Whoa crap you guys, we’re getting excited. The new album is almost here,and we’ve got big shows coming up in Des Moines, Ames, Iowa City, Omaha, and Kansas City. Here’s the run-down of next month’s activities:
The CD Release Party shows will be twofold: the first at Vaudeville Mews on August 14 — no cover, and there will be cookies! Ely Falls, American Restless, and Gabe Cordova will also be performing, because we love them.
The Mews CD release party, being a night show at the Mews, is a 21+ affair, so we’re having a second, all-ages one August 19 at Des Moines Social Club where we will be musical guests on the JG Faux Show at 8:30, followed by our CD Release show featuring American Restless and The Half Hearts.
If you can’t wait that long, we’re also playing at the Ames Progressive Office on August 4, and it’s possible we’ll even have the new CD available by then. Also on that bill are The Sundance Kids (from Olympia, WA), Dot Coma, .e, and Of Course You Realize. And on August 13 we’ll be at The Mill in Iowa City with American Restless and Final Alibi.
And we’ve scored a spot on the North vs. South Music Festival in Kansas City, taking place at Davey’s Uptown Ramblers Club. With 40 acts on 2 stages over 3 days (August 20-22), it’s going to be quite the hootenanny. We’ll be going on about 8:50pm Saturday night (the 22nd), but of course I’d suggest checking out as much of the festival as you can manage to get to.
You can always check out the shows page for all this stuff, but I still like to make a post about our upcoming shows once in a while. New shows usually hit the shows page first though.
By the way, I was at Des Moines Social Club last night to do one of my solo gigs, and finally got to see Blutiger Fluss. They’re a spacey ambient electronica band that Dan’s brother Jeff is in, and they were awesome. I do believe they’re playing the Mews on September 2, so check them out too.
So once again, I go to Omaha and don’t get to hang out there hardly any, apart form playing the gig and getting the hell out. But Lincoln wasn’t half bad, largely due to our gracious hosts Nick and Jessica. Thanks Nick & Jessica!
We mostly lounged around their house Saturday, walked down to a coffee shop for lunch, watched Pan’s Labyrinth on DVD, and eventually made our way down to Knickerbocker’s. Here’s Dan with Nick’s dog Rocky:
O Street is where the venues are. There was a cool old-school record shop next to Knickerbocker’s where we killed some time — record shop as in records, the majority of the stock being used vinyl. Saw a Hollowmen record I was tempted to buy (Dan pointed it out to me actually), but I’m really short on cash and don’t have a turntable anyway.
The opener was a collegey looking guy in a baseball cap with a Nike swoosh on it who sang like Jack Johnson while playing funky riffs on an acoustic guitar. He was accompanied by a 16-year-old violin/fiddle prodigy who noodled endlessly though the songs and looked bored the whole time. I liked his sort of Classical/Romantic intro to the last song though. They covered Ben Harper and also covered “Thriller” and managed to make both sound exactly like every other song they played.
It was one of those nights you get in a tour where the motivation to pull out the merch and try to charm the crowd into buying stuff was pretty much nonexistent. Jess and a friend came down, but there wasn’t really much of a crowd until the bands were almost all over and a wedding party came in. We still played a pretty good set, and to the folks that did check it out, you guys are rad. Thank you.
After us came the Stuart John Band, who did a pretty standard college-town blues thing. They sounded really tight, and had the good taste to cover Muddy Waters, so you can’t complain much. After the show we picked up a couple more beers to take back to Nick’s, where we watched a bit of The Minority Report on TV.
All in all, kind of an ill-fitting bill for us, but I think we came out ahead in the end. Came back to Des Moines and back to regular life on Sunday. Dan and Will are totally good dudes to travel with, and I’m looking forward to more of this.
