Old as the Hills

It's amazing how an 18 month old can take over your life. I've never been so tired in all of my life. It's not exciting, but my bed time each night is running around 8:30pm. It was a transitional Summer, the baby is too young to do a lot of things like the beach or amusement parks so we were scrambling trying to keep her busy. FP played a show in Philly in early Summer, the wife and I went out to San Fran for a weekend getaway and to see old friends, and then recently we took a family trip up to Mohonk Mt House in upstate NY. Just concluded our 16th year going back to ND for a game day (don't ask). Didn't do as much biking as I'd like to, but enough to get banged up. Now the Fall has arrived and there's a chill in the air, the holidays will be here before you know it.

FP in Europe

Wow, it's been a while since my last post. I use the excuse that having a baby is taking up all of my time.

Well, FP just got back from doing a week of shows in Europe. We played Sweden, Germany, Holland, England (2 shows), and Belgium. It was a really good time. The shows were all great and it was just good to be out on tour again (even if it was only a week). We played all of the shows with True Colors, who are not only a very good band, but also great guys. It would have been a perfect trip if not for one thing - we shipped about 1/3 of our merch over to Germany before we left the US (the rest we carried over with us). Turns out that the merch got held up at customs in Frankfurt, and, to make a long story short, we just got it shipped back to us yesterday. So even though we had a good time, we spent time each day trying to free the "trapped" merch. Which was a bit stressful. Oh, and someone please remind us to stop touring in the Winter. We're idiots.

Some highlights:

Bill saying his lasting memory of the tour was the sound of pills shaking around because we were all taking Advil and various other medications.

Porter saying after the tour that it was the first tour that we came back from where we didn't hate each other.

Getting stuck at customs waiting for the ferry to head over to England with the band Cannabis Corpse. Then in Leeds Porter announcing that I would be joining Cannabis Corpse after the FP tour ended and the sound guy coming up to me after the show and asking how I got the gig because he was good friends with them.

Actually getting everything on our tour rider at 3 of the shows.

Playing poker with the guys from True Colors after the Harlem (Holland) show.

Coming back with money in my pocket.


Here's the thing about tour (especially a short one) - it's no where near as glamorous as people think. "Oh, you spent a week in Europe, you must have had a blast and saw so many cool things." I'm not complaining at all, but in the week I was gone I think I had a total of 4 hours of "free" time. When you have shows booked everyday there just isn't the time for sightseeing. In most cases you spend the entire day driving to the show, get to the venue load in, set up, sound check, eat, and maybe you have an hour or two before the show starts. Or maybe the following day you have an hour or two of free time in the morning before you head out to the next show. I had about 2 hours to walk around Linkoping in Sweden and then 2 hours to walk around London (in the rain). It really becomes like a job.

With all that said there is talk of maybe trying to hit Australia and Japan next Winter. Who knows, I'd be up for a trip to the land of the rising sun and down under. I'll keep you posted.

The Pumpkin

I was just reminded about this story over the past week:

On one side of the equation was this lady in town that walked everywhere. She was the mother of these kids in our school and she could always be seen walking around town. I know they owned a car, so I can only assume it was for exercise.

On the other side was our group - towards the end of high school it was not uncommon for us to be driving the streets at 5am or 6am after a night of God knows what.

This must have been around Halloween, because we were driving around in the early hours of the morning and Dave had somewhere along the way picked up a pumpkin. We were minding our own business when we approached this lady from behind. She was walking (as usual) and before I knew what happened the car window was open and the pumpkin was flying through the air. It was a direct hit. It hit her in the head and sent her flying into a bunch of bushes.

At the time it might have been the funniest thing to ever have happen in the world. When I think about it now I feel a little bad when I snicker.

20 years? You gotta be kidding me

Saturday night was the 20 year reunion for the class of 1989. Yeah, I know, technically I was a graduate of the class of 1990, but I can’t bring myself to associate with a class that I only spent 1 year with, so I’m sticking with 89. Besides, it’s been 20 years; you think anyone outside of my group of friends remembers that I didn’t graduate with everyone else? Me neither.

So, 5 out of 10 of us went. Not bad, considering 2 of us were officially class of 1990 and another 3 didn’t get an official diploma from CHS. The night was off to a hot start as soon as I got my name sticker – it had our senior yearbook picture. Now I never took a yearbook pic senior year, so they had my Jr year pic where I had a shaved head and was wearing a COC shirt. Nice. I think I was the only person there that looked just like their pic.

