2rd Video+Blog! Shot by us, written by Peter, edited and set to the second (and huge international hit) song on our EP Dangerous Little Signs by Rasheed the Willing.

We played the license plate game on the way across the midwest to the east coast.

Ames Iowa has about four Hard Rock radio stations, that play either 80s hair metal or new recordings by washed up classic rock bands. If Stevie Ray Vaughn were alive today he would live in Northern Iowa.

Breakfast in the morning after the Minneapolis show: apples, peanut butter, and regret for partying so hard with intimidatingly friendly Lutheren people.

Chicago finally seemed like a real city, stores crammed so close together around the Vic Theater with signs in a hundred languages. The theater was huge and sounded like a dream, but we had to jet right after we played to go play an afterparty with our sideproject band No Lover and the amazing snotty pop-punk IL band the Safes at a bar called the Darkroom in the Ukrainian Village part of town.

Darkroom was dark.

The Exit we were looking for off Lakeshore was elusive, but we circled the museums til we made it out of the city and on to Detroit.

Faygo was dripping from the walls of St. Andrews Hall because it is the home base of a little old hip hop group called the Insane Clown Posse (who we’ve been accidently mirroring the whole tour, playing before or after them in various stunned towns everywhere….we even saw their caravan at a truck stop: two tractor trailers painted with evil circus shit—presumably full of orange drink?).

Gold For Cash joints and rebuilt art studios lined the route back to our friends place in downtown Detroit. He gave us a drunky historical tour of the demolished stadiums and dirt-cheap artisan spaces springing up.

We poured Hot Sauce the BBQ he spread out for us in his art deco home, right next to the BBQ joint he owns. Mindblowingly spicy and good after wearing ourselves out on stage.

We irrigated the heat with local wine and jelly beans.

Ko from the Dirtbombs and head of the Kokonuts lived right next door and came over at 3am to give us advice about getting into Canada. We tried not to geek out while she informed us about not hiding merch and being polite to the customs agents even if they toss your laptop on the cement.

Last stop before Canada: Duty Free for cigarettes and gas…we stuck to the total truth about what we had in the van and what we were doing and breezed right through.

245 Kilometers to Toronto, whatever that means.

Nine looney dollars for a liter of gas, which works out to: ummm.

Rural Ontario is like a Coen brothers movie about emptiness and isolation. But Toronto was alive, and in a European way just slightly more fashionable and antique than an American city somehow.

Parking behind the club in the pouring rain, moving amps and keyboards with laconic British stagehands, playing in front of a sparser crowd while coughing into the mic—our bodies and souls felt shit heavy from too much booze and smoking and hard travel.

Quality Inn, Buffalo. A day off spent in Dennys looking at video of people dancing as we play, remembering why we’re pushing ourselves around the countryside and why we exist.

Rochester to New York City in the morning. We split up into various corners for the night, Park Slope, Williamsburg, Staten Island. Corner Creek whiskey is delicious, only available in Brooklyn, and medicinal.

Terminal 5 is a converted dance club with neon 80s railings on the Upper Balcony reserved for Very Important Persons with VIP Passes like actor Justin Long who had to wait forever to get in because the guy at the ticket counter didn’t recognize him. We played to what seemed like a massive sea of blank faces. Did they hate us? Did they even recognize us as musicians or did they think we were a still life painting called Four White Dudes Gyrating with Electricity? But as soon we were done 15 teenager gaping at us like the Stones just touched down from planet 1964 mobbed the merch booth by the door. We ran out of M, L, and XL.

Did the woman who got naked during the Bravery’s encore and humped a random stranger on the dancefloor until she got kicked out have a Y chromosome? It was hard to tell under the plastic surgery. Then after the show late late late on the way across the river, right at the height of the Brooklyn bridge, Peter remembered we never got paid so we had to tear ass back through Manhattan to Hell’s Kitchen past saturday night madness everywhere on either side before they turned out the lights.

From zenith to nadir is moment by moment on the road so far…we have no idea what is coming next.

