My tour is cooler than yours!

I think I have some masochistic part of me that enjoys waiting a month to write about some lame experience I/we/The Congress had, uh, a month ago. The fun part is filling the blanks with complete BS to provide some sort of comic relief to the losers (yes YOU!) who actually waste their time reading my blog.

Not BS:

Google The Congress. We're #2. That's pretty awesome.

BS:

The Denver scene LOVES The Congress

Not BS:

We will be playing a super awesome show on September 11th at The Walnut Room with a great new band called The David James Band

BS: We will be covering Weezers "The Blue Album" on Halloween.

Well, this little exercise of what's BS or not has bored me to tears. It was neither funny nor satisfying. Time for pictures:

Parachute surfin, Hood River, OR

Look very closely at the license plate...

Portland Bridge

Random lake, somewhere around middle Oregon, where we came very close to running out of gas

Pointy mountain, around the same area of middle Oregon.

Middle Oregon was pretty cool, well, except for Medford. That was awful. Everyone we came in contact with in Oregon - from Portland to Bend warned us about Medford. "Go to Ashland" they said. Well, it's not that easy Mr. black rimmed glasses wearin, ironic moustache (I like spelling it that way), knit cap in the middle of summer rockin, skinny jeans-balls crampin, thrift store wardrobe havin Portland hipster guy. Shhheeesh.

Bend was fun. We met some weird people who spoke passionately of cities needing to build better relationships amongst each other. You know, like giving gifts, or exchanging cultural ideas. Said weirdo used, as an example, the two cities from The Simpsons that are always fighting with each other. He seemed to have a very real problem with this and was trying to figure out a solution -- all while apparently completely whacked out on psychedelics. At one point, this fella raised beer for a toast, "Cheers to giraffe tongues!"


Sidebar: Okay, I'm not much of a Simpsons watcher. I just had to do a google search for "the simpsons cities" to attempt to find out the adjacent city that Springfield is always feuding with. No luck on my first attempt. However, I did find that there is a wikipedia page about "the fictional town of Springfield." Within this wiki entry, I discovered that somebody has actually taken the time to describe the Geography, climate, and environment... OF A FICTIONAL CITY:

Geography, climate, and environment

Springfield's geography is varied, including forests, meadows, mountain ranges, a desert, a gorge, a glacier, beaches, badlands, canyons, swamps, a harbor, waterholes, and waterways. Major named geographical features include Springfield Gorge, Springfield National Forest, the volcanic Mt. Springfield, the West Springfield desert ("three times the size of Texas!"),^[11] the Springfield Badlands (also known as the Alkali Flats),^[12] the gigantic Murderhorn mountain, Springfield Glacier, Mt. Useful National Park, Springfield Mesa, and Springfield National Park.

The town's skies are usually blue and sunny. It has been subject to many natural disasters, however, including heat waves, blizzards, avalanches, earthquakes, acid rain, floods, hurricanes, lightning strikes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, and a comet impact.

Springfield's environment is unusually polluted. Overflowing garbage forced the whole city—both population and structures—to move five miles (8 km) away from the massive dump that the old town had become.^[13] Springfield is home to the state's largest self-sustaining tire fire, which has been burning continuously for decades.^[14] Lake Springfield's pollution almost led to the city's destruction by an Environmental Protection Agency bomb,^[15] and pollution from the nuclear power plant has mutated the fish in the river.

The Bendonites also had a trampoline:

And a painting of Bob Ross that I will not soon forget:

On the way from Bend to Me***rd, we camped at a sweet spot called Diamond Lake.

Witness:

I wish I had video of us trying to cook hamburgers over that fire... on that grate... Fire 2.5 burgers, The Congress 1.5 Burgers and a grilled cheeze.

Post middle Oregon, we headed south to Top of California. Top of California is a very magical and cosmic place. The trees grow tall and spooky layer of misty clouds makes for a visually satisfying crunch that is only matched by eating a french onion Sun Chip and crinkling the new compostable bag simultaneously.

Sun Chip Crunchy Trees

P.L.A.D.*

Rockness Monster

Northwest Top of California, particularly the counties known as Humboldt and Mendocino is know for agriculture. They have a lot of it. It's generally green and smells good. People give it away like it's going out of style, which, according to various laws that are being passed all over this county -- it won't be going out of style anytime soon. Snoop Dog and Dr. Dre preached about this agriculture way back in tha day. Yours truly skipped Algebra class my junior year of high-school to pick up the much anticipated agricultural bible, Dr. Dre's "The Chronic" It's about chronic growth of fresh peaches and apples and salad mix in the fields of Compton. It's also about killin n*****

Continuing along our southerly route to upper-middle-top of western coastal California, we happened along the ultra-conservative enclaves of San Francisco and Berkley. I'll call it Berklacisco from now on.

We found out that you can do anything that you desire in Berklacisco. Anything.

