APRIL 1, 2004 - SALT LAKE CITY, UT

Before the internet ruined it—as it does with most great things—I used to love April Fool's Day. When I was in bands, I tried to do a prank every year, but I never wanted to do the "we're breaking up" thing, because while people fell for it, every band did it. Having a band MySpace account was the perfect outlet for jokes, and I abused it more than I should have.

One year I posted a bulletin that no one in the band was straight edge anymore, and that veganism was far more important so we were definitely continuing as a band. That got a lot of angry messages.

Another year, after MySpace started allowing music players to be embedded in personal profiles, I got in and changed the band names and all the song titles. I changed our band name to "The Dick Holsters" and made an awful pink and purple logo, that made a lot of people very upset.

The best, worst prank I ever used Cherem for though was one I wrote about for the Until My Heart Stops blog I used to do. I've been going back to that a lot lately (which is the writing I was doing while I was on fun-employment last winter, instead of blogging on here) and ran across it earlier tonight. It's so dumb that I felt like I had to share it.

APRIL 1, 2004 - KILBY COURT

If I had to guess, I’d say that Cherem played somewhere between 75-100 shows in Salt Lake City alone. After a while they all start to blend together, and the more time passes, the harder it is to distinguish between any of them. This one sticks out and is still memorable only because of how much planning we did and how badly we failed at its execution.

Someone named Danny—a guy that none of us had ever met—sent Clint an email and invited Cherem to play a benefit show for a local animal rights group. He was setting it up at Kilby Court, which intrigued us. Kilby Court was a small venue mostly reserved for indie/punk bands. They had done hardcore shows in the past, but there were too many fights and they stopped allowing them. We hadn’t played a local show in a while, and saw it as an opportunity to bridge the gap and get back in the good graces of Kilby. Salt Lake was always in need of a venue, and we felt that we could use this show as a platform to prove that things had kind of turned around and fights at shows were a thing of the past.

The show was also on April 1st, which meant that we also had to come up with a really good prank to go along with our diplomacy.

I came up with an idea, pitched it to the rest of the guys, and we put the plan in motion.

On our website I wrote a post about how we were going through tough times as a band. Bill had recently been contacted by the police and was under investigation as a terrorist threat. The police had claimed that he was the mastermind behind a string of animal liberation-related crimes around the state of Utah, the events were being investigated and a case was being built against him. While Bill hadn’t been arrested yet, his lawyer had advised him to lay low, and avoid any and all contact with people that may be associated with that kind of thing, and thus, would be taking a little break from singing for Cherem.

Since we didn’t want to cancel the show and we still felt strongly about the subject, we’d still be playing the benefit on April 1st, only our good friend and surrogate band member, Brook, would be filling in on vocals. We thanked everyone for sticking with us and asked that everyone come to the show for additional support.

It worked way better than any of us had anticipated. I didn’t really think anyone ever looked at the Cherem site, but I was very wrong. Someone had seen it and reposted it as a MySpace bulletin and things spread like wildfire. We started getting emails and messages every day, and people were calling Bill to make sure he was okay.

Keeping half a dozen people committed to a two-week long joke is a lot to ask, and for the most part it worked. There were a few people that called bullshit as soon as they saw the April 1 day of the show, but we all kept up a pretty unified front, and just avoided the question whenever we could with lines like, “I don’t know. Bill’s lawyer doesn’t want us to really say anything.”

The lineup for the show was a little awkward and we had no idea where we’d fall in the order. There were two indie bands, a gutter punk band and us, but things kept changing all the way until the last minute. Clint, Nick, Chris and I all showed up and loaded our gear in through the back and Brook arrived not too much later. Bill showed up with his girlfriend, Misty, as soon as I found out when we were playing, but hung around outside by his car while we set up.

The way it was supposed to work was that we’d get everything set up, sneak Bill in through the back door and have him hide behind all the extra equipment that was off to the side of the stage. We’d start playing, Brook would be at the front of the stage jumping around and pretending to sing into a microphone that wasn’t turned on, while Bill actually sang from the side. It would look like a terrible lip-sync, and everyone in the crowd would be confused. After the first song, Bill would come up on stage, say “April Fools!” and we’d all laugh before finishing the set.

