Colorado My First Tour 2005

the Heavy Guilt has a newer old song called Colorado. The song was written by Sean Martin and I in 2007, long before the Heavy Guilt was born. There is even an early version out there with me singing it, but I'll let you mine the spacious caverns of myspace to find that one, and if you do, I apologize for my vocals. If you want to hear the version where Erik sings it it exists in the following locale.
http://www.archive.org/details/thg2010-02-12.matrix.flac16

I wrote this story at the library back in 05 before I had a computer or any means to save it, so you’ll have to get it from memory, but I promise only slightly blurred authenticity. So, I was in Aspen, rich, walking down the street with Penelope Cruz after lifting weights, and I pulled this gold bar out, after a recent fight with Kanye West......... Let me start again, dig a little deeper.
Due to primacy and recency, I mostly remember the bookends of the trip, fortunately those were the most important parts. This trip, still to this date, was the most treacherous and arduous tour I’ve ever been a part of (excluding all the other treacherous and arduous tours that you'll read about in these pages). It’s the kind of trip that could quite easily derail a young band from the tracks of existence. It started off in Flagstaff Arizona, on New Years Day.

If I was ever considering shooting an apocalyptic zombie movie and I was on the minimal budget that I’d assume I’d be on, I would just film any town on New Years day. All cities move at the slow pace of an extreme hangover. Tumbleweed owns the streets all through the a.m., and once people start to limp out of their foggy haze in noon bloom, they move in a drearily languid fashion through mostly empty roads. I would need no terrifyingly intricate makeup jobs to shoot this film, no detailed directions, I’d simply set up a camera and capture the slow midday march to the coffee shop and the fighting for position in line. In our band mailer I referred to the show as a “FREE ASPRIN GIVEAWAY”, hoping to bait all those owning headaches to come hear some peaking loud rock music.
Only the truly dedicated fans come out to a show on new years day, unless of course you have the drawing power of a Jimi Hendrix resurrection show sponsored by Myspace with Prince opening, or a boy band reunion tour. But even the dedicated K23 fans were facing other obstacles, mainly the blizzard that began to dump snow during our early sound check, accompanied with a frigid wind that bitch slapped you like a trifling hooker in a seventies flick and low temperatures, so low that if they were a person’s age, you couldn’t legally date them (unless you were Jerry Lee Lewis).
For some reason on this pass through Flagstaff we were playing in a very large antique theatre as opposed to the usual tiny dive bar that we’ve frequented over the years. I like the little dive bar because if you put 23 people in there it feels like a packed and energetic house, whereas the 23 people speckled lightly in the Orpheum (which can and hold closer to 800) felt a little awkward. I remember finishing a song and questioning if it was applause I was hearing off in the distance or if it was just phantom white noise from an old busted guitar amp, the claps took a while to get from the distant hands to my eardrum. I think a black panther meeting in rural Kansas would have drawn a larger crowd, but either way it was cool to stand on stage in a history soaked, gorgeous old theatre and hear the reverb of our band echo huge throughout the room.
The Orpheum has one of the most difficult load ins we have yet to face. Nimble gymnast would struggle navigating its twist and turns, especially with the addition of heavy and often awkwardly shaped instruments and amplifiers, not to mention the extreme snowfall that had accumulated during our sets. After the show, by the time we got packed up, had a snowball fight, took a quick drive and set up our sleeping bags on the floor of our friend’s house it was approaching 2 a.m. We had to be up and out by 5 a.m. to make the long drive to Breckinridge, under normal circumstances, a 10-hour drive.
I got about 1 hour of sleep because I watched some dumb movie (Van Helsing, more later) that I had to finish until about 4 a.m. When the various chimes of cell phone alarms began to ring at 5am, we made a quick escape. This was the early pre-band-van days of the K23 and we were in a three-car caravan, 7-people, a ton of equipment and a bunch of gas tanks to fill. I remember the briskness that child-slapped me upon opening the door to wintry Flagstaff and the wind had knocked a tree down blocking us into the driveway. We took the needed time to work our way out onto the road and head east through the kind or treacherous weather one leaves behind when one moves to San Diego.
Ice, sleet and snow fell steadily all the way to Breckinridge. I was in the one vehicle that had no cell phone owner and naturally we got separated from the pack in Denver. Our truck felt doomed like the young wildebeest with a sprained ankle who costarred in a number of Discovery channel hits. I was also one of two drivers in our truck, but the fact that I didn’t know how to drive stick shift meant that I was as useless as a remote control on top of a television. All the way through Colorado was the litter of car accidents. Drivers had met the ice, but didn’t befriend it and the ice was vengeful. Jeremy, who was driving our car, was a San Diego native who was only seeing snow for the second time, the first being the previous night in Flagstaff, so navigating the slippery terrain was a brand new challenge for him. All the spinning and careening eclipsed my ability to nap, so I was getting delirious from 1-hour of sleep. My batteries were far from charged. This was the first time I ever heard Wilco’s Ghost is Born album. It fit in with the streaking echo of street lamps and the slow cold madness of the day, it would also change my approach to writing lyrics immensely, moving from too much is never enough towards a less is more mentality.
We managed to get into Breckinridge, s-a-f-e-l-y, at about 10pm, just in time to load in our equipment down an ice slicked flight of stairs and start playing from 10:40-2am. The bar was filled with a bunch of rowdy frat boy Texans who were out there on a College sponsored ski trip. Their priorities didn’t necessarily coincide with our lefty-protest-jam-rock, but we made a few local converts. It was perhaps the longest marathon set of under-appreciated music ever churned out on 1-hr of sleep after 18+ hours of driving through obstacles worthy of their own video game. The polite light trill of golf claps and conversations stings awful, but we were inches from rest and that knowledge pulled us through. After the set. After the load out up the icy steps. After a few arguments sponsored by fatigue and distain. After packing the vehicles. After filling up the tanks, we were ready to make one more drive, short in the grand scheme of things, but at least a couple of hours. We were headed to Glenwood Springs Colorado to sleep at Josh’s brother’s house. At this point sleep was like dropping the ring of power into the depths of mount doom (sorry, I’m a nerd), like waking up from a coma and having the first food in a long time enter your mouth (strawberry milkshake), like a member of the chess club finally getting lucky on prom night with a non-unattractive girl, sleep was to be my heaven. The drive was slow through snow, but we were nearing Glenwood springs, I could feel the pillow against my face gently smothering me into oblivion (even if the driver just gave up and it was an airbag). At this point we begin seeing a number of brake lights, we started to lose speed ourselves and 15-minutes from our destination, we came to a complete stop. This frigid stop, this stop that stomped our will like an eager fat man atop grapes at a vineyard, this unexpected punctuation, the three exclamation points which follow the word SHIT!!!, this closed road due to an overturned truck in a one way tunnel would set the exhausted pace which we would move at through the remainder of our first extended tour. Somewhere around 9am we would find solace at Josh’s brother’s, a little more than a day after we left Flagstaff, Arizona.
What little I remember about the rest of the tour is what you might expect from a young band’s first time that far from home, playing shows during the workweek. It was similar to any mid-western town on new years day, except the tumbleweed was actually inside the bars we were performing in. You take that kind of stuff in stride and learn to expect it on the road, but after a rather extreme opening to the run, we were pretty beat up. The last day of the tour was in Denver, opening for Digital Underground and as exciting as that would have been when I was in 7th grade, when the Humpty Dance was the soundtrack for adolescence, it was rather anti-climactic nearing 30 years of age.
The venue was supposed to provide a keyboard for Digital Underground, but through the fine art of miscommunication, the keyboard never made it. They offered us $50 to borrow ours, which meant that we had to stay until last call. Fifty bucks meant a tank of gas and since some of the gigs earlier in the week were less profitable than a short-lived paper route (we were literally paid in peanuts in Carbondale, Colorado, no salt and we had to open them), we opted to loan them the keyboard. We played our set and time passed very slowly after that. I wound up making out with a very drunk girl to help speed up the time. She eventually threw up (hopefully due to alcohol consumption as opposed to her bad decisions in evening companionship) on the bar and was escorted out by men the size of the Bronco’s offensive line. Once again the minute hand lost a race to frozen molasses dripping uphill. Since the venue is in a neighborhood where the police don’t really care about (you know, the kind where a bunch of minorities live) the venue stayed open late and we didn’t make our escape until well after 3 a.m.
When forced with the decision to either a) ferret out a hotel in Denver or b) make the 16-hour drive to the place where our beds and televisions resided. The decision was quick and unanimous. About 15-hours into the harrowing all-nighter we met a torrential downpour which made an attempt on our lives. Apparently we were still on our epic quest to destroy the one ring of power (nerd remember). We were driving next to a semi and we basically hit a lake in the middle of Interstate 15, just outside of Temecula, California. It seemed like an eternity, but for a few seconds the van I was in and the 18-wheeler hydroplaned out of control and somehow managed not to hit each other. We breathed a collective sigh of relief and strayed into silence for the remainder of the drive. Sleep never tasted so good.

