Had a good time in Waterloo, playing at Spicoli’s. We’d had a chance to play Little Big Fest that same night, but we had already lined up the Waterloo gig when they told us. Plus they wanted us to play acoustic without drums, which isn’t really how we roll these days. But it is a pretty big event in Des Moines music, and from what I’ve heard, it was pretty cool.

It was good to see some old friends in Waterloo. The order had gotten shifted around a bit though, because Teddy Boys had to go one second so that Graham could leave for Texas to visit his parents for Thanksgiving. We ended up going on first, and a couple people who thought we were going on later got there late and missed our set. So all the more reason to come back and play there again soon now.

Here’s some fun, though: I just ran across the photograph that we found lying in the parking lot behind Barley Street Tavern back in July, and I just happen to have a working scanner right now. As you can see below, the description I gave of it back then doesn’t begin to do it justice. Maybe I should send it to Found Magazine.

Another fun show played. The Busted Lift, perhaps Dubuque itself, may well be one of the hippest spots in the state. If you haven’t been there, it’s the limestone-walled basement of a fancyish restaurant called, and located at, 180 Main. Feels like you’re hanging out in some ancient pub in Europe somewhere. Or maybe Ireland, given the abundance of Ireland paraphernalia among the decor. A sizable crowd, a nice kid named Josiah and his acoustic guitar opening the show, and an awesome two-piece headliner with scrappy, broke-down new-wavey sounds out of Chicago called Post Honeymoon. Then over to Aaron’s place (he plays in Old Panther and books The Busted Lift) afterwards, where we hung out into the early morning ragin’ full-on, playing records and drinking beers, before finally crashing. Following some mellow late-morning conversation about music-making, Dan and I drove to Iowa City to catch the Gojira show at The Picador and so I could go see a man about some web-development work. Thanks to all the above-mentioned.

Still massively psyched about the Meat Puppets show. Will also be coming up to Big V’s in St. Paul this weekend. Winter is time for Midwest bands to chill out, write and record, because travel gets treacherous.

I feel like a bit of a douche for the fact that it took me a solid 24 hours to get around to posting this, but after a long period of will-it-or-won’t-it-happen it’s been confirmed that we, along with Squidboy, will be opening for the Meat Puppets at Vaudeville Mews here in Des Moines, on Sunday, November 8. Doors are at 7pm, tickets are $13 in advance (here’s an iowatix.com link)/$15 at-the-door. HELL YEAH!

Meanwhile, we’ll also be playing at The Busted Lift in Dubuque this Friday, and Big V’s in St. Paul on Sunday the 18th. Check the shows page for more details.

Another fine show at our home venue Vaudeville Mews last night. Starting out with the folky sounds of two-piece Wet Chemistry. Our relative loudness seemed a little out of place following them up, but we played a real solid set.

I was a bit concerned about howRosewood Thieves‘ set would turn out, as before the show some of them seemed really out of it, and then their sound check took an awfully long time, but as it turns out they were great. They chose to sit down and emphasize the quiet side of their Dylan-influenced folk rock. They were good enough that I sort of forgot that I was there to play rather than see the show, and when Todd from The Dead Trees came up to me to tell me we sounded good, I thought he said “they sound good,” referring to Rosewood Thieves, and answered simply “yeah.” Then I realized what he was talking about and got worried that I probably seemed like a jerk.

Also, is there any keyboard instrument a Nord Electro can’t sound convincingly like enough for a live show? Having seen a few bands use them now, I’m kind of impressed and considering getting one one of these days.

The Dead Trees were great too. Sound-wise, they might be one of the closest matches on a bill with Why Make Clocks for some time. So if you like us, you should check them out. They have a truly heroic number of shows booked — the tour with Rosewood Thieves heads west from here, then down the coast, then east again to Athens and Chapel Hill, then after only a week off late next month, a whole other tour supporting The Whigs going from Boston through the Midwest into the Pacific Northwest. So wherever you are, you’ve probably got a chance to see them if you get over to their MySpace page and look at their schedule, and I’d recommend doing that.

Dubuque and Minneapolis are next for us, then maybe some writing and/or recording, and planning.

