The airport is always a comedy for us. We have too much stuff. Amp heads. Suitcases. Last year we didn’t have pedal boards, but now both Darwin and I have these giant heavy pedal boards. Now we travel with our own stage lights, so we have this big black box of lights to squeeze onto the plane. At the check-in counter, Darwin and Tim unfolded and refolded our giant light-up starry night sky backdrop, trying to make it compact enough to be approved as a carry-on, because when things are carry-ons we save like $50. The crew at the counter, head to toe in Virgin Atlantic red, are always baffled by our avalanche of belongings. One guy tells us that we have to check in the star backdrop here at the desk and pay full price. Another lady tells us that it’s cool, that we can check it at the gate as a carry-on. Are we getting more professional or more weighed down? More sophisticated or more convoluted? It is an airport riddle.

At security, they tell us that those giant American body scanners don’t cause cancer, because they don’t use certain types of rays or whatever, but I always err on the side of caution/paranoia and choose the pat down. I am read my Miranda rights, asked if I have any sensitive areas or injuries, and told that when the guard checks my groin and buttocks that he will be using the back of his latex gloved hands.

We again defer to Greg, the Big Prawn, regarding what this tour shall be named. “Too soon,” Greg protests. We toy with the idea of naming our tour Too Soon.

Some kind of fog is causing trouble and our flight is delayed two and a half hours. Darwin and I get out our guitars and do some unamplified airport terminals noodling.

I’m excited to go fly over to England to play some shows. I’m excited for our Edinburgh show, where our old friend from the antifolk scene, Lach, will be opening. Lach was the godfather in the old days at the Sidewalk Cafe at the antihoot where Darwin and I first met, where we were cutting our teeth. It will be special to play a big show with him on the other side of the pond, in Edinburgh, that enchanted castle city.

Entering California from Oregon, there is a small border patrol booth you have to stop at. The state trooper addressed us in a friendly tone.

“You guys are in a band, so I take it that means you’re open-minded about seeing the world in a different way, and I was just wondering if you’ve ever heard of the movie Thrive?”

A fitting welcome to the Golden State.

The mountains of California are a real force to be reckoned with. Last time the Deez passed through, two years ago, our van broke down, we had to call a tow truck, we had to rent an SUV, we had to cancel our San Diego show, we had to race back up the California coast to fetch our repaired vehicle and scurry back. It was a mess. But this year, we were equipped with a new van and feeling optimistic, maybe even a little cocky. We ordered grade D pseudo-mexican at the same pre-mountain Taco Bell that we visited last time, not intentionally, but not exactly unintentionally, either, laughing at the idea that we were tempting fate. Our proud van emerged victoriously on the other side, seemingly unscathed, so we raised gas station Coors cans and watched late-night TV at the Super 8 in triumph.

That morning, we turned the key in the ignition and nothing happened. Yet again, the Interstate 5 mountains had gotten the best of Darwin Deez, this time in a time delayed sneak attack. We wrestled with the dead vehicle for our first few hours in sunny California, stranded in the hotel parking lot. Fortunately, the solution was not as expensive or time-consuming this year, and believe it or not, we revived our van by hitting one of the mechanisms beneath the hood with a hammer.

San Francisco began a wonderful streak of beautiful California DD shows. We met up with our old friend Yoko there, who explained to us that she was polyamorous now and breaking girlfriends’ hearts all over Oakland.

In LA, we played the Echo, and hung out in that upstairs room again that is always too dark and has that eerie white sofa and kinda feels like a vampire den. This was my third time playing the Echo. This was my third time playing a lot of the venues on tour. We were seeing many concert flyers throughout the tour advertising Thurston Moore’s new band, Chelsea Light Moving. I looked at that Thurston flyer at the Echo and I thought, wow, will I end up playing at this place like 20 more times? It could be so.

The next day played San Diego and that was the most magical. We played this spot called The Casbah. It was one of those gritty dens of rock ‘n roll where excitement seems to bleed out of the walls and everyone has a dark, dirty, elating night.

