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| :: SUPERTOUR 2004 "California,
Here We Cum" DAY
1 - FRIDAY, MARCH 12th, 2004 This is more boring than I can possibly put into words. No booze. No oral sex. Nothing. Just shitty drivers and thin air that makes it hard to breathe. There's not even any good cities to take pictures of their road signs - like Manasses, PA or Fingerbang, KY. Everything's like "Denver" or "Lincoln" or "Des Moines" or lame shit like that. The coolest thing we've seen so far is a dinosaur statue at a gas station in some city in Colorado that reeked of urine. I wanted to get out and get a picture of me humping it, but we saw it too late and were already back in the car, so I just took a picture of it through the car window (I'll post all pictures post-tour). We also stopped at "Iowa 80" - the world's largest truck stop. Fucking fascinating. Not really. Oh yeah, also we saw what can only be described as "terror". Deech was driving and got scared of the ghastly spectacle. We got pictures of it, so you can see (1 | 2). Colorado is really scary, so I recommend never going here unless you're a real badass motherfucker. This car ride keeps getting less and less heterosexual as we get closer to our destination. I'm having trouble getting to sleep without wearing a pink silk sleeping mask, and I can't even count how many times Brey has seriously used the word "pretty" to describe the scenery around us. Maybe we should just turn around now before Deech takes his hands off the wheel to start dishing out unwanted hand jobs, and then we veer off the road and die. We all are getting very antsy to arrive in Vegas and begin what is sure to be an insane alcoholic binge. High levels of intoxication coupled with the exhaustion of a 27-hour-straight car ride could prove fatal for one or more of us. Brey just told Dan "I hope Matt dies." I love you, Brey. Pending the good fortune that I make it through the night and am not in a coma, I will write an account of the little bit that I remember of tonight's antics during our car ride to Los Angeles tomorrow afternoon. Hoffman, out. --- 1:25
PM Number
of times driven into a ditch: 0 It's about 2:00 Utah time, and we're looking at about 6 more hours of driving until we hit Vegas. And I have to apologize ahead of time if we do anything out of character tonight that might besmirch Vegas' good name. Deech, out. --- NIGHTLY
RE-CAP Dan had never been to Vegas before, so we took him to the strip. We got to a casino, paid $7.00 for a beer, then decided that we were a bunch of cheap-asses, so we went to some shit bars off the strip where we got hammered for almost nothing. On the way, we watched some water-fountain show or something. It was to some classical music piece, but it would've sounded better if it was to "Louder!" - bullshit. At this bar we were at, there was a show going on called "Shock". It was a freak show with people fucking with their bodies and stuff. Dan didn't wanna go, but the rest of us love stupid shit, so we pitched-in and paid for his ticket. It was pretty cool - we saw a guy that I've seen a couple times on Ripley's Believe It Or Not stick a bunch of needles through his body. We also saw A guy pick up a 12-lb bowling ball with his dick. Totally badass. One of the highlights was this hypnotist lady. She needed volunteers from the audience, so me and Dan each pointed at each other, and she told us to both get on stage. She tried to hypnotize us, but we were both too drunk. Plus, all I could think about was how much I had to piss, so I couldn't concentrate. Realizing she'd just embarrass herself wasting time with us two retards, she sent us back off stage. It turns out that she got this other kid hypnotized, and then they just put snakes and spiders and rats all over him. At that point I was glad that it didn't work on me, cuz I hate that shit. She should be glad that it didn't work on me too, cuz as soon as she put spiders on my face, I would've woken up and slapped the motherfucker. After that, it was back to the luxury suites for a night of restless slumber on the hard floors. SuperTour 2004 - fuck yeah... DAY
2 - SATURDAY, MARCH 13th, 2004 Anyway, we decided that they would make great mascots, so we put SHOOTING BLANKS stickers across their stomachs, and (in a bout of hungover creativity) named them Shooting and Blanks, respectively. Dan and Deech loaded up the van while Brey and I took videos and photographs exploiting and defiling our new dead mascots. There's a great shot of me humping the dead birds, but you can't tell because it just looks like I'm screaming in agony over their recent passing. Anyway, luckily Brey was videotaping my bird-rape, so we have live footage. After we thought that there was nothing more to do that would piss off PETA when we send them the tape and photographs of our antics, we decided to try to attach Shooting and Blanks to the radiator grill of our van and take them on tour with us. I had never strapped dead animals to the front of a car before (except