Dear ubiquitous roadside franchised eating establishments of the United States,
Could you please provide touring bands with food that won’t cause their stomachs to do cartwheels?
How about some coffee brewed sometime in the last decade?
Some salad made from actual vegetables that isn’t doused in plastic cheese?
Water that doesn’t taste like chlorine?
Your employees are all such great characters, how about letting them serve something edible?
Yours respectfully,
The Dashing Suns.
Survey says no.
Jeffrey sent us this link from the comfort of his workplace…
Buzzworthy.mtv.com
Seems like somebody named Daniel really likes us! This was a great piece of encouraging news for all of us, especially us Dashers that are sweating in a filthy van on the desert roads of highway 10! Where are we? No clue. Probably New Mexico or Arizona, hard to tell really, deserts just look like a bunch of boring dust and some vegetation that is a little too brown to be considered beautiful. Today is an epic drive, from El Paso to Los Angeles, 12 or 13 or 14 hours. Phew.
At least when we get there we have some fun planned, our buddy Bart Davenport and his band are playing the Silverlake lounge and have graciously agreed to let us in for free which is great because we spent all of our money in Texas.
We saw a great show last night entirely by accident, due to some native Texan insider knowledge we ended up at a venue in El Paso only to discover that Oakland’s very own and very mysterious bunny mask clad rocker Nobunny was playing and it was fantastic.
More later…
P.S, we’d like to give a shout out to a nice chap named Steve Munn, we haven’t met him yet but he’s been following our adventures the whole time. Hi Steve! We’ll change our shirts before we come say hi, we promise.
Phew.
We are on our way back to Oakland.
David left us last night on a shiny ol’
Airplane, it’s back to work for that dawg. We just dropped Jeffrey off in San Antonio where he is about to hop on a different shiny ol’ airplane, back to work for him too.
That leaves three of us… Kev, Matt and our boy Tyler who shall be dropped off in Los Angeles. It would be nice to relax and take a nice scenic route home but, alas, we shall be spending untold hours on barren highway 10. We have a show on Wednesday night in Oakland and have to drive like madmen to get there on time. This wouldn’t be nearly so bad if it weren’t for Kevin and Matts ridiculous decision to not change their shirts for the entire tour, this has not helped the vans odor problem in the slightest. Hopefully we won’t have to eat at the ghostly diner which we happened upon on our way here, if we do we shall certainly not be ordering the fried okra again or even the coffee which tasted like it was carelessy brewed in 1929 and filtered through a cowboys old underwear.
Goodbye to Austin and all the nice folks we met there. We’ll miss ya a bunch.
The first night of The Dashing Suns SXSW tour @ The Bordello
We played outside of Tyler’s on Sunday in Austin. We thought about playing a loud electric show, but our newly tested acoustic set seemed more apt for the sidewalk venue. This was probably our first outdoor show… ever! We had such a good time doing it that we can’t wait to play out next outdoor show. We also really enjoyed playing our acoustic set again, it is growing on us the way mold grows in our van. We even made a fan!
After our early afternoon set we went for a little ride in the Jansport van. The backseat was awesome and it had an open roof top (like a sun roof kinda). Scott drove us around Austin and we gave shirts and CDs to whoever wanted them and even those that didn’t want them.
The end of our ride in the van spectacle also marked the end of SXSW 09 for The Dashing Suns. Tomorrow we roll back across deserts, mountains and miles of asphalt to Oakland, CA.
The Halcyon show was great! Two months of anxious practices went a long way in the end. Scott from Readymade gave us a nice little intro and we did our thing. The set was the perfect length of time and Kevin’s endearing banter filled the moments in time when we were not playing. The crowd was solid and they seemed to enjoy the show. People picked up free shirts and collected free CDs and we got to live our little dream for a few minutes. We are fairly certain that it couldn’t have gone better.
We have just arrived at the Halcyon lounge for the Readymade magazine/Jansport show. The place is real nice and smells like delicious food and coffee. This is in stark contrast to the smell in our van. It was only a five minute drive but it was torturous on our olfactory systems. While none of us were born early enough to explore the interiors of freshly opened Egyptian tombs I imagine that the odors released upon releasing the tomb seals were remarkably similar to those in our fine red van.
We were excited to see an overflowing stack of Dashing Suns T-Shirts and some neat posters of us.
More after the show,
The Dashers.
After some much needed rest we woke up and headed directly to the Under The Radar SXSW showcase. We dropped a bunch of our CD’s off at the Jamsport table and were happy to see that they were all gone on our way out. Hopefully we won’t find the shelves of Austins goodwill stores stocked with them next time we are here.
We headed back to the hotel for another game of Marco Polo in the pool, some free drinks and a quick run through of tomorrow’s acoustic set. Phew.
In the evening we headed to an unofficial Bay Area music showcase to watch our friends the Splinters play. They were awesome.
Then it was back to the hotel for some more rest.
