‘Tis the slow season for touring bands, as evidenced by the Tour Diary section here on LocalCut. But Shoeshine Blue’s Michael Apinyakul was nice enough to send us this entry (in compact Readers Digest-style form) from the group’s recent December tour. Enjoy it well, because it’s the last tour diary of 2007!

Forces gathered against me at the start of this tour. My household was left in uncertainty, the van we were scheduled to take met its end, and if there couldn’t be a bigger, more pronounced sign, two storms were feeding off each other in the Pacific, promising an epic windstorm scheduled to hit Portland on the morning of my departure. When last I checked, airplanes and windstorms don’t jive, but adventures, by their nature, are a combination of gremlins and grace.

Monday morning came and the winds that lashed against my window through the night had been domesticated by the morning light. I was meeting up with Dustin (Run On Sentence) in San Antonio. Both Shoeshine Blue and Run On Sentence share some band members in Portland, but together—armed with two guitars, a glockenspiel, one drum, some tambourines, and a shitload of songs—we were now each other’s band.

Both the San Antonio and Austin shows were fun, but let’s focus more on the trip itself. Writing about shows is like writing about the way cake tastes. The food is never as interesting as the process of preparing it. This was going to be a ragtag tour without a van and we would rely heavily on the kindness of others and their vehicles. The first was a borrowed Toyota that belonged to a girl named Lindsey that we drove into Austin.

From there our friend Laura (Luna Tart) took us to her family’s 400 acre Texas ranch. We were a little outside of Gatesville, where it’s amazing that we weren’t arrested for our beards and unruly hair. The ranch was vast, quiet, and desperately needed. Deer and Armadillos rustled around in the night, while fire ants governed the footpath outside.

If you ever rent a car in Waco, Texas, ask for a hybrid. We were given an impressive discount for taking a Prius off their hands. “Nobody in Texas will drive it,” the lady told us. “They’re too scared, either to drive it or be seen in it.”

We took the Prius on a bizarre trip through climates and time, driving from Texas to Springfield Missouri in one day. The temperature in Texas peaked at around 80 degrees and we were about to drive into an ice storm. We went from a genuine sun struck Texas ranch to a cluttered college town apartment (that we’ve all lived in) occupied by the guys from Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, a box of half eaten pizza, and million guitars. We were treated very well in Springfield and had a fantastic show.

Coinciding with the ice storms was the hair storm happening atop my head. Strange things happen to my hair after a few days of neglect. It lifts up from my scalp, and fans out like a dark deformed peacock searching for its next victim.

There is an unfortunate amount of bullshitting and name dropping that can happen when meeting other bands. This is not always the case, but at it’s worse, it’s difficult to stomach. Fortunately, while in Springfield the conversation veered from who’s doing what on what label to an enlivened discussion on underground hovercraft races in the desert. A cute girl with glasses, who I would cast as Louis Lane, asked some pointed questions about these alleged hovercrafts. Here is what she dug up. They are built in a warehouse in California by a group of anarchist machinists, who also have an insatiable appetite for fireworks, pitbulls, and firearms. They are incredibly secretive and trespassing could prove fatal. But these answers only lead to more questions. Do they make their own fireworks or is that a lesser form of anarchist engineering? How do they get the hovercrafts to the desert? If they were to find ill repute with the law, could they escape in the hovercraft using land and water combinations to their advantage? And most importantly, do they offer internships?

We finally made our homecoming in Columbia Missouri, where Dustin and I met a decade ago. The ice storms kept our crowd to a minimum, so we unplugged and brought the show from the stage to the floor, which was an intimate and appropriate end. Interestingly, it’s hard to give up sleeping on couches and floors. My parents house was available to me after the show, but I opted to party a bit and sleep on a hotel room floor, where I slipped very easily into my dreams.

Links:
Shoeshine BlueSpace
Run On Sentence