Chapter 3: WE MADE IT!!!

Hey every­body,

The Right­eous and Har­mo­nious Fists’ Port­man­land Tour has finally ended and I think we all feel pretty damn good about the whole thing! It was a long haul for sure and, as expected, a bunch of unex­pected hap­pen­ings involv­ing some car trou­ble, some vibe con­trol trou­ble, and backed up men­tal exhaus­tion but it was an expe­ri­ence that I’m really glad hap­pened to me and the me I am right now.

Okay here’s what’s the past-haps:

After Porter­ville we drove to Atwa­ter, chilled at Julie’s lovely house and saw Pirates3.…yep…next day we headed west for Santa Cruz where the good­ness felt our need for love and got us a show at Caf­fee Per­golesi. It’s this big house turned cof­fee shop with a maze of rooms and a gigan­tic out­side patio. We played (with drums, yes!) a pretty long set for a vary­ing amount of people-and by this I mean there was a while where we played for the art on the wall and heads peak­ing around the reg­is­ter. The music seemed to get weirder and weirder as this went on and we also seemed to have more and more fun. Orem(the sink) played a nice set too (virb’s got some vids) and a cou­ple of high-schoolers, who were strangely famil­iar, were way into chill­ing so we went to a restau­rant called the Sat­urn (cruchy tofu salad!!, local greens!!!!) and then hung out on the beach. We camped off the side of the road and an extreme high5/shoutout! to the ranger for just giv­ing us a warn­ing in the morning.

San Fran­cisco greeted our exhausted minds with a buzz and we spent the after­noon in the Mis­sion Dis­trict. I took some time to myself that evening for a much needed solo adven­ture. By this time, we had lit­er­ally done pretty much every­thing together and that was try­ing for me at times and I needed some self won­der­ment. I walked to Fisherman’s Wharf, up to City Lights Book­store in North Beach (where I found this gem), and took in the mass amounts of pub­lic sculp­ture and nightlife. A video is on the way…

We then clan­gered on up the MAGICALNIFICENT coast to Arcata to play at the Yel­low House of Extrao­d­i­nary­ness and Extremerriment…short tour. This house was really beau­ti­ful and had a huge rose bush in the back­yard but unfor­tu­nately it was prob­a­bly the worst show of the tour and for a few dif­fer­ent rea­sons: 1) there was a dude solo­ing on clar­inet the entire time, 2) every­one was pretty fucked up, 3) hardly no one lis­tened, and 4) the post-show jam­ming went on for longer than our show and included a dude lying back­down on the floor and solo­ing on gui­tar for hours (not too unfor­tu­nately the video of this came out entirely shitty). There was two peo­ple, a friendly cute cou­ple, who were vis­it­ing col­leges and knew a friend of a friend at the house and were very respon­sive to us. Thank you to you both!!!

Now it was time…time to leave our sunny Cal­i­for­nia bub­bles behind and wind into the Ore­go­nial com­plex that was ever-planned to be over­whelm­ingly beaut and rich. We headed for Eugene! The show at Sam Bond’s Garage (very impor­tant side­note to imag­ine: pas­sion­fruit Heifweizen…hoof) had been approved and went on beat as one of the best acoustic (and alto­gether) shows of the whole tour.

Here’s a (12min) peek of The Fists @ Sam Bond’s Garage with intro­duc­tion by Devon Sproule:

We played between the more-than-fun The Kids on the Couch and the adorable and gifted Devon Sproule who you may or may not know as Paul Curreri’s wife. Jon and Chase stopped by on their way back from Sasquatch for a more-than-pleasant sur­prise. The whole evening was a-more-then-I-could-take. After the show Devon invited us to stay with her friend Tilka out­side of Eugene which ended up being incred­i­ble. Every­thing about this night was pure magic. The house was lit­er­ally, I felt, the most ideal relaxed atmos­phere for cre­ativ­ity and it was inhab­ited by those very type of peo­ple. Tilka and her house­mates are involved in all kinds of multi-sensory con­nec­tive arts (she was very in tune with her synes­the­sia and appar­ently knew that Caleb was too just from watch­ing the Fists on stage), teach­ing, paint­ing, invent­ing, music, friend­ships, gen­eral yet pure love, and also a giant gar­den of wild and tamed edi­ble veg­gies and herbs. Tilka gave us a copy of her incred­i­bly cre­ative hand­made children’s magazine,that you really must see to believe, called All Round Mag­a­zine: a rad­i­cal mag for chil­dren 1 to 100+. In our Music issue there’s arti­cles about things like lis­ten­ing (“close your eyes. cup your hands behind your ears. try and hear the most dis­tant sound you can ~ find the edge of the sounds you can hear. now make a list of all the sounds you notice; far sounds and near sounds. call it your ‘sound sym­phony’”) and eight ways to whis­tle. Hoooof, I’m get­ting really excited just talk­ing about it again!!

Not want­ing to ever leave we left feel­ing com­fort­ably high and esteemed with our­selves. We hadn’t plans and decided to move the steam­ing pot of dri­ving­to­port­land to the front burner and set the freshly washed mugs of excite­ment in the cuphold­ers of our cars. On we were!

Ore­gon is a fairly small state North to South and we made it in remark­able time. It was excit­ing and con­fus­ing to enter our new sum­mer­home and we def­i­nitely ended up at the apart­ment by mis­take, as for­tu­nate as it was. We met up with Dave Nuss to drop some some equip­ment off and check out the venue for the next night, grabbed some food, had a long over­due band meet­ing, and behat the hay with heavy heads.

The next day I started work­ing at Mar­riage and met up with Cur­tis, Flint, Christy, and some of the other peo­ple for an intro­duc­tionary greet­ing at the stu­dio. Marriage’s first issue of their pub­lish­ing project called Veneer is com­ing in tomor­row and we started putting together the inserts. I invited them to the show and took off for band prac­tice, got a deli­cious veg­gie pita with Nuss at the Base­ment Pub (where appar­ently trivia night is a favorite spot of Malk­mus), and got zoned in for the show. Bad Money, an APU grad trio super­group, played and then the Fists went on for a packed crowd (includ­ing the Mar­riage dudes (holy shit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)) in Nuss’ attic and played their softly ten­dered hearts out!!!!!

We’re now get­ting ready for the Ten­der Lov­ing Empire store open­ing on Thurs­day and catch­ing our col­lec­tive breaths. Port­land has greeted us with an over­whelm­ing sense of extreme cool­ness we really are excited for the future.

I’m sorry about the lack of updates dur­ing the trip — inter­net couldn’t keep up with our sched­ule all the time — but really appre­ci­ate you for read­ing this and for your sup­port. There are going to be many more videos on the way in the near future and a few more pic­tures entan­gled on the web.

We love you and thank you for being you.

Love, Jor­dan and the Fists!