Wags' 2005 Tour Diary: Deluxe Expanded Reissue, Volume I

In 2005, Earwig went on a U.S. tour in support of our DVD ‘Year Of The Drag’. I was persuaded to let an outside party do all of the booking for the 5 week tour which took us to OH, IL, NY, NJ, PA, NC, LA, FL, NM, AZ, CA, OR, WA, UT, KS and back to Ohio. That was a BIG mistake. Most of the shows sucked balls and we were stuck sharing the bill on the majority of the dates with another Ohio band that , how shall we say, left something to be desired. It was a learning experience and we did have a lot of fun. All’s well that ends well, I suppose. Prior to the first date of the tour, Earwig flew to Chicago for an awesome corporate gig and recorded in Engine Studios. Now that was a GREAT idea.

We liked it so much that we returned to record most of ‘Center Of The Earth’ there as well. Along the way, Matt kept a tour diary which he posted regularly to our now defunct message board. We though it might be fun to re-visit some of those entries here.
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During Earwig's summer 2005 tour, I kept a diary in my little Mead composition notebook. Various details were tweaked or omitted altogether, just for my own amusement. Whenever we were at a place with internet, I would post these diary entries on the Earwig message board with added commentary. It was fun: it gave me something to do and entertained literally dozens of people, who also posted their own words of encouragement. It also ensured our families we were still alive, without us actually having to speak to them (I left my phone in North Carolina and had to have it shipped to New Mexico).
Sadly, shortly after our return home the message board was poached to death by hackers (which is not nearly as bad as being hacked to death by poachers, but painful nonetheless). All of the colorful added commentary is lost to the world forever, but the Mead composition book remains in my possession. Here, for the first time in three years, is the first installment of my tour diary. Take a stagger with me down memory lane, won't you?

Earwig Confidential

7/20/05
NON SMOKING ROOM MY ASS

12:20 am central time DOWNTOWN CHICAGO club quarters hotel. Not very breezy for the windy city. So we all got rooms, courtesy evil tobacco LLC. Apparently I've got the best one, here on the 23rd floor - watching, to my right, The Hold Steady on Conan O'Brien (okay, I guess), and to my left, the fucking downtown Chicago skyline. I'll choose the left. Actually, the hold steady sucks. Chicago towers above me and here I am, spitting on the speedy little hotwheels below me. Ridiculous. Magnificent.
My bandmates are presumably asleep. Justin had a long, stinky night yesterday. Lizard's in his room too. Me, I've got a bottle of Jack that I need to find something to do with. Maybe one more drink. How the hell am I going to get half a bottle of JD on the plane tomorrow? Creative thinking. Gonna be a bumpy ride. Street noises in Chitown are surprisingly loud - even 23 stories up. Tomorrow we make the hits at the (rented out) Metro. But I'll be up all night. ->How the hell did I get myself into this? ->And I wonder if I can get myself into this again?

The Silver Baby Cup

Here at LFM secret HQ, everything is grand. As I mentioned in the inaugural post for this blog, there’s a golf course in my front yard named ‘Assisi Threepio’. My best friend and numero uno golf-buddy is a shipwright and knows lots of crazy pirates. We play golf just about every weekend and we're full of glorious ideas so we decided to start our own golf tournament and invite all of our wonderful, crazy friends! On Halloween weekend we hosted the first ever Assisi Threepio Silver Baby Cup Challenge. Sixteen golfers, thirty spectators, four rounds of elimination golf, a one hundred dollar cash prize and a very nice engraved silver trophy cup. Guests arrived from all over the United States to camp for the weekend. Folks from Maine, Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia, New Mexico and Arkansas regaled to the sounds of Earwig (with Nick S. on drums!) at the annual Freeman’s Secret Ball costume party bash on Friday night. The band played on a specially built outdoor stage constructed just for the occasion.

Saturday saw it’s share of surprises and upsets with the first four rounds of golfers.

And an outstanding evening of entertainment from our pals the Itinerant Locals and Trapper Haskins.