Dustys Fall Tour Video Blog: Week 2

Minneapolis to NYC
Track: Dangerous Little Signs
From The Sticky Blood EP

Touch:
myspace.com/thedustysmusic
twitter.com/thedustys

We Love
No Lover 
myspace.com/nolovermusic
Cut by Rasheed of CromagnonJazz.com

Also Posted on: Brightest Young Things.com

Genius photographer Mike Minehart took some great pics of us and the rest of the tour at the Fine Line in Minnesota.

Some of us feel we look a tad goofy in some of the shots but we acknowledge that has more to do with inherent goofiness and less to do with Mikes mad skills. Thanks triple to him!

Meanwhile, the afterparty at the Darkroom in Chicago went super well last night. The Safes get better every time we see them (and they started out amazing) and No Lover was twice as manic as they should have been given that it was everyones second show of the day. Fuck practicing by the way—it’s a scam.

On to St. Andrews Hall in Detroit tonight, where we gave away tickets through the fine Internet website Motorcityblog.blogspot.com …hopefully the winners will come say hi. Let’s save Michigan together, through the magic of whiskey!

In the continuing quest to figure out what we’ve gotten ourselves into and be prepared like boyscouts, Peter asked the Two Plus Two poker forum for vague advice, not really expecting to be answered directly by its most famous musical member.

In conclusion:

Steve Albini is awesome.

Preparing to take off on our almost 2 month tour this fall we (well Peter) asked MetaFilter.com what advice they’d give about life on the road. Here’s a sampling of what we got:

