Dammit! I left out sea monsters. Next tour.

Also thank you again to each and every one of you who helped us out / came / let us play / furnished us with discounted P.B.R. / didn’t boo.  It was kind of a ridiculously ambitious undertaking and there’s no way it’s possible without so much help from so, so many people.  Thank you again, so very, very much.

More to come–I am currently replastering a hundred-year-old kitchen wall, and I’m sure you’re anxious to know every inane detail.  This will soon turn into a blog about plaster.  Hope you’re as excited as I am.

(I have no idea who this brown guy is, but you see him often on the Internet)

Hey.  Hello!  It’s been quite a while since you and I laid virtual eyes upon one another, and though very little has actually ‘happened’ since then, a lot has changed.  The New Orleans version of the Mohican Scouts is kind of on indefinite hold while I figure out what in the Sam Hill I want to do with my life (disclaimer: this may take awhile).  This isn’t to say it couldn’t ever happen again, but after a solid year of weirdness (wonderful weirdness, but weirdness all the same) I needed some Kentucky for awhile, and got to see an absolutely beautiful autumn up here, take in quite a few baseball games, and spend some good, good time with family.  Now, of course, it’s something like 12 degrees, everything is covered in ice and last week’s snow (because it hasn’t been above freezing since then for long enough to melt it), and I’m starting to remember just why I was so happy to flee southward after high school. 

Y’all most certainly deserve a post on something more substantial than the weather, and most hopefully one will come soon, but in the meantime I just wanted to let everyone know I was still alive.  I kind of tend to hole up when I’m back home.  But here’s to new communication, a new year, forgetting every old acquaintance you ever had (I never understood why that was necessary), and all the rest.  It’s good to be back.

Love and Carrots and Potatoes on a Frozen, Dark-At-4:30-p.m.-Night,

Parker.

Texans, attacking something

Hello and Goodbye from the Sovereign Republic of Tejas, the only state in our Union (to my knowledge) that can split into five smaller states at any point if it ever wants to (have fun, West Texana!).  After four final shows, Dallas on July 19 (The Pearl Cup), Austin on July 21 (The Carousel Lounge), Denton on July 22 (Dan’s Silverleaf), and Dallas once again on July 24 (The Crooked Tree), this crazy-ass tour has nearly come to an official end.  One more drive to New Orleans awaits the old Minivan (now with 212,500 miles to its name, a surprise to most everyone involved with the vehicle at some point in its life, especially those present when the tire flew off on I-65 outside of Lebanon Junction a few years back or when the axle snapped two weeks later or when the winshield wipers flew off the side of the car during a day of tornadoes in Barren Co., KY or on a number of other occasions when the sanity involved in keeping said vehicle was in serious doubt), and then it shall all be done.  For now, at least.

Jim I am so sorry.

I know I lost my head and went and swore to Jim Nabors that I’d give you West Coast Highlights long before now (It was a moment of extreme emotional duress and I would never in my right mind make a promise to Jim Nabors that I could not keep but nevertheless I am an adult and must accept the consequences of my actions), and I am sorry to have let everyone down.  They shall come, they shall come.  In the meantime, a blurb at the end of a blog post about Gomer Pyle is absolutely no way to come close to the immense debt of gratitude that we owe absolutely everyone that we encountered on this, our first-ever tour, an immense and ridiculous 23-show trip that had us see both coasts, a Glacier (!), hikes both in the Appalachians and the Rockies, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Golden Gate, the Capitol, Minneapolis, an old mill in Rural Massachusetts, the Oregon Trail, and an officer from the Nevada Highway Patrol who made fun of us for not having any marijuana in the van (“you guys are the worst touring band ever.”  that is an exact quote).

But thank you, all of you, so damned much.  We’ll talk soon.

Much Aloha,

Us.

(Neal in Denver in the Early 1940s. Photo by Allen Ginsberg.)

