James’ Blog: Safetysuit Is My Hero
By Team Stovall on January 8th, 2012Over the past couple of years we have had the great fortune to do two tours with the band Safetysuit. Over those two tours they have become one of our favorite bands and some of our very favorite people.
On our last trip together in Asia they were working on finishing up the tracks for their new record. As they were working on the record their label imprint imploded and they were absorbed into their parent label. A lot of times this means big trouble for a band. New staff, new priorities, new cooks in the kitchen… It can get messy.
We could tell they had their worries about the situation… How could they not… But they were also so excited about the music they were getting ready to release… And they deserved to be… The pieces and demos they played for us back then sounded amazing… And they weren’t even done.
After we all got home from Asia, they started working on getting the record out… They would set a release date for it and then the label would push it back… They would set a new one… The label would push it back… (That is also not a very comforting thing for a band in their position)
They were constantly in our thoughts and prayers. They are such a great band and such wonderful people that we really wanted everything to come together for them.
Well, the record finally got it’s digital release last week… It went straight to #2 on the iTunes charts and after a day or so they even bumped Adele’s record off the #1 spot for a while… Which is a gigantic accomplishment… Huge…
The pride and vindication they must have felt after working so long to get that record out… Through all that uncertainty… It must have been incredible.
Well, tonight was their CD release show here in Nashville. It was in a relatively small club so it sold out weeks ago and we’ve been looking forward to it for a while.
We got there early to make sure we could get a good spot… It was packed… Seriously packed… The energy was palpable… It was amazing.
When they finally took the stage the crowd went bananas… They started playing the record down track by track… Killing it the way they always do… And the crowd was eating it up. We’ve seen them a bunch of times from behind the stage, but this was our first time out front with the fans… Man, I didn’t think I could like their show much better than I did… But it happened.
Then all of a sudden, about six songs into the set… Doug, their lead singer made an odd and deliberate run backstage… The lights went down, but you could still make out the faces of the other guys… Something was wrong… After a couple minutes of confusion and on-stage huddling their drummer Tate approached the mic…
Evidently Doug had been really sick all day… He thought he could make it, but he was wrong… He had just made it off stage before collapsing… They were all visibly shaken and concerned… After a couple more minutes Doug made his way back out, supported by their tour manager, to uproarious applause… He made one last attempt to get a song going, but he just didn’t have it in him…
We were on tour a couple years ago with them when the entire tour came down with dysentery… We played three shows with puke bags hidden behind all the amps… These guys are not wusses… So we knew this had to be really bad. You could see it all over his face… He was wrecked. And with tears in his eyes he had to walk away from a packed-to-the-rafters hometown crowd on what should have been the most triumphant and spectacular CD release show… I can’t imagine how hard that must have been. Well, I can… But I don’t want to.
They finally got him off stage, the crowd cheering him along and showing their love the whole way… But the band was still up there… Where can you go from there? All these people have paid to be part of this night, but you have no singer…
After a couple minutes of huddling and head-scratching Tate walked to the mic and asked if the crowd wanted to just sing for Doug… The place went crazy… So Dave, Tate, and Jeremy picked up their gear and finished out the night playing the band’s biggest songs with the crowd and a couple singers from their opening bands belting out every word at the top of their lungs… Holy s*** they have some amazing fans.
I know it’s not what they wanted or how they wanted it to go, but everyone in the room tonight got to be part of something very special. And that’s what they really wanted in the first place. To share something special with the band…
It takes a real band to walk up to the edge of disaster like that during such a huge show, pull it back, and not only salvage it, but leave their fans feeling like they were just a part of something great… No matter how far from the plan it was.
So tonight, like many others, I can honestly say that Safetysuit are my heroes. I just hope they can all see tonight the way their audience did… And we all hope Doug feels better and is back to 11 very soon.
jb
James’ Blog: Bahrain… The Land Of Chicken And Red Bull
By JamesBavendam on December 31st, 2011After an amazing three days aboard the Stennis it was finally time to get back to land for our two shows in Bahrain. This was our second time in Bahrain and my first time returning to a foreign country for the second time. (Try and diagram that sentence)
I remember the very first moment I stepped foot in Bahrain… It was a beautiful summer night when the marvelous pressurized door of Boeing 737 swung open to reveal a world I had never dreamed of experiencing… A world where it’s 105 degrees at 10pm on a Tuesday… A world where thinking thoughts is enough to break you into a full-body sweat… A world where… Well… Where it’s really hot.
