Four Lecherous Men and a Little Lady Tour: Recap Dénouement

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Four Lecherous Men and a Little Lady Tour: Recap, Part Deux!

We got to Eugene on Friday afternoon looking to rest up and relax before our campaign of nailing balls to walls commenced for the evening.  After being sorely disappointed by finding a severe exception to the "culture rating of the town is inversely correlated to the coolness of the local goodwill" in some town who's name I purposely forgot, we quickly agreed that that the old adage "the exception proves the rule" was a retarded bit of word phrasing trickery most likely first perpetrated by some sly bastard who found a way to confuse his convo-pponent just long enough to hop away unscathed in a cloud of complete nonsense.  

Our old (college) roommate Steve was an excellent host, providing burgers as well as outdoor sleeping arrangements.  Our stink factor at this point was perhaps a 5, no more. A couple of showers were taken and we retired to the porch to go over a couple of tunes.

We heard our pal Marty was coming down from Portland and decided to knock the rust off of our Steely Dan cover ("Kings"), since Martin Walsh being at the show constitutes our most Dan-receptive audience ever.  It went steely, by the way.

Inside the house, Jimmy got very excited about getting behind the wheels of his eighth favorite instrument (right behind "broken organ beat box machine").  He cranked through a quick version of "Tom Sawyer" and then headed to the club.

Check our moves!

James' star-tambo-face-obscure meets "the lean"

Tom finds that clapping helps him enjoy himself more and recalls him of youthful trysts!

Rob's patented stutter-step.  This is right before I knock James' amp setup right the fuck over mid-song.  Grace be the watch word, aspiring stage prancers!

After the show, we rolled on back to Steve's pad where I must admit I passed out almost immediately on a couch in a room where a drum kit was being played until very late.  Pointedly un-rock and roll, but a lingering sickness and sinister college device did me in post-haste.  The rest of the boys (and Ariana) partied down for several more hours and reported it grand.

Awake again we headed off to Seattle! More pictures an all-time Chop highlight (courtesy of Aaron) yet to come.

continued tomorrow....

Four Lecherous Men and a Little Lady Tour: Recap, Part 1!

Like any proper tour, this one began with the mindless, random destruction of our equipment.

Our big blue van ("One of Many") has an interesting tendency to take on more and more household items, dirty clothing, and completely useless knick knacks (all collectively known as "junk") the longer it's in a certain band member's possession.  It is a phenomenal ability, really, and it leads to fun like the kind you see above...a stringless, hopeless, utterly value-less guitar is smashed (partly out of spite) by one Heart-thRob.  Spring cleaning, as they say...is an important aspect of van ownership.

The below picture displays perhaps the most exciting sector of rock band membership, the loading dock.  Such a professional operation as ours has lots of expensive, fully-functioning gear and it all needs to be carefully loaded into (and subsequently unloaded from) "One of Many" before we can properly rock any socks.  Notice Tom's excitement...which will not be mirrored upon our return to the space late Sunday evening.

Old Ironsides in Sacramento is a fun place.  We've played there before.  We laid some sweet pink stencils in Sac-town, sipped New Castles, and sold a T-shirt to the bartender.  The bill was a good one, we played in the middle of Ahoy and Starring Morgan Freeman, and like any great artists, took our money and hit the road.

We popped out several hours later in Eugene, Oregon, fully prepared to "pretend learn" a few songs on the porch, to "steal" toilet paper from the bar, and to "Lady and the Tramp" a few Slim Jims in the parking lot...

To be continued....

Mayth Show and The Murky Origins of The Chop

We really had a tremendous time last Friday for my (Rob's) birthday at the Hemlock Tavern.

Everything about the evening was terrific.  Rob wore his birthday shirt and it was (as you might expect) quite appropriate.  This May 8th also marked the official 3rd anniversary of The Chop. Who can believe it's been 3 long years.......

(flashback sequence)

In truth, we toiled away for some 8 months leading up to that, primarily dealing with such relatively minor factors as 'no drummer', and 'no experience playing instruments' right up until April 2006 or so.  Around that time Phil moved to SF, we had our brief stint with drummer Gil (ahhh, Gil...) and once he left town we promptly asked Tom (another brand new California resident) to learn the drums from scratch.  Right at this point James quit the band for about 5 days and we had one practice without him which was also Tom's official first attempt at drumming.  As a four piece we played "Slippery People" "Demolition" and most likely "Taste of Luxury" and "Carry the Wood" and were feeling pretty good, I must say.

Then while out at the bar that weekend, James came back into fold and we came up with "The Chop" and all got behind it super fast, with James designing the logo hungover as all hell approximately 12 hours after the word 'chop' was first mentioned.  That monday (May 8th, 2006) we practiced for the for the first time as The Chop and the rest is (see below).

(end flashback sequence)

Here's some pictures before we head off northward tonight to play some more.  The last one's from last weekend at The Stork, but I really liked it and wanted an excuse to repost it.  I also videotaped the show (on Mayth) so perhaps you'll be seeing some of that soon.

I'll be taking as many pictures as humanly possible this weekend and will report back with numerous embarrassing stories about individual band members next week.

The Cake

The Band

The Attitude

News and Updates and Videos of Us

We got ourselves a video courtesy of RedLabelFilms.com.  It's edited together from our live performance at the Coho in Stanford a few weeks ago, but laid over the album cut of Scientist.  Abteen and Jay did a swell job...check it!

We made The Bay Bridged podcast April mixtape (that's episode #160) with our song "We Want It All".  The Bay Bridged is a well-established Bay Area music podcast with oodles of listeners and mad cred, as it were.  If you're hip to podcasts, download that now off of iTunes. It is FREE.

We also have had some exciting shows in the last few weeks, and some more coming up...here's some brief descriptions:

Our Talking Heads Spectacular on 4/17 went amazingly well.  Goodbye Nautilus played Take Me to the River and Girlfriend is Better in their set, Touch Committee played Wild Wild Life and Road to Nowhere, and The Chop rocked through Swamp and Pulled Up...at the end 7 of us crowded on stage for a sweet rendition of Life During Wartime. 

Also, this girl was there:

Last Friday we went to Davis and had a wild (wild) evening...showed up to find we were the only band playing (although they did line up an acoustic opener) and that we were expected to play for something like 2 hours (as opposed to the 45 minutes we're used to).  So we extended all the tunes, ramped up the solos, did some songs we didn't quite know...it was all pretty fun.

At the end of the night one of the bouncers/bartenders was going through and pouring the miniscule remnants of each "empty" liquor bottle into one consolidated bottle.  It was a disgusting brown, the product of every liquor under the sun being mixed.  He dubbed it "Dumpster Juice" and was really excited about it.  Naturally, James took a shot of it.  In the bathroom.

After that we went home.

The next night we played the Stork Club in Oakland and I posted a 109xxx Ms Pacman score. Take that, Namco!

Tonight, we ride!

next year is the best year,

rob