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His Philosophy

Well this is the longest tour we’ve ever done so far and probably the most fun. It was 30 days and I think about 25 shows. We got too drunk and I spent too much money even though I had none. The van held up fairly well, only broke down once, and as far as band money we actually still have some left. As far as my personal cash I’m paying my rent and all my other bills for this month with the trusty plastic, the vilest most blood sucking dealer ever to exist, furthering myself into the hellhole of debt. If anyone has $22,000 I can have, make the check out to Brian Gallagher and my address is 107-F West Main Street, Carrboro, NC 27510. No I didn’t spend that much on tour. That’s just my accrued debt and counting from eight years of poor financial decisions. My advice to kids in high school: don’t go to college and major in English unless your parents can pay the tuition, and never, under any circumstances, get a credit card. Just say No. In fact, say Fuck No you bloodsucking plastic demon from hell!

But, as rock n roll saint Bon Scott said, it ain’t no fun waitin’ ‘round to be a millionaire, and I should be the last person to complain. From August 23 to September 23, 2002, I saw a lot of shit I’ve never seen, places that I had never been too, smells I never smelled, landscapes that blew my mind and landscapes that blew, and above all I met some of the most generous people I’ve ever met in my life. The generosity people showed us, without expecting anything in return, was almost to the point of insanity. It seemed like almost everyone we ran into had an extra drink, a couple extra bucks, a place to stay, some food, what have you. It’s good to know the world is not completely filled with assholes. Fuck yeah!

And here we go…

Wilmington, NC
Fri 8/23/02 @ Bessie’s w/ The Needles, RPG

We shoved off from Chapel Hill, us three in the band and our roadie Nick Peterson, a fine roadie indeed, after going to the bank and depositing cash into our newly opened band account. Our CDs came in the mail in the nick of time that day but the print on the disc said “Buzz Sawyer” instead of the correct, one-word title of the band, “Buzzsawyer”. The fucks. Vertigo Disc in Marietta, GA – they do short run CDs but the service is horrible. Nick Peterson, a fine roadie indeed, called Vertigo and tried to get an explanation but like the 500 other times we tried to get a hold of them we had to leave a message and they never called back.

The first night was in Wilmington. Wimmy-tau! I love Wilmington. A beach town swarming with beautiful women that like rock n roll music. If we knew anything about anything we would have moved there instead of Chapel Hill, but I have no regrets. It was a 100 degree, balmy, sweat-your-ass-off-sitting-down day. Said hello to our pals in the Needles, said hello to our pals in RPG. I wish we could’ve done the whole tour with these two bands.

Knothead came out having promoted the show as best he could on his radio station and of course the Needles always bring a crowd. RPG opened and kicked ass despite the sound man not turning up the vocals.

Sound guy:”The guitars are really loud.”
Matt RPG:”What?”
Sound guy:(annoyed) “The guitars are REAL. LY. LOUD.”
Matt RPG:”I can’t hear you, the guitars are really loud.”

They say don’t piss off a sound guy. They can be little bitches from time to time. RPG ruled anyway. Their music is a fucking explosion.

We played second. It was an okay show. I put a lot of balls into it but I was having some problems with the action on my guitar being too high which I fixed the next day. Vee was knocked out of tune the last song, “Last Action Fuckers” – that’s the one Mick always comes up and joins us on the “Hey!”s and the tambourine. I thought it was me that was out of tune the whole time, but either way it sucks to end on a sour note. Oh well. We had fun anyway.

The Needles kicked ass on the home turf as usual. Their audience in Wilmington always seems to be 50% women which is a great and rare thing in the world of rock n roll these days. It’s not that I’m going to get any of them, it’s just that I prefer to look out and see boobs and butts shaking around rather than scruffy drunk dudes banging into each other, or worse scruffy sober dudes just standing there motionless like deer in headlights.

Went over to Mick’s afterward and partied all night. When the beer was drained there was some merlot to drink – a merlot nightcap straight out of the bottle always makes for a great sunshiny morning. Tried to go to sleep around 7am but the caged dove at Mick’s house kept me awake. I was hungry for a dove sandwich for breakfast.