Chilled out at Jestin’s until well into the afternoon Friday, reading, eating curry made by Michelle, and watching goofy YouTube videos. We became a bit obsessed with “Slap Chop Rap”:
Ah, Omaha. Music City of the Midwest. After some trouble finding the right street, we made it to the Barley Street Tavern (or “The Barley” as I later heard it referred to) about quarter after 7 pm. The doors were locked, including the front door with the sign taped to it that said “Open at 6.” I found a Cadillac emblem lying out in the back parking lot with a hilarious photo pinned to it of a guy in a black-and-white striped old-timey jail inmate Halloween costume looking really pissed and pouty standing by a pool table. Will considered making a belt buckle out of the Cadillac emblem.
The Barley Street Tavern is about a block off 42nd street in a part of Omaha called Benton or Benson or something like that. This part of 42nd street has about 82 music venues on it within a few blocks, but The Barley being a little bit off on a side street gives it kind of a cool outsidery vibe. We decided to kill some time walking up 42nd and maybe find something to eat, and that was where we ran into Nick from Little Black Stereo. He and Dan chatted for quite a while and he said he had some other show going on that night but would try and stop by ours for a bit (which he did), and also that we could stay at his place in Lincoln Saturday night.
The show at Barley Street opened with a solo acoustic set by Andrew John of Rock Paper Dynamite, as the full Rock paper Dynamite band were unable to make it for some reason.
On next was Moses Prey. Some blurb had compared them to the Stooges but I was hearing more MC5. Their shouts about “rocking our motherfucking socks off” and such seemed a little cheezy at first but they won the room over pretty quick by being really great. The three-part vocals were especially a treat. I dare say they actually did rock some socks off.
As you can see from the photos, The Barley is a pretty small place. It’s the very definition of intimate. If you want to stand up in front of the stage, this puts you right up in the band’s faces. This is kind of nice because even a small crowd gives the feeling that the place is packed. The crowd there tends to stay in the room where the stage is while bands are playing, then go off to the other room where the bar is between sets to grab beers. It’s a good sign that everybody doesn’t just hang around the bar when the bands are on. We’ve heard it’s where the real serious music fans hang out, and this detail seems to confirm that.
There are big signs taped up near the stage commanding “NO FUCKIN’ COVER MUSIC!” I get the impression this place has some kind of thing with BMI and ASCAP over the performing-rights fees that venues ordinarily pay. It’s a pretty standard fee that then covers a venue for any cover tunes that get played there, but I can see how that would be a rip-off for places that have primarily original bands. I don’t know how strictly the Barley enforces this policy — I’m not sure if I remember these signs being present when I played there as bassist for Samuel Locke-Ward about this time last year on the tour with The Teddy Boys, and I’m pretty sure we opened the set with “Ashes” (a Screamin’ Jay Hawkins tune) — but I guess Dan decided not to test them since “Rafters” (a Richard Buckner song we play) was out of our set. I hear that in Europe you turn in your set list to the venue and they get charged by the actual cover songs that get played, rather than a one-size-fits-all fee. I wonder if the venues pass that expense along to the bands or what.
I had to turn up my bass amp a bit louder then I had been lately since Barley Street has a vocals-only PA so my amp wasn’t miked or direct-boxed or anything. Turns out it sounds better loud, who knew? So I decided to experiment a little and didn’t play with a pick as much and used the compressor in a few more places. I’m starting to get the hang of being a bassist, as opposed to a guitarist-playing-bass. We played what may have been our tightest set yet, and I think this was a very good night to be so on.
During Moses Prey’s set, the bassist of Cat Island, whose name I have since forgotten, had asked me if he could use my bass amp, and also offered to let us crash at his place a few blocks away after the show. So I said OK to him borrowing the amp, but the guy was already noticeably stumbly-drunk. Later he restated his offer, and elaborated that they were going to be partying after the show at the even more nearby home of a guy that I figured was either another member of Cat Island or a friend, and we were welcome there and could probably crash there too if we’d rather. We were getting offers of places to stay left and right from the Cat Island folks; there was yet another from the singer.
