On
the road again
By Brian Brannon
On-line Forty-Niner
 For
some people Spring Break lasts longer than
others. For me, it lasted about 20 years.
During that time I toured the United States
and Canada in a big green school bus with
a punk rock band more times than I can remember.
(That’s what happens to your mind after
two decades of playing in a punk band.)
We still play to this day, but sadly, the
green machine is no longer our conveyance.
And nowadays, everyone is married and has
regular jobs, so we don’t get out quite
as much. Spring Break is over. School is
back in session.
The name of our band is JFA, and we play
music for skateboarding in abandoned pools.
I’m the lead singer, or “screamer,” if you
will. Traveling on the road taught me many
things about people, places and life in
general, and I still carry many of them
with me to this day.
I remember one of our first tours. We left
Phoenix at about four o’clock in the afternoon,
motoring into the night. Our guitar player
Don and I stayed up into the wee hours drinking
beer, smoking clove cigarettes and playing
war. We finally put the cards down at about
four in the morning and hit the hay.
We woke up with terrible hangovers at some
god-forsaken desert rest stop 300 miles
from nowhere in pools of our own sweat (the
green machine had no air conditioning).
The name of the place said it all. I turned
to Don and said it out loud: “Yucca.”
Thus began a curious pattern, which repeated
almost every day of the trip. We’d pull
into a town, play a gig, hang out at the
bar till 3 a.m., then jump in the bus and
roll on down the road. Each morning was
the same. For some reason, our driver Wayno
liked to eat at Waffle House and the only
place to park was always right next to a
dumpster. This is how we toured the Deep
South during the muggiest part of summer.
We’d wake up in pools of sweat to the smell
of garbage rotting in the unbearable heat.
A swarm of flies would be buzzing around
our heads and no matter how bad our hangovers,
there was no hope of getting back to sleep.
So we’d stumble into the restaurant, still
dressed in our gig clothes from the night
before, looking and smelling like creatures
from the black lagoon. Our manager, his
partner and Wayno would be well-rested and
freshened up, sitting there in the air conditioning,
daintily eating their breakfasts like the
normal folks that we in no way resembled.
Mothers held their children tight and old
grandmas gave us nasty looks as we walked
into the room.
And so it went. We had some great times:
playing in a place called Storyville that
was once a brothel in New Orleans; having
the run of the hotel where the gig was held
in Miami Beach; stocking up on bottle rockets
somewhere near the Mason/Dixie line; visiting
the Smithsonian in Washington D.C.; and
running amok in New York City.
After a while I began to miss seeing my
friends back home and sleeping in my own
bed. But then we’d come back to Arizona
and I’d wish I was on the road again, meeting
new people and experiencing different places.
It went back and forth like this for about
three tours, with me always wishing I was
somewhere else.
Finally, I got wise and learned the greatest
lesson the road can teach: Make the most
of wherever you are, whoever you’re with
and enjoy whatever there is to do. You may
not pass that way again.
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