Much hotter than I imagined… That’s my point.
Anyway…
I had never been to anywhere in the Middle East before… Shocking, I know… I am a drummer after all… But with all that’s happened in America over the last decade or so, I would be lying if I said there wasn’t an odd balancing act between curiosity and apprehension going on inside of me.
Bahrain is an amazing place… It’s viewed as sort of the Las Vegas of the middle east. It’s a predominantly Muslim country, but it is not governed by religious law. You can drink, you can smoke, you can wear western clothes, you can even be Catholic… They don’t care.
And neither do a lot of the Saudis evidently because on the weekends they flood across the bridge to wear jeans, drink beer, eat Kentucky Fried Chicken, and whatever else they want to. The Saudis we were hanging out with in the bar liked to joke that “Allah can’t see across the bridge”. (And in this context, by “Allah”, they mean the head-cracking hand-chopping-off Saudi religious police.)
It’s actually kind of eerie in way when you first start driving around Bahrain because in a lot of ways it looks like you just got off the interstate near a mall in Virginia somewhere… There’s the McDonald’s, there’s the Applebee’s, there’s the TGI Friday’s… The signs are just all in Arabic.
It just goes to prove that literally everyone loves 2-for-1 taquitos and jalapeno poppers.
Our situation in Bahrain was actually very cool… We got to stay in a hotel off base, we got to drink beers with the locals in the bar, we even got to walk around town a bit. My very favorite moment of cross-cultural-mind-bending-ridulousness was when we were out to dinner one night on the first trip and my brain just started buzzing… I had step and back and hit the pause button so I would never forget it… There we were sitting in Bahrain… In a Mexican restaurant… Listening to a Filipino singer… Singing a country song from Nashville… Written by an Australian country singer. BOOM!
I’ll give you a moment to gather your thoughts after that one…
…
However, even with the KFC and widespread western-tolerance, I won’t lie – it’s a little odd the first time you get passed on the sidewalk by a group of women in head-to-toe Burqas… Or see cars drive by with the husbands in the front seat and the wives in the rear… You’re definitely in another part of the world and there’s no way to forget that.
But the beautiful thing about Bahrain is that right behind the group of women in burqas there’s another group decked out in western fashion… And right behind that car is another one with the wife driving and a rosary hanging from the rear view… And it was all fine.
In fact, I even found the attitudes toward Americans to be much better out and about in Bahrain than I did in southern Italy. Which, on one hand, shouldn’t necessarily be surprising… But after watching the news here in America for the last decade, it was.
Not to say that there aren’t religious and political battles being fought in Bahrain… There are.
Our friend Hussein, one of the locals who works on base who escorted us a lot, had to move his kids out of his house and in with relatives because the violence and prejudice had gotten so bad in his neighborhood… You see Hussein is a Muslim… Just not the right kind evidently.
Hussein is Shi’a Muslim, who are the majority in Bahrain. While the King, the royal family, and most of the government are Sunni Muslims… From what I understand it’s a lot like Catholics and Protestants… Same basic religion with some small, but very important differences in interpretation…
But my point is not to devolve in to a Bahrainian civics lesson… My point is that my time in Bahrain gave me a lot of hope. Tolerance and diversity work the same way over there that they do over here. The problem is never really these people or those people… This religion or that religion… It’s with the crazies and the not-crazies.
Crazies are the worst… They always have the loudest voices, the worst ideas, and they’re willing to ruin everything to get them heard.
And the shows were pretty good too… ; )
Now it’s late, I am soap-boxed out, so I will leave you with some pictures and I will bid you good morrow.
Good morrow…
James
James’ Blog: John C Stennis Part III
By Team Stovall on December 30th, 2011Most of time when we’re on tour, whether we’re playing somewhere crazy like Djibouti or somewhere much closer to home, we’re usually in and out of places pretty quick. You usually pull in about 5 hours before the show, set up, soundcheck, relax, get ready, play, pack up, and then head out. The most time we usually get to spend anywhere is in the hotel resting up for the drive the next day. This pattern leads to a lot of conversations like this…
-”Oh man, you guys just played Charleston… That place is amazing. How did you like it?”
Me -”Oh yeah. Charleston was awesome… The Holiday Inn had a great breakfast and the beds were super comfy.”
-”How did you like downtown? Isn’t it beautiful… Did you guys get to walk around much?”
