A hectic start to the day - dropping the dogs off at puppy jail, getting the van washed and filled up, buying ice for the cooler and 4lbs of salmon and tuna sashimi from Quality Seafood... just the basic road trip essentials for a carnivore allergic to any food invented after 8500 B.C.

$8.99 a lb and delicious! I took it home, sliced it up, bagged it and threw it in the cooler. That's today's lunch, dinner and tomorrow's breakfast sorted, and the official start of Sushi Tour 07.



Yum. (Don't be jealous - it gets significantly less exotic as the week goes on...)



The freshly washed van gets its first drink of a very thirsty trip.



Damn! Little did I know this would be a bargain compared to the NYC area $75 fill-ups ahead of me...

I picked George up around 2pm and we loaded the van with the Summer Wardrobe's gear then over to our rehearsal space for the Sudden Moves' stuff.



It was a tight fit but we got it to work and the ever-important nap seat was left intact.

We were on the road by 3, with George taking first driving shift. Eyes on the road please...



He laughed at my radar detector, but soon started to appreciate it. Being that high up in a van it gave us a good half mile warning of cops hiding down the road. Not that we were speeding or taking drugs or any such shenanigans... but I do have a Chicago song on my iPod which I'm assured is an arrestable offence in some states.

Our first gas station stop delighted me by providing a giant, badly proportioned tiger for me to photograph!





I sincerely hope the tiger was made by a group of schoolchildren or at the very least the mentally challenged. I'm presuming he wasn't an officially sanctioned Exxon product... but just to be safe, we stuck to Shell or BP for the rest of the trip.

My 80GB iPod was a great companion...

Things To Do in 2007 #73: Get Dr Pepper sponsorship for the Sudden Moves.



We were planning to get to Memphis for night one, but traffic was against us and after 634 miles we called it a day at 2.30am and checked into a Holiday Inn about 45 miles south of Memphis. It had the worst pillows EVER. I threw mine on the floor and made a mental note to bring my own next time.




We covered another 626 miles today, driving from just south of Memphis to, er, somewhere in Virginia, I think.

We experienced some weird stopping places... What the hell is a Huddle House? We didn't plan to find out, and filled up the van across the road in the safety of the Alan Partridge-esque sounding Family Travel Mart.



Now THIS place looked like fun...



We loaded up on pyrotechnics for our upcoming show and hit the road.




Tonight's accommodation was a Super Eight. I don't understand how they price these places - the Super Eight was $20 cheaper than last night's Holiday Inn and absolutely no worse, in fact the pillows were slightly less awful.




Day 3. Destination: Brooklyn!

We found very reasonably priced to-go puddings at a small shop someplace in PA. I think they were handmade by people without electricity. Since puddings were invented after 8500 B.C. - even Amish ones - I couldn't partake, but George got a banana one and a strawberry one and stuck them in the cooler. I think I probably had some more fish.

As the night drew in I began to hallucinate... Was it? Could it really be? YES! We were in Fogelsville!



As you can see from this pic, we hit Times Square around 9:25pm:



It then took us another hour to inch across midtown Manhattan, aided by our wireless interweb connection and Google Maps.



Eventually we got to the midtown tunnel.



Unfortunately, we then missed our immediate turning and wound up on the BQE, but we eventually made it to Jennifer O'Connor's apartment in Greenpoint at 11:30. Road-weary, we were delighted to open the door and see that our home for the next 3 days was so awesome. Thanks again for letting us stay there Jennifer!

We headed out to see if my friends/ex-bandmates Jennifer or Laura Rogers were hanging out at their bar, which was only a few blocks from the apartment. We were in luck! Laura was there and we received a very warm welcome. She was understandably surprised to see us and fixed us up with a couple rounds of drinks on the house. Awesome. A great end to the day.




Today = radio day! We had a 3 o'clock date with Joe Belock at Jersey City's awesome WFMU radio station. We taped 7 unreleased songs - two BRAND new (like, written last week new) - "Magnet" and, er, "New Fast One" plus "Animal Planet", "How Can People Wear That Stuff", "Sleepyhead" and "Kid Could Be You," finishing up with a cover of Joe Jackson's "On Your Radio".





Matt, ready to rock.



George, ready to start a fight with an inanimate object.



The FMU studio, post-recording.

Then came a brief interview, and we were packed up and heading back into NYC traffic around 6. The taping aired at 1pm on Tuesday 17th, during Joe's "Three Chord Monte" show, which is archived here.



Joe (left) with Matt. Thanks again to Joe for having us! The welcome at WFMU is always really warm.

