cavashawn diary 11/4/09: tales of celebrity in three cities

If there was a common thread in these past few weeks, it may have been our continued brushes with quasi-celebrity. Now, lets face it, with reality TV being such a phenomenon and the media becoming an all-consuming 24-hour machine constantly making people famous for nothing, celebrity isn't all that uncommon these days. But that doesn't make it any less exciting now, does it?

The Big Man (with a Small Ego) on Campus
If you take I-80 West through Illinois, across the mighty Mississippi River and past the World's Largest Truck Stop, you'll find yourself in Iowa City, home of the University of Iowa. We were there last Saturday for a show supporting Chicago scene vets Lucky Boys Confusion (members of whom are currently in AM (American) Taxi. Iowa is a newer Midwestern state for us, but it's slowly becoming a more familiar dot on the map.

I was vaguely aware the Iowa Hawkeyes were having an excellent football season, but after witnessing a bar full of Hawkeye faithful explode after a dramatic last-second win over Michigan State (to stay undefeated), the point was seared into my mind. The Hawkeyes were heroes in the national spotlight. Students were in a great mood, and the show was a blast. We had fun hanging out with some of the other bands, including Danger Is My Middle Name, and got to spend time with friends. It was a night on the Big-10 college town in all its glory.

<--champions go big. they go for the venti.

We awoke to an absolutely perfect, crisp, fall Sunday morning in Iowa City. With the sky a brilliant blue and and tree-lined streets bursting with yellow, orange, and red, it was almost as if we walked into a U of I brochure, except for maybe the occasional puddle of vomit on the sidewalk. What better way to begin this day than with a cup of coffee from one of the quaint shoppes uptown? Apparently we had the same idea as Kirk Ferrentz, head football coach and the reigning BMOC. The man himself walked right in behind us at Starbucks! He had most likely flown back from Michigan after the game and was starting maybe one of the greatest Sundays of his life with a venti coffee. Scott struck up a conversation and we briefly conversed with the guy. I'm happy to report, that, despite totally being a man at the possible pinnacle of his career, he was a friendly, humble dude. An authentic Big-10 college town moment. Priceless.

A few days later & a few hundred miles south on the Mississippi
If it were 1875 and we were traveling via steamboat, it might have taken us 4 days to get from Iowa to STL. But since we were with van, it back to Chicago before heading southwest again. Yes, it was back to St. Louis for the first time since June. We were headlining a bill with our friends The Hey Day and State & Madison, and there was a good crowd out, especially considering it was Wednesday. We have some incredible fans in St. Louis, and it really is always a pleasure to play there. I have nothing but great memories associated with the city.

If you're wondering if we met Nellie, the answer is no. But if you'll remember correctly, Cicero's is the spot where we first met Todd, singer of John Boys Courage and former(?) host of Cicero's open mic. Well, since we last saw Todd, a lot has changed for him. Puff Daddy transormed Todd's life, and I don't mean in the way that you felt when you first heard "Come With Me" on the Godzilla soundtrack.

<--todd, just as intense in real life as he is on MTV

As we flipped through television channels a few months ago, we came across Starmaker, apparently PDiddy's & MTVs response to American Idol. As we sat on our high horses, bashing every contestent from the safety of couch (us being broke musicians watching Starmaker in our living room mind you), none other than Todd popped onto the screen. The same insanely intense dude we watched host Tuesday night open mic was in the running to be Diddy's next star. 5 weeks later we watched him lose in the finals. Runner-up. We didn't see Todd Wednesday, but we couldn't help but think of him. Maybe only a few people watch MTV these days, but damnit, 4 of us were there on stage.

Hey, Hey Heey...Keep Pushing Guys...
From St. Louis it was I-70 to I-74 to Covington, KY a stones throw across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, just a few miles from where we grew up.

Every year NACA (National Associaton of Campus Activities) holds a regional convention for the Mid-America conference. Colleges from Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Michigan, PA, Ohio & Kentucky converged in Covington to see and hire on-campus entertainment for the spring. This entails 3 days of showcasing comedians, musicians, a capella cross-dressers, a guy who shows reptiles, pretty much anything college students might find entertaining. We found ourselves working with our NACA agency trying to win votes for on-site showcase. All of the attendees vote in one lucky group (of the 30 or so extra acts who showed up) to showcase on the last day, Saturday.

