RS Road Journal #4

Day 7 – The Drive
With all of us pumped about hitting the waterpark,(Dave and Mikey were pumped about going to a reptile and puppy store) we finally started the inevitable trek 20 hours to Tacoma, Washington from Denver, Colorado. There was a whole lot of sleeping involved. I was poked awake with all kinds of ‘JP’ acronyms like “Jesus Petunia”. This was Dave’s way of asking me to drive, so I took a No-Doz and got behind the wheel. When I started driving we were in Utah. I drove through Idaho into Oregon. Man, the view this coast has to offer destroys the east coast landscape without a doubt. Being from Florida I barely ever see mountains, so traveling down an extremely steep winding road was pretty intimidating at first. Skipping ahead, we finally got to the Seattle area. Man, what a beautiful place.

Day 8 – Tacoma, Washington
Getting out of the van after this drive felt like I was entering a parallel universe. My legs barely worked and my head was spinning. We went into downtown Seattle, and we all got to hear the rants about how weak willed people from this city were. We got to that Pike Market place. It ruled. Dave, Klint, and I got retardedly large vegan cookies. I got a snickerdoodle and it tasted like heaven. After poking fun at those less fortunate, we took the drive to the venue. The place was called the Viaduct, a newer venue that hardcore shows have been going down at. The place is pretty cool and the dudes who run it seem legit. After the show I met this dude Mike from Furious Styles, dude is seriously hilarious. He told us where we could get a pair of nice house shoes. He also explained that people with face tattoo’s that can’t get jobs are simply retards that couldn’t get one without them. A good philosophy if you ask me.

Day 9 – Spokane, Washington

Upon arriving to the venue, Jackie and I realize there is wireless In

ternet. Goodbye social skills. Throughout the entire show I stayed in the room where merch was and had chats with the locals (one of which let me know he enjoyed this blog. Big ups to that dude). Rifkin (playing drums for Letdown on this tour) kept ranting about this homeless guy who claimed he invented The Matrix. The show was extremely short so we decided to drive to Portland over night. On the way to get some food a couple dudes in a Jeep stopped next to us at a light. Here’s Klint with the play by play:
We pull up next to them, and the highschool bro in the passenger’s seat says “Hey, what’s up?” My natural response is, “Fuck you, I’m eating.” He’s appalled, but I repeat, “Carl’s Jr. Fuck you, I’m eating.” He asks where we’re going, and I say Del Taco. He invites us to Subway and demands that we race. Dave starts driving like an absolute maniac, and the race is on. We absolutely crush them with rallye-inspired aggressive driving and a barrage of “Suck it, nerds!”
After the race is over, I proceed to give them the goat. For the uninitiated, if you grab your dick and balls, pull them behnind you, then pinch your legs together and moon someone, that’s the goat. They speed off, and we keep chasing after them. More asses, more yelling. One of them comes out of their sunroof to moon us, and I tell them that some old lady is calling the cops on them. They speed off and exit the freeway never to be seen again.
Fuck them. And there was no Del Taco, anyway. They turned it into a fucking Taco Time.
We settled for Carls Jr. and Green Burrito. Man, that place is absolute shit. Anyways, after eating we started the trek to Portland, Oregon.

RS Road Journal #3

Day 5 – Omaha, Nebraska
We got the venue, a place called Sokol underground, a little before doors opened. This venue was awesome. The layout was really cool. It had a perfect stage and a lot of room for merch, which saved me the hassle of trying to shove everything into a little corner or something. I felt pretty good aside from the long drive. Something about staring out into an open field and being able to see for miles is pretty calming. So the first band comes on and they were horrible. Two singers, one pea sized dude and some big doofus, one doing high and one doing low. That ended quickly, thank god. An old friend caught my eye and it kinda caught me off guard. It turns out Signs of Hope was also on this show so I got to hang out with Paul for a bit. Great dude. SoH just released a new EP that’s definitely worth checking out. Skipping ahead to Let Down’s set, I’d like to delve deeper into the stage persona that Bob acquires. At this show he kicked a dude in the chest and ran around at a rapid rate. This dude reminds me of a pissed off raptor on stage, if I hadn’t spoken to him aside from seeing him at a show, I’d think he was out of his mind. I’m liking this band more and more as this tour goes on, their new record is outstanding. Anyways we started a chant that went something along the lines of a sports team chant like “Lets go Phillies *clap*clap*clapclapclap*” except it went “Letdown Straight Edge *clap*clap*clapclapclap*” Needless to say, Bob absolutely hated it, so we’ll be doing it as much as possible from here on out. After the show, we stayed at this dudes crib for a couple hours, got as much sleep as we could, and left around 7 am for the 8-hour drive ahead to Denver, Colorado.


