As mentioned the other day, Ruby Fray is currently on tour and it’s an exciting thing. We asked the band to whip together a little tour diary for us, so we can pretend that we’re out there having adventures with them, and not stuck in front of a computer in a dark cave with no windows, and various odd stinks all day. Here’s the first installment:
CHICAGO
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The day before we leave, we get a van, from a half-drunk man who doesn’t want to sell it to us. Slightly morally suspect, but here we are. The van has a tiny dining table in-between the front seats and enough cupholders for a small army. “No wonder everyone’s fat. How are my fat kids in the back doing!?!” Emily asks us. Jason, Nick’s roommate, gets a ride with us, and they cram together on one of the back seats during the entire five hour drive.
AKRON, OHIO
Emily says, “How are my fat kids in the back doing?” and when we cry for ice cream, says, “Shut up! How are you doing? Shut up!” Ian makes some fat lisp voice and says, “They’re not fat, theers just hunggryyy”. Then Emily asks if we want to hear the new Christmas album, her other band on K (last night, a girl turns to me: “I really like your other band, Christmas.” Oh no no, that’s Emily’s band.)
She puts on the album and we listen. It’s less screamy than the last one, but Jake Jones is killing the drum solos, and Pat’s guitar is wailey and eerie and surfy, and I can’t hear Dave doing anything at all. They’ve just ended two weeks of touring and recording at Dub Narcotic, in Olympia, right before we came out to Chicago.
“I totally wasn’t prepared for Christmas to become a jam band,” Emily says, laughing.
Yeah?
Yeah.
“Are you going to open for Trey Anastasio?” Ian says, some guy none of us know.
“I don’t know who that is,” Emily says.
“Are you going to open for Phish?”
“Yeah! Lots of open-air concerts in Europe.”
“Ooooh, let me kiss youuu, I love the muiscc,” Emily says, in an eastern European accent, miming a kiss on the cheek.
The music gets plonky, some kind of xylophone, with harmonies. Slower.
“Is this not deep-sea music? Like there’s some fucking whale, some deep sea creature, in a documentary, just hanging out,” Emily says, her hand hovering above the dashboard, a whale.
“This is when the shark goes to bite something. WhaBOM,” and her hand darts towards the dashboard, and we are in Akron.
In comparison to Detroit, Akron seems polished, clean. Beautiful, even. We are staying on Adolf street, which strikes all of us as mildly offensive. 50 Adolf Street. We find the house and park in the back. The girls seem mildly surprised to see us, and not sure exactly what to do with us, but invite us in.
I catch the tail end of Emily’s discussion with some people about their band, how they’re progressing. “It’s like Margy Pepper – these three girls that moved to Olympia together, and started a band, and were like yeah just start a band, find your friends and sit down and play. And they sounded awful, they were just banging on things, like GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS,” she says in a high-pitched voice. “And I HATED going to their shows but because Olympia’s so small you end up going to their shows… and then they just kept going and going and then I saw them four years later – they had made their own sound, and they were so fucking tight and just had a mental connect on a lot of songs, and you could tell they loved playing together. And it was so fucking cool. Yeah – terrible music – not a bad thing. It’s like stretching. It’s good to do. No – it’s not like stretching – that always feels good – it’s like pullups, or something. You get better. So don’t stop. “
PHILIDELPHIA
We stop at Trader Joes on the way out, motivated by avoiding another Dairy Queen situation like yesterday. When we leave we pull up to a sweet old-timey convertible car at a stoplight.
“Whoa, what year is that?” Emily says out the open window, leaning over Ian to her right.
“1921,” the man says, his shaved-head tattooed son looking disgruntled, squinting at us in the sunlight.
“Whoa, sweet…” Emily says. “What kind of gas mileage does it get?”
“Pretty alright,” the man says. “Nice for city driving.”
The light changes and the car pulls away from us slowly. Emily says, “WANNA RACE?” and peels out of stoplight, cackling with delight.
We pull up to them at another light.
“I LIKE YOUR LITTLE HAT,” Emily faux-yells, The man is wearing a black newsboy cap. “IT GOES WITH YOUR LITTLE CARRR.” She growls and revs past them, as if we are racing, even though we’re both surrounded by cars front and back, our paces entirely dictated by traffic.
“Fuck you fuck you fuck you, she chants, “and your little car!” and they are turning away and we are continuing on Penn Street towards Philidelphia.
PITTSBURGH
Jabba the hut’s costume is, like, nine people, and midgets can always find jobs!
Like Peter Randlett – you know Game of Thrones?
He’s incredible, he’s the best one, I say.
“He absolutely refuses to take midget jobs. Like, he’ll take jobs where the actor is a midget, but he won’t take jobs where he’s like, an elf, or a goblin, or any kind of magical creature. “I’m not a magical fucking creature, I have a birth defect,” Ian says, as Peter Randlett, in defense of all the midgets in the world stuck playing dwarves and goblins and fawns. “I’m not a magical fucking creature!”
