Salon Wanderlust | On the road with the Smokejumpers

[Salon Wanderlust: Travel with a passion]

A L S O__T O D A Y

This week in Travel
Wanderlust presents a selective guide to the week's travel-related news.

T A B L E_T A L K
Where would you go if you had one or two months off? Make plans, imaginary or real, in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y
Savvy tips for holiday travelers
By Dawn MacKeen
When can you actually demand money from an airline? Where can you find low-cost holiday fares? Christopher McGinnis knows
(11/05/98)
The Hollywood tourists never see
By Jeff Greenwald
A travel writer finds life-changing adventure on the sound stage of an NBC sitcom
(11/03/98)
Death on Ios
By Jeffrey Tayler
Could he recapture his youth with a passionate encounter on Greece's most hedonistic island?
(11/01/98)
This week in travel Wanderlust's selective guide to travel-related news
(10/30/98)
Naked and in hot water
By Simon Firth
A proper Brit ventures to a clothing-optional resort and discovers that nudity offers more than meets the eye
(10/29/98)

Browse the
Wanderlust Postmark archives

S A L O N
E M P O R I U M
FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

On the road with the Smokejumpers
What happens when a punk-rockabilly band from San Francisco tours the country in a broken-down Big Orange Van?

-------------------[GET PARTS TWO AND THREE]
BY THE KING TEEN | "Hey, we're the Smokejumpers from San Francisco, California. Thanks for coming, thanks for sticking around, we need a place to stay. Here's our first song ..."
That's as good a way as any to begin the Smokejumpers' 16-day, 15-show, 7,000-mile tour, at an all-ages coffeehouse in Reno called Planet Nine. We're headed east from San Francisco as far as Muncie, Ind., then south to Montevallo, Ala., near Birmingham, then back home through the Southwest and Southern California. By the time we're through, the four of us will possibly hate each other, probably hate our Big Orange Van and almost certainly hate some things and people we can't even imagine just yet. We'll get home, swear we'll never do this again, then do it again.
We're a punk-rockabilly band. When we say that to people, they generally say, "You mean like Reverend Horton Heat?" and we say, sure, yes, like that, even though we don't sound like the Rev. We don't sound like anyone, really, although we also manage to be pretty unoriginal. But it's boring to describe yourself. We play loud and fast. We jump around. We make a lot of bad jokes. We're snappy dressers. OK?
We're on tour to promote our debut album, "Flat Tear It Up!" Thanks to some delays and screw ups, including a big communication failure between us and our label, Walking Records, a small, start-up indie in San Luis Obispo, Calif., promotion for the first few shows has been pretty weak. The crowd at this opening show is on the small side, but they've spread themselves out nicely to make the place look reasonably full. The other band is called the Atomics. They own this place. Literally. We're told they opened it because they were having trouble getting shows at the other two all-ages places in town. They wear busboy outfits and I like them, even before they give us the whole door take.
And my opening ploy works. Two college girls, freshmen at Nevada-Reno, offer to let us stay in their apartment -- which they share with three other students, including two football players.
At their place, something happens that amazes three-fourths (and maybe all) of the Smokejumpers: Tom "Double D" Thumb, guitar player and heartthrob of the band, the only one of us who isn't married or living with someone, whose sex life we live vicariously through on the road even though he never gets laid despite the fact that women are constantly flinging themselves at him, gets lucky with one of our hosts. (Not one of the football players.)
"I'm doubting everything I know!" Big Stick Mick, the drummer, is reeling. His world's been rocked, his assumptions destroyed by Double D's semireluctant admission in the van Friday morning that he had been co-responsible for the rhythmic noises coming from upstairs Thursday night.
Our hero.

