is this thing on?

***If the tour manager is not happy, no one is happy***

(Give the man some, Fini)

So Mike has been doing an excellent job of keeping the blog updated. I'm going to post a massive update once I get back to the states, probally in a video format...but in the meantime, I'm just curious who's out there reading this thing. So if your out there checking this out, post a comment and let us know!

And now for your viewing pleasure, a couple of pix(we will post a ton to flicker once we get back)

Cheers,

-Jason

First dud

We'll pick it up in Limeira.

The show was at a club called Kingston. It was an all concrete dive kind of place, which we really dug, reminded Jason of some places in NY. We met the owner, Gamba, unloaded our gear and hung out for a while. It was a beautiful night, really warm with a cool breeze, the place was up on a hillside overlooking the city and they had an outdoor patio we were chilling on. Very serene. Lots of awesome grafiti there as well, and before the show we met the artist and learned he was going to be finishing a piece there while we were playing. We ate some burgers yet found ourselves still waiting for a good one. After a while, people started to show up and we realized we were by far the oldest people there. The place was full of teenagers, and we were playing an all ages show!! (we weren't aware of this beforehand), which everyone knows how we feel about that. The two opening bands were all kids, a screamo band and a grindcore band. We got up and did our thing, we played more of our harder songs as that seemed to be the general feel of the night. Sergio got up and joined us on drums for a song(PS sos), then proceeded to trip over the power strip powering the whole stage so the power went out. Jay kept playing, and Anne got everyone clapping and singing along. Dan and I started playing metal riffs to Jays beat, altho of course there was no sound. But when they reconnected the power, boom, the amps came on, everyone was clapping and singing, we went into a huge crecendo and everyone went nuts. I'm realtively sure Jay broke his 3rd drum seat at some point. Jason has been destroying drum equipment left and right. After we finished, everyone was really excited to meet us. We went outside and it was autographs and pictures and hugs and awkward conversations and all that good stuff we've come to love down here. Holy shit, we found Dans long lost twin, this girl who couldn't have been more than 18 yrs old. We took pictures of them next to each other and I swear to god, we had to double check when we left and make sure we had Dan with us and not her. One girl in particular told us we were the best live band she'd ever seen, said we were a mix of the Pixies and Sonic Youth. Afterwards, we got interviewed for a documentary they are doing about that club. The kids at the show described themselves as broke ass high schol kids, however we sold more cds at this show than all the other shows combined(this is what all ages shows are about!). The enthusiam was great. The only bummer of the night was we learned that alot of the 2 song CDs we've been handing out have been duds, as in, don't play. But we'll deal with that later. All around, one of the more memorable nights of the tour.

Funny story about the drive home, which was brutal, Anne had to talk non-stop just to keep me awake. Luckily, she had had a few and was the right woman for the job, as those of you that know her can attest. Jason rode with Sergio. It was about 2 hours back to SP from Limeira, it was 4AM by the time we got back into the city. As we were coming closer to Sergios house, I noticed him picking up the pace a bit, and you have to understand I'm driving a giant box Fiat with a 1.7 liter engine and 100Lbs of equipment in the back so she don't accelerate or corner too well. They also have gnarly speedbumps all over the city, alot of them disguised, and I can bottom the van easily if I'm not careful. So gradually, Sergio was pulling away from me, I'm trying to figure out what te hell he s doing, until eventually we went through this one chicane and he was gone, so we're thinking, Oh shit, now we are lost in downtown SP at 3AM in a giant van full of equipment. We went around the block, and realized that we were pretty close to Sergios. SP is a mess, but we figured it out somehow pretty quickly (we were only a blck away actually). But as we pull up to the end of Sergios street, we see Sergios car parked, Jason flagging us down, and Sergio haul ass sprinting up the street holding his ass. Jason tells us Sergio was 2 seconds away from shitting his pants, which is why he started to book it home. He weighed his options and shitting his pants was the worse options to us getting lost in SP. I agree. He made it just in time apparently, but the situation was critical.

Next night was Jethros bar. We've been wanting to meet Jethro for a long time cuz, how often does that happen?