Even with 2 iPods between us on the way up, we were starting to get bored of the musical selection so when Matt broke out his iPod I informed him I would be taking it home for the evening and giving it a good dose of Senuti (aka iRophynol). Moments after this discussion, Matt's iPod froze. Possibly in fear, maybe just a technical glitch, we will never know.

Back in Greenpoint, George and I got sushi at a place Laura had recommended, and for good reason - it was terrific. The waitress was certifiably kooky, shouting at us for taking too long over ordering and offering me an A or B choice of "Are you Polish or American?", after pegging George for Spanish. Either way, the fish was great and the sake delicious. A little shopping for Advil and eyedrops (plus an unproductive hunt for Dr Pepper) was far more entertaining than it had any right to be thanks to the sake buzz. Once we got over the guilt of not going out (how often are you in NYC?), we settled in for a quiet night of iPod pillaging and banana pudding consumption...



We also listened back to the day's session recording (Joe kindly sent us away with a CD), and we were very happy with the results, even through laptop speakers. We decided, officially, that Being A Three-Piece Rocks!




A well-deserved sleep until noon was followed by a little more light iPod raping, then... UH-OH! The discovery that there's only one Dr Pepper left in the cooler! Things were starting to get urgent. We're clearly not in Texas anymore - do they even sell the stuff in NYC?

We made a dash to the local supermarket to try and find some before George started stabbing people. Two 12-packs (and one for the lady) later and everything was alright again...



We headed back to Sapporo Hanu for more sushi and attitudi, then on to the local Buffalo Exchange, where George scored an awesome $18 brown cord jacket and I didn't.

Home for a quick disco nap and suddenly it was time to head to Magnetic Field to load in for our show(s).



The show went absolutely GREAT. One of our best ever, seriously, and our first as an official three-piece. We played to maybe 30 people (although the bar is tiny so that felt like a decent crowd), but sold 7 CD's and 3 t-shirts, making new fans and meeting people who bought Drive It back in 2003 and had never seen us play. It was a really fun, fulfilling evening.

After the show, we hung out at Magnetic Field for a couple of rounds, then hunger struck and George, Marty and me piled in the van and headed for Blue Ribbon, fancy schmancy sushi bar in downtown Manhattan which I recalled was open until 3am. We got good close-by parking and made it through their doors by 2:45. We feasted on delicious sushi and sake. Afterwards we drove Marty up to Central Park where he was staying (at the YMCA, not actually in the park), then enjoyed a late-night drive back through Manhattan in the rain, across the Williamsburg Bridge and home to Greenpoint.




Today was the Summer Wardrobe's Big Day - opening for Roky Erickson at the sold-out Bowery Ballroom. We slept super late and had to go straight to the Bowery for soundcheck.

Today was also rainy as hell, NYC's little taste of the Nor'easter Of Historic Proportions that we had heard so much about from everybody who wasn't actually in the north-east.

The start of our journey looked like this:



Ugh.

We got good parking right outside (of course!), then hung around in the Bowery waiting for the others to arrive so we could begin loading in.

Once they were all setting up, I hopped in a cab and made a food run, forcing everyone to pick something from the menu at Risotteria, which I was excited to visit to sample their gluten-free pizza. I got there only to find that there was absolutely NOTHING on the menu I could eat, as ALL of their food contained butter. As well as being gluten-intolerant, I'm casein (dairy protein) intolerant. It's VERY very common for the two to go hand in hand and I was sorta astounded that Risotteria had overlooked this AND that their attitude was so shitty towards a customer with a food allergy, considering their whole business model is founded on catering to them... Still, the regular people food looked good and so I ordered the boys' paninis and pizza, and ran across the street to Sushi Mambo and purchased a truckload of salmon and yellowtail sushi, sipping on fantastic hot green tea as I waited. The guy at Risotteria was a slight jerk about my choice (like I had one?!), saying that the sushi place sucked and besides, "everyone knows not to buy fish on a Sunday..." Whatever. I got back to the Bowery, totally soaked from the rain, walked upstairs to the balcony, sat at a table and ate some genuinely fantastic sushi whilst the Wardrobe soundchecked.



The sound at the Bowery is always awesome. George's drums sounded INSANELY good. I shot some video of the tail end of their soundcheck.

After that we all headed upstairs to the green room and ate, then hung out until Roky's band arrived.

Here's Troy and Jon Sanchez...



Here's Roky's drummer and bass player...



Here's me and George sporting Tour Hair (how come it grows like an inch a day the second you leave home?)



During the Wardrobe's set I manned the merch booth which is downstairs from the main room, although I did sneak up to take a photo.



I helped Roky's merch man Robert sell a TON of Roky merch. It was crazy. Not quite Mission Of Burma at The Garage crazy, but up there... I also sold a few SW CDs, and by the time Roky went on I felt ok about asking Robert to take over the SW merch so I could go back upstairs and watch my first Roky Erickson show.

