Towards Disastour Blog Vol. 8: We’re all goin’ to Dallas! We’re all goin’ to Dallas!

We had a well-deserved day off in Arlington, Texas. We had the whole day and night to ourselves, so we started it off by going to a restaurant called Cici’s Pizza. Cici’s is a super cheap place to get tour food because it has a $5 buffet, which means endless pizza, pasta and desserts. Trust me when I tell you, I came out on top in that transaction. I went through some volume, son! We found a table for 10 and showed no mercy as we selfishly crammed our faces full of starch. I can recall this as one of the best afternoons on this tour so far, just because we were acting like a bunch of kids, eating all the pizza we could ever comprehend eating and had no adults around to tell us to stop. There were so many “high fives” and hysterical laughing sessions. We all left Cici’s with full bellies and sore faces from tittering.

After breakfast we got our laundry done, and contemplated our next move. Someone suggested that we check out Dimebag Darrell’s grave because he was buried at a cemetery down the street. So we went. I hope this doesn’t sound like sacrilege, but I thought it was a very strange and morbid way to spend a day off: checking out the burial site of a murdered rock star who I had never met. Most of the guys had their pictures taken next to his headstone, which was even weirder to me, if only because I’d have no idea what face to make: do I do it all somber and respectful, or do I throw up the horns and act all metal and shit?  It just makes me feel silly. I know a lot of people can develop an emotional connection with musicians, but I usually make the separation easily in my head. If I don’t know the person, I don’t think I really have any reason to be at their grave, you know? I may just have a broken relationship with mortality itself. At any rate, the dudes all gathered around the grave and cranked up some old Pantera songs on a portable stereo and paid their respects.

Afterwards we devised our next evil plan over iced coffees. We decided it would be a fun idea to drive to Dallas and see our friends in Havok perform. It was a real treat to get to check out a metal show and not have to worry about any responsibilities. Just enjoy some entertainment without lifting shit, driving, or having to be interesting for 45 minutes. Havok are without a doubt one of the best metal acts around. Their singer David Sanchez was phenomenally charming and enticing, their guitarist Reece put on a great show and wowed the concertgoers with his catchy and memorable leads, but the star of the band in my opinion is drummer Pete Webber. In my eyes, Pete holds the whole thing together with his hypnotizing technique and rock solid rhythm. Great show boys!

In between bands I went for a quick stroll down the block to get a feel for Dallas and maybe do a little people watching. An enormous tough-looking black man intercepted my journey. He pointed to a white bracelet around his wrist with text on it and told me that he just got out of prison and wanted some change, presumably for a new library card or to buy flowers for the elderly. I sheepishly lied to him and told him that I was fresh out of change, and in a foolish sign of good faith I slapped my front pocket only to summon the jingle of a healthy wad of change from an evening of buying drinks from the bar. It immediately became evident that I lied to him because I was basically playing the white-boy pants-pocket tambourine jingo-jango. He demanded that I give him the contents of my pocket and I happily obliged. I would say that it went down as the most casual street robbery of all time, on par with your girlfriend stealing a fry off your plate at lunch.  On the way back to the van, Adam and Mason took in a performance by a local crackhead who performed street magic while telling corny jokes.  All in all it was a great night out.

Spencer “Here's my money, sir” LeVon

Stay up to date with photos from the road on our Flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/98333748@N04/

Tune in to our tour Podcast at: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/fatalitys-backseat-levoncast/id640852941

Also check in weekly at www.deadrhetoric.com for the latest tour blogs!

