Tour Belly: Upwelling Vigilante Tour

Right now, I’m writing to you from the back of our tour van/home, “The Showboat,” doing about 75mph on a pitch black empty highway, in the center of New Mexico.  I’m currently working on a video that really introduces “The Showboat” properly, but for now just picture this:  Its a city short bus that was transformed into a livable mini tour bus.  Josh cut out the wheel cheer lift and installed four bunks, a couch, and a refrigerator inside of it.  We’ve traveled across, and all over the U.S. in this  this death trap, however, The Upwelling  Vigilante Tour is a new experience for us.

This is the first time we’ve gone on tour without a tour.  About a week ago Josh and myself spent some time hanging w/ Tyson Ritter (All American Rejects singer) while he was in NYC for fashion week.  In an incredibly cramped and loud NYC night club, with mischievous smiles, we decided on the plans for our next few weeks, a.k.a The Upwelling Vigilante Tour.

At this point in my story I’d like to insert some important background info.  A few months ago we had a number of potential tours lined up to support the release of our record.  Everything looked great and our tour schedule for the fall looked amazing.  In fact, it still looks great for late fall, but last minute the tour we had lined up for these weeks, the first week after our record release, was canceled.  Hey, what can you do,? Shit, does truly happen.

This brings us back to  the fashion week party plan.  Essentially, we we’re telling Tyson about our mixed emotions.  On the one hand, we’re glad to have some time off tour where we can enjoy answering emails, myspace/facebook messages and fan mail about our record.  It would be nice to really decompress before we went back out.  However, we we’re also really excited to get out and start playing our new record in front of people.

So it was in this surreal fashion party environment where we finalized our idea.  Josh and myself would get a “shotgun” education in power generators, live staging, an outdoor sound, and hit the road with AAR and Blink 182 one week later.  However, we’re not on the actual tour.  We’re just going to set up our own stage, our own gear, and play to folks in the parking lot before the gig starts, with Tyson.  Really exciting right?

Maybe too exciting.  There’s a good chance the venues wont allow us to play and we’ll have to turn around and drive back home with our tails between our legs and a nice credit card debt.  I even think there’s a reasonable chance we’ll be arrested.  But we are going to find out one way or the other.  And in “The Streets Have No Name” tradition we’re just going to grip it and rip it.

-Ari