Chattanooga, TN part I

In some ways, Chattanooga may be the greatest city on the planet. I've had the honor of visiting the 'Noog (that's what close personal friends of Chattanooga call it) 3 or 4 times now. That might not seem like a lot, but you have to put into perspective what a single day in the 'Noog can do to one's mind and body. I feel like the best way to portray my feelings on Chattanooga might be to just let you into the visits i've had, starting with the first.

VISIT I

So we're on tour for a couple weeks, and we're heading into the last couple days of tour, those last couple days consisting of Chattanooga, a day off, and then Asheville, NC. We pull into the Noog mid afternoon. Our drummer hooked this show up through his friend "Rev." Tom Foote, which i didn't hear all that much about till we pulled into town. We drive up to the Rev's house, we walk up knock, and there's Tom.

Tom is a late 30's early 40's WM with no teeth in the front of his mouth, i'm pretty sure he's drunk already, and he's really friendly. Don't get me wrong now, i love Tom, he's an awesome dude, "punk as fuck" would probably be the best way to describe him. His house smells akin to a farmyard barn. He's got a few dogs, all are older, mangy, and looking like they don't have long on this earth left. I can remember thinking, god, there's got to be a pile of dogshit somewhere in this house. So we proceed to get drunk at Tom's, our show is at a house across town, the turtlehead house. We spend some time at Tom's abode, listening to Weird Al and Minor Threat back to back with the stereo cranked to 11 and the speakers half blown. Tom's pretty much making us shotgun beers and smoke a lot of bad pot the whole time, but he doesn't have to twist the arm too much, i mean, you can't rape the willing.

So we end up at the turtlehead house, we load in, and we're setting up in a nice little cozy living room that's got all the furniture moved out of it. I love these shows, there's enough kids so that everyone's jammed together and everyone is in a good mood. We were at that perfect drunk, not too hammered to play, but drunk enough to rock, and we did, we rocked, it was a great show. Unfortunately for me, i got a migraine strength headache come on about 10 minutes before we played. For anyone not in a band, you can only imagine having the worst headache in your life and having to stand within a few feet of 5 or 6 large speakers, all cranked as high as they can go. It was a really good show, but i had to dip after we played and go sleep in the van and hope that when i woke up it would no longer feel like my head was in a vice.

I wake up fairly early, when you're in the Van the sun hits you as soon as it comes up and it's hard to sleep late. When i go back to the house i see a couple kids milling around the front yard and there's Rev. Tom. He's stoked that I'm awake, because now he has one more person to drink with. We proceed to go into the house and wake up my bandmates with beer bongs and bottles of Jameson's. Outside there's a kid trying to hit empty beers with a wiffle ball bat, he's missing....badly. When he starts talking i realize that he's mentally handicapped....or so i thought. Turns out he's just a crusty traveller kid from the Ukraine who speaks english in a way that just makes him sound retarded. Anyway, i felt bad for thinking that for all of about 10 minutes.

So we head back to Tom's house, and start drinking and smoking heavy throughout the day. Ian and Tom hit it off immediately, it didn't take anytime at all before they were arm and arm singing along to Weird Al and pouring beer bongs for each other. Ian got smashed, real smashed. At one point he asked for the keys to walk down to the van to get some rolling tobacco. He takes the keys, and he can't really walk down the stairs, so he slides down the stairs on his ass, gets to the van, forgets why he's at the van, throws the keys in a bush, and sits down in a mud puddle to continue drinking his beer. That was a few minutes after he tried to fight both Nick and Joe and ended up with a pretty good scab on his head.

