Exit/In. The title taken from the venue in Nashville, the photo at The National in Richmond, VA. One tour exits, another begins.
A Tour Diary Of Life On The Road With Joshua James
April 28, 2010
April 14, 2010
Entry 9, Day 24, In Which We Go Home To The Coast, Paddle Out On The Water, And The Sun Goes Down in Our Eyes
Our last three days with Third Eye Blind were as perfect an ending to our time with them as the knockout trio of songs that closes their first album. The trifecta began with a triumphant final show at The National in Richmond, VA, the curtain closing on a parting kiss Josh had been getting closer to delivering onstage each night. Fittingly, we would “paddle out on the water,” the second day, canoeing on a lake near Katie’s Williamsburg family home. Gnarled trees rose directly out of the water, pedestals for the nests of Ospreys, which took flight and circled protectively overhead as we glided past. In the shallows we navigated waterways that cut as neatly as crop circles through the reeds.
Admiring a house whose yard came down to the shore, we regretted not bringing a picnic basket to unpack there, and it was decided to have one back on the deck of Katie’s place. The diverse collection of food stuffs that spread before us after raiding the kitchen at will yielded such wonders as a peanut butter, honey, and banana taco on a handmade corn tortilla. I’m told that the look on my face upon tasting the creation, captured by Katie on her iPhone, was so life-affirming that it now graces the device’s background.
Before dinner Katie announced she was taking us on a walk “down to the river,” which I took to mean just that: a leisurely excursion the camera didn’t need to come along for. What I failed to hear implied in her words and the twinkle in her eye was the ending, “to see one of the most glorious sunsets of your lives.” I had mistakenly thought you had to travel to a tropical island to see the likes of it—the colors were so vibrant our eyes could behold them scantly more than gazing directly at the sun. IPhones, it turns out, are much better suited to capturing people’s expressions than indescribable sunsets, and I kicked myself all the way back to the house for leaving the camera behind. Mercifully, it was a short distance.
I forgot all about it though when Katie’s parents served dinner, as per family tradition, on an oriental rug rolled out for the purpose in their living room. Floor cushions with back support were a welcome sight for those of us who consider staying upright while sitting cross-legged on par with performing the feat while doing a handstand. Afterward, Katie’s mom, a laundry guru, instructed us in the ways of bleach and performed the washing machine equivalent of pulling a white rabbit out of a hat after inserting a blue one. She left us chanting the mantra, “Whites, lights, and darks,” the three sacred classes of washes never to be mixed under any circumstances.
In the morning we returned to the Richmond area, where we had another friend and accompanying parents’ house waiting for us. The shows co-headlining with Matthew Perryman Jones commenced the following evening, and, hence, our set length was about to nearly double; we desperately needed to practice. Wyatt generously placed the garage at his parents’ house, where he had a PA set up, at our disposal and we arrived in time to take advantage of it.
The Allen’s barn-turned-workshop certainly honored the industrious heritage of their town, Mechanicsville, and we all had a productive evening. While we brushed up on neglected tunes in the shadow of an old, hulking farm truck, Wyatt repaired a friend’s bass in his guitar workshop, Pablo joined Mr. Allen in preparing whole tobacco leaves, and Mrs. Allen tried her hand at vegetarian cooking. Some of us were more successful in our pursuits than others: Wyatt didn’t manage to solve the bass’s electrical issue, but the tobacco turned out well despite having its flavors administered by a sore throat spray bottle—a compromise after Wyatt and Pablo vetoed one containing cleaning solution. “Put water in that bottle and I’d drink it,” Mr. Allen had maintained even as he relented. And you wouldn’t have known that Mrs. Allen was a relative newcomer to meatless dinners from her pasta and zucchini with homemade sauce. As for us, the next days show at Jammin’ Java in Vienna, VA would reveal how much the practicing had paid off, and what the second half of tour would be like. We didn’t really know what to expect.
April 8, 2010
From right: Joe LaChance, two Radford University event workers, and Pablo’s foot. Please notice the “Welcome Joshua James” sign featuring a sea horse. This was our favorite of all the college welcome signs.
