From the Archive: Bellows Tour Diary 2012
While digging through an old journal of mine I found a perfectly preserved diary of the very first tour I ever went on. In 2012 Oliver asked me to fill in on drums in Bellows. Felix, the band’s usual drummer at the time, had switched to bass for the tour to cover for Henry who couldn’t take time off work. After a few rehearsals the three of us loaded into an ancient Toyota Camery and took off for a two week run through the near south east and back in early July. This tour was a profoundly important moment in my life. Beyond the novelty of being my first extended run with a band, it also inspired lyrics to two different Lamniformes songs, an entry in Drumming Upstream, and introduced me to one of my best friends and musical collaborators. Join me for a trip down memory lane, with present day annotations in italics.
Day 1 - Baltimore, MD
Despite worries about power outages in Maryland, the three of us set off. Oliver was feeling supremely under the weather, which was a bummer. We got stuck in a god awful traffic jam, made worse by the unbearable heat. My aunt & uncle’s apartment sadly was just as humid as the outdoors. The [show] went great. Sing alongs to “Like the Saint”, claps on the 2+4 for “I’m Building A House”. Very nice people. Tiniest cat in the world. Breakfast plans tomorrow with Thor and Mike.
The two songs mentioned in this entry, and much of the other material that Bellows played on this tour, is from As If To Say I Hate Daylight, the first Bellows album. We’ve never played either of these songs in the current post-COVID version of the band.
I remember making a bold play for the aux cable early on the drive down to Maryland. I played a song by A Silver Mount Zion, a song by Have A Nice Life (“this is like if How To Dress Well were emo” I recall Oliver saying, a comparison that was true in 2012 though no longer) and part of a SubRosa album. SubRosa were not a hit, but I think my bandmates were amenable to the other two. The show itself took place in a basement and we played with an emo band.
Day 2 - Washington, D.C.
Rough start due to a lack of AC in the apartment. We stopped for breakfast at Pete’s Grill, decent. Short drive to D.C.. Public urination. Took a brief walk through the Smithsonian, lamented the absurd cost of tourist trap parking. Difficulty finding cheap eats which made us look foolish when Beehive cooked veggie pasta. Played “Like the Saint” and “See Bright”. Dropped “White Sheet”. Two other acts on bill. Soft electric singer/songer [sic] from New Haven (friends with Helen!) and a completely insane folk set from one of the residents. Reminded me of Mikael Akerfeldt if he didn’t get lost in the weird for the sake of it. Stayed the night at Beehive. Slept v well.
“See Bright” and “White Sheet” are from Bellows’ second album Blue Breath, which Oliver was still working on by the time we started the tour.
Lmao at “Public urination” as a stand-alone sentence. It took too long in my life for me to shake the Rorschach from Watchmen out of my writing. While driving through D.C. I put on “New York State of Mind” by Nas, and ever since its bassline has always called to mind the sight of the city wavering in humid July heat through a car window. Oliver eventually switched to the radio and got upset at the host talking about a rumor that Gotye had died. Real 2012 hours. I’m certain the folk singer we played with didn’t sound a thing like Mikael Akerfeldt. You can take the boy out of the metal-archives, but…
Day 3 - Chapel Hill, NC
Better sleep led to a better mood. Once we left The Beehive we made record time through Virginia, which is home to many absurd town names (Dumfries, Squirrel Level Road). Chapel Hill itself is a quiet college town. Fairly boring. The local music store had a pretty excellent collection. The show was strange. We thought we bombed but the people who saw us were extremely excited afterwords and very supportive. The other bands were an Animal Collective-esque group (cool dudes) and a folk-pop band who played for too long and skimped us out of cash. We spent the night in Durham. Our host was a nice guy, but certainly eccentric. Set list was “Am I”, “Blue Breath”, “Uh Oh”, “American Girl Dolls”, “Like The Saint”, “See Bright”, “I Am Building A House”, “Yangguang”.
All of these songs are from either Daylight or Blue Breath, with the exception of “American Girl Dolls”. That song never made it onto an official release as far as I know.
90% sure this drive originated the habit of blasting “Mercy” every time we entered our destination city. You can read more about that in Drumming Upstream #37.
I’m also certain that Oliver put on Similes by Eluvium while we drove through Virginia. The Animal Collective sounding band were Oulipo, but more on them & our “nice” host in the next entry.
