the giraffes: stories from the tour

List of characters:

A (Aaron, lead singer)

Damien (guitarist)

Drew [Andrew] (drummer)

G (Grant, interviewer extraordinary)

John (bassist, absent from interview)

(in their van outside Trash before a show)

G: As usual, I’m in a van with The Giraffes. They just got back from tour, and they probably have some stories. Let’s talk about how your day starts. Or maybe not, maybe you’re day is just ending at 8am.

A: Yep, that’s pretty much it. Half the time…

Damien: That’s not how it starts. All I can remember is when I got back from tour, I went to one of my favorite slap shacks on the way to my meaningless job at a hospital and I had put a Giraffes sticker in one of my favorite slap shacks with a booth that actually worked that had four screens so I can pick my anal pleasures. Somebody had scrawled into it, “This Band Roks.” But r-o-k-s, so it was awesome. That was the best thing I had ever seen.

Drew: I have to fart.

A: It smells like you were boiling parmesan and cilantro in old man blood.

Drew: I wish you could all smell this.

(Everyone exits van and your intrepid reporter proceeds to vomit on the curb.)

G: How does the morning start?

Damien: Andrew takes a piss, I wake up, Aaron gets up.

A: I get up in the morning and discover a crumpled shower curtain on the floor of the Motel 6 bathroom that I try to step on and discover that John is curled up in the fetal position in…

Drew: In the shower curtain.

A: In the shower curtain on the floor on the tile with a lone log floating in the toilet bowl with no toilet paper in sight.

Drew: So he goes back to bed and he’s sleeping with Damien, right…

G: Aaron goes back to bed?

Drew: We’re all in bed and John goes back to the bed Damien’s in. We wake up the next morning and I’m like, “John, what happened with the shower curtain and stuff?” and he’s like “I don’t know,” and I’m like “Hey, check your ass.” And his ass was caked in shit. He didn’t even wipe his ass.

Damien: I’m bet he’s proud we’re telling this story.

G: He’s not here. So what are you going to do?

Drew: Exactly.

G: What happened the night before?

Drew: We played a town in Florida, I can’t remember which, cause we were drunk, and we got tanked and on the way back to the hotel, John was tanked, and Aaron was tanked, and Damien was tanked, and I was tanked and high, but Damien and I could somehow stay awake – in this van, if you fall asleep, it’s your time. You’re in trouble. So, I’m driving down the Florida highway and I look back and Damien is already completely naked. And I’m like, “What the hell are you doing?” I grab my camera and Damien proceeds to stick a lollipop in his asshole and tried to feed it to John.

Damien: It was a great idea, man. It was watermelon.

G: Did John bite?

Damien: No.

Drew: But he almost got it in.

Damien: And he was swerving to try and get my ass closer. I’ll tell you a good one okay? Ohio.

Drew: Oh god.

Damien: I’m drinking like I drink, having a good time. And someone makes the mistake of leaving the Jameson bottle, and this is my Achilles. It’s one of those things where you keep drinking and you’re like, “I’m cool. This is good stuff.” And then you’re just druuuuunk. It’s the Jimmy Fly Snooka to the motor skills. For some reason, I’m drunk and they unload everything and I’m talking to some dumb bitch, making out with guys probably, I have no idea. And they drag me in the car, and I’m like, “I don’t wanna go. What’s going on?” Sometimes I get claustrophobic when I’m drunk and I lash out in the van. I’m sorry, I love you guys.

Aaron: These cracks in the windshield are from Damien.

Drew: He’ll get to that.

Damien: I flip out. At one point we’re waiting for a light and I go completely insane, I start throwing things and Drew tells me to stop and I don’t stop.

Drew: Hold on. He’s got pretzel rods in the back, so he chews about three and then throw the chewed pretzel rods at my head. Which I’m, “Okay, that’s cool.” Then he proceeds to shake up a fucking soda and opens it up in the van, and soda goes everywhere.

Damien: That was a dick move.

