RED FANG

I was going to write a rap song in tribute to my favorite Oakland celebrity Too Short for this entry. It’s was going to be all about my tough life on the streets, spitting game to ho’s and being an all around playa, but then I remembered that tough experiences on the streets of Portland consist of having a hard time finding a parking meter that takes credit cards. So I went on a mission to get “hard.” The first person I ran into was our good buddy Sonny from Saviours who is from the hard streets of Oaktown: He was to busy doing sound for the show to toughen me up, so it was out in to the mean streets (AKA the school of hard knocks) on my own. Well, I didn’t want to go to far away from the van because, you know, there is strangers out there . I told John that I was going to start a gang called Satan’s Dentists and he wanted in, the only problem was in order to be in the gang you have to get beat in and I don’t really like fighting so I told him he had fight his drumset. He put up a good...

Los Angeles, it goes by many names to many people: Lala land, the big apple the wind city, Bridgetown, America’s dairy land, big sky country… But one thing is for sure, it’s where many dreams come true and way more are shattered into tiny tear-stained pieces. We were sure that by the time the show was over we would be in a jet made of solid diamond, reviewing a new unprecedented record contract that gave the band every cent made from each release as long as the record company got the pleasure of putting their name on the record. Oh yeah—and we’d be on our way to a lobster lunch with the King of Europe. That didn’t pan out, so we started making other plans. Bryan wasted no time and started training for the Ultimate Fighting Championship: Heiges and Sera started practicing for a roll in the next Tim Burton movie. And Jared made some calls about becoming a Chia pet model. I was kinda banking on the whole gold jet thing… —Coyle Tour To Live!

San Diego is always our favorite part of tour. For going on ten years our good friends at the OTRO house have taken us in, nursed us back to health, fed us, and then left us with some of the worst hangovers of our lives. The kind of hangovers where you feel like you’re spelunking in a pain cave without any water and the only flashlight you have is a hundred pound strobe light that is medically implanted into your brain. The kind that you would be really bummed about if you hadn’t spent the entire night laughing so hard you cried with ten of your favorite people in the world. This time would be no exception. Our show in Mesa ended early so we made the executive decision to make the six-hour trek over night so we could wake up in SD and have the rest of the day off. First things first though, we needed to stock up on crappy energy drinks. As a general rule the worse the name, the better the chance that they are going to be more like the water from a meth lab mop bucket, in both taste and...

It got a little sketchy.

You know, sometimes it ain’t about the quantity of a crowd it’s about the quality and Mesa was definitely one of those situations. While it might not have been the hundreds of thousands of screaming, bloodthirsty fans that we are used to playing to, the show ruled. How could it not when you got kids like Tommy at the show? I’d like to think that I was this fucking cool when I was fifteen, but I wasn’t. The kid has a Spirit Caravan shirt on for Christ’s sake. My idea of underground music cred at that age was knowing all the lyrics to Caught In A Mosh and this kid is listening to Saint Vitus. When shit like this is going on literally a half block from the club… …Kids like Tommy give me hope that the world isn’t turning into a bunch of Ed Hardy T-shirt wearing, Jonas Brothers listening d-bags. But who am I to judge, I got Dido on my Ipod. —Coyle Tour To Live!

Jeez, I didn’t realize how much ground I had to cover. So much bloggin’ so little time. You ready? Get loose. Take a breath. Let’s go. Okay, so we left San Francisco heading for Bakersfield when we got the news that both the other bands had to pull out for some reason or another and the promoter was pulling the plug on the show. Leaving us in the middle of nowhere and two days to make it to Arizona. To most people this would be a blessing in disguise but to us any change in the plans causes panic only rivaled by Rain Man not making it to Wapner on time. Think I’m joking? The band motto is “When in doubt, freak out.” The next hour was spent debating what to do, covering all the bases from drive straight for thirteen hours to Tucson to lets find an In-n-Out and figure it out from there. In the end we pointed it to San Diego end stayed with what we consider our second home the OTROS house. Slept for a couple and six hours hours later we rolled in to Chris Kaufmann’s desert oasis. As usua...

Got a couple days off. We'll catch up soon. I promise.

Reno to San Francisco: A time line: Noon: Check out of Circus Circus and head towards Tahoe City to drop off the Ladies 1:35: Drop the girls off and head out over Donner pass en route to our 5:00 load in at The Bottom Of The Hill. 2:05: It starts snowing pretty hard: 2:15: Bryan’s body gets back at him for ingesting nothing but coffee, energy drinks and gas station hot dogs for the last three days. There’s some collateral damage: 2:30: We notice a sign that tells us that chains are required and there’ll be a checkpoint ahead to make sure they are on. We don’t have chains. 2:35 Traffic comes to a dead stop for what we assume is the checkpoint. We start to panic. 2:40; John spots a guy selling chains on the side of the road, $70 later we have chains. 3:30: Still sitting there: 3:45: We venture out into the wild to smoke and try and see if we can tell what the hell is going on: 3:47: Back in the van. Too damn cold. 4:00: Cabin fever starts setting in. David starts talking about the unifyi...

This one's on the arm of "America's Sweetheart", Sean Clair and it looks awesome! Inked by the creator of the design, Cheyenne Sawyer. If anyone has or gets the "Red Fang Skull" tattooed, send a pic! - Posted from Sherman's pocket.

Reno is one of those towns that can just sneak up on you. One minute you’re hanging out, knocking back a couple of beers and the next you’re putting your Grandma’s dialysis machine on Craigslist to pay off a gambling debt to a three fingered man name Toolshed. So when we heard our good friends Valient Thorr were in town we made a list of bail bondsman, hospitals and pawn shops to hand out just in case we lost each other. I tried to get a photo of David in the event we had to put up missing person posters, but people would have only noticed him if he walked by real fast. At first we thought all the precautions were unneeded because our Valient homies had to leave right after the show to make the long haul to their next show. But we didn’t factor in that our other homechickens Mongoloid Village was on the bill with us: After the show it was off to Silverado for some 3AM club sandwiches and craps followed by some blackjack and shots. At about 4:30 Maureen and I split off on our own advent...

The crowd shot is blurry. Weird. Can I just rant for a second? Almost four bucks a gallon for gas? What the hell is this Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome shit? The entire time this was pumping I was waiting for Tina Turner to jump out and start chanting “Two men enter, one man leaves!” Luckily we have that dingo kid with the boomerang doing sound this tour, so we would have been cool… 
Okay, Salt Lake. What happened… Our friend Fletch (scroll down to Salt Lake) stopped by again and with eight Scottish eggs and a bronasaurus size slab of brisket for us: Look at that! That’s only one chunk, there was about forty more where that came from. John got a raging food boner just looking at it. Thanks again Fletch. Not for John’s boner, for the food. Speaking of John, he really wanted to buy this shirt: But we had to remind him that he’s married and there is no way you can’t get laid wearing a shirt that classy, no matter how much you try. We would like to give a big thanks to Tonino (AKA Muchacho) ...