April 7, 2010
Entry 8, Day 17: “I’m afraid I just blue myself”
All of my clothes are blue. I’m not just now noticing that my wardrobe contains a disproportionate number of articles in my favorite hue—I’m talking about a catastrophe here. I will admit, I do own a fair amount of blue clothing, but I did have some that wasn’t. Until this happened.
Joe broke the news to me slowly: “Some of your socks might have turned a bit blue.”
“Well, no matter,” I thought. They were pretty dingy to begin with and no one can see them anyway. How had that happened though? I had diligently separated my lights and darks into two distinct piles. Joe, it turned out, making the tough call to consolidate loads in order to get all our laundry done had thrown caution to the wind—and everything in together.
“The rest of it should be ok though,” he said, swinging the dryer door open so we could inspect the damage. I began to get nervous—I didn’t catch a glimpse of white in the swirled nest of colors. Reaching in, we pulled out socks, undershirts, and button-ups all turned a shade of blue that goes best with kaki pants and an artificial tan.
“I think it was this. I left it in my jean pocket,” Joe confessed, solemnly holding up one of the adhesive all-access passes we’re given to come and go unmolested at the Third Eye Blind shows. Had it been a pass for their ’99 Blue tour, I would have accepted the proof as conveniently conclusive, but, as it was, it was hard to believe such an unassuming piece of fabric that wasn’t even blue could have caused such widespread and thorough damage. Whatever it was had rampaged through our wash like one of Plagues of Egypt, ignoring even the exempted color; not even the clothes that were blue to begin with were spared, left instead with mysterious yellowish stains.
We still don’t know what the culprit was for sure. It could have been our relatively new jeans bleeding off their excess dye. What we did know was that our initiative to establish a dress code for our stage attire had sustained a serious blow. The classiness of the white collar had been unceremoniously reduced to the commonness of the blue. A visit to the downtown Charleston, SC location of Urban Outfitters, which appeared to have once been a theater, did nothing to restore our costumes to their former glory. But we were blue collar at heart, no matter what shirts we wore onstage—we would soldier on in whatever uniform we had.
April 6, 2010
Entry 7, Day 16: Fleeing Florida
Florida looks prettier leaving than driving in or during a stay, I’m noticing. We’ve been here for the last three days and it feels good to be headed north again, away from, rather than into, the summer heat creeping slowly up the country like sap drips down a tree. Perhaps I’m being too hard on it—we’ve had a great time here, actually. The whole tour family enjoyed a glorious day off together on Easter, the majority of which was spent lounging on an eighth floor hotel terrace, or, in my case, on the other side of the glass doors, where shade and air-conditioning made up for the slight downgrade of view and sitting surfaces.
I think the first show in Panama City Beach—a major spring break destination—that just happened to fall during that coed Christmas of a holiday, put a bad taste in my mouth. And I don’t mean the one of Bud Lite and cigarettes that many in the audience seemed to be enjoying. Let’s just say there was a pool in the middle of the venue floor where, naturally, a wet t-shirt contest was held earlier that day. On the dressing room wall a band had shared a thought about their experience playing there: “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups,” spelling underestimate with an ‘a’ instead of an ‘i’. They didn’t sign their name but I assume they were a large band.
Alarmingly, something about the place tugged at a memory filed somewhere in the no-access area of my mind. Cautiously, I let myself remember: I’m in middle school, at a friend’s house. MTV is on and some band, I imagine Limp Bizcuit, has a bikini- and board shorts-clad crowd jumping in the sun around a pool. Why hadn’t this been erased? Probably to be used as an alarm to warn me if I ever came in close proximity to the place, as I had now. My suspicions were confirmed: it was indeed MTV’s spring break filming location of choice, but it was too late now. We figured we would get two, maybe three, songs before we had all fallen to thrown beer bottles. We would have to make the most of them.
We took the stage with our senses heightened, ready to simultaneously give it all we had and defend ourselves from bodily harm. “You’ve gotta fight for your amp,” Stephen told us. And, somehow, it worked—they didn’t turn on us. Instead, we convinced them that they liked us long enough to play our set and get off stage. We would have to thank Jack Johnson for training the frat crowd not to attack at the sight of an acoustic guitar if we ever ran into him.
