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| :: SUPERTOUR 2002 "Driving
Sucks, And So Does This Band" DAY
1 - THURSDAY, AUGUST 15th We arrived at the hotel at around 8:00 at night, and were told by the front desk lady and some guy at the hotel bar to go to The Ugly Dog to have fun. We drove there (on the way, Schitzo ran over an animal....or it could've been a person - we didn't stop to check), and it was okay cuz they had $2.00 imports. After defacing the property with Shooting Blanks stickers, Brey found a hot girl who told us to go to someplace called "the strip" cuz there's lots of bars and young people there. Then she quickly avoided any further conversation and made a point of telling us she was married. Off we headed to this "strip" place, which I won't even spend any time telling you about cuz it sucked ass. After paying a $10 cab ride there, we had one beer and took another $10 cab ride back to the hotel. When we got upstairs, Brey was doing acrobatics in the hallway and gashed his head open. This was not your average little cut, and the blood loss he suffered made our hotel look like either a murder scene or a big tampon. Brey stayed home and bled while Deech, Schitzo, and myself went back to the Ugly Dog. Pictures of Brey bleeding are here. We almost killed two more animals on the way home from Ugly Dog, but didn't - I'm sure they were deer and definitly not people this time. When we got back to the hotel, instead of finding Brey dead, he was hanging out with a security guard who gave him a video tape so that we could now capture the memories of this fine trip on film. The security guard also showed us a tape of a bunch of girls flashing him that he had - weird. We went upstairs, and Brey bled himself to sleep. Schitzo got his own room. DAY
2 - FRIDAY, AUGUST 16th On the way to the way to the hotel, we formed a new band called the ManAsses - it was an experimental outlet that used the instruments from the dollar store in Pittsburgh. The ManAsses are way better than Shooting Blanks, so keep your ears open for them at a venue near you. The line-up is: Deech on plastic 4-string untunable guitar, Brey on marraccas, Schitzo on drums/tambourine/Gatorade bottles, and myself on plastic whistle-thing. We are backed up by Soul Coughing's "Irresistible Bliss" album. Traffic was horrible on this drive, so we arrived to the hotel super-late. Me and Schitzo went to check in while Deech and Brey parked the car - when we walked into the lobby, we were greeted by a room full of beautiful women in sashes modeling for pictures. Turns out they weren't there for us, but in fact there was a Hawaiian Tropics competiton taking place in our hotel that weekend! - eveningwear competition that night, and poolside bikini competition tomorrow!!! We were supposed to play a show this night, but the place closed down or something. Not such a bad thing because there probably would've been zero good-looking women at our show, and our hotel had an excess of them. There was a great club attached to our hotel, and we got in free cuz we were staying there. The Hawaiian Tropics first round competition went on, and then there was some cover band that played way too many Limp Bizkit songs. By the time we left there, we were pretty drunk, and Brey still wasn't bleeding. What Brey was doing, however, was getting in good with one of the Hawaiian Tropics judges, and so while Schitzo, Deech, and myself were hanging around and drinking with the Virginia locals at our hotel, Brey was in the Hawaiian Tropics suite drinking with about 20 girls that were way out of any of our leagues. I don't remember much after that time due to my blood alcohol level being so high, so this day's journal entry is over. Oh yeah - and Schitzo got his own room. DAY
3 - SATURDAY, AUGUST 17th This is when me and Schitzo got our first glimpse of the Hawaiian Tropics suite cuz we went with Brey to go retrieve his camera. We walked up to the room, and some hot girl in a robe was being pretty rude to Brey, and obviously wanted us out of her room. I thought she was a bitch, so when Brey was talking to her, I stole a Hawaiian Tropics shirt and wrote "fuck" over the words "Hawaiian Tropics" in permanant marker. All the info Brey got was that some "little karate guy" had his camera, but he was no where to be found. This began a tirade of Brey grumbling the words "fuck" and "shit" every 20 seconds for the entire rest of the day - not much else was said from him. We got to the show, drank heavily in the 95-degree heat, got yelled at by park rangers and cops, played a crappy set of music outside, and I saw my first jellyfish in some body of water. We were anxious to get back to the hot chicks in the hotel, and Kil'Cupid followed us and was going to party with us and crash on our floor. We stopped at the Waffle House for food which no one but me liked, then stopped for beer and let the drinking continue. We couldn't watch the bikini comptetion cuz the club was 21+, and Kil'Cupid wasn't, so we figured we'd just wait until later and try to get in the suite with the girls. While drinking, PGS and Starstruck called and asked if they could crash here too - the more the merrier. They got there, we drank more, found out that room 104 wasn't giving out free oral sex, inflated a blow-up doll, played music in the room, and when we were good and drunk we headed up to the Hawaiian Tropics suite. Oh wait - before we went up, we found a review of our "Nuclear Family" CD on LocalShibby.com. It was the most scathing review ever, and had the entire hotel room in hysterics. I'm fairly confident that someone in our band must've murdered the reviewer's family, because this review was relentless! It is a definite must-read, however, and it's good to know that we changed someone's life through our music - click here to read the whole thing. Schitzo and Brey went to bed very early in Schitzo's separate room, so myself and some of the other band guys went upstairs to try to get Brey's camera and to get access to the suite - both missions were accomplished. They even let me in with my inflatable date. We were drinking with the girls and doing shots and then some of them wanted to hear music. Matt & Billy from Starstruck went to get an acoustic guitar, and right when they started playing, some girl freaked out and started yelling for everyone to leave. We took one of the girls named "Star" with us to party in our room. Every night I kept thinking I had drank my limit, and every night I surprised myself more and more. We woke up that Star girl's roomate, drank more with them, I showed her my feet, and we found out Star's real name that I don't remember. We then went down to the lobby to draw on the pictures of the Hawaiian Tropics girls in marker, but there was a security guard right by them. Since Schitzo and Brey were trying to get sleep, that left only Deech and my's room to house 4 bands. At like 4:30 in the morning I was talking to the front-desk girl, and she gave me a room. I was with about 6 other band people in the lobby, so I kept trying to call Deech's and Schitzo's room to let them know that I had a new room, and that's where we'd be in the morning. No one answered, despite my repeated calls, so we crashed cuz we had to get up early to make it to our show in Ohio......or did we? (insert suspensful foreshadowing music here). DAY
4 - SUNDAY, AUGUST 18th Deech drove through mountains and hillbilly towns. Somewhere in here, our friend Tour Butterfly was callously mangled by our tour bus - Tour Butterfly was a dedicated friend, and his sudden death paralleled the turbulant Shooting Blanks tour. Most cities have billboards for fast food places and lottery and cell phones and stuff - the only billboards in these cities were graphicly disturbing anti-abortion ones and anti-wife-beating ones. Shooting Blanks supports both domestic violence and baby slaughter, so needless to say we got back on major expressways as soon as possible. We got caught in this crazy horrible storm that we almost died in, and it's all on film - although we tried to convince Schitzo that it was a life-changing epiphany, and he should play the Ohio show, he didn't buy it. After about 20-hours in the car, we made it back to Chicago - Deech stayed over at my house cuz it was too late to drive home due to fatigue. We didn't have sex or anything cuz he slept on the couch, and I was in my bed. And so that was tour - end communication..... TOUR
STATS AT-A-GLANCE Bands
Broken Up: Shooting Blanks Hawaiian
Tropic Contestants Nailed: zero
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