SO the four of us sat in our Auburn Moon Agency booth and tried to sell every single person who walked by to vote for our band. Luckily these were some of the most open-minded music-loving students in the Midwest, so regardless, it was a great opportunity to meet a lot of new potential fans. But it required constant hustling and persistence. It was tough, and, well, we had to keep pushing. We needed inspiration. We needed an inspirational figure, a leader, to show us the way. But who?

That's Dennis Haskins, but you may know him as Mr. Belding, the principal from Saved By The Bell. Yes, Mr. Belding. A massive, massive figure from our generation's youth. There he was, sharing our booth (also booked by Auburn Moon) giving us words of wisdom. "Keep pushing guys", he kept telling us. And that we did. How could possibly we let Mr. Belding down?

<--he's still kicking. hard. thanks mr. belding, you really know just what to say and when.

So we went on to win the showcase, voted in by students of the heartland. It was amazing. We played Saturday and had a blast hanging out with so many friends (some old, some new) including The Hey Day, Tim Blaine, and We Shot The Moon. We met tons of students and will be playing a hefty amount of on-campus shows this spring.

We're back in Chicago for the next month or so working on a bunch of new songs and improving our acoustic set, which we'll be showing off December 1st at Schubas as a part of the New York Songwriters Circle Chicago Showcase.

cavashawn diary : catching up

So I realize my last post was in July. It's October. I've had some time off from blogging, but I've been busy doing my best to survive. We've really had our hands full traveling, promoting, and trying to make enough dough to pay our rent. Things are moving along and we continue to make great progress, but reality is, well, reality. Our rent is cheap but we're just not making enough money to get by on the band alone anymore. It's time to dig in and really survive. We still want to travel, expand our fanbase and promote our shows the way we know they need to be promoted. In order to do this, we have to make more money. So we're scraping up odd-ball jobs and doing our best to keep the ship afloat, and the blog took a backseat.

But I really do miss the writing, and I realized I'm doing myself a disservice by not keeping up with what we've been up to. I like looking back at my blog and seeing my thoughts and reflections on events as they happened. It's interesting to compare hindsight with those (almost) real-time thoughts and feelings. My own selfish motives have drawn me back to the blogosphere.

When I originally started "The Cavashawn Diaries", there was no such thing as twitter, and I wanted to keep things updated daily. Twitter has pretty much blown up since then, and we keep the cavashawn twitter page updated all day everyday. If you want to know what's going on in our world, that's a go-to.

So in light of a busy schedule and the ever-changing technological landscape, I'm changing the format of this blog a bit. Think less documentation, more reflection, insight, etc. Every Monday (starting tomorrow) I'm going to post an entry that attempts to wrap up the week. I think this might be more realistic. A weekly blog. We'll see how it goes.

cavashawn diary: THEFT

<-thanks to sarah daniel for this shot at WPF saturday.

It was bound to happen eventually. I think I knew deep down that it just couldn't last forever. Yes, I always knew someday I'd have to part ways with my Fall '99 LL Bean backback. I just didn't expect it to be this way. But then again you never do.

Yes, someone entered our van and stole our video camera and my backpack, which happened to have my vest, 2 t-shirts, jeans, my wallet, my iPod, and the band's phone. It sucks, but it could've been much worse. How I will replace this stuff, I'm not sure, but my wallet had no money in it (ha!), and I did have my Blackberry and sunglasses on my body. It could have been much, much worse. It's incredible how quickly something like that went down. We were right next to the van loading in and out, at no point more than 40 yards away. Lesson learned.

