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August 29th-I departed Florida for Cleveland. It was a pretty scary ride, flying right over the most recent hurricane, in this tiny little plane. I thought I was going to die. What else is new? Anyway, I met up with the band and crew and our flashy new tour bus at our sound engineer’s house there in Cleveland. I’ve had a lot of tour buses throughout the years, on all different levels of pimpiness, and, well, crappiness too, but this one; this one is the winner for the pimpiest bus ever…(I know, “pimpiness” isn’t a word, but if it was, I definitely would misspell it). This bus had plasma TV’s, marble floors, Tivo satellite TV, the whole thing even expanded 4 feet wider whenever you’re parked! Like Gobots! Or Voltron! Well, not like Voltron, but in a way nothing like Gobots either…hmmm. It was the bomb though…I could live on this thing!! Wait, I am…with 9 other guys…for many, many days…hmmm. Before we left, I found a Whole Foods super market nearby. I stocked the kitchen on the bus with healthy stuff for the upcoming ten-day ride, instead of “Count Chocula” and “Pop tarts” like usual:) I even bought fruit! My Mom would be so proud;) Anyway, we set off on our journey and drove all night to Montreal, Canada.August 30th-We arrived in Montreal early afternoon. I did press all day around the city. Montreal really is a beautiful place, so clean and safe…it’s almost too safe, makes me paranoid… “Who’s there!? What do you want?!” “Are you threatening me?!” Anyway, we played a little acoustic radio show club gig thingy for a bunch of adult winners. It was just Chops, Arms and I who played. Corey and Justin just watched from the crowd and tried to make us laugh the whole time…picking on poor Arms. Everyone picks on Arms all the time…I feel bad, NOT! Ha ha! No, just kidding, I love Arms. See, he’s got this stuffed animal…it’s a sheep, one of those “Serta Mattress” sheep, here’s a link to them if you have no clue what I’m talking about, copy and paste:
https://secure.serta.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=TH
Arms says his sheep’s name is “Flarb”…he goes everywhere Arms goes. I didn’t believe him, but then he opened up his luggage and there “Flarb” was, and then he started showing me all these digital pictures of “Flarb”; “Flarb” sitting in his suitcase looking scared to leave LA, “Flarb” on the bed in his hotel room watching CNN, “Flarb” eating dinner at a restaurant, “Flarb” waiting at the airport, even “Flarb” sitting on Arms’s amp while we played a show! I told Arms that he should share his “Flarb” pictures with all The Lofters, although sick and twisted, they are mildly entertaining for all audiences. Yah, so that happened… Anyway, Montreal was indeed a beautiful city, but I didn’t get to see much, as usual. That night, after the acoustic show was finished, we drove to Ottawa for a headlining show at some club the following night.
August 31st-I did press all day, like every other day, a few radio station visits, TV, etc. While getting ready for the show that night, I realized like no one was showing up to see us play. It’s weird, “Our Lives” is a hit in Canada, the video was number one on Much More Music, so was “Wherever You Will Go”, but no one wants to see us play live? Where’s the Canadian love people? And this is our first real trip through Canada. On the last record we only came to Toronto for one day. I give it up to the few fans that did come and support us, making the club look mildly full…kinda. I found out right after the gig that we had to cancel tomorrow’s gig in London, Ontario and drive all the way to Long Island to do an emergency video shoot for “Anything” instead. I felt bad canceling our show in London, but I had to, and I apologize to all the fans who were planning on coming, all 5 of you…you guys rockJ Please bring your friends, and all their friends, and all their friends’ friends, and all their friends’ friends’ friends next time we come:). So, we left Canada that night to drive to Long Island…a very, very, long drive.
September 1st-OK, so, we’re still driving, most of this day as well. It took us over 14 hours to get to Long Island, but we finally made it. We were tour bus crazy! Cabin fever! We jumped out of that thing and ran! Run Corey, RUN!!! So, Jennifer and I met with the director and the producer of the video once we got to our Long Island hotel to go over tomorrow’s shoot. Jen and I had written the idea for the video and we were going to star in it together! I always wanted to do a video with her, and now that we’re married, it seemed perfect. We usually have two days to shoot our videos, but because of our crazy schedule on tour right now, we only had one. We knew it was going to be a long day tomorrow!
September 2nd-We started very early in the morning with the video shoot, which was set in a cute residential neighborhood on Long Island. I don’t want to give the whole video away and tell you guys all the little details; I’ll save that for later once you see it. I can say that the shoot went really well, and as expected, we worked for 14 hours, long into the night. I had to do my own stunts too! Don’t worry, no flying;) Sacha gets to throw me onto the balcony of a house. We had to do it a bunch of times until I actually got up there. I sprained my foot doing it and my “booby” muscles have been sore for days since, from pulling myself up! This was the new band’s first experience doing a video and they loved it. Our bus driver plays a role in the video as well and drives up to a house in the beginning of the video, but he ended up driving the massive tour bus into a giant light pole, ripping it out of the ground and ripping his bumper off the bus too!…Bummer. The band got out of the bus when it happened and was like…”What the f*ck was that?!” The cops showed up and there was a lot of drama going on. We finally finished the shoot at midnight, and drove our tired asses all through the night to Pontiac, Michigan.
