Starbucks office again. I failed!!! After waking up to see that Dan had posted this comment:

__

Great blog (and I don't say that about many!), it's kept me suitably entertained for the past few months - but I've got to call you up on one thing: Starbucks? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Pseudo bohemian corporate scum - there must be somewhere better just round the corner or have they already put them out of business.

http://www.ofb.net/~epstein/sl/0412/20041210-starbucks.jpg
(contains swearingly altered merchandise.)

dan mac

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In my delirious morning state, I decided he was right. Why support some corporate conglomerate when I can support a smaller local entity. So I set off to find an alternative, drove around for 20 minutes looking and then after getting jammed in local traffic decided it will have to wait for another day. I don't hate Starbucks nor do I feel any alliance to them. Though I must admit that the grungy mix of homeless people, local starving actors and business people on morning break that come in waves to this particular location does provide a wonderful backdrop. I will try again to seek a new office, but I will save that battle for another day, today my time is short now shorter.

Hey, lets have a look at the work week - Today the monitor rig gets loaded into the Grammy's, tomorrow rehearsals, friday is more rehearsals, saturday is off and sunday is the real Grammy deal, monday we fly to London to arrive tuesday, Brit awards wednesday and fly home thursday, friday I am going snowboarding with the shorties.

Hey, look! Rat Sound is up for Pollstar "Sound Company of the Year" and the awards ceremony is on Friday as well and if all goes well, I may even make it down there to watch! An honor to be nominated and how absurdly cool would it be for little Rats to win against companies that dwarf us so dramatically business wise. Furthermore with Mcdonalds being voted "Best Coffee in America" and after tossing a pathetic chuckle in the general direction of the absurdity of the humans that actually marked Mickey D's as "Mmmmm, yumm, wow, this is the best coffee in America!," I ponder the relevance of winning anything that involves a cross-sectional american vote.

But here I am sitting in Starbucks, possibly without much a leg to stand on as far as being coffee critical. Oh well, off to the Rat shop,

Dave Rat

Starbucks, Magnolia and Vine. My morning office that satisfies the the requirements of hot coffee, edible food and a constant flow of humans reminiscent of trying to work in the crew room or catering. Fifth day home and the first day the tour haze begins to lift and the realities of this other world come into focus. Fifth day at home and for every morning I wake up and realize how cool it is that a housekeeper has not tapped on my door every 15 minutes for the past 3 hours, I am equally dismayed that the mess I left here yesterday is still where I left it and once again there are no clean towels. If I only had a phone in my room I would call the front desk to complain.

I spend the bulk of my home-time solo, at least solo as in "not in the proximity of the humans I speak with other than buying things like food." The exception being the two or three days a week I go in to the Rat office or the weekends that I have the girls. I spend most of my tour time surrounded by huge quantities of people I know quite well with the exceptions being the mornings of days off before the quest for coffee inspires me out of my hotel room. My two lives could not be much more different. I think the term used in describing these transitions is culture shock, when applied to normal humans.

I guess working at Starbucks is just my little version of Cargo Cult Science as if hanging out at home around bustling humans will somehow inspire the tour bus to show up. If you have not read it, it is worth a look look, if you have read it, well, it's is still worth a look. Richard Feynman would have made an excellent roadie.

Perfection is unachievable and on projects that I put my heart into, mediocrity is unacceptable. Combining that thought with the project of the big rock show and the fact that my sound world is but one facet of a multi-dimensional presentation results in a complex balancing act that is far from boring. Pushing for the best but not to the point that it will overly compromise another department's presentation, requires a level of cooperation, understanding and the ability for all involved to look at the bigger picture. I guess that applies to just about every cooperative life endeavor.

OK, my newly implemented morning work/blog time limit is and the fully charged laptop battery is reaching red line warnings. Upload time and oh, hey, tomorrow we load into the Grammy's!

The shaky hands, 20 oz drip coffee buzzed

Dave Rat

The time to board the plane approaches and as I always seem to experience in the not too distant memory, I am filled with this anxious feeling of remiss or more accurately pre-miss and it dawns on me to ponder the things I will miss. With that in my mind, today I add to my computer a new folder called 2007 where I will store month by upcoming month each batch of photos I accumulate in my travels and wanders that inspire the snapshots of time I grab paste into the physical memory banks.

**** The Things I will Miss ****

I First is the little people I love. My daughters, my niece and the little ones in my heart that I rarely see. And though far away and disconnected, I always I hold them in my heart. Some things hurt too much to think about more than in flashes so I let them slide out of my mind and find distraction.