But getting that many people on board for a joke was a lot harder than it should have been. The main problem was the sound guy at Kilby Court. He had absolutely no idea why I wanted two microphones, but only wanted one of them to be turned on. I tried my best to explain it to him without ruining the joke, but he still didn’t get it. I explained to him what was going to happen, but he didn’t know why, and the more I told him the less he understood. He eventually gave us two microphones, shrugged his shoulders and walked away.

When we were all set up and ready, he asked for a soundcheck. He did all the instruments, and got ready to start. I was facing Clint and he was gearing up to count us off, when we heard the sound guy’s voice come through the speakers.

“Okay, uh, microphone one. The one on the stage, I guess.” he said.

Clint just started smiling and broke into a giant laugh. I turned around, looked at Nick and said, “Are you fucking kidding me?” He and Chris were both laughing. I just shook my head.

Brook shrugged, started laughing and spoke into the microphone. After he had finished, we waited for him to check the second mic, the one that no one could see and further ruin the surprise, but he didn’t. After Brook checked his, the sound guy’s voice came through the speakers again.

“You’re good to go,” he said.

I looked off to the side of the stage, and Bill was tapping the microphone with his fingers. No sound was coming out. He shook his head, and Clint counted off. We started playing the first song, and Brook tried to lip sync, but there were no vocals. Every few seconds Brook would make a noise and it could be heard over the PA. He stuck with it for about a minute until Bill walked up on stage, took the mic from him and we finished the set.

A few people appreciated what we tried to do, a few people were angry that we’d joke about that kind of situation, and a couple were just relieved that Bill was okay.

Bill, Clint and I spent the rest of the year explaining to people in every city that we drove through that we’d made the whole thing up, and that’s why we weren’t accepting donations towards Bill’s legal troubles.

I learned two things from that whole ordeal. One is that it takes a lot of hard work to get good practical joke to land, and two, a lot of animal rights activists have a terrible sense of humor.

...AND IT'S DONE

For the time being, anyway.

There hasn't been much going on in the universe of satellite provider copy writing, so I've had plenty of time to work on those "Until My Heart Stops" entries. I've kept a pretty good pace since late summer and I'm actually really excited about the fact that I finished it.

Sort of.

I've been working on these stories for about 8 years now (I wrote the first one in February of 2005) and I've probably matured as a writer a little bit over that time. At least I hope I have. If I haven't, then I'm going to run into some serious problems over the next little while.

This was a huge undertaking and now that the first draft is done, I can move on to the second. I know that I need to let it sit for a while before taking it back out, but that's hard to do. I want to treat this as a real thing and give each character (i.e. real person) an actual voice and make it so it reads not so much like a collection of things that happened, but an actual narrative story broken up into segments. I started out just aping Get In The Van, but now I'm trying to figure out ways to avoid that.

There are a bunch of things I want to accomplish with this and make it more of an autobiography of a ten-year stretch of my life. Those ten years weren't incredibly compelling, but they were a lot of fun and made for some great stories. I'm pretty excited to put it out into the world, but that's still a ways away.

There's rewrites, layouts, pictures and a better title in the future, but for now, it's done. It's a cool feeling to finish something this big, but it also feels a little strange. I kind of thought it would be one of those things I kept plugging away at but never actually got anywhere with.

Thank god for corporate desk jobs with downtime, right?

UNTIL MY HEART STOPS - UPDATE

I seriously doubt anyone still looks at my other blog (Until My Heart Stops), but in the off chance that someone does, I'm making a little update.

This project is still very much alive, it's just not alive in real time. The method used to be that I'd write a piece and post it immediately, but I stopped doing that a long, long time ago. Like 4 years ago. Ooops.

I transferred everything that's on this site to a Google Doc and added every other out of town date that I've played with Cherem, Tamerlane and Aftermath of a Trainwreck. I made little bullet points of things I remembered about each show and have been slowly plugging away at it ever since.