September 3rd-Today was the WKQI Radio show in Pontiac, set on top of a lovely parking structure. We didn’t do really anything all day except walk the empty streets of downtown Pontiac in search of food for our empty stomachs. We finally played our show on the roof of this huge parking structure, and it went A-OK. There was a pretty good crowd for the beginning of our set, a little spread out and eclectic. But by the last few songs, there were thousands of people, a lot of them singing along with me to that song they all knew…what is it again?….oh yah, “W-h-e-r-e-v-e-r Y-o-u W-i-l-l G-o”…Please sweet Jesus! Not again! Aaaaaaah! Anyway, we finished and ran off stage, just as the B52’s walked on stage right next to us, to begin their set! The B52’s! Come on! Rock Lobster! Love Shack! Awesome…I watched for a minute and had to rest my ears and mind back on the bus…I was all sweaty and tired from the show. Sacha didn’t want to walk me and a few of the band guys through the huge crowd to get back to the bus (since that was the only way there), so a security guard offered to help us go a secret way. Yah, well this “secret” way was a big f*cking nightmare! If we would have walked through the crowd, like the way we had come up earlier, it would have taken us two minutes to get back down the parking structure to where the bus was. But no, let’s just take this “secret route”…sounds great right? OK, so this security guard somehow managed, and I have no idea how, but somehow managed to get us lost for an entire frikkin hour! An entire hour of frikkin walking around aimlessly! Waaaah? We thought at first that he was just taking us around the back of the stage, down an elevator and then we’d cut through the parking structure and find the bus there…but instead, we started walking around the entire complex, which was massive. After about ten minutes, I was like, “Hey man, uh, why are we going completely around this huge city block?” He was like, “I’m not familiar with this area, sorry…I’m no good…hu hu…sorry…you want a peanut?” I said, “Are we lost?” “No, no, it’s just right around this next corner…” OK, by this point, it’s been twenty minutes and we’ve made a huge circle and find ourselves back where we started! I brought up the idea then to go back to the backstage where we truly started, and then just go through the crowd, whatever. Everyone agreed that this was a good idea, but there was a problem…we didn’t know how to get back to where we started! I said, “Follow the B52’s! Follow Love Shack! Follow Rock Lobster” So we followed the music and got even more lost, now on some huge open grassy lawn with a highway right next to us and an entrance to the parking lot of some big event to the left. Hey! That’s the entrance to the event we just played at! And there are tons of people coming in and out! By this point it was a little over half an hour that we had been walking, and the security guy was now following us, repeatedly saying, “sorry guys, sorry, I don’t know this here area, uh, yah, uh, peanut?” We passed through all the people, most of them people we just played for. I was starting to get looks like, “Hey, isn’t that the kid who was just on stage?” or after passing some group of girls, one of them points at me and puts her hand over her mouth…and well, that’s it. Anyway, so now we’re in the parking structure, the show is 5 floors above us, and the tour bus is parked in some secure location on the floor we’re on…How hard could it be to find it now? Well, let’s just say, a half an hour later, we arrived at a huge metal fence, tired and sweaty and pissed off! “Sorry guys, uh, I’s don’t know this place, sorry, but, but, buuuuut, I told you I’d get you there, see!” The bus is parked ten feet in front of my face, a thick brown rusted gate totally surrounding us, from the ground to the ceiling of the parking structure, barbed wire all over the place, no way through, absolutely no way through to the bus. “Uh, Peanut?” “NO! No f*cking peanut fool!” By this point, Justin, who had been sitting comfortably on the bus for the last hour, sees us out the bus window and through this huge gate and starts laughing! “Hey Jerkus! Ha Ha!” I was about to completely freak at any moment. To turn around and try to find our way out, lost in this parking structure for another few days, was not an option anymore. Just then, “Dan the man”, our tech extraordinaire, came to the rescue from the bus and slipped Sacha the “jaws of life”, scissors the size of a guitar with razor sharp blades. Sacha started cutting apart this gate, while we were all cheering him on with the small amount of energy we had left. “You go Sacha! Rip that f*cking gate apart! Bad gate! Bad gate! YAY!” And then, there was an opening, and we all ran through it and right into the air-conditioned bus of safety! We drove the rest of the night to Cleveland, OH.