Next would be sensation and familiarity of my bed. The place I go at the end point of each day when I have had enough and where I climb in to recharge to be for feeling of warm fresh start.

And when I wake I like to play a album as I start my new day, I will miss the scratchy sound of the needle upon the spinning black disc and how I never know exactly how long before the music will start.

I will miss the way the the dreary and hazy sleep fades away each day as I head to the ocean blue room of clean. The rubber ducks that sit on the shower head and the way my day comes into focus as I ponder my plans under falling water.

I will miss drinking that first morning coffee without having to get dressed and the way the espresso maching always scars me when it gets hot and starts spitting steam out the relief valve when it is ready.

I will miss searching the fridge for bits of food when I went too many days between shopping and being able to eat simple clean cool mangos, making shrimp tacos and salsa and my two favorite knives, the one that rusts if I don't wipe it off and the one that makes the cool shhwriiing sound like a mini "Kill Bill" sword.

I will miss my favorite pan made of cast iron that I cook nearly everything with and how I need to take care of it to keep the perfect layer of cooked in oil and how it never touches soap.

I will miss the enjoyment I feel to create new things or fix things that are broken with my pile of tools

I will miss the freedom that my motorcycle and car gives me to be able to travel on a whim to destinations without hindrance. I will miss not getting anything good in the mail and then after day after day passes to the point where I stop checking, actually getting something good. I will miss the two ladies next door that take a walk every morning and always smile and loaning tools to my neighbor across the street. I will miss going to the Rat Shop and especially everyone there that each day come to share a bit of their life together for a common goal and the challenges and successes that each day brings. I will miss the people I care about that that I hang out with at home.

So to all that I press the pause button and step away. But it never pauses, it just keeps rolling along without me. Bye bye home and soon all this will fade, I know it will, it always does, it is just so hard to see there from here.

The not sad and getting ready to leave,

Dave Rat

So I am doing my best to keep to clean the house in between making messes. Seems I spend my home life doing one, the other or in a horizontal position. Projects unfinished expose themselves as I peel a few layers of between-tour-sediment away from the various clustering spots and low and behold, I find some old journals. Though most of the contents consist of cringingly unreadable babble and actually unreadable hieroglyphics, a quick scan through did reveal a few pages of interest.

The was written while on Black Flag tour. "Cel" was the bass player for the band that was riding with me and we were on our way to do a show at a club called Maxwell's in Hoboken. As you can most likely tell, the truck ran into a serious 'hitch in it's get-a-long' right about the time it's wheels were no longer on the pavement. Some idiot had cut our brake lines in San Francisco after him being tossed out of the club and our brakes never worked quite right since then. Well, also it did not help that we were doing about 60 in the fast lane that was actually not a fast lane but in reality a left handed freeway off ramp, downhill into a "T" intersection in a fully and completely overloaded truck. Anyway, I am pretty sure that I could had ground the gears down and pumped the brakes up enough to force that manual steering piece of crap truck around the right hand turn when a stressing and screeching and "POW," the actual box mount to the truck snapped and over we gover. Splash goes the window and I must say that to this day I still recall that it was the strangest sensation to have your head just 6 inches await from a window view consisting of sliding asphalt.

**** Sound Nerd Speak ****

For the next blast into the hand written past, I present some high resolution images of a PA design that never got built.

This was to the next incarnation of the system we carried on that tour

but due to the decision to pay rent and eat food rather than finance yet another PA from the ground up plus our in ability to locate satisfactory 8 inch drivers we ended up reconfiguring the "Brown System"

into the "Thin Fills."

For you sound nerds out there, I thought you may get a kick out of a line array based design that was based on dual 15", dual 8", dual compression driver components that is 48 inches wide and 18 inches high designed in 1986.

Anyway, the cool line array wave guides were still a decade away from being developed by L'Acoustics which was the true turning point in line array feasibility. I know most of the Rat site regulars are familiar with all this but for all our new friends, if you are curious about the development of the Rat PA systems, you may way want to check out the Evolution http://ratsound.com/evolution/evol1.html pages. I have not updated them in a while so it just stops about five years ago but you may find it kind of interesting.