Me -”There’s a downtown?”
This is pretty standard issue with touring bands. You get to see the inside of hotel rooms in all kinds of super cool places. It only gets more exciting on these Navy Entertainment tours when we’re not jumping between clubs in the southeast, we’re jumping between countries and continents.
When we got our first official copy of the schedule we were very excited to be kicking off the tour on the Stennis. When we actually gave the schedule the first thorough reading we noticed that, not only were we playing there, but we were going to be there for two nights and almost three days.
Wow.
That never happens. Two nights on an aircraft carrier. Who gets to do that?
Well… Sailors, I know… But besides that…
The only possible downside to all of it was that we were going to be spending almost three days on a aircraft carrier… And none of us had any idea what that meant.
I had a feeling it was either going to be the coolest three days of my life, or the longest.
After a heck of a trip to get out to the ship, there we were standing inside the belly of the beast, and we were about to find out.
I’m just kidding… I’ll save the suspense, what is this CSI? We had an amazing time… Once we got on board it was a whirlwind of tours and meet-and-greets and amazing experiences, with a little bit of sleep thrown in.
I’ve been trying for a while to be able to write it all out story style, but I just can’t… Too much happened too quickly. Even if I could dissect and reorder all the memories in my head to be correct, there’s just too much… We would be onto Stennis Blog Part 17, everyone would be bored by that point, and we’d already be done with our next tour before I’d finished telling about this one. So I’m giving up on that… But I have narrowed down the best of the best to pass on:
Top 5 Memories From Being On The Stennis:
1) The Ship -
Trying to really picture a ship on this scale is futile if you’ve never been on one… It’s just insane. A cruise ship is similar in a lot of ways, but cruise ships are crazy in part because they work so hard to make you forget you’re on a boat. You’re sitting there watching some gaudy review of the doo-wop era in a giant theater when the room starts moving – you then have to suppress your panic reaction, remind yourself you’re on a boat, and remember it’s all ok.
On a ship like the Stennis, the seemingly endless corridors of ladders and pipes and cold grey steel won’t ever let you forget you’re on a ship… You just spend the whole time walking around going, “Holy crap, this is all the same ship?” And it is…
But the people on board know it like the back of their hand. It’s amazing… Have you ever seen a group of musicians try and follow a sailor around the inside of an aircraft carrier? I have… It’s not pretty. if they had cameras on us the whole time there would definitely be a solid blooper reel to be made. The sailors just fly up and down ladders, around corners, under the pipes, through the hatches and there we are, one by one “Ummm, so I put one hand here… And my foot goes where?” Pretty soon there’s a rescue party going back to find lost band members, it’s ugly.
Have you ever tried to sleep when someone is launching an F-18 two floors above your room? It’s not easy… But these guys do it every night. Actually, one of the most interesting things I kept hearing is that, after a year out on one of these things, a lot of the sailors have problems readjusting to quiet. They finally get home to a place where they have a comfy bed and people aren’t banging metal and launching jets 24 hours a day and they can’t sleep. The silence is too much… How nutty is that?
2) Nighttime Flight Ops -
On our first night we got an invite to come upstairs and watch the last group of jets come in and land for the night. How could we say no? It was a beautiful night. There was great breeze blowing in across the gulf and when you looked up you saw a crystal clear night sky exploding with stars… Truly unbelievable.
Then, all of a sudden, it started to sink in that the reason the sky was so clear was that were no lights on. Anywhere… Ummm, but aren’t they supposed to be landing planes on this thing? Yup…
All that stuff I talked about before with the winds blowing the jets around and ocean moving the deck of the ship around are all still very true… Now it’s just nighttime and all the pilots can see are a couple of small runway lights floating out in a massive black sea. But here they came, one after another, throwing moldy cheese into Death’s face… Awesome.
3) The Fight Deck -
Speaking of jets and aircraft carriers… The pilots aren’t the only ones throwing cheese around out there. I think the hands-down-bat-sh**-scariest jobs I saw on board were all the people out on the flight deck. For every jet out there getting ready to launch, there are probably 10-15 people scrambling around them trying to get everything ready… fueling up the jets, attaching bombs and missiles, escorting them around, getting the jets secured into the catapult… Everything. And not one at a time either… It’s all happening at once… And the margin for error is razor-thin… And if they make mistakes people, including probably themselves, die.
