us in the u.s.

Remember when we went on a tour with A Place To Bury Strangers and All the Saints? It was October. That was a long time ago. These should refresh your memory. Click to enlarge.



Day 1


Arthur Bryant's BBQ, Kansas City, Missouri


Sun Inn, Kansas City, Kansas




us and Nikki, at our favorite Cincinnati chili parlor


Time-Out Chicken N Biscuits, Chapel Hill


this place




the photo(s) Linda took




New Orleans




Jared Zapruder, on the grassy knoll




having a very, very good time in El Paso (official tour photo)












photos by will!

Food: Part Two

Read the prologue here.

As promised, here's part two, numbers 1-5:

1. Pappadeaux. Austin, TX. This was a blowout feast, except in this case we blew our wad here within 30 minutes of arriving in Austin for SXSW. We spent the trip there making big plans to splurge at whatever advertised 8-star steakhouse had the best pull quotes in the in-flight magazine. But this place was next to our hotel on the interstate, it was late, and we were tired and hungry. It’s probably not actually the best seafood on the planet, but for one shining moment in time, it was. Best service on this list though, by a country mile, especially considering we strolled in 5 minutes before they closed. On the other side of the Doubletree this place flanks is sister restaurant Pappacito's, where your jaded high school-aged server will simultaneously make your guacamole at your table and talk shit on everything on the menu.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2. G Michael's Bistro. Columbus, OH. Scene of our high-class Thanksgiving dinner. We only ate here after Rob, Anthony and Will concluded a 30-minute gabfest with a charismatic local vagrant on the shuttered streets of downtown Columbus by spurning his offer to make us boloney sandwiches in his car. But why would George Michael open up an Italian restaurant in Columbus, Ohio? Weird.

3. Bob Sykes Barbeque. Bessemer, AL. It was an accident. Driving out of Birmingham, we took the last exit with any sign of civilization, looking for a billboard-promised KFC. But then this inviting 50’s-era BBQ hut with a giant pig on top popped up. Turns out this is one of those places that always gets written up in all those books on roadside diners. Pulled pork sandwich with cole slaw on it, fried okra, collard greens, lemon meringue pie, sweet tea, etc.

Bob Sykes

4. Irma's Mexican Restaurant. Deming, NM. I think we went into all this under the impression that the notion that Mexican food is better the closer you are to the border is a myth. Well, turns out, it is better down there. This place and Letty’s (see previous post) prove that. Nothing really noteworthy here; this place was just good, straight up. It’s also across the street from another restaurant called Si Senor - that is, Yes Sir. So good that Jared went back for breakfast 6 months later.

Breakfast King

5. Breakfast King. Denver. We go out of our way to eat breakfast here every time we’re in Denver. It was providence that led us here the first time, after getting lost in a byzantine offramp maze trying to get to a freeway-side Denny’s and suddenly finding ourselves in the Breakfast King parking lot instead. They also have one of those 70-year-old celebrity waitresses that can carry like 18,000 plates at once, whose likeness adorns the restaurant in the form of reverential framed-and-mounted Rocky Mountain News articles.





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Best Taco Bell: Ontario, OR, at Highway 30 and Interstate 84. Even though it was 5 minutes before closing, everything we ordered was exactly as pictured on the menu. Flawless.
Best CFS: Breakfast King, Denver (see above). Although Cracker Barrel does have a good'n too.
Best shrimp 'n' grits: the high-end G. Michael's, Columbus, Ohio, just edging out Atlanta's Flying Biscuit (aka the Flying Beaver, as it's owned by one of the Indigo Girls or something like that)

Honorable Mention:

Fife Restaurant

Welcome Diner

Sollys Hot Tamales

At Random, Milwaukee. Ice cream cocktails in a time warp, ca. 1966.

Tria, Philadelphia. Fancy shit, like wines and what-not.

Fife Restaurant, Birmingham. Die of breakfast.

Bison Witches, Tucson. Say it fast 5 times. Buy sandwiches.

Welcome Diner. Phoenix, AZ. Painfully adorable.