1. Keep a SECRET stash of cash (or a credit card or two with a large enough limit to get you out of a big jam (ie van stolen with all equipment or drummer in jail).)
2. Do NOT eat crap or you will pay for it many times over (lethargy, low blood suger, feeling crappy, getting sick, losing energy, etc). It’s much better to be hungry than to eat a bunch of junk.
3. Budget a little $$ for a fresh six-pack of socks (and maybe briefs) every week, and just toss the old ones.
4. NEVER fall asleep with your shoes on. This is free license for the other band members to draw on your face with a sharpie. Shoes off, hands off. Shoes on, fair game.
5. Set up a resource path so you can get more merch while you’re out on the road. If you do well, and sell out of stuff early, you will be kicking yourself for the rest of the trip if you can’t get more.
6. Have fun, and keep a positive attitude, even if it just about kills you
7. Learn the names of the sound people at each club. You will get a much better mix if you refer to the sound person by name, rather than just yelling out “hey sound guy”. Give a copy of your CD to the sound person each night.
8. Have 2 band members, (preferably where at least one isn’t drunk), separately perform “the idiot check,” ie making sure that your drummer hasn’t left his cymbals on the drum riser etc. (Lots of drummer hate in these answers, sorry Dex!)
9. Either bring extras of things that might break or get lost, or know ahead of time/have an easy way to find out where the closest music store is.
10. Cool t-shirts are a great money-maker/easy seller. People who even kind of liked your band will buy a shirt if it looks really cool. And don’t use shitty t-shirts or Hanes Beefy T or thick shit like that to make your shirt. People hate those.
11. Don’t get the cheapest van possible because it will break down catastrophically when you’re in the middle of nowhere (this happened to me Dex).
12. Don’t become mildly alcoholic as a result of getting free drinks every night (this happened to me Dex).
13. People LOVE free stuff, like stickers. If you don’t have stickers already, make some - if you do have them, make more.
14. Also hot on the merch front are cloth bags, especially now that lots of places are outlawing plastic bags.
15. Know the free weekly newspapers and magazines and make sure you’re listed in them. Try to get a sense of what radio stations might be friendly to a stop-by from you, like a college or similarly independent station. Contact station managers or other relevant staff & send CDs to them.
16. Do you have any kind of street team infrastructure? Friends-of-friends/AskMeFites/etc. who’d be willing to post fliers in the week or two leading up to the show in each town, in return for free admission?
17. Are you on Facebook? If so, set up Events that your fans can Attend and Invite their Friends to. Free & easy promotion.
18. Find local messageboards and introduce yourself to the local scene before you go. Hang out with locals before and after the show (and I don’t mean groupies).
19. Get your band on JamBase or other concert search engines/organizers.
20. A friend of mine started betterthanthevan.com to help bands find cheap/free places to stay on tour.
21. Personally I’d recommend against the CDR w/ marker route. If you’re going to represent yourself with a physical item make it look good. I think a lot of people get a bland-looking CDR and never listen to it because it looks amateurish. And for the same reason I think you should charge something. Free equates to worthless for a lot of people. And if you say “We’re selling this album, and we’re giving away this free CD,” people tend to say “I’ll take the free one, thanks, later” and you don’t sell any albums. So my personal feeling is you should have a CD with 2-4 tracks and design an image to be printed on the CD with the band name, website, and tracklist, stick them in sleeves and call it an EP, and sell it for $1-3 alongside your albums which you sell for $10-15. Then people come over to your merch table and buy at least the cheaper one or maybe both, and you know they’re gonna listen to it since they paid for it and it looks nice.
22. The most important thing I can think of off the top is SECURITY. Make sure your van is locked when no one is watching it, your trailer is securely locked to your van, and pick up a safe to bolt into the floor of your van to hold money and valuables. Don’t drunkenly let a random untrusted fan help you load or you will wind up with less stuff than you started.
23. Some fucked up shit will happen over the 6+ weeks of tour. Expect at least one flat tire, two oil changes, and if you’re lucky no major injuries. Keep a small first aid kit handy for the minor ones like cuts and blisters. Tums, tylenols, cough drops, and any other medicines you might need.
24. Get as many names, phone numbers, and email addresses for the venue, venue contacts, promoter, production manager, and house sound guy as early as possible for each of the dates
25. At least one week before the date of the show, call everyone and touch base starting with the promoter. Confirm the address for your GPS, everyone else’s name and numbers, when load-in (this might change) is, what the parking situation will be for your vehicle, when doors are (this will change), and when you go on (this will also change). Ask if they need anything from you and what they need from you. Ensure that you communicate with someone associated with every show.
26. If you get there at the same time the headliner is loading in, you might be able to make use of the local hands to load your stuff in quicker.
27. If you drive at night until you get to the next city and get a hotel room after the audit, like 5-6AM, you will have it for the rest of that day and night until checkout the next calendar date. If you can plan when you’re going to do this, possibly when you have a short drive the next day so you can hang in the city where you’re playing, then you can maximize party time and not have to wake up early and do all your driving in the morning.
28. Aside from hotel rooms and generous friends’ houses along the way, the van will be your home for the six weeks you will be on tour. Think about what you’ve done in your life over the past month and a half. You need to be able to squish is all into a vehicle and move it around the country every day. Pack and travel light, one big bag for soft goods (clothes) with nothing breakable inside that can be thrown around and piled in the trailer (if you’re using one, more later), one toiletry bag with all your shower/bathroom supplies in it, and one day bag for your laptop, cellphone, ipod, and all the other stuff you want with you at all times. You can always bring more stuff, but space is limited and everyone has themselves and other people to worry about.
29. Be considerate. Grab a car charger for your phone, and look into who needs AC power for laptops etc and get at least one appropriate AC/DC inverter. Long drives can be brutal, so bring something to entertain yourselves, TV series on DVD, lots of movies, video games, but that stuff needs to be accounted for as thieves will break into a van to get a LCD TV and xbox.
30. athe often, do what you can to not stink. New socks, gold bond, deodorant, febreze, and taking 10 minutes to splash off every chance you get go pretty far. An 8 hour drive sucks, but an 8 hour drive with a dude that smells like onions and balls is going to cause tension. (Again seems like they’re picking on drummers, sorry Dex!)
31. Maintain your van. Not getting there will cost you a lot of money. This means regular oil changes, checking your tire pressure, not towing a trailer with overdrive on, keeping your fluids at acceptable levels, carrying jumper cables and spare fuses, and whatever else you might need to keep the vehicle you get around the country and spend a great deal of your time in running.
32. A giant canister of unscented baby wipes.
    You can clean your face, neck, hands, pits…. any time.
    You will thank me later if you do this.

We’re thanking you now. THANKS METAFILTER!