Coalmine Canary - Doppelgangers in Disguise Tour Diary

Coalmine Canary (myspace.com/coalminecanarymusic)
Doppelgangers in Disguise Tour Diary

Wednesday, January 21st

Since we don’t believe in being overly prepared, we started packing today. After hand washing our laundry (the pipes in our washing machine froze) I headed to work and left all the packing up of equipment up to Justin and Andrew. Work was uneventful (I work at a perfume store in Burlington, MA that no one goes to). I got back to Lowell at 10PM, we packed up my van (which only has one working door) and hit the road.

It’s a 7 hour drive to Baltimore. Andrew mostly slept. I drove the first 3 hours and Justin the last 4. We talked about our childhoods and listened to the terrible music that reminded us of those awkward adolescent years (Limp Bizkit’s 3 Dolla Bill Y’All in its entirety as well as Korn’s Life is Peachy).

Thursday, January 22nd

We arrived in Baltimore somewhere around 6AM, stopped at a Dunkin Donuts and asked for directions to the nearest hotel. We don’t have enough money to stay at a hotel but we figured that a hotel parking lot would be a safe place to crash for awhile without being bothered by anyone. We were in the parking lot for about 10 minutes before we got sketched out by the security cameras and the non-executive borders at the Executive Inn. We consulted the GPS and found a Wal*Mart 15 minutes away. Despite my absolute disdain for the business ethics of Wal*Mart, the parking lot, being huge and not well lit, is a perfect place to crash.

At noon, Tovio Roberts, of the Calliope of the Future , called me and told us to head down to the collective his friends live at, just a few minutes away. The collective is really amazing, a lot of radical literature and musical instruments all over the place complete with friendly residents. The people living there (Ilanna, Emily, and Porter) had accumulated a bunch of wool coats from an abandoned factory down the street and since they had so many, all of us are now decked out in 1970’s style wool jackets.

After talking and hanging out for awhile, we heard a chopper overhead and someone on a loudspeaker say, “The cops have the place surrounded, you’ve got nowhere to go.” Straight out of a movie, cinematic really. We all ran outside to see what was happening, took seats on the wooden fence and watched a swarm of cops stomp through the backyard to arrest some guy on a roof across the street. The suspect was up on the roof, already in flexcuffs, where he was jumping from rooftop to rooftop. I have no idea how he climbed up a roof while in handcuffs or how he escaped from the cops in the first place but there he was, looking scared but determined not to be arrested (though the situation looked futile from our perspective). Someone in the house decided that he deserved some musical encouragement, so we found a guitar amp and blasted “The Final Countdown” and “Breaking the Law”, imagining him escaping in some kind of montage. After everything subsided we heard several different accounts of what happened. Someone said he fell through the skylight and died. Someone said the cops found him and arrested him. Someone else said he fell through the skylight, lived, then the cops beat him up. I’d imagine the last account is probably the most accurate.

After eating some food, (thank you Kayne and Ilana for feeding us) we went up the street to Red Emma’s, an Anarchist bookstore/coffee house. Though I am not an anarchist in the strictest sense of the word, I can really appreciate both the community and the literature and I firmly believe that we can always use more class-conscious book stores. We met our friend Jane, who is the newest member of our band (she sings and plays tambourine on a bunch of our songs), at the bookstore. She is also from Massachusetts but was down in D.C. for the inauguration and decided to hitch a ride back up and play a few shows with us.

Our new friend Sine opened the show with an acoustic performance, which was utterly fantastic. Her picking/singing style reminded me of Appalachian-inspired folk. Lyrically, Sine wrote imaginative narratives about dead cowboys and tiny robots, getting the crowd to join in with appropriate sounds. I think I speak for all of us when I say that I was really impressed.

We played next and played what I consider to be our best set so far. Justin is always lecturing to me and Andrew about how we play better in acoustic settings, and though I disagree to an extent (who doesn’t love a good dance party), there is definitely something to be said for playing a more intimate show that doesn’t rely on amplifiers. We added a new song to the set, a song called “Ivory Towers”, which got a really solid response from the audience. I managed to tell the story of the police chase and the free coats (though a couple people in the audience thought I said free coke, which was certainly not the case) in between songs. Everyone clapped and a bunch of people sang the end of “A Willie Nelson Song.”

The Calliope of the Future, Tovio and Kayne, played next. It’s difficult to describe the Calliope of the Future but I will do my best for the purposes of keeping an extensive account of our tour. Tovio sings and plays accordion and Kayne plays Glockenspiel. As for genre, I would say it is something like Eastern European-influenced sci-fi oriented Vaudeville circus music. Tovio is a wanderlust world traveler with amazing stories about all the absurd people he has met in his travels and it translates perfectly into music. The only word for it is brilliant.

