Dustys Fall Tour Video Blog: Week 3
New York to Florida
Track Sticky Blood
From The Sticky Blood EP
EP available at:
thedustys.bandcamp.com/album/sticky-blood
Touch:
Blog:
Cut by Rasheed of CromagnonJazz.com
We got people in Boston. We got people in Philly. We got people on the beach in Florida. And you know we got people in DC.
On stage at the Boston House of Blues: “Anyone here from Weymouth? *some applause* Anyone here from Needham? *three dudes go insane cheering* Good towns!”
Met friends in the cold drizzle, across from the photograph that is Fenway. “Carl Sagan called it “America’s Lyric Shoebox,” said one in his Needham accent. It sounded good.
After the Bravery played, the floor of the HOB was ankle-deep in beer and cups. One friend offered us some couches close-by. Unfortunately she didn’t mention the raging college party going on right next to the open curtainless windows of our living room. Banging on the glass, slamming into the wall fighting, screaming at each other about how is bein more ridiculous—this must be how fish feel about their idiot air-breathing feeders.
Philly seems forever away but actually is reached pretty quickly, back through New York’s snarls. The rest of the night was a blur of faces. Old friends drove up from DC to taunt our rockstar airs and travel beards, buying us drinks. Philly connects, family members: buying us drinks. Drinks buy themselves for us. Some of us made the punk rock afterparty, others pass out, others drove back to DC through the sudden mid-atlantic winter.
The first time spent apart the whole tour is in our own beds, alone. Then we gather at the 9:30 Club for our homecoming, discovering we’ve been spared an indignity. The other opening band, poor bastards, had their van swiped from a hotel parking lot back in PA. It’s a tragedy, but an opportunity for US Royalty to sweep in from an outdoor show and whirl onstage, as well as for us to be in the second spot for our hometown triumph. Walking through the curtains, playing the best and tightest set we could imagine, the music sounding crisper and more confident than possible, as if we were miming to backing track of a much better uglier group, the faces of friends and distant acquaintances and just “Oh I Know that Chick From Somewhere” nod and dance and come to the afterparty and dance to our friends bands, thee Lexington Arrow, Death By Sexy, out long past bar time but not even drunk just giddy on the love. It felt good.
Back together in the van 29 hours later, we were still riding that high down to Norfolk. The venue’s bigger than expected, and the dressing rooms are insane, ping pong tables and pool and two TVs and a dining room and a hot-tub for the headliners and trained penguins carrying drinks—but the real wonder is the packed house on a Tuesday, practically dragging us down the street to Hells Kitchen, where the tatooskulls bobbed to terrible 00s punque, Say Anything, Today’s The Day.
By the time we get to Charlotte the rain and sickness has caught up with us again. The sound on the tiny stage is like playing in wind tunnel and we’re looking at rock and roll from the outside, like the puppets who play our songs are falling apart at the strings. But everytime someone comes up and hugs us or asks shyly to take a picture with us it’s a shot stronger than your best speedball baby.
(I hate to keep going back to this narcissistic point — “OH WE’RE SO GREAT EVERYONE LOVES US” but the fact is that A. if we weren’t attention whores we’d be playing chamber music or working as accountants, not making crotch-thrusting rock music. And B. even if it’s only a byproduct of being from out of town, everyone we’ve met so far from Ed Hardy sporting black baseball cap dickbag to soccer mom to misguided teenage emo kid has been more than effusive—more like totally familiar, as if we should know their dreams and hobbies based on our presence on a stage in front of them. So it’s only partially narcissism— I also want to point the real heros from this or any tour: the roadies. They get us drugs. I LOVE YOU ROADIES.)
Down in Florida we played in a tiny club in a strip mall next to a bible store, where it’s 100 degrees and some sorority girl at the foot of the stage keeps yelling “I WANT TO FUCK YOU” and then more specifically “I WANT TO FUCK YOUR DRUMMER.” We drove across the everglades, slept in earshot of mating flamingos, lay on a beach where the water was 10x warmer than the air. Day off, we wander around a no-name town alone. Thumbnail-sized green frogs stuck to every surface outside our motel…even they seem to want something. We signed their legs, and drove to Atlanta.
Also posted on Brightest Young Things, who are awesome.
