Bellows Tour Diary #4: West Coast/Worst Coast

Three shows in Cali and two in the Pacific Northwest

Welcome back to the Bellows tour diary. The first three entries covered our time on the east coast, a run of shows in Texas, and then our time in the Southwest desert. This entry covers our, uh, less than ideal run up the west coast from Los Angeles to Seattle. Enjoy!

Day 13: Los Angeles

It is our only true day off. Nowhere to drive, only time to kill.

From the moment I wake up I have Steely Dan’s “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” stuck in my head. The perfect soundtrack for riding passenger side with a mild hangover and a pair of sunglasses over my eyes. 

After some breakfast burritos we take Cat’s enormous dog Bonham to the Laurel Canyon dog park. Some good LA people watching here, especially because dog parks bring out all sorts of neuroses among dog owners. Cat also shows me some historical landmarks, an old Jim Morrison haunt, the Houdini estate, etc. Once Bonham gets enough exercise Cat drops me off in Sherman Oaks where I meet up with Oliver and Frank for a dip in a pool. Joining us are a smattering of our friends who came to the show the night before, including Daniel Ott who directed the video for “My Best Friend”. Hanging out, shooting the shit, jumping in the pool and all that is fun, but frankly most of my needs are met by wearing an unbuttoned Mets jersey with no shirt underneath and sitting still in the sunlight.

Eventually we relocate to Dan’s house. Different groups of people cycle in and out throughout the day, sharing tacos and exploring Dan’s vinyl collection and his expansive blu-ray library, organized by genre. I let myself sink into the couch and allow the flow of conversation to wash over me. Maybe its just the company but I feel care-free in a way that I haven’t since college. I know objectively that this is revisionism, I had plenty to worry about back then, but if some misremembering helps me feel better now then there’s no harm in it. 

One problem I’ve had with visiting LA in the past is figuring out how to see as much of it as I can before I have to leave. Traffic renders quick movement from one neighborhood to another pretty much impossible. You have to choose to do three things at most. This situation, where the group has a home base that different folks and pop in and out of, is vastly preferable to grinding inch by inch along the highway.

The evening ends with a group screening of Knives Out, a much hyped who-dun-it from a few years back that I missed entirely. All I knew about it before we hit play was that Daniel Craig used a cartoonish Louisiana accent and that his character cracked a joke about not having read Gravity’s Rainbow. Now having seen the film, I bet director Rian Johnson has read at least some of the book. This makes me just slightly sad. Jokes about how no one actually reads these books just make them seem all the more imposing. You can read Gravity’s Rainbow if you want to. It might take a while, but it is not impossible. You might even enjoy it! Anyway, good movie, had me guessing the whole time.

Day 14: Santa Cruz

In the morning I try a workout using Oliver’s cousin’s kettlebells. I am way out of practice with these tools, but I’m proud to say that I set a new personal best on lunges. This being the case, please read the remainder of this entry with the knowledge that my ass is sore the entire time.

We shove off early. Our drive takes us out of SoCal proper and into the Central Valley. I’m going to be blunt. This place fucking sucks. Miles and miles of dust. I am trying, and will likely try for the rest of my life, to overcome any coastal elitism that my upbringing may have instilled in me. Every place is home to someone. The lives lived here are no less meaningful than lives lived anywhere else. But there are hellholes in this world that will rebuff even the most earnest attempts at empathy. This place has been abandoned by both god and country. We pull off the highway into Bakersfield in pursuit of (slightly) cheaper gas and are faced with broken roads, busted infrastructure, no businesses with any hope of stable jobs. And gas is still expensive as fuck! In a state where driving is essential!

As we pull out back onto the highway we cue up two songs from locals who made it out of this wasteland. “Streets of Bakersfield” by Dwight Yoakam, and “Freak on a Leash” by Korn.

On the road we pass by trucks carrying mountains of garlic and tomatoes. On my left I look out the window and see a Tesla passing with a child in the passenger seat licking an oversized lollipop. Gradually we rise out of the valley and into the mountains. Green returns to the landscape. It occurs to me that California might be the only state in the union that features all five of the colored mana from Magic: The Gathering. We climb higher and discover that the temperature has dropped down to the mid-60s. We pass down again into fields of farmland that reek of weed even through the car windows. A massive fog cloud descends on us. We’re all starting to feel a little loopy from days of driving and start making nonsense sounds instead of speaking. OOOH LALALALALA. I swear to you that we are not experiencing a contact high. LALA LELELE LALALA

Santa Cruz is to this east coaster’s eyes about as definitively Californian as a city could be. Beach town with a boardwalk, baggy skater fashion mixed with woo-woo spiritualism, punks and preps in equal measure.

