Ramming Speed are in the middle of a Winter tour that has them playing across the country for an entire month. Along the way, Ramming Speed’s drummer Jonah will be sharing highlights and pictures of all the craziness that’s been happening while on the road in his 2011 Ramming Speed Winter Tour Diary.
I’m bad with deadlines, but love sharing personal experiences and adventures. Thus: welcome to the 2011 Ramming Speed Winter Tour Diary! I’ve been taking notes for the last 12 or 13 days, but lashing something coherent together in between hangovers and load ins has proven to be an interesting task. With that in mind, I’m throwing out the three pages of scribbles in my backpack and starting fresh. Let’s go for themes and general concepts.
For one, bro love. Male bonding and the open road. Beer drinking, chest bumps, ZZ Top singalongs, the occasional rubbing of genitals and so on. Saviours quickly proved themselves to not only be a legendary rock and roll band in the making, but intensely fun dudes to be around while on our European tour last year. However, this time, fun dudes turned into best friends and watching them on stage has been like hearing heavy metal for the first time ever, every night of the week. When we weren’t all urinating in front of a city Christmas tree we were drunkenly nerding out over guitar scales or vintage heads. Scummer romance, alive and well.
As a tour package it was easy to adopt a modern day viking mindset. Dirty warriors packed into white metal boxes flying down the highway, bursting into town just to stomp onstage and tear into our gear with reckless abandon. Drunk on freedom… and plastic bottle alcohol. This image is all good fun, but the reality is that some nights are better than others. Despite good intentions and top tier shredding (and rad openers Fight Amp and Bad Dream), our Philly gig proved tame and uneventful. Chicago was at a great venue (the Double Door) with a helpful staff and great hospitality, but ended up under-attended. That said, the unexpected wildness of Lincoln, Nebraska, the welcoming crowd of Columbus, Ohio, or the speed-fueled madness of NYC more than made up for a slow night here and there. And this is the crux of it all: learning to appreciate the ebb and flow of the road. You deal with the curve-balls and you like it. If you try too hard to wrap your head around the “why?” and “how come?”, you’re bound to get brain bubbles.
Maybe it’s your guitarist half naked in the hallway of Reno’s Cal Neva hotel/casino, screaming like a monkey and waving a sharp blade in the face of a young couple sometime around dawn and after many many hours of madness. Or maybe it’s shooting down the icy corridor between Nebraska and Denver on a long ten hour cannonball run, knowing that your fate rests in the hands of the drunk mechanic who quietly snickered at the state of your van before fixing the brakes at a deep discount three days prior.
Your thirty minute set makes your band, but the singular moments of both weird and special during the rest of the day makes your tour. We were very lucky to have Saviours to dump gasoline on the out-of-the-ordinary every time it reared its head and, after some quick tour tattoos, last shots of whiskey, and a packed San Francisco show (with Kowloon Walled City and SLOUGH FEG!), we are now out on our own. The venues will now start changing from clubs to basements and the tour rolls on…
Our Tour Tattoos
Find out if Ramming Speed is coming to a town near you on their Facebook page.