**** End Sound Nerd Speak ****

Pondering. Air brakes are good, especially on big heavy trucks! For you non trucky mechanichy types out there, did you know that air brakes work the opposite way of the brakes in a car or small truck? In a car, you press the brakes and the brake fluid pushes these little pads to rub on either a disc or cylinder attached to your wheel. Brakes are normally 'off' and press to put them 'on.' Air brakes are normally 'on' and have big strong springs that push the pads against the cylinder and then when you start the motor, it builds up air pressure in the brake line hoses that forces the brakes to be 'off.' When you step on the brakes, it releases pressure and the brakes then go 'on.' This way if you have a leak in the system, the brakes get stuck 'on' rather than 'off.'

Ok, enough! Till we meet again in a day or two, good travels to all!

Dave Rat

First order of business is to skip jet lag. I am not going to play that silly little game of being all tired and screwed up and off to the Rat shop. Right now, my biggest stress is peeling back seven months of mini messes that I leave behind each time I on tour break. Endless bits of homeless items strewn about. Clean up time! The worst part is that at some point I picked up a room mate. More of a squatter I guess. The little guy moves in and roams freely for I don't know how long. A couple of breaks ago, with the help of a cage trap and some cheese and my friend Andy, we were able to persuade him to relocate. But not before he ate the only living plant, the corners of a half a dozen album covers and build a few nests. Oh, little ratty rats, testing my patience but ya know, all they want is a warm place to sleep, a bit of food and to exercise their curiosity. At least it was not herd of cows a grizzly bear because they make a lot more poo.

Wayno's Catering (Yes, it is owned by the Wayno who is the band's Personal chef!) going to handle the food for the Rat Sound holiday party, how cool is that? Clean house, clean house. Looks like thirty or so people are coming this year and I have two days. I can't believe the little butt head ate my records.

Off to Costco to stock up on essentials and some party stuff. I love Costco. I love it exactly as much as I hate Wal-Mart. No comparison between the two. Walmart is predatory slave labor compared to the employee partnership of respect that Costco forms. The result? Well, Costco has the lower employee turnover, much better medical plans and pays workers nearly double. Oh, and they provide better products are more fun to shop at, have great prices and treat customers really well. Do some reading up on Costco vs. Walmart http://www.laborresearch.org/print.php?id=391 if your curious. Honest ethical business, great people, great gear, great prices vs pure growth, greed and world domination. The best part of seeing something cumbersomely large is watching it fall!

So the festivities include, massive amounts of awesome food and drink including a pot of Gluhwien, the hillbilly fire pit, Guitar Hero, the Hookah spot (with the Hookah from Keli!) and different tunes in all the rooms.

And Thank you Daniella and Danalle Rat for putting this all together! You are awesome!!!

Well alright, guess what? It's clean up time again!!

The somewhat hazy but very happy,

Dave Rat

Not only was my dad at the show yesterday, so were my daughters as well. Family day and since their mom works for Pearl Jam and is currently on tour as well, the little people have been parentless for a bit. The good part is is that they are well cared for, safe and happy and the downside is that the two tours are awkwardly and consistently overlapping and putting them for longer periods without either parent in town. Regardless, what it means right now is that I step into full time dad mode instantly which is all good. Unfortunately though, I live too way far away from where they go to school so after the weekend I say bye-bye to my home and move up to their mom's place for the break, good thing my bags are already packed.

At this point tour has pretty much become the norm and getting back to home feels more like just an extended set of days off. Time to play catch up until get ready to leave time comes around.

As far as touring schedules go, this is one of the best in my opinion. Three weeks on and two weeks off is the rough pattern we follow. Many if not most bands will do six weeks as a typical segment length with ten weeks out not being too uncommon. My first tours was four months long and in the pre cell phone era, pre internet era, a four month tour meant total and complete disconnection from the other world. At the peak of my touring I was doing sound or PA tech for three bands with interwoven tours flying directly from one to the next. I used to try and call home when I had someone I wanted to talk to in my life but it was pretty easy to spend 1/2 the tour pay on calling cards and hotel phone charges. The largest hotel phone bill I saw was $ 1200. One of the guys had used a hotel phone to talk for a few hours to his gal from Europe. It happens to most new touring humans at least once. That hotel phone just looks so tempting sitting by the bed, so easy, how bad could it be? I have paid the bill of shame myself but where and how much I have long ago forgotten. There was even a "mail day" because our schedule kept changing, as did our hotels and the cities we though we were going to. So any mail was sent to the management and they would then forward it to certain cities. Motion meant disconnecting and that disconnection is both the best and worst part of touring.