Earlier this year, I got a boring desk job that comes with A LOT of downtime. In some of that downtime, I've been pecking away at these stories and fleshing them out. The last entry that I published (July 19, 2005 - Redlands, CA) is pages 49-50 of that document. I just hit page 116 this morning. Things are moving along nicely.

My goal is to have the whole thing finished by the end of the year. I'll let it sit for a month or so then dive back in for rewrites. I want to make the tone consistent throughout and hit all the little things that I missed along the way - anecdotes, side stories, new recollections, etc.

The plan is to put it together with some fliers, photos, set lists, news articles and things like that and make a nice, limited edition book. Mostly it would be just for the dudes in the band, but depending on how it turns out and how much it costs to manufacture, I might make a few extra available in the off chance that other people want one.

We'll see. I'm determined to get this finished. Whether or not anyone actually sees it is another story all together.

Either way, I'm pretty proud of the progress, so I thought I'd throw it out there. It's kind of like taking a selfie at the gym - if there's no real time record of you doing it, then you didn't really do it in the first place. I didn't make the rules, but that's what they are.

Back to work.

UNTIL MY HEART STOPS

In addition to the always delightful and informative trevorhale.com, I also have another, far less frequented and even less updated blog.

I started it a long time ago as a home for all the writing I had done about touring and being in bands. It's called Until My Heart Stops. The goal was to update it a couple of times each week (ha) during and after all the touring I was going to do. That plan started somewhere around Valentine's Day in 2005 and I started cobbling together stuff I had already written and started fresh. Stories were pulled from various MySpace blogs, LiveJournal posts and my trusty notebook.

The goal was to write about every out of state show I played with either Cherem, Tamerlane, Cool Your Jets or whatever other band I was in at the time. I had decided to take a few years off of school and become a full-time touring musician.

It might have been the worst idea I'd had up to that point.

We never toured more than a few weeks at a time and there were months in between stints out on the road. And over time, I got lazier and lazier about updating or writing about any of the shows. There are huge gaps and lapses on the blog. I started out strong, with 36 posts in 2005, 1 in 2006, 1 in 2007 (when both Tamerlane, Cherem and Cool Your Jets stopped being real bands that ever did anything), 0 in 2008, 9 in 2009 (when the restaurant I worked at was closed for 3 months and I had nothing to do so I tried to get caught back up) and 1 in 2010. Hasn't been touched since.

Slowly, I've been working on compiling a lot of little miscellaneous tidbits and writings that have shown up elsewhere but it just hasn't been consistent. There's a file on my desktop with scanned fliers, notes, pictures and various writings and I've always meant to get back to it.

Last week, as I was sitting at work, I realized that I now have the perfect opportunity to do something with this. I pretty much always have something to do at work, but sometimes, I'll finish a project early and there won't be anything else ready to start right away. Instead of just refreshing Twitter every few minutes, I can work on Until My Heart Stops.

That night, I gathered everything I could find that was on the Internet in some form or another, took the word document out of the desktop folder and compiled it all into one place on my Google Drive so I can get to it whenever I have a few minutes.

Right now it's a text document that's 90 pages long. There are still 47 shows that have bullet point notes that I remember but haven't written about yet. I'm trying to make it a point to get through at least three a week when I have downtime either at work or at home.

Then once I've finished, I'll go back through and make it all consistent. I've grown a lot as a writer since I started doing this in 2005 and some of those older posts are hard to look at. I've almost gone back to them all in the past week, but stopped myself.

Finish the damn thing first, then toy with it. That's my 2013 goal. It was also my goal from 2010, 2011 and 2012, too. But whatever.

No one probably cares about any of these stories, but I'm going to do something with them anyway. Maybe by summertime next year I'll have my own version of Get In The Van where you get to read all about the weird places Cherem played and all the random stuff that happens on the poorly planned and borderline disastrous tours of a vegan straight edge band.

My uncle really wants it to be called The Junkyard Next to the Women's Prison, which is an actual place we played once. But I don't know. I'm getting ahead of myself again.

You can read one of my favorite tour stories in the post below. That's one that I'm still mildly happy with, but will definitely need to clean it up a bit later on. Still though. It's a good time.

Check it out.