I was preparing to get off the stage and leave my amp there for Cat Island’s bassist to use, when he asks to use a cable. I grabbed a spare one out of my bag and handed it to him. Cat Island had a bunch of friends standing around near the stage for their set, some of them right in the doorway between the bar area and the stage area. I decided to hang around the bar with the merch, but they sounded like fun. Two songs in though, the bassist reappears telling me he had just broken his bass and wanted to know if he could use mine. From the sound of things, he had either bumped into or yanked the end of the cable, pulling the jack out of the bass and pulling the wiring loose. I’d had this same thing happen to my bass once before when I was practicing with a shorter cable than usual. Since then, I’ve always used a cable with a right-angle plug on one end, but the one I had given him earlier was a straight one. So I went and got my bass out of the case and handed it to him. So now some drunk guy was playing my ’66 P-bass with a straight-plug cable after having just broken his own. Oh man. That set couldn’t get over fast enough.
Luckily the bass made it through the set uninjured, and the Cat Island bassist came back later and reiterated the offer of the party and the crash space. We didn’t really need a party, but it was nice of them to offer, and I figured Drunk Bassist was going to be going there so we’d probably better follow him around until we figured out where were were sleeping. Then while we were loading out they all took off without getting us directions to where they were going. To put it nicely, they probably were drunk and forgot about us. To put it another way, the fuckers ditched us.
Dan called Austin for some reason, to see if he had any ideas what we could do I guess, then we got the idea to call Nick and see if we might be able to take him up on his offer a bit early, since Lincoln was a fairly short drive. He was cool with it, so we called Austin back to let him know we had a plan, and ended up going over the blurb for our CD release postcards that we’ve been really over-compulsive about lately, while I pulled out my laptop in the van and found some wi-fi courtesy of an unsecured Netgear to figure out our way out of town. Arrived at Nick’s about 3 AM, watched a little bit of Wildest Police Chase Videos, and crashed out.
I’ll pick this up with Saturday’s events sometime tomorrow.
OK, the Record Bar was awesome. One of the best, possibly the best, venues ever. Great sound, great food, all around great place. Dan tells me it’s owned by some guys who used to be in Season To Risk, which is awesome. I was pretty obsessed with their first album for a long time back around ’93-’94, and In A Perfect World is also a mind-blower. I haven’t actually heard Men Are Monkeys, Robots Win, but I bet Dan has it on his iPod, so maybe we’ll listen to it on the way to Omaha. THANK YOU RECORDBAR!
Here’s a picture of Datagun kicking out some bass-heavy electro-noise-pop grooves:
And here’s locals The Feverbell, who headlined and were amazing. Their drummer is a real treat to watch too. I was trying to figure out where his other two invisible arms are. Something seemed to be hitting more drums and cymbals at once than a mere two arms and two legs possibly could.
Met up with Jestin and Michelle there and came back to their place afterwards to sleep. Jestin got us donuts this morning. Fuck yeah! Many thanks to them as well.
Well, tomorrow is the big day, or evening… heading out after work on our Kansas City/Omaha/Lincoln trip. Far from the first road trip in Why Make Clocks history, but my first with Why Make Clocks. At three days, I’m not sure if it qualifies as a tour, but I hope to do more online chronicling of it than I have my previous tour experiences. I’ll probably be posting to my twitter profile a lot about what’s going on. Also, I’m actually going to bring a camera this time, and maybe I’ll manage to not have my head so far up my ass that I forget to take any pictures. If I do, I intend to post them.
Speaking of which, I have a wealth of past WMC photos that I’ll be turning into photo galleries on this site before long, and also looking to post some music you can listen to on the site here. So keep an eye on this site for that stuff.
The CD/cover art is coming along great, the CD itself is on its way off to the pressing folks, there’s no turning back. These Things Are Ours is hurtling toward you like a meteor. Or something.
The radio interview was on last night. On the other hand, Grant Hart was playing at the Mews, so if you missed our radio appearance for that for that, we forgive you.