for twice), and it's a lot harder than you'd think. Blanks was saturated in Vodka because Brey poured Popov on him when conducting the eulogy, so he wasn't staying on the van well at all. Brey and I got Shooting secured on pretty well (so we thought), and we figured we'd just cut our losses and only take Shooting on tour with us. At our first pitstop for gas, we saw that Shooting had fallen off somewhere in Nevada. Tragic. But funny. We got into Los Angeles, met the Flipout guys, and got some food. We had a show scheduled that night at Jonny Foxx's, and that got canceled a couple days earlier. Then we got a show booked at a place called The Scene. About a half-hour before the show, the manager of The Scene notified Flipout Steve that the show was canceled because he was afraid that we would draw too many people into the bar, and then it would be a hazard. Let's forget for a second the maddening idea that SHOOTING BLANKS would bring "too big" of a crowd anywhere - aside from that, what business owner doesn't want a lot of people at their establishment? Weird. But all was not lost... Flipout Steve got on the phone and organized a last-minute party at 11:00 that night that we could play at. It was a good turnout, and we all got nice and shitcanned. We oftentimes call Brey the "ManChild" of the band, and tonight the greater Los Angeles area got to see why. All-in-all, I came to see that the social situation out West doesn't differ much for SHOOTING BLANKS as it does in Chicago - all the girls like Deech so they ignore the rest of the band, Brey disgusts and repulses rooms full of women at a time, Dan goes in early, and I bitch a lot. Actually,
in what can only be described as some fucked-up alternate universe,
this particular night it was Dan who hung out and got shitty
with us all night, and Brey who ended up going home early
like a big lame pussy. Life is funny sometimes. So, Dan, Deech,
this girl Mona,
the Flipout
guys, and myself went to this place called Norm's that is basically
a Denny's. We got food and saw "Bum Rage". This homeless
guy was throwing shit all over the place in the restaurant and grumbling
obscenities. Norm's kicked him out, but then we invited him to sit
at our table - bad mistake, cuz the guy smelled like a dead animal.
Soon the cops came and made him go away. Then, Flipout Steve met
a stripper named Lisa, and she hung out to eat with us. She stood
up and showed us this big-ass tattoo over her vagina of someone's
face. It made me want to get Deech's face tattooed over my After that, we went back to Mona's place where we drank until the sun came up and then went to bed for a couple hours. Dan slept on a floor and me and Deech shared a bed together. He was wonderful. DAY
3 - SUNDAY, MARCH 14th, 2004 I've never watched so many cartoons in one day as I did today. No shitting - we probably watched 3 full seasons of "Family Guy" and two full seasons of "King Of The Hill". By 6:00 PM we were all getting the shakes of sobriety, so we knew that we needed to get some alcohol quick before detox started setting in. Deech, Mona, Flipout Andy, and myself went to a grocery store to get food and beer. We got pretty drunk bumming around and watching DVDs. I wanted to see the Avril Lavine live DVD, so we put that in. Deech started getting really upset - like more upset than I really think I've ever seen Deech in the 9-years I've known him. It's funny that a little Canadian girl could cause Deech so much pain. He kept talking about how "manufactured" and stuff she is, and I kept saying that it didn't matter because she's young, she's cute, she drinks, she says the word "fuck" a lot, she's rich, and she seems pretty stupid - those are all qualities in the perfect woman for me. Agree to disagree, Deech. Anyway, after her live cover of "Basket Case" by Green Day, Deech could take no more, so we spared him by putting on the blockbuster hit "Drumline". For those of you who haven't seen "Drumline", it's a ridiculous movie about dedication to drumming. This opened up a world of opportunity for us to make fun of Dan for a couple hours. As an aside, we've really logged a lot of hours on this trip making fun of each other. I'll bet that we spend a good 4-5 hours of our day just insulting one another. "Dan likes guys", "Brey's a fat manchild", "Hoff's a freakish midget", and "Deech is a lanky douchebag" pretty much sum up the groundwork for the insulting, but sometimes we mix-and-match. Like maybe Deech will be the raging homosexual and Dan will be the lanky douchebag - we get creative. I'm sure that the Flipout guys probably think that we hate each other. The truth of the matter is I love these guys. As much as I love a genital herpes outbreak. DAY