Sollys Hot Tamales. Vicksburg, MS. You can get tamales in the southwest, or you can get a different brand in the Delta - cigar-thin, wax paper-wrapped sodium bombs. Started by a hobo in 1939.

Food: Part One

We’ve established by now that the sole reason we exist as a touring band is to eat at as many Taco Bells as possible. But sometimes you can’t find a Taco Bell, and you have to eat at some totally unkown local restaurant, where you can’t order with the confidence that you can at a Taco Bell. Hell, they might not even have bean burritos. But sometimes these unknowns turn out to be really good.

Thus, this, our civic duty to share this wealth of culinary knowledge we’ve amassed. This will be a two-parter, chronicling the top ten restaurants of the last year of touring. It was gonna be a 2008 year-end list, but then we did another US tour and ate more US food. So now, here it is, after driving around this great land for the last year, the dudes' top 10 restaurants in the USA.

Part one / numbers 6-10:

6. Sokolowski’s. Cleveland, OH. While Tom Jones ate Chinese at the food court back at the hotel, we split for an old Polish cafeteria/tavern on the wrong side of the Cuyahoga. We caught the end of their lunch, and they heaped upon us mounds of what was left of their pierogis

Sokolowski's

and boats of gravy, unsolicited and gratis. It’s the kinda cafeteria where the cashier eyeballs what you got and makes up an arbitrary price. We were the only ones in their dining room, but gosh, we sure filled it with moans of delight. The pierogis lived in a styrofoam box under the back seat of our van for the next 2 weeks. Also, Bill Clinton ate here in 1993.

7. Tomato Head. Knoxville, TN. Not much to say; just really good. Downtown Knoxville, near that sad little mirror-ball-on-a-stick poor-man’s-Space-Needle 1982 World’s Fair relic. Soup/sandwich/pizza/good-lookin staff/etc. Bonus fact: You know how like all of the 20th century’s great innovations were unvailed at the World’s Fair? i.e., the telephone, the hot dog, the ice cream cone, etc. Well, said Knoxville World’s Fair gave us... Cherry Coke. Marinate on that.

Tim outside Letty's

8. Letty's Casita. El Centro, CA. It’s an hour west of Yuma and 15 minutes north of Mexico, and the only thing it’s (to translate) The Center of is nowhere. But it’s at Letty’s little cottage that you’ll find the greatest machaca - which is more or less reconstituted beef jerky, which doesn’t sound good, but so is; when it’s done wrong, which it almost always is, we gringos can just call it “shredded beef.” Then there’s the mantarraya tacos Will had. That’s manta ray, aka sting ray, and everyone knows the Crocodile Hunter died eating sting ray tacos. Turns out it tastes kinda like canned tuna, which makes you wonder why you can’t ever find that in a taco. When we left here - again, 15 minutes north of the Mexican border - we drove up into the mountains and into a snow storm, thusly giving us the unique distinction of being able to say we were late to our San Diego gig because we got caught in a snow storm.

9. Kit Carson Restaurant. Chehalis, WA. If only because of two dishes, which were more just fine than anything else. One, a heaping pile of any and all morning foodstuffs called Mt. St. Helen’s Eruption.

Kit Carson

The other, unremarkable though it may be, was listed on the menu as C.F.S., which is an acronym that entered and has remained our lexicon. That is, country fried steak. It was also here we learned that steak weights and men’s shoe sizes are congruous. That is, as a rule of thumb, an 11 oz. steak is roughly equal in size to a size 11 foot. And vice-versa.


10. Famous Anthony's. Roanoke, VA. If you’re driving down Interstate 81 in Virginia on a Wednesday night, are looking for an affordable all-you-can-eat spaghetti feast, and dislike flavor, go to Famous Anthony’s. Our 16-year-old waitress had both the cutest southern accent and the cutest cold sore.



and for good measure, avoid these at all costs:
Amigos, North Platte, Nebraska
Fiesta Azteca, Nashville


Stay tuned for more...

for the record!