Hello from Denver, Colorado, where we’re about to play a show on Larimer St., keeping a sharp eye out for the rickety, carjumping, forever-wandering poolhall ghost of young Neal Cassady, or the crumpled curbside beerswilling frame of his father.  You’ll be the first to know if they appear; they haven’t yet RSVPd to our Evite (yes, ghosts have their own email host) so it could go either way.  Becca and I have come a long way since you and I last spoke: from Seattle, we played shows in Eugene, OR, Portland, OR, San Francisco, CA, San Jose, CA, and Berkeley, CA.  Sorry the updates haven’t been more frequent, it’s easy to let things get away from you on this sort of Haul that we’re on.  I swear to Jim Nabors that highlights, cleverly constructed and concisely put together, will come soon.  Until then, an excerpt from the New Lyrics Brainstorming Session that took place last night in Boulder:

“The cat looks like an old baseball manager, in orange light”

This band is going places.

A excerpt from journal entry made during our first hours in Glacier National Park:

“I’m sitting outside in the Glacier National park, almost in Canada. Parker just drove off with the van to get firewood. It’s getting dark, and I’m scared of the dark…….Will he ever come back? I’m not sure…………We’ve had an interesting couple of days; driving until 2am last night to sleep in a rest area in Montana was by far the most disorientating. When going to sleep, we had no idea what our surroundings looked like. When we woke up we saw rolling hills covered with grass that looked like the state of Montana employs endless lawnmowers to keep the landscape tamed….or maybe not.  We were also greeted by an area of travelers stopping to pee. Tumbling out of the car with sleep face and brushing our teeth/charging our phones in the bathroom was quite enjoyable. Since then, the landscape around us has changed so drastically it’s hard to keep up or remember where we are – everything is breathtaking and adventure invoking.”

The next day, after viewing a Glacier (the sole purpose of our adventures to the unknown) we took a lovely hike through the woods, yelling out “BANJO MUSIC” every 10-ish minutes to scare off potential bears that might want to eat our faces off. We subsequently decided that if we did encounter a bear, we would name in Banjo Music and bring in on tour with us.

Now, we sit in a coffee shop in Seattle after playing at Café Race last night. Needless to say, Parker did come back with the firewood and we built two friendly fires to keep us warm amongst the glaciers. No marshmellows, but banjo and violin music.

Tour Haikus:

Violin, Guitar

How did the van get like that?

Where are we going?

Thank you GPS

Secretly you have saved us

You are safe with me

Gas has many forms

Varied outlets, volume, stench

We have grown this close

One of the coolest parts about this crazy-ass trip has been the opportunity to play in so many cities with such rich musical histories.  Our first show was in Memphis, Tennessee, for cryin’outloud, and we weren’t playing soul downtown in 1963 (unless you replace “soul” with “contemporary indie-folkish type stuff” and “downtown” with “a pirate bar” and “1963″ with “2010.”  In that case that statement totally works.), but just being able to actually be a part of a musical tradition in a city is such an amazing feeling, after having admired them from afar my entire life.  Memphis, Louisville (if you’re gawking at including them in the same breath, look up Slint and Squirrelbait, and even though they made their bones outside’a town, My Morning Jacket and Bonnie Prince Billy), Charlotte (pretty rockin’ undergroundpunk scene both once upon a time and currently, look up the Milestone Club), Western Mass. (Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh), Brooklyn (good lord.), Chicago (good lord again.), Minneapolis (The nutso underground 80′s scene that gave life to The Replacements, Husker Du, and Soul Asylum), and now Seattle (good lord for a third time).

Volumes have been written about the music scene here, “beginning” with Mr. Jimi Hendrix and The Ventures and a hugely vibrant oldtime/folk scene in the late 60′s (notably the Gypsy Gyppo String Band, featuring the inimitable Sandy Bradley, an absolute gem of a person who taught me how to drive a stick shift and milk goats in rural southwest Washington’s Willapa Valley last summer), and then of course the Grunge Explosion! and Nirvana and Soundgarden and Pearl Jam and Sub Pop Records and all that.  It’s so interesting how a particular scene in a particular town can suddenly be flung into the mainstream, and then catapult several of its bands into the bizarre collective consciousness that is pop culture.  San Francisco did it in the late sixties, with Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead becoming household names, Minneapolis did it (admittedly to a lesser extent) with The Replacements and Husker Du, Seattle did it with those three giants of ninetieskultur (making up German words is really easy).

