A long time ago when I actually thought I could get somewhere in the music business, my old band went out on tour with another band from our scene. We were good friends at the time, and this band had toured much more extensively than us, so this was going to be a huge learning experience as far as making connections in other states, meeting different promoters, different bands, and learning how to survive on people's floors with no fucking money. I have never eaten so much Ramen in my life. Nobody really cared about anything other than playing as many shows as possible for as many people as possible. We were psyched because this band had done this shit so many times before, we knew we had good shows and good times ahead from coast to coast. Remember the PCH club in Long Beach? Played that motherfucker on this tour. Smelt like bird shit and piss but the show was bad ass. We had circle pits going from one room into another, kids swinging around support beams in the middle of the room. All in all it must have been like 30 shows, all done completely DIY by the other band and kids who they knew could put on shows wherever one needed to be. I don't think we played a real club until a year plus later. But this one stop in Louisville, that one got real fucked up.

The other band had a friend there who they stayed with every time they passed through town. He was at one point straight edge, in a crew of real scary dudes, complete with X's tattooed on his hands. All these dudes used to buy belt buckles that were in the shape of brass knuckles. They would file off the fastening hook and then use that shit as you would any other normal pair of knuckles. I forget the minutia of what exactly happened with this guy, but it was something like his cousin who was also in the crew broke edge, then got the shit beat out of him, causing a war between the cousin and the guy we knew. And these fuckers were killers. They would fuck with anyone they caught smoking, drinking, or whatever they thought wasn't edge. So if you were at a show, you basically looked straight ahead, shut your mouth and prayed to be able to walk home that night.

We played our set and nothing happened. No big deal, pretty good show if you ask me considering we had been to this city maybe one other time before. Then, when our friends proceeded to play, shit got all fucked up. I remember a bunch of guys coming in and clearing the fucking room, they held a knife to the throat of a guy who actually had an X tattooed on his neck and then chased the guy we knew out of the back door. Imagine 5 dangerous kids with no real conscience running through the kitchen of a VFW hall wielding a knife ready to kill some 25 year old punk. Scary shit. That dude ran for a long time. I don't know where he ended up but he got away. And the crew thankfully did not return to the show to finish the beatdowns they had begun. We were safe. Safe enough to pack our shit, get the fuck in the van and haul ass out of town before they came back.

Once again that moment flashes into your head, same as it does when you almost drive off a mountain in Wyoming, or when you pace around St. Louis looking for a toilet, "Why am I here, what am I doing?" To this day I don't have a good answer for that one. We did what we thought we needed to do to get somewhere as a band. These days shows don't happen like this. Shit is so PC and safe you could bring your mom. In our minds, we really believed that this was the price you paid to get somewhere. This earned us our stripes into the wonderful world of Rock n' Roll. Funny how we did it this way, when all we had to do was rip off Texas is the Reason and sign to Victory.