Tour Journal: Day Two

Synthesis Editorial Director Daniel Taylor is out on the road as part of the Tooth and Nail Acoustic Tour, and will be blogging about his travels

I’m starting to understand why touring musicians often have a unique sort of disaffection, offset occasionally by undue excitement over seemingly trivial things. For example, we were fairly excited last night by the fact that we were allowed, in lieu of any sort of real accomodations for the evening, to spend the night in a gigantic tent, set up in a parking lot for the purpose of selling fireworks for the forthcoming Independence Day. After having slept for literally tens of minutes the night before, in the upright position in a van whose back windows don’t open with 4 other dudes, the thought of having my VERY OWN wooden table to lay my sleeping back out on was enough to get me practically jumping for joy.

The problem with Utah though, is that even when you get a fireworks tent to sleep in, trying to find enough beer to make sleep actually happen is problematic. They only sell “real” beer in the state run liquor stores, which even in a city the size of Salt Lake City are apparently few and far between. These stores also apparently close before it’s even really beer-thirty. Stores and gas stations are only allowed to sell 3% beer, which as its name implies is beer with only 3% alcohol content. Imagine the shittiest domestic beer you can think of: Hamms, Oly, Schlitz, Keystone, etc. Then imagine it watered down, moreso than it already is. But its still beer I guess.

So far the best thing about Salt Lake City is this cafe with free internet that we’ve basically been living at for the past two days. Besides just being a hard place to find beer, SLC is a hard place to find a fucking coffee shop, probably because Mormons aren’t supposed to drink coffee or whatever. I think the people who work here are starting to give me the stink eye though. I brushed my teeth a little bit ago in their bathroom, which was the first time since we left Chico. I’ve taken a couple dumps already today, which were also fairly refreshing, since I’ve basically ate nothing but cookies for the majority of the last 3 days. And we’ve had five guys on their free wireless since about 9:30 AM, all off of two cups of coffee. So I guess I should market for them a little bit: if you’re ever in SLC, go to Just Add Coffee and sit there all day. It’s right by Guitar Center, so if you happen to be in a band its a good way to kill two days in an amazingly boring American Metropolis without spending any of your measely tour budget.

Anyways, I guess I’m also starting to see why most band’s tour journals are excessively banal and uninteresting. When all you do all day is try to figure out where to eat next, and how to kill the next 24 hours before getting in the van and driving somewhere for 20 hours or so (the entirety of which will also be spent trying to figure out where to eat next and how to kill the next however many hours until you get to wherever youre going) there’s not really a whole lot worth saying other than FUUUUUUCKKKKKKK.

All photos by Surrogate guitarist / Official Photobiographer Chris Armstrong. Check out his photo diary of the tour here

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