Savannah, GA
Sat 8/24/02 @ B&B Billiards w/ The Needles

The show was originally supposed to be at the Velvet Elvis, but they were shut down by the Man because they forgot to pay their taxes for the last three years. We heard optimistic rumors via our good friend and Savannah resident Nat Hayward that the owners paid their dues and a re-opening of grand proportions was scheduled the night of our show. The neighboring bartenders suggested otherwise and they proved to be right – the Velvet Elvis would not open that night.

We ate down at the burrito place on the corner near the Elvis and the sweet tea there was to hungover me in the sweaty Savannah eve like water to a man in the desert and with free refills too. Cheap Mexican food is great, especially for a merlot hangover. Nat, Vee and I went down by the river after that, or maybe it was a bay or something. It’s the place with water there where all the people young and old hang out, and they have old fashioned looking riverboats down there with paddles that don’t actually function anymore but they keep them for decoration like the Gateway Clipper fleet in Pittsburgh does. Savannah is another one of those cool little southern beach towns where people actually go out and do things in great numbers. I’m not used to that being from Pittsburgh. There were street musicians down there, a trumpet player that wasn’t anything special but better than the guy that used to stand outside Three Rivers Stadium and play “When the Saints Go Marching In” over and over again. There were also some rad fuckin’ breakdancers down there.

One kid in particular was mesmerizing to watch, a black kid with long dreads and a black T-shirt that read “I AM HIP HOP” in big white letters. He was dancing to that Curtis Mayfield tune from Superfly – “Pusherman” I think it’s called - it’s got a real mellow groove to it. It was like watching a movie in real life. The kid’s legs were moving so rhythmically and fast that it looked like he was floating inches above the sidewalk. He was so completely in his element that it was as though his dancing reflected some profound, wordless impression, broadcast directly from the soul. It was one of those images in time that cast itself on my memory like a photograph.

I didn’t take any photos there so I’ll paint you some images of Savannah: narrow streets, damp old alleyways, cobblestones, horse and buggies, weeping willows, (Forrest Gump was filmed there), Southerners in white golf shirts and light docker shorts and even bonnets on the ladies on Sundays, tunnels under the city that pirates used to use to shanghai poor unsuspecting fuckers. They used to go into Savannah, get some guy drunk, knock him out when he wasn’t looking and drag him out through these tunnels to their docked ship. The next day the poor chap would wake up in the middle of the sea with a nasty bastard like Blackbeard giving him two options: work or walk the plank. Who’s a pirate’s favorite pedophile? ARRRRRR Kelly.

When we got back to the closed club The Needles had arrived and were understandably pissed because they had rented a van for the weekend (they were doing Wilmington Friday, Savannah Saturday and Atlanta Sunday with us and went out of the way to do this show). We were standing around the outside of the club wondering if we could find a dead fish to put in the mail slot. Eric the Needles’ bass player wrote a note that said “Thanks for letting us know you shut down, you fucking assholes. Your pals, The Needles & Buzzsawyer” and we hung it on the door. We may never play there again but you can’t just turn the other cheek when someone fucks you.

Then out of the woodwork this very talkative young fella appears and strikes up a conversation. We give him the 411 and he pauses for a moment, says “Come on, come on” and walks a some of us a few blocks down Congress Street to a place called B&B, which stands for Bar and Billiards – a pool hall with an outside stage in a three-story brick-walled courtyard. The owner, cool as hell, lets us play for free beer and food, but he can’t pay us and they got no P.A. Shit – who needs a sound system? We could have Mick do the “haht-too, haht-too” dance naked for drinks like he did up in Brooklyn. But Josh, the talky kid, gets a hold of a mic and a mic stand for us and we figure we got enough gear between the two bands that we can rig a makeshift P.A. that will be suitable to our needs. The mic stand has no base to it so we take a block of wood out of the stand and ram the thing in there with a broken drum stick and Vee’s bass head and two speaker cabs act as PA. Nick Peterson, a fine roadie indeed, had to get out the soldering gun and reverse the polarity and attach a new plug to the end of the cable so it would go into Vee’s socket. It didn’t sound that bad after all. In fact it was better than a lot of places we’ve played with full P.A. and everything miked.