After the show we sold a few CDs to some really generous people who all gave us more money than we had suggested. Marcus, who volunteers at Red Emma’s, gave us $20 for a CD and told us that if we sent him the files for the CD he would remix them, which would be amazing. After we said our goodbyes, we headed out to drive to Haddon Heights, New Jersey, a 2 hour drive, to stay with our friend Rob Wilcox of the fantastic band, By Surprise.

We arrive sometime around midnight, watched a BBC show about a 476 pound (that’s 34 stone!) teenage girl, and quickly passed out soon after.


Friday, January 23rd.

Justin and I woke up to Rob jumping into bed between us. I expected this, as every time I have ever slept in the same house as Rob, he has never let me wake up on my own. One time Rob put on a fake wig and screamed lines from the musical, “Oklahoma”, until I quickly woke up in a panic, my fist missing his face by an inch. After we had all showered and dressed, we went to visit Devin, also of By Surprise, at Grindhouse Coffee where he works.

We stepped outside and realized that our hats and coats weren’t necessary. 54 degrees. Dead of winter. No clouds in the sky.

Anyway, Pat, also happened to be at the Grindhouse and we all sat down and talked about politics and Sega Genesis. Afterwards, Rob, Justin, Andrew, Jane, & I went into Philly to adventure around. We found a really amazing record store, AKA records, where I bought the Casket Lottery’s Moving Mountains for 2.99 (I’ll spare you the details of our other purchases because…you most likely don’t care). Afterwards we drove to a vegetarian restaurant/bakery for vegan cheese steaks which were amazing. Fake meat products are pretty hit or miss with me but these were really really good.

Our next stop was at an outdoor art gallery of sorts; a public garden full of mosaics (broken mirrors, bottles, and other assorted glass). I can’t accurately describe how beautiful everything was, so please see the pictures (or go to Philadelphia and see it in real life, it’s called the Magic Gardens).

We stopped at Village Thrift where we picked up a copy of D2:The Mighty Ducks 2 (my favorite movie of all time, which may have stared a young Pat Gartland) before we headed back to Robs to meet up with our friends Shannon and Erin who drove down from Massachusetts to hang out for the weekend.

Later we all went out to get some groceries and visit Dan at the record store he works at, where we of course spent an unhealthy amount of time and purchased more records. When we got back we cooked a family dinner and all sat around the table and exchanged stories. Dan explained the intricacies of an Alabama Hotpocket and we had Jane explain how “roping” works and the story behind “Eight Ropes” which I will certainly not recount here.

When we all went to the backyard we noticed a strange blue glow coming from down the street and on closer examination realized it was a giant neon sign, attached to the church, that said “Jesus Never Fails”. Not being able to resist we grabbed a camera and took group photos, most of them jump shots, under the sign. On the way back Rob told us how his friends were planning on making a B-Horror movie called, “Jesus Never Fails…To Kill You.” If they never end up making it, I might steal the idea.

I fell asleep watching D2 and the next morning I woke up to Rob Wilcox jumping on me.

Saturday, January 24th

Since Shannon and Erin hadn’t seen Philly yet we decided to venture back into the city after everyone woke up and showered. We spent most of the day shopping in the innumerable stores that line South Street. Justin and I bought more records, Andrew bought a sweater, Jane got a shirt that said, “Your man can stand under my umbrella”, Shannon and Erin bought clothes. We all spent too much money.

Rob took Justin, Andrew, and me to Tattooed Mom’s, a punk inspired bar, where we drank PBRs and talked about how we all want to move to Philly. Rob said if it didn’t work out he’d come live up with us in Lowell.

After filling up on falafel and pizza we headed back to Rob’s house to meet up with the rest of By Surprise and head to the show. The show was in Honey Brook, PA, a town an hour from Philadelphia and roughly the same amount of time to get to civilization in general. We arrived at Scotty’s house and loaded our stuff into his basement, which at that point was already packed with kids.

We played first to a responsive crowd. It felt good to be in such an intimate setting with everyone clapping, dancing, and singing along with our old friends in By Surprise and Pirouette (along with our new friends we met in the other bands and in the crowd) in attendance. CJ, who we met in Massachusetts at Philachusetts Best Friend Fest, came in halfway during our set and forced us to take our shirts off (this is actually not the first time this has happened). We finished our set shirtless, sweaty, and satisfied. Please make some kind of joke about that.

By Surprise played next. I’ve seen By Surprise somewhere in the realm of 5 times over the past 2 years and in that time I’ve become really good friends with everyone in the band and have committed all of their lyrics to heart. This was, by far, the best By Surprise set ever (and not because I wrote the set list). The energy was unprecedented and everyone in the crowd was singing and clapping along.