I’m looking at the tour book, which has all of the places we’re going. On the back of one of the pages it says “I’m really glad you’re here with me,” with a little drawing of a dick. I laugh, and show Nick, and we giggle together. Emily and Ian glance back at us, curious, and Emily says, “Oh, did you discover my secret? I drew that with my eyes on the road! See how it almost connects?
Yeah, it’s very artistic,” I say, looking at the tiny picture of the dick.
“I did the hair on the balls!” Ian says.
“I LOVE DRAWING DICKS,” Emily says. “I just love it.”
“My favorite is drawing dicks in cars on the snow…” Ian says.
“Yeah, a big fuzzy dick,” Emily replies. “My favorite is someone made a pink vagina stamp in Austin and put it on chairs – like if you sat down on a piece of glass and looked up from below, and your vagina’s all squished – and then they would stamp it on barstools, and girls would sit down on it and then get up and be like OH my GOD.
We all laugh.
“That’s really funny, huh. That’s really funny…” she trails off, then adds, “But it wouldn’t just be red, it’s be blue, and white, and black.”
“WHAT did I SIT in!
“Ohmy goodd did that come off of meeee,” Emily wails, and we fall silent, picturing distressed girls embarrassed about their multi-colored vagina prints.
“Where is Pittsburgh? It says we’re five minutes away. What does it just, rise up out of nowhere?” Ian says.
“No, it’s actually just underground, a fact somehow nobody ever mentions when they talk about Pittsburgh.” I say.
We turn another corner. “It’s not” Nick says to me.
“No, it’s not. It’s beautiful,” I say. Deciduous forest. Nothing like it – and we turn another corner, and a big black building looms in between two forested hills.
“There it is, Ian! “
In five minutes we get there, pass the Heinz factory and go over the bridge.
“Whoa, I am super in Pittsburgh right now,” Ian says, as we turn off the freeway into downtown Pittsburgh. It looks similar to Seattle in some ways – but older, obviously. More filled in.
“Did you see that bridge back there? I was getting real nervous about that bridge. You know there’s some bridges you just feel like you’re going to take off, like there’s so steep and there’s such a curve to them… and I’m like oh god oh god oh god.” Ian’s doing well driving so far, but his fears come out every so often. He used to have paralyzing delusions about being poisoned via his toothpaste – his driving fears are a much, much more reasonable version. Before we took off he warned us all that the driving might go slowly because there’s no way he would be driving more than 55 on the freeway, but he’s been going at least 70 for the last hour, which none of us have mentioned.
“Bell was the original monopoly that was fucking up shit – like a lot of shit that fucked over other countries in the sixties was actually Bell, because it was so fucking big and it had its fingers in so many pies, like it was the ultimate fucking American institution. Yeah. But, um, and then I think it was like in the seventies Bell got, like there was this hippie movement, anti-stuff anti-capitalism movement and a big part of it was all these lawsuits started coming up against Bell, like they were too big and controlled too many aspects of peoples lives, so it got split up into a bunch of companies. And I think it was originally from Pittsburgh – started by Alexander Grahm Bell, who invented the telephone.” Ian has somewhat of an eclectic collection of knowledge about many things – largely technology and music related, and often general science related. They tend to explode out of him in small chunks – someone will ask a sem-rhetorical question like “how does that work, anyway?” and all of a sudden he’s been talking at highspeed about how transistors work for ten minutes. And then he realizes, and gets a little embarrassed, and stops, unless asked another question…
We arrive at Garfield Artworks. A short man with a reddish pube-beard is opening the door – he introduces himself as Manny and there is some strange communication about when the show is – it’s at eight.
We walk up to a bookstore just up the street – there are three cats, and an introverted-looking owner checking her iphone and petting one of the cats. When I tell her how much we like Pittsburgh she, unexpectedly, launches into telling me about her space, how much it cost, how cheap it was, how much she rents the upstairs floors out for (cheap). When I’m finally almost out the door she calls after me, “Let me know if you come back, if you need help finding a place!”
We head up Penn Street to a café she told us about. Our waiter is friendly, and seems displaced right out of a punk house in Olympia – within the first five minutes we whisper amongst ourselves: he’s our guy! He’s totally going to let us stay with him. Indeed, it quickly comes out that we’re al lmusicians. “Where are you playing?” he asks, and when we tell him where, he says “ohhhhh, Maannny.” We give him the eye. “Well… he’s an ass.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, he rips everyone off.”
“Oh MAN THAT’S HOW I KNOW HIM!” Emily exclaims. “He ripped Christmas off when we were here! That’s how I know him!”
“Yeah,” our waiter says, not impressed, but empathetic. “He ripped Nirvana off and shit. In some magazine he was voted one of the top 12 most hated people in independent music… one of the top 12!” We laugh.
Roger introduces himself and asks us where we’re staying – and we’ve got a spot! We tell him we’ll put him on the list and exchange numbers. And we’ve got a PLACE TO STAAAYY.
Stay tuned for Part Two. And in the meantime, here are pictures from their show at Death By Audio last night:
