Tour Diary #4: Dinosaur Pile Up Handles “Press Day”

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Tony Shrum
August 1, 2014

Dinosaur Pile Up hit the road for a string of shows, supporting Brand New. We’ve teamed up with guys to bring you the tour diary; check out the first installation here, the second installation here, and the third here! And be sure to pick up the band’s full-length Nature Nurture on iTunes here.

SILVER SPRINGS / NYC Press Day

YOOOOOOOO. Yes yes I did that classic thing of finishing a tour and going in to a tour sleep / haze / cloud and basically lost track of everything ever after the flight and everything. I’ve just kind of come out of the fog so I figure I should finish this thing right?

SO. This is the END!! And it escalates quickly. Silver Springs Maryland was the last show of the tour and we were all super bummed to be leaving the Brand New guys and ending this thing. But at the same time we wanted to end it all on a huge show so we were kinda buzzing for the whole day. As soon as we got there we started the hangs, and everybody seemed in the same vibe. Bittersweet and all weepy (not that weepy, but weepy…ok?) We had some some really cool people come down to the show, Gloria and the fam from previous tours and it was super cool to hang. They had made bootleg t shirts for us with pizzas on which blew my mind and brought gifts for us which was SO rad, and didn’t surprise me at all. It was cool. The set went on to be awesome, we were all just super into it and the crowd seemed pumped on us too. I kept looking at Mike and Jim just crushing everything. It was killer. I’d been hanging with Jesse before talking about some production stuff I was doing or something, or maybe getting down about songs and albums and stuff and he’d said was it cool to come on stage with us again for the end of Nature Nurture – to which I said of course. So we’re just about to kick in to Nature, ending the set, and Jesse runs on and stops mike making the opening fill just as his stick breaks because he wanted a high five. It was fucking hilarious because I don’t know what Mikey was more surprised by – screwing up a fill or Jesse stopping everything just so he could high five him. Too funny. So we started again and as Jesse had already put his guitar on I guess he was into it for the whole thing. It was awesome, and Nature sounded huuuge as a four with Jesse on the backing vocals as well. So good and such a rad memory. Afterwards we went down and hung with people that had come to see us, did the merch, had a beer and then went round the back of the curtain to watch Brand New kill it for the last night from the side of the stage. It was an amazing show, and they all were just giving it that typical extra bit of “THISISTHELASTSHOWSOIWILLGOHARDERTHANIEVERHAVE” which was awesome. We were stood next to Joe (BN’s bass tech / total hero / ultra nice dude) right in his guitar tuning booth. Jim was so in to watching the show that he poured himself a beer whilst just still watching, eyes fixed on the chaos. The beer was NO WHERE near the cup but my shoe was. A whole shoe of beer just for me. Jim was proud and I was into it. Getting near the end of the set Joe turns round to me with Jesse’s second Fender and shouts over the music, a couple of inches away from my face “YOUWANNAPLAY??” I say “WHAT!???” looking at the total mayhem going on in front of me, Vin on his knees in flashes of pitch black and white light strobes, Jesse spitting flowers everywhere. Joe says “YEAH IT’S JUST TWO CHORDS!!” I felt like I was in some kind of rock band hybrid of Saving Private Ryan it was so fucking intense. “YEAH JUST C AND A G!” he’s showing me roughly as he says it. You should know that I never learnt to play guitar from theory so the names of notes or strings or chords still mean nothing to me even now. You may as well be speaking Russian. So believe me when I say, I have never watched somebody play two chords so intensely in my entire life. It’s almost as if I pushed out ALL other information in my brain be it memories or knowledge just to remember those two fucking chords. Oh yeah and I was drunk. So throw that in there. I’ve never been on stage with another band like that because I’m just too nervous for that type of shit. However. A tiny voice in my head was saying “dude you can’t do that you’re too nervous”, whilst a massive resounding voice was saying “DOITYOUSTUPIDF#CK!!!!!” I wasn’t gonna do it, but also there was no WAY that I wasn’t gonna do it, and with that I was suddenly across the right hand side of the stage, stood next to Garret playing G and C as hard as I possibly could. Did I tell you that Joe was drunk also? Joe who gave me the guitar? No? Good. Well, Joe was drunk as well. And I’m stood there looking at 4,000 people, whilst he is hid behind the big stage monitors just to my right, creasing with laughter. Why is he laughing? Because Joe thought it was the last song, when in fact, it was the second to last song. Thank you Joe. That mattered little because luckily for me both songs were in G and C. Thank fuck songwriters are creatures of habit. What it did mean however that I was now locked into rocking with the dudes for a good ten minutes instead of around four minutes, which I didn’t mind at all. We kick in to the last song, I can’t even remember what it was now, and Jesse looks across at me with a look so pumped that I can only describe it as totally insane. We’re playing and he runs up to me, and I’m like ‘cool we’re gonna just wig out together’… No. He runs right past me and grabs the big volume knob on the vintage amp that Joe has put my guitar through. He rams it right to eleven. There is literally no way it could be louder. I’m now the loudest thing on stage, thank you Jesse, and he is hopping around the stage like a 9 year old on his birthday that just blew out the candles on his cake. He’s fucking stoked. I think that nothing else can possibly happen within this 5 minute break from reality. I’m wrong. Right then, my amp that is on eleven thanks to Jesse – explodes. He’d cranked it so hard that all of the valves popped and it just blew right there. I look at him and shout amongst the deafening noise “LOOKWHATYOUDID!!!!” His face lights up even brighter and changes from the hopping 9 year old on his birthday – to the hopping 9 year old on his birthday that just threw that fucking birthday cake right into his older brothers face. He’s now in hysterics. This was made SO much funnier by the fact that you couldn’t hear anything due to us basically stood in the middle of a man made earthquake, and by the fact there were 4,000 people losing their fucking emotional shit only about 5 meters away. The next thing I know, Jesse has walked up to me, slung HIS guitar over me, and is now smashing flowers that were on mic stands on to the floor and kicking monitors in a complete and full circle wig out. I’m now wearing two guitars. Both are expensive, and both are not mine. I sling the first one around my back (I was actually pretty stoked on that) and finished of the set with just Bryan and Garret, whilst playing Jesse’s. It was amazing. Vin bailed at some point during, and Jesse just bouldered about in applause soaking up the calm after the storm. It ended with me and Garret pressed up against the amps in a sea of wandering feedback waiting for Bryan to call it quits. All the while Ben Homola (BN’s drum tech / second drummer / dude for life) had been taking shots of this right behind the amp, just two feet away shrouded in black. Some ninja shit right there. Drunk. Ninja. Shit. Eventually 5 minutes of pure feedback later and we’re in some Nirvana, Jesus Lizard, Weezer blue album baby and Bryan calls it. We leave the guitars singing on the amps. It. Was. Fucking. AMAZING. Afterwards we went back, did merch, hung out and then chilled back stage with the whole crew having the beers. We gave the guys the DPU cake (a dinosaur tradition) and said our long good-bye’s. It was a great ending to a killer tour.

The next day we woke up at like 7am after three hours sleep and drove 5 hours into NYC to do a bunch of press. It felt good, and floaty. We played Peninsula and White T Shirt acoustic a couple of times for some radio stuff. We met GUNZ from The Gunz Show which was rad, he was a force of nature, and we did a One on One Session for Ehud Lazin, which was super super cool.

Later that day I found myself on a plane asleep on a dude that wasn’t Mike and wasn’t Jim. Tour over. Holy shit. Nailing it.