Seems that there are a number of outposts of the interweb that purport to our whereabouts in the coming weeks in Europe with our friends Crystal Antlers. So, just to clear all that up: we ain't gonna be there. The straight story is that our record was supposed to come out over there in early February, but last month, our distributor suddenly went bankrupt. As in, all those records of theirs on the shelves - poof. This crumbling-economy rubbish knows no bounds, and here's another casualty, which affects a gazillion indie bands and labels of every stripe, and puts the kibosh in a lotta well-laid plans. Including ours. So yeah, the deal was that we were gonna go on this fabulous European vacation with those Crystal Antlers to coincide with the release and all. But now we're gonna wait to, y'know, take Europe by storm and whatnot when our record does come out over there. So, U.K., Europe, whoever had hopes to boogie with us over the next several weeks... just you wait.

yours mostly,
the dudes

L.A. by sunrise

We just passed the first highway sign for LA. So close we can smell it. Yet even though this is the prize we've had our eyes on for the last 5 weeks, cold feet's creepin' in. Not sitting in this van for hours for the first time tomorrow will be jarring, and the compulsion to go to a club around 5 and set shit up will surely be deafening. Tour withdrawal. Weird.


Also, the Strangelove stickers finally came in. Here's one we plastered on a backstage wall, which is the most surefire way to ensure your band will stand the test of time. Email us your checking account info and we'll probably put one aside for ya.

Tour is over, if you want it.

And thank you, Lower 48. It ruled, and the worst part of the whole thing was the part where it ended. The funny part was the part where we didn't update the blog regularly throughout as planned. Part of this was slothfulness, part of it was the unexpected absence of a cloud of free WiFi covering the entire nation, and part of it was leaving Rob's MacBook at the Red Roof Inn in Toledo (picture below) and not realizing it until we were 2 hours away. This MacBook contained about 47,000 words of titillating, unposted blogalia - words you'll never see.

To recap, however, the gist of the great lost blog entry/entries were shout-outs to: Nan P and DJ Bilto; Sean P.P. and Dana for driving our van to Denver; The Bronx for trusting us with their van; Aaron in Denver of Hi-Dive fame, who is either totally awake or totally asleep right now; everyone else in Denver who likes to stay up late; Chuckie of San Antonio (aka Chaos Town), who, via MySpace, got us that BIG JIGGERS SHOW, which was absolutely the best show of the tour, as part of, in spite of technically not qualifying, Local Gorefest '07; Jered (correct spelling) of C-Town's All Your Fault (see below); and yet another Aaron, this one in Austin, and this one of Lot 6 fame, who also quartered us.

And that was where all the typing ended and where the slothfulness began. The next 7 days went undocumented, and then the laptop disappeared. Coincidentally, that's where Miz Malia James joined us, and it was not long after her misty-eyed departure in NYC that everything, hyperbolically speaking, fell apart. Fortunately, Sweet Becky at said Red Roof Inn FedEx'ed said laptop to Seattle, for a (ahem) nominal fee. And, turns out, she did not erase the contents of the hard drive. Not that it mattered. But anyway.

Maybe there'll be another blog entry (although it won't be this week or next or the week after that or anything resembling any of those weeks) chronicling the rest of the tour, but for now, the important thing is to thank The Warlocks for taking us with them. They turned out to kinda rule, both musically and personally, and now they're in Europe, melting even more zombified faces. Thanks dudes (and Jenny).

And now, presented in chronological order, the pictures:

[click to enlarge]

The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Fillmore, SF.




This is what happens when you've graduated from Clown College.




Big Jiggers Show Confirmed!!!


Chaostown's own All Your Fault, in their debut at Local Gorefest '07, Jiggers, San Antonio




Chuckie. He's the man.












this here photo by Will's dad


Brand New Rob gets caricaturized, Atlanta.










NYC






Red Roof Inn, Toledo (referenced above). Not thinking about his Macbook.


400 Bar, Minneapolis. With 2/5 of The Warlocks.


We went out of our way to dine at Bismarck's own Space Aliens Grill & Bar. Terrible food, but totally worth it.


Nowhere, Montana


Not the LA River. Also Nowhere, Montana (aka Custer, Montana)
photo by Miss Jenny P. Fraser




Jared escaped.

Photos courtesy W.P. Canzoneri, except where noted.