Hi and welcome to the blog.  We've returned safely from our 21-day tour of the east coast.  It was quite an amazing time and best summed up by Chase (our road manager and friend since childhood) as "Four months of life in three weeks."  So , I'm going to be recounting some of our  happenings with pictures and videos. I hope you enjoy them.  Feel free to leave comments. Especially if they come at Dan's expense.  :D

June 12, 2009: I'm not very proud to admit that the majority of the band, save a few geography wizards, thought that Pensacola was on the eastern side of the state.  Little did we know, that we actually had a seven hour drive to our gig that night.  We didn't get back from The Dungeon until about 3 a.m. the previous morning so getting up at 8:30 was so much fun.  Especially for Chase, who on a side-note, amazingly drove all 5,000+ miles of the trip (he earned a special prize for that which you'll see later on...)

We arrived safely at the hotel in the late afternoon but not before a small panic when Dan swore he saw us miss the exit for Pensacola.  We all double checked the map and verified our correct course but Dan was pretty insistent.  That is, until he mentioned that he noticed it was in an alternate spelling involving a "g."  We were ok.

We later deduced that Dan must have thought the sign on the left was how to spell "Pensacola."

We were staying in the crummiest dust bin in all of the Florida armpit.  Aside from the shattered door locks, stains on the carpet, nasty funk in the air and rock hard beds that would make a paraplegic toss and turn, it was basically the Ritz.  We threw the football, walked about a mile to a Quizno's down the road that turned out to be an Econolodge, proceeded to eat Wendy's then went back and showered up for the gig.

Downtown Pensacola is a very cool place.  For about a 2 or 3 mile radius, there are nice ale houses, restaurants, stores etc.  We were scheduled for a four-hour slot at a bar called HopJacks.  While loading the gear and grabbing a pre-show meal, we noticed a very odd trend.  Throughout my adult life, I've learned that one of the facts of nightlife is that the populous of guys will always out number the girls.  That part isn't odd, it's just a foregone conclusion. Lord knows where the hell all the girls are.  Anyway, we noticed that there was an even greater tilted male to female ratio.

We took the stage and played our set and a lot of people really enjoyed it, dancing and moving to the front, but most of the men in the bar seemed to gravitate away from the stage.  After our set, I asked one of the waitresses if this was a gay bar.  She laughed at me. I asked her how she plans to explain the sausage party. She told me that there is a very prominent Air Force base just down the road.  Apparently, our loud music was intruding on one of the few military mating nights of the season.

So on behalf of The Juice, I'd like to apologize to all Pensacola-based Cadets for making their pickup lines sound that much worse.

We had a great time playing and hanging out with some fans afterward. Once we got back from the Waffle House at 4 a.m., I got mistaken by some crack whores for a drug dealer named "Tommy" and crawled into my sleeping bag just as the sun started to creep in through the greasy first floor window.  All in a day's work as a touring band.

One of the funniest moments of the tour, and one that we retell to this day, came during an impromptu cover of Weezer's "Say It Ain't So."  Because I was jamming it clean (with no overdrive), I implemented a little reggae feel, thus neglecting the very distinctive and distorted signature guitar riff during the chorus.  But that didn't stop Colin who made up for it with his singing...

I couldn't sing the next chorus because we were all laughing so hard.  Absolutely hilarious.

I'm sorry that we didn't take many pictures or videos on this particular day.  I honestly can't remember why we didn't but we have tons for the rest of the shows...

Have you ever been to Mobile, Alabama?  Neither had we and we were really surprised by what we saw the next day...

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 at 4:28 am and is filed under Four Months In Three Weeks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.