We loitered around during the cocktail hour and mostly talked to each other. Although, I did talk to my old childhood friend from when I lived in SO. It was good to see him and hear that his family and parents are doing well. Spoke to a few other people that I played sports with in Jr High and HS and then when I was going in for dinner I saw a friend that I hadn’t seen a lot of over the past 5-10 years so it was good to catch up with her over the course of the night. During dinner there was a DJ playing all of the 80 hits we all know and love, as well as a video screen showing pics from our year book – which I was featured in due to having a friend on the year book committee.

My general consensus is that both the guys and girls fared about the same. Some guys gained weight or lost some hair (raises hand), and some of the girls gained weight or dyed their hair. But there were a few girls that looked very good, especially considering that I know they had children. I have to say, that for the most part, everyone looked similar to how they looked in high school. Now, I was on drugs and skipping class for a good portion of high school so there were a lot of people that I just didn’t know, but for the most part I recognized a good portion of people and if I didn’t I took a peek at their name tag. On a side note I only recognized 2 of the black people from our class that were at the reunion (there were less than 20 there). Also, one of the funnier moments of the night occurred when everyone moved to the hotel bar after the festivities ended. I was talking to a friend of mine and this girl comes up and is like, “Oh, I wanted to say hi to you” and then kind of butted into our conversation. It took me about halfway through the conversation to figure out that it was a girl I hooked up with a couple of times in 10th grade. Oh well.

The highlight of the night was a conversation Jeff and I had with a classmate. Within 5 min we heard all about how his marriage fell apart and how he was banging the babysitter. It was classic. At least he mentioned that he’s on the wagon, so I guess that’s good news.

All in all it was a good time. My friends still see each other so it wasn’t like we had to go to see anyone, but it was still a good excuse to get out of the house. We also had a BBQ at my buddy’s house the next day so that was just icing on the cake.

A question we were wondering is - what's next? 25 years or do they wait for 30? No one knew.

The Walk Out

It started with a mysterious flyer handed out around school when we were in 10th grade. I don’t remember the specifics, but it had something to do with budget cuts and voicing our opposition by walking out of class mid-day and holding a mass protest out in front of the Board of Education (which was located right next door to our high school) - I think it even might have been signed “Mister X”. To be honest, I didn’t really understand (or care) about the protest. I think it was supposed to be this secret underground student movement that would shock and surprise the teachers and administration into talking action. However, I do remember being bored in class one day and asking my history teacher what the deal was with the “walk out”? I might have created a faux pas because the other kids in the class looked at me with daggers in their eyes, like how dare I share our secret strategy with “the enemy”. In the interest of full disclosure there’s a good chance that I was high during this incident, I’m not making excuses, just playing the percentages.

As I mentioned, I had no interest in budget cuts, they could have cut high school out of the budget entirely and I would have been fine with that. But there was something going on there, a buzz if you will. There were rumors that at least one of the networks would have a news crew there and so I guess we used it as an opportunity rather than a cause.

The day of the walk out Al brought his video camera in to school to document the event for posterity sake. I remember using the walk out as an excuse to cut the whole day of classes even though the walk out didn’t start until later in the day. I also remember Al “interviewing” me and Alan in the back of the school before the event to get our opinion on the walk out. I haven’t seen the video tape in about 20 years (because Al’s brother’s taped over it – Superman II anyone?), but from what I remember of the interview it consisted of a lot of random complaining on our part. Of course, the interview was just the prelude to the main event of the day – the actual walk out. Students started gathering out in front of the school at the specified time – since I was already cutting I can’t give any first-hand account of teachers standing in disbelief as their students walked out en mass. We then walked over to the board of education and stood around while more and more kids joined the protest. There were even a few teachers there; I guess to make sure things didn’t deteriorate into chaos. Out of almost 2000 kids in school I’d guess that somewhere between a half and three quarters ended up joining the protest.