Sunday was the final round of golf. I actually came in second

(thank-you very much).

The trophy, the large $100 check and the honor to host next year’s tournament went home with Andres Bermudez, otherwise know as the "Madman in the kilt".

Election Blues

I’m into my second cup of coffee, letting the new record from Gone drag me into a guitar-skronk fueled trance. Ripping metal claws and a pulsating beat are digging holes in my psych. Hammer-on, pull, bend...skronk! I like it. It mirrors the sound my life is making, going full blast in several different directions at the same time. My new position with MoveOn.Org has been taking up a lot of time. But instigating reckless political debate on street corners is important work ...and fun. Skronk! The power outage in Columbus put a crimp in the progress of our album and upcoming DVD documentary. Earwig plays in Cleveland this weekend. Reading “The Tao of Physics” by Capra. Organizing a Midwest tour for Earwig next summer....wait. Time for a slow blues-jam, walking bass-line with an epic slam-dancing drumbeat. How does that work? It just does.

Horror In The Hills

When we lived at the farm, deep in the hills, Rich Cefalo came to visit with his newly found Super 8 camera in tow. He'd just bought it at the Goodwill store in Columbus and it had one roll of film left in it. That afternoon, we decided to shoot a Low Budget Masterpiece. We built the script around our one obvious prop...a menacing looking dog cage. I grabbed a suitcase, a hat, a suit and tie from the old clothes closet on the farm and we got underway. I play a traveling salesman who has lost his way. We shot each scene consecutively with no second takes. It was all or nothing. It was fall and the trees were beautiful. Aaron Freeman plays the hapless pumpkin farmer and his younger brother Daniel was in charge of lighting. Lighting consisted of a cheap mirror we pulled from the medicine cabinet. Daniel held it in his hands and used it to reflect a small patch of ultra-bright sunlight in my face for every shot. You can see the rectangle of light bounce around as young Daniel moved along with Rich as he filmed each scene. These were the days before steady-cam. Behind the main farm house, there was a lonely outbuilding that, for some unknown reason, was filled with sun-bleached animal skulls. This seemed like the perfect spot to devise the demise of our hero. Corn syrup + pumpkin entrails = a gruesome end. In spite of our shortcomings, the 3 minute epic came out well and we watched it once. The cheap projector (also from Goodwill) ripped the start of the films-strip (that's why it skips badly in the beginning). And so this Super 8 masterpiece sat in an old drawer for several years. Until last week.

I brought it to Matt Parker to archive the footage and figure out some way to use it later on. Matt immediately got excited that it would make a great music video for Earwig. He was right. It might not be obvious from the first viewing, but Matt had a LOT of work to do to make this footage into a good music video. There are so many things that might not work out with timing, no convenient edits, finding the right song etc...But in Matt's hands, Horror In The Hills took on a new life. Originally shot by Rich Cefalo, conceived by Rich, Aaron and Lizard and eventually edited and set to music by Matt Parker. This is Earwig's video for 'Parked'. Enjoy.

One Night in Bangkok

It’s been quite a stroll down memory lane, compiling videos and photo evidence for the upcoming Earwig Gone Wild – DVD series. I remember the night a strapping collection of lesbians wandered in on Earwig’s gig at Café Bourbon Street. They seemed a bit bored and were probably looking for the bar next door. But they quickly livened up when I called them out and started asking for requests. Soon, three divine young ladies staked out the real estate directly in front of the band. After a few songs, I invited them all up on stage to sing while the boys and I improvised some “slow jams”. Things got a little intense. Two of them started “dirty dancing” and I ended up riding the other one around the bar like a pony. Do they make a saddle for that?