Towards Disastour Blog Vol. 7: The Dudes at Night are Not That Bright, Deep in the Heart of Texas

After our gig in Pensacola, FL. we had a good long drive ahead of us. We were to drive into Houston and pick up our friends in ZH the following morning around 11 am because they were to join us in our tour van and play gigs with us for the next 3 weeks (that’s right, 10 dudes in an 11 seat van). They were taking a 2-day bus ride from sunny California to Texas, and that meant in order to meet them at the Greyhound station we would have to drive all night long to prepare for our gig at the White Swan. We fuelled up with some pancakes and hit the Florida highway at around 4 am. Night drives are absolutely horrendous and I hate them like I hate being stabbed in the ass with the butt-end of a goalie stick. First of all, it is very uncomfortable to drive while you are tired, but it’s also near impossible to get any rest in the bench seats while the tour van cascades towards its destination in the dead of night. So you are damned either way. We made it into town and illegally parked in a lot next to the Houston Greyhound station and waited in red-eyed anticipation in the mid-afternoon sun for our California rock star buddies to pull into town.

I was relieved when they arrived and looked even worse than we did. They had a dreadful and uncomfortable 48 hours in a bus, all with different sets of stories including almost getting kicked off mid trip with all of their gear on the side of the road. Even though we hadn’t seen each other in 2 years, everyone was dead tired, and a little dazed from exhaustion. We went for burritos and blinked at each other in restive stillness for 3 or 4 hours until we were set to play. Despite the mutual fatigue, we both played crushing sets to an enthusiastic crowd of young headbangers. The crowd was so rowdy that a fight even broke out during one of the sets.

After the gig the ZH boys and us headed to a motel for a snooze. To save money, all 10 of us crammed into the same room and conked right out. Thank goodness we had the next night off and were free to slob the day away and go camping in the outskirts of San Antonio. The spot we ended up at turned out to be where they filmed the Patrick Swayze movie Parenthood. This ended up being our first big party blowout with ZH, and we had an absolute blast. The night was spent making fires, cranking James Brown music and playing Frisbee in a scorpion field and sleeping in tents under a tree. It was the perfect way to get reacquainted with old friends.

I could not be happier with having ZH on the road with us. It is very strange for 10 dudes to be sharing each other’s space while avoiding conflict. I think the reason is that both of our bands function in a world of positivity. No matter how bad things get, we keep each other laughing and energized, and when things are good we are all there for each other to savour it as a family. Every conversation we have is fodder for a sidesplitting joke, or a milk-out-the-nose laugh that will catapult you into a schoolgirl-like titter for miles and miles.

The next day we went for a swim and headed into San Antonio for our gig at a club called the Korova, which was a Stanley Kubrick-themed rock club. Before our set I went for my pre-gig walk and vocal warm up looking quite haggard. I was running out of clean clothes at the time, so I was wearing black Daisy Duke cutoffs and a black tank top. My brother Mason remarked that I looked like an Australian Goth. I also had a patchy, shaggy tour beard that made me look like a real asshole. After our gig a dude came up to me and said that he thought I was a homeless lunatic because he had seen me walking past the bus station singing to myself. That assumption was completely justified, because at the time I looked like Saddam after they took him out of that hole. 

Spencer “I smell worse than I look” LeVon

Stay up to date with photos from the road at our new Flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/98333748@N04/

Tune in to our tour Podcast at: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/fatalitys-backseat-levoncast/id640852941

Also check in weekly at www.deadrhetoric.com for the latest tour blogs!

Towards Disastour Blog Vol. 6: Loco in Cocoa

On this tour we played a handful of dates in Florida, but the one town that stands out in my mind is when we spent a couple days and debauchery-soaked nights living within the depths of chaos and depravity in a bar called the 321 Local in Cocoa Beach. It all started when we pulled into town the night before our gig. We had nothing to do, and nowhere to go. So we decided to go to the venue we were going to play the following night and start our night that way. To kick things off, we had ourselves a tailgate party complete with beer, BBQ grilling and George Thorogood cranking on the stereo in the parking lot of a Baptist church around the corner. We went in to check out the bar and met the owner Kevin and the booker David. We had nowhere to sleep and couldn’t afford a hotel, so the owner of the club offered for us to just party all night long and fall asleep on the floor of the bar. We heartily obliged. The next few hours are a blur of air drumming and table dancing until late the following morning.

