THE OFFICIAL EAST COAST INVASION TOUR LOG!
or… "Can Anything Else Get Screwed Up?"

A detailed look at The Army of Freshmen’s 7 day trip to the East Coast to play at The 2004 Flipside and Skate and Surf Festivals in Virginia and New Jersey brought to you by the band’s humble and hoagie loving front man, Chris Jay.

It all started when our bass player Kai decided to go to his all time favorite Thai Restaurant in Oxnard the night before leaving on our week trip to the east coast. All was well- he had a great meal but then came the fortune cookie… what the hell is up with fortune cookies anyway? They’re not fortunes anymore. They are sayings. That’s sucks. I want to know if I’m winning the lottery not that "Tree blows. Wind blows. You blow." or some bogus deal like that.

(Uh oh. This just started and here I am tweaking off the subject. If this is your first experience with an AOF tour log- you’ll soon find that me- CHRIS- has a very bad tendency of getting off the subject. My apologies. With that said back to Kai’s bogus fortune cookie that simply read…

YOU WILL TAKE A JOURNEY OF GREAT TRIALS.

Not quite the kind of fortune a man wants before getting on a plane and taking off to the other side of the country for two festivals but oh well. Who believes in the magic powers of a cookie anyway.

If we only knew.

So the next morning me and our new faithful driver Kyle (keep in mind I don’t know Kyle he came recommended by a friend but we needed someone to drop us off so I took the gamble) take off to pick everyone up. We make the rounds and as usual before picking everyone up for a big trip- we get more excited with each and every guy we pick up. For your info we also brought along our friend and cameraman Troy who was going to film footage from the trip to begin work on an Army of Freshmen dvd. So we pick everyone up and Dan says he’s got some bad news. Turns out that his grandmother who’s been very sick for a long time is very close to passing away. When I say close we’re talking any day. Pretty sad shit and a tough way to start out the trip but we all hope for the best and leave it at that.

So make the long drive to LA, pretty much scare the hell out of Kyle the driver with our usual perverted ramblings and we pull into the airport when…

Dan’s phone rings. We get quiet. Dan gets off the phone. His grandmother has passed away while we were on the ride to the airport. Sorry to be depressing but it’s true. So off the bat as we are pulling up to the airport Dan has to stay to of course be with his family and attend the funeral. We all totally understand but it’s just weird when something terrible happens in the midst of something really fun. We all felt really bad for Dan. Not only is our keyboard player not going with us but our best friend’s grand mom just died. Really terrible. In the midst of all this really sad shit we’re busy loading our bags into check out- finding out we have too many bags, running late and Dan and our friend Kevin (who was going to fly out the next day to hang with us) are trying to make arrangements to have Dan fly out to the east coast after the funeral.

How f’d up is all this so far. I hope I covered that with respect and all. To Dan’s credit he was absolutely remarkable in his composure.

So Dan is down. We get on the plane minus a man. We all agree this is weird. Way weird but Dan will be able to be with his family and also get back to the east coast to make the shows thanks to our friend Kevin who agreed to front price of the changed airline ticket.

So as for the plane ride… they showed some terrible Ben Affleck movie. I mean bad. It should been called "Ben Affleck in a suit running around looking confused." I watched parts of it. Meanwhile… to my left were Owen and Mike. I didn’t pay much attention to them till half way during the flight when those air breathing emergency masks came crashing down on them knocking their food everywhere and generally scaring the entire plane. Why you ask? Well they were attempting to turn the light on. Not that hard of a task right? Well it can be hard when you’re DRUNK!

That’s right. I want to keep this as clean as possible but turns out one of the stewards (I think that’s what they call a male airline host) took a liking to Owen. I’m not making this up. So throughout the flight he had been bringing them free drinks. I’m talking it was so out of control that he gave them a free bottle of wine when they left. What this mile high male Casanova failed to realize when he tried to booze his way into Owen’s pants was that he had now gotten 2 members of the Army of Freshmen toasted and not capable of helping load gear or drive home. They seemed happy though.

So 8 hours into the trip we’ve lost 3 guys. That leaves Me, Aaron and Kai functioning and Troy the cameraman. Speaking of that slacker I haven’t seen one camera yet.

We get to New York. It’s midnight. It’s cold. We’re tired. Mike and Owen are singing. Have you ever seen Mike sing? You get the point.

We lug all our gear (keep in mind we have a lot of stuff- keyboards, guitars, merch, suitcases) to a train that takes us to the rental car place as we had to rent a van to drive to all the shows. We pick up the van- it’s the wrong van. That’s right. It’s a 12 passenger not a 15. This may not seem like a big deal but if you could have seen all of us crammed into that thing with all our stuff. Well it was kind of pathetic. So tired, hungry and crunched into our too small van we take off for the 4 hour drive to my parent’s house in Cape May, New Jersey where we would be staying for a day.

We get lost and take the very long way out of New York City.

Mike is the only one who can sleep due to the booze and the Ludacris cd that is blasting out of his headphones. How any man can sleep blaring Ludacris is beyond me but much like the Lord… the Rinus works in mysterious ways.

4 LONG hours later at the crack of dawn we arrive at my parent’s house where they’ve prepared hoagies for us (gotta love the east coast) and we stuff ourselves and find floor space to crash. It’s 5 in the morning and I’ve been up for 24 hours.

(Side note… As I go to sleep I grab a blanket. Now I love my Mom a lot but she has this weird ass thing about linen. She doesn’t believe you have to buy new linen- EVER. This blanket is the same Winnie the Pooh blanket that I have baby photos of me in and it’s not just this special blanket… it’s every stinking pillow, afghan, cloth, towel, you name it in my house. They’ve all been around since the Civil War. I spent my entire childhood embarrassed to have sleepovers cause of this sick linen epidemic that seemed to only strike my mom. I still have nightmares of a whole school bus singing… "Chris, Chris doesn’t he wish his mama had blankets that didn’t smell like piss!" Life is hard.)

We wake up in the afternoon and pretty much spend the day laying around. We watch Kill Bill on dvd. We hang out at my dad’s music store which is actually my house (long story). A couple kids even come by to get autographs and meet the band. Not kidding. Not too shabby. Fans coming to your house.

That night we go to the local bar where a friend from high school’s band is playing- I used to be in a band with him in high school actually- YCLEPT- the greatest high school alternative rock metal Nirvana cover band you’d ever want to hear- ask for us by name. Sometimes the demo pops up on EBAY.

We proceed to have a great night- I mean we are partying. Got to see a lot of friends and have a ton of those half drunk I miss you dude conversations that happen so often in small towns between old friends. Conversation goes something like this…

GUY 1- I Miss you dude.
GUY 2- No dude- I miss you.
GUY 1- No dude. No. I miss you.
GUY 2- You don’t understand dude- Me. You know me. Me miss you.
GUY 1- Stop it man. I miss you.
GUY 2- Dude. Don’t do this. Dude.
GUY 1- No. dude. No.
GUY 2- Me miss you dude.
GUY 1- Want another drink dude.
GUY 2- I miss this dude. Dude.
GUY 1- Hey dude! You know this dude? Yeah. Well I miss this dude.

Or something like that. : > )

Anyways- you don’t want to hear about that. What you want to hear about is the birth of the Legend of Kai "Sweet Pepper" Dodson. Unfortunately I can’t tell that whole tale here. According to Kai his grandmother reads this and she wouldn’t do well with the vision of Kai running around my parent’s house at 3 in the morning in his boxer shorts screaming "Sweet Pepper" with a Choco Taco smeared all over his face occasionally stopping to apologize if his balls fell out but… wait a minute… I think I said too much already. Sorry Granny. Anyways- next time you see Kai say "What’s Up Sweet Pepper?" You will see a look of shame on his face usually reserved for rapists, lawyers and people who lost their virginity to the Clay Aiken record or to Clay Aiken himself!

Ok so the next day we were set on taking the ferry which is a boat that takes you from New Jersey to Delaware so we could make our way down to Virginia where we were playing the first show the following day and also picking Dan and our friend Kevin up. Well every time we stay at my parent’s house we say- Let’s take the Ferry and every time we wake up late and can’t take it. Guess what happened this time- you guessed it. We woke up late. No ferry. We all mumble and grumble about who fault it is- as for "Sweet Pepper" he says nothing. He just stares out the window of the van and grunts whenever we hit a bump.

So we make it to Virginia and pick up our friend Kevin. We check into the first hotel room of the trip, grab some dinner and then hop in the van to meet up with our friends’ band, Urban Style to hit the town in DC- little did we know we were almost about to be killed by… OWEN!

A short aside on death- it sucks.

Ok so there we are crammed into this van speeding down a DC highway and Owen is looking in the rearview cause he wants to change lanes. Suddenly the lane we are in comes to a dead stop. Everyone sees this of course except for… you guessed it- Owen! We are about to do 60 miles directly into stopped traffic. We’re not sure who was the first to scream the fateful words O-W-E-N!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! but someone did (thank God) and as we braced for impact Owen made a split second decision to shoot into the other lane. The van fish tales from the sudden change of direction and as we head into the other lane we again brace for impact- so keep in mind within one second this is now the second time we brace for sudden death. Weird how time freezes in those moments- I turned and looked at Aaron. He was crying. I touched his leg. He mouthed, "You complete me." I leaned in….

THE OFFICIAL EAST COAST INVASION TOUR LOG!
or… "Can Anything Else Get Screwed Up?"
Page Two

Gotcha again- you sick bastard! For God sake those feelings are OK but you really should talk to someone about it. : > )

Back to almost dying. We careen into the next lane and luckily no car slams into us. Then Owen decides to head back into the original lane thus scaring the shit out of the car we almost hit cause at this point he’s got to think we’re after him. We finally stop. We are alive. Everyone is silent. I mean in 6 years and driving all around the country this was by far the closest we came to ever dying. If we would hit the car as fast as we were going we all would have died. So how do we respond to this near death experience? Do we read Owen the riot act? Do we assault him while he’s still at the wheel? Do we call him every name in the book? No. Someone and once again we don’t remember who simply says…

"Good job dude."

That’s all we can muster in the face of death. We compliment him. Owen who is totally pale and looks like he crapped his pants answers back a simple and cracked, "Thanks Man."

So we hang out with Urban Style and have a blast- weird factoid- we first met Urban Style on our first ever tour in 2000! So it’s awesome we’re both still together and playing together. They’re really good people and we totally recommend you check them out at www.urbanstyleband.com

Now if you think things have been bumpy so far. You haven’t heard anything yet. Dan is scheduled to come in the next morning he’s been on an all night flight from LA that he got on right after the funeral. He’s coming in tired and having gone through a lot so we decide to do something awesome for him. We decide to get him a limo. Straight up. Dan will be picked up in limo and a dude will be there with a card that says Army of Freshmen. We all think it’s a hell of way to pick Dan up. Start his part of the trip off right. Right? Wrong.

We all head back to the hotel really late and CRASH. We are dead zombies. That’s why no one and I mean no one noticed that our phones were ringing off the hook all morning. Guess who that could be on the other end of the two rooms worth of cell phones vibrating and ringing all morning?

I awake to this… the door swinging and Mike announcing we got a big problem. Turns out our little surprise was a rip off and the limo company never showed up. Dan is stuck at the airport. Ok. Ok. His flight was coming in at 5 am what time is it? 11:30 am. Yeah let that sink in. Dan who was on a flight all night right after a funeral has been stuck at an airport for 6 hours and calling EVERYONE in the band trying to find out where we were and we were all asleep. Everyone of us. So Mike and Kai head off to get a VERY angry Dan who has left several angry messages wondering where the hell we were. Keep in mind he knew nothing about the limo- we were supposed to be there.

I’ll be honest- a pissed off Dan is a sight to behold and not in a good way. We’re all pretty nervous by the time he shows up- did I mention the hotel is kicking us out cause we slept past check out? Yeah it was that kind of morning. So as we are getting thrown out of our room, Dan arrives. He does the silent treatment. The worst.

He eventually gets his fuck yous in and after that quite honestly he was in great spirits. By far the trooper of the tour.

So wow- after all this we finally get to the first show! It’s the Flipside Festival in Franconia, Virginia and it’s a smaller festival at a Rec. Center that has only 3 stages but they scored Sugarcult, Fallout Boy, Wakefield, Maxeen as headliners and a lot of local bands. Really cool set up. Two big stages on either side of the gym. We set up our booth and spend the first half of the day meeting kids hanging out and even cooler- some full on AOF fans are in the house which was a great feeling to be on the other side of the country and have people make the drive to see us! Too cool.

As for the show- it went great! We had some serious technical difficulties including a sound guy who played our intro disc three times so quiet that you couldn’t hear it- so that sucked but we got through it and after a couple songs- we really caught our groove and kicked some ass. The crowd for 6 pm was RAD! They were totally going off- we did a big Braveheart Pit, had a massive sing along and pogo for GET UM UP and I saw a lot of people singing along. It was the shit. Really energetic. So I made a decision at the end of the set these people need more than just the typical high stage dive. So at the end of the set I climbed to the top of the PA speakers and when the crowd hit the countdown I did a flip into the crowd. Not only did they catch me- I didn’t even break my back! Well played.

We spent the rest of the day hanging out and making A LOT of new friends. Really, really cool scene. Everyone was totally stoked to be there and friendly. We sold a lot of merch and honestly had a great time. Big, big thanks to Urban Style for getting us on the show and to the Festival’s promoter Keith who was a killer guy. Got to meet Fallout Boy who were really nice. Hung out with our old friends Sugarcult who were in a tour bus. Considering we used to play with them for 50 bucks at empty bars in Ventura- that was kind of weird. But it was nice to see Tim feeling better. They had just come from Playing Conan O Brien- a life long dream for us. Lucky bastards.

Now we left the fest early cause we had a hotel booked in Jersey and we needed to get to Skate and Surf Festival early. Keep in mind the crammed van is past capacity at this point cause Dan and Kevin and their gear is now with us. I mean this van is stuffed to the brim with bodies and stuff. You are side to side against two men- not quite the most comfortable place to be. Suffice to say you can’t sleep at all in these conditions plus we just came sweaty and nasty from being at a festival all day. It’s starting to stink and we are EXTREMELY tired but we start the 4 hour drive up north with dreams of the hotel room we have booked where we figure we can get at least 6 hours of sleep when we get there.

Let’s fast forward to getting there. We get there! Yeah! Sleep- finally. Strangely enough we arrive at 3 in the morning and a few kids come up to the van and it turns out they are from LCMR the school where I went to and mom and dad teach at! They invite us to hang in their room while Kevin checks us into ours. We gladly accept the offer and first see the madness that is Skate and Surf. We’re at just one of the shit load of hotels booked up and down the state for this festival- I mean this thing is huge. Three sold out days of 6,000 people plus and more good bands than you’d know what to do with. Point being is each one of these rooms is filled with kids partying who‘ve been at the festival. It’s awesome. Well just as we get to this room- the unthinkable happens. We are informed that our rooms were given away. Gone. We don’t have a place to stay. Nothing. We are screwed. We try and figure out what the hell happened? We had the agreement in writing. The guy running the place just keeps telling us to leave. Turns out that this shady fuck (excuse the language) sold our rooms out for cash at the last minute and then tried to act like we were late. Bastard. So we are in big trouble. We’ve got 8 guys crammed into a van who are delirious with no sleep. We decide let’s hop back into the van and go to every single hotel we can find- someone’s got to have a room right? Wrong. Nothing. We drive around for another 2 hours- we are past the point of delirious and uncomfortable. After getting turned down by a ton of hotels and almost driving into New York City we decide we’ll just turn around and go back to the hotel that originally screwed us and find the kids we met up with there and try to fit as many people as we can in their room.

That’s what we did. We woke them up and they were totally cool about letting us crash there- keep in mind no blankets or pillows just the hard floor (for the first time in my life I longed for my mom’s linen closet). So how much sleep did we get after playing a festival and driving all night and having to wake up to play another festival? Two hours. Two lousy stinking hours. It sucked BAD.

Who cares though right? We’re getting ready to play Skate and Surf! The biggest festival on the whole east coast and it’s at the Asbury Park Convention Center where I used to go to shows when I was kid. Sleep is secondary.

So we get to the festival and it’s a site to behold. Vans and buses everywhere and already at 10 am a huge line is forming that goes all the way down the boardwalk. We set up our merch upstairs and check out our stage which is outdoors and to be honest pretty cruddy. We were on one of the smallest stages by far but we had a secret weapon… 1,000 cd samplers that we used to walk the line and help bring people to our stage not to mention raffle tickets for a guitar autographed by us that the clothing company Level 27 is giving away. Our first auto’d guitar- a big moment for a band.

Couple problems though. We were playing at 1:30 and the line is so long that barely anyone is allowed to get inside and even though we are outside sure as hell no one is leaving the line that they’ve been in for 2 hours to see us. So we attempt to take on the massive line and give away flyers, cds and raffle tickets in hopes of getting people to our stage. It worked pretty good. I decided to go inside and hit the people who were already in and get them to go back out which worked even better.

So with only seconds left I rush out to our stage and find out a cord for my microphone is missing not to mention that but the stuff I was going to throw out to the crowd- you guessed it is gone. This throws me off pretty bad, I running around like a maniac looking for this stuff but I rebound to the best of my ability and we take the stage to a fairly solid crowd. Best part was though as the set went on the crowd got bigger and bigger not to mention the tons of people off in the distance watching from the line. What was cool though was we saw a lot of friendly faces from all over. People from Illinois, Jersey, Michigan, California, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York all came out to see us and that made it really worthwhile. Best part of being on tour is seeing old friends. We had short set and were exhausted from the night before but we gave it our best and for the second straight day I attempted the front flip and it worked, no broken back.

After the show as we signed autographs and caught up with a lot of friends – I thought to myself… as much fun as it was the pressure is off- I can finally chill out. Some of the guys from Something Corporate and Fallout Boy watched the set which was cool.

So as for Skate and Surf we all split up and divided time at the merch booth and seeing bands.

Who did I see? Nobody. Not kidding. I mean I caught a song or two but I have more fun hanging out at the booth and talking to people. I did meet old school MTV VJ Matt Pinfield though and that was cool. He was always the shit. Totally nice guy. Absolutely down to earth. Usually when you meet people like that they let you down but he was rad. As for everybody else- Mike was blown away by Matchbook Romance.

A weird thing did happen though- they evacuated the entire building for a fire scare. I was pretty sure I saw smoke and I’ll be honest it was pretty freaky. Seeing that many people rushed out of a building is weird scene. After a few minutes they let everyone back in but after all the mishaps I figured me burning to death at Skate and Surf wasn’t that far from a possibility. So I hung outside a little longer.

I’m gonna rush to the end of the day… we were destroyed and decided to leave and head towards New York- we obviously didn’t have the hotel room in New Jersey anymore. So we stuffed into the van once again. I passed out sitting upright and leaning on Troy the camera guy. I was torn up. Our boy Kevin put up for a bitchin hotel in New York- THE NEW YORKER- right next to Madison Square Garden and if you don’t know anything about New York hotels- they are small as hell- so we squeezed into 2 rooms and crashed.

The next morning we woke up and had all day to explore New York. Let me tell you there isn’t a bigger or crazier city. The early birds- Kevin, Mike and Dan took off on their own adventure and the late sleepers myself, Aaron, Kai, Owen and Troy- remember Troy the cameraman? Took off on our own. We went to top of the Empire State Building (Kai wouldn’t go out side- wuss) and walked around Times Square where we passed MTV while TRL was taping- guess who was on? Hanson. No shit- they’re still alive and popular by the looks of the line outside holding up Hanson posters.

Now I’ll be honest- we got that shat end of the stick. The other party saw a ton of great stuff mainly since they took cabs. They saw Ground Zero, Central Park, Empire State Building, Times Square, Stock Exchange- the whole nine yards. We saw… TRL. Yuck.

That night we met up with some friends and ate this adult cool haunted restaurant that was way too expensive- everything in NY is too expensive and hit some bars in Greenwich Village and then walked half way across the city to our hotel. We also got to take the subway which was cool. It was a great, great day. Problem with New York though is you could spend weeks there exploring it. It’s truly a special place. Got to eat some great pizza and hot dogs too. Love the food on the east coast. Mmm.

Next morning we woke up late as always and we rushed to get out of the hotel with no showers- we made Troy the camera guy drive in the insane ass traffic and he did a good job of making it to the car rental place. Now for this car rental place- it should be burned to the ground. Despite the fact we were running late we had to endure these morons trying to bill us correctly and after a half hour and the manager getting involved they insisted it was all good. It wasn’t. When we got home it turned out they put it on the wrong card and I got stuck with a 21 dollar overdraft fee. Total nightmare. Customer service- down the pisser.

We barely made the plane and worst of all one of the most boring movies in the past 20 years- MONA LISA SMILE was playing- it couldn’t be a worse flick for a plane ride. Who picks these movies already? I think they purposely pick flicks that suck to keep your mind numb- no getting all rowdy on a flight. I finally got some decent shut eye and figured with all the little stuff that went wrong I might as well be asleep when this bird falls out of the sky.

All in all- it was a great, great week- just a whole lot of surprises. Should have listened to that damn fortune cookie.

THE END

Soundtrack- the new Alkaline Trio/One Man Army Split
Favorite Show- Flipside Festival
Best Bands We Saw- Fallout Boy, Matchbook Romance, The Format
Best Moment- The Birth of Kai "Sweet Pepper" Dodson
Worst Time- Waiting for the Wrath of Dan Clark
Best Food- Papaya’s 75 cent hot dogs in New York City.
Worst- Daemon’s Grill in Alexandria, VA.

So that’s that… up next… JAPAN! Now if I can just get around to finishing that first Japanese Tour Log!