On this tour, I played guitar/keys/bgvox in both bands, in our supporting act Caged Animals, and of course in DD.

Caged are old friends of ours from Brooklyn. I started playing with them off and on when they played Iceland Airwaves in 2011.

At the beginning of February, a week before departure, Darwin started having misgivings about my double duty plans. We texted back and forth about it for a bit. I was looking back at our texts and found them to be kind of funny, so I thought I would post them and give you guys some voyeurism.

As you can read, food was a central concern. “You know how I am about food,” warns Darwin’s text. Darwin was worried that my extended sound checking with Caged would either delay his meal or delay mine, with possibly grim consequences.

Food takes on this exaggerated presence on tours. Maybe because it is the primary monotony-breaker of the 8 hour drive, of the identical sound checks. Factor in Darwin’s own extraordinary interest in eating, and food inherits almost divine attributes in our van.

Darwin eats a seemingly impossible amount for that lanky body. There is frequent speculation that when his parents’ took him on a spiritual trip to India as a young boy, Darwin picked up some kind of tapeworm that’s never been dealt with. After ordering a jarring amount of eggs, sausage, bacon, and french toast, Darwin will sometimes joke, “Time to feed the worms.”

Darwin has an interesting diet. Lots of eggs. He’s a diner man. Lots of meat, too. Burgers. A Wendy’s man. Last November, at this tour’s inception, Darwin was dabbling with going gluten-free. An almost caveman diet, nearly Atkins. But tour has a way of beating down any strict lifestyle acrobatics you might attempt. Well-intentioned vegans eventually make vegetarian concessions, and gluten-free hopefuls may find themselves eating a free waffle at Super 8.

I get the feeling that I am referencing the free waffles at Super 8 too much in this blog. But I assure you, it is only in proportion to their ubiquitous presence in our lives.

Anyway, back to the Caged Animals double duty dilemma. A second concern was me not getting enough sleep. The way I am about sleep is like the way, Darwin is about food. I get grouchy when I’m ready for bed at 1 and the group drags me through parties till 2:30. Would my Caged Animals endeavor sap my nightly energy into the danger zone? And would the rest of the group have to suffer for it?

Note the nerdy, sensitive tone of these text messages. Darwin is the son of psychologist. I’m a super rational/logical double Gemini. We’ve been touring for years. Can’t you tell?

The happy ending was that my playing in Caged was no conflict at all. As Darwin correctly predicted in the middle of this conversation, “You’ll probably enjoy it cause let’s face it, there’s so little to do on tour.” The good news was, Darwin did not get annoyed. All the dinners worked themselves out without much thought. Darwin never had to wait. I liked playing the two sets. I didn’t feel any more tired than usual. I liked all the practice I got on guitar. I liked doubling the music in my day.

I hope I get to play with Caged Animals again. They have a beautiful new album coming out this fall, and maybe if the tour scheduling works out, I’ll jump back into the Caged cage this fall or winter.

We named our Feb/March/April US tour “The American Way”, and this was largely in tribute to our beloved tour manager Seb, a Frenchman, who we were exposing to our homeland for the first time.

We have toured with Seb in Europe for years, since 2010, but in the states we’ve always been on our own. Seb has breezed through America once, previously, in the cushiest of circumstances, working with Metronomy on a short arena tour supporting Coldplay. By now it was time for the real deal. Five weeks in a van with the Deez. Bars and clubs. The USA, up close and personal. A cultural exchange, if you will.

I realize now that there was another purpose for naming our tour The American Way. And that, my friends, is that when on tour, it’s useful for bands to have a rallying cry. Because, as romanticized as the rock ‘n roll life can be, the vast majority of tours are surely peppered with humbling, near-pathetic moments when the only consoling words are a well-chosen slogan that keeps the team together.

For example, in 2010, we named our fall tour “High Life.” Thus, when you find that you are sleeping on the floor of a one star motel, using a chair cushion as your pillow and your coat as a blanket, you can shout out “High Life!” and everything feels a little better. Similarly, on this tour, when our dinner consisted of a bag of Fritos and a Tropicana orange juice, we would comfort each other, explaining that it was simply “the American way.”