We eat dinner at a Chinese restaurant across from SubRosa, the anarchist library/bookstore where we’re playing. Liv, the singer/guitarist of Practicing Sincerity and the organizer of the show, tells us that this is the first indoors show at SubRosa since the pandemic. It is also the first show we’ve played on tour where every attendee wears a mask. I don’t say that to shame or judge those who decided not to wear a mask at our shows. I’m in no position to pass judgement. All of us have settled into mask wearing practices that feel more superstitious than scientific. Am I really less likely to catch or spread COVID while I’m on stage? The four of us might have a little more leeway to play fast and loose considering how recently we got infected, but the rest of the crowd? Who can say? It seems impossible to enforce strict adherence, even in crowds that register as the types of people that are otherwise taking COVID seriously. All this is just to say that I’m impressed that a bunch of anarchists were so complaint to a mandate handed down from the venue.

The room is small, which forces us to play much quieter than we had been for the last few shows. This is a fun challenge. I recall a lesson from a teacher I had in my freshmen year of college: if you can’t hear someone else on stage, play quieter. Our restraint pays off. The show goes swimmingly. After we finish loading back into the car, Jack and I sit in complete silence for several minutes, completely content with life, briefly.

Day 15: Oakland

Everything in California costs way too much. Our breakfast is stupidly expensive, which sends me on a bit of a spiral for the rest of the day. I suddenly become acutely aware of how much more money I’ve been spending every day just to eat compared to my life back home. Why is this bothering me so much on this tour when it never bothered me before? My first few tours were short and I was young enough to behave stupidly. My last full U.S. I had somehow scammed my job into paying me while I was on tour by accepting a promotion to a salaried position and using paid time off for the days I was on the road. This time around I have no real job and inflation has jacked all the prices up to comical levels. A bougie paradise like Santa Cruz only amplifies the cost. Sitting in the booth of the diner where we’ve coughed up our hard earned cash, I see an email notification of a Stripe payment from a subscriber to this newsletter shining on my phone like Hope at the bottom of Pandora’s box. Thank you, whichever one of you you are.

Since Oakland is only a short distance away we spend the rest of the morning on the Santa Cruz boardwalk. As we step out of the car about a block away from the entrance we hear someone playing piano in the distance. The piece, which we didn’t recognize, was exactly the kind of relaxed melody that’d play in the background of a seaside town in a JRPG. The boardwalk isn’t packed yet this early in the day. We lazily float through a few different arcades. Jack and I take turns on a Times Crisis 5 console that someone left a few credits in. The pop-a-shot cabinets are all branded with Golden State Warriors logos. A father and son in matching expensive looking street wear hoodies pass by. 

When we reach the end of the boardwalk we leave and drive to a movie theater where Oliver and Jack split off to watch Bodies Bodies Bodies. Frank and I try and get some work done in a coffee shop only to find that it has no publicly available electrical outlets. But hey, you can get kombucha on tap! Eventually we find a bar in a food court where the bartender lets us plug our laptops in without ordering anything. While I type up the last tour diary I overhear the same bartender describe a mezcal cocktail to customer as containing an actual cricket. I don’t think they went with that drink.

The movie ends. Frank and I’s electronic equipment charges to a satisfying level. We head off toward Oakland. The drive is short but traffic is completely out of control. I’m talking on par with Boston, D.C., Atlanta, you name it. This pause in momentum gives us a moment to talk over our plans for keeping our gear safe. It is no secret, based on horror stories from other bands and our own personal experience, that the Bay Area is rife with van theft. When we finally make it into the city proper we stop for a quick picnic on the shore of Lake Merritt with a former roommate of mine who recently moved to the Bay Area for work. This is the first time all day that my shoulders unclench and I can relax for a second. 

The relief is brief, because we need to make it to the venue and load in. We move quickly and efficiently. All of our musical gear makes it safely into the venue. But we are not out of the clear. While making small talk with the opener Sucker Crush (who as it turns out is a fellow Columbia College music alum, small world!) Jack and I get a call that our car has been broken into. Fuck. While we sound checked someone drove by, smashed the driver’s seat window of our car and the door guy’s car, grabbed Oliver’s personal bag of clothes and sped off onto the freeway. We tape a plastic bag over the missing window only speaking with such grim practicality about what must be done that we might as well not have been speaking at all. We play our set in a daze. I’m confidant enough in our playing that I’m sure it went well, and a few folks dancing near the stage suggest to me that it did, but it hardly feels like it matters.

