Hey, I’ve got it. It’s a great idea. It’s one that can’t go wrong! We should start our tour in Homewood Illinois! It’s foolproof! Ok, end sarcasm. We played our fist show of this 5-day jaunt at an all ages coffeehouse called Sputnik’s. This place used to be called Extreme Bean a while back and I have fond memories of playing solo sets there at open mic nights when I was in junior college. This is where I would try out songs from albums such as "a fire breathing dinosaur by tim" and "the pink tape." This is the same place where I watched a girl cry when her boyfriend played a Dave Matthews song. We were there. We were ready to rock. And we were extremely happy when we discovered there was a bar next door.

Since I was there last the interior has changed quite a bit. Besides the name change, and probably owners as well, they’ve constructed a decent sized stage for such a small room and put up some hip decor.

So a bunch of the Parthenon life-members were in attendance, which always helps. They formulated a small gathering in front of the stage along with the other select suburbanites who showed and we played our lil’ hearts out. Although we battled with working/non-working microphones for a majority of the set it was still pretty fun. You dig?

Our good pal, Lance Walker (aka the white papers) joined us for this show (and cleveland too) and played quiet and intricate ditties about England, I’d assume...

Kleenex girl wonder was is fine form as well, busting out a bunch of new songs from their forthcoming album.

I’ve had two really bad experiences with horrible traffic. I mean, really, really evil traffic. They both happened on the same road and both on the way to out of town shows. I-80 / 90 east, into Indiana is a fucking nightmare on a Friday afternoon. I should’ve thought ahead and worked out an alternate route but didn’t and we ended up in the ol’ bumper to bumper for about 2 hours. The other time this happened, we (wolfie) were on our way to Detroit for one of our first ever out of town shows. We never saw Detroit that night. I think we got as far as Hammond, Indiana and went home after we saw the endless snake of traffic ahead of us. But we forged ahead this time and arrived at speak in tongues right around 10pm; a couple hours late but actually right on time. Speak in tongues is a totally laid back club run by a collective of people. Shows there tend to start when enough people have arrived, not at a specified time.

Dan, our Speak in Tongues contact, had some really tasty hummus, pitas and assorted veggies for us when we arrived which was super cool. It beat the hell out of the 2 7-layer burritos I ate while pushing my Neon harder that it ever has before. Good lil’ car, that Neon.

One of the coolest things about Speak in Tongues is that it’s BYOB. Luckily there’s a store right across the street that sells. We stocked up with Bud and dug in for a long, hot night of rock.

Churchbuilder and the white papers played with us and KGW and both put on really cool sets. During Lance’s white papers set there was a small incident that involved a really drunk and obnoxious attendee getting up on stage during a song and attempting to play drums. Not wanting anything to ruin Lance’s set I jumped up on stage and nicely asked him to not play and attempted to explain that Lance doesn’t play with a drummer. Luckily there were no sticks by the drums so all he got was a couple of weak bass drum beats. He gave me some lame excuse as to why he should be up there but Dan from speak in tongues and I were able to talk him off the stage without any real damage. Later on, while we were on stage the same guy started yelling at me trying to tell me that the band M.O.T.O. was from Philly, when it’s a completely true fact that they reside, and have resided for quite some time in the lovely city of Chicago. He also referred to M.O.T.O. as "moto"... like a company’s mission statement or something. Ok, one last thing about this dude... he’s in a band called "temple of music". I believe that out of all of the band names I’ve ever heard in my entire life that’s the worst one of all time.

Churchbiulder made me really happy in their antics during kgw’s set. They proved that indiepop doesn’t have to be cute (which is a good thing)... their music definitely is but it’s hard to put 2 and 2 together when the keyboard player is wearing a "Pabst hat"... not a cap, but the box from the 12 pack. The show ended with Dan and I getting on stage with kgw for an improv jam. There was talk to doing Magic Carpet Ride but it ended up as something more along the lines of Jazz Odyssey by Spinal Tap. What key are we in?

Injuries of the evening: I chipped a tooth when the bouncy stage got a little too bouncy and caused the mic to slam into my mouth mid-lyric. Dan somehow cut open his hand and made cool blood splatter designs on his whiter than white drum heads. And, graham from kgw found a shard of glass in his hand during their set. No one was too seriously injured although I keep rubbing my tooth with my tongue in hopes that I can wear down the small jagged spot. Is there a dentist in the house?

There’s a town in Ohio called Dayton. There’s a band from Dayton named Guided By Voices. There’s a man in Guided By Voices named Bob Pollard. We made the pilgrimage.

