I’ve been a bit on the busy side lately. Between several other competitions and the new music website I’m looking to launch within the next few weeks, I haven’t had much time to bash and gripe about the usual. So here is a throwback story I did last August. It ran in a few places, namely on Crunkbox Music. Figured I’d give it another go here.
Enjoy.
Running Rotten: Four Days on the Road with The Dollyrots
by
D.T. Pennington
“We don’t do drugs in the van,” is practically the first thing Kelly Ogden tells me after her and her band, The Dollyrots, kidnap me. “But, if you want, I’m sure we could stop somewhere and find something for you.” Those who work entry level jobs in Denver aren’t supposed to skip town in the night after consuming ten beers at the local dive. I was supposed to be in bed, resting for another day of the office grind. Instead, I was forgoing every possible responsibility for several days to travel halfway across the country a rock band.
Yes, it’s just like that movie.
Rock.
When I have free time, I listen to everything I can think of and try to enjoy what I hear. But lately, it hasn’t been much. Clear Channel and radio personalities destroyed any concept of a quality DJ, MTV has focused itself more with asinine culture than it has with actual music. Even “revolutionary” internet applications like Pandora and Last FM failed me when, no matter how finely I thought I had tuned a station, the programs would find a reason to stuff Nirvana into every single mix. Clearly there was something wrong with rock and roll. The music world spins awkwardly when not even pop music has any pizzazz left.
Which is why I tried to justify my kidnapping by The Dollyrots a godsend.
Even in the recording I listened to ahead of time, I could tell the Dollyrots weren’t quite the punch my ticket needed, but it was a hell of a good start. On a Monday night the Dollyrots (from herein ‘The Dollies’, or, depending on the context I wish to apply, ‘The Rots’) at Bender’s Tavern in the heart of Downtown Denver. I could only imagine the kind of young, supple crowd a girl like Kelly Ogden (lead vocals, bass) could draw to this 21 and up venue.
The Dollies appeared a little fragile against the other Denver punk bands that performed that night (for the most part they were all male quartets talented in the art of mercilessly pounding away on their instruments). But they brought along an energy and a dynamic that I can say, for certain, most bands can never even dream of bringing to the spotlight.
One thing The Dollies couldn’t bring to the stage, however, were the slew of beautiful women and potential girlfriends that I was counting on. Instead, most of the audience that night was made up of the usual Denver selection of cock-rockers and a clan of overweight, balding men who lack enough teeth to make a smile who tried, without success to take a picture of what was up Kelly’s dress. After their set, Kelly was approached aggressively, hugs and all, by the very same crew of shameless men. She took it all with a smile and her trademark squeaky voice. This crowd was her bread and butter, and she was really laying it on thick with them.
A drink later I learn The Dollies are next driving to Fresno – 1,100 miles away – and they could use another driver to help them out. I was seven beers in. Any man, after seven beers, is more than willing to do just about anything a pretty woman asks of them.
We pull through the Eisenhower tunnel around two thirty in the morning and the alcohol starts to fade. I’m told that the band’s next show is in Fresno at a small stage at the Warped Tour. I’m sharing the middle bench of the van with Fuzzy, the band’s merchandise manager, while talking with Kelly, who has since changed into pajamas and is piled in with a fortress of pillows and blankets in the back seat.
“Everyone’s grandma lives in Florida, grandmas and racists,” is the next gem Kelly lays on me. The gravity of my situation sits in on my. I start to fabricate excuses to get out of my nine-to-five (dead uncle, family estate, super messy) and wonder if I even have enough cash to buy a ticket back to Denver, and whether or not I will even have a job to return to.
“I’m not actually a murderer, but I did play one on TV,” at this hour, Fuzzy is asleep and I’m having a hell of a time keeping up with the conversation as the last few beers really start to take their toll. All I know is that I am sheltered in a dark van with people who were strangers all of three hours ago, one of them talking about racists and murder. And I can’t help but thinking there is a story here.