We hightail it out of Oakland with wind billowing through the front of the car for the full 90 minutes it takes us to get to Sacramento. We debrief and commiserate. The combination of where our day began and where it is ending, priced out of Golden State Warriors territory and then chased out into the domain of the pitiful Kings, feels like the complete Californian experience. We resign ourselves to the possibility of cancelling our next show in Arcata. Everything that is wrong and broken with this country appears to me with burning clarity. Oliver’s brother lets us in and we waste no time going to bed.

Day 16: Arcata

I determine to start the day with a win. I set a personal record for bicycle sit ups. I successfully make coffee using a French Press, not always a sure bet in my personal history. Jack and I get wrapped up in a conversation about Dark Souls, which Jack is replaying on his Nintendo Switch. It isn’t lost on me that we are doing our best to not “go hollow” IRL as we talk. We get some good news. Oliver found a car shop who can fix up the window and bought some replacement clothes at a Target. Our show tonight is still on.

Sacramento looks like a nice enough town. The landscape outside the city limits is dominated by row after row of farmland and orchards. Everyone finds the name “Yolo County” pretty funny. We stop at a Love’s to grab a fast lunch. The woman at the register is way more excited about my Def Leppard shirt than I am. I mumble out something like “yeah… they’re pretty cool…” entirely distracted by the full stock of fresh fitted hats emblazoned by the logo for the New Orleans Hornets, an NBA team that hasn’t existed for years.

As we pull up into the mountains we listen to an episode of Analyze Phish where Scott Aukerman accompanies Harris Wittels to a Phish concert at Madison Square Garden. The episode is a hoot, mostly because Aukerman holding a tape recorder attracts a lot of genuinely hilarious comments from Phish fans. As the episode wears on it takes a darker turn. While they listen back to the audio from the show, Wittels gets hit with an existential crisis and starts questioning why he’s spent so much of his life doing drugs and going to concerts. Considering how his life ended, hearing Wittels get this introspective breaks my heart a little.

It feels like we are driving straight upward as we go north. The trees get absolutely huge. We are entering Humboldt County, where California starts to bleed into the Pacific Northwest. The fog is dense, the woods are denser. All I know about the place is that its the origin of much of the weed in the U.S. both legal and illegal, that its the backdrop of much of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland and that Mike Patton is from one of its larger cities, Eureka. All of this paints an image in my mind of a deeply weird place. When we pull up to the venue, an all ages community space across from a square park, this image is vividly confirmed. Crowds of college age kids wearing drug rugs lounge on the grass. A man shouts unlistenable political poetry into a microphone. The vibe is crunchy as hell. We eat dinner at a nearby Mexican restaurant and order margaritas that turn out to be the size of our heads.

Our show is the grand re-opening of Outer Space in their new location. The walls are covered in posters for shows at their old location, including the Bellows/Gabby’s World show that we played in 2019. The new spot is pretty small, so again we have to modulate our playing to fit the tighter confines. We also switch out some of the new songs we’ve been playing for a couple more oldies to satisfy members of the other bands who clearly perked up during the Fist & Palm numbers that we usually play.

The same band ends up hosting us that night. One of them offers me some weed. I enjoy the sound of bugs at night, chirping through the fog. I curl up with The Three-Body Problem and listen to Mike Dean’s 4:22 until I fall asleep.

Day 17: Portland

With my GoPro fully charged I decide to test out the camera’s Time-Lapse function as we zip past towering fir trees. This is preparation for a longer stretch of driving on the horizon through more open terrain. I feel like I’m way behind on my tour diary so I spend most of the drive catching up to the present. My mind is elsewhere for much of the drive. Since LA I’ve tried to stick to protein bars as my go-to rest stop meal. Lunch isn’t an option today, so I have plenty of opportunities to interface with the unsettling attendants behind the counter of Oregon’s gas stations. This state gives me a light case of the creeps. Earlier on in the tour the car had worked over which American cities correspond to which cities from the original Pokémon video games. We all agree that Portland is the ghostly Lavender Town.

We drop off our sleep gear with a friend of Oliver’s parents in Salem, OR and then get back on the road toward Portland. We blast Sufjan Stevens’ multi-part epic “Impossible Soul” to raise our spirits. Frank raises the question of Bob Dylan. I’ve always had trouble getting on board with Dylan because of what I think of as my “second verse deafness”. I get too caught up in the music to keep track of lyrics after one round through a verse and chorus, which makes listening to a lyric-centric musician like Dylan a bit dicey. Frank puts on “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” and I make an effort to read along with the lyrics on my phone.