Factors of Four took the floor next. I had heard them previously on myspace but their live set was fantastic—girl-fronted energetic indie-rock that had everyone up and dancing. The basement was alive. Everyone was dancing or moshing and a few kids even managed to crowd surf (including myself thanks to Justin lifting me up from behind). It was ridiculous. Monster Machismo, from New York, kept the energy going with a set full of fast technical prog-inspired post-hardcore—something like Fall of Troy meets Maps and Atlases.

There was an impromptu acoustic / hip-hop performance afterward and then Pirouette took the floor. Seeing Pirouette in their own basement was a borderline religious experience for me and by the looks of it everyone else there. The basement was filled to the brim with moving bodies and sometimes you couldn’t hear Amanda and Scotty because everyone was singing so loud. You could tell that everyone was there because they wanted to be, not to get drunk (well, there was plenty of that) but to be amongst friends listening to amazing music. No big venues or productions just a lot of heart. During the last song Pirouette played, “I’ll Never Leave You Alone”, everyone moved all the way up, stood in the spaces between band members and sang along. It was beautiful in so many ways that I can’t convey here other than to say it was one of the few things alongside the movie “Life as a House” and the Penfold song, “I Will Take you Everywhere,” that actually makes me cry (I should throw in there that I’m kind of a wuss though).

It was my favorite show I’ve ever played and in my top 5 favorite shows I’ve ever seen, right between the Braid Reunion show and Texas is the Reason’s last show.

Afterwards, By Surprise+ Coalmine+ Shannon & Erin + Devin’s Girlfriend (I’m so sorry I forgot your name!) went to the Crystal Lake diner for a late night meal. My GPS thought the diner was in the middle of the woods so it took us a little longer to get there but once there, we all ate and laughed and basically passed out, getting to Rob’s somewhere around 4:30 in the morning.

Sunday, January 25th

We woke up around 1, or rather Rob woke us up in his usual manner and we decided to hang around the house for awhile and relax. When we finally got going we stopped at a Starbucks for coffee, to Target for blank CDs (it felt really good to run out of CDs), and then we all headed to this place called the Pop Shop (Not the Pop Shot much to my dismay) for lunch because it supposedly had more than 20 varieties of grilled cheese. We didn’t end up sticking around because of the wait, we had to be in NYC in a few hours and were worried about traffic.

After heading to our respective cars, we all hugged and told Rob how much we loved him and how fantastic it was that he took us in for the weekend and showed us such a good time.

The ride to NYC wasn’t bad at all, not even two hours. We got to the Parkside Lounge around 7:30 and got to check out Dan Strauss and the Ericksons who were both immensely talented. The Parkside is a cool place, the website calls it the “champagne of dive bars”, but mostly it’s just really nice. When you walk in there’s a large room with a stocked bar, a pool table, vintage table-top arcade games, and a really good jukebox (we listened to Dylan, the Beach Boys, Elvis Costello, and New Order). If you walk to the back there’s a separate room with a reasonably sized stage surrounded by chairs and tables.

When we first got the show at the Parkside, Jenny the person who does all the booking told us we could find someone to split the bill with in order to get a few more people at the show, since we don’t really have a following in NYC yet. I first asked Jason Anderson, who is amazing and who I knew would be in the city, but he wasn’t available so he directed me to his friend Jesse. Jesse has a really awesome noisy-indie folk project called the Wailing Wall. I asked Jesse and he couldn’t play either but he told me about Alixandra and the Tailor Sea, an alt-country singer songwriter with a full backing band. I sent her a message and she said she would be getting back in town the week of the show and that she was down to play. I realize this digression is kind of superfluous, but anyone who’s booked shows away from home can relate to how difficult the process of finding a venue and good local support can be.

Alixandra played a solo-set that was absolutely mesmerizing. The melodies she comes up with are original, well-executed, and really catchy. There seems to be a market for cute singer-songerwriters and I honestly feel that Alixandra outdoes Michelle Branch or Vanessa Carlton or any other pseudo-country radio darling in both talent and originality.

We played next and by the time we took the stage a bunch of our New York friends had filed into the room. A special thanks to Gilroy and Katie for being there and buying us drinks. It was kind of a weird setting for our music since I find that we are pretty solid as an acoustic act when we play a coffee shop setting or as a loud dance-party band but we have trouble finding the middle ground between those things. Regardless, the sound was really good (it’s weird playing somewhere with a professional sound guy) and our set was well received by everyone in the room.

Afterwards, we drank and drank and drank, or rather everyone else did—I was DD, and we all talked and played pool and met a lot of really cool people, including one of the guys from the Snake the Cross the Crown who just happened to be there. Some guy, who gave the illusion of having not been sober in the course of several weeks, came up to us and gave me an American Spirit cigarette box. He said something like, “Yeah you guys we’re really good…you know if McCartney and Tom Petty were mixed together… well…that would be cool…by the way, there are no cigarettes in that box.” It was probably more nonsensical, and certainly more slurred, but you get the idea.