We come to find out somehow, that Tom's roomate Mickey (who's quickly become our hero in the Noog) is selling acid, gel tabs to be exact. Well at this point Ian's passed out but the rest of us are all about taking some acid. We quickly realize we don't have any money but we pony up some of the band fund to buy us all one hit each. Half an hour goes by, Joe is tripping his face off but the rest of us aren't feeling anything, so we make that mistake everyone's made once or twice and decide we need to take more. We understand that it just wouldn't be right to take any more out of our gas money to buy drugs, so we come up with a plan to offer Mickey a paper bag full of fireworks that we procured in NC earlier in the tour when we did have money. How were we gonna ask this stranger if he'll trade acid for fireworks? We decided to send Joe in to reason with Mickey, "Joe, tell him that it's not working and we'd love to trade fireworks and a some merch for more acid". Of course, it's gonna be hard for Joe to convince Mickey that the acids not working, by this time Joe's walking around with his shirt off and a big plush goose under his arm preteding it's talking to people. Joe was fucked. We sent him in there anyway, with a goose under one arm and a big brown paper bag filled with fireworks under the other. Joe walks into Mickey's room drops the bag of fireworks, gives Mickey a look that to Joe says, "hey man, can we trade you fireworks for drugs" of course to Mickey the look said, "holy shit, my face is melting, i'm gonna go outside now and watch the trees fly away"

Luckily enough Mickey came outside and asked us folks who's faces weren't quite melting yet what the bag of fireworks was for. We explained, he gave us all another hit. We probably didn't need the other hit, our stuff started kicking in pretty soon after the firework negotiation.

We decided it was a good idea to start lighting off the fireworks we didn't barter away, one of which looked like a giant bottlerocket with a grapefruit sized ball of aluminum foil at the end. This was way too top heavy to light out of a bottle, so i came up with the idea of sticking it in the ground and lighting it from there. We're all standing a foot or so away as i light it, the fuse burns to the gunpowder and we quickly realize that it's stuck too far in the ground to take off. I saw my life flash before my eyes as i ran, tripping my face off, from this atomic bomb looking thing that was about to blow up right on top of us.

We lose Joe at this point, he went a bit over the edge. We saw him through Tom's front window laying on the couch with one of the mangy dogs at his feet. We figured that Joe looked pretty comfortable and maybe he was just done for the night and decided we should walk around the Noog at 3am and take a look around. Turns out Joe was scared shitless of this beast at his feet, and wasn't moving because he was afraid the dog was going to eat him if he tried to get away.

We decided to take a quick trip to the gas station at 4 am or so where we sent Paul in with a handfull of nickels and pennies to buy us candy, which was pretty hilarious because it was just Paul, with a headful of acid, and a bunch of construction workers or whatnot preparing for a day of work. Then it was time to adventure on foot.

Turns out Chattanooga has an entire little park built out of landfill. There's perfectly shaped conical hills named "adventure mountain" and weird stadium seating cut into the terrain, all facing the a sewerage pipe. We decided that we couldn't drop a cigarette on this landfill hill because it looked flammable, the grass was more of a sponge, hydrogen sponge is what we figured, the whole thing could blow at any second. I'll tell you though, sitting atop the hydrogen sponge "mountain", watching the sun come up, and feeling like you could touch the reds, purples, and oranges in the sky was damn near a religious experience. We realized it was landfill while we were walking back to Tom's and we see rust running out from the bottom of the hill and a powercord coming out of the ground.

We were walking back to Tom's at about 5 or 6 am, the sky lightening up, and we realized that our fingers were yellowed by the cheap rolling tobacco we've been smoking for the last day or two. "Holy shit, look at our hands, fucking gross, they look like Tom's hands, it's the fucking appalachian mist man, if we don't get out of here now, we're never gonna get out of here". That was pretty much the train of thought at 6am in Chattanooga, still tripping hard. We find both Ian and Joe in the van already, which makes escape a lot easier. Ian's still sleeping, Joe's wide awake and hiding behind a plastic spoon with a picture of an antelope on it.....we all deal with stuff in different ways. We explain to Joe that the Appalacian mist is upon us and we have to get out of there now, he put up a bit of a fight, but was in no position to be dictating what we were doing, we might be tripping, but we weren't hiding behind a spoon.

We left a note on a pizza box for Tom, thanking him for the amazing time and high tail it out of there. On our way to Asheville we had a really strange run in with a waffle house employee but that's for another blog entirely