AUGUST 12, 2006 - ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO

The El Paso show ran late. Add that to the fact that it was a Saturday night, and by the time we left Taco Cabana, it was around two o’clock in the morning. Since I had driven the night before, it was my turn to sleep and Clint was ready to drive. Albuquerque was three and a half hours away, so we figured we’d get there with a little time to sleep in the van before the sun got high enough to make that impossible. Seemed like an easy enough drive, but there was one catch.

Everyone in El Paso, at various times through the night when they learned where we were headed next, told us to be extra careful on the drive through New Mexico. They said we had to drive through a town called, I kid you not, Truth or Consequences and that the town was the inspiration behind the movie Nothing But Trouble. In the movie, Chevy Chase runs a stop sign, gets arrested and detained in a junkyard prison. Apparently, this is really what it was like. They said that the road turns into a two lane highway that runs right through town, and that there’s cops waiting at every turn. They’ve got nothing better to do than pull people over for even going 2 miles over the speed limit. Another kid told us that the town itself is just a haven for degenerate drug addicts, and the way they support their habit is by hiding on the side of the highway, and waiting for passing vehicles. Once one gets close enough, they would throw bottles, cans, whatever they could find on the road to make the driver stop. Once they did, they would be ambushed and robbed.

Sounded like an old wives tale, but we were still half nervous/half excited to find out if they were telling the truth.

As we got in the van, I hung up front and gave Clint directions. “Right outside El Paso, look for the 25 North. That will take us all the way up to Albuquerque. It shouldn’t take long.” With that, I climbed on to the third bench, the best spot in the van, and immediately fell asleep.

When I woke up, we were pulled off to the side of the road and the dome light up front was on. I looked at my phone and the time was 4:52 am. I went up front and asked Clint what was going on. Then I noticed a highway sign that read 10 East a little ways ahead.

“I missed the 25.” Clint said, “And I think I missed it a while ago.”
“It’s like 15 miles outside of El Paso.”
“Then I missed it by about 100 miles. We’re about 80 miles from the Arizona border.”
“Fuck,” I said, “so we haven’t gone through Truth or Consequences yet?”
“Nope.”
“Well, turn around. I’m going back to sleep.”

A couple of hours later we pulled over again because Clint was too tired to keep driving. Austin took over and I fell back asleep. At about 8:30 in the morning we pulled up in front of some building and parked. I sat up, still tired but awake, and asked if we had driven through Truth or Consequences. Austin told me we had, and that he didn’t see a single person or car the whole way through and should be glad I slept and missed it. It took us 7 hours to make a drive that should have been 3 at the most. The day was off to a good start.

It was too hot to sleep, so we got out of the van and proceeded to take part in our usual tour routine: Coffee shops, Whole Foods, K-Mart and the mall. We did find one area that had a bunch of little shops and whatnot, so we parked the van and walked around. We spotted a health food store and as we cut across towards it, a lady sitting at an outside table of the restaurant next to it started shouting, “Hey! Hey! I know you guys! You’re the guys that are playing tonight!”

We figured she was either making it up or had us confused, so we just said yes and continued into the store. “I want to talk to you about something when you come back out.”

We took care of business and left. Sure enough, she was waiting for us to come out and when we did, her first words were “I’ll pay you more to play at my club.”

Confused, we asked her what the hell she was talking about, because she obviously had no idea who we were.

“You guys are the fire dancers, right? The ones playing at (insert ridiculous club name) tonight? Because I own a gay club called (insert equally ridiculous, but more flamboyant club name) just up the street, and I think you guys would do much better there.”

We all looked at each other, then spent five minutes trying to convince some lady that we were neither gay nor fire dancers and that we had no intention of taking her up on her offer, not just playing hardball to get more money.

At one point she did say, “If you’re not the fire dancers, why are you all dressed the same?”

We all looked at each other again, even more confused. Each of us was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, most of which were black. But we weren’t dressed exactly the same, so that statement confused us.

Still not convinced that we weren’t gay fire dancers, she finally gave up and let us go. We walked away and started talking about how awesome it would have been to just say yes, ask for half the money up front and just never show up. She wouldn’t have known. But of course we didn’t think of that until the opportunity had passed.

