Teen Wolves Tour

Teen Wolves Tour

As the John Phillip Sousa tune goes, “it’s a long way to the top, if you wanna rock n’ roll”.  But if your aim is scraping the bottom, you can get there almost immediately.  The angelic power tool noise that was the band Teen Wolves from New Brunswick, NJ, was together for about a year, with about two dozen shows under our belt, before we shipped off on our first and would be only tour outside the northeast corridor.  The itinerary we all set up, which was modified on the fly along the way, ended up including 13 shows, in 12 cities, in 15 days and with over 4,300 miles of driving to get it done.  Going on tour is a lifelong ambition of nearly all punk kids.  As a bunch of “adults” in our 20’s, with the word “teen” in our idiotic band name (to which I was a major proponent of), we set out to make those kid dreams happen.

The band came into existence after we schemed to poach Sayuri during the decline of her old band, whose vocals we all loved since she débuted them in the New Brunswick scene as a teenager.  We managed to convince her to join our existing, but not so serious, side project that we three dudes, Patsky, George and myself, had going on. Our singer had recently vacated the role after failing to show up to our first show due to previously unrealized stage fright.  Her joining immediately raised the bar and T een Wolves very soon became the main project for all of us.  Band practice was conveniently held in the basement of the house where we three dudes resided and a few blocks from Sayuri’s place.  It is the same basement where we recorded our first demo and our much better album (All Out of Sheep?), which was never released.

For many bands in the punk and hardcore scene, tour can function as a practical and low cost vacation where you get to meet new people, experience new places and get to play your music to people who would most likely never hear it otherwise.  Though playing the shows themselves is the driving force, some of the most memorable parts of touring are everything in between.  The photos in the series are of that:  the road, the time killing, the old friends we met up with along the way, the friendly strangers that hooked us up with shows, fed us and let us crash at their place and the exploration of the places we happened to find ourselves in. 

We toured in the middle of summer and headed right down south.  The heat was doing a number on us in New Orleans.  As we were killing time walking around, we ran into someone in a band we played a show with the night prior.  He invited us over to hang and we were all excited at the prospect of chilling in some air conditioning for a couple hours, until we arrived and realized this household certainly did not have air conditioning or even cold water, from what I remember, we were lucky they had chairs, but it was a really cool house.  They had adorned the space with all kinds of post-Katrina jetsam and flotsam they had collected, creating an anarcho-installation piece as their home.  I mostly remember Patsky being so hot and miserable it was comical.

We were only pulled over once, by my recollection, in a small town in Mississippi.  The southern twanged officer walked up and immediately swung the side doors of the tour van (George’s van) open.  He seemed just as perplexed as we were.  During the mild interrogation of who we were and how we came to find ourselves pulled over in Mississippi, it came up that we were a band on tour.  He then insisted we sing a little something, as if to validate our story.  After several refusals, we managed to convince him that he really didn’t want to hear what we had to sing.  Patsky got a speeding ticket, but we definitely dodged some other potentially major issues.  As the old folk song goes, it certainly made us feel like we were “moshing on eggshells.”

I believe it was later that day, playing a show in northern Alabama there was a kid who was being turned away at the door, because he showed up to the bar with no shirt on, as one is apt to do in the northern Alabama summer heat.  He yelled to us that he really wanted to see our band, so we ended up giving him one of our band shirts so he could enter and he was by far our most enthusiastic fan for the rest of the evening.  

In Chicago, our boy Rich from New Brunswick hooked us up and showed us around town.  We slowly gathered that he was acting a little different than we all remembered him, a little off, as he mumbled stories interspersed with the extremely bizarre shouting of directions.  The next day he let us know, “Sorry if I was acting weird yesterday, I was tripping on acid while I was giving directions”. 

On a day without a show scheduled, after playing in Grand Rapids, MI, we headed to the east shore of Lake Michigan to camp out for the night.  The weather was perfect, so George and I decided to sleep out under the stars, instead of all four of us again cramming in the van.  The next morning a friendly middle aged couple came up and started chit-chatting with us.  It ended up that he was a Reverend and that they were enthusiastically religious, but repeatedly stated, as they referenced George and I sleeping out under the stars together, that they didn’t have anything against gay people.  I guess sleeping outside is a signal that you are a homosexual in the mid-west?  They eventually asked us to pray with them and we in good humor obliged these friendly folk and all held hands in a circle.  Patsky did not find this hilarious.  Once again, he was so visibly uncomfortable it was comical, I thought he was going to run away into the woods screaming “Hail Satan!”

