival was, things like this are what stand out and ultimately get remembered and talked about. Sure, there were a zillion unbelievable bands at the festival, but we weren’t always together as a group watching the same bands play. Driving around in Ralphonso, though, pissing our collective pants with laughter at a stupid running joke about an all-powerful talking car, is what this whole thing is really all about; it’s about finding the fun in any situation and any place you find yourselves, whether it’s Morecambe, England or Patterson, New Jersey. No matter where we end up, we’ll always have our Ralphonso’s to look back on and laugh about.

p.s. I'm still waiting for someone to help me name this damn thing. Pubcrawlers Road Blog is entirely too generic, so let me hear 'em!