The Big Orange Van is new to us. It used to belong to the city of Orange, hence the paint job, though everyone thinks it looks like a Cal-Trans vehicle. We honk and wave at highway workers whenever we pass them, and they look at us like they'd like to hunt us down and kill us.
It's a one-ton GMC Vandura, the BOV is, and it's a beast, much more powerful than the 3/4-ton GMC van that died on us north of Eugene, Ore., in the dead of night five months and three road trips ago. Saying that your van, with all your musical gear in it, died in the dead of night 500 miles from home and 35 miles from anywhere -- bad as that sounds -- does not begin to get at how bad it is to go through it. But that long dark night of the Carrows Restaurant (waiting for a mechanic to open up) is behind us now, and we're happy in our Big Orange Van, powering up mountains at 65 mph, leaving hapless musicians in 3/4-ton vans in our dust. If it had a radio, the BOV would be perfect. Also, if the rearview mirrors stayed where you placed them and the floor didn't get so hot, that would be nice. And the seats could be more comfortable. And if the windows didn't all whistle, we could maybe get more sleep.
We beg for floor space to sleep on each night, but we live in this van. A West Coast band that wants to travel is in for some heavy driving. Bands east of the Mississippi can travel from town to town to town in a matter of hours, but out West in the wide open spaces there's a whole lot of endless gray ribbon, baby, long black highways and thin white lines yeah yeah. They don't write road songs about Maryland or Connecticut, you know. After our friendly little first-day drive of 230 miles from San Francisco to Reno, the next eight days promise hauls of 560 miles to Ogden, 533 to Denver, 556 to Lawrence, Kan., 347 to Iowa City, 430 to Muncie, 540 to Montevallo, 380 to New Orleans and 507 to Dallas. Almost everyone I've showed this schedule to over the last few weeks has had the same reaction: "Are you crazy!? How can you stand so much driving?" My answer: 10 or 12 hours a day in a van, driving, sleeping, watching the scenery go by, beats spending that same time on the job, grinding away at someone else's life's work. Plus, we get to play music at the end of the day. How could I go to work all day without this to look forward to?
We have two bench seats, so at any given time on the highway, half of the band is asleep, preferably not including the driver. The addition of the second bench before this trip has cut down on the endless games of Boggle and 20 questions, which might better be called X questions, with X representing the number of questions it takes to guess the person or character one of us is thinking of. Through this game we've learned that various Smokejumpers have never heard of James Joyce, "Beowulf," Che Guevara and "The Greatest American Hero."

"What's Ogden like?" I ask two local guys as I change my guitar strings before Friday night's show at the O-Town Tavern, weirdly located in the basement of a state office building.
"A little Salt Lake City," they say, and clearly it's not a compliment. There's a Quiet Riot/Warrant/Slaughter show in town tonight, but it's probably our publicity woes more than some loss of potential fans to '80s fluff metal nostalgia that again keeps the crowd on the small side. Ah, but they're enthusiastic again, and you'd be amazed how much that helps this thought not go through your mind as you sing: "What am I doing up here? I'm wasting my life!"
My opening plea for a place to stay works again. This time a woman in her mid-20s offers us floor space in her one-bedroom condo nearby and we quickly accept. Kathy had been an eager stage-front supporter during our set, and now it's clear to me she's in her cups. She's slurring her words as she tells me about her condo and that she lives alone there. Part of me -- not the part that's glad to have a place to sleep, of course -- is appalled at her lack of judgment. We're four men she knows nothing about other than that we play music and live in another state, and she's not operating at full mental speed. She's really putting herself in a terribly dangerous situation. We should watch out for our fan, tell her not to invite strange groups of strange men into her home. That's it, we're going to refuse.
So, over at Kathy's place, we claim our spots on the living room floor as she puts on various CDs. Louise, a friend who had been with Kathy at the show, turns up. Seems she lives next door. I'm a bit uncomfortable about this because I'd pressured Louise to buy a T-shirt at the show, taking a bit of advantage of her own beer-lubricated generosity. Hey, we're on the road. You gotta be aggressive. But now she doesn't seem to have any objections to the deal, though she can't seem to remember our band's name for any length of time. We all talk some more about Ogden. Kathy insists it's a pretty tolerant place, once you get past the fact that the Mormons really want you to join their religion. Louise disagrees. Her mother is Vietnamese and her father Puerto Rican. "I got shit all the time growing up here."
An Ogden police officer knocks on the door with a complaint about the noise of our "party." Considering there are only three occupied units in the building and the occupants of two of them are here, there's little doubt who called. Local dispute. None of our business. We turn in. It's the smallest, quietest party I've ever been to that's been broken up by the cops. I hadn't even known it was a party.
Saturday in Wyoming, on the way to Denver, we climb above 7,000 feet. The altitude is wreaking havoc on our gas mileage, driving it down from about 10 miles a gallon to maybe seven. This is costing us money! And that's in short supply. All of us have managed to get time off of our jobs, but it's not paid time for any of us. We have some money from the record label, plus what we make on the road. We probably won't lose money out here unless the BOV lets us down in a big way, but if we don't make some decent coin at some of these shows we could come home not having earned much for two weeks. We discuss CD sales. We've had them for about eight days, and at our current sales pace, we'll go platinum in 5,000 years.
N E X T+P A G E | The BOV lets us down in a big way


