so…I drove the length of the US over two days this week. Driving from Vancouver to LA in 2 days saw me drive pretty much the entire West Coast of the US, I timed it with passing through Olympia and picking up Heather Barnes (also happens to be visiting the US) and taking her and Onyx (of Polka Dot Dot Dot) down to a Panther show in Portland, which was heaps of fun…man, Portland is so amazing I can’t explain, I can now totally understand why so many amazing bands from the US are from the Northwest. Olympia and Portland are basically one giant Cub Street/K-Road. We visited a bar that has like 100 old school video game machines, all in awesome condition…played WWF, Paperboy, Tron!!!, NBA Jam and so many more.. Disasteradio would be in heaven…man, Tron the video game is beyond explanation.
The views from Portland-Arcata are pretty spectacular…but from Sacramento south, which is the bulk of California, its pretty crap, just highway after highway and stretched out industrial plains.
After the epic drive i decided to drive into LA around 5am since i figured trying to drive in around rush hour would suck…man, I am so glad I did…even trying to enter the city at 5am is hellish. I mean, you’re driving on a 5 lane highway at 5am in the morning and its PACKED, for like an hour…does like half of LA work in a bakery or something? why do all these people start work so early?
I get to the airport and sleep in the carpark for 5 hours before OTA land. After an excrutiating wait for them to pass through customs I meet them to see that they didn’t bring anything with them except a snare and some cymbals, We’ve got two days and bugger all money to buy a drumkit, bass amp, guitar amp, bass guitar and guitar.
We head to LA central and drive over to John Girgus’s house. One of the two guys who basically saved our asses and made LA awesome instead of crapsome. John just decides to vacate his apartment for 5 days leaving it entirely to us, so amazing, and means we can spread out and treat the place as our own. John calls a few friends and also jumps the band on a last minute bill the next night at a gallery playing with “Georgie James” (a band on Saddleback - Bright Eyes’ label). We then have a day to try and buy an entire backline….we straight away get onto “craigslist”, the US trademe, except even more awesome and track down a $100 peavey amp..haha, man..most bands absolute nightmare, but exactly what we were after. We pick that up, then go drumkit shopping, and buy the cheapest kit we could find…$200 for a complete kit..haha, its so rangi, we pick up some cheap guitars a $100 guitar amp and we’re set. A full backline of gear for less then most would spend on one guitar.
We buy the last piece of gear about 45 mins before we had to be at the first show….man, anything you’ve heard about how sprawled out LA is, is an understatement. Its ridiculous. It seems everytime we go anywhere we transfer through 4-5 different freeways and spend 30-40 minutes driving anywhere….its like getting to any part of LA is like driving from Wellington to Paraparumu