SleepStandingUp

Tony and Leilah are getting married. They’re going to be very happy, of that much I’m sure. It’s rare to meet two people who are so incredibly nice and as well-matched as those two are. Tony actually went to the same high-school as I did, Whitehall. Although it was after I graduated so I didn‘t meet him then. But he’s been an Earwig fan since back in the golden years of LFM (the 1990’s!). While we were on tour, Earwig even stayed over at their place in Las Cruces, New Mexico. They brought their whole gang of friends out and that show is one of the best tour memories we have. It was an incredible night. After high-school, Earwood joined the military and moved away from Columbus, but it seems like there is no end to his circle of friends. Some of his C-Bus pals who are going to the wedding offered to pay to fly me and the band out to play at Tony & Leilah’s reception. It’s quite an honor to even be asked, but we can’t go. Tony says that SleepStandingUp from Mayfeeder is one of his favorite Earwig songs. So here’s a special rendition of that tune just for the bride & groom. Congratulations.

SleepStandingUp
Autumn falls and here am I, beneath this windshield that’s built to protect me
Swallow it whole, ginger blue sunshine
is all mine
Try to find you and I will, my sympathies run high tonight
the boy with the cool fag haircut, was he the one
made you so sad
It’s all made up, yr an angel in my eyes
you know the truth and I’m a liar
he uses me

It takes a thin young man to say the things a giant can’t
call me yr thin young man
Sometimes I rely on you to tell me how I feel
Severely restricted and gingerly kissed, mouth wide open
like this

The choice I haven’t made could be my big mistake
I’m hearing opera through the door

I know myself, and it wouldn’t be right, to say the least
Sometimes I rely on you to tell me how I feel
Severely restricted and gingerly kissed, mouth wide open

Yr my warm spider web
Yr my suck benefit
Yr my remember dog
Yr mine

* The first time we played the song, Matt’s amp fell over. The second time we played it, I forgot the words. On the third try, we made it all the way through and that’s what you see here. Third attempt, two cameras, one take. Allan Foster filmed us in Matt’s room on Wednesday night and then our pal Matt Parker edited it together the very next day. Thank you very much to those two guys for helping make this happen.

Bambi vs. Lizard

I am a savior to the animals. Or at least I try to be. Although I'm not "exactly" Catholic, my patron Saint is Saint Francis. He was a good friend to the animals and he liked to talk to worms. That makes him pretty cool in my book (yes, I have a book). St. Francis was always down with helping an animal in need. I look to his example and we even have a small sanctuary (on the grounds of our secret compound, deep in the hills of Southern Ohio) that we call St. Francis park. In the picture above, you can see a few of the many St. Francis statues in the background. One day last spring, I was sitting in St. Francis park meditating when I heard Bambi's desperate calls and rescued her from a savage pack of canines. These days I'm mostly dealing with cold blooded creatures. I've recently saved several friendly turtles (Box turtles and Painted turtles, typically. Snapping turtles are very grumpy and can be down-right mean) and a few snakes. I also rescue cats. I have way too many cats, but that's another story altogether.

The song that wouldn't die

Earwig made a few trips down to The Recording Workshop in Chillicothe, OH. prior to actually starting work on ‘Center Of The Earth’. The sessions are run by the students and the bands get free recording time in exchange for serving as guinea pigs to their progress. We mostly used the sessions as rehearsals and often never even heard the final mixes. Most of the songs never even saw the light of day. The Workshop keeps the files around on a hard drive though and students can pick from their catalog for their final mix projects before graduating. Recent RW grad. Ralph Miller has posted his mix of Used Kids on his Myspace page . It’s funny because I don’t even remember recording that song there. He did a very good job on this alternate version. This is an early demo of Used Kids and it’s interesting to note the differences from the final album version. Check it out. If you dig it, leave him a comment.