<- chi street team badass nikki was, um, on fire saturday

But besides that, Wicker Park Fest was a blast. We had some sound issues, but the concert was excellent. There was a great crowd to check us out and street festitivals in the summer are just plain fun. We stuck around to check out the headlining set by our friends Treaty of Paris at 8 on the same stage. It was a jolly summer weekend, the kind that make Chicago winters worth the wait.

cavashawn diary : 7/16/09

And so we closed a chapter in the Cavashawn story last week. The EP that started in October (and RE-started in January) took us to the West Coast for the first time and solidified our current musical identity is now out for good everywhere. Sure, June 17th was the big day, and with iTunes, etc. a physical release isn't as practically necessary, but we wanted to have CD release shows in our four main cities. There's something both symbolic and meaningful about presenting the fruits of our labor to the people we're proud to have recruited as fans. And It so worked out that Milwaukee was the last of these four cities. Summerfest was just too right of a place to do it.

For us, Summerfest has become a great summer tradition. The festival truly celebrates and supports bands and musicians, particularly ones from the Midwest. The fact that such a well run, well executed festival exists and supports up-coming-artists while still featuring so many hugely world-wide popular acts is downright special.

This year it was bigger, better, more exciting for us - basically it was moving up from the kids table to the adults table at Thanksgiving. The past two years we played a smaller stage, in the afternoon, to a few hundred people. It was still incredible, easily our one of our favorite shows of the summer. Year 3 at Summerfest for us was in front of a large crowd, on the 4th of July, in the evening. It was one of the biggest crowds we've played in front of in a while, and it was, well, everything we could've hoped for.

Thanks to everyone who voted for us during the set and online, we ended up winning the "Emerging Artist of the Day". Summerfest hooks it up. We won about $600 worth of much needed gear. Cymbals, microphones, headphones - we were thrilled. Summerfest was nothing short of spectacular. We made the drive back to Chicago that night feeling very much alive and very much Midwestern.

Chapter 2: Tales of Other Great Cities of the Midwest, Particularly That One in Indiana

And so with the fresh scent of Milwaukee's Great Lake Coast still lingering in the confines of our big red machine, our next stop was the Indianapolis for an acoustic set at the VIP Lounge of the Verizon Wireless Music Center before the No Doubt/Paramore concert there. Despite a slight panic that set in as we realized we were really, really late, we managed to get set up and going in time for it to all work out. The acoustic set is coming along nicely, and we felt like it went over pretty well. We also got to check out both No Doubt and Paramore. Great concert. No Doubt absolutely brought the place down. We left impressed.

cavashawn diary : 6.28.09

So last night we were at the Madison Theater in Covington, KY. Covington has all of the benefits of being in greater Cincinnati, just with three times as many drive-thru liquor stores and tobacco outlets.

Despite it being a relatively disorganized pre-show and general confusion abound, I think it was one of our best performances in Cincinnati ever. It was a phenomenal crowd, thanks in part to the fact that we were sharing the bill with Cincinnati vets July For Kings. People knew the words (even to the new songs!) and the energy was intense. Great crowd, great venue, good sound. I can't tell you how many times we haven't had that combo, so it's always refreshing to have things go so smooth. It was smooth despite there being one of those 'worst-case scenario moments' for drummers, and well, it was self-inflicted and my own stupid fault.

I had the terrible misfortune of blowing out a snare drum two songs into the set. I think I stripped a screw that connects the actual snares to the drum as we were setting up before the show. This has only happened to me once, 4 years ago, and it was a pretty big deal. The snare drum crack is the backbeat, literally the sound of rock time. It's the ticking of your watch, the smack that spits 2 & 4 in everyone's face - it's why drunk people dance at concerts. In short, it's the rock drummer's go-to. So you can imagine my horror when the beautiful, crisp punch of my favorite snare became the doughey slop of a non-snared snare drum. It sucks, and it sounds sooo bad.

So during the short section after our 2nd song where Scott was talking, I jumped back to grab my backup snare. We've been lugging around this backup snare to every show since this happened 4 years ago - just as a precaution. I frantically found that the backup snare was not in fact ready to play. Fuck, right? After all those years of lugging it around I don't have it ready to work. I really hate myself in those moments. Really. And so as Scott did his best to talk our way through it, I desperately searched for alternatives backstage. Luckily, Dan, drummer for July For Kings, was willing to let me borrow his snare for the rest of the set. Thank you Dan. The rest of the set was pretty excellent, but I am definitely putting my gear through the grinder this week. I'll be damned if that is ever going to happen again. Back to Chicago Tuesday morrning.