We were refueling our vehicle at Love’s, a widespread American truck stop, and Seb decided to also refuel his body with Arby’s roast beef-like sandwich products inside the station. He stepped up to the soda fountain. “What’s this?” he asked me, pointing. “Ah ha, it’s Mountain Dew, you should try it, it’s very American.” Seb skeptically discharged an ounce of soda into his Arbys cup. Took a sip. Processed. “It’s weird!” he exclaimed in his thick French accent, paused, and then proceeded to fill his cup up the rest of the way with delicious neon green carbonated corn syrup.

American women are smitten by Seb. We had to fend off several Taco Bell assistant managers determined to run away with him.

“The girls are very wide here,” Seb observed as we battled through a grueling 12 hour drive through Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas.

“Where are you guys from?” was a frequent question our band encountered at gas stations and Waffle Houses. Truckers and waitresses and janitors were always delighted to hear that we are a traveling band. “People are friendly here,” Seb praised. ” In Belgium or France, a stranger would never talk to us like that.” I liked touring the states with Seb. I liked seeing it through his eyes. This country, it’s not so bad after all. I promise.

It was a bittersweet last meal for Darwin Deez and Caged Animals, sister bands, touring soulmates on this dear tour we had titled “The American Way.”

We ate at Plato’s Diner on the outskirts of Washington DC, a gleaming metallic UFO of a diner. American tours are inevitably crammed with yellow food, with omelettes, with buttered toast, with pancakes, and ours had been blessed accordingly.

Our two bands came up with a lot of lists during this late breakfast. Favorite shows, worst shows. Most embarrassing moments. We can’t tell you who we named as worst opening bands, because then this blog will show up in those bands’ Google Alerts and that won’t be good for anybody. But we can tell you who were our favorite bands. One fave was Week of Wonders, in Seattle. They were this trio of energetic guys wearing all white, good guitar playing, exciting pop songs, minimal, tight, kind of a Vampire Weekend sort of sound, big personality and presence kinda like The Hives. Another favorite band was The Very Knees from Columbus, Ohio. They were this duo, one was this cool rocker dude and the other was a kinda goth punk transgender girl, and sometimes they would play guitar and bass, and sometimes they would just rock the mics with a backing track, and it was super funky and subversive and dancy and unique and uplifting and beautiful. I think The Very Knees was my personal favorite. They were like such a good first band that it was intimidating to follow. And our third favorite band was this big folk rock collective band with a stunning lead singer named Monica, and they were called Phox and they are from Madison, Wisconsin.

Washington DC had been a rad last show of tour for us. The crowd that comes and sees Deez in DC is one of the best in the world. They are always enthusiastic and supportive and fun and diverse and numerous. I love playing the Black Cat. I love their vegan friendly menu, and I love how they always hook us up with chips and salsa during sound check. I love their long, Lynchian, black-and-white checkered live room. It is a fun, wide stage to play.

At the stroke of midnight was Darwin’s birthday, while we were on stage. Darwin’s parents made the drive up from Chapel Hill with a chocolate tofu cake, Darwin’s favorite homemade dessert. Caged Animals brought cake #2 on stage when we came out for the encore, and there were burning candles and the happy birthday song from the crowd. We did the Spring Dance and Bad Day and closed with 800 Human. Afterwards, as I was packing up my guitar and keyboard. the Black Cat staff brought an unprecedented second tray of chips and salsa just for me. It was my favorite show of tour.

Hey guys. It’s Andrew. Sorry that I haven’t been blogging. Sorry that I’ve been slacking HARD on the blog tip. But now I’m in Brooklyn and I’m gonna start from DC and go backwards and tell you a bunch about what the band has been up to so far this year. And then hopefully when we go to UK in a couple weeks, the blog ball will be rolling and I’ll keep journaling like you know I should. Peace, love, truth, beauty, darkness, light.

Hey guys! It’s me again. It’s Andrew. It’s been so long!

