Hello, Boots here.
It has been quite a while since I’ve written one of these road
journals. Such a long time, that I
don’t know whether to call it a road journal or a blog, or perhaps a road
blogournal. I’ve been
concentrating more on the video side of things to keep you updated on what
we’re doing on the road. We call
those things video blogs. Or
vlogs. Maybe we should start
calling them road vlogournals…
Neither here nor there, the past two months have been worthy
of many vlogs and blogournals because so many great things have been happening
to The Sixers that it’s hard to even know where to begin.
How about September 4th 2009? That sounds good. That was the day The Sixers got
together with the UMass marching band and made a video for the HIT SINGLE Shady
Esperanto. We had a vision of
making a video with a huge amount of people, preferably a marching band (I
don’t think we had access to state penitentiaries). What would we do with them? At first we didn’t know, but when Stephen and I started
dancing in a hotel room somewhere in Indianapolis it all became clear; we would
teach them a poorly thought out dance.
Actually, it wasn’t poorly thought out more than the moves just looked
silly. Especially when these moves
were being performed by two dudes with no pants on in a Holiday Inn. But with 400 people doing it at the
same time we thought this dance could stand a chance, even in your underpants.
Shooting began at 7am, which was a bit scary for me, because
this summer there were very few days that I’d wake up before 11am, but luckily
Jess brought an i.v. of coffee.
After several injections of lattes and 5 hour energy drinks we began to
teach this massive crowd the silliest dance I’ve ever seen… and it looked
great. They got us some uniforms,
we sweated, danced, got the band to spell out SK6ERS, edited the footage for
over 10 hours somewhere in New Jersey 10 hours before we had to leave for tour
and we were done. Just like that.
And what a wonderful way to start off a tour. From one eminent, grandiose idea to
another. When talking with Carbon
Leaf about how The Bear Rhymes With Woman Tour was going to shake down, we
weren’t exactly sure if it were possible.
Normally, when you tour with another band, in order to save room, time
and other important things like channels on the soundboard, dignity, etc., you
sometimes have to share equipment and move your gear out of the way (we call
that Striking in the business…).
But we had a plan. We
weren’t going to do any of that.
There would be no set changes, no waste of time in between bands. We would vigilantly do nothing, we’d
only go against the grain, against everything our touring forefather’s have
done before; we were going to leave our shit up there and never stop the show...
When most drummers meet each other on the stage for the
first time on a tour, there is always this all too common joke and it goes
something like this:
Drummer 1 (while taking drum
set off stage, usually in dismay): Hey man, I should just leave my kit up here
and we could do a Grateful Dead or Allman Brothers jam… Two drum kits would be cool!
Drummer 2: Haha, yeah that would be funny… Get your shit off the stage.
But this time no one was joking. No one was fooling around. We were going to leave drum sets on stage for a seamless
transition and encore at the end of the show with every member of the two bands
together. And yes, there would be
two drummers and no, no one would get hurt, except if you count people’s heads
being blown off by an unbelievable dual drum set solo to end the show!!!! After an Allman Brother’s song of
course…
Following through with ideas like the Shady video and the
transition element of The Bear Rhymes With Woman tour is what made these past
couple of months so special for us.
Because with both of these ideas, there were at least 12 people who said
“That’s impossible” or “Are you fucking kidding me? That’s never going to work, go fu-“. You get the picture. But we conquered the elements and not
only reached our goals, but in the process it seemed like we made a lot of
people happy. I don’t know if
every person noticed the fortitude of these accomplishments, but we sure did
see a lot of smiling faces and that’s really all you can ask for.....
So Carbon Leaf went home as did SK6ERS. Ten sweet days off and then back out on
Lady Road as we call her, ready to take down the west coast with our good buddy
Tyrone Wells and his gang. We’re
excited for what’s on the horizon and we hope to see you there.
All the best,
Boots