At that point it’s more than just music that’s becoming mainstream– it’s a new culture, replete with its own ways of dressing, looking, talking, and behaving.  Music has never lived in a vacuum- it’s always been intextricably tied to the human culture it ‘represents’– it does not exist without image, and that’s as big a part of why any of these scenes have exploded as any songs that anyone sang.  I mean, Jimi Hendrix looked really cool.  So did Nirvana.  This is not to say that there wasn’t (and isn’t) something fundamentally gripping about their music– it is absolutely some of my favorite music ever recorded, and the crazy human intensity of one of their shows is something I can only ever wonder about, having been born in 1987.  But “grunge” does not take off like it did if they wore Young Republican Haircuts and khakis and polo shirts with little alligators or lizards or salamanders on them.   Or hell, maybe it does, and everyone on MTV dresses like Latter Day Saints Missionaries all through the 90′s.  Either way, some kind of “image” would catch on.  So I suppose this means your Scouts need one.  Any ideas?  Lobster Outfits?  Shoes on our hands?  Potato Sacks?  Reeboks?

Right, so, we also played a whale of a fun show last night, at Cafe Racer, with Audra (a solo acoustic act from Boise, ID) and Alexis V-O, an old friend from Davidson College who is from the area.  I hadn’t heard her solo music in a couple years, and it was awesome to be able to again.  Seeing old friends is also one of the coolest parts about this crazy-ass trip (can there be many of these?  because there are.), and mixing old friends and old tunes with new folks and new music and meeting people all over this damn country of ours who are doing what we’re doing and that have been so wholly generous and warm and crazytalented has been such a refreshing experience, and has kind of restored my faith in human people (working at a restaurant in New Orleans called this faith into question on a daily / hourly / minute-ly basis.   A human being of relatively normal size and stature does not need five extra sides of ranch dressing for a calzone, and also does not need to ask for them like they are reclining above you on a plush Roman Pedestal in fine robes of silver shimmering silk while you, on all fours and wearing only a potato sack and shoes made from old plastic from individually wrapped cheese slices that you melted together in secret one night [it is illegal for a commoner to be seen with cheese for they are not allowed such fine things as individually wrapped Harris Teeter Imitation Cheese Food], scurry to meet their every demand on the hopes that they may leave you some scraps of crust that you can take home to your coughing, tubercular, but still stoically and so-sadly-cheerful in spite of their Situation, children.)

Next stop: Eugene, Oregon, TONIGHT, 7.  See you there, folkers.

Hello from Minnesota!  Not much time for a long piece today, as we need to be gettin’ on the road to North Dakota (there’s a line I’ve never been able to use before) so we can make it to Seattle by our show there on Wednesday, July 7. We played a house show at a spot called Fecal Manor last night, and between playing in the living room for some darned cool folks, hearing some badass other acts (including ShugE of local band Sorry OK (who just finished a tour of their own; we shared a show in New Orleans before we left) and another MPLS. band Bouncer Fighter, who’s a hell of a lot of fun.  When I have time I hope to write a lot more about this town, and Chicago, where we just left and had a dayum blast– so much music has come from both cities and it’s been so, so cool to be a small part of their musical cultures & c.  Cool?  Allright.  To North Dakota, and the cheering throngs that will surely line I-94 as we pass.  ALSO Happy AmericaDay!

Anyways, with the wedding of Rachel Smith and Stephen Figura (now Rachel and Steph Figurasmith) concluded, the Mohican Scouts were ready to rock out at the Lovin’ Cup, a small narrow Brooklyn bar with nightly music and what seemed like a pretty hefty crowd of regulars.

The Lovin Cup was packed with loved ones from all different stages of Parker and my respective lives – college friends, cousins, and high school friends. It’s been great to go so many places and to feel so at home all the time.

All in all New York was quite enjoyable. I managed to not have to navigate the public transit alone (who knows what strange place I would find myself in if left to my own devices in a New York City subway), and got to visit parks, pubs, friends, and spend a wonderful night on the roof overlooking the Manhattan skyline.

Oh yeah. And the MOMA is closed on Tuesdays, in case anybody was wondering.

