Nowhere Band News

I’m convinced that this is how most practice spaces work. If you’re in one for a very long time and have a great deal of patience, you can fine-tune things a little, but for the most part I think this is how things are… although I guess the one thing I should have added is to mark the entire room as the “PA system feedback pain zone,” in addition to “lesser drum ear pain zone.” Because let’s face it, when the PA starts to feed back, there really isn’t a safe spot in the room.

My friends the Harvey Girls point out that the other universal practice space thing I’m missing is a cat litter box; and, weirdly, they’re right. Most of the practice spaces I’ve used _have_ had litter boxes, or at least cats who liked to pee in gig bags. Huh.

The timing on 48’s a little uncertain; I’m travelling for work next week, and that’ll throw a bunch of curveballs into the mix. If 47’s inked before my flight leaves, and if there’s good internet access at my hotel, 47 should be up next Monday or Tuesday. If no to either or both of these, well, I’ll be back in Mipples by Thursday…

Even Josh has limits to who he wants to come to shows. Can you blame him? Getting grandmotherly huggles after a show is about the least-rocking thing in the world. During the heyday of AC/DC, the Young brothers kept their grandmother chained up in a basement just to prevent such an occurrence.

Other notes:

1. I learned the hard way that changing your wife’s ringtone to “Cotton Eye Joe” will provide much hilarity and leave you perilously close to sleeping on the couch. Being single, of course, Josh has no one but himself to blame for his ringtone.

2. Josh’s all-beige apartment is pretty typical for your cheaper Minneapolis rentals. I lived in a bunch in my 20s, and the weirdest thing is that they all had the exact same floor plan.

3. The hardest part of the coloring process for this strip- by a long shot- was Josh’s shirt, which is really fussy and has a lot of little nooks and crannies and isn’t even the shirt I meant to draw to begin with. This is why so many NB characters wear blank shirts. Ugh.

Man, those Swedish death metal dudes are depraved. Depraved and lewd.

Wherein Dan and Miranda talk about where the Awesome Boys fit into the bigger scheme of their lives.

I like the way this one looks; it’s been a long time since I’ve done something with a black gutter, which I used to way, way overdo. In moderation, it’s a cool look.

Other notes:

1. Just to be clear, not autobiographical. Although I’m guessing that everyone in a band (or dating/married to someone in a band) will have something resembling this conversation at some point. or think about this conversation.

2. For the millionth time, I wish I’d either given Miranda a different name or a different hair color, since I’m always cringing about the (extremely) unintentional Sex and the City shoutout.

3. While I’m at it, I wish I hadn’t gone for a Wilco song for 43, because “The Late Greats” is just too thematically perfect not to use here. Oh, well.

4. #45 will probably take about 2 weeks. Some stuff’s happening this week that won’t be very conducive to comic-making.

Where do you go when you’ve busted your guitar, need a new one, and don’t have much cash? You go to a dark, dark place; a place where 14-year-olds seranade you with their metallic chops; a place where dudes with ponytails try to sell hundred-watt amps to practice with in your apartment; a place where you can count on some dude who thinks he’s Flea to be snapping and popping with a bass in the corner; a place where the sales people will hand you a cable, plug you into some digital-amp monstrosity, and then stand there openly radiating, “what’ve you got, sucka?!” as you try to test-drive a guitar; where signature-model guitars with fake autographs from the dudes in Oasis hang on the walls as something other than a joke.

Actually, I suppose if you’re smart you go to Craigslist. But an awful lot of people aren’t smart.

Not that you put a lot of thought into it when you go guitar-smashing, but maybe Aaron should have thought things through a little bit more than he did… Like I said for #41, I’ve never smashed a guitar, but I did get rid of one because I thought it had bad wiring, when it turned out I’d just been using the wrong kind of cable. Hey, live and learn.

I have not ever done this, but god knows there have been lots of times I’ve wanted to.

Also: somehow, I guess this is the 1-year anniversary of Nowhere Band. Huh. It doesn’t seem that long, but that’s pretty cool. Lots of ups, lots of downs (the biggest down being the stretch from about #5 to #10-ish when I was really struggling with a move to a different computer/scanner system). All in all, I guess I’m pretty happy with the way things have moved in the first year, and really it’s probably completely in character that The Awesome Boys have managed not to play a “real” show during that whole time.

Aaaaand speaking of real shows… my band, Derailleur, actually has one! Sept. 12 at the Bedlam Theater in Minneapolis. Details here.

Josh has some worries about the stability of the band. Is he justified? Read and judge for yourself!

Not much in the way of direct liner notes… Intraband relations are always complicated, and the Awesome Boys aren’t any different.

As for the numbering change, yeah, I’m correcting for the a/b/c thing I used to use for extended storylines, which was throwing off the numbers.

One last gasp on the covers discussion. The Boys are wrestling with something I still see a lot of, to my puzzlement and amusement: the Replacements still cast a long, long shadow up here. When I was a music writer a couple of years ago, every local band I interviewed, without fail, would mention the Replacements, even if it was just to say that they see part of their mission as getting the Twin Cities music scene out of the Replacements rut. If one band says something like that, it doesn’t mean much, but when everybody does, it gets kind of interesting. Anyway, the vast majority of Minnesota bands do seem to go through at least a very short phase where they see themselves as the heirs to the ‘Mats, either in sound or in work ethic (IE, “we’re so talented that we don’t need to practice, so let’s get FUCKED UP”).

To be honest, I like the Replacements a lot, but I always kind of preferred Husker Du. And yet nobody compares themselves to them. Weird.

…and we continue with last week’s internal Awesome Boys debate over how to get ready for their show at the Terminal.

I don’t know what the deal is with the rule Jon cites, but it seems to be pretty ironclad… covering still-active bands that you like is just Not Done, for no good reason that I can think of. Especially weird since I remember reading about Jimi Hendrix covering “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” like a day or two after it was released, and the Beatles being really flattered, etc, etc. Essentially, I think it’s hard to say that something’s uncool if Jimi Hendrix did it (especially death by vomit!).

Future comics note: I’ve gotten a little bored with the formatting and general look of Nowhere Band. Played with it a little bit for this one, and it might drift some more as time goes on. Depends on how some experiments go, and how much drag they put on the comic-making process.

I survived the monster bike ride I was talking about, although lack of daylight forced us to cut it off at about 75 miles. We made up for the shortfall, though, by spending the weekend splitting a metric shitload of wood.

I don’t do a very good job of keeping my weekends restful.