Drew: I’m pissed off cause I just cleaned the van. So I make a hard stop and Damien flies into the front of the fucking van. He’s like, “Oh, you want to play like that?” so he starts throwing himself at the windshield and breaks the windshield.

G: With what? His head, his arms?

Drew: His whole body. So then I get really pissed off and I chew up some pretzel rods and stick it in his hair, squeeze an orange in his hair, and throw his comb out the window.

Damien: You don’t fuck with my hair. You just don’t.

G: How do you keep it up like that?

Damien: Sperm and cat food.

Drew: I knew Damien loved his hair, but I didn’t know to what extent my man loved his hair. So, on occasion, I have to throw Damien out of the van and be like, you’re on your own.

Damien: I deserve it.

Drew: So we threw him out of the van and we broke out.

Damien: So they’re leaving and I’m like I’ve got pretzels and orange…

G: Where are you? In the middle of the highway?

Damien: On the side of the road by a bridge. I look over and I see a huge body of water, and I’ve got dirt in my hair and god knows what in my ass, so I’m like I’m going to take a dip. So I take off all my clothes and go swimming. I thought they left me, but I was cool. I was getting clean, I was going to get dressed and take a walk, I was in Ohio, good times.

A: We’re on the campus of Ohio State and the cops there are notoriously hard core because everybody’s partying there all the time. I’m like, hey, where did Damien go? And Drew’s like fuck that guy. So, we’re like cool. We stop at a 7-11 to try and get directions to an after party, and when we get out, John’s like, I’m going to try and find Damien and he goes wandering off into the night. Drew and I are driving around looking and we finally see John stopped next to a stand of trees next to the river, so we pull up and John is shouting into the trees. I look into the river and Damien is buck fucking naked doing the backstroke squirting water out of the gap in his teeth. The Olentangy River goes through Columbus, and is filled with radioactive waste, used to be surrounded by pig farms, there was a scandal a couple of years ago where the medical students were dumping cadavers in the fucking river. This motherfucker is buck naked doing the backstroke.

Drew: Something must have crawled up his dick.

G: What hasn’t?

Damien: Whatever makes it stronger. So they flag me down, I put my clothes on, fix my hair up. But the best is we get back in the van and go to this after party, and there’s this dickhead there. This guy that started a beef with me…

A: By the way, it happens to be the guy who owns the bar that we’re going to.

Damien: We get to this bar and I guess I had this big heated argument. This bitch was just talking shit and wouldn’t shut the fuck up about how great these terrible fucking mainstream bands are. And I was like, you know what, fuck you, why did you even come out to a local band show, go to your fucking Madison Square Garden, and suck a few underage dicks and help some recovering heroin addicts cause I don’t want to hear it. Fuck you, you don’t know shit. In Ohio, they’re very passive aggressive, so they get really mad but they don’t show it. They try to school you that they have a better record collection than you do. So, we go to the bar, and I have one drink and about five minutes in I see the big bouncer talking to the dude I had the fight with pointing. Next thing I know, I’m getting carted out. The bartender pulls out a fucking taser and was like, yo, you guys got to leave, and I was like, hey man, come on, make me.

A: If I get hit with a taser, I’m dead. [Aaron had a heart attack in 2005. Because he’s a rock star]. So I’m trying to get Damien out of there.

Damien: I wasn’t going to fight back, so I was like to the big dude, just throw me out. If I’m getting bounced from this shitty, wacked, watering-hole in Ohio-fucking-nowhere, I want the big dude to kick me out. But he didn’t. And we left.

Drew: That is pretty much quintessential of what goes on every day.

G: So, basically, you guys are drunk 24 hours a day.

Drew. No. No, no, no, no. We wake up drunk and then we drive about eight hours and then we proceed to get drunk and play a show.

A: We got sober around 4, and then we get drunk again around 7.

Drew: And then we play a dope show. And then we wreak some havoc.

A: And then we get drunk.

Drew: And then we get drunk.

