Baby’s first tour

I booked my first tour in 2009, mostly via Myspace. I accidentally typed “facebook” before going back and correcting that.

It all kind of started in 2006 I think. My best friend and I had finished Cosmetology school and decided to go visit our other friend in Pittsburgh. While we were up there I got to meet Elliott Sussman. He was good friends with the friend that we went up to visit.

Elliott turned out to be an old music and film nerd just like me, as well as a musician. A lot of the details are foggy but we probably got drunk and talked about 1920s blues and playing ukulele. I know for a fact that we ended up in bed together, and that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Elliott hit me up a few years after that about doing a tour. He had a girlfriend so there was no pressure for a love connection which was nice. Since 2007 I had been hitch hiking and traveling all over the place going to anarchist convergences, hanging out in the mountains with a bunch of radical queers, playing my ukulele at house parties and random bars whatever I wanted to do basically. So I obviously had no car and essentially zero money. I really don’t remember the conversation we had but we agreed to do a tour without a car. We figured, oh we can just take the chinatown bus/greyhound/Amtrak, space out our dates to account for travel time, and everything will work out totally smoothly!

One of the memories I remember pretty well is realizing I needed something to sell at my shows. I had no CD, all my recordings had been done on my laptop i’m pretty sure. I didn’t even have a CD burner, I think I had to borrow a laptop with one. I know I borrowed my room mates tascam recorder because she used it for journalism stuff (Thanks, Hermelinda!) and sat in my small closet room at my house, The Flying Brick Library. The room was so small that I really didn’t ever bother getting a bed for it. I just arranged two sleeping pads on the floor on top of each other and would roll them up when I woke up. I was basically paying $150 a month to camp out in a closet at an anarchist house. I once had a dude I brought home exclaim after seeing where we were gonna sleep, “OH WOW THIS REMINDS ME OF CAMPING!”

So I’m sitting there recording myself. Hacking up loogies and grunting and just making these guttural noises because I felt like I couldn’t clear my throat well enough and I hated recording even more then than I do now. It was just all very new to me in a lot of ways. Even though I was alone I remember just getting so frustrated to the point of almost crying ( I probably did cry a lot actually). I hated what I sounded like when i played the songs back. I just wanted to record them, listen to them, burn them to a fucking CD and never have to listen to them again.

I used to always say that I related to Clara Bow being afraid of microphones. I much rather preferred to just belt out my songs without amplification. Still do, to be quite honest. I cut my chops busking so it just feels natural.

Eventually I made it through and had enough songs to burn on a CD.

But then there was this other problem of how the hell I was gonna package this thing, how I was going to put it together to hopefully look cool enough for someone to buy it.

I asked my friend Julia to do the artwork on the front, which was awesome. I designed the back in some old Adobe program or MSPaint more than likely. I didn’t have the money to go make a bunch of copies or buy clear sleeves or whatever. I had been making zines for a few years at that point, about traveling and being anarchy or whatever, so I knew a scam to get free copies, which I won’t go into here because hey, if you know, you know. I had lifted a carving set from a craft store recently and turns out i really hated it. Or maybe it was a nicer exacto knife? Either way, I decided to return it and use the store credit for card stock to copy the album art onto. Damn the man! Take that, government!

So I went over and made my copies for essentially free and got out of there. Doing that scam always made me paranoid.

The next step for me was to edit my songs down to get rid of the spitting and hacking noises to make them acceptable for the album. Like, people knew I was DIY as fuck, but I didn’t want to make them puke or anything.

For whatever reason, the program I was using kept messing up and I could NOT trim these tracks down. I think this was probably a handful of days before I left for tour. I was scrambling trying to burn these god damn CDs, man. Like I remember just crying from being so stressed out, on top of trying to make sure everything else was in place as well.

Looking back now, it’s kinda funny because I don’t think we even had 10 shows booked. They also weren’t even back to back. I guess we did spend a lot of time on busses and shit though. If I thought THAT tour was stressful….woof.

