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Entry Three
July 19- July 27, 2006
Including Portland, Route 5, the Bay Area,
Hot Hot Heat, and Las Vegas!

July 19, 2006
4:35 pm
Joe - Yikes! Unexpected traffic requires our van to stop short and while I’m working on the tour diary, my keytar flies forward and hits Paul’s computer on the screen. I guess this shows that the power of wizard rock is too much for muggle contraptions. Now this computer, as durable as it may be, bears a scar. A scar, that marks this computer as the one to defeat the creator of said scar. Children all around the world will know the name of this computer. And they will know that the keytar, the great villain that it plays, must be destroyed. After all, neither can live while the other survives.

4:36pm
Paul – Does anyone know where I can get this stupid computer fixed for cheap? I don’t really want to spend like $1000 on a new screen. Someone out there has connections, right? Email us!

5:10pm
Joe – Tonight we are playing at Acme in Portland. Tomorrow we are playing at the In Other Words Bookstore. We see Mount Hood in the distance. The mountain sees us too. It knows where we are going and what we are about to do. We are so close to this mountain, but not close enough for it to be massaged and shaken by our magical rock. We would invite it to the show, but doing so would put the earth’s tectonic plates at great risk, especially in this treacherous Ring of Fire. Sad, that it cannot attend our two day stand in Portland, Mount Hood sheds a tiny avalanche in the distance. I shed a tiny tear as a great mixed feeling of pity, awe, and resøpect for the mountain as it graces the horizon.

7:30pm
Paul – Una, from the band Blubird just opened up the show. She’s 12 years old. She played a cover of the Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” that nearly killed me. Amazing.

8:45pm
Paul – Just a little bit before the show started, I found out all the under 21’s need to clear the premise before 9pm. Unfortunately, we’re dealing with a totally inept soundguy who’s set the schedule back about 30 minutes. So we’re about half-way into our set when we get the “2 more songs” cutoff. I’m totally pissed because a whole bunch of people have paid like $7 to come see us play and they’re getting half a show. I invite everyone to come to our show tomorrow for free. I think it worked. They look happy.

12:30am
Paul – We’re on our way back to Ali B’s house to meet Cathy and Sancia, but wait! There’s the Burnside bridge! And guess what’s open? Voodoo Doughnuts! We tear a left onto the bridge and in minutes, we’re back in the lovely confines of punk rock donut heaven. Joe and Brad find the largest and most delicious donut in the world and consume it in its entirety. They will be ready to rock tomorrow.

July 20, 2006
1:05pm
Joe – After a quick bite of leftover doughnuts from last night, we are ready to get some breakfast with our friend, Ali B. We walk down Alberta and stop to eat at the Tin Shed. With our bellies full of breakfast we walk back to Ali’s house and grab some more doughnuts at an awesome little doughnut shop. We tell the lady at the counter that we have traveled three thousand miles to eat these doughnuts. She is very impressed, but not impressed enough to give us a baker’s dozen. The doughnuts are pretty good though. I like Portland. There are doughnuts everywhere in this city. People practically breathe doughnuts here.

3:00pm
Joe – I’m working on the Internet. I press the invite button a lot to get these myspacers to the show. Our shows are a place for friends. Cathy and Paul are renting a car, so that they can drive around our Dutch friend, Sancia, who is visiting while we demolish the United States with the power of a time traveling wizard band. Tonight we will play her Platform 9 and 3/4 in Dutch.

9:25pm
Paul – This show was an absolute tie-wringer. We had about 200 kids crammed into the In Other Words bookstore. No AC. Just a couple fans. At one point, I nearly passed out. Partially from the heat. Partially from only eating one meal all day. When the show is over, we were able to find some small dry spots on my pants. They were on the legs. From the socks down.

9:30pm
Joe - What did I just slip in? Oh. … That’s a puddle of sweat, … probably from a tie. Gross, Paul.

10:45pm
Paul – We are encountering the problem where all these Portland establishments that serve food won’t allow minors in after 9pm. How is a rock band supposed to eat after an evening show in a bookstore? Various restaurants are proposed. Many are called. All are 21+. Finally we decide to go to a place called Dots and we give Joe my driver’s license. He slides in no problem. We are totally successful in sticking it to the man this evening!

11:20pm
Joe – Bradley and I are so ravenous that we order three meals between us and we devour every last bite between us. We are dinosaurs! Thunder lizards. No! We are thunder wizards!

11:30pm
Joe – I’m asleep at the dinner table. Someone is talking to me. They are one million miles away. I am underwater. The muffled voices of our rock and roll party travel light years from my ears to my dormant brain. Over space and time they dissapate into nothing but fodder for my dreams. I dream that gravity is gone and I am weightless in a sea of doughnuts. I love the dreams I have in Portland, the City of Doughnuts.