Damien: We drink, but that’s just to numb the pain. You’ve got nothing better to do. You show up in a fucking town, you got a soundcheck and then wait around for two to three hours. What are you going to do for two to three hours? You going to see the town? We get drunk.

A: We listen to Leonard Nimoy and In Your Eyes by Peter Gabriel and then we circle jerk.

G: I’m putting that in the interview.

Damien: You’re putting the circle jerk in, right?

Drew: But because we’re broke, every night after every show, we got to find a place to stay.

G: You don’t have places set up to stay?

Drew: No. So every night before the last song, we always say, we’re the Giraffes, we need a place to stay, who’s going to do it? We get a handful of idiots that are willing to put us up.

G: They have no idea what they’re getting themselves into.

Drew: No, no idea.

Damien: We’re pretty good houseguests. At my worst, I’m just drunk, and they’re like, just let him be. Give him that patch of floor and he’ll be fine. We’ve got our own pillows. We smell a little bit, but whatever.

Drew: And for the record, I want to thank all those people that put us up because they rule. Almost without fail on our Eagles of Death Metal tour, we had a free place to stay every fucking night.

G: So you didn’t have to sleep in the van much at all?

A: I’m the guy that sleeps in the van the most.

G: Is that because you’re anti-social?

A: Yes.

Drew: Usually he comes out because he’s tanked and passes out there. So we leave him there.

A: Tell him about New Orleans.

Damien: I actually had two girls and a bike on my lap and I managed to go over Andrew and barf out the window. They don’t play in New Orleans. They just breathe booze.

Drew: They’re professional alcoholics.

G: What do you do for the eight hours you’re in the van?

Drew: At first, no one speaks and the news is on. We try and catch up with what’s going on in the world.

Damien: It’s all about current events kids.

Drew: And then we try to stop for some lunch. And then we talk about dumb stuff.

Damien: And we take shits.

Drew: I shit my pants once at lunch. I had to fart and squeezed one out and shit my pants at a truckstop.

Damien: Me and John barfed twice in the same day once.

Drew: On the fucking turnpike. I had to pay two fucking tolls because I had to get off twice for you and your fucking barf.

G: Okay, then what?

Drew: Then we show up in towns and usually we have fans we’ve kept in touch with so we text a fan to see what’s going on. Sometimes we can get a free fucking meal, like barbeque, some play, you know. Whatever. And we have travel Scrabble. And the dumbest guy on earth—Damien —houses all niggers. That’s what he does.

Damien: John beat me once. We tied once. But he did throw the letters down in anger.

G: Do you talk in the car? Growl at each other? Go over the set list?

A: No, no. We write the set list like ten minutes before the show.

Drew: We talk about dumb shit. Whatever’s in the news, what happened the night before.

Damien: We have a good laugh.

G: So what do you do with your time after the soundcheck?

Drew: We usually have time to kill, but that’s when we start texting.

Damien: And that’s when you just get enough time to eat before you go on so you don’t shit yourself or you’re too bloated on stage.

G: You don’t see the towns at all? You get in, go the club, get some dinner, do your show, go drinking.

Everyone: Pretty much.

A: We average about 500 miles a day when we’re on the road.

Drew: In the last five months, we’ve put 50,000 miles on the van.

G: You’re at the club, are you hanging with the other bands?

Drew: We went out with Eagles and we were opening.

A: It was great. We were sold out every fucking night.

Drew: The Eagles tour was amazing.

G: You hang out with them?

Drew: Yeah, yeah. We get on the bus with them and chill.

Damien: If the band’s cool and wants to have a drink and hang out, we’re there. We’ve actually never come across another band that’s been total dicks. So we’ve been pretty lucky.

G: How do you find parties after the show?

Drew: They come to us baby. In Minneapolis our van broke down. The spindle on the passenger side wheel caught fire, so it broke down in Wisconsin, so we had to get towed 200 miles on a flatbed truck to get to the next show.