In 48 hours, the brothers Deez will be flying over to London town to release our new record, Songs For Imaginative People. We are going to be exchanging our imagination waves with you. Hope to see you in the crowd this year beaming your creative fantastic love flows in our direction.

We actually already did a band warm-up / sneak preview tour of sorts in November. I know I never wrote you then! Feelin a little guilty, in that regard. It’s not that I don’t care about you.

A big reason I was not writing was because I was working hard practicing guitar. Did you stream the new album today on NME? You might notice, the guitar parts have gotten a lot harder since last time. Darwin’s playing them all on the recordings, and now it’s up to me to faithfully bring half of them to the stage.

Remember how in the early days, one of our things in Darwin Deez was like: “Darwin grabbed a bunch of his friends to play in his band even though they can barely play their instruments”? It was charming, i think. Greg had never played drums before, but there he was, kick snare kick kick snare. Michelle the tap dancer learned just enough bass to make it through the sets. Well, those days are gone! Greg is back on his actual instrument, the bass. We have a new drummer Tim who’s super pro. And Darwin, during his Asheville hermitage, has conjured crazy Hendrix shredding chops. So now it’s just me left (somewhat) proudly carrying the amateur torch. Me, Andrew, the bassist and pianist, hanging on for dear life trying to pull off these tricky new guitar parts. So wish me luck. Send me some heart signals from the audience! You know, that shape you make with your hands. I will need your heart shaped signals.

So anyways, yeah, more practicing, less photos and tour diary blogging, so far. But even once I get my guitar parts locked in, I still haven’t decided if I’m going to be the faithful documentarian that I was in 2010 / 2011. I’ve always got this creative itch, you know, and I’m always thinking, “OK, I did that. Now what else can I do?” I’ve recently started exploring the new-ish (to me) social media of Instagram and Twitter, so if I’m not blogging enough, you will surely find regular peeks into our Darwin Deez touring times by following me on Instagram at username givetolight, and on Twitter at @givetolight. (https://twitter.com/givetolight)

The pictures on this post are some of my favorite Instagrams from November.

Speaking of faithful documenting, did you know that the new deluxe edition of the album will have my entire blog writings and photographs in a 110 page book? Plus album on vinyl! Plus amazing DVD documentary! This is the link to buy that:

http://www.recordstore.co.uk/search.html?l=en&term=songs+for+imaginative+people

“Why would I need this book?” you might ask. “I can read your blog and see your photos here for free.” But try to go back to the beginning of the blog. You can’t go back that far, can you? It stops you at a certain point. The internet, it stops you. That’s why you need the book. The internet stops you, but the book will not.

Darwin parked our new US tour van outside of NYC in Jersey this evening. I picked him up. We hopped in my zip car. “Adventure time!” I declared. “Our lives are so exciting!” he replied. It’s a happy day. I feel good. Anticipation!

There’s this structure built alongside Interstate 87 when you start driving north in the Bronx, on the right-hand side. It looks like elevated train tracks, maybe abandoned. Also kind of looks like an aqueduct. I’ve been seeing it for a long time. I noticed it when we departed on that first Creaky Boards tour in 2007, which was the very first tour that Darwin and I had ever embarked on. I noticed it again when I left on a tour to play bass for Saturday Looks Good To Me. I noticed it again when the Darwin Deez band did our US tour in January of 2011. I might have even written about it on that January 2011 blog. Anyway, this structure, these train tracks, this aqueduct, for me, it’s a symbol of adventure. We are going to be touring pretty much nonstop for two months. England, Paris, Germany, then the entire circumference of the United States. Canada. SXSW 2013. This structure next to I-87, it gives me such a feeling of awe and mystery. What is about to happen? What is about to unfold? This silent structure. It almost seems like it knows the future.

Last night we played Boston. When we arrived, all these dudes and dudettes were marching around the streets in yellow T-shirts and viking hats, doing a college-style bar crawl. Classic Boston crust punks were on the scene, reminding me of my Boston crust punk experiences from the days of yore. This girl Aoife came to our show (how Gaelic can you get?). She was indeed from Ireland and had seen our band’s show in Cork last November.

