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.