Its been a while since I’ve updated this. We’re more than half-way done with tour now which seems crazy. Things have blown by so fast. I guess a 2 week or so tour seems so short compared with being on tour for most of the summer. The southern California shows were all really fun. We met some very nice people in SoCal who came to some of the other SoCal shows besides the ones in their hometown and it was nice to meet them and hang out with them.
Playing Gilman was great, of course, and it was nice to play at a place with such history, let alone with good bands. I never really knew much of Gilman growing up in punk, but both Ryan and Bz said that, growing up, they always dreamed of going to a show at Gilman, let alone playing one.
We had to drive a long ways up from the bay area to Olympia which was kind of grueling, but it was nice to see autumn happening and both the Olympia show and Seattle show were really fun. We went to a record store in Seattle called Singles Going Steady and it always blows me away to go to a record store that is all punk records. I bought a Ballast 7″ and a Zounds Cd which I’m real excited about. In Seattle, we played at a newish space called the Rung Theatre which is a warehouse space converted to a movie theatre that a friend fo the Pipebomb owns. They’re doing the Fucking Fabulous Film Festival there soon, which you should check out if you live in the Seattle area. From basements, to art spaces, to home-grown cinemas, to DIY halls, we’ve gotten to play a diversity of spaces on this tour.
We played Response to Griot sans Will last night and we’ve played it a few times. We wouldn’t have done it except a lot of nice folks from San Diego who went to a few shows asked us. I’ve been thinking about the song, which is basically about bridging distances, and seeing many people on this tour from back east, or who we’ve met a few years in the past has made me feel better about punk’s ability to bridge physical or temporal distance. There are other distances in our world – across enemy lines of a war, distances of class, ethnicity, or ideology, generations, lifestyles. Some of these are very real and very broad, and some of these are only a matter of perspective. We’ve had a lot of conversations in the van that have been hard for me because they’ve helped me recognize these distances, and even how miniscule they might actually be, but crossing them still seems so far away. I hope that they’ll eventually be bridged as easily as I feel that time and miles have been crossed.
xo,
Geoff