Colorado
Haven’t seen the sun for days
And all I know is Rocky gray
Awake for almost 48
This ghost awaits sleeps slim embrace

Wind blows shadows through the black
Those shadows settle into cracks
Beneath my eyes and on my back
A worn will searches for the track

Sleepless lids that long to meet
Left turn down this icy street
These naked trees have lost their leaves
Reminds me of my home back east

A sunrise split apart by clouds
A thousand beams break on this town
Hard rain beats against the ground
I need to dream before I drown

My bed is calling out my name
Whipped around by wind and rain
Drifting in the center lane
Break lights just a fading flame

The sky is blackened by night’s cloak
A fork ahead divides the road
One way leading us towards home
The other points towards the unknown

Is this the way the story ends
Is this the way the story ends
Is this the way the story ends
As long as I am with my friends

Is this the way the story ends
Is this the way the story ends
Is this the way the story ends
As long as I am with my friends

Lay down and dream this noon away
Just burn the blue that turns to gray
A star in bloom would guide our way
It’s time to move I’d rather stay
What’s stranger than this gray friction
To sacrifice the space between
When ego ran through the quicksand
And silence burst instead of screams
The same source feeds my love and hate
These times when youth evaporates
Between the moon and suns first rays
I didn’t kneel this time to pray
Just threw a hope into the sky
The daylight pounds me into dream
Rearview mirror eye to eye
And silence burst instead of screams