Roman Candle bailed on the Omaha show at Barley Street Tavern, unfortunately… unless it was The Roman Candles instead, I’m slightly confused. Whoever it was, they canceled, and we don’t intend to hold it against either of them. But Black Heart Booking went and got Rock Paper Dynamite to take their slot, and they look to be pretty rad. Also on the bill are Moses Prey and Cat Island. From the sounds of things, that’s one hell of a bill.
Check out this awesome flyer the Black Heart folks came up with:
Don’t forget the other cool shows this week:
The Record Bar in Kansas City Thursday night with The Feverbell and Datagun. They have Trivia Clash at 7pm too — I think I’m going to start a side project band called Trivia Clash and try to get it booked there, just to fuck shit up.
Speaking of a hell of a bill, Ames Progressive had some surprises in store for us last week. Besides Ghostbeard and Anchor In The Valley, currently on tour together, being both pretty damn great, It’s True and Little Black Stereo were added on late-like. LBS had a gig elsewhere in town but turns out it got double-booked and Ames Progressive was kind enough to let them jump on. It was worth it. It was a marathon show, but every act was a winner. All of them apart from It’s True are mid-tour about now, and may be coming near you soon.
Lots going on this week. Got the finished cover art for These Things Are Ours from Anthony Pontius and it looks fantastulous. We’re very excited to have Anthony’s artwork as a part of our release and we’re quite pleased with what he came up with. Check out some of his stuff at his blog or here.
Went down to Capital 106.3 earlier this week and recorded our interview segment for Sunday night’s “Capital Backyard” show with Dan Bosman. It was a really fun time. D-Boz said he liked that we actually talk, he says a lot of bands don’t talk much, which makes for a rather dull interview. We talked about These Things Are Ours mostly, and a little about me joining the band. You should definitely tune in Sunday night at 10 for it.
I actually could have talked more, but Dan was handling the questions really well so I kept more to the background because he’s the frontman and I’m the new guy. D-Boz asked me about bands I was in before Why Make Clocks and I rattled off a very incomplete list. I had been working up a really great spiel in my head about the connections that led me to join Why Make Clocks, but I didn’t get to use it and I’m not sure if I’d have been able to keep it short enough to come across well on radio.
See, I didn’t just end up being the new bassist of Why Make Clocks by dumb luck or by Dan and Will putting up a flyer somewhere or something. Before I moved to Des Moines in December, I lived in Waterloo, and since the mid-90s or so I was in a lot of bands, mostly based out of Cedar Falls. And for much of that time I was like, two degrees away from Why Make Clocks.
First, there was No Consensus, in which I played guitar. In local music scenes you tend to end up with other bands that you become “band buddies” with — you all really like each other and each other’s music and you get to be friends and collaborate and set up lots of shows together. And No Consensus’s big Cedar Falls band-buddies were A Is Jump. A Is Jump’s original drummer was Peter Vanderwall, a close No Consensus cohort, and their original bassist was Ben Powell. Later on these were replaced by Phil Sterk, previously of the Donny Brazile Band, and No Consensus’s bassist Steve Wilson, who pulled double duty for a while, and later was also in an early lineup of The Beat Strings. Peter Vanderwall later became the bassist of my next band Exit Drills, in which capacity he replaced Stacy Peck after she moved to Seattle. Stacy had been bassist of both Exit Drills (originally called E.D.I.T.H.) and The Mittens, and that lineup of the Mittens also included Pat Curtis, who Des Moiners now know from North Of Grand — but in-between, Pat played in Why Make Clocks. Incidentally, speaking of Ben Powell, my dad’s company built a house for his dad that I worked on quite a bit. So there’s the Chuck Hoffman -> Exit Drills -> Stacy Peck -> The Mittens -> Pat Curtis -> Why Make Clocks connection.