The weird thing about that stage was there was a giant window to the right into the ladies room and the whole time you could watch girls fix themselves up in front of the mirror and adjust their clothing and whatnot. What kind of guy owns a joint where you can see into the ladies room? My kinda guy! Aaaaaa!

Some of our Savannah friends managed to find out where we were and showed up. We put a note up along with Eric’s note on the Velvet’s door telling them the situation. Not many people that were there to play pool pay attention, but we’re getting drunk for free so we don’t give a shit. That night in the middle of the street in front of the bar Needles’ guitarist Will demonstrates that awesome puke-on-command talent he has and we watch nice, clean expensive cars and even a limo drive through it and get a puke speckle paint job on the undercarriage and rims. We cheer.

We stay at someone’s house and play some acoustic guitar and smoke some pot and get drunk and the next morning I read snippets out of a compilation filled with stories about the drug experiences of different famous authors like the junkie William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. (I guess the middle initial “S” stands for “shitfaced”). It had a great emphasis on the psychedelic and I guess psychedelics are interesting to me again because I don’t do them anymore.

Absence makes the throat grow thirsty. And there’s a whole country out there waiting to be drunk…

Atlanta, GA
Sun 8/25/02 @ 9 Lives Saloon w/ The Needles & two other bands that didn’t even bother to watch us

Little Five Points is a cool neighborhood. It’s got the 9 Lives, the Star Bar, lots of good and cheap places to eat (I got a Sicilian pizza slice like I did last time I was here - $2 fills you up), little fetish and head shops, stoned Rastafarians trying to sell their poetry on the street for weed money. One guy tried to sell us a rubber dinosaur for $2. I offered to trade him our rubber chicken. He laughed and that shook him off but there’s no way I would have traded that thing anyway. The rubber chicken stays in Scumbag One, right next to the headless soldier.

We were squeezed in last minute on this show so us and the Needles were treated and paid as one band. The 9 Lives, “Atlanta’s only Rock ‘n’ Roll Bar” was a decent place. The decor was heavy on the metal with paintings of Kiss and Motorhead posters everywhere. I heard Motorhead blasting from the sound system at least seven times that night. Lots of long-haired dudes with chain wallets and denim and leather. Hell yeah. If I’m not mistaken this is the bar Nashville Pussy hangs out when they aren’t on the road. The 9 Lives website has pics of people like Alice Cooper and Lemmy hanging there (stay tuned later in the tour journal for our exiting trip to Alice’s restaurant in Phoenix).

The people seemed cool enough there and gave us a bucket of PBR and Black Label, which I hadn’t had in a while. We opened and played to the Needles and the sound guy and I said I liked playing shows with the Needles because they have five members, which always helps to pad, and in this case compile, the audience. The last two bands didn’t even show before we had to be off the stage at an early 8:50pm. Paying customers started to show after the Needles played to us four the soundguy. The first band that played after the Needles was fronted by Dave the Star Bar’s soundguy. He’s a funny dude but shit does he have some gloomy music. We left before the last band was over. We said our goodbyes and The Needles headed back to Wilmington and us off to Birmingham, Alabama. We slept in the van in a parking lot of a hotel right outside Birmingham. I got the loft that night, a mattress for a single bed which was comfortable as hell and I snored loud and Nick Peterson, a fine roadie indeed, made these odd little honking noises like he was having dreams about reversing polarity or something. Matt enjoys singing our sleepy duet to strangers if you ever want to hear it. “KAAAAAAAAA!” “honk” “KAAAAAAAAAA!” “honk” Three Stooges poke your heart out.

(Next time: Trouble in Birmingham, Pississippi Rest Stop, A Pause for the King City & The Good People of Whitewater)