Steve on The Phone #4 [J Roddy Blog Archive]

This post was originally published on the old J Roddy Walston & The Business blog in 2009. It was written by Steve Colmus. I’m reposting it here for archival purposes.

Howdy folks, It’s been awhile. Lots of things have happened since we last spoke. Let’s not getting bogged down in he-said-she-said and let’s get right to the tale of the tape.

This is Zach on the balcony of the Driskill Hotel in Austin, TX, at a free happy hour we went to at SXSW last March. He looks rather pensive here, as though he’s just come to the end of a long journey and is pondering what it all might mean. But instead he’s probably just catching his breath from the maniacal pace of our drinking that day, as we tried to cram an entire evening’s worth of drinks into two decidedly happy hours. On this tour, we were all dead broke and relying on our wits for survival – sleeping in a friend’s backyard, making mental maps of where the free buffets with the loosest security were, trying to hang out with the people most likely to buy us dinner, and pouring free Shiner Bocks down our gullets like our intestines were on fire.

This is a lamp we saw for sale at The World’s Most Awesome Flea Market – it’s God-given name – just outside of Louisville, KY. We almost bought it for the merch table, but we realized it’s porcelain days would be numbered in the back of our van. Plus, we were all pretty positive that it was housing at least one Satanic spirit (and Zalamia doesn’t need back-up). But we made out in the end because a kind, shirtless, semi-toothed man took our brief pause here as his opportunity to tell us about the time he beat a Teddy Ruxpin doll to death with a baseball bat after it verbally threatened him. My favorite part was him capping the story by aping himself standing over the obliterated doll, bellowing “Who’s your daddy NOW m*therf*cker!” I’m sure around the same time this happened, KrazyGlue stock went through the roof. Rod had another priceless exchange with a dealer: [Rod admiring a bicycle the man has for sale] Dealer: How much you wanna pay for that? Rod: Ahhh, only thing I can offer you right now is a handshake, man. Dealer: How ’bout $75? Rod: I wish I could. Thanks anyway though. [Starts to walk away] Dealer: Hey! [Under his breath] Trade you for a gun? The South is spooky.

This is a side project some friends and I have called Warning Track Power (featuring most of The Egg Babies Orchestra). Back in February, we wrote a song for this past Baltimore Orioles season called “How ‘Bout Dem O’s.” The team picked it up and starting playing it at games, and we enjoyed five seconds of local celebrity in the run-up to Opening Day. We got to play on “Coffee With” with Don Scott and Marty Bass (a personal dream of mine since third grade) and this is us on the field at 7am on Opening Day, doing brief musical spots for the Fox 45 morning show. The O’s subsequent 92 losses rendered most of our optimism comically premature, but hey – there’s always next year. In October and November of last year, we went on tour with Murder by Death and William Elliott Whitmore for a month, and my heart and health have never been the same since. One day when we’re all rich and famous, we’ll play touch football on the front lawn in Hyannisport and drink Keystone Light until someone drives a car into the lake. In the meantime, all we have are precious, precious memories. Like these:

I wish I had a better shot of this, but this is an old AirStream trailer out back of the Bottletree in Birmingham that we spent the night in after playing there last October. It has several eerie spirit orbs! Are these the souls of lost rockers of years past?? Hendrix? Cobain? RAY VAUGHN? Mayhaps. The spirits have been known to be attracted to Zalamia’s glowing angel shoes.

This is what came down the street about 30 seconds after we parked the van in New Orleans. I’m pretty sure this was The Official Welcome Wagon.

When we were in New Orleans, we somehow stumbled into a time warp and ended up on the set of Miami Vice, where these guys had just shot a rival dealer and were on their way to the speedboat with the coke they’d just stolen. I’m pretty sure Crocket and Tubbs put an end to their scheme, but I got distracted by some really nice booby beads so I didn’t see what happened.

This is a sign we saw in Ft. Worth, TX advertising…something. Beats me. I took French instead of Spanish because it seemed to me at the time that…OH MY GOD! IS THERE A HUMAN BEING BEHIND THAT THING? I stared at this for like 10 seconds trying to translate it when suddenly the hands moved and I screamed like a woman. Apparently this is someone’s job in the 135 degree Texas heat – human wooden stake. Texas is weird – don’t let anybody tell you different.