Kelly started the Dollyrots around five years ago with band mate Luis Cabezas. They met in their teenage years and shared the college experience in Florida (oh! I get it, Grandma! Racists!). After W. stole the election in 2000 they decided the world was coming to as much of an end as anyone would see, and that a rock band was a better idea than a practical job. It was only after the stereotypical run of drummers that the band finally settled on Chris Black, and the latest generation of The Dollies was formed.
This was the generation that DIDN’T do drugs in the van.
The band struck it big after their gig at the 2006 Warped Tour. They passed off a copy of their CD to Joan Jett. A love affair ensued between Jett and the band and the band released Because I’m Awesome with her label, Blackheart Records. The title track to the CD went on to be featured in a Khols commercial. Kelly did a cameo on an episode of CSI: New York to be accused of murder. The Dollies are also featured on the soundtrack of the upcoming summer flick Endless Bummer for their cover of Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation.”
It is now ten in the morning and we are at a gas station in Utah. This is the kind of gas station where the dust and grit from the desert runs right up to the foot of the pumps and you can only imagine what kind of crap is being put into your tank. I’m still wearing black jeans and a black t-shirt from the night before and the desert sun is roasting me. There is a message on my phone from my boss, telling me that I’m forty minutes late for work.
“You haven’t slept?” Luis calls from the van.
Pretty, no?
“Nope. We ready?” It’s true; I hadn’t slept the night before. Sitting up right and watching Luis and Chris trade driving responsibilities didn’t exactly spell relaxation. Luis had even pulled off the highway at dawn and parked in a city park. The early morning sprinklers came on and every five minutes, like clockwork, a loud rap of water landed on the roof of the van. If sleep was had, it was in those five minutes.
Back in the van I’m now riding shotgun with Luis behind the wheel. “The first thing to remember is to take it out of overdrive,” he tells me as he hits a button on the end of the shifter. He points out other things I should know – speed, turning, mirrors. He pauses occasionally to push a length of gnarly dark hair back out of his face. We continue across the desolate landscape that has proven so unwelcoming that no developer dared to touch it.
The highway stretches out in front of us, there is the desert out either side. As so many dozens of movies have portrayed before, the road is a dangerous place to be. The middle of nowhere tends to be where city slickers get murdered by transients and gangsters. Slowly, the hangover sets in.
“The combination of male and female vocals on a recording always makes a much more powerful statement,” Luis explains everything, even when I don’t ask. His dark wardrobe and mane of inky hair give him the mysterious guitar player guise, but he tops it off with quick smiles that tell me he still loves a good dick-and-fart joke. Every once in a while his voice cuts through the hum of the engine with an observation about the road, the band, or whatever he happens to be thinking at that particular moment. For as many thoughts that Luis regales me with, very few of them are actually applicable with other thoughts.
To save fuel, the going is slow. Luis keeps the van barreling across the Utah landscape at a steady sixty miles an hour. Apparently this had been the driving speed all night, but the slow rolling was less excruciating in the dark when I couldn’t see out the window. After an hour of slow progression I start to grow impatient and feared that the coast would never appear before me. I could only imagine what the band, now on their 6th week of touring, must have felt. Staring at nothing was starting to make me a little angry; it must have been the heat, the heat of the west – and the downright retarded ugliness of the Utah desert.
The west is a place that has always served as a refuge through history for so many outlaws and rebels and other scums of society. A century ago across this same landscape there was little use for rules and vigilantism dominated this realm at the cusp of the law. I find it beyond coincidence that I am traveling to Warped Tour, what has been heralded through the years as a Mecca for the modern outlaws who take form as the punks and misfits who gather to watch iconic groups such as NOFX, The Offspring and The Misfits perform. As the alternative rock was slowly swallowed up by modern punk and pop-punk, Warped Tour became the new Lollapalooza. But I would soon learn that just as Lollapalooza had destroyed itself by adding Metallica in order to the bill to bring in revenue, the Warped Tour has been on a downward slide almost since it began. And to be taking this journey with modern day vagrants and minstrels only ads to the thrill of the ride – all 60 miles per hour of it.