So, we survived to play the next show at Floyd’s Music Store in Tallahassee. We arrived early to browse the music store portion of the venue. However, Joshua’s inquiries as to its location were met with quizzical looks and curt answers that there was no music store. “This is Floyd’s Music Store. The rock venue.” Apparently it was very “rock” to confuse having music in store for customers with being a music store. Luckily, our couch surfers didn’t mean something else when they said the bar we were meeting them at was giving out free pizza. Nor was Florida’s license plate slogan, “The Sunshine State,” false advertising. But sometimes one piece of free bar pizza, or three days of sunshine, is more than enough.
April 2, 2010
Onstage at House of Blues, New Orleans. Photo by Pablo Blaqk.
March 29, 2010
Entry 6, Day 7, In Which 3EB’s “Flame Bus” Catches Fire For Real, and We Sleep On 7th Day Adventist Picnic Tables
The highway simulates the sound of the ocean for the landlocked, the whooshing of passing semis as persistent and soothing as crashing waves. And if the highway were the sea, then we’ve just slept on the beach—that sound lulled us to sleep and it’s still there, unchanged, when we wake. It’s nearly noon as we sit up in sleeping bags laid out on the tables of a Seventh Day Adventist church’s picnic area. We’re in plain view of the passing drivers and the arriving churchgoers, who glance at us curiously as they go about their business but don’t approach us. Our steps squelch as we cross the muddy lawn carrying our sleeping accoutrements back to the van—it rained all night. And so we drove all night, trying to escape the storm system that has hurricane warnings going up father south, until the sight of the church caught our eye. We couldn’t even see the sheltered area through the curtains of rain receding into the darkness.
We had an eventful evening, and not necessarily the kind of events you’d want to have happen. The drive into Virginia was breathtaking though—it took us over a system of bridges and tunnels that alternately skirted over and plunged into the sea. Riding its arcs and troughs was like driving on the back of one of those sea monsters that adorned the corners of maps in antiquity. The venue was solid as well: The Norva in Norfolk, VA. I had fond memories of it from seeing Ryan Adams & The Cardinals there a few years ago.
It was during our soundcheck that the trouble started. While the sound guys battled an unwieldy microphone into submission, its piercing shrieks of feedback taking their toll on the eardrums of anyone in the vicinity, the venue inexplicably opened its doors to the line waiting outside. The early arrivals cheerfully flowed in and assembled three rows deep in front of the stage, making a spectacle of the painful proceedings. All we could do was stand there like idiots until the problem was fixed. We couldn’t believe it—this exact thing had happened to us the night before. We hurriedly changed backstage and returned to play our set, only to find the problem hadn’t been fixed after all but probably just given up on. The microphone had simply been turned off, which Joshua found out when he went to sing through it. The loss of the mic, a green bullet harmonica model, wasn’t the end of the world—Joshua alternates between two mics—but its effect is a big part of our sound.
As we packed up our gear, we marveled at the absurdity of the last two shows. Certainly it couldn’t get any worse. Carrying some records out to the van, Joe and I noticed a foul vapor attempting to blend in with the mist of the Virginia night. Panic quickened our pace—Joe and I knew the smell of a vehicle on fire—and squinting ahead we discerned plumes of smoke billowing from the back of Third Eye’s bus. Dropping the merch, Joe ran back inside to raise the alarm while I started pounding on the door of the bus. No one responded, but someone might have passed out in the back from the fumes, so I continued my assault on the door as a stream of black-clad Norva workers streamed out of the building, fire extinguishers in hand.
We felt relieved but slightly guilty—it had probably been the fire spirit that visits us on a tourly basis to set our van alight, and the flames emblazoned down the sides of Third Eye Blind’s bus must have thrown him off. In the ensuing chaos, it emerged that our couchsurfer was not responding to our calls. We hung around as flights, hotels, and a new tour bus were booked, waiting to see if any of the vague assurances of a place to crash from various locals in the backstage crowd panned out. One by one, all of our leads fell through and the hour grew late. Optionless, we were forced to start the nine-and-a-half-hour drive toward Lexington.