Ever wonder how much Kiss you can buy for $150 at Target? This is us on Halloween night in Austin, TX, on the Murder by Death tour. We’re wearing about six rolls of aluminum foil between the four of us – if anyone had turned on a microwave, we all would have pissed ourselves. Billy is the saddest Spaceman ever.

This is Adam from Murder by Death singing Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” in Louisville, KY. Zach saw his Meatloaf (err) and raised him “Unchained Melody,” which forced Adam into going all-in with a version of “The Beautiful Ones” by Prince that he sung so hard I thought he was going to have an aneurysm. He literally dragged himself across the stage on his stomach, begging and pleading with the crowd. I think he actually cried. I was moved. Meanwhile, Zalamia was in the middle of a hot sake fit in the bathroom, and let’s just say the toilet seat was definitely getting the worst of it.

This is William Elliott Whitmore, Dagan (from Murder by Death) and Rod yukking it up backstage in Northampton, MA. We were all in the midst of admiring the handiwork of the bands who’ve left their artwork and anatomy lessons on the walls for the rest of us to enjoy. Two of my favorites:

“Anus Punch” This has a real stick-it-to-the-man vibe about it. I picture it symbolizing some secret resistance group, who just really want you to “Punch ’em in the ass!” Maybe I’m wrong. Whatever it means, this has been the wallpaper on my phone for nine months. It never fails to get me pumped up every time I see it.

“Wizard Bong ’07.” That’s a four-chambered bong with a set of boobs in the hitter. Sweet.

Here’s Murder by Death’s tour manager/merch guy/driver/wet nurse, Mr. Dixie Earthmover, wearing one of his many hats in Buffalo, NY. (Hats may be the only things Murder by Death does not have for sale on that table.) Dixie used a gentle hand in keeping us in line for the month, kindly turning a blind eye to our habit of tacking on five extra minutes of piano-humping to our already-generous set (which was cutting in to Will Whitmore’s banjo-fingering). He’s also an oddly sensual dancer. (Dixie fronts his own band, Sam Lowry and the Circumstance.)

Lastly, the immortal Wizard Staff. Murder by Death taught us this game on the last off-night of tour after talking it up for an entire month, and we were still completely unprepared for how hard we would fall in love with it. The basics are such: You buy a bunch of cans of beer and once you finish one off, you duct a new one to the top of the old can, thereby assembling a Wizard Staff of beercans over the course of the night. Like so:

The real essence of the game is built around House Rules. These are the ones we played with:

Speaking of #7 – I don’t shotgun beers. I don’t bong ’em or slam ’em, and Senior Week ended for me a long time ago. Even when I drink to excess, it’s at a stately pace – a canter, maybe. Billy has a similar mindset, so when he finished #6, I just had to see what was going to go down:

Like an old pro. He made it look so easy, that when it was my turn a few minutes later, I was ready to slam that beer, spit it back up in the sky, and slam my own backwash while I was crushed my beer can with a might crunch. That feeling lasted about three seconds:

Man. That sucks. Anyway. As the night went on, we were visited by the motel manager and the Albany County police, on account of the folks downstairs who saw fit to complain that we were “entertaining minors” in our room. The manager opened the door on ten people wielding staffs of beer cans taller than him, and was so clearly terrified that he slowly backed away from the door as he was talking, like he’d just delivered pizza to the Manson Family. Twenty minutes later, the cops showed up, and once they verified that we were all of age, they professed their awe and amazement at this Great Game. One of the younger cops couldn’t stop laughing while he was checking ID’s, and the eldest said that in all his years on the force, he’d never seen anyone playing this before. They left us to our fun. Point = us. We rule. Anyway, we were all feeling victorious by the end of the night, but the true winner was Dagan, who conquered all and rose to a Level 18 Wizard. (He still had two beers to go when this was taken) Truly mystical.

In May, we flew out to L.A. to do some recording. We’ve never toured farther West than Texas, and for some of us, it was our first time on the West Coast. For me, it was not only that, it was my first time in an airplane. Weird. Because we spend so much time riding in the van with our lives in the hands of someone else – someone who probably hasn’t slept right in three weeks – I was able to relax enough to enjoy the whole thing.