Fresno’s Warped Tour takes place within a fenced in portion of the Saver’s Center – a dilapidated looking events center in the heart of town. We arrive early and the band sets up the merchandise table underneath a Blackheart Records tent. I assist Luis in jotting down the band’s performance time and place on sixty bright pink posters featuring an aged picture of the trio. All around the venue, fences and lamp posts and portable toilets were already covered in hundreds of glossy posters advertising other bands that would play that day. We tack up The Dolly’s posters over them and wait for 1:45, the advertised stage time.
Luis is all about business.
At 11 the gates opened and the lot floods with a slew of teenage kids in spandex, denim and elaborate hairstyles. Even though the temperature promised to climb well over 100 degrees that day, fans insisted on dressing in all black. Vendor tables sold enormous watches encrusted with fake gemstones and florescent sunglasses that only Max Headroom should be wearing. Instantly I feel my age double – I feel like I’m the chaperone at a high school event.
Reel Big fish opened things up with a relatively mellow performance. Their age shows, but Chris Black will tell you age doesn’t matter in this business.
The Dollies had gained a lot of their momentum through the teen crowd. About a year ago, in an interview for Radio Disney, they were asked to confess to their “real ages” (between 19 and 21) although the members are nearly a decade older.
“We don’t write songs to attract a particular audience,” Kelly tells me during our dash across Nevada the day before. “When we write a song, that’s just what comes out. We record it and younger types gobble it up.” Younger types, she confesses, and the older creepy guys that frequent places like Bender’s.
“But you would be surprised how many performers you’ll see tomorrow who are playing to a younger crowd,” she says.
Aaron Barret, the only original member to Reel Big Fish, advertises his age at 33. But through my telephoto lens I could make out every bag and wrinkle on his face. His pompadour had the glossy opaqueness of a heavily dyed head of hair. The band is obviously tired, the album they advertise as “new” is nearly two years old.
Mike McColgan, currently of the band Street Dogs, can’t be younger than thirty even though he acts no older than the pit of seventeen year olds who find their jollies in slugging one another.
Still, when bands release albums called “Everything Sucks” and “Fading American Dream,” it’s no wonder they sell so well to the young and the hopeless. I would necessarily say the older performing to the young is a bad thing; it’s just rather surprising to see. It makes you wonder how a 33 year old can still hate life enough to write pop songs about it.
The Dollies are scheduled to play on the Skate Ramp Stage, which they have played before. It is a smaller stage, which is usually right next to the ramp that makes the Warped Tour the VANS Warped Tour. However, due to the unusually cramped size of this venue the Skate Ramp Stage is tucked around a corner next to the set up areas for the main stages and behind an enormous bus advertising Monster Energy Drink. The Dollies are then informed that their start time is now 1:30, instead of the advertised 1:45. A fifteen minute change may not seem like much, except when it is more than half of your set.
Bad goes to worse when Cobra Starship starts their set at 1:25 on the monstrous stage which overshadows the Skate Ramp.
There are two girls standing next to the stage when The Rots go on. They are both wearing purposefully torn shirts that read “The Dollyrots” and neon leggings under their skirts. They can’t be more than 16 years old and they are the only two people who show up for The Rots performance. For the most part, this doesn’t discourage the band. But even with his thick aviators masking half his face, Chris looks extremely unenthused.
As the band grinds through their set a few other curious passer-bys stop and get a feel for the music. The band plays their current single, “Because I’m Awesome,” and then vacates the stage.
Back at the tent, Luis is trying to convince me to go back to the van and get drunk with him. At this particularly frustrating moment I learn that no one in the band is happy with how the tour was being run. Luis and Kelly vent about the constantly changing stage times, merchandise that doesn’t move, and the general quality of the tour. Instead of hanging out to sign autographs with the transparent fans, Luis and Chris and myself retreat to the van, Kelly disappears into the air conditioned “backstage” of the Tour.