More Shows

We just got back to SP last night from our mini tour through the northern part of Sao Paulo.  Very little sleep, lots of Skol, some great shows, lots of great people.  So last we wrote was after Sao Carlo, which was a wild night.  The guys we were staying with took us by the local college radio station in the morning where they all work.  It was incredible, the entire station is run on Linux with open source software and they play all genres of music, mostly local bands.  They are trying to build up the station and are a huge part of supporting local msuic, Jason and Anne had alot of fun talking with them as they were also involved with their local college radio back in Michigan.  We saw alot of people there from the show the night before, so it was a good way to refresh on names and faces.  Sao Carlo was a beautiful place.

We headed next to Araraquara to play at a place called Caibar.  We first headed over to the venue.  We had some time to kill so I juggled, Dan ran laps, Sergio smoked crack out of his phone, and Jason and Anne napped.  We found out we were the only band playing that night, met Junior who was the booker, and unloaded our stuff.  We then went and checked into one of the creepier hotels I've ever been in (they had postd signs that warned of scorpians), and we all more or less passed out for a while as we were still pretty beat up from the night before.  We woke up about 30 minutes before we were supposed to go on and when we got to the club we were sort of still asleep and kind of sour.  The stage there had big yellow X's on it where someone had fallen through it a couple nights before.  We were told to please not step there.  Lots of technical difficulties here, as has been the case mostly everywhere.  But that shit is our forte.

We played a more spacey set which matched our mood.  It was a big place, but there were only about 50-60 people there.  Apparently we were way too loud and it appeared that everyone left, but what really happened is that most people just hung out towards the back of the club in the lounge area.  We thought it might have been a dud but once again, we were approached by a bunch of people afterwards telling us how much they loved it.  We signed some cds, hung out for a while, then went to Habibs (some sort of Brazilian-Middle Eastern fast food joint) for some burgers and pizza.  Bad move, most of us felt like shit the next morning.  Also, when we woke up in the hotel the next morning most f us were covered with bugs.  We got the funk out.

OK, we headed to Ribeira Preto next, which translates to "Black Stream",  The place was grimy.  We headed to the hotel we were supposed to stay at, which looked to be worse than th one the night before so we said "Awwww hell nah".  They told us there was a nicer version of the same hotel down the street and we should check that one out.  When we got there, there was yellow police tape across the entrance, no bullshit.  So we found a much nicer hotel and checked in.

Jason tried to find the pool but found out it was some kind of practical joke for gringoes.  Thre was no pool.  We napped again, but this time it was nice.  We headed over to the venue, LIVER ROCK POWER.  The owner was the man, he appeared to be extremely drunk, but we later found out he was mostly just Irie.  There was a 14 year old gil there waiting for us.  She wasn't old enough to see the show, but she just came down to get our autographs and take pictures with us.  It was our teeniebopper moment.

We ended up going on, again, at like 2 AM.  The place was dead empty when we started (the two opening bands were ... interesting), but it filled up decently by the time we were done with our first song.  We played really well, people seemed to like it lot.  We were planning to play without Dan actually because he was too busy making out with a young Brazilian chick on a pool table upstairs and we didn't want to cblock, know what I'm sayin?  But bros before caminhoes (portugese for truck), so he came down and played.  Also, apparently some american hating jealous dude was there and tried to fight Dan before getting kicked out by the owner because he was trying to flirt with the girl as well.  We later found the guy outside waiting to jump Dan as we were leaving.  Sergio, Jason, the owner and I had to cross our arms and form a human wall as Dan snuck past us into the van with his hunny.  We dropped her off down the street, dan said goodbye with body language since she didn't speak a word of english, and we headed back to the hotel.  We ate some kickin crossaints.  I also learned that they show some pretty awful shit on cigarette packs in Brazil.  I won't mention specifics but it made me naseous.

Sooo, then off to Kingston (Limeira).  Gotta go, I'll hopefully write aboutlast night later.  It was incredible though.

The grind begins ...

(Mike)

OK, its Friday, I think. We have embarked on the realistic part of the tour now, and said goodbye to festivals and catering and being driven around and treated like we are the Beatles.

Lets see, Wednesday night, we played in Sorocaba at the Imperium bar with a band called The Biggs, a really good punk band. The singer, Flavia, is an instructor at a rock and roll camp for girls in Portland Oregon, and is a badass. They rip. We played really well, jumped around, broke some strings, fried some amps, ate some burgers, met some people that had heard of us or had seen us already at one of the fests, which was neat. Everybody there, Andre from the Name, and especially the Biggs, were really cool people, we hung out with them afterwards and had some beers, went out to an all night place to eat some chicken balls, then drove the hour home back to Sergios in Sao Paulo. Sergio almost drove off the road after falling asleep at the wheel, and Jason had to grab the wheel from the passenger seat to save the day.