Our show is at Turn! Turn! Turn!. I’d been told by Cat Jones to try their coleslaw, but it looks like the menu has changed under new ownership. After I wolf down some dinner I take a walk around the neighborhood. Whole lot of soccer fields up here. I learn from a friend of Oliver and Jack’s that Portland is a huge soccer town with a bitter rivalry against the Seattle soccer team. Its the first Bellows show in Portland in a long, long time so we play the full time-warp set. Kevin Duquette of Top Shelf Records is in attendance and compliments us after the set.

For personal reasons I’m going to cut the rest of this night’s entry short. Some phantoms don’t need to be acknowledged. Some ghosts should stay in the grave.

Day 18: Seattle

Because we ended up sleeping in Salem we have less time than initially anticipated to relax before heading to Seattle. Still, I have a pleasant and intellectually stimulating conversation with our host about Jesus as a historical figure, the state of the music industry, and our differing experiences living in the midwest. Then we’re off.

The drive isn’t too far but traffic is bad, so our progress across the river that bisects Portland is slow. We listen to a few tracks from Radiohead’s The Bends and then all of Tracy Chapman’s self-titled debut. I’m nearing the climax of The Three-Body Problem and need to contain myself from flipping the hell out in the backseat.

It feels so silly to be back in Seattle so recently after my stay in late June/early July. As we pull into the city I recognize our path from the bus lines that I took to and from Northwest Terror Fest. Our show is at The Vera Project, a community arts space in the Seattle Center only a stone’s throw away from the Museum of Pop Culture that I visited last time I was in town. The staff brings us a wheeled cart to help us navigate the rolling hill down into the venue proper, where we set up in the lobby. The actual concert hall is cordoned off as a green room and is refrigerated like a meat locker. We make small talk with the other bands about the surprisingly gruesome process by which dates are pollinated.

As luck would have it, I receive an email from Decibel Magazine telling me to order their October issue, which includes my review of Day 3 of Northwest Terror Fest. I immediately order a copy. When I get home from tour a magazine with my first ever print by-line will be waiting for me. That’s pretty damn cool. You can order a copy yourself, if you’d like. It’s got KEN Mode on the cover. KEN Mode are great!

Crushing, the band that opens the show at The Vera Project, are also great. Some of the smoothest odd time signature playing I’ve ever seen, and masterful dynamics to boot. As we inch closer to the start of our set I can feel my adrenaline kicking in. I’m not experiencing as much self-imposed pressure as I did in Los Angeles, but knowing that I have family coming shoots this show up to second place. My podcast cohost Joseph Schafer also makes an appearance. I always love it when my metal friends come see me be an indie dude.

After our set I decide to skip out on the last band to join Joseph, my cousin, his gf and one of his friends to a nearby bar to shoot some pool and shoot the shit. I am no good at pool, but its a fun way to kill time and it forces everyone to move around and jump from micro-convo to micro-convo. I did not manage to pocket a single ball by the time my bandmates tell me to get back to the venue for load out. I sprint down the streets of Seattle with two drinks in me and then help cart our gear back up the hill through throngs of Kid Cudi fans streaming out of the nearby Climate Pledge Arena.

The next morning we will embark on two days straight of driving through Montana and North Dakota. I know it isn’t wise to push myself too much here but after our less than ideal trip up the west coast I need a win. Enough with break-ins. Enough with ghosts. Enough with these outrageous gas prices. It is time to party.

While the rest of Bellows heads up north to the suburbs where they’ll be spending the night I loop back to the bar where Joseph and the rest of the gang are finishing up the pool game. We duck out to a second location to avoid the Cudi-ites and work our way through multiple pitchers of PBR. Joseph and I sit on one side of the table and one side of the generation gap while the three Gen Z-ers sit across from us. We get into the kind of spirited discussions about rap music, politics in art, and politics in general that most of my friends have aged out of engaging with passionately. Speaking only for myself, we have a great time. We all agree to call it a night after I ask the question “have you read the Communist Manifesto?” in complete earnestness. I crash on my cousin’s couch. I know that I will only get a few hours of sleep before he heads off to a hike at 5 am in the morning. Fuck it, there will be plenty of time to sleep in the car.

Next Up: The Home Stretch