“I know I have a bit of an ego,” Chris vents, “but I’m sick of playing to a crowd that small.”
“We once played to a venue of five thousand people,” Luis confesses, “and we fucking rocked that place.” Appearances on television, commercials and radio should have guaranteed the band more than a dozen spectators at a place like Warped Tour, especially after an 1,100 mile commitment.
The bigger stages are packed with bands that are louder, but not necessarily better, than The Dollies. Performances on the bill range from Hip Hop to Punk with everything in between. Cobra Starship and Gym Class Heroes dominate the main stages and play to a thousand screaming tweens. Family Force Five, who have an almost embarrassing stage presence, drew a crowd I couldn’t even walk through while on the neighboring stage Colorado’s Single File – with the catchy tune of “Zombie’s Ate My Neighbors”- couldn’t even pull the expired Force Five crowd ten feet to the right.
For an alternative/punk/misfit crowd, the Warped Tour patrons sure know how to pick some awful bands.
Topping this list of awful is the mere presence of neuvo-factory-girl/pop princess Katy Perry. The “I Kissed A Girl” but never actually kissed a girl pop princess took one of the mains stages towards the end of the day. Her presence at the Warped Tour was dominant, but there wasn’t a single act here that wasn’t laughing at her behind her back.
Fuzzy tells it like it is.
Fuzzy, the merch girl who had been with the band for the duration of the tour, hangs a hand-made poster at the Dollies’ tent that reads “I kiss girls because I’m GAY, not because some straight girl thinks it’s trendy.” There are many, many people on the Warped Tour who are more than anxious to meet Perry in a dark alley. Perry’s tour bus is a snap-shot of narcissism – a two story pink eyesore that features a dominant photo of her every-girl-I’ve-ever-seen kind of face.
She also touts a promise ring – something I thought people had to give up wearing in high school, not when they are “23″. But if Katy Perry can consider herself “one of the boys,” in the mess of masculinity that rages throughout Warped Tour, then so be it. I’m sure the giver of the promise ring, Gym Class Heroes’ Travis McCoy, wouldn’t mind the subtle homo-eroticism.
But the mere fact that she is not only on one of the larger stages, but that the stage in front of her is packed with nearly a thousand Warped fans stirs numerous questions within pop-culture which will most likely go forever unanswered. Do these kids have any idea as to what they are actually listening to? Do they even understand the process that it takes to get someone like Perry into the spotlight? Does Katy Perry even understand what Katy Perry stands for? Looking over this crowd my beliefs of a connection between culture and pop culture are true – there is none.
Over centuries of civilization the one thing that humans have rallied around, fought wars and died over is this idea of culture. To see that it has become so readily interchangeable, so easily moved by glossy magazines and Bruckheimer productions, I doubt it would even be worth it to call it “pop-culture.” How many people would go to war for Katy Perry when there are even solders refusing to fight a war to save our right to have a saccharine culture that can easily change with the slightest breeze.
I needed a drink.
“Catering is basically a place where self-absorbed assholes serve food to self absorbed assholes who are in bands,” I overhear as I follow the Dollyrots down an air conditioned corridor in the Saver’s Center. The corridor opens up into a dock area where several tables have been set up. This late in the day, the tables are riddled with trash and dropped food has been smashed into the floor by negligent feet. Remnants of finely seasoned chicken and sautéed vegetables are piled high on top of an overstuffed trash can.
Another band from LA called Black President, who was looking plenty peaked from the heat of the day, was seriously contemplating not attending the next Warped Tour stop in San Deigo.
“Whoever planned this was a fucking idiot,” one of the band mates commented. And he wasn’t far from right either. Today the tour stopped in Fresno, but the very next morning they would have to play in San Diego, 340 miles away. The very next day the tour stopped in Mountain View, a 470 mile trip from San Diego. The route screams of irrationality.