September 4th-We pulled into Cleveland, OH at some time, on some day, in who, wah, where? I don’t remember these things! Come on! Anyway, our day began with an odd yet fun trip to a completely random person’s house in the woods. We were not there to shoot a pornographic movie or join a cult like all of you might be thinking...no, no, no…See, this sweet couple won a contest for us to play acoustically at their house for all their friends. It was a really nice family, and a great house, so it took away from the odd factor a bit, and everyone eventually became relaxed about it. They were really excited to have us there and had invited all their friends and made food for everyone. Chops, Arms, and I played a few tunes acoustically, sang for everyone, took a million pictures, and were then on our way. It reminded me of a time, long ago, when a family won us playing their backyard Barbeque and it turned into an “off road ATV crash course extravaganza” (look back a few years through the tour diaries). Our next stop was to play a show at a big fair called “The Taste of Cleveland Festival”, A whole lot of food, a whole lot of people, and a whole lot of Arms….? Anyway, the gig went really well and we had a great time. It was a really good audience, especially for having a 5 o’ clock time slot like we did. After running off stage, I jumped on a high powered golf cart and went speeding away, backwards, to Mix radio’s stand that they had put up somewhere in the fair. People would spot me flying by them through the festival backwards on this extremely fast golf cart…a few started chasing me, but couldn’t keep up. I was surprised to see a lot of fans waiting at the Mix booth to meet me. I did an on-air interview with the DJ, signed for everyone there and, well, talked to a sushi chef who made me sushi? It was good. Strange, but good. OK, well, away I went then, back to the Bat cave on my golf cart chariot! I really don’t know where the rest of this day went, but I assume I spent it here, on earth. We started our drive later that night to good old Toronto, Canada. Tomorrow is a day off, yay!
September 5th-It was nice to finally have a day off, in the lovely city of Toronto. We walked along lake Ontario, which was beautiful and packed with people…although there were these huge caution signs everywhere that said “Toxic, DO NOT enter the water, fatal bacteria present!”…yummy. Everyone on the beach there was looking to the skies, waiting for a big air show to happen, with military jets and stunts, the whole shebang. We sat around for a while and waited too, but no planes ever came. The air show got canceled due to too much smog, and moved to tomorrow, right when our outdoor radio show was suppose to be happening in the exact same spot! Yay! :( Anyway, the rest of the day we just hung out in the hotel and caught up on much needed sleep and work.
September 6th-It was a beautiful sunny day in Toronto…and I love getting woken up to the thunderous ass-shaking scream of F1 fighter jets flying so low overhead of our hotel, that my morning breakfast of eggs ends up falling on my head from the ceiling (don’t ask). We headed out to the Mix 99 Beachfest radio show, which was set up right on the “beach” or lake Ontario. We were scheduled to play a show later that afternoon. We were the headliners for this radio show with a bunch of other acts, most I hadn’t heard of. Fefe Dobson, who I have heard of, went on right before us and the crowd by that point was really big. After she was done, like more than half of the people there got up and left! They had stayed through all these other bands for hours, some of them unlistenable, then we go on and they all leave! What is it with the Canadians? No love for The Calling! Well, the fighter jets kept going by at like two thousand miles an hour blowing our brains out. So that was a nice addition to add to the oh so fun day. It sounded like we were at war…truly the loudest things I’ve ever heard, jets swooshing down over the water and then flying up into space and doing flips and drops and all kinds of tricks over our heads. Creepy. It shook the whole ground beneath our feet. Anyway, we finally played for almost nobody and surprise surprise, the show was crap, the audience was crap, we played like crap, my mic stopped working for half a song, so it was crap too, and Corey’s bass rig was broken, crap, it just sucked in every way. The one highlight of the day was meeting this guy who was from Brazil. He was a really huge fan of ours and a really awesome guy…I only wish he had caught us at a better show! So, after we did our 40 minute set of crap, each minute crappier than the next, I did some press and then went to bed. I wanted to get some rest for our crazy day of travel tomorrow…the dreaded 15-hour direct flight to South Korea.
September 7th-I ended up doing press all this day in Toronto, mostly at the BMG offices. Late at night, after a day of work, Sacha, Chops and I made our way to the airport for our journey to Korea. This Korea trip was only for press and some acoustic stuff, so everyone else returned to LA for two days off before they will meet back up with us in Japan. Man, this truly was an endless flight, the longest one I’ve ever been on. I mean, 15 hours? Stuck in the same seat? Not fun. Thank God for video games though. I played the original Zelda on gameboy the whole frikkin time, beat it right before we landed…eyes bleeding, thumbs raw. Yes.
September 8th-It’s confusing and strange, but we lost this entire day of our lives because we were on the plane going backwards in time15 hours to a place that is 16 hours ahead. Due to the weird time zone change and the long flight…we never really lived this day. I want my September 8th 2004 back!