It was such a cool reward after a day of almost absurd combinations of traffic and weather getting through N.Y.C. and Connecticut.  We literally could not go twenty miles in Connecticut without having to slow down to a stop, on the interestate.  It took us something like 3 hours to get through the state, and Connecticut is the opposite of state that it should take three hours to get through.  It was a triumph to leave Connecticut.  It also didn’t help that we were almost late to a gig and freaking out with greater insanity at each subsequent trafficjam that we encountered.  I suppose these Yankeefolk just get used to them.  It was also neat to meet all of Becca’s people, after dragging her through Kentucky and North Carolina, my old haunts.

As it’s been a long while, a quick recapitulation (what up, Dr. Botelho) of where we’ve been and played:

• -June 18 in Davidson, N.C., at Summit Coffee, my old place of employment and site of many a goofy essay that I wrote while at Davidson College.
• -June 19 at the Common Market in Charlotte, N.C., a really sweet corner store-turned-coffee-shop-turned-patio-bar type of place where you can get a cheap bottle of wine or break up a sixpack of Nice Beer or pull tallboys out of the PBR-can-shaped cooler for $1.37 and drink them on the patio out back.  It was a spot I loved to hit in college (Davidson is just up the Interstate from Charlotte), and it was really neat, in a circle-of-life sort of way, to be able to play music there, and to get to explore the Plaza/Midwood neighborhood a bit.  I used to bitch quite a bit about Charlotte, and it definitely has its sterile spots, and weird sleetgreyvaguelyfuturistic skyline and bank headquarters and all that, but it’s got some incredibly cool, laid-back, and pretty spots as well.  I just wish I’d known more about it in college.
• -June 20 saw us in The Grace Kelly Suite of the Manor Inn in Asheville, N.C., an apartment in a converted grand-old-turn-of-the-century-mountain-hotel.  This particular apartment was named from actually having hosted Ms. Kelly while she was filming her last movie at the Biltmore estate in 1956.  It was also featured as the Asheville Citizen-Times’ Home of the Week recently.  Catherine Walker (you may know her from the Citizen-Times story) was cool enough to put together a little doo-dah for us on her deck, and we played as the sun set over this crazy green mountainscape.  It was pretty surreal how gorgeous it all was, especially coming from New Orleans, a city 507 miles from any kind of hill / dale / modest variety of incline.

 (view from the deck as taken by the Citizen-Times)

• -June 21 saw us at Seven Day Weekend in Greensboro, N.C., a new DIY space in a re-emerging part of town that was left for dead as recently as twenty years ago.  There was a date mix-up, so the headliner didn’t make it, and the other supporting band had their van break down along the Tennessee state line, so a four-band bill ended up as two, with us following a badass solo set by Mat Masterson of Greensboro band Friend House.  It was a super-intimate show– there was way cool lighting, and it was totally quiet, and the folks who came did so to see music, and we met some incredibly cool people.  It was a fun show, and a space I’d recommend if you’re in the area. 
• -June 23 (Wednesday) had your Scouts waking up with full damned bellies in Washington, D.C., thanks to Dr. Hunter Stone.  We wandered around the Capitol in the afternoon and saw an exhibit of Allen Ginsberg photos at the National Gallery before playing at the Wonderland Ballroom that night.  Despite a soundboard located a few rooms away (only kind of an exaggeration), we played a fun show for some damn good people– folks I hadn’t seen since college, folks I hadn’t seen since going to India in 2007, and a surprise guest in my Uncle David.  The folks at the bar were incredibly sweet as well.

Allright, there’s your recap, goodnight, goodevening, goodeverything–

So after a lengthy absence, your favorite Obscure Indie-Folkish Group’s Sparsely Updated Blog is back (and has migrated to new digs! all the thanks in the world to Josh Pitts for designing our new site, which has turned out so incredibly cool-looking) for what will be a much more regular and running account of this crazy-ass tour that we’ve begun.  I write to you presently from Louisville, Kentucky, home of Muhammad Ali, the cheeseburger (the world’s first was served at Kaelin’s Restaurant in 1934, which operated continuously on the corner of Newburg & Speed up until last year, when some scumbags bought it and turned it into an awful, generic-Irish-kitsch-themed bar called Mulligan’s, approximately the 379th awful, generic-Irish-kitsch-themed bar in Louisville), the sisters who wrote the “Happy Birthday” song, and several generations of my family.   I grew up here in a neighborhood called Crescent Hill, a part of town subdivided originally in the late 1800′s and home to a bunch of Victorian-era houses and Big Old Trees. 