A Is Jump then became Des Moines band-buddies with Why Make Clocks. I remember always hearing about them doing shows together at the Mews. I’m pretty sure Exit Drills did a show with Why Make Clocks somewhere along the way, either in Cedar Falls or Iowa City. There’s also an A Is Jump song floating around somewhere, I think it might be on Spongetoucher, that I play trumpet on. It’s a little minute-and-a-half ditty that starts with the words “Now it’s broken.” Phil Sterk took up the pedal steel and started playing in Why Make Clocks as well. Sometime during this period, Exit Drills, with Peter Vanderwall on bass, played a couple shows in Des Moines at The Fallout Shelter. I remember one that was set up by some kid who I think tried to cram every band that any of his friends was in on to, there was something like 13 bands on the bill, and about the only one we thought was any good was a band playing their very first show called Mondo Cane (well OK, The Horseshoe Spatulas were decent too). It turned out that a couple of the guys from Mondo Cane really liked Exit Drills too and became our only Des Moines fans ever, really. And one of those kids was Will Tarbox, who of course you now know as Why Make Clocks’s drummer. So the Chuck Hoffman -> Exit Drills -> Mondo Cane -> Will Tarbox -> Why Make Clocks connection is one that I didn’t actually know about until I was already in Why Make Clocks, but there it is.
Then I started up a weird experimental band called Passage Of Deformed Man Supermarket with Peter’s brother Tom, and who should end up being the third member but, A Is Jump/Why Make Clocks drummer/pedal steel guitarist Phil Sterk. Passage even did a show at The Reverb with Why Make Clocks where Phil played both sets. Chuck Hoffman -> Passage Of Deformed Man Supermarket -> Phil Sterk -> Why Make Clocks.
Phil Sterk went off to NYC with Tom, and Phil ended up playing pedal steel in Phonograph and some various other things. As for me, when I moved to Des Moines I wanted to make sure I picked right back up playing music as quickly as possible, so I looked in my MySpace friends list for Des Moines bands I knew of to try to introduce myself to some local musicians and hopefully find my way around the local scene. Naturally one of the first bands to come to mind was Why Make Clocks because I’d known of them a long time and knew members of past lineups. Dan wrote back and we arranged to meet at a North Of Grand/Squidboy show at the Mews.
When I started to get the idea that Dan was interested in having me in the band, I think he mainly thought of me as a guitarist at that point. I think he was looking to add to the band but was open to just about anything in the instrument department as long as it was the right person. We jammed on some guitars and he sent a copy of a rough version of These Things Are Ours home with me. After listening to it, I told Dan that if I was going to be in Why Make Clocks, I thought I’d do the most good as a bassist, because the basslines Dan put down on the record are too good not to have someone playing them live if possible. A lot of folks say bass is my best instrument anyway, it’s what I played in Passage Of Deformed Man Supermarket and then Radio Dramamine.
Next weekend is going to be super crazy. Since we’ve all got to keep our regular jobs, we’re trying to work up a series of weekend mini-tours. It’s a little tougher getting weekend gigs where you’re still a bit unknown, but Dan’s been scoring us some good ones. Thursday night we’re headed to The Record Bar in Kansas City, then Friday night at Barley Street Tavern in Omaha, then Saturday night at Knickerbocker’s in Lincoln. It should be an especially interesting trip since we’re traveling in my van, which has no functioning speedometer or gas gauge. See it had one of those “digital dashes” from the early ’90s when people were still dazzled by anything with blinky lights on it, and a few months back it shorted out and died while I was driving down University Avenue in Waterloo. Melting-electronics smoke was coming out of it and everything. Also the passenger-side window doesn’t roll down and the muffler is pretty much ineffectual. The AC’s not so great either. I should have got all this stuff fixed, but I spent the money on going to Chicago to see the Posies and then 80/35 fest instead. But hey, the tires are in excellent shape and the stereo plays mp3s. It’s going to be a bona fide rock and roll adventure. We must be out of our freaking minds.