In Youngstown, Ohio, we stayed at this nice dude’s place who hooked us up with the show that night, where I believe the number of people we played to was just the headcount of the two other bands that also played that evening.  We had a lot of down time before the show so we spent a decent amount of time hanging out at his strange quarters.  Apparently, the story was that he was watching this large warehouse building while the owner was in prison on drug charges so people didn’t mine the copper out of the walls, which was not an uncommon problem in the largely abandoned city of Youngstown.  Amongst other oddities, there was a “floating room,” which was a floor suspended from the ceiling by some straps and swayed when you hung out on it.  It was the second coolest place I slept that evening after the roof, which had been disrupted by rain in the middle of the night.  The building had stairs that led down to an abandoned quasi-legal club with everything still intact, where they used to hold boxing matches and the like.  There was a back passageway that then snaked from that club up another flight of stairs to land you in an old steakhouse style restaurant that had those cool old hat racks built into the end of the booths.  Supposedly, mob hits were ordered out of there during Youngstown’s car-bombing hey-day.  I believe I also bought a whole pizza for $3 in Youngstown, almost like the city had a favorable foreign exchange rate to the US dollar. 

The tour culminated in a show we were playing in Washington, D.C.  It was part of a multiday festival of feminist motif and had many stellar bands billed.  It was also the largest audience we likely ever played to and an important venue in the history of the DC punk scene.  It was also probably the best set we ever played as a band, with a sharp and brief off the cuff political parlance by Sayuri, that really smacked everyone in the face just right.  Later that day, we got to meet Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi fame.  Us three dudes, being giant fans (our band covered multiple songs of bands he was in), were embarrassingly star struck and did a pretty shitty job of keeping that under wraps.  I believe we collectively managed to mumble out some stupid words to answer his casual questions and handed him our demo before he likely concluded we were idiots and rightfully walked away.  I don’t know where Sayuri was during this interaction, but we most definitely could have benefitted from her presence.  Anyway, it didn’t stop us from talking about it like little schoolgirls almost the entire way from D.C. back to New Jersey, as Sayuri stayed behind to party it up in DC like a cool kid.

We certainly had some highs and lows on the adventure and a bunch of weirdness, but overall it was a blast.  And…we just about broke even on the whole endeavor, which in our world was an outstanding financial success. 

April 3rd, 2019

T.W.P

My Ears Are Ringing/ Can't Hear What You Say/ From All The Shows/Back In The Day/ Quarter Life Crisis/ Fuck That/ I'm Joining The Teen Wolf Pack/Teen/Wolf Pack/Teen/Teen Wolf Pack

2011 Summer Tour Route and Details

1.   June 24th, Beat Kids House, 2609 Hampden Ave, Baltimore, The Mandroids, Grounds, Endless Bummer, Pahaa Verta (FIN), Ydinperhe (FIN),

2.   June 25th, The Blue Nile, 181 North Main, Harrisonburg, VA, Evan P Donohue (Nash), Cake Dreams (VA)

3.   June 26th, The Shadow Gallery, 232 Wilbur Ave, Atlanta, GA, Flex Your Head (ATL)

4.   June 27th, The FUBAR, 658 Central Ave, Saint Petersburg, FL, Gonad Rehab (ST. Pete), Dead Cat Lounge (Tampa), Mosquito Teeth (Tampa)

5.   June 28th, Siberia, 2227 St. Claude Ave, New Orleans, LA, Autistic Fit (NOLA), Fast Boyfriends (NOLA)

6.   June 30th, Chelsea’s Café, 2857 Perkins Rd, Baton Rouge, LA, James Hayes (NOLA), Struggle Bear (Bat Rouge), The Melters (Bat Rouge)

7.   July 1st, The Benchwarmer Food and Spirits, 2998 University Drive, Huntsville, AL, Random Conflict (AL), The Miscreants (AL), Babylons M? (AL)

8.   July 2nd, Nashville, TN, Lazy Susan (Nash), The Choors (Nash),

9.   July 3rd , The Springwater, 115 27th Ave, Nashville, TN, Fancy Tramp (Nash), Thelma & the Sleeze (Nash)

10.   July 4th, Archer Nemesis/Ranchos Huevos, 2966 S. Archer, Chicago, IL, Asymmetrical War (Seattle), No Problem (Edmonton, ALB, CAN) Sospectos? (CHIC)

11.   July 5th, Thunderdome/Bartertown Diner, 6 Jefferson St, SE Grand Rapids, MI, No Problem (Edmonton, ALB, CAN), The Amoebas (Grand Rapids)

12.   July 7th, Royal Oaks Bar, 924 Oak St., Youngstown, OH (Cool Band from OH), Hipster Trash  (Memphis)

13.   July 9th, Clitfest, St. Stephen’s Church, 1525 Newton St. NW, Washington, D.C., Cat Vet (Philly), Hot Mess (DC), Big Eyes (NY), Foreign Objects (MA), Nuklear Blast Suntan (Augusta, GA), Condenada (CHI)