Like party with Rock Stars:

4th from the left (in yellow P.L.A.D by the way) is Rock Star Daniel Clarke

The long-hair with k.d. Lang

The short-hair with The Chrongress. He's much better looking in our band

After a few extensive meetings, The Congress decided that we would allow Mr. Clarke to tickle the keys for us -- only after tickling me until I cried + a warm, long embrace. Daniel joined us for our shows in Berkley (with Great American Taxi) and San Fran at a cool joint called The Boom Boom Room which was opened by blues legend, John Lee Hooker. Both shows were wildly successful for our first time in Berklacisco, culminating with a chance meeting with a gentleman named Dennis Cook who is an editor for jambase.com. Mr. Cook published a nice article about the band that you can see here.

Prior to bidding adieu to Berklacisco, we all gathered for a great breakfast of dungeness crab cake benedict and zucchini fries at a place called The Fat Lady in Oakland. Once again, Dwight reminded us why he shall never be trusted with sharp objects...

I think my favorite part of this is the green bush in front of the house

4 DAYS OFF IN TAHOE!!!


P.L.A.D. Camouflage

That's it for me. I'm tired of this post. We have a couple of days in Tahoe and a drive back home to discuss. Add a few almost-all night gambling binges and I'll have a one last post coming soon to wrap up our 2010 northwest tour. I'm motivated to get this done because we'll be heading back to the southeast in a little less than a month and I'll have all sorts of new picture words for my upcoming TV stories to share with the tens of people who read this blog.

Stay tuned as I'll be announcing our tour dates for October...

Pirkano paye yan

The Congress Northwest Tour 2010

After a nice 6 week return to Denver in which I:

• Played 26 times in June
  
• Slept in a Wal Mart parking lot 2x
  
• Continued to sleep in a park the next morning 2x
  
• Spent a week and a half in bliss, house sitting for a friend in Evergreen
  
• Lost 8 hours of my life at The Glendale Ballet with good friends Gizz and Stern
  
• DID THIS:

(for those of you not on the creepbook or friends with Mike Maurer, you may not be able to enjoy the goodness)

I reconvened with the fellas from The Congress as we are currently embarking on another lengthy tour. This time, we added a week, got rid of the humidity, added some mountains & elk & mooses & jackalopes:





















Apparently, jackalopes are the state animal of Wyoming -- at least, according to Dwight, The Congress's low end theory. You see, Dwight might just be one of Cody, Wyoming's most famous exports, demonstrated by the fact that his return home was documented in the well circulated Cody Enterprise:


In the interview, which featured Dwight -- and only Dwight, this quote was attributed to him:

"That's something you can't put a label on ... I suppose you could call it the spiritual result of a ridiculous serendipity."

Hmmm... Interesting. Let's find some other Dwight quotes... (these are published)

-- "I'd rather have a day job than play music for some audience full of drunken assholes."
-- "I was fed up with music. I was pissed off at people"
-- "The audience that comes out to listen to this type of music is actually a quality audience"
-- "They give a shit when they're there listening."

Okay, okay... I took some editorial liberties with the quotes but I think those respective statements sum up our friend Dwight "You'd never want me to be President of The United States, and this is why:" Thompson.

I would give you some unpublished quotes from Dwight but those are completely inappropriate and certifiably insane.

Regardless of the mental health of the best bass player I've had the pleasure of playing with for an extended amount of time, he's a real teddy bear who has a huge heart and a admirable standard for cleanliness and cigarettes.




After a great gig in Cody, we headed to Billings, MT for a show at The Yellowstone Brewery. It was an afternoon show on a Saturday -- that generally sets off some warning sirens for the band, as in, uh, there ain't gonna be shit for people there. PLUS, there was a $5 cover charge for a SATURDAY AFTERNOON SHOW. Damn, this is going to suck! Who in their right mind is going to come see a band that has never been to Billings, play inside, from 4-8 pm? Uh, about 70 people. The reason?

Scott Lane's own damn poster

Billings treated us well and we can't wait to get back. We had no place to stay after the Billings show but as we've come to find out, Montana is an incredible place full of amazing people who bend over backwards to welcome us into their lives. Primarily, Randy, our sound engineer for the brewery show who invited us to his home, provided us with beds, chex mix and eggs with chicken-apple sausage.

Day #3, Livingston, MT. Murray bar. Great pizza, nice bartenders, but we got shut down by complaints from the adjacent hotel and the police. Not our fault, really -- I think it was a little unexpected to have a Rock band on a Sunday night. We gladly finished out the evening "acoustified" and played a bunch of covers to a sparse but attentive crowd. At one point, Jonathan ran full speed down a hotel hallway to escape from the crazy port wine drinkers. That's about all I have.



Day #4&5, Bigfork, MT. Flathead Lake. THE RAVEN:

Margarita Monday's. "Shots shot shot shot sha Shots!"

Uh, yeah. Bigfork is one of the most spectacular places I've ever been. The Raven seemingly liked us and invited us back for a second night on Tuesday -- meaning we had an extra night of room & board at one of the most spectacular places I've ever been. We played in the lake, we drank beers looking at the lake, we tried to do business deals with ice-cream cones in our hands. We ate "meatloaf burgers" made with locally raised yak, and we sold like 20 some CD's over the course of two nights and we found out that one of our dancing folk lost her American Apparel head band and cried endlessly over the loss of her modern-retro fashion accessory. Shots shots shot shot shot sha Shots Shots...

Up next:

Keep Missoula Weird
Gwednesday's
Bauer Ranch

Tot Ziens