We begin beside the old brown cargo van that we named Chewbacca due to the sounds it makes and a mysterious smell that we could never quite explain. I still won’t be able to place it even after we have him put down. At our feet army surplus backpacks are stuffed with clothes for any sort of weather because we once learned the hard way that sometimes shorts and a t-shirt won’t always keep you warm in New Hampshire in the middle of June. We won’t be going to New Hampshire this time but the lesson was learned there and applies to all other excursions. This time we are heading west in a big circle almost like Kerouac drew before he found out that hitchhiking doesn’t work in direct routes. Tours are different. They’re supposed to work in direct routes if we plan them right and the rock gods smile down on us. Aaron, the guitar player, had shoved his writing notebooks on top of his clothes because he is always working on a song. He also never leaves for a tour without his acoustic guitar just in case he gets the chance to pull it out at an after-party and entertain. I filled a lot of the empty space in my bag with books to keep busy when it gets to be my turn to take the sentry position in the van with the equipment at the end of the night. Early on in our travels, a seasoned road warrior in Buffalo had told us “have someone sleep in the Van every night even if it looks like a nice and fancy neighborhood because there was a good chance that a nice and fancy crack-head will smash a window and have no problem pawning your shit the next day while you are asking a different band every night if you can use their gear.”
More often than not, I’m the one who gets stuck with the job while Aaron, the most frequently single band member and Ken, the bassist with overlapping girlfriends, tries to get into the beds of whichever girls we manage to talk into letting us stay the night at their house. If it was a house full of guys, there would be a much better chance I could avoid the bench seat below the gear with a seatbelt in my back. I will sleep better when I get home. This is about the journey.
Last time Ken brought an iPod loaded with movies, cans of Vienna sausages and a mini stockpile of assorted salted snacks from his mom in his bag. There was even a card from his girlfriend containing a condom and a note that said:
“If you’re going to do something stupid, be smart about it.”
We laughed at this because he took it as a serious possibility that he would get to use it. He was the kind of guy you had to know for a while to see the charm and we almost never stayed longer than two days in the same city on a tour.
We had already loaded the back half of the van with stacked musical instruments, replacement guitar strings, snare heads, and a roll of duct tape which would fix just about anything in a pinch. On top of the van we had fastened a large waterproof luggage shell and filled it with copies of the new album we just got back from the press and boxes of shirts with artwork cool enough that you might buy one even if you didn’t like us. We traded shirts with other bands and boom, no need for laundry. There were buttons and patches that we were supposed to sell but usually just handed them out freely to anyone who gave a compliment. We had compilation albums with a song or two of ours on them. We weren’t supposed to sell them but we did. We even had comic books that were put out by a local comic book shop. The comics had Downtrodn fighting zombies with a punk rock Norse God nicknamed Johnnie Zombie. We had bags of stickers to hand out at shows or leave peeled and placed across the country on pool tables, bar walls and bathroom stalls.
Missive Silo 