Day 6 – Denver, Colorado
We got into town pretty early, so we headed to Dave’s friend Memphis’ house. He had just returned from Europe the day before and was heading out for two months again with his band Death Before Dishonor. Completely awesome guy. He had a really cool dog named Spaghetti that kept me entertained for awhile. It was at this point that I really caught the grasp of Dave’s love for dogs. While watching Reno 911 I looked over to see Dave in an intense make out session with Spaghetti showing no signs of coming up for air. We left to get to the venue, the underground. The venue itself was pretty cool, lots of graffiti and plywood. The show started off real slow, not too many people. We played soccer outside until the show started. I gotta say im probably the worst athlete in the van. I looked like an idiot. Once Letdown came on kids started coming. When RS played the room filled up and the show ended up pretty well. We found out the Twin Falls, Idaho show the next day was cancelled, and after searching for a house and failing, we realized we had a 20-hour drive to Washington, but we had two days to do it. We slept over Memphis’ place, and hung out around Denver for the day. When we left, we got some lunch and hit the road. On the way out we were stuck and traffic and saw a waterpark called Water World on the right off of the interstate. Klint and I got out of the van to scope out the sneaking in possibilities. We came up with a few feasible plans, but we didn’t think anyone else would be willing to try them. We walked up to the entrance to check admission prices. Too high. As we’re about to give up, Klint decided to barter a bribe with the dude working the gate. The Dialogue went something like this.
Dude: Tickets?
Klint: Oh, we don’t have those.
Dude:…
Klint: So, we’re from Philadelphia, and broke. There’s about six of us. Do you think if we threw you like 20 dollars would you let us in?

Dude: haha, okay.
Klint: Fuck yeah
We ran to the van and collected the others. I put on my newly acquired swim trunks and it was on. We only had an hour until the park closed so we ran as fast as we could to each slide. What really made this trip was Jay’s sparkly purple Speedo. Un-fucking-believable. All of the slides were great. After the park we started the inevitably sucky drive to Washington. We’re currently in some mountains about an hour or two outside of Denver. This road is not ready for the Supreme Team.

RS Road Journal #2

Day 3 – Peoria, Illinois
The drive wasn’t so bad to this show. The venue was a VFW hall. On the inside it was reminiscent of a log cabin, which was pretty cool. There was lots of table space and such, all and all a pretty cool place. This was one of those suprising shows. Coming into it we had no idea what to expect. It’s a Sunday night in a town Reign Supreme has never played. There were just around 100 people at the show, and people went off for both Letdown and RS. At the end of the show kids bought a ton of merch, which was awesome considering we had a twelve hour drive ahead of us to Wichita, Kansas. When everything was packed up we headed to this dude Nate’s pad where he fed us and let us shower, big ups to that dude. On the way to his place, we had a brief fireworks war, which left both bands hiding in their vans, doors locked and windows up. We came to a truce and headed inside. While eating we threw around ideas for Sound & Fury specific merch. Some great ideas were discussed, such as a Carl’s JR “Fuck you, I’m eating” shirt. Both bands came up with some pretty great designs, so be on the look out if you’re gonna be at this fest. Once everyone had showered, we hit the road and drove through the night.

Day 4 – Wichita, Kansas

The drive to Wichita was a lot of things. It was long; it was unpleasant at times as well as completely hilarious. Though it took twelve hours to complete, there were some highlights.

1. Dave getting pulled over a few hours into the drive for speeding. The dialogue went something like this
Cop: How are ya?
Dave: I’m fine
Cop: I got you goin’ 54 going into town.
Dave: That’s literally impossible.
Cop:…
Dave: I haven’t gone over 40.
Cop: Can I get your license and registration? [Dave hands it over] Thank you. One moment.
*A few minutes go by spent laughing at Dave’s approach to avoiding a ticket. The cop returns*
Cop: Here you go, try and slow it down. [hands Dave his license and the registration. NO ticket]