Day 4 - Asheville, NC
After escaping the clutches of our sad and disturbed host we drove for a solid uninterrupted 4 hours. Eventually we enter the Blue Ridge Mountains and were greeted by an on and off thunder storm. Asheville itself was adorable. The town’s work force seemed to be almost exclusively made up of punks. Older hippies wandered through sloping streets. Many cafes & restaurants. The venue was a grimy looking house near the highway. We played with Oulipo again, who seemed to struggle with the less refined setting. Free Lunch played a noisy and sloppy set of mathy jams. Verrpunk. We opened with “Darker Days” instead of “Am I” and returned “I Opened My Eyes” and “White Sheet” to the set. Crowd was sparse but we played well. We spent the night at Oulipo’s awesome house. Great guys with good taste in music (Giles Corey!) and movies (Paprika!). Interesting talks about Mild Southern life. This might where its at.
“Darker Days” is a one-off track that Oliver included on the first Epoch compilation.
LOL at how quickly my tune changed on our Durham host. That guy wasn’t disturbed, he just sucked. He wouldn’t stop offering us hookah and played us his terrible songs about his relationship to God. You know which guys don’t suck? The Oulipo guys. Playing with Oulipo is how I met their bassist Frank Meadows, who went on to later join Bellows and contributed to two Lamniformes records after moving to New York. It’s also how I met their guitarist Nick Scavo, who also moved to New York and is a heavy-hitter in the new music/art music space as well as a co-host of the excellent Flavortone podcast.
I’m fascinated by “mild southern”. I wonder if I meant to write “mid southern”. Considering that shortly after this tour Angel Olsen moved down to Asheville from Chicago I think I was at least a little bit right to say that was where it was at.
Day 5 - Murfreesboro, TN
We slept in at Oulipo’s house in order to avoid killing time at our destination. Our drive was mostly uneventful other than a brief and awful detour into Knoxville and a minor crisis at a rest stop in which we thought the car had broken down (turns out it wasn’t in park). We played an extremely dirty party house populated by very chill southern stoners who listened to prog and jam bands. The crowd was super rowdy and was fed by a Pizza Bus. One asshole in a pink shirt spouted cliche one liners and got away with it. Our set was the same as the first but with an encore of “Blue Breath”. Very energetic dance pop band after us, covered Neutral Milk Hotel. After a late night pizza we collapsed into sleep.
“I keep imagining that I see mountains in the distance/shrouded in blue. I’ve been looking for something that doesn’t exist/I leave behind a small piece of myself at very stop we make. What will be left when I get back home?”
A lot going on under the surface of this one. As you’ll see in the next entry, the car break down was more than a minor crisis. Knoxville was awful because Felix got hate crime’d by a loudmouth in a passing vehicle. This also happened to us in Asheville the day before, but I guess my overall positive impression of the city overwhelmed that unfortunate blip. Knoxville was also where I noticed for the first time, thanks to a local movie theater, that The Dark Knight Rises was going to hit theaters on my birthday. I proceeded to have dreams involving Batman nearly every night for the rest of tour.
The pizza bus pizza was truly terrible.
That last stanza is a segment of lyrics that eventually became a Lamniformes song. I wrote it during the drive on Day 6, so I’ll talk about it more after that.
Day 6 - Covington, KY
We venture into the unknown. After a brief morning at Wolfcastle we drove to a nearby Cracker Barrel for breakfast. Our drive took us past Nashville and many pro-life billboards. At another rest stop we had a second near breakdown which put us in a foul mood for the remaining hour of driving. Things only got worse when we arrived in Covington, Kentucky, which resembled something from a Lynch movie. Local dinner, sad country music, weird lighting, eerie mechanical band playing in corner, sudden and prolonged silence punctuated by low drones. Creepy painting of a stormy coastline. Show was played to no one but the opening act and his girlfriend, who took us in for the night in Cincinnati. They took us to a local bar and were generally the nicest people in the world.
We were convinced that we were fucked. The Camry looked like it was done for somewhere in Tennessee. We were as far from home as we’d be for the rest of tour. Only Oliver knew how to drive, and none of us could tell what was wrong with the car. Once it got started up again none of us talked for the rest of the drive. Oliver put on Clear Moon by Mount Eerie. We did not listen to “Mercy” when we arrived in Covington.