Out of nowhere one of the organizers of the walk out stood up on the back of a pickup truck that was parked in front of the board of ed, I didn’t recognize her, and to this day I couldn’t tell you her name. She started rambling about one thing or another, but of course, whenever you have this many kids in one place it would be tough for even Sirus (Can you dig it?) to hold their attention. About this time Alan hit play on his little boom box he used to carry around and the Cro-Mags “We Gotta Know” started drowning out the rambling girl on the pickup truck. Almost immediately all of the metalheads, dirtbags, and hardcore kids broke into a spontaneous mosh pit further distracting the crowd from the purpose of the walk out. The walk out was clearly losing steam, the final straw was a hail of rocks that crashed into the truck as the girl speaker was trying to lead the crowd in a chant of “No budget cuts!”.

The crowd soon started to disperse and head back to their remaining classes. I never saw any sign of reporters and I don’t remember any disciplinary action on the part of the administration. In the end, the only impact was a mosh pit, a school wide case of juvenile delinquency, and a long forgotten video tape.

Hey, these kids look too safe; let’s give them some bows and arrows

I’m not sure who made the final decision. In my mind it’s something that should have gone through at least 3 levels of vetting before being approved. Somehow, the “powers that be” at our Jr High thought that we should have a day of indoor archery during gym class. Archery? You heard that right. It would have been safer for them to give us access to enriched uranium.

Let me set the scene for you. Targets lined up along one wall of the gym and a line of 75 kids at the opposite end of the gym. I think the teachers knew better because (for the most part) they basically stood in the hallway once we had the weapons in hand. Now I’m going to guess that maybe 1 person in our class had ever used a bow and arrow in their lives. As a result, as soon as we got the go ahead arrows went in every direction: towards the targets, into the floor, into the ceiling, towards other targets, towards other students, etc. It was pandemonium. After a while we got a little bored and started trying to bounce the arrows off the floor at the targets and trying to shoot the ducts on the ceiling. At one point someone shot at the teachers while they were putting a balloon on one of the targets and that was pretty much the end of class. These were real arrows too, the bows were kind of a joke (made of hard plastic and single stringed), but if you got into one the arrows could penetrate a hard target at 50ft, so they could do some damage.

It’s not really a surprise that we only had archery gym class once in my 3 years at Jr High

New Years Rockin Eve

With the holiday season upon us I was inspired to tell a brief tale of a magical New Year’s Eve (the fact that I’m on vacation and sitting on my couch also helped). The more I think about the title of this post the more I think this should be about the New Year's Eve when I went to see Manowar, Dio, and Megadeth at the Nassau Colosseum, got totally f'd up on mescaline and got lost on the way home. Maybe another time.


I think it was 1989/1990, but the year isn’t as important as the fact that it was COLD. Not only was it cold but it had been cold for a week or so. That night the big shindig was going down at Wade’s house and we were all looking forward to a night of fun and debauchery. The thing about Wade’s house is that it was on the boarder of Newark (truth be told it might actually have been in Newark), not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I wanted to paint a picture of the neighborhood. I think I went there with Jeff, and after parking down the block we started walking towards Wade’s. We got about 2 houses away and were literally stopped in our tracks by what we saw. Parked on the street was a car that was covered in 2”-3” of ice. The strange part is that we hadn’t had any snow, rain, or any other precipitation. Yet here was a car that was totally encased in ice to the point that it was iced to the ground. I have never seen anything else like it before or since. Someone had to be responsible, and to be honest we were a little upset that we had never thought of such a prank/act of vandalism.

After collecting our wits and entering the party the night proceeded with quite a few memorable incidents. Wade lived on the second floor of a 2 family house, and with all of the people crammed in there it got quite hot. At one point this dude was pissing out an open window, and in his drunken state started to fall forward out of the window. Luckily my buddy witnessed the whole thing and grabbed him by the back of his pants averting disaster. Next a fight broke out in the bathroom. There was a line for the bathroom and to be honest I forget how the argument started, but at one point this dude that I was friends with was getting stomped in the bath tub by two of my best friends with the door shut and locked. Shit happens, what can you do? The caper of the evening came at the stroke of midnight when there was a spontaneous alcohol spraying fight in the kitchen – beer, champagne, wine, even some soda, being sprayed with reckless abandon all while Wade was screaming trying to stop it. When the booze settled there must have been 2 inches of liquid on his floor.

Oh, this was the night we also convinced my buddy’s drunken sister that she was adopted.

All in all a good night.