All right, this is a little unusual, normally MOIST newsletters are written in the comfort of a fashionable apartment in Vancouver's west end. The kind of place none of us live in but break into every now and then to scam beer and food, and run up huge telephone bills before spiking the family pet's kibble with salt, pepper and Jalapenos.
Not this time. No, we're on the road, 200km from Toronto and closing faster than the law will allow, weaing nothing but maniacal grins and, with the exception of Stan, wearing matching blue and white striped engineers uniforms with our names emblazoned on the arm in red sequins. (Graeme's idea and design.) Stan is fashionably dressed in his traditional Kevlar body armor, night vision goggles and optional combination multi-speed baton weilder/vegetable processor attachment mounted elegantly on his forehead. Interestingly enough, Stan insists he is not paranoid, just very well prepared...Right, and Kevin's not twitchy, he's just constantly dodging invisible bullets...
For the past week and a half, we've been in the states doing shows in and around New York...And folks are we glad to be back in Canada! At least most of us are. David and Mark are in the air as we speak, firm in the belief that shortly they will land in Germany and begin a 2 day round of interviews and promotional visits in preparation for our European release. They're wrong. The rest of us have arranged for them to land just left of James Bay where they will spend two muck filled, terrifying days and nights naked except for the astonishingly realistic deer antlers glued to their heads, banging drums and trying desperately to find their inner warrior, food and a way back to Toronto while running screaming for their lives and boyish complexions from moonshine drenched, kill crazy hunters who would gladly speed them on their inner journey with hot lead and colorful language.
Anyway...MOIST has, typically, discovered that in addition to the usual drawbacks of touring in the United States, that is, no solid(pronounced salad by some) butter, or knowledge of white vinegar, almost total denial of the metric system, cheese in aerosol cans and more handguns per square inch than anywhere else on this planet, that living on 9th street in the east village, NYC, right next to our manager, Keith "wrong way" Maryanovich's new office/crawlspace with telephone, there lives a fat naked man with a samurai sword and something against skateboarding. Ten hours ago while frantically loading T-shirts and Xanax into our trailer for the trip to Canada, this voluminous creature wearing nothing but a beard and flesh colored boxer shorts(I hope they were shorts)appears yelling and chasing local skateboarders with the grace and demeanor only 3 gallons of grain alcohol and a belly full of wake ups can inspire. I don't know about you but when 400 pounds of butt cleavage on a bender carrying a four and a half foot straight razor, bent on making nasty, shows up for tea and crumpets, it's time to leave immediately.
...sound like a nightmare? Well, how about the friendly and lonely border line psychotic staff of the Lakewood manor motorist hotel in Cleveland whose hospitality during our brief but memorable stay proved beyond any possible doubt that filth and pestilence are still fashionable and that rooms decorated in post apocalyptic squalor don't need working toilets, lights or phones to provide a comfortable place for multitudes of cockroaches to swarm a human body, wrapped only in a sheet freshly washed just days before your room's previous occupant died in it. Nedless to say the band reacted with it's usual self assurance and calm-
David: blames Keith and lectures him loudly and sanctimoniously at great lengths until retreating into the parking lot to play with his scar.
Keith: pretends to listem, picks up the cell phone(completley ignoring a nearby public telephone), looks constipated and orders two additional cases of Grecian formula for men.
Kevin: blames the Klingon empire and goes catatonic gracefully.
Mark: makes lists of people to blame, cross references, finalizes blame in 1995.
Paul: promises not to blame anyone as long as the whole band agrees that he's the pretty one.
Jeff: too busy dipping fingers in cow's blood and scrawling his memoirs on the hotel bible to blame anyone.
Actually...
aside from this splendid tourist attraction and the usual "wrong turn",
vat of tequila,
club weilding bouncer,
waking up screaming in Technicolor with our pants around our ankles,
near death Detroit experience,
our trip to the U.S. was filled with large ice cold fishbowls of Blue Curacao,
big fun,
several games of volleyball on Long Island,
and suddenly obscene luck landing a show opening up for the Red Hot Chili Peppers at New York City's Roseland Ballroom.
Thanks to all the people who showed up at our shows in the states, dancing and sweating and making us welcome, and to everyone who showed up in Canada, packed our shows to the roof with sweaty bodies flying everywhere in various states of undress, yelling and causing havoc night after night without fail even armed with the knowledge that any day Jeff could sip once too often from the devil's gravy boat, get caught, cop a lame excuse and say a few heartfelt words about the history of Canadian film, before vanishing in a puff of recycled socks and stolen CDs.
More thanks to Bif Naked, Universal Honey and treble charger for playing with us across Canada. See you in a few days at the dates listed on the back.
Nauselbaum
MOIST