After hanging out for a few hours we loaded up the van and headed to our friend Jenn’s apartment in Brooklyn. After being fucked with for a little while by my GPS (TomTom has quite the sense of humor) we arrived and trekked up the four flights of stairs to get to her apartment, which is really spacious and nice—contrasting the sketchiness that stretches out on the street just 40 feet below. We fell asleep almost immediately, or rather after we had a contest to see who could crack the most bones in their body and Jane politely asked if we could wait to be dicks until the morning.

Monday, January 26th

Jane had to get up at 5 AM to catch a bus back to Boston so she could make it to class in time. We actually all had class but Jane is apparently the only dedicated student in our band and we figured missing the first day for a show in Brooklyn was well worth it. I woke up around 7:30 when Jenn was leaving for work in order to move the car (8:00-9:30 street cleaning) and when I came back to the apartment, the bed had been annexed by Justin and Andrew. I took the floor and slept for most of the day, only getting up to eat a late breakfast and to watch D2 in it’s entirety.

On a side note, if you haven’t seen D2 recently I can’t reiterate enough how good of a movie it is and how necessary it is to watch it immediately. Sure the acting at times is atrocious, but the hilarious antics, Emilio Estevez, and the messages relayed in the film ( the anti-consumerism sentiment and the necessity to make a life over a living) more than make up for it.

After spending the day relaxing, we braved the cold to get take-out Chinese food from a freezing corner restaurant (the term “restaurant” used in the loosest sense of the word) with a completely unresponsive cashier who didn’t acknowledge the fact that we existed never mind that we wanted to order food. Regardless, after a while we got our food and headed back to the apartment to eat it before we drove the half mile distance down the street to Goodbye Blue Monday.

Goodbye Blue Monday, formerly the Trash Bar, is a bar/café decorated floor to ceiling with junk-art and old records. The decorations help to provide a creative atmosphere for all kinds of musical performances and movie screenings and it makes me wish we had something equivalent in our area. When we got there around 9, Alanna Fugate and Ray Rizzo started playing a split set of their respective solo songs. Alanna reminded me a lot of Ani Difranco in both the way she sang and her picking and strumming patterns in different open tunings. Ray is a little harder to pin down, but I remember Andrew and I looking at each other in mutual agreement that he was fantastic as soon as he started playing.

We played next what was to be our last set of the tour. Everything flew by so fast and it seemed like only earlier that day we were in Baltimore. We ended on a reasonably good note playing in front of a few of our good friends (Tovio and Kayne were there along with Jenn and Hannah) and since the show was streamed live online, everyone watching at home as well. At one point Andrew’s drum machine fell off the table, but remarkably didn’t break or even turn off.

We stuck around to see Tovio and Kayne play another brilliant set. Just from seeing them twice and listening to their CD a few times I was able to sing along to a bunch of their songs and anticipated the well constructed stories that accompanied them. It is really remarkable to me that Tovio and Kayne just travel around everywhere, making money doing street performances, and get by without so much as a car to take them from place to place.

After they finished we talked for a few minutes, met a new friend, Emily, who was originally from Ann Arbour (I have a theory that no one is originally from New York City) and packed up our stuff. We said goodbye to everyone, wished Tovio and Kayne luck in Europe, and saddled up for the 4 hour drive back home.

Andrew and I talked the whole ride while Justin was passed out in back. We made it safe and sound back in Lowell around 4 AM. Kevin was up waiting for us and we filled him in on what happened during the tour, though most of the stuff he had already heard since we had been texting him as it happened in return for random quotes from the movie “How High” (no, that’s the ivory).

This tour, though relatively short in time and distance traveled, has been life affirming for me. The ability to wake up somewhere new and play the music you love every night is something I will never take for granted. Being able to travel and see the people you love dispersed all around the place is something I will never cease to appreciate. I’ve already said my thank you’s to the people that made this tour both possible and exceptional but saying thank you is something that one should never hope to grow tired of, so—
Thank you to Tovio, Kayne, Ilanna, Gabby, Porter, Emily, Marcus, Sine, Rob Wilcox (you are our collective favorite person right now), Dan, Pat, and Devin (all of By Surprise), Scotty, Amanda, Kyle (Happy Birthday again), CJ, Shannon, Erin, Alixandra, Gilroy, Katie, the American Spirit guy, Jenn, Hannah, and everyone else we met who watched us, bought a CD, or said some words of encouragement.


Please listen to these bands/artists:

The Calliope of the Future ( myspace.com/thecalliopeofthefuture)
By Surprise ( myspace.com/bysurpriserock)
Sine (myspace.com/sinebean)
Factors of Four ( myspace.com/factorsoffour)
Pirouette ( myspace.com/pirouettemusic)
Alixandra & the Tailor Sea ( myspace.com/alixandratailorsea)