I found a hot piece of floor beside the pool table and time traveled to the early afternoon the following day. The hot Florida climate has a way of just drying you out. Nothing makes you feel like less of a winner then waking up next to a bar-sports apparatus with pool chalk in your hair, feeling dry as a wine cork.  I was so dry that I pissed sand. I was so dry, only British people thought I was funny.  I was so dry, I found a bunch of camels traversing my beer gut.  Oh, if only I had the foresight to grab myself some morning water and rest it beside my soon-to-be unconscious body lovingly. That’s a real treat isn’t it? When you awake from a late night of liquored-up lunacy only to find that drunk you left hung over you a chilled Snapple or a 2-liter Fresca?  If you can find someone that does that for you, you marry that person and impregnate them immediately to pass on that trait to future generations.

I waddled over to the men’s room to freshen up and saw Adam sleeping on the stage, snuggling up to the subwoofer. The other dudes begrudgingly arose from whatever man nest they created for themselves and we began talking about heading to the ocean for a quick splash just to wake up and get psyched before we needed to perform later that evening. We went down to the beach with the club owner Kevin as our tour guide, and he pointed us in all the right directions and made sure that we had a beer in front of us at all times. He had us in stitches with his wild sense of humor and stories, as well as his positive and earnest attitude towards living the life he loves to live. “It’s a hard life, but it’s our life,” he kept saying to me.

It’s amazing how a nippy dip in the ocean can set your mind straight. After playing in the waves like a pack of soft-minded imbeciles, we brought a ton of food back to the bar to cook in the massive kitchen and to get our powers back to full strength and play a power set. About an hour after we played, I felt so loose that I decided to go back up on stage and play a last call jam session with Eytan and Mason with me on bass. We took requests and jammed out until it was time for another well-earned pool table nap.

Be well friends,

Spencer “it may be time for an orange” LeVon

Be sure to follow our tour podcast! Recorded by myself and my brother Mason here.

Towards Disastour Blog Vol. 5: Cape Fear and Loathing

The party in Richmond came to a slow end at around 5:30 in the morning, but once it started dying down strange people began showing up. One gentleman notably came in covered in sweat, visibly annihilated on drugs with a towel around his neck and a ketchup squeeze bottle full of booze. It seemed like just as all of the metal heads we had met during the night made their way home, more and more drug-addled lunatics began showing up to have a late night drug binge party in the attached bedroom that separated the living room with the only bathroom. At one point a girl, belligerent and haggard, emerged into the living room from the drug shack, took off her pants and underwear and pressed her naked ass on a gentleman who was sleeping on the futon in the living room while party goers laughed and took pictures in relative discomfort. We eventually gained control of the living room as though it were a game of RISK and eagerly turned down the deafening record player as I found a hot piece of floor between the TV and the coffee table to rest my troubled head. The users in the next room began getting aggravated and “pill sick”, as the hesitant sun began to rise. We also heard the group aggressivly turn on one of the individuals for doing needle drugs. I closed my eyes, put in my ear plugs and began focusing on sleep in hopes of getting a couple hours of floor rest before we needed to head back to the van we left at a parking lot that was to be ticketed and towed when our parking slip expired at 10am. I heard doors slamming, screaming and relentless conflict in the next room as we listened to the soundtrack of withdrawal, sorrow, and unbridled discomfort as the drugs began to wear off.

