Bellows Tour Diary #2: The Lone Star Saga

Long drives, Texan paranoia, and Aliens

Welcome back to the Bellows Tour Diary! We are making our way across the contiguous United States through the power of rock and roll. If you missed the first entry of the tour diary, covering our shows in Philly through Nashville, you can find it here! If you’d like to see us live you can find our remaining tour dates at the bottom of this post. Thanks for reading!

Day 5: Texarkana

Touring is driving. Enough musicians have beat this horse that I’m hesitant to take my own swings at the felled beast. But there’s a difference in knowing a cliche in principle and experiencing it in practice, especially after three years away from the long road. Driving means getting adjusted to sitting in one place for a long time, rubbing shoulders with the gear and personal affects overflowing from the back seats. It means asymmetrical application of sunscreen (I sit car-left). Our shows have so far been booked close enough together that we haven’t been in the car for more than four hours at a time. Today is the first exception. With no show tonight the plan is to get as far along the road from Tennessee to Dallas as we can. This takes us to the demilitarized zone between Texas and Arkansas, aptly named Texarkana. Along the way I get a good look at Arkansas from my lefthand window. I dedicate myself to the mental task of processing the sight for what it really is. Even as recently as 2019 I would have thought we were passing by a whole lot of nothing. In reality we are driving past miles and miles of farmland. In the wake of COVID and the Russian-Ukraine War, that kind of bare civilizational essential takes on a more pressing significance.

When not gazing out the window I keep myself occupied in a mix of solo and group time killers. I read a sizable chunk of The Three-Body Problem, marveling at the similarities between its fictional video game and the virtual realities in Koji Suzuki Loop and Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. I’ll have more to say about that once I finish the book. I get some writing done, the results of which you can judge for yourself in the last tour diary. I answer a few anonymous messages on Instagram.

I am not alone in the car. If it weren’t for the foam pad leaning on my right shoulder I could reach out and touch every other member of the band. Ignoring them to keep myself entertained doesn’t help anyone. So while we all take time on our own, we try and loop back around to group activities. On the suggestion of Kurt from Addy we fire up another interview with Tom DeLonge, this time conducted by one of the members of Silverchair who gets DeLonge to dive right into his conspiratorial bullshit by sucking up to him like a moray eel. As with the Steve-O interview, much of what DeLonge says rests on a bedrock of fundamentalist Christianity, all of this talk of souls, good vs evil, demons as aliens working to suppress human potential. As we ride through Arkansas news is breaking about Alex Jones, another narcissistic bullshit artist, getting caught with his pants down in court after his lawyer emailed the contents of his phone to the opposing attorneys. We also spin some music, first an unreleased project by [REDACTED], then Dijon, Bon Iver, a handful of late 90s hits (“this is secretly a System of a Down song” Jack says of “Livin’ La Vida Loca”) and finally “If The Phone Doesn’t Ring, It’s Me” by Jimmy Buffett.

Driving on tour is not the same as driving on vacation. It is not the time for sightseeing. We cut straight through Memphis, TN. I am grateful to the city’s architects that this path still gives us a passing glance at the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid. At the sight of the glistening blue-metal pyramid I start hooting and hollering like a maniac.

Driving for this long can wear you out. Hell, I’m not even behind the wheel and by the end of the drive I can feel my grip on myself slipping a bit. Sitting in the backseat and watching Arkansas farmland whizz by I start thinking about “Invisible Wall” by Stuck. I’m reading The Three Body Problem on the recommendation of Stuck’s Greg Obis, and as I near the book’s halfway point I start to feel gears clicking into place. “Am I an NPC in someone else’s game?” Obis asks in the song’s chorus. The car, a loaded symbol of American Freedom, must travel along set roads, follow strict rules. I am not free in this backseat, I am little more than an extension of the gear in the trunk.