Here's a video (post-snare replacement) of Friendly Fire that Dave Hood shot last night. Thanks Dave!

cavashawn diary : 6.26.09

SAINT LOUIS

<-you can thank the infamous scott feister for this pic of clifford in tow.

Summer is definitely here, and we are back to the good times of being on the road. Yesterday we made the trip from the shores of Lake Michigan to the banks of the Mississippi, tripping from Chicago to the great state of Missouri. The Midwest is green, corn seems to have been planted, and unfortunately, the Cardinals are atop the NL Central.

The show last night at Cicero's went particularly well. We had a great energetic crowd show up and I thought we played pretty well. Saint Louis is a unique place for us, because we started from scratch. We hardly knew anyone in Missouri when we started, and we haven't caught many breaks (i.e., opening for a larger band, etc.). We've slowly built a great fan-base in this music-loving town, mostly through the Internet. Early on we met some diehard music fans and worked together with them to get the word out about the band. We shipped out flyers and posters, coordinated on Facebook and MySpace, and have inched our way forward. It seems to have been working. People know the words, and the place was pretty full, primarily with our fans. St. Louis makes us believe we can do it. That's why, despite hating the Cardinals (like, really hate) I love the city.

Today was another hot, sunny day as we drove straight west through Illinois, Indiana, and into Ohio. We're in Cincinnati now, prepping for our show tomorrow night at The Madison Theater. It's late June in the Ohio River valley, complete with all the crickets, firecrackers, and humidity you may have come to expect. Summer! It's healthy.

cavashawn diary : 6.24.09

And the incredible week that started last Wednesday sludges on. The CD was released 7 days ago today, and it has literally been an emotional blur of sweat, stress, and ultimately triumph. We're in the dog days of Summer, and it's unseasonably hot, gross, and muggy. Our bodies move more slowly in this heat, and we sweat sitting around the TV on the sofa, lights low with more noticably warm laptops burning our legs as we try to keep up with the flurry of Internet activity that has been the result of this CD's release. We are stealing feels of AC when we can.

There are about a million and one things going on right now, including the fact that we have an Emmy-winning documentary crew following us around shooting footage for a piece they're working on about entrepreneurship in the music biz. This is clearly awesome, but it also means we have two extra bodies in our already relatively crammed apartment. Life is chaotic right now, but it's amazing. My room is a mess. I need to do laundry in the worst way, but every single day has been jam-packed with one thing after another. Something as time-consuming as laundry simply does not seem to be a priority right now, so I continue to recycle clothes.

After Friday's show at Metro, the rest of the weekend was a bit disjointed, but necessary to re-charge. Chris and I ran around to a lot of the MobFest activities, and got drunk on Saturday night and stayed out late with Dan and Mike from The Fold, watching the sunrise as we finally got back to our apartment. It was awesome. And necessary. The past month has been extremely demanding, and Friday's show was something of a catharsis. It was a lot to grapple with, not so much putting out a CD and playing a show, but feeling the existential weight of knowing that everything, everything - every single day for the past 2 years, the personal struggles, the countless rehearsing, shitty shows, the merciless amount of work that is an endless, enduring reality - was devoted just to getting to where we were Friday night.

And was it a great place to be? Absolutely. There were clear moments that I felt as if I was living in a dream I had when I was 16. But I think what set in Friday for me at least, was the awareness that while I have poured every ounce of my mind, heart, and body for two years straight into this band (and the same is true of the other 3 guys too), we've done this all just to give ourselves a fighting chance. There are no guarantees, no clear light at the end of the tunnel, and no checkpoints to ensure that yes, you're doing the right thing, you're on the right path. All you have is your gut. If this is just the beginning, is it really going to be this hard? That was the question that was sinking in for me Friday. Not that the answer even really matters.

But it's an incredible high to be in the middle of this all. I think I've reached a new level of appreciation for life this week, a feeling of freedom that only comes from unshakeable commitment. And I think this heat is going to my head.

But enough of the heavy stuff. Off to St. Louis tomorrow. More updates via twitter and this blog as the weekend unfolds.