At around 6 in the morning I had the unmanageable need to urinate and had the ill-fated realization that the only way to the bathroom was through the gauntlet of savages that had regrettably ran out of drugs hours ago. I tiptoed to the door and overheard their conversation. They had become increasingly sick, angry and paranoid; particularly of the unknown Canadians who were subsided in the living room next to them. “Lets kick them the fuck out of here! Who the hell are they anyways?” I heard one of them say as I began running through my choices for urination. Do I pee in the sink, take my chances on the street and risk getting locked out, or do I brave the drug gauntlet? I put my hand on the doorknob, took a deep breath and opened the door. There were 5 people in there, a few of them curled up and visibly ill. Sweaty-towel-ketchup-man was pacing around the room and a woman was sitting on the end of the bed awkwardly awaiting relief from the after affects of drug use. When they saw me enter the room, I can only describe the look on their collective faces as sheer terror as I whizzed by to take a super loud early morning endurance piss with the door locked. I made my way back to the floor and got an hour of pained half-sleep before the alarm went off and we needed to trek back to the van by foot.

We were all annoyed, overtired and cranky as we made our way through the downtown core clinging to our personal belongings like a walk of shame after one of the most uncomfortable evenings in recent memory. However, our style while traveling is to make the best out of any situation and do our best to become positive and energized. We made our way to the ocean and gleefully splashed around in the waves, then headed to Wilmington, North Carolina, part of a region known as Cape Fear, and arrived nice and early to have a no-holds-barred BBQ in the parking lot and got our energy back up to full and got ready for our gig at Reggies.

It was the promoter’s birthday party and everyone was in good spirits. We played first and spent the rest of the night playing pool, sitting at the bar enjoying dollar beers while watching Happy Gilmore muted with subtitles and checking out the local bands. We stayed with Carlos from Salvacion and his girlfriend Erin and listened to great albums, drank beer and of course slept until 2 in the afternoon. Apparently they had just put up our friends in Cauldron when they played through there a few weeks ago. Carlos and Erin were gracious enough to let us stay the following night as well and we made them a nice healthy vegetarian stir fry and went to a party in town on our day off. So nice to make new friends and have a clean place to rest after such a wild and restless week.

Time for another swim,

Spencer “please don’t stab me, I just need to pee” LeVon

Towards Disastour Blog Vol. 4: Just a peek in Chesapeake

Boy, I sure hate being the designated driver while everyone indulges in booze and gets silly. There is not a more thankless job in this world than to be chauffeur for this wily group of 4 young men with hard-ons. When I am tasked with doing this, I tell the boys right at the beginning of the night: “I will drive us to where we gotta go, but you may as well start calling me Stephanie, I will tell you right now.” Stephanie is the name of my inner fat girl. Everyone has one, that snarky voice in the back of your head when everyone is hammered and having a great time except for you. I always imagine Stephanie looking like Chris Farley from the Gap Girls sketch on SNL.

“Can we go now? I’m bored.” “No, you can’t have sex with that girl, we came as a group we leave as a group.” And occasionally, just an incredulous “Really!?” are all things that can be heard by Stephanie as she passive-aggressively ruins everyone’s night like a serial arsonist of mirth. Did I mention that I also stink at driving? I am famous for absentmindedly spending most of the drive with the cruise control set to 10 under the limit, with only the most tenuous grasp of the wheel at 7 o’clock, cyclically drifting on and off the shoulder rumble strips. You know, those little grooves on the side of the road that make your tires rumble to wake you up just incase you decide to take an ill-advised nappy while on the way to your destination. “BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM” goes the rumble strip, followed by countless crass backseat remarks such as “Dude, you spend more time on the shoulder than a goddamned parrot.” I might have been angrier were it not completely accurate.