That night at the hotel in Texarkana we watch episode four of The Rehearsal. Online discourse has circled around whether this show, a post-modern reality program where Nathan Fielder leverages an HBO budget to trap regular people in elaborate recreations of their lives, is mean spirited or exploitative. As I suspected, these critiques miss the point entirely. Sure you could watch the show just to laugh at the bizarre scenarios Fielder puts people in, but there’s more to it. The Rehearsal is just as much about the fragility of the self and the unknowability of other people. No amount of effort will ever reveal to you the contents of another person’s life. Beneath the absurdity of the exercise is a pain that I recognized instantly. The pain of yearning to be an actual person not just a performance of one, to experience real feeling and not just the surface of it.

My sleep that night was uneasy.

Day 6: Dallas

I don’t just say this to butter up its residents, but Texas is practically a different country. The culture is different, sure, but I mean visually and architecturally. The highway is shaped differently. Roaring through massive concrete structures with lone star insignias carved into them I find myself imagining that I’m traveling through a former Soviet state. The iconography in Texas is self-contained. The American flags fluttering next to the state’s feel like a concession to a fragile unity. If these weirdos ever succeed in seceding I won’t be surprised.

After yesterday’s long drive, getting to Dallas is child’s play. We arrive early and drop our stuff off with our hosts with plenty of time to spare before the concert. We debate how to kill time. I get maybe a little too excited when our host mentions seeing The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford at The Texas Theatre. I briefly feel the distance between me and the DeLonge’s of the world shrink. The rituals and iconography of paranoia are as likely a lure into full on looney-hood as anything. Hey, blame it on being fresh off of Don DeLillo’s Libra if you want, but seeing that movie in a theater crucial to The Assassination of John Kennedy by the Coward Lee Harvey Oswald would be pretty neat right?

We forgo movies altogether for museums. Cheaper, less time consuming, more cardio, less noise. First up, Crow Museum of Asian Art. I spend a lot of time looking at the collection of rocks and minerals from China. I stare at a map of China for two minutes, aware of how useless my familiarity with third century medieval geography is when looking at the modern landscape.

Next up, the Dallas Museum of Art. You have no idea how important it is just to walk in a cool, quiet place after spending a week in a car and rock clubs. It is brutally hot in Texas.

We spotted my favorite piece of art later that day at The Double-Wide. In the courtyard just outside the venue, diagonally across from where we’ve set up our merch, there’s a mural of Big Tex engulfed in flames. I imagine some Texans might find this to be in poor taste. I think it rips.

_lamniformes_

A post shared by Ian Cory (@_lamniformes_)

The show goes great. It’s our first night playing with Crisman, who will join us for the following two Texas shows. The sound guy, a former industrial dude, compliments my Iron Maiden t-shirt. The bartender is hilarious. I drink a Yoohoo Yeehaw and feel fantastic. I drift off to sleep back in our friends’ apartment to the Inuyasha closing credits.

Day 7: Denton

The band desires a swimming pool. I publish the first tour diary. There are no swimmable lakes between Dallas and Denton, as far as we can tell. The locals suggest crashing the pool in someone’s backyard. We don’t do that.

For the first time since buying it in an act of desperate cleanliness, I am wearing my gas station tie-dye Def Leppard Hysteria shirt. This is my third ever act of t-shirt poserism. I’m not saying that because I think this makes me sound cool, it pretty obviously makes me sound like a no-fun-haver. I just think needlessly specific details about my musical history are funny. This morning if the hair metal scene police¹ pulled us over and asked me to name five songs, we would have spent the night in rock and roll jailhouse. My first impression of Hysteria is that it is too catchy. The band arrived to the studio having written nothing but choruses. It’s exhausting. “Love Bites” is pretty rad though.

The drive might be the shortest yet, so we arrive early at Civil Audio. Michael Briggs, our host, lets Oliver, Frank, and Jack run wild over his collection of guitars. Did you know they’ve invented a guitar that can’t go out of tune? You can’t even bend the notes by bending the strings. It’s like putting a shredder in time out. We ooh and ahh at the twelve string and the acoustic with Nashville tuning.

Soundcheck is early too. Thank god the venue has a fan whirring behind the drum kit. The green room upstairs has an N64 and an emulator. We struggle through a round of The World Is Not Enough, the inferior James Bond 64 game. Jack does a quick tour of some games that never made it to the states.

