Life as a touring artist brings unspeakable volumes of filth, fun, and profane awesomeness. We offered up our blog as a road diary and our friend Keith Buckley from Every Time I Die took the bait. Currently on ETID’s From Parts Unknown tour with Counterparts and Expire, which you can find tickets to here, Keith opens up about tour life in this compelling first entry for The Noise. Read on below, and stay tuned for Part 2.
Part I
"Stone Cold” Steve Austin doesn’t give a fuck about his ass. In the podcast that our tour manager is listening to on his driving shift from Kitchner, Ontario to Sault Ste. Marie, the texas rattlesnake admits that he will not buy two ply toilet paper because he would not be caught dead in public purchasing something called “Charmin Cuddly Soft” and therefore willingly denies his asshole the comfort it deserves, an asshole which is probably in rougher shape than most and could certainly use a bit more TLC than his discomforting ego will allow. He is simply “too macho” to buy something with an angel on the packaging and has resigned instead to using a brand that he has horrifically compared to “wax paper”, and so while my friends back home are preparing their wonderful children for bed or eating a delightful and warm home cooked meal with their loving wives, I am staring out the window of our van and silently envisioning a sweaty barbarian smearing his own shit around his flabby butt cheeks, altogether failing to appreciate the colors on the leaves of the maple trees as they blush in the cold september air before the trees are forced to strip them off or the light of the setting sun laying across the waves of the lake.
We’re coming off a rough Bills loss tonight, and it was not by any means rough because we don’t know what it’s like to lose. In fact, we as Buffalonians have come to consider more than two consecutive wins a worrisome sign that the universe may not be operating under a purposeful eye of god after all, so the fact that we lost tonight is actually fairly reassuring and indicates that all is working as it should. The Bills going 3-0 would have been as unsettling as seeing Jim Kelly’s son uploading pics to instagram from the sideline. What makes this particular loss rough is the extent we went to in order to reach one of the only bars in Canada along our driving route that was willing and able to broadcast a game that its patrons otherwise wouldn’t give a shit about and that immediately following the game, Andy Williams discovered he had been poisoned by the dingy eatery’s loaded nacho platter, requiring us to pull over every so often in order that he might spew. As he did so, I realized that in all my years of being on the road with him, I’ve never ONCE seen or heard Andy throw up. Andy claims its because he hasn’t since 1996, a fact which blows my fucking mind considering just the other day I had to choke back puke from looking at .gifs of fetish porn my friend sent me in an email. Could it be possible that he was right? I will say with all sincerity that seeing him along side of the road bent over in the foliage made me genuinely nervous. It transported me back to the time when my father was incredibly sick and I was no older than 5 years old. Seeing the infallible human that is your dad suddenly and inexplicably under the spell of some internal evil force is a jarring experience and it makes you feel vulnerable and alone. You can’t help him and he, for the moment cant help you and that new feeling of abject helplessness, when authentic, is indelible. So seeing one of the biggest guys I know reduced to a pale and fragile fountain of blue corn chips and cheese undeniably struck a chord that probably wouldn’t have hummed so loud had it been struck before. Perhaps this really was the first time since 1996 that Andy has had that experience, in which case I commend him. Aside from getting a little on his shoe and subsequently wrestling his soiled footwear from his feet and- for some unknown reason- chucking them deep into the woods along the road, he handled himself quite well. If you’re reading this: Good form, bud.
Tomorrow we will have woken up at 6am and driven another 8 hours to our destination of “Crocks” in Thunder Bay. Eric The Actor from the Howard Stern show will have died, I will have driven the first 4 hour shift on no sleep thanks to the inhuman snoring of our tour manager and I will stay alert only because of the scenery the mountain roads offer at sunrise and an episode of the Joe Rogan podcast where he gets Graham Hancock to smoke weed for the first time in 3 years. We will see a wild bear along side the road that will look directly into our eyes before turning back into the woods, leaving me with a stunningly blurry photo of his ass, which I have included with this blog.
It’s that little black mark to the left of the center. Like a Where’s Waldo.
I will do laundry for the first time in almost 3 weeks and regret that I haven’t had enough peace and quiet to meditate in 2 days. I will feel foggy and overwhelmed. I will suffer from a pinched nerve in my back that will make it impossible to keep my head up straight for more than a few minutes and I will realize that recently my right arm has begun tingling all the way down to my hand and panic at the thought of arthritis as the image of my great uncles mangled, arthritic hands terrorizes my brain. I will have had an unspeakably awful episode of sleep paralysis which I will for the first time realize happens more when I sleep in a moving van than it ever does at home and I will begin to wonder if there is any correlation between the vibration of the engine and that of my cells. After I finish writing this from the bench in the van I will probably begin drinking in order to forget about most of the complaints I have just included in my introductory blog. This last part, of course, is pure speculation. What is certain, however, is that I will never be ashamed to treat my own ass to two ply toilet paper.
