Just got back from a 4-day tour filling in on drums for LiveFastDie, a band fronted by New Hampshire’s own Ethan Campbell, who was the guitar player for my old band Some Action.

We were in the supporting slot for King Khan & the Shrines, who are one of the most amazing live bands out there. Pure garage soul, like a punk rock James Brown fronting a German punk wedding band.

Highlights include:

• Seeing Khan’s junk on two occasions — once when meeting him for the first time (he was stretching it backstage for optimum length before taking the stage in his arabian bike shorts) and again when he ran out of the venue in the middle of the song to tell his friend he had just shit himself, and pulled down his pants to prove it before running inside as a police car cruised down the street. This was shortly before he jumped on a moving dump truck and rode down the street. To describe each and every crazy stunt he pulled would be exhausting, but nudity and interfering with scheduled garbage pickup always rank high on the punk points scorecard.
• Rocking out to hundreds of people — three of the four shows were sold out and overflowing. We had a frontline of fist-pumping fans and a packed house behind them. The sets were a Bud-soaked blur, and everyone just ’shredded’ in between songs so there would be no silence. Sometimes Ethan would teach us how to play the songs on stage. The crowd was there to be entertained but also annoyed into remembering that all things are not comfy bourgeois yuppie Ikea peace symbol vinyl collection Starbucks okey-dokey.
• Always bring a chicken suit on tour, but burn it afterwards because you’ll never want to put your head in there again.
• On the first night we were partying on the Motel 6 balcony after trying to duct tape a plastic bag over the broken window on King Khan’s van in a downpour. It was late and we were loud, and suddenly our neighbor flung his door open and screamed at us to keep it down. After we all just kind of stared back, his tone became more forceful: “I mean, really guys. Let me give you a suggestion: for instance, SHUT THE FUCK UP!”. The door slammed behind him.
• The King Khan guys wanted to go to what they said was a ’50’s rockabilly diner’ down the street from the motel. It turned out to be a truck stop with a diner called ’50’s diner’. I caught a couple more hours of sleep in the van while the band went in and tried to order fresh-squeeze orange juice, mineral water and a green tea. “Orange juice? We got a jug,” was all the waitress could think to say.
• By the end of the tour, we had accumulated about three yards of reflective metal foil (retrieved from a dumpster in Boston and worn as a helmet by LiveFastDie shred guitarist Sarim), the aforementioned chicken suit (also often worn by Sarim to approach people stuck in city traffic) and a stolen Pizza Hut sign that said, “It’s all about the cheese” with the words “drugs in the” written between “the” and “cheese”. Of course there were various illustrations of crack pipes on the cheese and it was used as sort of a backdrop for the LiveFastDie merch table.
• (told in a completely exaggerated New Jersey nice guy voice:) “Hello, My name is Anthony Piscanelli, and I heard you like cheeseburgers! How do I know you ask? A little birdie told me! No matter! I’m here to tell you about a great deal from MacDonalds. Two cheeseburgers for ninety-nine cents! You can’t go wrong! MacDonalds. You can’t… go… wrong.” I’m probably butchering it but that was the funniest thing I’ve ever heard and if you don’t understand why, think about all the stupid shit you were laughing at the last time you had to drive several hours a day.
• Everyone was awesome yet again, from the people who let us crash to the random strangers who we found something in common with, albeit usually for only a few minutes. I saw a lot of old friends from the Some Action days and was glad to see everyone is doing well. In fact, we still had much more in common that I had expected, running along parallel paths as it were through getting older.
• To me, music is music. I don’t see any conflict in having a crazy pop-metal band on one hand and then go play with a power punk band on the other hand. All of these experiences feed off one another. I would love to be the one that figures out a way to bring both scenes together. But until then, on with the show…

I’ll be checking back in sometime next week as we’re entering the studio tomorrow to start tracking the new Dead Unicorn album, Global Thermonuclear War. Following that I’ll be wrapping up an EP with Morgan Evans under the Acid Arrow name, nailing down the Ads project with Joe Maggio and preparing the Stage Select debut LP. Oh yeah, and a little thing called writing an entire business plan before the week’s out… wish me luck.