So last weekend’s planned string of shows went a little differently than expected. First, we found out Wednesday that Will’s out from work fell through. The guy he had covering for him had a death in the family, and since the company is about three people, Will couldn’t do the Thursday or Friday shows. We got Dan’s brother Jeff, from Blutiger Fluss, to fill in on drums, which required us to do a couple long practices to get it worked out; he’s filled in on drums for Why Make Clocks once before, but I think that was before the new album, and it’s been some years since he’s played drums at all.

So Dan, Jeff, and I head down to Lawrence and have a pretty good show at the Replay. We traveled in Dan’s Taurus Wagon so I brought the little Ashdown amp we use at practice instead of my badass Kustom. Jeff performed admirably considering the circumstances; less flourishy in the drum department than we usually sound, but very much together. The opening band, Lite Loins, was a raw-sounding garage-indie/noise-rock kind of band. The singer/guitarist, who Dan mentioned to me was previously in some kind of hardcore band, kind of does the Grunge-era “bored and wishes he was somewhere else” act, and I think the other two guys might have been a bit new at things. The songs didn’t have endings so much as sudden collapses. They did start to get some good momentum going during the guitar solo bits though, and kind of reminded me of a less-dramatic version of my old band Exit Drills. I can tell what they’re going for and I like it, and they were cool to us.

Mystery Of Two, the headlining band from Cleveland, was rad. They started the set with the drummer and bassist doing a feedbacky drone-jam on the Big Muff pedal. She was throwing in harmonics and stuff, really playing the feedback, so I was expecting them to go into some kind of epic psych jam after that, but instead the guitarist jumped onstage and they launched into one fast melodic punk tune after another. Their MySpace page mentions The Voidoids, Talking Heads, and Pere Ubu, and those are pretty appropriate points of reference. It appears they’re about to work their way down the East Coast vicinity, so if you’re out there, see if you can catch them.

Lawrence kind of weirds me out now. It rivals Iowa City as an epicenter of Midwestern college-town fucked-up-ness and drunken shenanigans, and the corner that the Replay is on is where shit seems to get the most bonkers. Some guy hauled a couple electric guitars, a small PA and amp (battery-powered?), a Rotovibe pedal, and a homemade wooden mic stand, with “RECYCLED” Sharpie’d all over them, out there in some kind of shopping cart, set up and was busking out there playing ridiculously awful versions of every Nirvana song ever, doing the Cobain moves like throwing the guitar in the air and catching it, and shoving the headstock into the pavement and pivoting around the guitar while it feeds back. I guess he was having fun, but I think he was specifically out to receive abuse.

Dan had decided to cancel Friday’s show so that Jeff wouldn’t have to do two, meaning I didn’t get to use my joke “I’d like thank Lemmon’s for squeezing us in tonight.” Hopefully we can get another shot at St. Louis before long, though. So we drove right back home into Friday morning. This cancellation also meant a long drive in the Taurus to and from Springfield, MO for the show at The Outland. Sweetwater Abilene was originally on the bill with us, a good pairing, but it turned out that some of their band-members had other commitments that night and they canceled. We ended up in the headlining slot after Street Light Suzie (the night’s big draw, actually, based in Austin) and Quest For Fire (a metal band who I think were local, but were definitely not this band, who I found when I googled the name, and sound pretty rad). Neither was at all bad musically, but it kind of sucks getting shoved into playing last in a town where no one knows you yet, especially when you drove six hours, and it’s usually because some other band is being all diva and trying to get their shit over with early, and fuck how that affects anyone else on the bill. As expected, we lost a lot of the crowd after Street Light Suzie’s set, but a few people stuck around, most notably the members of Quest For Fire who gave our set a warm enthusiastic reception. It might have helped that Dan threw in some mildly belligerent stage banter and for some reason the Ashdown sounded huge that night. It was also nice to play a decently long set (almost an hour) for a change. It seemed to fly by, too.

Here’s the Quest For Fire we saw:

And here’s a blur that might be Street Light Suzie:

We stayed with J.R. from Sweetwater Abilene at his place which is above the print shop he works at. It’s one of those sweet huge loft spaces upstairs in a downtown building where some business dude runs out of money and/or time three-quarters of the way through remodeling it into a total party palace, so you have things like a Jacuzzi that doesn’t have water hooked up yet, and boxes of ceramic tile left lying around. I gotta find me one of these places.