The show itself, well, it was by no means the biggest, and nothing new or unpredictable happened, but it was nonetheless a pretty damn good performance. And that was that. I knew it was the last time I would be playing these songs for a good while, likely a year. I knew a nightly tradition that I had become immersed in was finally concluding. I knew that I would have to cease existing 24/7 with this group of best friends the way I’ve been doing. But I couldn’t feel sentimental or sad or dramatic. Dancing the Miike Snow Dance finale. Returning for the Constellations encore. Packing up. Even the drive home. I felt eerily normal, chill. It’s always hard to know things are really over until they are months and months behind you, and you realize how difficult it may be to bring them back in exactly that way that you had loved. Or maybe even impossible.

Playing in this band for the last year was a trip. Made me think a lot about fame, and made me think a lot about promiscuity. I hope it made me wiser and more kind and more appreciative. I hope it did not fill me with pride or arrogance, or make me bratty and difficult to please, or make me a superficial irresponsible party boy. It was a real blessing. It was true fun, true love.

I was struck by an uncommon craving during the journey back to New York from Boston, and Darwin indulged me with a detour to Dairy Queen. We also allowed ourselves a little time at a classic, cheap, non-picked-over hunt in the goodwill. And soon enough, Darwin was dropping me off in Brooklyn.

Greg is going to keep living in this city with me, but we are on opposite sides of town, and to be honest, we don’t see each other that much when we aren’t touring. Michelle lives here, too, but we see each other even less. Miles is in LA. And my best bud, Darwin, is heading down south to North Carolina to buy a trailer in Asheville where he can live for cheap and make as much noise as he wants. With any luck, we’ll have a new Darwin album on our hands for 2012. Fingers crossed, everyone.

The family we are staying with is slightly eccentric. There are multi-generations in this household. The grandma is a raw foods enthusiast. The grandpa hangs out in this room downstairs and jams blues solos on his electric guitar over instrumentals of songs like Green Onions. I can see him in there; his door is open a crack. The mom, Greg’s friend, is the daughter of some famous CBGB’s New York rock band. She talked for me for a good while last night about her path from insanity and drug addiction to equilibrium. The little daughters have left an abundance of arts and crafts all over the house, along with a toy apocalypse in the room next door. They are presently naked like pixies and frolicking about.

When Greg and Darwin picked me up at my apartment, they blurted, “did you hear!?” Hear what? “Cole’s coming on this tour! Playing guitar! For Caged Animals!” What? Really?! When did you find that out? Who told you? “Not Cole,” Darwin continued. “Stephen told me in an e-mail this morning.” (Stephen’s our manager)

Back in January and February when shit went down, it seemed appropriate to be discreet about this situation, but now that there’s been some time and space in between, I feel there’s no harm in telling you that there was some drama and tension when Cole’s time with the band ended.

For these last four East Coast dates, we have our friend Isaac Gillespie along as videographer. As the band rolled off to Philadelphia, we briefed him that he absolutely had to capture the moment when Cole and Darwin first meet during load-in. Our very own made-for-reality-TV moment.

Michelle (back on bass for the final four) taught us a game where you go into the gas station and try to find the most compelling oddity item for the least amount of cash. Greg won that contest yesterday by buying this interesting version of Teriyaki Flavored Beef Jerky in the form of chewing-tobacco-esque shreds.

The first show in Philadelphia was a little lackluster, causing Darwin to tiredly declare backstage that this final leg of tour was entitled “Going through the Motions tour.” “Oh great,” Michelle quipped, “you guys get High Spirits tour, and the Last Supper, and I get stuck with Going through the Motions.” But the kids in DC last night were a real special crowd. Excited, supportive, sincere, fun, good natured. I think it made Darwin feel a little better. I think everything’s going to be okay.