After 13 hours of driving and a close brush with starvation we have finally arrived in Austin.
We just stopped in Kent, Tx to conduct restroom business. According to our scientific calculations we are still pretty far away from Austin. 303 miles give or take a few. It’s been a long day. It shall be a long night too…
This is Dasher, spirit guide , good luck charm and road companion of the Dashing Suns. He has a bobble head and so has the ability to answer questions and make decisions for us. While none of us are physicists we know enough about the forces of the universe to realize that his wisdom and decision making prowess is largely dependant on the motion of the van which his plastic feet are superglued to.
We still believe everything he tells us though.
Dasher’s origins are shrouded in mystery, as far as we can tell he just showed up in the van at some point.
If anyone is missing a plastic horse let us know and we’ll sell him back to you.
We have reached Texas after an extremely uneventful drive through the desert. We are in El Paso and can see Mexico across a little ol’ river. We have approximately ten more hours of solid road dawg driving ahead of us before we reach our ultimate destination of Austin. We are super excited to meet up with all of our bay area band buddies and trade tales over delicious, cold beverages.
The van still works but is consuming oil faster than gas.
More soon,
The Dashers.
After racing across the desert we arrived in Albuquerque, NM. It’s a wonderful little town, and we had no trouble finding The Agency in Down town thanks to our collective navigation skills. Unpacked, introduced, and excited to play a show in a new city, we proceeded to nourish ourselves at a local watering hole and enjoy the show.
Drew Danburry, a fellow SXSW traveller, played first. A two piece (Travis on the drums), they rocked pretty hard. We made friends!
We played a fun set next. We got past or usual (and unusual) tech difficulties and had a great time!
But denny’s was calling our name! We headed south to the town of Truth or Consiquences where we enjoyed our second Gran Slam in a 24 hour period and generous amounts of decaf.
Finally, in bed by 4am like good boys.
Almost in Albuquerque!
Tonight we play at a place called The Agency. It is an all ages venue, hopefully a bunch of teenagers will arrive with their parents money and buy some CDs from us.
The van is still alive but seems to have an incredible thirst for oil.
After a relatively small amount of sleep we departed LA to begin the
drive to Phoenix. We learnt a valuable lesson about automobiles on the
way, they need oil! About halfway to sunny Phoenix we noticed that the
van was making a number of odd sounds, we later found out that the van
had far too little lubrication, zero to be precise. Oops.
We checked into our hotel and headed right to the Ruby Room, the venue
in which we were scheduled to play loud rock music. The room was cool
and the Bartender was a very nice man with excellent taste in music.
The other bands we were playing with were real nice folks too. There
wasn’t much of a turn out tonight so we decided to mix up our setlist
with a couple of our old songs and two brand new ones.
We forgot to eat dinner and so, after some questionable detours, we
found ourselves at a local D–ny’s filling ourselves with food shaped
garbage…
Kevin says “Hi” to his Mom and Nana, and Matt is grateful that after
an epic, 45 minute debacle he was finally able to remove his left shoe.
Albuquerque next….
So the show went well tonight… there was a good crowd and Bordello was an awesome spot. Check out our photos and a quick snippet of video on the right panel of this blog.
So, it’s 2:57am. And our food just arrived: 4 orders of Pad Thai. Matt is worried that we’re going to spill sauce on his bed, and mostly that he doesn’t want egg in his food. Kevin, on the other hand, wants avocado on his Pad Thai. Jeff likes his Pad Thai free and spicy. David went to sleep early so he must not be a fan of Pad Thai.
Best part of the night: meeting the drummer from Bo Peep - the Japanese girl band who played before us.
Second best part of the day: the van didn’t break down.
Third best part of the day: playing marco polo at the swimming pool.
Catastrophe of the day: waiting in line at the DMV to register the van. Oops.
Kevin has temporary tattoo on his neck.
More tomorrow… we’re heading to Phoenix!
Tonight’s the first show of the roadtrip at Bordello in downtown LA. More to come soon…
The Dashing Suns
The Dashing Suns are a four piece band hailing from Oakland, California. While many bands in today’s scene seem to follow a paint by numbers musical format, The Dashing Suns have managed to find a way of redefining the idea of popular music. Their style is a combination of 60’s psychedelia, 70’s pop radio, 80’s post punk and 90’s shoegaze. Their songs are short, dynamic, infectious and undeniable.
Although the band has only been in existence for less than a year, The Dashing Suns have managed to perform a staggering amount of shows that range from headlining in cushy Bay Area venues to sweating it out at Brooklyn warehouse parties. Their live shows are a testament to the power of a simply crafted melody and their recordings (that happen to be crafted in their practice space) simply put most of today’s overwrought studio recordings to shame.
The Dashing Suns are not just a band that one watches cross armed in the dark. They have somehow figured out a way to become a manifestation of the powerful combination of brotherhood and sheer talent.
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