Damien: I actually won the pool because I said we were going to break down in Wisconsin.

Drew: So we get to the show and unload off the flatbed. The club owners are like, we’ve never seen this before. We were like, if we’re schedule to play, we will fucking play.

A: I had to piss like a fucking racehorse. I get off of the flatbed in downtown Minneapolis, which is some bizarre set from Robocop and I’m looking for an alley. I walk past this guy that’s standing there with this dazed look on his face, and I notice cops advancing on the other side of me towards him. And there’s another guy on the other side of me, and he’s grabbing his gun. I look at the dude—this wastoid raver kid—and he’s got tazer wires hanging out of his chest.

G: Did you whip it out there and pee? That would have been rock star.

Damien: No. We went up around to the other corner where there was a dumpster.

Drew: After the show—we rocked it hard—we ended up staying at this all-night hoochie-mama gas station.

A: Apparently it’s the only place open past 2am.

Drew: The gas station had a convenience store, but upstairs it had a little diner and they were like you guys can go sleep on the benches up there.

A: There are hundreds of people outside of this gas station just partying. You couldn’t even get in to the place. I saw two people get maced by the cops.

Drew: Bobby and Steve’s.

Damien: That’s where the Minnesota Vikings go to get arrested.

Drew: So we stay at this gas station all night and they’ve got Sirius radio and they’re playing 80’s jams all night. We wake up and there’s this retarded kid with a cassette player….

Damien: He woke me up. I wake up and I see this slopey looking down at me.

Drew: He’s got the cassette player hanging around his neck.

Damien: He’s like, hey. I’m like, hey, what’s up man. I’m looking at his gear, and he’s like, yep, and I was like, okay.

Drew: There’s a big statue of Elvis standing over us the whole night.

Damien: We got a picture of John blowing him.

Drew: So the van can’t get fixed for another two days, so we had to leave John in Minneapolis and play two shows without him. We rented some vehicles and took off. We were with Eagles, and we weren’t not going to play.

G: Why did John have to stay?

Drew: Because the guitar is playing the lick of the song, and the drums have to hold the beat down. There’s bands that play with just guitars – like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or Local H. It wasn’t fun, but we did it. Then John had to drive 1500 miles to meet us before the next show. Which was in Salt Lake.

A: We played Kansas City and Denver without him.

Drew: The funny thing is there is no day in the life. It comes as it happens, you don’t know what’s going to happen the next day. The van could break down, somebody could get ill, somebody could get too drunk.

A: There was the time we were driving into Detroit to make the gig, we were barely going to make it on time and the windshield gets fucking shattered by a fucking bird.

Drew: You have to take it as it comes.

Damien: Heavy on the come part.

A: There’s the day in Chicago where I got offstage and went straight to the hospital.

G: With your heart?

A: Got shocked three times.

Drew: I almost killed him. I was hitting the snares so fast at the end of Sugarbomb where it speeds up that Aaron had this great idea of trying to match my snare hits by going hey, hey, hey, hey…til his blood pressure got to a certain point and almost died again.

A: It was fun. It hurt worse than anything ever.

Damien: Pain is temporary, pride is forever, my friend.

G: Tell me about the worst city you played.

Drew: Always Tucson, Arizona seems to be hurting. We have some fans out there, but for some reason, they just don’t show up.

A: I hate to say this, but Austin and me don’t get along for some reason.

Drew: But Austin does love us. We had an article in the paper there—the Austin American-Statesman—with a headline of “Has Austin Lost Its Mind Because It Likes the Giraffes?” Swear to god.

G: If you weren’t talking to me right now, would you be down in the green room hanging out with some groupies?

A: There is no green room.

Damien: I prefer to drink at the bar and talk to some of these fucking poor kids that spent their parent’s money to come out and see us. If I got to go backstage and flex, I will.

Drew: I chucked a shitrag at John in Aspen. He opened the door while I was shitting, and cause I shit standing up…

G: How do you shit standing up?