This Tuesday night we’re the locals again, in an 8:00 show at Vaudeville Mews with Rosewood Thieves, and The Dead Trees, and Wet Chemistry. Come on down, it’s going to be great!

On the 9th we’ll be making up for that Dubuque show we canceled a while back, at The Busted Lift with Wolves In The Attic (hell yeah!) and Post Honeymoon.

Unfortunately, we have had to cancel our Sept.25 show @ Lemmons in St. Louis.

We’d like to thank Lemmon’s for fitting up into the line-up for Friday night, and we wish it could’ve worked out.

Had a wonderful time at The Mews once again last night. It was the kind of gig where the turnout is really low such that it’s mostly musicians playing to each other, but the vibes among the musicians are so overwhelmingly positive that no one seems to mind. It was a real musicians’ bro-down. The few of you that did show up that weren’t playing in the show yourselves, thank you very much for venturing out on a Tuesday night..

Jacob Tyler Wolfgang got things started with a quiet set accompanied by his own acoustic guitar and his misses’ piano and harmonies. The sounds were really pretty, and the subdued mellow vibe was a nice way to start the night before getting our faces rocked off…

…by Nuclear Rodeo. When I saw these guys a few weeks back with Petit Mal and The Bassturd, they only brought half the band, and even in that configuration they were rad. They’re “from” Cedar Rapids but “live in” Ames, whatever that means. I wonder if that means I’m from Waterloo and just live in Des Moines, or if I can start saying I’m from Des Moines? I mean I guess we could just as well say I’m from Lancaster, Wisconsin, my birthplace, though I only lived there until about the age of one year. Nuclear Rodeo have a song about Wisconsin. Anyway, great power-pop thing going on here.

Bob Nastanovich showed up with a record player and a box full of records and started spinning alt-rock classics. He also got on stage to give New Radiant Storm King a rousing introduction.

Our set may have been a bit rawer than usual in spots… all our practices and performances for the past couple weeks have been of a stripped-down acoustic variety, and we hadn’t managed to get in a rehearsal in which to regather our rawk legs. None of this seemed to bother anybody but us though.

New Radiant Storm King was fantastic, epically jangling, driving and melodic. I’d been hearing their name around for years but never managed to get familiar with their stuff until just recently when I found out we were going to be playing this show with them and that Dan is a big fan, and I’m really glad all that finally happened.

Several points during the evening, Peyton Pinkerton of NRSK couldn’t seem to stop talking to me. Not in an annoying way, but in the “mutually interesting guys who want to be friends” kind of way. We had much very engaging conversation. I hope these guys come back again so we can hang out some more. And I would definitely see and/or hang with Nuclear Rodeo again. Didn’t get much chance to chat with Jacob, he might have left early. But it seemed like everybody had something nice to say to somebody. That’s always a good feeling.

Kim (my wife) & I went to see The Whigs and Band of Skulls @ the Waiting Room in Omaha last night (which was awesome, though sparsely attended).  Afterwards, we went for a post-show beer @ the Barley Street Tavern where Midwest Dilemma and Issac of Longshadowmen (from Ames) were playing a show that turned out to be more of hootenanny of sorts with different songwriters (myself included) in the crowd getting up and playing songs together Kyle Harvey (of It’s True) was there serving the drinks, Sarah Benck was there and played a few songs and another fine gentlemen (unaffiliated with a band) got up and played 4 songs that were pretty damn good. I closed the night with a version of “Tight Dissolve” that included Nick of Midwest Dilemma on electric guitar, Nick and Liz from Little Black Stereo on tamborine (Nick) and vocals (Liz)-Liz plays w/both Little Black Stereo and Midwest Dilemma I thought it went pretty damn well considering none of them had ever heard the song before. It was a great time. Omaha has a lot of really good bands & singer/songwriters (beyond the well-documented circle of quality bands on Saddle Creek) that people should hear such as Little Black Stereo, It’s True, Brad Hoshaw, Midwest Dilemma, Kyle Harvey (solo), Thunder Power, Spiders for Love, Platte River Rain, and plenty of others.