Made by AmyD

My pal AmyD makes clothes. She designs everything herself and she has an expert eye, keeping her focus on making things stylish yet comfortable. Amy’s heart is in the right place too and she works hard to come up with ideas that re-use materials. You can find her awesome recycled coffee sleeves at Yeah Me Too coffee in Clintonville. She makes beautiful skirts, dresses, scarves, aprons, tops and more. But what she really excels at is business. She’s been a successful manager at the corporate level for a large book-store chain. In the 1990’s she owned and operated her own independent book, comic and zine store in Columbus called 'Joe Books'. These days, she’s turned her attention to her clothing business. She’s just opened her own AmyD shop at Java Central in Westerville and got a nice write-up in The Columbus Alive too. There’s just something about her clothes that appeals to my sharp, independent streak. I know that she doesn’t like the term, but I think “Fashion Maven” describes her well. If the shoe fits, wear it. That’s what I say. And while yr at it, check out AmyD’s Etsy shop and the official AmyD website http://www.madebyamyd.com/ . She’s Earwig’s #1 fashion consultant and even designed the outfit for the actress in our video for She Is A Witness. If you watch the whole thing, AmyD is in the video too...at the end. She gets hit in the head with an Earwig cassette. We had to film that scene about 10 times! What a good sport...

Now Dance!

New: Used Kids Radiation Room Remix
download it now.

Last year, The Columbus Roller Girls had Earwig play at their title bout at the fairgrounds. It was a fun gig and I ran into my old pal Paul Kavicky at the show. Paul is an audio professional and moderates a forum on live audio over at The WOMB, which is a gathering of minds for forward thinking audio engineers. Since I also work in audio and play in band, Paul asked me to do a web-interview with him there and it ended up being a good time. DJ Peter Carli, who creates professional club remixes and has a show on XM radio, heard Earwig through the WOMB interview and approached me about doing a remix of our song Used Kids. I must say, I think he did a fantastic job. He really took this track and ran with it, coming up with something completely new and different from the original version. You can download the song for free over at The Daily Chorus. It’s getting mentions in a few places online. Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Year of the Used Kids

I remember being very excited to play CD101 Day at the LC in 2007. Pretty unbelievably, our song “Used Kids” was being played on the radio like crazy. 400 spins in 6 months. You do the math. We got our own dressing room and were generally treated like conquering kings. Earwig got the second to last slot, which was great. The place was packed and the audience was incredible. Despite our nerves, we actually didn’t screw up and played pretty well. It was one of the biggest and best shows we had played up until that point. Then FOX TV called and asked us to come in for an interview and to play the song on their morning show ‘Good Morning Columbus’. We had planned on doing the tune as a full band but, as usual, things went awry and we ended up on-air as an acoustic duo, just me and Matt. It was a happy accident though, since I don’t know if we would have been able to deliver fully functional rock at 7am. I bet the soccer-moms probably liked the stripped down version better anyway . Next, we somehow landed the headlining spot Friday night on the main-stage at Comfest. Despite technical difficulties (with my brain) we did an admirable job and went over well with the massive audience that’s a cross-section of free-music fans and beer lovers from the Midwest. We capped the summer off with another show at the LC, this time outside, and then a short tour (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York) to promote ‘Center Of The Earth’. At the end of October, a week after we got back from the tour, we went into the studio and put down basics for 14 songs that should comprise our next full length album. All in all, it was a fantastic year. You can see clips of Earwig at Comfest, The LC, CD101 Day, FOX TV and several stops on the tour in this new video for ‘Used Kids’, superbly edited by Matt Parker. Enjoy.

*BONUS* Look for the scene where I have Matt in a headlock and then throw him to the ground. We were playing in Cincinnati. I broke a string mid-song and, disposing of my guitar, finished the tune by flailing around the stage like an aerobics instructor on PCP. I guess that I got a little caught up in the moment. Matt, if your out there...I’m sorry.

