Touring, a Theraputic Weekend of Awesome

As I may (or may not) have mentioned in my last post, I recently went on a weekend tour with my band HKPOE! (Hardcore Karaoke Pile-On Extravaganza). I had a busy week leading up to it and the whole cold turkey thing didn't really work out like I'd planned. Just another bump in the road, I suppose. I thought the weekend was going to be stressful and that I would be curled up in the van, under tons of equipment, pulling out my hair. As it turned out, everything - as flawed as it was - was amazing. So amazing, in fact, that I can't recall pulling a single hair from my head throughout the entire weekend.

The tour was Thursday-Sunday. We hit Brooklyn on Thursday night, where we played in a small venue in Bushwick to a small crowd of people, with our tour buddies Hey Stranger and Nix86. The van was pimped with a couch and a cooler full of beer, so we were pretty much set. We considered this our warm-up set for the rest of the weekend.

Thursday night I sardined myself in-between two of my bandmates on a futon in Crown Heights. I might have woken up once or twice with someone spooning me. It was easier just to let it happen and go back to sleep than it was to wake him up and make him move (Oh, Dancho). These things happen. If he hadn't been spooning me, he'd have been spooning Xian (which may have been just as exciting).

Friday was spent with a delicious breakfast/brunch at Tom's Restaurant in Brooklyn. EVERYONE SHOULD GO THERE AT LEAST ONCE IN THEIR LIVES. Like a pilgrimage. Best food, great service, amazing prices, cute place. It's very much a loved place in the community, and it now has a bunch of new fans!

We headed to the Bronx fairly early for our gig at FLC with Bronx Underground. Early enough to clean the van - there was a surprising amount of empty beer bottles/cans general trash considering we had only been in it for a day. We did our daily booze run, made it back and began drinking. At the request of the promoter, we quit with the alcohol around 6 (lawyers were there!) and prepared for the set.

We played to several hundred kids (it was a hardcore show with Knuckle Up) after Nix86 KILLED it that night. We had an awesome time and are very excited to be invited back to play again. We had to turn down an encore, but we were honored to have one. After sticking around to meet-and-greet with fans and other bands (and after 3 kids were knocked out cold), we headed to Long Island. We had booked a few rooms to sleep in (how pampered are we) at a motel, but there was a discrepancy and we basically told them to go fuck themselves and took our business elsewhere.

We ended up in the roomiest Days Inn in Hicksville. So much floor space!!! We were very impressed. 3 in each bed, 3 on the floor and 1 on a cot = 9 happy campers... especially after showers were acquired.

We spent a lot of Saturday walking around Garden City and almost getting kicked out of Guitar Center (see twitter.com/thechubreport for tour/dick-related nonsense). We ate at a clutch Kosher Deli and bought booze before heading to the Humanist Society. There was another misunderstanding with the promoter that still needs to be smoothed out, but overall we all had a great time. We played with BTMI, Hey Stranger and Nix86. Our set was killer, kids loved it, we loved them.

We headed back to CT that night, but I was unable to make the Sunday gig due to my roommate's Senior Recital that I was playing in. I hear I was missed and the show was amazing anyway.

I've found myself missing everything about that fucking van this week. I had an amazing weekend and can't believe how awesome it turned out to be. Wahoo!