2. After being too tired to continue driving, I hand the wheel over to Joe. As I’m sleeping on the floor, I start to hear a lot of gravel hitting the bottom of the van, and it’s a pretty bumpy ride. I decided to get up and investigate. When I get my head up and look at our surroundings, I noticed we’re on a tiny dirt road in the middle of fucking nowhere. I closed my eyes and caught my bearings, then opened them again and I could spot the highway about 100 yards to the left, running parallel to this dirt road we were on. There was a huge ditch separating the two. I ask Joe “What the fuck?” to which he replies with loads of laughter in between, “Maria told me to turn right, so I turned right.” (Maria is the name given to the GPS we use to get from city to city. She was quite the personality and often asks us to turn ‘Bleft’)
Around this point, everyone is waking up and realizing we’re not on a paved road. Joe is still laughing. At this point I’m relatively excited to see what’s going to happen next. The dirt road turns off and comes to a fork. Joe started going left when everyone yelled at him to just turn around. At this point the jokes start flowing in. A few of my favorites were a series of jokes that spoke of a troll that Joe wanted to visit that resided at the end of this trail and Oregon Trail references.
Once we got into Wichita we were all dead tired. We passed a Ford dealership and it had a huge blow up slide in the parking lot. We stopped and a few of us ventured over. As it turns out we didn’t take into account the heat of the slide, and as we were going down each of us suffered burns in random places. On the way out there was a huge gong in the lobby, so I hit it rather hard and got back in the van.
The show itself was a pretty big disaster. It took place in this old brick warehouse in the middle of an industrial area. Around 4 people showed up, the first band didn’t go on until 9 due to lack of a PA. Once the PA was acquired, it decided to stop working after the first band. No one was there to work sound so Klint and I haggled enough to get it to work for about half of Letdown’s set. During Reign Supreme’s set it didn’t work at all, so we shot off fireworks and Jay sang into the butt end of a roman candle. We did what we could to have some fun. We crashed at a friends and woke up early for the drive to Omaha, Nebraska.

Reign Supreme Road Journal Entry #1

So, recently I made the abrupt decision to spend the summer in Philadelphia. I called my friend Klint and asked if I could crash on his futon, and there it was. I was drudging through an eighteen-hour drive from Tampa to Philadelphia all by my lonesome. Klint plays bass for Reign Supreme. As it turns out RS needed someone to roadie for them, and just like that, my summer plans changed.
As I write this, we’re sitting in front of the “colonial pantry” somewhere just outside morton, illinois figuring out what movie to play on my laptop, heading to the third show of a (whatever) day tour.

Day one – Cleveland, Ohio
We leave from Joe’s house around 9 am to head to Cleveland, Ohio. The show was pretty cool. This dude Nick who does Hope This Helps booking booked the gig (big ups to those tank tops). The venue was called “Now That’s Class” and apparently has a daily vegan meal served, which I didn’t get to experience this time around. Just outside the venue Joe had a run in with a local cruising on a mountain bike, equipped with a blue tooth headset. I believe the words she uttered went something like “Move your punk ass out the way”, “Get out the middle of the street”(it was a sidewalk), and “You better not have no money in ya pockets”. All in all it was a good run in. We met up with the dudes in Letdown at this show, who happen to be traveling in a mini van.
The show went pretty well. Not the best turn out for a Friday night, but a cool vibe. Letdown killed it. I’m so excited to be able to see these dudes every night and witness Bob jump off whatever he can find. RS played well. There was a point that Justin (bassist of Letdown) pointed out in which Jay looked like he was preaching to the crowd with his arms stretched to the sky, and everyone bopping up and down in unity with him. After the show we went and hung out with our new friend Taylor. Dude rules.
So, that’s day one. I’ll try and update every couple of days with pictures and crap from this trip. Keep an eye out. (always) Keep the faith.

Day 2 – Louisville, Kentucky
This show was in Louisville, KY. After a brief stop at the ever so delicious Chipotle, we left Cleveland and trekked to the venue. Once I was finished shaking off my cramps from sleeping on the floor of the van, I walked into the venue. The place was called the Brick House. From the back entrance it seemed a lot like a storage unit from the early 80’s, with Rifkin lying on a couch in the smoldering heat that encompassed the venue. I got to see a couple friends I hadn’t seen in awhile, so that was pretty cool. The show went pretty well aside from the heat. Everyone played in their underwear and Klint got naked. During load out it started pouring rain so we all stood around and picked our butts until the rain let up. We drove straight to Indianapolis from there and slept at this girl’s house. She had a pretty rad pool. Klint and I teamed up for some extreme chicken fighting. Titty twisters and kicks to the chest of the base DEFINITELY help you win. After eating random items from this generous girl’s kitchen, we hit the sack. In the morning we said our thanks and were on our way to Peoria, Illinois.