But it has been a while since we last spoke, so let’s take it back to where we left, shall we? We left NYC in a state of goofy blurry-eyed bliss and made our faithful voyage to Baltimore. We arrived nice and early and decided to go for a stroll through the streets down to the harbor. While nowhere close to the neighborhoods depicted in The Wire, the areas we were in seemed pretty rough around the edges with loudmouthed lunatics and bullet holes in a few of the storefront windows. Our gig was at a venue called the Side Bar. A cozy underground bar that has a capacity of less than 100. Before the gig started I went for a little walk by myself to clear my weary mind. I bought the local paper and chilled out on a stoop reading and relaxing on my lonesome. I read that Baltimore had 32 murders in the first week of the summer. Holy dog shit. They must really love our band in Baltimore because I found the word “Fatality” written about 80 times before I even got to the funnies. Either that or they are all just constantly murdering each other over there. I also passed by the strip club district. I was drawn to it because there was an almost tangible darkness that hung over the street of sadness. The other thing I liked about it was they had old-school strip club barkers standing in front of every club trying to pull in some business. I saw men in cowboy hats outside of each club sayin’ goofy shit to me like “Hey swinger, looking for a good time and cheap thrills? Girls girls girls, nude and nasty.” “No thanks sir, but I might be back.” As we drove past the same strip after the gig the entire street was blocked off with caution tape and 10 cop cars. I reckon there may have been a shooting shortly after I scurried back to the venue.

We were lucky enough to stay with Eytan’s friend DK whom he lived with during his stint in Israel. DK’s place is in the suburbs in a beautiful white house that was built in the 1800’s. The boys and I spent the next 2 nights there sleeping, eating good BBQ and doing the occasional phone interview. He also had a beautiful acoustic piano that I played and played and played.

Our next date was in Chesapeake, Virginia. This proved to be one of my favorite sets of the tour so far. I can always gauge how good a set is by how seamlessly and comfortably we can navigate through the set. The more relaxed we are on stage, the more engaging and adaptable we become and our set becomes more of a resonating meditation of music than anything else; a tantric expression of love and musical enjoyment. When I am at my best, it’s like I am on autopilot, acting completely on instincts and riding the set like a spirited surfer on a tsunami of sound.  This was the first show in a state where you are still allowed to smoke in bars. It was like going back in time to a stinky, slightly yellowed past. The smokers in the band took advantage of this onstage and lived out their Keith Richards fantasies.

Then it was off to Richmond, Virginia: home of many great metal bands such as Municipal Waste, Gwar and Lamb of God. We were scheduled to tape an appearance on a cooking show called Brutally Delicious with Bruce Moore. We called him in the afternoon to confirm, but it seemed he would have to cancel because he couldn’t get a hold of his camera crew to film the episode. We were defeated until Adam chimed in with: “wait a minute, aren’t we traveling with a fuckin’ camera man!?” So we headed down to Bruce’s house and our roadie extraordinaire Sean DeCory saved the day and manned his camera as Eytan gave a great interview while making some picturesque chicken breasts and hot peppers on the grill. Bruce Moore is a great guy, as well as an extremely interesting dude. Apparently he was a mastering engineer in NYC during the 90’s hip-hop boom before moving to a small town with his amazingly welcoming and polite family. He also published a few recipes from Eytan and I in his cookbook “For Those About to Cook” a few years back.

Richmond is a really sweet place. We played on the main nightclub strip and it really came to life after the sun went down; complete with live music spilling out onto the street like sonic contentment from the open doors of the surrounding clubs. We had a great set and hung around playing darts, drinking beer and enjoying the chaotic atmosphere of the crazed party animals slinking in and out of the bars on the strip. After the show we headed to someone’s apartment for some shut eye. When we got there we were surprised to find a rowdy house party in full swing with music uncomfortably loud on a jittery old record player, beer chugging and a whole lot of boisterous and noisy shenanigans. Although we were ready for a good night’s sleep, we submitted to go with the flow and get a little silly with the locals. I was in the party zone and was loud, making jokes and working the room. I remember at one point getting the entire room of partiers singing “I Feel Good” by James Brown as I pounded on a nearby electric guitar. But as the night got later and later, things got weirder and weirder and took a very surreal and dangerous turn.

To be continued…

Spencer “Call Me Stephanie” LeVon

As always please stay updated with our tour photos on our new Flickr page here

And check out the Fatality Backseat LevonCast (podcast) for hilarious stories from the road! Hosted by my brother Mason and I.