This is Tour Diary, where artists give us a behind-the-scenes look at life on the road. In October, Upchuck returned with their third studio album, I’m Nice Now, which they recorded at Sonic Ranch Studio in Texas with producer Ty Segall. Despite its winking title, their sound remains a rush of venomous rage, recorded straight to tape after years of putting on blazing punk shows (including one where vocalist KT was hit with a shopping cart, covered in blood, and kept going). Its 13 songs, sung in both English and Spanish, confront the heaviness of racism, sexism, and loss, wielded by the band — completed by drummer Chris Salado, guitarists Mikey Durham and Hoff, and bassist Ausar Ward — as a rallying cry for critique and resistance. “In this world of constant distractions and stressors, it’s important to keep your mind, body, and spirit sane and sound enough to continue through this seemingly never-ending fight,” KT says. “Being a POC, by default, you’re gonna have that rage… You’re gonna have that desire for change, and that desire for the fuckery to end.”
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The Atlanta punks have recently been playing those tracks live, including overseas throughout November. Before they wrap up their shows at the end of the month, Hoff took us through some tour highlights, from playing Austin’s Levitation to hot dog eating contests to front flips on mystery mattresses.
I’m going to preface this by saying I’m working my way backward here, and to my shock when I walked into the public bathroom in the basement of Philadelphia’s Own First Unitarian Church… I found the most diabolical urinal setup, two urinals so close, you can almost use them only by interlocking arms with the person next to you.
Completely unrelated to the last photo, we have here what ended up being our final attempt at beating our bandmate Mikey at our tour-long hot dog eating contest. I hung my hat up here in Pittsburgh at the Bottle Rocket Social Hall. They served us as many hotdogs as we could eat as venue hospitality. In this moment, both Ausar and I were holding our third and fourth hot dog of that sitting.
It’s become some sort of tradition of ours as a band to hit this Detroit area pizza spot. It was originally a recommendation of our buddy Marlon, and at this point we can’t help ourselves but stop every time.
Before our Chicago show at the Subterranean, our buddy Brooks from Crisis Actress gave us a tour of Electrical Audio Studio B, which is a place we’ve always wanted to check out. I personally love the idea of it almost feeling like some sort of zoo enclosure. I enjoyed hearing the many stories and being taught how to make the infamous “fluffy coffee.”
This business scheme seemed interesting. Seems like a real meeting of the minds. Would love to pick the brain of their marketing guy.
I’m not really trying to insert any filler photos here. But this, this is a gas station dinosaur that seems like it’s had some work done.
In Boise, Idaho, we played an old Shriner’s Lodge that was converted into a music venue. It’s called Shrine Social Club. It was a real time capsule. It was almost as if they hadn’t changed much of anything, even the stage carpet. It was kind of creepy, kind of awesome. We took a little bit of a self-guided tour around the building. I at one point climbed into a cabinet with a loud hefty metal latch and waited about 10 minutes until Chris and KT came into the green room. I shook the cabinet, popped the latch, and jumped out, startling them. It was pretty funny.
This was one of the many odd toilets of the tour, as we stayed many different places and played many different venues. This one specifically was in Portland, Oregon. About an hour after I took this photo, I went to go get a sweatshirt out of the van after a walk, and there was a couple of guys who seemed to set up their own personal living room outside of our van. When one of us asked them to move so we could get into the sliding door, he said he would, but he pulled out a large Karambit knife and kept pointing it around as he was moving his stuff in a threatening but passive manner. Took him about 15 minutes to move everything. His friend was twirling a pipe and pacing back and forth. It was tense but also ridiculous.
On an off day, we split a drive between San Francisco and Portland. We had figured out we had a couple of slow leaks from screws in our tires, and we were far from a tire shop. That night we cooked a nice meal on our grill in a remote cabin just north of the Washington/Oregon border. The next morning, we were almost completely out of gas, and we stopped at a gas station that had the oldest functioning gas pump that I had ever seen. An older lady came out and pumped the gas for us, and she told me I had to come inside to pay for the gas. There were two front windows with broken glass, and this sign welcomed me as I stepped inside. She told me that there were a bunch of black widow spiders on the other side of the wall in the garage in the building.
I had this burger at Nuge’s Burger She Wrote. They call it the Oklahoma burger. One of the most unforgettable meals I had on the whole tour.
We had stopped here. It is honestly pretty wild how many different types of scenic views there are in the desert. In about five hours time, we went from all sort of different terrain, from seas of cacti to mountains of what looked like just massive piles of rocks to giant sand dunes. It’s amazing how many different kinds of “middle of nowheres” exist across the United States.
This was after our first show of the tour at Levitation as we were loading out. It was a great set, with snapped strings and dust flying everywhere from the ground as we played the outdoor stage. The lineup for the day was amazing, as it included A Place to Bury Strangers, Population II, and one of our favorites Being Dead, who we also played a festival with out in Wales just a couple months prior.
At a rental house northeast of Austin, Ausar did a front flip into this mystery mattress that was left on the floor of the garage. I guess they gave us a bonus bedroom in this one. And a show, when stepping outback later that night we sat still as we heard a shootout with well over 100 rounds from a handful of different weapons, somewhere within a one-mile radius.