 Punk Rock Matt had taken an interest in magic when we met Richard the Adequate on the streets of Orlando, so when we passed a magic shop he had to go in and learn a few tricks. Once back outside, he refused to show us anything he learned because he was afraid we’d give him shit. It’s true, we did then and we still do now. But he’s getting better at it, so we’re equally impressed as we are skeptical.

Around 6, we found the venue and hung out in the parking lot until the show started. We had jumped on tour with Winds of Plague and A Love Ends Suicide in Alabama, and told we were on all the shows. But no one had informed most of the club owners or promoters of that fact, so this was another case of us showing up and having to plead our case to get us on the show. The promoter said he couldn’t promise us any money, but we could play and sell merch and if he had any left over, he’d do what he could. We said fine, set up and played. It was a small show, but a few kids were into it, and that’s what it’s all about.

After the show, as I was sitting in the van ready to go, Austin came out and asked if I’d seen the microphone. I told him that I hadn’t, and that Bill brings his own mic and never uses the club’s. He said he knew that, but the promoter was accusing us of stealing his, and that if we didn’t find it, not only was he not going to pay us, but he was going to take $150 off whatever he was going to pay the other two bands. We were furious. Bill told him that he took their mic off, set it on the stage and used his and that was the last he ever saw of it. Austin argued with the promoter, Bill and Clint looked all around the venue and I took everything out of the trailer to prove to him that we didn’t take it. After 15 minutes of arguing, we got in the van to leave when the promoter stopped us. He and Austin talked, and he decided that we didn’t take it, apologized and gave us $45 for gas.

Still upset, we drove off in silence until all of a sudden Clint started laughing hysterically and said, “Are you fucking serious?”

I turned around from the passenger seat and saw Bill holding two microphones, his own and the one from the club.

“I didn’t realize I had it.”

It was in his fucking pocket. The whole time. He checked everywhere inside the venue, I checked the whole van and trailer, Austin argued that we weren’t fucking thieves, and the whole time, it was right in his goddamn pocket.

The mood lightened up after that and we started on our drive to Phoenix. Austin drove while I rode shotgun, and a few hours into the drive, I dozed off. I woke up when I heard Austin say, “Oh fuck.”

My eyes snapped open, I looked at him and he said, “We’re out of gas.”

“Are we all the way out, or did the fuel light just come on”
“We’re out. We’re coasting. And I passed a gas station like 5 or 10 miles ago.”

We both watched as the speedometer plummeted at a fairly rapid pace, and we went slower and slower. At about 8 mph, the road broke and we started rolling down hill and the needle began climbing higher. About that time we passed a sign for gas 1 mile away. Austin and I felt relieved, and we made it all the way up to 35 as we approached the off-ramp. We could see the gas station just to the right of the exit, but the problem was that it was up a small hill. We figured we could make it, so Austin got as far to the left as possible and was just going to use the momentum to make a wide turn and hopefully have just enough power to make it. As we got closer, we looked to make sure it was clear, but it wasn’t. The only car on the road was a huge semi truck coming up from our left, going just slow enough that it was timed to pass us the second we hit the end of the ramp. Austin held out as long as possible, but still had to brake at the end. We lost all momentum came to a dead stop at the bottom of the driveway of a gas station that was closed.

The pumps still worked, but there was no one around to help, so we were on our own. Six vegan kids pushing a van and trailer up a hill isn’t as easy as it sounds. It took all our energy, and we had to let it roll across the road in order to get a good running start, but after 15 minutes of trying we finally made it and filled up.

We pulled out of the gas station and headed down the hill to the freeway entrance, when we all saw the same thing. There, to the left of the freeway off-ramp and down hill, was an open gas station 30 cents a gallon cheaper.

“Well fuck,” I said, ”at least we can get drinks.”

NEW POST UP ON xUNTIL MY HEART STOPSx

"We drove sluggishly through the night, with Brook doing the lions share of the work behind the wheel. I rode shotgun most of the way, but couldn’t stay awake the entire time—which is the one thing you’re supposed to do while riding shotgun on tour. Sorry about that Brook..."

Head over and check out the rest.