So I burned an album with tracks with weird noises at the beginning of almost every song. I just really didn’t care at that moment and just wanted them to be DONE. Finally they were and I put them all together and what not. Probably cried some more at one point.

(That album is still on my Bandcamp if you want to suffer through it, i’ll link at the bottom of this story!)

So the day came that we left for tour. I don’t remember that day, but it was April 3 2009. I am pretty sure we played a show at my house the last night. It seems likely.

I know, by reading my old Live journal entries, that April 13 2009 we had just played Pittsburgh and I don’t think I remember it. But I remember hooking up with this really babely ginger upright bass player, whose name I won’t mention. But i just had a flash of this memory, TW for somewhat graphic description of sexual things:

We were in the middle of banging and I had to pee. So I went to the bathroom. Took a fat piss. Realized the dudes condom was somehow stuck to my ass cheek. This is nuts but i’m pretty sure we just slapped that fucker right back on and kept going at it. He was a super cool dude and we kept in touch for a bit after that. I think he’s married now. I feel like 80% of the people i’ve ever banged are now married, no joke.

Anyway, I regret not typing a full update to LJ after or during tour. The only other entry is from April 17th and I mention that:

“I am losing my voice.”

nooooooooooooo”

Way to go, Alison. Great recap.

All I can do is write down what i definitely remember, i guess.

I remember we took the chinatown bus from Philly to NYC. Or was it NYC to Philly? Whatever.

I had probably drank a bit the night before and was not feeling 100% by the time we got to the bus. We got on the bus and unfortunately Elliott and I had to sit separately so that was annoying. So I’m sitting there, doing whatever, i guess writing in my journal or reading? I felt this urge like I had to fart, so i tried to let it out REALLLLL slow. I was pretty good at farting at that point and assumed I had the spinchter control to not blow anyone away. I felt wetness. Oh my god. I had just sharted myself on the chinatown bus! I frantically ran to the bathroom. The bus was already in motion at this point, so i’m banging around in there trying to take my shoes and my pants off. After some pretty good contortion or acrobatic moves I finally got my shitty underwear off. They weren’t totally obliterated but it was bad enough where I couldn’t like, wipe it out of my underwear and keep wearing them or anything.

Once I sharted myself in my friends car, and then rode my bike home in the pouring rain. I figured that was good enough as a washing machine and while I threw the underwear away, I definitely did NOT wash those cut off jean shorts. I guess I was wayyyy to much of a crust lord.

Which brings me to my next point. For whatever reason I didn’t throw my fucking shitty underwear away. Instead I took the thankfully empty plastic bag with the giant smiley face “THANK YOU” on it, placed my underwear in it, wrapped it up around itself and shoved the bastards in my POCKET.

To this day, I have no earthly idea why I didn’t just throw them away. Maybe I was embarrassed that someone would see them and associate them with ME since I was just in the bathroom. Maybe I felt that I was so poor that I really needed to salvage those drawers? Maybe I wanted to give them a proper burial? I have no fucking clue. I feel like that detail is the funniest part of the story. shart pocket. wow.

So of course, I immediately sit down laughing my ass off, and text like 5 people on my flip phone,

“Dude. I just sharted myself on the chinatown bus.”

Elliott looks back at me and is giving me the “What’s so funny?” eyes and I just exclaim “I’ll tell you when we get to New york….”

The next part of the story I remember fairly well is our time in Kentucky. I believe it was Lexington. We had a show lined up at a community space and when we showed up. There was no one there. They guy running it had done zero promo. I think it was this random building near or behind Al’s Bar. Somehow we ended up meeting a guy whose name escapes me now, but he said we could come play a song or two at his show which was slated for the same night! His name is pretty cool sounding so I wish I could remember it! [update: It’s Warren Byrom i’m fairly certain”]

We played that show, I’m actually not sure if i ended up doing any songs but I know my tourmate did. We spent a few days in Lexington and somehow found a spot to stay in this old old beautiful house with this older lady and her son. Sounds innocent and normal enough. Or so we thought.