With a few extra hours to spare we made a slight detour to check out the house where Bob Pollard, a contemporary songwriting genius in Dan and my eyes, grew up and where the album title "Vampire on Titus" came from. As soon as we got into Dayton we saw an exit for Needmore... which is the copyright name Bob uses for all of his songs: "Needmore Songs". Anyways, we laughed about that and drove into the downtown area of Dayton to try and find a phone book that would hopefully have a more exact map of where Titus Ave. is. Hard to believe there’s NO phone books in downtown Dayton. We headed back north and just as a shot in the dark we got off at Needmore. We went to a hotel and asked the receptionist if we could borrow a phone book. I let my fingers do the walking and there it was... the exact address. The map also made it clear that we were about 3 minutes away from the house. So, yes it’s true, Titus is right off of Needmore. Before we knew it we were parked, quietly and subtly cutting through a couple of neighbors backyards to get a peek at the infamous basketball court where the "I am a scientist" video was shot as well as lots of snippets from the "Watch me jumpstart" documentary. It was pretty cool to see it in person. The basketball backboards looked really old and handcrafted. Little did we know but the garage next to the court is THEE monument club. I always thought that it was at a different location but Jason from Luna Records informed me that that was it. It’s a garage bar, not unlike the Parthenon.

We left Titus Ave. pretty quickly just because we didn’t want to be stalkers or anything crazy like that. We just wanted to see the house we’ve all heard so much about. God knows how many GBV classics were written and maybe even recorded there.

After a quick trip to Hoagies pizza we were back on the road to Indianapolis. We made a stop at Luna Music and then made our way to the Melody Inn and began the drinking of the 12 free drafts we were offered by the air-drumming bartender. There was a sort of in and out crowd that night. It seemed that the audience fluctuated from being kinda Ok to kinda empty. But we had a good time nonetheless. The impossible shapes played as well and we thought they were really fantastic. Although I’ve played with them a couple of times before I never really got a chance to really pay attention to what they were all about. They put on a really swell show. We joined kgw for another end of show jam with this one being a lot longer, louder and obnoxious. It was still really fun though and surprisingly we didn’t clear the room. This time the proposed song was a Sun Ra tune, which I don’t think anybody knew except for Christian, who’s the bass player in kgw. No, really, what key are we in?

The party continued at a nice fellow’s house who’s pals with the kgw dudes. Much illegal smoke was had and the pizza and Gatorade tasted fucking amazing. Jeff, kgw drummer, coined the term "booze for dude". Unfortunately I have no context or background to make that term make any sense at all. So, please, use it however you’d like.

During the drive from Indy to Milwaukee I realized how little sleep I had gotten over the past few nights. I really hate when bands on tour start to publicly complain about how hard the road is and blah blah... I mean I can see if you’ve been on tour for 3 weeks or longer then it’s acceptable to curse the roads, curse the clubs, curse what ever else pisses you off. So, I’m not actually complaining here because there was really nothing to complain about. I was just incredibly tired and out of it and dreading having to play and then drive back to the Chicago suburbs and go to work the next morning.Dan and I both laid off the drink for this show. We had a few before we played to take the edge off and then called it a night. The show was really really fun. The cactus club filled up nicely by the time the bands were ready. I hadn’t seen Por Avion for quite some time and was excited to see what they were up to. Steve from Por Avion surprised me a lil’ bit by ditching the electric guitar and going completely acoustic. It fit their sound well though and I like their newest batch of songs the best compared to all of their old stuff. They also did a really fab John Prine cover which I’d never heard before.After the show it was time for Dan and I to motor back home for a few hours of sleep and a day at work.

I’m on tour... but I’m at work... I’m confused. Anywho, we hightailed it to the double door after doing the 9 to 5 thing. After a quick soundcheck we met up with Lance from the white papers and his pal Joan for some hot eats down the street. MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmm I had some amazing falafel from a cool place called earwax. After our bellies were full we said goodbye to lance and joan and got back to the club. The show turned out pretty cool. The double door is a lot bigger than most places we’ve played and it takes quite a few people to fill up the big open floor. The dudes and babes trickled in and politely clapped when necessary. I would place this show in the lazy Monday night category, which is fine since I was a bit lazy myself. All of the other bands rocked out and seemed to have a swell time. Derek from the Beauty Pageant supplied me with one of the most screwy CD’s I’ve ever heard. It’s called Cathy McGinty and it’s out on the infamous hamburger records. It’s a must have.So that’s that. I suppose everything went as planned on our little jaunt. Thanks for the memories guys... (sniffle, sniffle)... ok, I’m getting all choked up. I better stop now.