Drew: This is a long conversation. But, I threw a shitrag at him.

G: Do you guys have to deal with girls on the road?

Drew: What I do not say does not incriminate me.

Damien: I’ve sucked a few dicks. You know how it goes.

G: I’ll leave it at that.

Drew: There are girls on the road.

Damien: There’s not enough ho’s out there. For all the girls out there…

Drew: There’s merit to being a ho.

Damien: I like to know that you want to suck it. It doesn’t mean you’ll get to taste it, but I want to know you want to suck it.

G: What time does the night end and someone passes out?

Damien: Between 3 and 7.

G: Didn’t you say earlier you’d get up at 8 and get in the van?

Drew: Yeah, pretty much.

G: What do you eat on the road?

Drew: Dinners we try to hit some sushi, we try to keep it real.

Damien: Depends on how much sleep we’ve got and how much driving we have to do.

Drew: It’s a lot of pork rinds, beef jerky, egg McMuffins. Sperm and catfood. We have a rule—Damien and I—that we have to eat five hours before showtime so we can digest.

Damien: Or at least three.

Drew: Three’s hurting. We’ll try to find something nice.

Damien: Anything that doesn’t involve fried fucking death.

G: What’s the drink of choice on tour?

Drew: Jameson.

Damien: Jameson’s and Guinness.

A: Fuck Guinness.

Damien: He doesn’t like the Guinness.

G: Do you ever not drink because you’re so hung over from the day before?

Everyone: No.

Damien: I mean, I won’t drink until…

G: 9: 30 in the morning?

Damien: If it’s really bad and you spend all day puking, like after New Orleans, you need another drink to stop the shakes. I’m not talking about slugging, you just sip something.

Drew: And it’s after a rockin show the night before, and your body’s tired after all the action, so the next morning a lot of wake up with headbanger’s neck and pain. And the only way to ease the pain is pills and whiskey.

G: Do you ever call home?

Drew: We all hate the fucking phone. If you’re on the tour, you’re on the tour. I’ll call once a day so my people know I’m alive.

Damien: What are you going to say? What are you doing now? I’m driving. I’m at the club now. I’ll call you later. It’s three in the morning and I’m drunk at a hotel. Can I call you next week? Are you eating good? No.

G: This is a cramped van.

Damien: It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe it makes great journalism, but if I didn’t give a shit about these guys and love playing rock, fuck this. I’d make more at Arby’s working the salad bar.

G: You taking time off?

Drew: We’re working on a new album, so we’re going into hiding until maybe March. And we’ll come out with a new album.

Damien: Wearing only spandex.

G: You going to tease your hair up?

Drew: Yes, especially mine.

G: Apart from Jameson’s, what do you spend the most money on while you’re on tour?

Drew: Gas. It’s so fucking expensive. To go to California and back, to do a tour of this whole country, is about $2500 in gas. So up our guarantees you fuckers!

G: How are the club owners when you show up?

Drew: They’re usually pretty cool.

A: People don’t understand how important the rider is. It’s not like we’ve got grinder-organ monkeys or something, we just want beer, whiskey, and a case of water. That shit is so important. And food—nachos, a meal-buyout, anything. And, of course, the whiskey and the beer.

G: Would you do this again—the tour?

Drew: Every god damn day.

A: It’s almost easier to stay on the road than it is to come home.

G: Anything else?

Drew: When you get old and you can’t get you dick hard anymore and you’ve got no teeth and you’ve got five cats and two dogs, I’m going to sit on my porch and go, god damn, I had a great fucking time. I sat in a van with my friends and rocked hard and saw loads of tail. No regrets.

Damien: There’s no other reason I’d be in Missoula, Montana. But I can say I was there. I want to see America. I’m an American piece of shit and I want to get flushed down with the rest of them.

Drew: As gay as it sounds, when you bring a rock show to the people that are hungry for rock, they love you.

Damien: All you got to do is kick ass and be yourself. Fuck it. That’s it.