Most bands don’t get paid to do Warped Tour. Instead, they are “paid” in exposure and merchandise sales. For most bands, what determines whether or not they get to their next show is directly tied to how many shirts and CDs they sell.
“It’d almost be cheaper to grab a motel and wait for the tour to come back to us,” another band mate, one with heavy eye liner, said.
About half the bands on the tour are traveling in vans and the other half on enormous tour buses. Everyone hauls a trailer. During the day the buses idle in the parking lot, air conditioning running full blast. Simple math shows that the buses get around 2 miles to the gallon and the vans pull off anywhere from 12 to fifteen, depending on the terrain. Assuming gas prices (in California) average at $4.15 a gallon and that there are thirty buses and thirty vans hauling trailers, the cost of moving just the bands from Fresno to San Diego computes to somewhere near 24 thousand dollars in gasoline. And for a band to make it to the venue in time, many of them would have to drive through the night only to show up exhausted for the next performance.
The last verdict I heard was that Black President was not going to show up for the San Diego gig. They fabricate a story about malfunctioning vehicles like any logical band would do.
A reporter from an indie zine requests an interview with The Dollies and the band is more than happy to give it. On the way to the press room, Kelly is accosted by a few teens who ask for a picture and an autograph. She takes it all in stride with smiles while trying not to turn any fans into friends.
The press room is air conditioned, which is a welcome relief. I sit against a wall and read the latest issue of Punk Confidential and the band is interviewed by a very odd reporter who is “following his dreams.” It is obvious in his questions that he is both trying to be a very unique reporter without coming off as the huge Dollies fan that he most obviously is.
He asks the stock questions about inspirations and where the ideas for songs come from. Questions I should have asked but never got around to. I take a note or two on what is said, he records everything into his tape recorder. I learn that Kelly is a huge admirer of Kathleen Hannah and the band thrives off the dichotomy of appearing innocent but still using “fuck” on their record. Pure and tarnished, Dolly and Rot.
On the Skate Ramp Stage
That night we are on the road again. I help the band drive through the night southbound, towards San Diego. Sometime around midnight I am dropped off near a bus station in Los Angeles and Luis gives me an estimation of where I can probably find the airport. I buy a homeless guy a forty of Mickey’s and ask him the best way to get to LAX. He gives me a series of bus lines and the approximate times they leave. I jot it down on the note pad that has served as the recorder for most of this trip and he stumbles off into the night.
It didn’t help that he was dead wrong. Giving me names of buses and lines that didn’t exist. I eventually resort to paying a cab sixty bucks to get me to the airport (which, by my estimation, was only a thirty minute walk from where I was picked up at.
The next flight to Denver doesn’t leave for at least two hours and costs me four hundred dollars. I am exhausted; living in a van with a band doesn’t give much opportunity for REM cycles. I’m four days behind sleep but even the vinyl covered benches in the concourses aren’t inviting. I walk the corridors of LAX, security officers eye my grungy appearance and canvas rucksack suspiciously. In the men’s room mirror I just looked like a guy who was traveling the country by foot, carrying a few provisions in his pack, looking for his next way home.
Over the P.A. system, between the multi-lingual announcements about abandoned luggage and security threats, a muzak version of Nirvana’s “All Apologies” plays.
Touching down in Denver, the sun is just coming up over the horizon. I bus it back to the city and drop my gear at my apartment, manage a quick shower and change of clothes before I am due in at my office to perform a job that satiates rent payments but not much else. Re-acclimating to a sedentary lifestyle proved challenging, especially as I was reluctant to settle back down. All I could think about was how there was an entire world out there that needed thorough observation and analyzation with commercial interlude.
I snap the radio dial to “on.” Katy Perry plays on a modern rock station.
Luis carves a Jack-o-melon in the Rock and Roll Parking lot
on the fact that it was worth it.
