Rarely a Dull Moment - Touring with Pangea Collective.

I'm at my friend Suzy's house in Berkeley right now. It's a ten-person punk house called Fort Radical, where Suzy lives in a cozy attic bedroom with cool little corners to snuggle up in and arches to barely miss your head on. I'm finally gonna be settling down up here - I have a couple of good job prospects and have found a great, cheap sublet at a sweet warehouse in Oakland for at least a month with some cool kids from Camp Winnarainbow who want to start a circus troupe. The place is so D.I.Y. I could plotz. I mean, we can move walls around and someone's gonna have monkey bars in their floor. How funky and refreshing is that?

I've been back in California for nearly three weeks now, after having possibly the craziest travel of my life rolling back to Los Angeles. I was completely in the flow of life for ten days as I flew back to San Francisco, worked odd jobs to make up the cost difference and then some, and hitched a craigslist ride to Los Angeles on a private, four-person propeller plane!




I bussed into a beautiful apartment in Hollywood with the two German girls who I shared a flight with, and after a night of beers on the house at their friend's empty gay bar in West Holly, I showed up at the Treehouse to couchsurf for the week while waiting for rehearsal with Pangea Collective to start. The band first rehearsed at midnight Wednesday in a recording studio setting on Santa Monica Blvd., then earlier the next night at Will's house in West LA, and finally on Friday morning we headed down to San Diego to play two shows at what we were told was an environmental music festival.

It turned out the festival, called Ranchita Rocks, was not in San Diego but out in the middle of nowhere towards the Salton Sea! It was a small benefit concert to raise money to keep large transmission lines out of the Anza Borrego Desert. While the promoters were expecting about 5,000 people to show up, the crowd on Friday seemed more accurately counted below 1,000 - and most of these folks were volunteering, working, or performing at the festival. The main stage was six hours behind schedule because rain had interrupted the stage setup the night before. We later learned that the backline company would not set up the second day because they were having a pay dispute with the organizers.

It was very much like one of those Christopher Guest films like Best in Show or A Mighty Wind - or like if everyone failed to show up to Burning Man except for the volunteers and the meth addicts. After waiting patiently through set changes and three power failures during our sound checks, we played our first set at sundown - six hours late - to a crowd of about fifty folks standing in a barren, fenced off patch of dirt meant for thousands more. I am almost certain that we drew the largest crowd at the main stage that night, as the headliner, Mountain, bailed for unknown reasons.

After Ranchita, we headed back to Los Angeles for a couple nights only to leave for San Francisco on Tuesday for three more shows in Palo Alto, San Jose, and most successfully at the Elbo Room in San Francisco. At that last show, we played our most solid set of the tour to a boiling-hot dance floor filled with Thursday-night party-seekers. It was a nice capstone to the short tour.

We drove overnight back to Los Angeles, with myself taking the sunrise shift over the Grapevine - easing into LA freeway traffic for the first time. Not bad, but I definitely wouldn't want to drive it every day. Back in LA I spent all Friday sleeping at Brittany's apartment while she was away in San Diego, and then spent the next day at Venice Beach again and on the CRANK MOB first birthday ride. The ride was fast-paced and accompanied by the Crankmobile - an old RV painted up and outfitted with a sweet soundsystem. The ride climaxed with bike jousting and an open-air punk concert at the Costco parking lot in Marina Del Rey - a crazy party to boot!

I played my last show with Pangea Collective for a while this past Monday at Molly Malone's in LA, where we were very blessed to have many friends come out to see us play! I'll definitely play sticks again - there are very few people who enjoy meditation, have good timing, and have fun on stage doing the same thing for an hour!