4 - MONDAY, MARCH 15th, 2004 Dan and I went and layed out near this cliff in Malibu and started drinking first thing in the morning. We were out there for about 2-3 hours, and were convinced that we weren't getting any sun because we weren't very hot and neither of us looked any darker than when we got out there. Turns out we were wrong, but more on that later.... So, in the course of that 2-3 hours, I end up talking to this casting director from VH1 who I spoke to about 8-months earlier about being on a reality TV show. I'm a total media whore and I have a wildly unhealthy addiction to reality television, so I'd do any shameless, demoralizing, self-deprecating thing to get my 15-minuntes. Anyway, this lady said she wants to put SHOOTING BLANKS on this show in July where we can embarrass ourselves like idiots. She actually told me that we had "the image" that they were looking for. Huh? I'm not the most "hip" guy on the planet, but I wasn't aware that the new "in" image in music is four ugly drunk guys. Teen Beat, here we come!!! Dan
and I
got inside from our Our show that night was at a place called "The Gig" in Hollywood. It was a really cool venue, and the sound there was awesome. We didn't get pictures of us playing, but I'm sure you don't care cuz you've all seen us on stage a million times before, and it pretty much looks the same, except for the fact that Dan and I are pink. Something was off on tuning during our set, and based on his track-record, I coulda sworn it was Brey. I told him to check his tuning, and he said he was in tune. Then I asked him again, and he started getting angry. This made me laugh, and so at this point I knew he was in tune, but I also knew that he was a loose cannon, so I kept telling him like 3 or 4 more times to tune his guitar, just to set him off and to cause amusement for myself. This was really funny to everyone but Brey, and it got even more funny to everyone but Brey when the show ended and he went on a super Brey-Rage. I think at that point (and even still as I type this the next morning), Brey still thought that I thought he wasn't in tune because I kept harassing him about it, just for fun. He was yelling and screaming, and so we got out the video camera to capture the magic on film. He was bitching like a little sissy, and it was classic. The more times he said "I'm going to stab you, Hoffman", the more me and Deech and Flipout Steve would tell him that he needed to fix his guitar or something else to set him off. I was waiting for him to punch me, and I really hoped he would've done it on film. Good times! All ended up well, though, because Brey crawled into my bed to end the night. No matter how upset he gets with me, at the end of the day that crazy ManChild just can't resist the Hoffman charm. I wish I had that effect on women. That was at about 4:45 AM, and Deech was still up drinking with Flipout Steve - read on... DAY
5 - TUESDAY, MARCH 16th, 2004 Hey kids, flipout steve here, dictating a drunken memoirs from the mysterious deech who is physically incapable of typing for himself: I'm deech bitches, and my hand hurst, i need some bandages (breaks into song) bandages on my arms and my legs for you, bandages, bandages, bandageeeeees! <Now deech is wandering around, aimlessly, still singing 'hot hot heat'> I wish all of you could be here wit my hurted hand, its blood on me. Weer is my... there is a stain on my shirt. Shit. Shirt. --- 9:42
AM --- 11:07
AM --- WHAT
HAPPENED TO ME - by The Mysterious Deech While 3/4 of Shooting Blanks was at the hospital (I'm getting pretty sick of hospitals), the housing association that controls the property in Malibu that we're staying at gave us 3 days notice to vacate. Neighbors were telling Mona (The Super-Cool Girl who owned the place) that they have pictures of Dan and Hoff drinking on the roof of the van, and that people (Steve and I) were being excessively loud all night/morning. It's hard to argue, since they're right, so now were staying at a hotel in Venice (conveniently located only minutes away from the hospital). --- NIGHTLY
RECAP Once Deech finally got out, we had to go straight to the show at The Good Hurt because it took forever to heal our accident-prone bassist. Deech and myself hadn't showered since yesterday morning, so we smelled like beer and rock'n'roll still from the night before. When we got the club, I just sprayed my body with deodorant, but that didn't do much. Deech remained stinky, to the best of my knowledge. Lisa The Stripper from Day 2 showed up at the show, so afterwards her, Flipout Steve and SHOOTING BLANKS went back to our hotel room to continue binge drinking. Things got a little unusual at that point - and I say that even after seeing the inside of Deech's hand, watching a guy lift a bowling ball with his Dick, and strapping dead animals to a radiator grill. Going into detail of 2:00AM - 5:00AM would most certainly be incriminating to most parties present, but some of the events included:
Let it be known that although I did not have my digital camera handy, Brey videotaped all of the night's festivities, so keep a look out for the SHOOTING BLANKS UNCENSORED DVD - it'll all be on there. If you really need to know the juicy details beforehand, come to a show and ask us about it - we'll be happy to recount the seedy tales of tour gone astray in return for your superFan support! DAY
6 - WEDNESDAY, MARCH 17th, 2004 In the afternoon, we went out to Venice beach. The Flipout guys kept talking about how they knew of this place where you could get giant slices of pizza for 99-cents, but the thing is that it is the worst pizza ever. I didn't believe that there was even a such thing as "bad pizza", so I was excited to check it out. I ate a couple slices, and although it was in fact the worst pizza I've ever had, it was the best $1.98 I'd ever spent because I got all filled-up for so cheap! We got some cool pictures on the boardwalk of a guy who rollerblades around while playing old metal songs on his guitar and also this other guy wearing nothing but a black thong who plays with steel balls. He made me pay him a dollar to take his picture, but it was well worth it because now Dan had spank-material for when we got back to the hotel room. We drank around the hotel room, and then headed out to a bar to see Nothing Special play. They were nice enough to actually call us on stage in the middle of their set so that we could play "Louder!". That was really badass of them to let us completely kill their set like that. Brey wasn't drinking at all, so he wasn't "on his game". We were using all of their instruments, and due to my height limitations, the guitar I was playing was like down by my knees, so I sucked. Dan is just talentless in general, so he didn't play well either. Deech, of course, was perfect and all the women loved him as usual. Stupid Deech. He's fucking fired. Since Brey was staying sober that night, we knew that we had to step it up a notch or two and drink extra in lieu of his abstinence. That wasn't a problem. I know I was pretty much shitcanned, and I think Dan was too cuz he was hitting on this band guy all night. Deech was doing his fair share of bottle-tapping as well, so I think it was a successful night for the "SHOOTING BLANKS Race To Liver Failure". Afterwards we went to a party at one of the Nothing Special guys' houses. I don't remember too much from that except for this girl burning me with her cigarette. Then we were hungry, so we went to Jack-In-The-Box for food. This was a great part of the night, because you could get two tacos for 99-cents. So now, in less than a 24-hour period, I got the following items for a dollar: a huge slice of shitty pizza; a picture of a guy in a thong; two tacos. What a fucking steal. Nothing too "eventful" happened today, but there certainly was an assload of liquor consumed. Tomorrow it's off to Vegas where 99-cents won't get me jack shit. DAY
7 - THURSDAY, MARCH 18th, 2004 The hotel we're staying at is called The Klondike - it's about 4-blocks south of the strip. For a cheap, classless, easy-to-please motherfucker like myself, this place kicks ass for several reasons - the first of which being the room Dan and I were staying in. We got into our room, and the first thing we noticed were two big gaping holes - one in the front door and one in the bathroom. The curtains to the main room were halfway ripped down, and there was no soap or shampoo. I called the front desk (on our room's phone, which looked to be the first non-rotary phone ever created) and asked if they had anything to clean ourselves with - they said that we could walk down and get soap, but no shampoo. Also, there's this mystery door in our room. The doorknob is ripped-off, and I'm sure that I could open it if I put any effort into it, but quite frankly I'm afraid. I began unpacking my stuff, and I heard running water. Oh, someone had forgotten to turn the sink off. No wait, my bad - the sink just doesn't turn off at all. The soothing sounds of our running faucet are way better than those crappy "beachfront serenity" audio CDs that are supposed to relax you - I'll be sleeping easy tonight! By the time we got all settled in, it was kinda late, and we decided that this place was super-cheap so we could have fun getting hammered down at the Klondike's casino without spending a ton of cash that we didn't have. We wanted food first, so Deech, Dan, the Flipout guys, and myself all went down to the restaurant in the casino. Here I discovered another reason why this place kicks-ass - the cheapest motherfucking food you've ever seen. We got HUGE prime rib dinners with potatoes and carrots and soup/salad for $4.95. We could've also gotten a full pasta dinner for $2.49. They had a special where you could buy a pizza for $2.25, but if you added a beer onto your order, the total was only $3.00. They also had dollar margaritas. Then, remember what I said earlier about not getting jack shit for 99-cents in Vegas? - I stand corrected. They have full breakfasts in our hotel for 99-cents. Fucking badass. All the gambling stuff was really cheap too, and it wasn't crowded at all. Flipout Andy literally won over $200 on penny slots - un-fucking-believable. The rest of us played $2-blackjack all night. My goal was to drink enough free alcohol at the table to offset the money that I would inevitably lose because I