March 20 - The Valley of the Vapors Independent Music Festival, Hot Springs, AR

At 6am I felt the urge to vomit. The bathroom upstairs was occupied. I didn’t know the location of the bathroom downstairs, but I went down there in my underwear anyway. I hovered above the kitchen sink and drank a glass of water in Alan’s parents' house. I drank another and lied down on the cool floor of the kitchen in my underwear. I woke up at 7:30 in my underwear and found a bathroom. TOURING!!!

In Blytheville, Arkansas we found The Dixie Pig, a barbeque spot in the middle of yet another dying small town in Main Street America. The service was nice (the waitress gave us each two glasses of water to drink from), and the meat spoke for itself without too much input from the sauce. In the Memphis area, meat is to man as sauce is to Stepford wife.

We returned to The Valley Of The Vapors Festival in Hot Springs, this time in the rain. A steady stream leaked from the hills down to the valley, muddying the dirt parking lot where a car echoed “Sympathy For The Devil” against the rocks.

A speedy bluegrass outfit named Cletus Got Shot growled Jim Crow songs with an upright bass made out of an industrial plastic tank.

Next was Projexorcism, a visual “Revolution #9” made up of old instructional film reels, their projectors manipulated by an entertaining man in bunny ears. It lasted forty minutes?

The kids in Hot Springs wanted loud and fast, some of them wanted it hateful. They yelled, they danced, they questioned, they hugged, they tossed out “we love you”s, they tattooed the word HATE on their inner lips. We played a loud set. We played a good set, too. The HATE-tattooed went bananas for "The Companion." It took three shows to get tight, just in time for the end of the tour. A-one, a-two, a-thrreee! Crunch! A-thrreee!

Closing the evening was Frown Pow’r, a quintet form the Little Rock area. They borrowed Alan’s guitar amp. They should have borrowed his tuner, too. They were a sloppy fun mess. The bass player looked like Brian Wilson with a Jonas Brothers haircut: a dumber angel. The singer looked like Rod Blagojevich, the perfect front man. The mandolin player had 5 pedals, adding a high-pitched drone to the clumsy party rock. After several false starts, they inexplicably closed with “Shout,” the Isley Brothers song, the one heard at weddings. They even left a gap for the crowd to sing “shout,” but no one did. “You know you make me wanna (silence)…” It sounded like the song was being edited for television. People danced and had fun, myself included. Except for the dancing part.

Zac and Cheryl from Itinerant Locals put us up once again. This summer they are going on tour by train, performing in spots like Tucson, Minneapolis, Klamath Falls, Minot, San Francisco, and more. It sounds pretty amazing. Look for an Itinerant Locals show with these Bitter Tears in Chicago this July.