I’m sitting here wondering if ‘OMG’ is a symptom of a pandemic abbreviation virus that retards intelligent discourse or an effective shortcut in increasingly faster communication loops. Regardless, ‘OMG’ is exactly what I thought when I saw I haven’t posted a blog in over three months.

It’s time to be blunt: this blog has a very small audience. If anyone is reading this, chances are they hail from the close and cherished group of friends who appreciate my rantings, or the small but important group of associates whom I came to work with professionally through earlier blogging efforts.

As a particular kind of writer, I am obsessively compelled to render complete thoughts rather than the casual remarks typical of a personal-themed or daily-updated blog.

For instance, I recently spent close to five hours writing, editing and re-editing a 750-word piece for the GarageBand.com newsletter that was sent to over 100,000 people. It is my most widely published piece yet — an opinion/advice column that speaks to independent musicians about the importance of live performance during the death throes of the recording industry. (I will put the article up on the blog shortly.)

Despite having a strong and unique conceptual foundation, I realize I still have a journey ahead of me in terms of getting my writing skills up to snuff to write my ‘Big Finish’ book. I also imagine that this blog could be a path to the acquisition of these skills — an exercise in creative evolution. But too often it feels like I’m on the stationary bike, getting in shape but going nowhere.

This feeling is not exclusive to writing. It came up in every band that I’ve ever created or participated in. It was there when I uploaded videos to YouTube after an all-nighter of editing. It happened when I spent hours designing websites that never launched. Even when they did launch, I often succumbed to the most dreaded two words that can be spoken to a creator: ‘nobody cares.’

But that’s simply not true. People care about everything that you and I do. Yes, sometimes they are patronizing and sometimes that ‘care’ is simply Schadenfreude, but trust me, they care. Giving a shit is the basis of all human interaction.

The scary thing — the reason why people like you and me have to raise our voices and be heard — is that our species is being conditioned to deny its own humanity. We are being born and bred not to care. And our caring is being repackaged and re-purposed to serve the best interests of elite factions of materialistic megalomaniacs.

Who knows what the future of this blog is? It seems silly to even ask the question in the face of such an epic quandrary that is the corruption of humanity. It seems utterly ridiculous to even put both of those sentences in one paragraph.

We’ll carry on, we’ll carry each other, and in the end, death will unite us. But while I’m still here, I’m gonna break this exercize bike off its frame and wrench on an engine. There is no exercise, only fitness. We’re far from going nowhere. We are on a collision course with creation, in the grandest sense of the word. I want to be a part of it. Who’s with me?

Quick update from ground zero: the first Counterfeit Disaster show (with me on drums) went well, and we prepare to play with 3 at Bearsville Theater for a post-Thanksgiving bash.

Meanwhile, Dead Unicorn continues to finish material for our upcoming Global Thermonuclear War LP. I have also been writing a long piece based on our tour diaries from March when we went on tour with the Casket Architects. A combination of from-the-frontline notes and present-day rumination, the first two days of tour have totaled over 5,000 words so far.

Also, as the last blog suggested, we are in the process of simplifying the bureaucracy of our Music for End Times label by merging the End Times Institute with the End Game Society to produce corresponding propaganda which can also be role-played to prepare for immediate post-apocalypse survival. In other words, our role-playing game has become our (might I say so myself) ingenious guerilla street team experiment and vice versa. More on that later.

I finally got all the old blog posts online, and I will be filling in the gaps with my print-published work soon, including the ‘Survival Guide’.

As a final aside, I haven’t logged into my personal MySpace account for over two months now. It was an experiment, and I won’t know how successful it was until I finally log in to check my messages, but I am pleased with the results so far. Anyone who needed to contact me has through e-mail, phone or otherwise. I don’t like having a ‘personal’ MySpace anymore. After awhile I just opened up the floodgates and took on any friend I could. I no longer wish to use it for ‘personal’ correspondence. Which is why, once I finally catch up with this blog, I will finally log back in and change all my information to point here.

So until the post-Thanksgiving glow, see you later.