(taken by my sister Peyton in Indiana)

It may not seem it on the surface, but Louisville is kind of a fascinating place– founded in 1778 on what was then America’s frontier (though in a few short decades this frontier moved quickly and dramatically Westward, causing a disgusted Daniel Boone to pack up and move to Missouri after he racked up a sizeable debt in towns that had popped up in the wilderness he had explored, towns being the sort of places he’d spent much of his life escaping) it peaked in both commercial viability and national importance in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and has largely been successfully anal-retentive about leaving old buildings standing where many similarly sized and positioned cities (I’m looking at you, Nashville) have made little effort.  (ed’s note: I’m not citing anything specifically here, so don’t go off listing me as a source for your fourth grade Kentucky History paper, but a fanastic history of the area can be found in the 1882 volumes “A History of Ohio Falls Cities and Their Counties,” copies of which happen to be in my parents’ living room). 

The whole place just has this subtly quirky feel, being at the northern extreme of a quasi-southern state and home to perhaps the largest quantity of gambling-and-alcohol-based Catholic Church Picnics this side of the Vatican (though you should see the dollar blackjack table at Pope Benedict’s Vatican Family Picnic).  We’ve all made a collective decision to be very proud of either living here or being from here, but it seems like none of us are exactly sure why.  Louisvillians who encounter one another abroad will in short order find out which high school the other went to and then nod in understanding at the answer (we really like nodding in understanding), and out at bars, I’ve often been asked what grade school I went to.  It’s a weird thing, but I kind of like it a lot.  I’m by no means ready to hunker down here, as so many of my friends have, but it’s a wonderful place to be able to call home.  

the University of Louisville has twice won the N.C.A.A. basketball championship and if you disagree that this is an Important Fact then you are probably not from Louisville

TOUR-WISE,We have now played three shows:

Friday, June 11, we played at The Cove in Memphis, a pirate-themed pub with a legitimate Pirate Ship serving as the place’s bar.  We played to my brother, my old man, and some of my brother’s Memphis folks (he lived there for 7ish years), and the bar-regulars.  The people who ran the place were extremely cool people and a lot of fun.  It’s always weird to play over people’s conversation when people don’t necessarily come to see you perform, but taking that into account, the show went fantastically and we had a blast.

June 12 saw us at Derby City Espresso in Louisville, a new (to me, at least, it’s 2 or 3 years old I believe) coffee shop / bar / venue that’s opened up very near Downtown.  I hadn’t played in Louisville since the breakup of underground posterkids Milo and Otis years ago (we were so underground that we played only two shows, ever, one of those two being a reunion show.  Try and tell me that’s not punk rock.), so it was really, really cool to be able to bring everything I’ve been working on for the past few years home to my old friends and family.  This whole tour is going to be a series of “THIS IS YOUR LIFE” moments for both Becca and myself, and my Louisville moment was a damned cool one.  Thanks to all you folks for coming, seriously.  The mic was a little strange and I kept popping it whenever I used a plosive (“p” or “b”), but there was a fun freaking energy and I’m so glad to have had the opportunity.  Jerry Castle of Nashville and Follow That Bird of Austin both played as well and are worth checking out in their own right.  It was a cool night all around.

June 13 had us in Lexington, Kentucky, at a little dive called Al’s Bar on 6th and Limestone near their downtown.  I’ve only been twice, but it’s easily my favorite bar in Lexington (okay so it’s only one of two that I’ve ever been in but it’s a great little spot).  The folks who work there are incredibly sweet, and they have Ale-8-one on tap.  We got to play for some old friends I hadn’t seen since high school who were badass enough to come out and a few other folks who happened to wander in.  The Fillmore?  No.   Fried Green Tomatoes, Ale-8-one, and getting to take highway 62 into town?  Aw shucks baby, now you’re just telling me what I want to hear.

Heading to North Carolina this afternoon, for shows in Davidson, Charlotte, Asheville, and Greensboro.  More to come, more to come, wish the van whatever luck you can spare.