The show goes great. There are fans whirring in front of the drum kit too. Our choice to play songs from every Bellows record really pays off. About halfway through our set, the sound guy interrupts to warn concert goers that the cops are outside and fucking with people’s cars. We resume when it’s clear no one is getting towed.

Back at Civil Audio Oliver and Michael rush to watch the latest episode of Better Call Saul. I curl up with my book and a Squarepusher record until I fall asleep.

Day 8: Austin

At breakfast I get a cold brew where the ice cubes themselves are frozen cold brew. The drive time creeps back up to four hours. Texas also just looks different from the rest of the country. The flora is low and stubbled, the sky looms enormous, filled with armadas of clouds. The open sky amplifies the sun, but even in the shade something about the sheer scale of the space above you is unnerving. I start to wonder whether there’s something about this place that encourages a need for alternate histories, conspiratorial thinking, that sort of stuff. Is reality capable of holding up against the magnified clarity offered by a Texas sky?

On the drive we dive even deeper into The Derberts catalog, uncovering the track “Vs Me In Any Game” and opening up another round of gutbusting laughter. Our hosts from Dallas start a group chat with us to praise The Derberts after listening to them on our recommendation. We joke that we’re doing a better job promoting their music than our own.

We stay with Lindsay of Little Mazarn who recommends a nearby fresh water spring for swimming. We say hello to Lindsay’s dog Lightning, and I make a note that we’ve passed from cat country to dog country. On the way to the spring we pick up more Bellows records from the distribution company in town. Since making it to Texas the four of us have made increasingly pained sounds upon exiting the car. By Austin this has escalated to the point of imitating a video game character walking across lava. Ough. Oof. Urgh. Argh. Ough. Argh. Oof. Grahh. Mmf. Ough. Ough. Urgh. Mmf. Jumping into the water refills our health meters back to tolerable levels. Lindsay shares horror stories of running into Roganites that have travelled to Austin to follow their icon’s path. A small drone hovers over the spring and I can’t help but feel like it’s leering at us.

When we make it to the venue they’re projecting a Netflix documentary about aliens, and within seconds none other than Tom DeLonge pops up as a talking head. The show is packed, easily the best attended of the tour so far. Crisman sound fucking amazing. On stage Oliver asks for time killing recommendations for our upcoming day long drive across West Texas. Our friend Timmy, a dedicated Deadhead offers up “Analyze Phish”, a show where Harris Wittels tries to convince Scott Aukerman that Phish is good. I have an illuminating conversation with Timmy about why Deadheads don’t vibe with their younger jam band cousins. After the show a free jazz friend of Frank’s gifts him some vinyl as a surprise. We hang out on the corner for a while with Crisman after loading up, wishing each other the best and basking in the glow of a show well played. Life feels very good. The moon glitters huge over the bustling Austin nightlife.

That night before bed The Three-Body Problem opens to the sentence: “Preliminary Analysis of Social Patterns of Extraterrestrial Civilizations Using a Materialist Conception of History”.

Next up: The Sunbelt and the City of Dreams

8/13 - Los Angeles, CA @ Silverlake Lounge

8/16 - Oakland, CA @ Elbo Room

8/17 - Arcata, CA @ Outer Space

8/18 - Portland, OR @ Turn! Turn! Turn!

8/19 - Seattle, WA @ Vera Project

8/22 - Duluth, MN @ Prove

8/23 - Minneapolis @ Icehouse

8/24 - Iowa City, IA @ The Close House

8/25 - Chicago, IL @ The Hideout

8/26 - Cleveland, OH @ Cleveland Art Workers

8/27 - Washington D.C. @ Quarry House Tavern

1. Oh god, now I’m imagining a hair metal band whose whole gimmick is dressing like cops. Has anyone ever done this? Might be the holy grail of metal camp, but with a high chance of popularity with thin blue liners who miss the homoerotic subtext entirely. Thank you for indulging this needless footnote. When in the DFW area, do as DFW did.