HORSE THE BLOG (PART 3): LORD GOLD ON THE REPETITION OF LIFE ON THE ROAD
[Horse the Band are currently on tour supporting their new album Desperate Living (full stream here!). Keyboardist Lord Gold (his mommy calls him Erik) is recording their current road trek for posterity in this here MetalSucks blog. Entry 3 follows (read Entry 1 and Entry 2). -Ed.]
What has happened in the past week. I don’t remember. I have watched a lot of plants go by through the window and also watched the sky for a very long time while listening to the song “Eskimo Snow” on repeat. There have been some inspirational cloud formations where I thought “yes, life is worth living.”
One night we made a lot of money and people were going insane and I didn’t hate them and I felt very happy and excited because I knew I could make the minimum payment on my credit cards before we went to Europe and still have money left over. The next night we played next to A Day to Remember in San Diego and their show had pre-sold 2,400 tickets. I thought about how their guarantee for the show was probably $25000 and they would sell another $30000 of merch so after expenses each member of the band would probably make $5000 minimum in one night and that would happen every night for a month. I felt sad. If I could be in that band for 3 days I could pay off my credit card bill and have a fresh start in life at 28. It would be funny to pay off 8 years of band induced financial failure in 3 days.
That night our show had 6 local bands.
I think we drove like 3000 miles this week.
I think I would describe the state of music today as “clowns who sell clothing to people.”
Seriously writing your band’s name, the name of the tour you’re on, and the year it occurred on the wall in the back room of venues every night with a Sharpie seems like “the stupidest thing I have ever heard of in my life.” It is like, misjudging the historical relevance of your life on a previously unimaginable scale.
We are driving in the Central Valley of California. It is really flat and the sky is brown with no clouds.
Seems like all the farms here got “fucked up” somehow. Everything is dead. I think there is some sort of political issue with water. They can’t farm or something cause someone diverted their water for something else. Now there are signs that say “Congress Created Dust Bowl”. I think they are trying to appeal to “the kid in all of us” who had to read The Grapes of Wrath. I saw the farmers on TV in Fresno. They looked like they knew they were on TV and were trying to look somber/angry as if they were at a protest on TV, because they were recording it at home (fingers crossed). The first time I drove here I felt slightly enraged that the government fucked them and possibly brought it up in a conversation to people I didn’t know very well for some reason. Just now I realized I do not care at all.
I want someone to make a Venn diagram of “people whose opinions are objectively wrong”, “people who think their opinions are right”, “people who value other people’s opinions”, “people who tell their opinions to other people”, and “people with an IQ above 150”. Then make everyone in the world have to look at it every day when they wake up and answer questions about it.
Sometimes people say “man you did that crazy world tour, what was that like?”. Then you say, “haha, I don’t know, it was pretty crazy, fun” as their eyes glaze over. Possibly they make it to the next question “where was like the craziest place you went?” Then you smile and say “I don’t know, probably China… Moldova?” They have never heard of Moldova and you see their brain do a restart. A little bit of fear. They say “man, I would love to do something like that” and do what they have seen on TV as a “meaningful head nod” and you think about nothing and look into a wall at nothing, smiling nervously. “Yeah man.”
Then that person goes back to their dorm room and reviews your album about the ecstacy of total life failure and depravity, and writes “nostalgic bleeps and bloops” or Nintendo or keyboards or something, 8 bit samples and memories of Megaman, sends it to their editor (probably a Senior), updates their facebook status, and reads something by Bret Easton Ellis or Chuck Palahniuk in a visible location.
-LG