July 21, 2006
11:30am
Joe – We really should be on the road, but Myspace is totally slow. I might never finish inviting California to all these shows. Paul and I double-team Tom’s nightmare creation and begin inviting thousands of people, one by one, simultaneously. Why is there no INVITE ALL button? Come on ,Tom! Someone needs to write a Myspace hack so that we can invite massive amounts of people to our shows without clicking on their faces individually. That would be magical.

4:30pm
Paul – We’re in a parking lot somewhere in southwestern Oregon. We need lunch, but no one wants to eat at Applebees. We hit s supermarket and get some hummus and bread. I eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Brad and I split a half gallon of Odwalla B Monster. We’re ready to drive for hours and hours. We joke about the “Tour Food Pyramid,” which would consist mainly of pizza, Cliff bars, and EmergenC.

6:47pm
Joe - We’re in some wooded mountainous portion of northern California. We stopped top get gas. It may be the most expensive fill up we have had yet. $3.67 per gallon here. I guess they can jack up the prices in the middle of nowhere and rape travelers of their money and property during long treks. This is totally Oregon Trail style. Whenever I played that game the further and further west I got, all the trading posts would be jacking up the prices and ripping off all the pioneers in my party. How were we going to get enough rubbing alcohol for our oxen related wounds? And how were we ever going to afford the medicine to combat typhoid fever? It’s 1849 all over again.

July 22, 2006
11:00am
Joe – We are eating breakfast at St. Francis’s Soda Fountain in San Francisco. Sancia is wearing one of our t shirts. One of the employees here asks us if we are going to the Harry and the Potters show later today. We tell her that we will be there early. We want to get a good spot. She seems a little confused about the time of the show though. The San Francisco Bay Guardian had published show time as six o’clock pm. Showtime is at two o’clock! This is a totally bummer. We will just have to rock extra hard and extra loud so the whole city can hear, in case they don’t make it on time.

12:00pm
Joe – The sun beats down on San Francisco. This divine heat is sent from the Heavens as a prelude to the tremendous energy emitted from wizards who wield their sword of rock and mace of literacy. In the Golden Gated City, a hero emerges from the library. She has witnessed the destruction Harry and the Potters have brought to her library twice before. This time she is prepared. Today, the rock will not occur IN the Library, but OUTSIDE the library, IN FRONT OF CITY HALL. The power of rock is too strong! Ready to save the library from crumbling, and to repel the destruction of knowledge and public restrooms, Betsy Levine, walks into the streets and marks off a parking spot for our van. We meet the mayor and he seems quite frightened that the magic of rock is going to be so close to his headquarters. He considers raising taxes to defend his Hall from our wreckless destruction. We tell him that won’t be necessary. When today is over, there will be no need for a city hall. When our work today is done, a tremendous energy will be created by the citizens of San Francisco. This energy, the combined power of love and rock, will travel faster than light to the deepest parts of the universe, destroying all entropy in its wake. Every heavenly body will align. Every atom of the universe will perfect itself, creating perfect atomic structures,that make perfect moelecular structures, that build perfect biological beings which, in turn, create perfect harmonious societies. Order will be brought to our world and every other world. Every member of the universe will be governed solely by the laws of rock and love.

The mayor smiles a smile that seems to say, “Well, if that is the case, I am resigning right now. You have free reign over my city until these new laws are in place.” It is a beautiful smile.

6:00pm
Joe – So umm. City Hall is still here. The mayor is still in power. I must admit, our calculations were slightly erroneous. The universe is endless. We cannot just send our message into the space and time and expect it to return to us with grandeur greater than we forged. The power of love needs to bounce back to earth for us to be ruled by its grace. It needs to be reflected off something and focused back to earth…AMPLIFIED! We silently resolve ourselves to keep rocking, everyday in different directions, broadcasting the power of rock and love into the deep pockets of the universe hoping that it may be broadcasted back to us. Who will broadcast it back? We know not. It could be some god, or a giant weightless amplifier constructed from the hearts of heroes. It could be our futures selves. Or … it could be you. Yes! IT IS YOU! You must take the power of love. You must take the power of rock. You must make these louder and more plentiful. Make the air heavy with it! Make the earth so dense with this power that it rains love upon us every day, and rock every night. This is the future and it is yours to create!

SFPL photos by Joviana Carrillo

8:00pm
Joe- We are hanging out with Dawn Riddle! She is going to give me a CD of her brother’s old Fantasy Metal Band, Night Fist! She had put a Night Fist song on a mix tape she sent us before our first tour. We listeneed to that tape a lot, and mostly we listened to her band on it, The Sour Grapes. But when we got home from tour, I left the tape in my tape deck and drove around listening to the Night Fist song, rewinding it and playing it over and over again. Paul would get mad at me for playing the same song over and over, so I really only listened to it alone in the car. But I treasure those sweet victorious moments where I rode on the backs of horses, wielding mace and chain, and fighting the world with my brothers of metal in the stereo.

July 23, 2006
11:45am
Paul – On the way in to Sacramento the temperature on the rental car reads 105ºF. We are pretty impressed by this. I guess it’s nothing new to Sacramento though.

12:10pm
Joe – All right! Here we are at the Rancho Cordova Library. It’s 110ºF. No one is at the library to let us in, so we can be ready for our 2:00 show. Paul lies down in the shade and falls asleep. I tell the Malfoys to give him some water while Cathy, Sancia, and I try to find some food. We purchase several sandwiches at the supermarket down the road.

12:45pm
Joe – We just returned to the library. Still no one has come by to let us in the library. After we finish our lunch, which I only have the stomach to half finish since the heat is so hindering to digestion, I walk over to the side of the library to see if there are any other doors that may be open or to find someone waiting for us. I meet these nice girls who have come to see us play and they give me news that a woman has entered the library a few minutes before and would not let them in. How curious. Why has she not sought us out? We’ve been right by the front entrance the whole time. It is time to take action. I begin banging on doors and windows for about five minutes until this woman emerges. “WHAT DO YOU WANT?!” She yells.
“I WANT TO COME IN!”
“ARE YOU IN THE BAND?”
Does it matter if I am in the band or not? I think to myself. People are dying out here in this heat. Well they’re not dying here, but somewhere maybe. Let us inside! “YES! I’M IN THE BAND.”
She opens the door and says, “I thought you were one of your fans.” Ughh.
Apparently, the air conditioning is not working in the room we are playing in. It still feels cooler than outside though. We should let everyone in as soon as possible.
We start to load in our equipment and loose about twenty pounds in sweat.

5:50pm
Joe – After the show, on the way back to the Bay area, we stop for gas. Yesterday we had gotten some nice bananas. Today we left them on the dashboard of our car while we played the show. Now they are black. Very black. Completely black. No color is reflecting off of their surface at all. I open one up and it smells like demon spittle. I place these devilish bananas in a trash receptacle. The trash can shivers with disgust.

July 24, 2006
11:35am
Paul – I just cut my nose while shaving. On the first stroke of the morning, no less. I must be a little tired.

1:05pm
Joe – We are eating a Chloe’s on Church and 26th St. for breakfast. I am eating Croissant French Toast. It is blowing my mind.

3:00pm
Joe – On our way to Milpitas, we stop at the beach! We have to find it first. I didn’t find a beach really. It was more like a bunch of cliffs that drop down onto the beach. Still pretty cool! There are some people on these powerless flight mechanisms that are sailing off the cliffs, all Icarus style. Paul asks if he can try. The owner of the wings tells him not to fly too close to the sun, otherwise the wings will melt. We can get an awesome picture of him sailing over us. Yay.

7:20pm
Paul – Roonil Wazlib is opening the show tonight at the Milpitas library. She’s great. She’s 16 and she’s already recorded and released her own CD with cool songs about awesome silver hands and stuff. And she’s pimping an organization that a friend of hers has started called Art with a Heart which is aimed at getting high school artists to help raise money for social causes like the genocide in Darfur. Brilliant. Wizard Rock Rules.

Photo by Amy Bassett

12:00am
Joe - So hungry after the show, we find ourselves eating burritos in the Mission. We carefully avoid the beef brain burrito that is on the menu.

July 25, 2006
12:00pm
Joe – We are eating and the Squat and Gobble. Dawn Riddle recommended this place to us. She will be meeting us here in a few moments. The crepes here are outstanding. These are the best crepes I have ever had. San Francisco has amazing food. I want to spend days here eating. Oh look, Dawn is here. She shows up and eats all of our leftovers. There is even some ice cream soup for her. We decide to make our annual trip to the pirate store. On the way over, we show Brad Neely’s new music video to Dawn. The creator of Wizard People Dear Reader has stunned us once more. This time, it is a series of drawings, done by Neely, set to an amazing song, also by Neely. It is centered on the American hero, George Washington. In this song he is six-foot-twenty, weighs a ton, and saves the children…. but not the British children. He’s coming.

1:00pm
Joe – We are at the 826 Valenica, the pirate store. I was just mopped. I walk in, and seven mops fall on me, descending form the pirate ceiling. I help the pirate attendant put them back into the hanging mop box. We get to toss them like basketballs…. except they are mops, without the stick part… just the mop part. It’s kind of like throwing around giant white dreadlocks. We being talking with the pirate lady and she tells us that she was at our show in Portland a few days ago. Cool! We ask her if we can barter some of our CDs for pirate materials. Yes! Of course! What a deal! Lard prices are way down too! We could get ten pounds of it for a seven-inch record!

3:00pm
Joe – We just arrived at the Amador Theater in Pleasanton. It is a totally beautiful theater. There is a bunch of space up front with a makeshift orchestra pit. That would be a perfect spot for people to come dance. I ask some of the theater employees if we can make some space up front for people to stand. “Nope.” They need to keep it set up for the play. We cannot even just move some of it, and leave most of it set up. We need two weeks in advance to clear that sort of thing. I am discouraged. People should be dancing. Then I am informed that the owner of this theater does not allow any standing at all in the theater. Everyone must remain seated. There is no dancing. Oh. And there is also a decibel limit. We will be fined hundreds of dollars if we exceed it. We cannot turn up any louder. What is this?! Who is this woman that owns this theater? Does she hate fun? I do not even have to ask. Of course she does.

4:15pm
Joe – It turns out that the theater owner is a dinosaur woman. She is no gentle stegosaur either. She is a velociraptor. Her mouth is salivating as she watches the children waiting outside try to fan themselves in the intense heat. She will not let them into the theater lobby to wait in the air conditioning yet. Soon maybe. We hear her mutter to one of her employed henchmen to let everyone in a half hour, “Let the people in…but send the children to the oven. Children belong in the oven.”

Whoa. What have we gotten ourselves into? Half of our audience is about to be roasted by this woman! We will save the children! The power of love will prevail! Tonight we rock for the millions of children all over the world that have become the meals of angry gingerbread house residents (and theater owners).

July 26, 2006
2:00pm
Joe – We dismount our thirsty van the oasis that Las Vegas provides travelers, who have been driven mad by the heat of the Great American Desert. Judging by the character of this city, I can’t say for certain that anyone who leaves after a visit is cured of their insanity. It may even worsen it. We are meeting Georg at the library. He has flown from New York to become part of our fellowship of rock. He just got a Las Vegas Library Card. That is too bad. All the libraries here are going to be rubble soon, once we blow some speakers.

5:00pm
Paul – The libraries in Vegas appear to be rather well-funded. We’re playing in a 7 or 8 million dollar theater. There’s an awesome spread of junk food in the changing rooms. There are sound guys and light guys. The sounds system can crank. Unfortunately we encounter the old “library decibel limit” thing that seems to have afflicted so many awesome library auditoriums. Whatever. We shall overcome.

6:30pm
Joe – Wow. Vegas is pretty evil. They really are enjoying the Malfoys’ set. Way more that usual. The library cheers are deafening when Voldemort is mentioned. It is intimidating.

1:30am
Paul – After the show we came over to the Lumos hotel to hang out with all the HP internet geeks in the LeakyFace/MuggleMan suite. They had pizza. We ate some. We hung out for a while and then people started heading down to the hot tub. Joe and Georg made a bubble bath in the Leaky tub. We covered them in bubbles and then they walked down to the hot tub outside and jumped in covered in bubbles.

2:30am
Paul – Someone went back up to the room at some point and got the rest of the bubble bath. The entire contents of the bottle has now been emptied into this hot tub. Totally rock and roll. This is something Motely Crue would do. They’d probably have more champagne though. Tomorrow we’ll get the champagne.

2:35am
Joe- My hands are incredibly wrinkled. They look like the neck of a great grandmother. I have to get out of the pool. Brad, Sancia, and Georg are falling asleep. I’m going to drive them back to our hotel. We have to rest up. Tomorrow we will rock the hungry wizards and witches of Lumos. They must be satiated.

July 27, 2006
9:30am
Paul – Everyone else got bored with the bubble hot tub and went back to the other hotel around 3am, but Brian and I stayed and eventually it started getting light out so we crashed in the LeackyFace/MugleMan suite, I just woke up. Why am I wet? Oh look, I’m still wearing a towel over my bathing suit! This hotel-provided robe is pretty comfy though. I have a look around the suite and there’s like 10 people sleeping. And there are only 2 beds. I feel lucky that I got a couch. The queen beds are both triple-teamed. It’s like pre-birth control living conditions. There’s still pizza.

10:30am
Paul – Tonight, we are playing opening night of Lumos 2006. Yes, it is a Harry Potter conference. For adults. It’s overwhelming and awesome. I just got in an elevator with a quidditch team. These are the hardest of the hardcore. It is impressive. I’m psyched for tonight.

3:00pm
Paul – All day, people have been giving us expectant looks. They know that we would gladly spill our blood on stage for them. They know that we would take a guitar to the face, or an electric shock, or whatever. Yes, we are warriors, and tonight we will battle both heaven and hell for supremacy of earth. And maybe these people are also aware that tonight, they will be asked to open their hearts and to open their throats. And from this infinite abyss of love and voice, we will ask them to sing. And they WILL SING! And that song will be sung in voices so clear and crisp that demons will weep and angels will curse. Our time is now, and our song will let THEM know that we are alive and we are here.

Vegas Library photo by Sunny