By this time, SW had been demoted to the 'other' backstage area, aka a weird little curtained off cubicle by the upstairs bar. This was the very same weird curtained off cubicle The Sudden Moves were given when we opened here for The Wedding Present. It brought back no fond memories at all! It does have nice light fixtures though:



After some post-show drinks in the downstairs bar, we loaded out (still in the rain - it didn't stop all day). The other SW's went with Roky and band for Chinese food, but my dietary restrictions 'forced' George and me to once again pay a late night/early morning visit to Blue Ribbon. Shame... We grabbed what we thought was probably the closest parking spot we'd get, then ran in the rain to the restaurant. Where right outside there were two empty parking spaces. Ha! Oh well, once you're wet you can't really get any wetter. Once again, we had an amazing meal and very nice sake.

Afterwards we drove back to Greenpoint and decided to call in at Daddy's Bar again for a nightcap. Once again our luck was in and Laura was there, although she was just leaving and the bar was closing up, she asked the bartender to pour us drinks on the house and we sat in front of the fire and dried off. The only other person still at the bar was a strange European accented man who was trying to talk the bartender into sharing his apartment with him. "It will be great! We can wear rollerskates in the house and make fruit smoothies!" - just one of his many selling points on the propsed set up. She volunteered that she did, indeed, own rollerblades, and he interrupted angrily "No, not rollerBLADES, rollerSKATES!" He then began to explain what "caveat" meant to the girl, who had misheard "caviar". This got us a little giggly, but I think it was when he started to demonstrate his yoga moves that we lost it. Thankfully it was very dark and he was very drunk so I don't think he noticed us laughing our asses off at him. I was at that point of laughing so hard that it hurts and your eyes are watering. We drank up and left, wishing we'd had a video camera or at the very least a tape recorder.




Monday - homeward bound. But first we had to make a trip into Manhattan to pick up Roky's guitar and amp, which we'd been asked to drive home for him. I guess it gets airsick. Since we were on the mainland we decided to head back downtown on the way out and pick up lunch, so it was back to Sushi Mambo for me and George got an awesome looking Cuban sandwich.

The plan was to make it to Chapel Hill, NC for the night. We played there last year and I got the feeling I wanted to spend more time there. The weather was against us however, and although it wasn't too rainy, there were really high winds which kept our speeds down and made driving pretty tiring work. Still, we made time to drive through Washington, DC, since George had never been. We drove down Capitol Hill and saw lots of old, official, famous buildings.



We drove on and spent the night in Oxford, NC, just outside Chapel Hill. The motels are all merging together, so I can't remember what type it was tonight except that the man at the check-in desk looked like Alfred Hitchcock and was a racist.




We listened to a little bit of our WFMU session live via the laptop as we pulled into Carrboro, heading to Akai Hana in time for the lunch special. This was probably my favourite sushi place on the trip, primarily because it was so damn cheap! We had decent sized lunches and then we ordered a load of it to go, so that we had food for the rest of the day, thanks to the cooler (which, by the way, is now a permanent fixture in my van).



I also bought a t-shirt which, to my pleasant surprise, they had in girl sizes. I'll post a photo when it's made its way out of the laundry cycle. It's brown and has a drawing of a fish, standing upright, serving a plate of sushi. Bizarre. Obligatory Japanese writing too. Kinda looks like a Pavement shirt. I changed into it at the next rest stop and it smelled of sushi (in a good way).

Ah, here it is:



Anyway, back on the road, we had BEAUTIFUL weather all day...



George even broke out the sunglasses...



I like to think this is what Ric Ocasek's bathroom door might look like.



Time for another screen cleaning... I think George is swearing at me here.



We put our collective foot down to ensure we didn't have to spend the night in Alabama, and made it to a Super Eight in Meridian, Mississippi by around 1:30am. We wound down with some Jameson's on the rocks in plastic motel cups with 678 miles ahead of us tomorrow.




Well, this is it - the final day of our roadtrip! We were on the road by noon and, after 8 days of talking about it, George finally got breakfast (to go) from here:



Totally out of sushi and options, today was Canned Fish Day for me, so my breakfast looked a little more like this:



Mmmm!! Actually, can one was pretty tasty, but by dinner time I was getting a little bored.

The weather, once again, was beautiful, as was the scenery.



By dusk we were back in Texas.



...and pretty exhausted. We got back into town at 11:30pm and around midnight I was enjoying my first hot meal in 9 days.

It was an awesome trip and well worth the effort on all counts. If I did it again I would throw in an extra day each way to make time for getting into towns early enough to explore/get dinner, etc. And I would pack more Dr Pepper.