So naturally these jobs would have to be staffed by aged and learned sailors who’ve spent years training on these specific jobs… Nope. I think they said the average ago of the kids on the fight deck was around 19-20. For many of them this was their first real job in the Navy. Insane. Most 19 year olds don’t have the discipline to do laundry on a regular basis. Watching these guys run around that flight deck the way they do day-in and day-out was humbling. It really shows what people are capable of when they need to be.
4) The Show -
2,000 people packed into an aircraft hanger (with actual aircraft) floating out in the middle of the Persian Gulf…. What’s not to love? One of the best views I’ve ever seen from stage.
5) The Catapult -
The inevitable result of the catch landing is the catapult takeoff… And if you’re thinking that the phrase “catapult takeoff” sounds like they strap an airplane into a catapult and launch it off the deck then you are correct.
It’s every bit as exhilarating and terrifying as the landing… Just in reverse. Strapped in backwards… No windows… No countdown… Just sitting, waiting, and wondering what’s about to happen… Then all of sudden BOOM! 0-200 in a matter of seconds… Natalie was smart enough to tuck her hands into her harness, but I wasn’t so my arms definitely went flying forward uncontrollably… Part of me wanted to try and be sneaky and mount one of our flip cams in there to capture, but I didn’t. Part of me is sad I didn’t, but the part of me that knows my wife would have been showing off the footage of me flailing around in there forever is fine with the fact I didn’t.
All in all an unbelievable few days and a hell of a way to set up a tour like that. Catapult takeoffs and night landings set the bar pretty high… How could the rest of the tour stand up to such a beginning?
Stay tuned to find out.
James
James’ Blog: Merry Day-After-Christmas
By Team Stovall on December 27th, 2011Like so many families out there our family is scattered in many different places… Tennessee, Washington, New York, Iowa, and Colorado just off the top of my head…
Holidays are a wonderful but strange time when you have family in so many places… There’s no way to be all the places you would like to be. There’s no way to spend time with all the people you love and who love you. It’s a wonderful problem to have in your life. More people that love you than you have time to travel… Truly “Cadillac Problems” if I’ve ever had them…
This year, as we have for the last few years, we spent Christmas in Columbia with Natalie’s family. Which was amazing and wonderful as always… On one hand we are so blessed to be this close to any family. God knows that a lot of people that chase their dreams to Nashville aren’t around any family at all, and can’t afford to do anything about it.
And to be close to a family that loves and cares for each other like the Stovall’s do is truly a blessing inside a blessing.
But on the other hand, sometimes it would almost be easier to not live close to anyone in our families because then it wouldn’t have to feel like we were playing favorites when we were too exhausted to leave town.
We had a wonderful Christmas in Columbia filled with food and family and children and chaos and presents… Just the way Norman Rockwall imagined it. But when you’re the children of many families it’s hard not to spend the day thinking about everyone else in your life who is having a similar experience without you.
Every year we tell ourselves that this Christmas was wonderful, but next year (hopefully) we will be to a place where we can finally make all the things work that we want to work… I know we’re not the only ones out there with this problem, but we’re the only ones with this blog, so you’ll just have to deal with it for a moment. Hopefully next year everyone in our giant extended family will be able to feel how much they actually mean to us…
May 2012 bring us all the things that we all desire. And may it bring us another wonderful Christmas no matter where we are able to spend it.
Thank goodness for wonderful and understanding families.
jb
James’ Blog: The Tour As Seen In My Favorite Photos
By JamesBavendam on December 20th, 2011A picture is worth a thousand words, so the saying goes. Which is excellent because we’ve both been hard at work today and I don’t know that I have a thousand words in me… Tonight I will tell my story through some of my favorite photos from the trip…
A rainy day in Nashville as we left town...
Still in Nashville... Panther style...
John C Stennis. Yup... We were that close...
John C Stennis... Unbelievable.
Hey, that's me!
We flew on that!
Mesa Verde. It flew us here...
God bless the USA
No caption necessary...
That's Natalie... Shooting a machine gun...
Just another day at the office...
Can you capture a long year of touring in a single photograph? Yes...
Hanging out the back of a hellicopter... No big deal...
The streets of Spain... Best way to close out a tour ever.
I will finish my Stennis blog tomorrow, I promise… For the first time, probably ever, people are actually wanting to read something I write and I haven’t been able to finish it to save my life. Go figure…
That’s why I play drums.
James