While we were driving silently with Mount Eerie on in the background I pulled out my notebook and worked through my feelings by free writing. I was sitting shotgun, which didn’t happen often on that tour. I had a clear view of the Appalachian mountains. I wrote about the mountains. I wrote about the fleeting joys of tour, how exhausting it is to be an excited new stranger every day. That free writing became the bulk of the lyrics to the Lamniformes song “Deep Despair in Covington, KY”. I grabbed the name from Oliver, as he described our shitty experience in the city to a host later in the tour. I almost never use first draft lyrics, but with a few minor tweaks these just felt right and true in a way that my first drafts usually don’t.
Day 7 - Oberlin, OH
Overslept, but quickly got our stuff together and drove out towards Oberlin. In order to avoid another potential car breakdown we did the entire 4 hour drive without stopping. Oddly enough, this wasn’t that stressful thanks to solid conversations about interesting subjects (9/11, religion, how much the South is screwed). Arriving at Oberlin was an incredible feeling after spending the last two days in worry and discomfort. The cookout was miles better than the one in Asheville and the show was closer to the vibe we work best in. Talked to [HORRIBLE SCREECHING SOUND] briefly on the phone. Went to sleep fairly early and slept decently other than a sudden headache at 4 in the morning.
I’m certain that whatever we said about the South was dumb as hell. Forgive us Yankee elitists for our trespasses. This drive was the first time I’d heard of Max Weber, though, so I guess we weren’t total idiots. Every tour has an oasis moment, a breather episode, a moment where everything unclenches for the first time. I have never forgotten the gentle rolling of the road through farmland in Ohio on this drive.
I reserve the right to not talk about ghosts, ghouls, and other haunting individuals in my tour diaries.
Day 8 - Pittsburgh, PA
Due to my late night headache I slept in. When I woke I played a game of Magic with our host Aaron. We lounged around before getting ourselves some pizza. Soon afterwords we headed out to Pittsburgh. At this point the drives aren’t real time to me. They are just a lack of action. The show in Pittsburgh was right next to a separate crust punk [show] happening at the same time. Weird crowd juxtapositions. Played the standard set but with “Darker Days” opening. Saint Seneca headlined. Super cool folk pop. I should remember to tell [REDACTED FRIEND NAMES] about them. Spent the night Ursa Major. Oliver finished the first disposable camera.
“This is the sound of arms unfolding”
That final line ended up in the Lamniformes song “I Have Been A Flame”. It meant one thing when I wrote it in this tour diary, it means something different in the song.
I was definitely dehydrated when I had that headache. Looking back there were so many times in my life when I suffered avoidably, needlessly, from dehydration headaches. Then I suffered a much more literal kind of headache from lack of hydration and I’ve never let myself have the other problem again. I don’t remember whether Aaron or I won in Magic. Could see it going either way, honestly.
I never did introduce those friends to Saint Seneca. Probably because they weren’t actually friends, just people I knew. The side-by-side indie folk and crust punk shows is honestly the perfect setting for meeting Maryn Jones, formerly of Saint Seneca and now of Yowler. Years later Oliver and I toured in Gabby’s World for a double-headlining tour with Yowler. Indie is a small world at every level.
The presence of the disposable camera on this tour is so interesting to me. We were juuuust barely ahead of the moment when smartphones and Instagram became truly ubiquitous. Every tour I’ve been on since has visual evidence scattered through my IG account. Not so for this one.
Day 9 - Buffalo, NY
The dudes from Ursa Major made us a mean set of eggs and grits for breakfast. Our journey north to Buffalo brought us into the city early, which gave us a good deal time to wander in search of food. We settled for burritos. The venue was an art space covered in paintings of horrible dicks. Our set was a very new arrangement. “See Bright”, “Darker Days”, “Blue Breath”, “American Girl Dolls”, “White Sheet”, ‘From Outer Space”, “Uh Oh” “Yangguang”. Oliver convinced a waitress at a coffee spot to come to the show. She bought our blue Bellows dress. We stayed the night with Kevin, who ran the venue.
Damn, shout out to Oliver’s 19 y/o rizz. I wonder how long that waitress kept that dress. While we were walking around Buffalo we saw an actual Lamborghini Murciélago on the street. It felt like a prophecy come true. By this point we’d really hit our second wind. I want to say that we listened to a few Why? albums in a row on this drive. I know we did that on one of the NY state drives, so let’s just say it was this one.
Day 10 - Rochester, NY
Kevin also made a killer set of eggs. A very short drive to Rochester forced [us] to spend most of the day waiting in chain stores and restaurants. We played Clue in Starbucks. We played with a band with 15 members. Completely insane. Very pretty girl in a cast. Similar set to last night but with “Like the Saint” and “I Am Building A House” instead of “American Girl Dolls”. We are now sold out of CDs.