Foshy Photo

My pal Allan Foster takes lots of pictures. I don’t think that he’d call himself a photographer, even though he’s very good at it. He’s actually sort of a jack-of-many-trades, being a kick-ass photographer is just his latest hobby. In the past he’s directed, edited and shot music videos, built websites (Earwig’s website!) and played drums in a smart and influential Columbus band (Po-Po Volcano). He also makes some wicked salsa. Allan is a very talented, yet unassuming type of guy who is always happy to pick up yr slack and help out in some way. I’ve got plenty of slack that needs to be tended to, so Allan is pretty much President and C.E.O. of “Team Earwig”. He took some great pictures of Earwig in December at the Lyle Gallery. Lately he’s been getting really into this Strobist group and building his own specialty photo and lighting equipment. It's interesting stuff. He got a new camera last year and his skills have improved greatly. In addition to portraits, he’s been shooting a lot of live bands like Watershed , The Editors and Hot Hot Heat. Columbus bands The Guinea Worms and Necropolis had Allan take their picture for an upcoming piece about the Columbus underground scene for some big British Music Magazine. The picture at the top is a shot Allan took of the Guinea Worms for the Columbus Dispatch. One of Allan’s nicknames is Foshy. Wil Foster from the Guinea Worms is his brother. You should listen to a few of the Guinea Worms/Wil Foster songs. Wil is unique, funny and legally bat-shit crazy.

Low Fidelity

I like the sound of tape hiss. It’s warm and fuzzy. I like it when you fall asleep on the couch watching a movie. And when you wake up, the tv’s gone off and your left with a warm blanket of pixilated static (but not like in Poltergeist, that would be bad). There’s just something comforting about analog artifacts. Sometimes, with music, it helps blend everything together. Make it mushy. Like cake batter before the cake. It works in movies too. I loved how in Grindhouse (the movie by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez) they went to great lengths to make it an authentic tribute to B movies and exploitation thrillers. Right down to all of the fuzzy, out-of-focus camera work and stray hairs on the projector lens. My pal Matt Parker makes movies. He let me watch some cool exploitation style trailers that he tacked onto the front of a short horror movie of his called “Hack”.


I dig all of the after effects, the coming attractions, 70’s movie styling, the funky music and the foley sound work. It all makes me feel like I’m back at the drive-in. This is just stuff Matt does for kicks, he also edits video professionally (www.mattparkerproductions.com). Matt is working on a music video for Earwig. It’s a lot of rough live footage that I collected over the last year cut together to the song Used Kids. Matt has a great eye and he’s a very talented cat. It’s coming out better than I had expected. Some of the footage is well shot, glossy, bright and clean. While some of the other raw video I gave him is pretty low quality. Matt found a theme to tie it all together and used filters and other effects to get the footage to all work well as a video. He sacrificed the quality on the pristine footage to give it all a lo-fi feel. There are a few other neat tricks too. I like it. I’ll post the finished video here as soon as it‘s ready.

I like to write. But staring at a computer screen too long hurts my brain. The internet is digital and harsh. I think that coffee in the morning must be somehow analog. The more coffee I drink, the longer I can stare at the computer screen. They seem to almost cancel each other out.

Yard Golfing

When the sun comes out on a day like today, after another long winter spent indoors, I get the urge for new occupation. Today that occupation is yard golf. I live deep in the woods of southern Ohio and have no neighbors (excepting dogs, deer, cats, chickens, turkeys, rabbits, chipmunks, beavers, weasels, raccoons, possums, turtles and the occasional wild boar). My yard is a couple of acres and surrounded on all sides by woods. I have never golfed before, but recently bought three used golf clubs from the thrift store for a buck each. I walked the yard to discover the best drive lanes and set three holes with plastic containers that I dug out of the recycle bin. My new yard-golf course is three holes. The first hole is a fairly long drive, with the chicken house and garden serving as hazards. I'd say par 4. I don't have any golf tees and after digging two pretty good sized divets out of my yard with my number one driver (a 9.75 Hogan) I hit a strong drive that sliced hard, just missing my van and hitting my garage. No damage. I chipped onto the "green" with my wedge and sunk the putt for a swell birdie. I was off to a good start. I cut across the yard, length-wise for a bogey on the second hole. So far so good, par for the course. I felt pretty good. That's when it all went bad. I ended up almost beaning one of my favorite St. Francais statues while trying to shoot around the brush pile on the third hole. 4 shots over par in the end. Damn.