Last summer at a restaurant, Greg, who had never liked his original nickname “Griffin”, without warning declared, “from now on, you will call me The Big Prawn.” (Popular variations have been simply “Big Prawn” and also “Master Prawn”). In the year that followed, Greg continued to prove himself a master of naming things, from Darwin’s pedal case (“The Calzone”) to our most recent Brazil/California tour leg (“The Last Supper”).

Exhibit B: on occasion, our band would have some downtime between shows, anywhere from three days to a full week. During these times, Greg would often make a trip to the grocery store, returning to our temp-apartment with three of the most budget-yet-healthy food group basics: uncooked lentils, uncooked brown rice, and a big head of cabbage. Prepared with little embellishment, besides occasional seasoning from squirreled away fast food salt and pepper packets, Greg would boil his rice and boil his lentils and saute his cabbage, spending as little money as possible until the next haven of free backstage food.

Exhibit C: during February, I tried my hand at rap battling Darwin during the City Remix. Although my execution was lukewarm, at best, I wrote a few good lines. Between our band, my most popular line was “Big Prawn, get frugal with the cabbage”, the final line of my verse. This was, of course, a reference to Greg’s cooking habits and his general spendthrift approach to money.

As the months of tour progressed onward and inside jokes mutated into even less accessible inside jokes, this rap line received many treatments. Members would frequently and spontaneously sing, “Can we get more frugal?” (A parody of Kanye West’s line “Can we get much higher?”). Another favorite was “Prawn, frugal, cabbage. Cabbage, frugal, frugal…” (A parody of the YouTube video “Big Booty Bitches”). Also popular was repeatedly rapping the phrase, “Big Prawn gettin’ frugal with it, DAH.” (dah = breath punctuation sound)

More recently, Darwin began imagining in the van, “what if we were able to get ‘frugal’ to catch on? Like as a slang word… what if you started hearing people say things like, ‘hey man, did you hear the new Chris Brown joint? That shit is frugal!’ Darwin continued, “what if people found out about Big Prawn and cabbages, and they started showing up at our concerts with cabbages?” As we would drive along, Darwin would riff about all the funny ways he could hype the cabbage holders in the crowd. “What if we bought a bunch of cabbages and passed them out?” one of us suggested. We paused for a moment, and then unanimously agreed, “People would throw them at us. We couldn’t do it.”

Which is why I was surprised when Darwin and Greg showed up at the Echo with a grocery bag of green cabbage heads. “We’re going for it,” they announced.

Soon it was time to start our entrance music (accomplished by pushing the first button on Darwin’s foot pedal), which is currently the theme from Star Trek. “Start the music, but don’t leave the stage,” Darwin instructed me. “Take your position on the right, extend your hand, and hold up the cabbage. We’ll join you when it’s time.” I did as I was told. I stood there, staring into the blackness of the Echo, staring into that familiarly nebulous region of the room where you can see the tops of people’s heads, mostly darkness, perhaps an exit sign in the back. I almost broke into laughter onstage. A few days later, I’m happy to discover that this moment was captured and posted by two different YouTube clips.

Mid-set, Darwin distributed the cabbage (smartly selecting girls who looked least likely to throw the heavy heads back at us). We played a little bit more, and then Darwin broke out the same riffage that we had entertained ourselves with in the van. “All you ladies in the house,” he hyped, “if you’ve got your OWN cabbage, and you don’t need NO MAN, raise your cabbage in the air and say I’M FRUGAL!”

It was a lot of fun. I especially liked it because LA is another one of those shows where there’s this undercurrent of band awareness telling you: “this is a big one. Important music industry people and press people are here. You’ve got to nail it tonight.” At some of our shows (Glastonbury, for example), I think we’ve psyched ourselves out with that pressure, but this time in Los Angeles, we just had fun and did an over-the-top silly show using one of our favorite long-time inside jokes. The concert received two reviews, and both mentioned the cabbage, and, miraculously enough, both reviews were POSITIVE!

http://www.mxdwn.com/2011/07/08/reviews/darwin-deez-live-at-the-echo-july-7-2011/
http://www.buzzinemusic.com/reviews/music-review-darwin-deez-live-echo-07092011