From the start, I knew L.A. was going to be a different than the East. This was posted outside all of the elevators in the condo complex we stayed in. This is L.A. in a nutshell – “Just in case you don’t know about what an alarm sounds or looks like, we’re gonna go ahead and explain it to you like you’re brain dead. Then we can all dig on this beet-radicchio smoothie I just paid $13 for.” But I quickly fell for L.A.’s charms, in no small part because of palm trees.

At least L.A. seems to appreciate what it has – most of the ones in Hollywood were better groomed than the people passing underneath them.

This is Rod, Billy and I at the mixing board of Ocean Way studios, where we did some tracking during our stay. This was easily the nicest studio any of us had been in, with a full complement of runners and engineers, and wall of platinum records that seemed to stretch around the block. (They also had incense burning in the bathroom, probably for “vibe.”) Below is an eerily silent mini-tour of Studio B, ending on the huge photo collage of all the greats who’ve recorded there: Brian Wilson, Frank Sinatra, Tom Petty, the Rolling Stones…Wilson Phillips. All the “heavies.”

Here’s some drum mic’ing hi jinx on Day One:

This is the studio apartment we rented in L.A. I like to think we decorated it “Communist Chic.” We didn’t end up miss many creature comforts while we were out there, because our apartment was in a Melrose Place-type complex with a pool and a hot tub, and we only managed to get thrown out of those once a piece.

This is a “Al Pacino” – a street performer that we ran into a couple of times just outside the Hollywood and Highland metro stop in L.A.. From what I could gather, he just hung out there all day long, randomly butting into other performers’ acts, and then doing his level best to blow them off the sidwalk. I never got close enough to figure out whether he was perpetually hammered or semi-retarded, but I felt like he worked for my laugh so hard that it was probably O.K. to give it to him. The other performers were less appreciative of his talents, and I saw him almost get in a fist-fight with a one-man-band who did not appreciate his impromptu backing vocals. But I instantly loved him. Every time I came out of the station and he wasn’t moonwalking with the Michael Jackson impersonator, or locked in a grapple with a Transformer, or trying to juggle loose change directly behind the knife jugglers, or pelvic thrusting the audio-activated t-shirt girl into the Sweet Hereafter, I was disappointed the whole damn day. You can hear my mind being blown at the :24 mark.

This is the first time I saw the Pacific Ocean. This is from Zuma Beach, which pumped Neil Young up enough that he named a record after it. We did a photoshoot here with Matt Wignall, with a bunch of surfboards, cowboy boots and Coors Original cans everywhere. We ended up not being able to stay here long enough to actually watch the sun set, instead darting back up the canyon to hit a seafood stand, where I had my 17th shrimp burrito of the trip. I was cosmically repaid the next night when we ran into Matthew McConaughey at an after-party at the El Rey, and as he was leaving, Billy and I watched him do two enormous bong hits in the front seat of his van with the doors wide open and the dome light on. Maybe I wasn’t cosmically repaid in full but I’ll take it. And that was kind of the year that was. 2010 has loads to live up to, but I’ve got a feeling it’s up to the task. Keep your eyes peeled. Some quick ones:

Zalamia giving it back to the Finger Lakes.

Zach, crushed by the weight of it all, One-Eyed Jack’s, New Orleans

Zach at the Gateway to the West, St. Louis.

“Tell me you don’t want to go to heaven.” – Rod

This is a father-and-son set of mariachi outfits we saw at a thrift store on Melrose. I’ve never wanted a child, a chimp, or a midget girlfriend more in my life.

The game room at the Broxton Highway Citgo, somewhere in Georgia.

Thank you, West Virginia.

Our Moment of Zen. (Kudos to our friends Ryan and Cherie for getting us into Disneyland for free.)

But despite all our adventures over the year, this is the most amazing thing that happened to us. This is Lilian Rose Westphal, Zach and Greta’s daughter, born on August 25th of this year. Thankfully, for Greta’s sake, she did not come out flailing with spurs and a moustache (though she does have an amazing head of hair). I just can’t wait for their first father-daughter headbang. Alright. That’s enough out of me. Keep it real. Steve