In it's purest form disconnection can be one of the most invigorating and wondrous experiences imaginable. Completely letting go of everything. No bills to pay, no car to register, no set schedule to follow. Each day is just a simple set of instructions to follow cryptically written in a the book of life called the itinerary. Lobby at 8 am, eat, set up gear, eat, tear down gear, shower, eat, sleep in bus, wake up, repeat. Each day someone paints a different picture of the world outside the bus and makes it a bit hotter, colder or wetter. Each day the gear comes out of the trucks and each day your focus slips farther down from the horizon to seeing only that which immediately is at hand. It is at that point where living distinctly in the moment is all that matters where the sensation of true freedom solidifies. That sensation is the essence of what I believe is the allure and magnetism of choosing a life on the road.

The price paid for disconnection is that when the tour ends and reality is crushingly dropped back into your lap, you have no where to stay, all your worldly belongings are scattered in various garages, the battery is dead in your unregistered car. Motionless is depressing. New cities and music and crowds of excited humans all gone. I used to dig through all my stuff stored at home and rediscover things I tucked away and forgot. Drive somewhere, I guess, eat food and begin to miss the endless string of adventures that had presented themselves daily. Instead I sit with four walls waiting for the phone to ring and take me away from motionless stagnation.

After about 16 years of touring and around 5 years ago, I made the conscience decision to try to learn how to be a normal human and try and adapt to a more normal life. I wanted to learn how to not to travel and also to be happy at the same time.

The enjoying my time off,

Dave Rat

OSMCITBRAPMWIDNLHC!

Woke up at a gas station near Magic Mountain, when I was shorter I would have been bouncing of the walls seeing the huge wooden roller coaster. No such luck this morning though as we are dumping roadie Dave Lee and roadie Daniel off before heading into to town. All of the out of town roadies and some in towners, with no reason to go home, are staying at the hotel in Marina del Rey. The rest of us will make our various ways home. It says two days off in the itinerary but if you interpret that it means drive day and pre-rig day where a bunch of roadies go load in a day early, fortunately I have been immunized against pre-rig-itus so I get to stay home.

First order of business, swim. Then clean up the splattering I left the house in. My friend Andy has been staying here on and off and we get caught up on the happenings. He arrived two weeks after I left and it has been mega hot here. He was especially curious as to whether I still wanted the chinese food that I left in the microwave before leaving on tour. I guess It took him quite a while to discover the source of the less than pleasant new house odor.

Fixing the house AC (again) was not so bad. This time it was just water leaking out all over the garage floor from a little pump and once I got inside the little thing reglueing the impeller back to the shaft was pretty easy.

And with that being as interesting as I got for these two days, how about rewinding back to a decade onto Rage Against the Machine tour and here is a picture of Matt, myself and Tom Morello in business suits after visiting the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange

And that was the first and only time I saw Tom in a suit while I have actually put one at least twice since then. Oh, and here is Brian Rat, myself, Ford Engerth and Zach de la Rocha standing in front of a Buddhist temple in Thailand.

And while you imagine exploring Thailand, I am going to wash the sticky kitchen floor.

The multi-lived

Dave Rat

DYTDCTTHYS!

Wow, it seems like just yesterday we all headed to Japan and here we are near the end this journey. With a sad heart and fond memories I bid thee farewell. Like all great things, this must too come to an end. I feel that a brief synopsis may be in order to accurately relate. First we flew here, then had a day off, did a tv show, Fuji festival and now we fly home. Mathematically, approximately 116 hours will have passed from when I left till I return with only 46 hours spent in planes, trains and automobiles. So that comes out to about 60% of the trip was actually spent on solid ground!

In the mean time, I will just sign on to the internet and work on being boring. Whoa, what do we have here?..... Uh Oh, this does not look good:

Now what am I going to do? Or more importantly, what have I done? Time to get out the antenna because the the threats from the 'allegedly' free hotel internet is making me nervous.

**** Later this same long day ****

I have landed, made it home and just as you loose a day when you fly to Japan from LA, you actually land before you left when you come home! You do not get your lost day back but the super long day acts a consolation prize.

First order of business, food. Unlike the series of delectable meals I experience on the road, at home I am relegated to consume a much simpler grub. Look what $30 at the local mexican market gets me:

Oh, this is going to suck as torture myself with shrimp tacos and home made salsa. Ummmm, I got to go...

The very hungry Dave Rat

MDGWFHD!