I Need Sleep or I Need Crank

I need sleep or I need crank. And I’m not the only one, I’m pretty sure that’s how we all felt when we pulled into Austin City Limit Sunday morning after 2 hours of sleep. As we got ready to play the black painted stage and the temperature rose toward 100 I was wondering who would pass out first.
We had left Chicago late Wednesday night sleeping in East St. Louis, perhaps not the wisest decision but uneventful. Bleary eyed, we arrived in Tulsa Thursday to be greeted by Jonathan from Unwed Sailor’s beautiful bottle of whiskey as well as the Colour Revolt boys. We meet the Neva Dinova chaps for the first time, a swell bunch. Niko made us delicious chorizo taco’s… hmmm…. so good. Not much else occurred until Conor Oberst arrived during Colour Revolt’s set with 4 ladies on his arms (he had only two arms however). I was generally an asshole and a pile, my frustrations culminating in throwing a paper napkin at Shawn, the ultimate pathetic gesture. Shawn strangled Eric. We tried to crash only to stay at a house that was warring with their neighbors. The cops came. Pretty standard stuff.
It was really Friday in Denton at Hailey’s where we began a spiral that would land us squarely sleepless on Sunday morning. Perhaps it was the mind erasers. It may have been the jager bombs. What ever it was I do remember strangling Eric, actually it was a headlock with a pizza slice in the face finish, pepperoni I think.
We woke early-ish to start the 9 hour drive to McAllen. If you are unfamiliar with McAllen it’s at the very bottom of Texas and to drive there you need to go through a lot of what can be best described as nothingness. At one point in a traffic jam outside of Dallas Eric donned a Mexican wrestling mask, howling and greeting our fellow I35 parking lot attendees. He was not strangled. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere we were bee-kakied, that is to say the van hit a swarm of bees that must have been fighting butterflies. They smashed against the window like a hail storm, hundreds of them. Bug guts splattered everywhere, butterfly wings in Shawn’s hair, a bee abdomen on Eric’s forehead, general yellowness and tiny black legs spewed on Angela and I. It was plague-esque, we had to stop at the next gas station to clean the windows just to see. We arrived at the Incubator just in time and thanks to some generous Sparks consumption we were ready to play a half hour later. McAllen’s awesome crowd made it all worthwhile. Alas, after just 2 hours in McAllen we were turned around on our way back to Austin.
We drove through the night, arriving at 5am, sleeping till 7am and then heading to the fest. As you can tell, we obviously needed sleep or crank. We received neither. Imagine our dismay when we couldn’t find beer at 10am. F’n blue laws. We did acquire some Lone Star, which is a bit like crank and sleep in a can. I was pleasantly surprised at the number of people who made it that early to ACL and were actually excited, especially in that heat. Adrenaline carried the first 4 songs; Lone Star took care of the rest.
See You On Tour,
Phil