I woke up one morning to the sound of water, some kind of running water liquid sound. I look over to the floor and there is one of the lady's ugly ass dogs (a pug, i can’t deal with looking at smushy faced/bug eyed dogs, sue me) pissing on the floor and staring directly at me. Little bastard. It was disgusting. I then woke up a little more, looked around the room, and there was DOG SHIT all over the place. Obviously this lady was not letting her dogs out enough and they had shit little pug turds all over the rug of this old but still fairly nice looking house. I likely didn’t notice it the night before because it was dark or something. I don’t think we stayed there another night, and I thank her for her hospitality but naw.

Another town and show I remember fairly well was Morgantown WV. Mountain college town. don’t know who or how the hell we got a show booked there but yeah. It was this dudes house party essentially. I don’t remember playing, but I remember going to Sheetz drunk as hell and ordering a cheeseburger. Elliott was gone for a while and I was out at the car. Suddenly I see him strutting out of the Sheetz with this long ass receipt like they give you to go pay for your food before you pick it up. I just started laughing and he was yelling “CHARGE IT TO THE GAME! CHARGE IT TO THE GAME!”

We got the hell out of there and headed back to the house. I must’ve been feeling pretty confident that night as I sat on the couch shoving a cheeseburger in my face. This guy whose name I don’t remember and probably didn’t even know at the time, was sitting next to me. I remember in between bites of my cheeseburger I looked at him and asked,

“Hey do you wanna make out?”

He responded with a confused “I’m good…” and walked away. Your loss dude, i probably still tasted like cheeseburger.

One of the other nights we were there we went to this college bar and drank $1 grasshoppers. Creme de menthe, vodka and half and half? some kind of green milky thing. I’m a bartender and I am not even sure what the fuck was in that thing. I think it was one of those “ladies get in/drink vodka for free” nights which was creepy as fuck but I took advantage. I’m pretty sure I just went around and stole peoples half drank beers anyway.

At some point in kentucky we went to visit Elliott’s sister and her boyfriend. They took us out to this downtown area and I just sat at the bar and watched girls walk by in stiletto heels, trying not to get them stuck in the cobblestone. I was impressed at them for being able to walk in stilettos in general but simultaneously being really amused. I ended up having a really good in depth conversation with his sisters boyfriend about trans people and what that meant and actually got him to think about things he never had before which was really cool. Not a bad night at all.

So the whole touring via bus thing was going fine, but we went into it knowing we had a dilemma to solve. There wasn’t anything connecting Lexington to Morgantown WV or Morgantown WV to Harrisonburg VA as far as bus/train. We ended up having to rent this giant truck (they were out of regular cars i think) to get to Morgantown. I honestly do not remember how we got out of there after that. I guess I went to Harrisonburg and Elliott went to Pittsburgh from there.

I remember nothing about Chicago for the most part except the name of the place was ‘Common Grounds’ and it was a coffee shop. Also if I had $200 for every fucking coffee related business with that name I could live like a king. Now that i’m thinking….Did we take a plane to Chicago? Was that a different tour with Elliott? I really need to call that guy and get some help filling in the blanks.

So those are basically the nights I remember. I’m having a hard time remembering Philly, but I think it was a house show. NYC was probably a blast because I probably got to hang with my friend Rudy. If I think of anything else I will update this story.

I do remember that I came back from tour with negative money essentially. That was fine by me. This wasn’t the first time I had played shows in other states but it was the first one that I helped book so that was a really good learning experience. I still think back to this time period and it was the time of printing map quest directions and hand writing things down. No smart phones. I don’t really even remember how we got from the bus stations to the venues. I guess we walked and asked for directions or I probably wrote city bus directions ahead of time.

Thanks for reading and if you enjoyed this, let me know and I will write more tour stories. I have a bunch.

alisonself.bandcamp.com scroll down to “Self titled” and that’s my first album. cute!