tonight i was going through old pictures.  no, not old pictures from 1862.. that was earlier this evening.

i was reminiscing specifically about my first-ever cross country tour.  the band i was in at the time, brand new disaster, had completed several tours of the east coast and midwest, but had yet to make that “leap” to playing shows on the west coast.  it was such a huge deal for me.  i remember thinking that if we could make it to california, we could accomplish anything.  there were so many obstacles - an unreliable van, money, trying to convince our jobs to let us leave for six weeks, the difficulties of booking a tour somewhere you don’t know anyone.  it was really hard, but after months of work and booking the shows myself, we had finally hit the road and winded our way across the country to the west coast.

our second show on the west coast was in a tiny town in southern oregon.  we showed up that night and found ourselves at a weird christian coffee shop venue.  we played a lot of christian venues, since at the time, those were the places that seemed to be doing all-ages shows most often.  they were also usually receptive to touring bands, which helped a lot.

when the show was over, we set about asking people if we could crash at their place.  hotels were not an option because money was so tight.  after having little success, the guy who owned the venue basically offered it up as a place to sleep.  at first, we were a little taken aback.  this guy is just gonna let us sleep here?  grateful for the offer, we accepted.

we thought for sure they’d leave us a chaperone or someone to keep an eye on us, but everyone left and we were just hanging out inside this coffee shop with a stage.  their only rule was “no drinking alcohol in the venue”.

we immediately set to misbehaving, because that’s what you do when you’re in a touring band and you’re an irresponsible 23-year-old.  we decided to take the rule very literally and headed out to our van and proceeded to pound multiple cans of sparks inside our van and then headed back inside the venue once we were all thoroughly intoxicated.

once we were drunk, it was sort of inevitable that we’d start playing with all the stuff at the venue.  we found some bongos and had an impromptu drunken bongo jam drum circle.

the night peaked at about 3:00am when we discovered the controls to the lazer lights and smoke machine in the venue portion of the building.  we decided to throw an impromptu drunken lazer show and lost each other in the giant plumes of smoke coming out of the smoke machine that we had set to full blast.

once all the novelty wore off, we put everything back in it’s proper place, secretly disposed of all our empty sparks cans and quickly fell asleep.  the next morning we were greeted by the coffee shop employees arriving for work.  we quickly gathered our things and headed off to the next city, hopeful that no one would notice any clues to the previous night’s antics.

easily one of my favorite tour nights for sure.