The May Fire

More breaking news from the Cat Files...After "Drunk Zombies in Salt Lake City" we stopped to play a show at the most friendly place ever: Nampa, Idaho. We played at a nice coffee shop where every person was very appreciative of the music...

The way they billed the Circo Rocktastico tour for the in-store at Rasputin Music in Berkeley seemed oddly appropriate, somehow...

but we sure spent a lot of time driving through it. And right in the middle somewhere, we found a real special place:

On our way out of Chicago, Cat noticed that the sky looked exactly like the opening sequence from the Simpsons. It was an omen of pleasant midwestern times to come.And we soon learned that there's hardly anything pleasanter in this world than a stay with Johnny Beane's mom and dad in Minneapolis...

We've got some great timing on this tour. And by great, I mean maybe not so much. Fourteen hour drives! Texas in the middle of August! Little college towns when school is out! Denver on the exact night Obama accepts the Democratic nomination for president!So let's talk about Chicago instead...

From the offices of Catty Tasso:In every city I try to get a little bit of gourmet food. When I see a supermarket I go straight to the delicatessen section and I fix myself a nice bagel with salmon and tomato...

Astra Heights tried to warn us... are you SURE you want to go play one night in Monterrey Mexico?Hell yes! we said, it's gonna be sweet. And it was. Kind of. Sort of. And everything went smoothly until we.. entered Mexico...

On the road to El Paso, we find a bright wiggly friend.We play in a sports bar in a thunderstorm.The crowd watches the Olympics carefully.Later, in a tiny hotel room with a slightly defective toilet, we lose our minds as usual.

Just about as opposite as can be from the night before, the Mirage is very large, very air conditioned, and overflowing with complimentary liquor. There is no back load-in access to the Revolution Lounge, so you just need to cart your equipment all the way across the casino floor and back...

After a particularly hot and sweaty set in a particularly hot and sweaty Phoenix establishment, we escape to our hotel in Surprise, AZ and struggle to open up some warm beers: and attempt to cool the beer down:

Relaxing poolside in the desert on Sunday, our one day off before we strike out eastward. Warm winds, chips and beer, eccentric neighbors. Phoenix tomorrow.

From the office of Catty Tasso:We came to L.A. a week before the tour to shoot a video with this cool guy called Heath, from Lowbrow films. So it feels like we've been on tour for more than 4 days. The video shoot was really cool and their crew was amazing...

From the mind of Catty Tasso:Fuck, fuck, fuck, this is hard.. where is my bed and my dry towels? After 4 nights drinking and going to bed at 3am, sleeping on the floor and driving in the heat, I'm cranky. I can't imagine how it's gonna be after 4 weeks....

The tour begins, naturally, in the cozy L.A. bachelor pad of Frankie "It's Just a Prop" Martinez, where we all plan and scheme on our laptops...

Rob likes maps. Pipe likes mapquest. Cat likes to ask for directions. And now Johnny has a GPS thing. So we can generally find whatever we need to find, if we can decide on which navigational method to use for each situation...

First of all, what's going on with all this singer illness? A few hours before the Elbo Room show last Weds, we learn that the headliner's singer has laryngitis, so they're cutting their set short, and aren't drawing a crowd. Then one day before the Silverlake Lounge show in L.A...

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A couple days after the first two shows with Zoe at the Red Devil, we got up in the early-ass morning and drove down to the Ford Amphitheater in L.A., had a sound check, did some random filming for LATV, played our set from 7:30 to 8...

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