	A L S O__T O D A Y This week in Travel Wanderlust presents a selective guide to the week's travel-related news. T A B L E_T A L K Where would you go if you had one or two months off? Make plans, imaginary or real, in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Savvy tips for holiday travelers By Dawn MacKeen When can you actually demand money from an airline? Where can you find low-cost holiday fares? Christopher McGinnis knows (11/05/98) The Hollywood tourists never see By Jeff Greenwald A travel writer finds life-changing adventure on the sound stage of an NBC sitcom (11/03/98) Death on Ios By Jeffrey Tayler Could he recapture his youth with a passionate encounter on Greece's most hedonistic island? (11/01/98) This week in travel Wanderlust's selective guide to travel-related news (10/30/98) Naked and in hot water By Simon Firth A proper Brit ventures to a clothing-optional resort and discovers that nudity offers more than meets the eye (10/29/98) Browse the Wanderlust Postmark archives S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.		What happens when a punk-rockabilly band from San Francisco tours the country in a broken-down Big Orange Van? -------------------[GET PARTS TWO AND THREE] BY THE KING TEEN \| "Hey, we're the Smokejumpers from San Francisco, California. Thanks for coming, thanks for sticking around, we need a place to stay. Here's our first song ..." That's as good a way as any to begin the Smokejumpers' 16-day, 15-show, 7,000-mile tour, at an all-ages coffeehouse in Reno called Planet Nine. We're headed east from San Francisco as far as Muncie, Ind., then south to Montevallo, Ala., near Birmingham, then back home through the Southwest and Southern California. By the time we're through, the four of us will possibly hate each other, probably hate our Big Orange Van and almost certainly hate some things and people we can't even imagine just yet. We'll get home, swear we'll never do this again, then do it again. We're a punk-rockabilly band. When we say that to people, they generally say, "You mean like Reverend Horton Heat?" and we say, sure, yes, like that, even though we don't sound like the Rev. We don't sound like anyone, really, although we also manage to be pretty unoriginal. But it's boring to describe yourself. We play loud and fast. We jump around. We make a lot of bad jokes. We're snappy dressers. OK? We're on tour to promote our debut album, "Flat Tear It Up!" Thanks to some delays and screw ups, including a big communication failure between us and our label, Walking Records, a small, start-up indie in San Luis Obispo, Calif., promotion for the first few shows has been pretty weak. The crowd at this opening show is on the small side, but they've spread themselves out nicely to make the place look reasonably full. The other band is called the Atomics. They own this place. Literally. We're told they opened it because they were having trouble getting shows at the other two all-ages places in town. They wear busboy outfits and I like them, even before they give us the whole door take. And my opening ploy works. Two college girls, freshmen at Nevada-Reno, offer to let us stay in their apartment -- which they share with three other students, including two football players. At their place, something happens that amazes three-fourths (and maybe all) of the Smokejumpers: Tom "Double D" Thumb, guitar player and heartthrob of the band, the only one of us who isn't married or living with someone, whose sex life we live vicariously through on the road even though he never gets laid despite the fact that women are constantly flinging themselves at him, gets lucky with one of our hosts. (Not one of the football players.) "I'm doubting everything I know!" Big Stick Mick, the drummer, is reeling. His world's been rocked, his assumptions destroyed by Double D's semireluctant admission in the van Friday morning that he had been co-responsible for the rhythmic noises coming from upstairs Thursday night. Our hero. The Big Orange Van is new to us. It used to belong to the city of Orange, hence the paint job, though everyone thinks it looks like a Cal-Trans vehicle. We honk and wave at highway workers whenever we pass them, and they look at us like they'd like to hunt us down and kill us. It's a one-ton GMC Vandura, the BOV is, and it's a beast, much more powerful than the 3/4-ton GMC van that died on us north of Eugene, Ore., in the dead of night five months and three road trips ago. Saying that your van, with all your musical gear in it, died in the dead of night 500 miles from home and 35 miles from anywhere -- bad as that sounds -- does not begin to get at how bad it is to go through it. But that long dark night of the Carrows Restaurant (waiting for a mechanic to open up) is behind us now, and we're happy in our Big Orange Van, powering up mountains at 65 mph, leaving hapless musicians in 3/4-ton vans in our dust. If it had a radio, the BOV would be perfect. Also, if the rearview mirrors stayed where you placed them and the floor didn't get so hot, that would be nice. And the seats could be more comfortable. And if the windows didn't all