suck at gambling. I succeeded, as I ended up down $10 but totally shitcanned without ever paying for a drink. At about 2:30 AM the pitboss cut us all off from drinking, and I'm not quite sure why because I don't think we were being belligerent or anything. Oh well, fuck it - we all just went back to Deech and Brey's room to drink beer that we had. On the way, I stopped at the front desk to pick up soap. They gave me a bar of soap from the Embassy Suites. I showed Deech and Brey, and they said that the soap in their room was from the Holiday Inn. The Klondike steals other hotel soaps to give to their patrons - awesome! Deech and Brey's room was broken-down too, but it looked like the penthouse suite at The Bellagio compared to mine and Dan's room. They had this really odd kind of off-shoot room in it. I don't even know if "room" is the right word for it - it's more of just a tiny cell with a third bed in it. It's hard to explain, but the best way to describe it is that it looks like something where if you were staying with your friends and you brought back a hooker, that's where you'd bring her to bang her without disturbing your roommates. I'd definitely throw down some money that says Deech and Brey will have a romantic night of cuddling in the hooker room until the sun comes up. Everyone wanted some 99-cent breakfast, but I wasn't hungry, so at 4:00 AM they all left to get food, and I went back to our room. Nothing at all exciting really happened today, but as you can see, on SuperTour 2004 even the most uneventful days end up with us getting blitzed until all hours of the morning. I turned on the TV before I went into bed and "Saved By The Bell" was on - that's when I really started to miss television. The two loves of my life are TV and cheap beer, and this past week one of my passions has been stripped from me. Shows that I've missed include Real World, Survivor, Simpsons, and the 2-hour Britney Spears exclusive on E!, just to name a few. I'm getting teary-eyed now - gotta go. DAY
8 - FRIDAY, MARCH 18th, 2004 We had intentions of going and flyering for the show beforehand, but the combined motivation levels of SHOOTING BLANKS and Flipout Records is nothing to boast about, so we just ended up getting to the Double Down Saloon early and drinking until the show started. The Double Down kicked ass. It was a dingy little punk club, but fun as hell. They had $2 beers all night, and they also had bacon margaritas and a drink called "ass juice". The bartenders wouldn't tell me what was in their ass juice, but I had a few glasses of it, and it was good stuff. We were supposed to go on first and play for 40-minutes. Instead, we closed the night out and played a crazy balls-out 2-and-a-half hour power set! The crowd was nuts and the place had a ton of people in it - our friends from Crazy Coconut Creations (who made our kick-ass t-shirts that you should all buy) even flew out from Portland, OR for the show. Despite SHOOTING BLANKS' "make love, not war" hippie rock, we still managed to incite riots as two separate physical fights broke out during our set. One of the fights was between two girls, which was even cooler. Since we were on stage at the time, we don't know the circumstances behind the brawls, but I would guess that the girls were fighting over Deech and the guys were fighting over Dan. Brey got naked to close the night out and show Las Vegas how SHOOTING BLANKS rocks in Chicago. They made us finally pack up and leave at 4:00 AM, and after that the night is kinda blurry. I know that SHOOTING BLANKS, Nothing Special, the Flipout guys, Malibu Mona, the Crazy Coconut crew, and some girl named Angie that I met at the Double Down made it back to The Klondike where we were staying because we all wanted 99-cent breakfast. I'm not sure what time that was at, but I know that the sun was up and it looked like morning. I don't remember much from that either except that it seemed like I got a lot of food for only 99-cents, and also that girl Angie did like thirteen shots of coffee creamer. After that, I think Deech stayed and gambled for a little bit more and I think the rest of us went in. It was like 7:00AM or so at that point, and we had to be up at 10:00AM for our 27-hour drive straight home. Fun! DAY
9 - SATURDAY, MARCH 18th, 2004 The only cool things that happened on this drive that did not happen the first day is that Dan got drunk and we saw a super fucking awesome truck explosion (1 | 2). Roadside carnage is fucking badass. EPILOGUE SHOOTING BLANKS would certainly like to thank Flipout Records, Nothing Special, Malibu Mona, Crazy Coconut, and all the badass motherfuckers out West who watched our sets and bought our merchandise so that we had gas money to get home. We'd also like to thank you who are reading this, because if you have made it this far in the tour diary then the amount of free time that you have is absolutely astounding. Go get a job or do something productive. See
ya next SuperTour, shows
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