We´ve gotten our first taste of driving around Sao Pàulo, in a big clunky Fiat van no less. Its a blast, let me tell you. You gotta stay on your toes, and actually be a bit of a prick or else you will get nowhere and probably kill a motorcyclist. Road laws are purely suggestions here, and the traffic is insane.

So luckily, yesterday morning, we headed out of Sao Paulo city for a 4 day mini tour, in the sense that we are not going to drive back to the city after these shows, but just crash somewhere and head to the next one. We drove 4 hours out to San Carlos, a college town north of the city. Before the show we got the Brzilian version of hotdogs whic is ... strange. We played at the cd release party for a band called Plano Proximo, a sort of sugar pop band. Carol, the singer, and all of them, were great people and very friendly. Probably because it was sort of their party, the atmosphere at this club was a big contrast from the night before and we were curious how it was going to go for us. There were djs playing mashup dance music, then a pop band, and then us. Oh and we went on at 2AM.

Oh yeah, shit, it was also Jasons Birthday. So happy Birthday to Jason.

We played probably our best set of the tour so far. People were diggin it and stuck around for our whole set, which probably ended around 3am or so. AND we got our first A.M. (after Mike) encour. A few people especially, including Carol from Plano Proximo, gave us huge props.

Oh, also have to mention we met Mark, the drummer from the Dead Rocks, a local surf rock band that played the Goiania noise fest. Besides being the man, he also let us know that lots of people in Goinia were buzzing about us. We were entertained at the end of the night by a really crazy drunk chick that had everyone laughing. Thenwe crashed at Phillipe´s, a local radio DJ. Now, we go for breakfast. Oh, and I almost took out the driver side rearview this morning.

More later ...

Poster-CalumetHecla

Poster-CalumetHecla
Originally uploaded by mark2b2001

Updated tour poster!!!

Ton's of pix!!

DAY OFF 1 - Mike

We were originally supposed to play a show in a park tonight, but there were terrential downpours there all day the day before and there was some problem with electricity so the gig was cancelled. Gabriella took us all around the city of Sao Paulo instead. We rode the bus and subway, walked around, got breakfast (we had these Brazilian rolls with cheese bake dinto them), went to a huge marketplace that used to be a train station and ate lunch (mortadella sandwiches) and ice cream. We went shoe shopping. We went to a mall, which was huge, and Anne and Gabby girled out and shopped. We then met up with Eduardo (the other half of Debate) at his house and we made pasta dinner and chilled out, DIDNT drink, and just talked about culture, music and whatnot. It was a perfect chill night to regroup and get our bearings.

Pictures of us were popping up on flickr and in RollingStone. Anne is pretty much always the center of attention, and there were some great shots of her screaming. We read a review of the show by some local columninst thats well respected. He kind of flamed the fest a little, but gave us some props for having really avant guard music that people still were able to connect with. He also said something about our music being depressing, which we thought was funny.

check it ...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/eugeniovieira/3053436490/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/eugeniovieira/3052602699/in/set-72157609718261424/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ulissesbarbosa/sets/72157609989504092/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/carttilagem/3050834368/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/moralis/page2/ (look down the page)

Theres more popping up hour by hour. If you search around for calumet hecla, calumet-hecla, Sp noise fest, Goinia noise fest and whatnot, you should be able to find some more pix. They were shooting video at the Goinia fest, and we'll hopefully be able to get the footage at some point. And we took lots of pix and some video.

*****************************************
I have to say something about all the doom and gloom we were hearing about Brazil. I have seen absolutely nothing to make me feel unsafe here at all. So far, at least in the areas we have been in, its like any other city. Watch your shit and stay alert. No big deal.

Brazilians are such a racially diverse people that we don't necessarily stand out much as Americans, at least not on looks alone. I've fooled various people after greeting them with a couple portugese phrases, and they assume I'm Brazlian. There are people here from african, european and latin decent, and every possible mix of those three. Its really an amazing thing to see. The atmosphere is completely laid back, no one becomes hostile to us once they find out we are american. It really is a very cool place. Goiania was a tad bit more brotherly. Sao Paulo is much more like the New York of Brazil, but still not the dangerous place we were made to think it is.

-Mike