In the morning, or afternoon rather, when we woke up on the picnic tables we had a barrage of disheartening messages waiting on our phones. Our couchsurfer claimed ignorance that we would be any later than ten, even though she had been thoroughly briefed by Joe and had expressed enthusiasm about coming to the show, which started at eight. The fatal blow came from finding out that one of my best friends, with whom I had played phone tag with the day before, was visiting Virginia from San Francisco and had been six blocks away the entire time. What could have been an amazing evening was needlessly a dismal one. Our spirits broken, we swung by a parking lot coffee cart and merged back onto the highway, our tires casting a faint spray on the still-wet roads.
March 28, 2010
Joshua James, upstairs at Crocodile Rock, Allentown, PA
March 27, 2010
Entry 5, Day 5, In Which We Graduate to Performing in an Armory and Stay in The Office Hometown of Scranton, PA
The setting of tonight’s show admittedly maintains the unconventional theme set by the hockey arenas, but it’s definitely an improvement. It’s an armory, run with an appropriate military precision. A whole brigade of stagehands is assigned to our service and the van is unloaded with unprecedented swiftness. Soon we’re left with nothing to do but admire the vast, open space of the building. During our performance, Joshua’s vocals would bounce off the far wall nearly a second after being sung, creating a distracting natural delay.
We used our buy-out (money given to procure meals when they’re not provided) on our first restaurant meal: take out Thai food. Not the best we’ve ever had, but a welcome change from our few revolving meals, and Pablo’s first encounter with the cuisine. He likes it but is nervous about what his stomach will think.
Third Eye Blind isn’t doing the song Joshua sang last night, but Stephan asks him if he wants to do another, “God of Wine,” and he reluctantly agrees—though he’s heard the song a million times, Joshua doesn’t know it by heart. Luckily we have the CD in our road collection and we coup ourselves in the van so he can run his part till we hear the applause calling for an encore.
Kingston, PA isn’t really on the Couchsurfing map yet, so Joe has arranged to stay in the neighboring town of Scranton. Yes, as in the setting of the American version of The Office, a show that reminds me of my college days. Fittingly, we’re staying with a bunch of students. The TV’s on when we come in, and I half expect to see Office reruns, but they have it tuned to Current TV, Al Gore’s network. Joshua mentions doing an interview on the station the previous year, and the conversation starts up as people hurt themselves in hilarious ways onscreen. It’s the first night we’ve had to unwind—the talk and antics last long into the night.
March 27, 2010
March 27, 2010
March 25, 2010
J.Viewz - Come Back Down (ft. Joshua James)
Joshua received the request to lend his vocal talents to this song while on way to the airport for a Tokyo to New York flight—from one music festival to another—and laid them down during a day off there. We thought the track and its video turned out nicely.
March 25, 2010
Entry 4, Day 4, In Which Joshua Joins 3EB Onstage To Sing “How’s It Going To Be?”
A bitter wind angrily bids us good riddance from The U.P., propelling us toward the Michigan mainland. Before crossing the bridge connecting the State’s two pieces, frigid, choppy waves crashed onto beaches with dunes of snow rather than sand. But on the other side, the water has taken on a beautiful, transparent turquoise that resembles an ocean more than a lake.
On our way to Port Huron, we surprise a group of bald eagles lunching on some road kill in the middle our lane, sending them screeching into the air as we pass. Probably the equivalent of the “Game off Wayne. Game on Garth” exchange in eaglish.
Not even the Canadians, we imagine, could combine live music and hockey as expertly as Midwesterners, and Port Huron was not about to be showed up in exhibiting its hockey arena’s capability to be transformed into a concert venue. It was so cold and blustery, we were just happy to get inside, whatever the place was. Compared to Marquette, we found Port Huron’s zamboni room to have the more formidable scent, but declared the two facilities to be otherwise evenly matched.
During Third Eye’s soundcheck the lead singer, Stephan Jenkins called out as Joshua was passing by, “Joshua! You want to sing a song with us tonight?” Donning Stephen’s “3” guitar, our front man joined theirs to rehearse “How’s It Going To Be?”
The performance later that night during the encore went over extremely well and Stephan seemed so pleased with the result that he soon made the invitation an open one to sing with them every night. Our guy’s voice has that effect on other people’s songs (see the J.Viewz video below). Stephen seemed to have answered his own question—it’s going to be great.
March 25, 2010
