Transcript
Speaker: I'm Mark McBride. And I'm Steve Brown. Welcome to Season 2 of the Yo-Yo Player Podcast, where two dusty old graybeards gather their friends and reminisce about the 1999 Fiend Magazine Yo-Yo Tour.
Speaker: In this episode, ready for eternity. You ever seen a grown man cry, Timmy? Pfft!
Speaker: Yeah, remember like BAC 99. We had done like some, wait we'd taken some pictures for Fiend Magazine, which ended up being like the promotional stuff. we hadd done We'd made all the sticker, because we were smart enough, we knew that you got to have stickers.
Speaker: Oh, yeah. Like yeah you'll make i make all the other. sticker setup for this was was pretty solid. For Fiend? Yeah. Yeah. like fiend had stickers yeah so this is this is a perfect example of how yo-yo companies didn't fucking get it and in fairness still kind of don't right no so so we told every so you told everybody we see i'm just like rolling myself into this i didn't do shit you told everybody you're like we're going on tour it's a punk rock tour you need fucking sticker you've told me this story so many times it is so ingrained in my memory And it's one of those things that I like, I internally trot out as like a constant reminder to like understand your market and understand where you are.
Speaker: ah So you told all of me like, we need stickers. We need stickers to hand out. And to you and me, because we came up in the punk rock scene, that means... fucking vinyl stickers that will last forever. You want, you want fucking nice, like silkscreen vinyl that you're going to slap on the bottom of a skateboard and it is going to last as long as that fucking skateboard does.
Speaker: Yeah. so And it's not, it's not miracle stuff. You, you, we went to list like you go to sticker guy.com and you send it to him It's bumper sticker stuff. Yeah. not it's just This is, this is simple shit. So instead what what like half of these companies did was gave us like rolls of unperforated paper stickers no only Duncan gave rolls and nobody else I don't think anybody else had Henry's rolls and it was one sticker and it was fucking enormous
Speaker: It was just this gigantic round. It was like a four inch diameter fucking circle with like the Henry's snake logo on it. And they sent one roll and it was like a huge inch like cardboard tube. And then like, like that much actual sticker on it. And I feel like shit like Nick ran out of those like so fast and he was just like, man, don't know. Exactly. it it Again, it goes back to like Duncan.
Speaker: Duncan had the inside track because they had employed the organizer as their demonstrator. So I was telling them the shit to do. So I was, