Blogs

A wiser Mount Righteous. (Adam Neese)

Mount Righteous actually got home last Wednesday from its tour. But through email complications, this final post has been unfortunately delayed. Either way, here it is: Mount Righteous' final tour blog post. Enjoy.

After spending most of the morning and afternoon at the house in Kansas City, (and being made a huge breakfast by an amazingly generous aunt), we got back on the road for Wichita. There was a little more room in the van than usual because Lee and Casey rode with two of our superfans who had driven up from Denton to see our Kansas City and Wichita shows.

Driving through rural Kansas, we were all thinking about how the night’s show would be the last of the tour.

Abilene, Lubbock, Santa Fe and Phoenix seemed distant memories even though they had been less than two weeks prior. Now, we were rolling through the Midwest, facing the abrupt interruption of all the good times we’d been having traveling together and playing music every night.

More

After half an hour of sitting in the van after our show at El Cid, most of the band was fast asleep, leaving Kendall and me to the driving and navigation as we left Los Angeles for Denver.

With the aid of some sleep-preventing pharmaceuticals, we took turns driving all through the night until we reached south-central Utah, where we handed the keys to Adam and Mason for the daytime shift.

Driving over some high elevation passes, we ran into heavy sleet in Utah and wet snow on the east end of the Eisenhower tunnel in Colorado. As we descended into Denver, the temperature warmed a bit, but it remained rainy and overcast.

More

When morning came in L.A., we began to get out of bed to find the house littered with the remnants of the night’s party. Stepping over bodies, beer cans and strewn instruments, a few members of the band gathered their stuff and headed up to Malibu where Lee has family. They planned on spending the day by the beach and taking it easy before our final show in California that night, but the rest of us decided to stay behind and spend some time with our friend Mike Shapiro.

We walked down to Sunset Boulevard and found a vegan restaurant where we got some lunch. Continuing down the road toward Hollywood, we came upon the painted wall where Eliot Smith’s album cover for Figure 8 was shot, and took a moment to snap a couple of photos before walking to Los Feliz where we saw a movie.

Anticipating the 17-hour drive to Denver that we were in for that night and the next day, we were happy to relax a little and conserve our energy. We’d played every night of the tour, and several days with two shows, and had been traveling at a pretty rapid pace. Just over the halfway point of the tour, the fatigue of being in a traveling band began to catch up to us, and it was really nice to have a day where we could have some quiet time and catch up on some rest.

More

The city of South Pasadena has passed an ordinance that prohibits smoking cigarettes in any public place--including sidewalks, street corners and parking lots.

Mount Righteous, aghast, became aware of this reality as we pulled into the town late Thursday night. This was after we left Long Beach and went to a bar in Echo Park for a while where we met up with a friend of a friend who was letting us stay at his place in South Pas.

More

After regrouping in Los Angeles in the morning, the band and our good friend Mike Shapiro of Lemon Sun got in the van and headed south to Irvine, California, where we were scheduled to play in the middle of the UC Irvine campus.

As is typical of the roads in Southern California, it took us an hour and a half to travel the 35 miles to Irvine. But once we arrived, we hauled our gear into the university center and set up on an outdoor stage across from a student center and food court. UC schools are still in session--this is their finals week--and the campus was busy with activity. We began to play to a crowd that had accumulated to see what was going on. It didn’t take long for others to be drawn in as they passed by.

The UC students were great to us, many of them dancing and clapping along. It felt like they were probably seizing the opportunity to have some fun and take a break from finals. And how convenient that we were right there to provide some relief in between classes.

More

The band somehow achieved our goal of leaving Tucson by 10 a.m., and we headed back through Phoenix and west on I-10 for Los Angeles.

The drive took us through the extreme desolation of the Arizona and California desert, finally relenting as we began to approach L.A. Though, as it happens, the approach to L.A. lasts for about 100 miles and we felt like we were almost there for an hour and a half.

Luckily, the traffic was far less severe than it could have been and we got held up only a few minutes in downtown before making it to the venue in the Silverlake area.

More

Note: Technical difficulties meant we never got Mount Righteous' Dispatch yesterday. We'll make that up now, posting the last two days of Mount Righteous updates in one post.

The morning after our show in Santa Fe was spent at a music shop browsing through trombones. With the hopes that the police or one of our friends in Lubbock would eventually turn up our stolen horn, Allison bought a nice Yamaha trigger trombone that we immediately put in the trailer. Then we headed west for Phoenix.

Anticipating a drive of seven hours or more, we struggled to keep good time and stay on the road. As we passed through New Mexico and eastern Arizona, it was hard to sit and watch the gorgeous landscape pass by from behind a window.

At our show in Santa Fe, a couple of symptoms of having brand new members manifested during our performance: The effect was minimal, but we felt we could use a short time together to quickly run through the set. But, by the time we pulled into the outskirts of Phoenix, there was very little time left before we had to be at the venue.

We didn’t want to blow the surprise of our show and practice in front of our audience, so we took an exit and set up in a dusty vacant lot. Aside from a few honks from the occasional passing motorist, we had an undisturbed and productive rehearsal under the setting Arizona sun with mountains all around us. Squinting our eyes against the dust, we ran a few songs and loaded up again.

More

We first fell in love with Mount Righteous after the band wowed us with their performance at Good Records' eight birthday bash. Since then, we've taken in their debut disc, When The Music Starts, and we've interviewed 10 of the band's 11 members for an upcoming story on the disc's release--which won't officially take place until after the band returns from it's 13-day tour. In the meantime, band member Justin Spike (guitar, accordion, vocals) has agreed to document the band's tour with a daily tour diary exclusive to DC9. Enjoy.

We rode into Lubbock with high spirits, ready to play two shows that had been well-promoted locally by friends and college radio. Sadly, by day’s end, we’d suffer a pretty serious blow to our morale...

First, the good news: Our first show of the day was at Ralph’s Records, an amazing independent record store next to the Texas Tech campus. Our friend Daniel Fluitt from Thrift Store Cowboys works at Ralph’s and was our man in town all day and night; he brought us a few bicycles from his house so we could explore the town and run some errands, and generally took really good care of us, going out of his way to make sure we had a good time in Lubbock.

The in-store show at Ralph’s started at around 6:30, and a good crowd showed up to see us. It was a lot of fun to play to a lot of faces we’d never seen before, sandwiched between stacks of used rock CDs and cases of old Nintendo paraphernalia. We got a few of our CDs on the shelf for sale and encouraged everybody to come out to the show that night at Conference Café.

In the meantime, we had a few hours to kill, so we had a couple beers at Ralph’s with Daniel and the rest of the staff. They even let us pick out any used CDs we wanted and take them with us, an amazingly generous gesture. We felt so loved by the folks in Lubbock—they’d been playing our CD at Ralph’s and on the radio and promoting the show for weeks. Now they were giving us beer, bicycles and CDs. There are some really fine people in Lubbock, Texas.

More

We first fell in love with Mount Righteous after the band wowed us with their performance at Good Records' eight birthday bash. Since then, we've taken in their debut disc, When The Music Starts, and we've interviewed 10 of the band's 11 members for an upcoming story on the disc's release--which won't officially take place until after the band returns from it's 13-day tour. In the meantime, band member Justin Spike (guitar, accordion, vocals) has agreed to document the band's tour with a daily tour diary exclusive to DC9. Enjoy.

We descended on the town of Abilene with a few loyal fans from home following us, not quite ready to see the last of us, I suppose.

But by the time we pulled into town in the afternoon, we found ourselves with a few hours to kill before we played. So we tried our best to entertain ourselves.

From what I’ve always known of Abilene, it’s a staunchly conservative, highly dogmatic West Texas town that contains two of the largest Christian universities in the country. Not exactly where the party’s at. With this in mind we dispersed around the modest downtown area and didn’t find much but a stuffy art gallery party with free crackers, fruit and wine. Leave it to artists to sniff each other out when the chips are down. Or maybe it was the wine.

More