whistle, we could maybe get more sleep. We beg for floor space to sleep on each night, but we live in this van. A West Coast band that wants to travel is in for some heavy driving. Bands east of the Mississippi can travel from town to town to town in a matter of hours, but out West in the wide open spaces there's a whole lot of endless gray ribbon, baby, long black highways and thin white lines yeah yeah. They don't write road songs about Maryland or Connecticut, you know. After our friendly little first-day drive of 230 miles from San Francisco to Reno, the next eight days promise hauls of 560 miles to Ogden, 533 to Denver, 556 to Lawrence, Kan., 347 to Iowa City, 430 to Muncie, 540 to Montevallo, 380 to New Orleans and 507 to Dallas. Almost everyone I've showed this schedule to over the last few weeks has had the same reaction: "Are you crazy!? How can you stand so much driving?" My answer: 10 or 12 hours a day in a van, driving, sleeping, watching the scenery go by, beats spending that same time on the job, grinding away at someone else's life's work. Plus, we get to play music at the end of the day. How could I go to work all day without this to look forward to? We have two bench seats, so at any given time on the highway, half of the band is asleep, preferably not including the driver. The addition of the second bench before this trip has cut down on the endless games of Boggle and 20 questions, which might better be called X questions, with X representing the number of questions it takes to guess the person or character one of us is thinking of. Through this game we've learned that various Smokejumpers have never heard of James Joyce, "Beowulf," Che Guevara and "The Greatest American Hero." "What's Ogden like?" I ask two local guys as I change my guitar strings before Friday night's show at the O-Town Tavern, weirdly located in the basement of a state office building. "A little Salt Lake City," they say, and clearly it's not a compliment. There's a Quiet Riot/Warrant/Slaughter show in town tonight, but it's probably our publicity woes more than some loss of potential fans to '80s fluff metal nostalgia that again keeps the crowd on the small side. Ah, but they're enthusiastic again, and you'd be amazed how much that helps this thought not go through your mind as you sing: "What am I doing up here? I'm wasting my life!" My opening plea for a place to stay works again. This time a woman in her mid-20s offers us floor space in her one-bedroom condo nearby and we quickly accept. Kathy had been an eager stage-front supporter during our set, and now it's clear to me she's in her cups. She's slurring her words as she tells me about her condo and that she lives alone there. Part of me -- not the part that's glad to have a place to sleep, of course -- is appalled at her lack of judgment. We're four men she knows nothing about other than that we play music and live in another state, and she's not operating at full mental speed. She's really putting herself in a terribly dangerous situation. We should watch out for our fan, tell her not to invite strange groups of strange men into her home. That's it, we're going to refuse. So, over at Kathy's place, we claim our spots on the living room floor as she puts on various CDs. Louise, a friend who had been with Kathy at the show, turns up. Seems she lives next door. I'm a bit uncomfortable about this because I'd pressured Louise to buy a T-shirt at the show, taking a bit of advantage of her own beer-lubricated generosity. Hey, we're on the road. You gotta be aggressive. But now she doesn't seem to have any objections to the deal, though she can't seem to remember our band's name for any length of time. We all talk some more about Ogden. Kathy insists it's a pretty tolerant place, once you get past the fact that the Mormons really want you to join their religion. Louise disagrees. Her mother is Vietnamese and her father Puerto Rican. "I got shit all the time growing up here." An Ogden police officer knocks on the door with a complaint about the noise of our "party." Considering there are only three occupied units in the building and the occupants of two of them are here, there's little doubt who called. Local dispute. None of our business. We turn in. It's the smallest, quietest party I've ever been to that's been broken up by the cops. I hadn't even known it was a party. Saturday in Wyoming, on the way to Denver, we climb above 7,000 feet. The altitude is wreaking havoc on our gas mileage, driving it down from about 10 miles a gallon to maybe seven. This is costing us money! And that's in short supply. All of us have managed to get time off of our jobs, but it's not paid time for any of us. We have some money from the record label, plus what we make on the road. We probably won't lose money out here unless the BOV lets us down in a big way, but if we don't make some decent coin at some of these shows we could come home not having earned much for two weeks. We discuss CD sales. We've had them for about eight days, and at our current sales pace, we'll go platinum in 5,000 years. N E X T+P A G E \| The BOV lets us down in a big way