I remember Felix and I had a long walk and conversation in the morning before we hit the road. We hadn’t really had a chance to one-on-one on the whole tour. Our friendship is filled with such periods of prolonged missed connections. One of our hosts at the venue (a house), and one of the 15 band members mentioned above, was very impressed by Oliver’s description of the difference between folk and pop songs. I can’t remember what the pretty girl in the cast looked like, but I’m sure she was pretty.
Day 11 - Hudson, NY
We spent the night with Mike of Attic Abasement and his adorable pets. Knuckles the cat and Boris the dog. Once again we were treated to an interesting set of eggs. Our drive to Hudson was long, but we took two rest stops. Saw the same pair of bikers at both. Oh, before I forget, I dreamt of meeting the Sky God Qatwa. Hudson itself is a cool little town. We met with Oliver’s mom who took us out to dinner, which was greatly appreciated. Our set was the same as Day 9 but with “Like The Saint” instead of “Blue Breath”, which went very well with the Bardians in town. Had a Rogue American Amber. Very good. We spent the night at Chatum in a house from Oliver’s family. Long talk about horror movies, the epoch, and problematic white rap. Slept great.
I for real had a dream about meeting a Sky God named Qatwa. I’ve never had another.
Attic Abasement are another formative influence on Bellows, as far as I understand. We definitely played them in the car a few times on this tour.
One thing I remember about this set that I didn’t mention in the original entry is that we tried a variation on the set where “From Outer Space” went straight into “Uh Oh”, which I thought was really cool.
During that conversation about horror movies the three of us successfully freaked ourselves out by imagining how scary it would be if a tiny man the size of our hands was suddenly standing along the windowsill of the kitchen. Incredible how quickly we can invent reasons to get scared.
Day 12 - Athol, MA
Short drive to Athol, Mass. Felix was denied cigarettes at a gas station and I wasn’t allowed to buy them for them. Our GPS attempted to send us through the woods. Our destination was a farming camp. Most of the kids were ages 8-13. We helped take care of chores, feeding animals, and such. It was odd to be on the councilor end of the summer camp experience. Fell in love with this absurd Ram named Junior who would shout at us in a hilariously deep voice. Ate great tacos.
“attempted to send us through the woods” is an understatement. The GPS put us on a road that had been completely overgrown and abandoned. I don’t know how this revolutionary war ass trail got picked up by GPS. The Camry, god bless it, crashed through branches and had it’s underside cut up by rocks before we realized we needed to turn back. This incident inspired the final lyrics in “Deep Despair In Covington, KY”.
Stones cut the floor
Branches crush the roof
A coffin fit for three
That night we stayed in a house a short drive away from the camp. When we woke up we discovered that we were on the shore of a serene lake, dotted by birds making their morning calls. We ate breakfast back at the camp. An eleven year old boy talked to us about the beef between Drake and Chris Brown. The kid like Chris Brown. We liked Drake. The two had just gotten into a fight at a night club that also involved San Antonio Spurs point guard Tony Parker. That last detail wouldn’t matter to me for a few more years. We drove back to New York City. Our last show of the tour was in the Bronx. We talked a lot about feeling “tour tight”. We played with Cave Cricket.
The next morning we unloaded the equipment into Felix’s basement. The Camry hadn’t given us any trouble since the drive to Covington. I don’t know if we ever learned what was truly wrong with it. Felix told me that they planned to start recording some songs the next day. They wanted to keep the momentum of the tour going. I wouldn’t see them for another two weeks but to say hello before they holed back up to keep working. At the end of the two weeks they had Still Water, the first Told Slant album.
“I am searching for something that does not exist”. What this meant to me when I wrote it, through gritted teeth and far from home, is a mystery to me now. It means something far more concrete in retrospect. Felix, Oliver, and I were all on the cusp of new albums. We were making new connections in places we had never been before. We reached aimlessly into the mist and found our way along the edges of America’s labyrinth until we were back home. The search made the road. Searching made it exist. What we found out there, new friends, new songs, couldn’t have existed to us before we went out there to find it. Searching redefined what we could search for.
I started working on this post before I left for another short tour with Bellows. Both I and the band are very different these days. We played a similar route this time though, and I was surprised to find a number of echoes from our 2012 tour at the shows we played this time. I’ll tell you all about it on Friday. Until then, drive safe.