We head into town to hear the bad news about the muffler. The first place we go to was a local dude, he couldn’t fit us in for another 4 days, took a look at the damage and shook his head and gave the impression things weren’t looking to good. We then hobble down the road to Midas who fit us in straight away, 20 mins and $60 later, we’re welded up and on our way…perhaps the very first time I’ve EVER come out of a mechanic’s smiling.
During our drive east we switch from Wyoming into Nebraska, Nebraska is incredible, it’s just all green fields with livestock. Basically Nebraska is New Zealand. The best part of Nebraska is the first coupla hours where you are driving on red roads with rich green pastures and deep blue skies….sweet.
This IS middle America. You pass through ghost town after ghost town. We decide to stop in one – Sand Hills, after taking a few photos of the depressing main street, we leave pretty fast.
PICS ABOVE - Sandhills Main Street
PIC - Strange cattle identification sign opposite the town Post Office
We pass through the tiny cowboy town of Du Bouis, While at the local op-shop (I bought a cowboy shirt so I could start fitting in) one of the women behind the counter strikes up a conversation (as EVERYBODY does in the US) and we explain while we are passing through. She gets really excited and asks us if we can play a show in town tonight. Intrigued, we say we’re interested and she leaves to go talk to the various bars to see if we can play. One bar gets really excited about it and really wants us to play, but we get there and find there is no PA of any description, so frustratingly had to turn down playing a show to a bunch of cowboys.
PIC - DU BOISE
we pass through some tiny town that had been totally covered in snow the day or two before, we drive through massive piles of snow everywhere, it was very strange.
After more driving through cowboys towns, we come to the town of valentine and decide that it could be good to spend the night in. I pick up a flier for the Wacky Wild West travel park at a service station. We head to it and discover that the only thing “Wild west” about the park is a badly drawn picture of a cowboy on a brick wall. If you could imagine the ultimate rundown trailer park camping ground, this is it. We get on well with the owner of the park and even though we decide not to stay, she invites us to have our dinner there…which we do.
We decide to drive through the night. Even though the camping ground was cheap - $13 for the 4 of us, the snow storm is still floating around and we were a little paranoid of waking up buried under 3 feet of snow, we decide just to drive through the night.
We keep driving and just pull over at the occasional rest stop and sleep for an hour or two before moving on. In the US on the main interstates they have these amazing rest stops every 40 or so minutes. They really are incredible. Usually have shelters, toilets, food/beverage dispensers and even free wireless internet.
We arrive in Des Moines around 8am and just drift around aimlessly. We hang out in a “Dollar Store” for ages and it dawns on us how we should have visited one earlier. The cereal we have been sharing is $4 for 2 packets here as opposed to $4.30 in the supermarkets. Heaps of other cheap stuff as well (PS. Americans don’t understand it when you say “heaps”). It’s Sunday and everything is closed, we are broke from driving all the way across the States and even though we aren’t meant to load-in for another 13 hours we head to check out the venue. When we arrive at the venue we discover its being used for some hip-young church service, where all the parishioners have like tattoos and are all aged 25-35. They had just finished some sort of pot-luck breakfast which we manage to get invited to join in…nice. They hear that we had no accom and drive through the night so they gave us $20 to go the local YMCA to have some showers, we give them a couple of CDs in return.
With 12 more hours to kill we head to a local park and just sleep.
We get woken up by some sort of BMX rally happening just over the hill, we go to Check it out. Two redneck kids ask us if we are fags, I say yes and they run away from us screaming. Quite funny.
It was like a local BMX club meeting and it was really cute, one of the few races we saw was between 2 young kids, one of whom couldn’t make it over the a small bump in the track and fell over. Some teenager dude who was there (we find out later doing community service) ran over to help him get back up.
We go to a local café and play some crappy game for about 5 minutes before getting bored and just sit around for about 2 hours eating their complimentary crackers. The music they were playing was awesome so it was easy to hang there for a while, its been really great going to cafes in America and not hearing NZ dub music or bad acid-jazz like every NZ café.
We make it through till 5pm and decide to check out the earlier show that’s happening at the same venue we are playing afterwards. It’s some ridiculously cheesy rapper called “Maxx G Flip”, and it was the most incredible show ever. The venue was like a small pub and they were rocking this show like a stadium. Around a dozen people were walking around with official ‘laminates” hanging around their necks, there was an entourage for Maxx G that numbered more then the people in the audience. They were staging a competition after the show to find the hottest chick in the audience, of which there were only 3-4 girls anyway. The show was amazing. Think of the worst Prince song ever and then cheese it X1000 and you’re getting close to this guy. (PS. Prince is awesome, but we all know he’s done some stuff we’d rather forget). He even had a dude who would stand on stage holding his guitar, then when it was time for a solo, that guy would give Maxx G the guitar and Maxx G would let rip with the cheesiest guitar solo you can imagine. There were around a dozen people on stage, aside from 2 dancers we couldn’t work out what the others were doing. Everynow and then Maxx G would grab one of the 3 (obviously placed – given free comps) girls in the audience and do some sort of dodgy dance on stage with.
Check out the photo of Maxx G below and then weep cause you missed it. Picture Snoop Dogg’s Sensual Seduction Video in real life with not a hint of irony.
The rap show managed to kill a bit more time, straight after it we load in for our show and meet the other band we are playing with Blake/e/e, of whom half the band are based in Italy, half in the US. They are actually really choice, remind me a bit of Amina, with a little bit of MBV and Pixies in places. A fairly underwhelming show (Maxx G obviously must have stole our audience, I mean..who would have thought playing a late night show on a Sunday night in Des Moine, Iowa wouldn’t be awesome?), but we still manage to sell a decent amount of merch and meet (who we find out later is the “coolest chick in Des Moine”) Angela who puts us up at her place after the show. We watch some sweet skateboarding DVDs of hers and while she’s flicking through my ipod checking out what we are listening to she remarks “You would LOVE my friends band Lymbyc System”, we laugh and tell her that we are infact playing with them the very next night in Chicago.
Never thought I would say America is a “small place”.
Sometime during the night we are hanging outside the venue and this random dude comes up to us and asks us to take a photo of him. we oblige.
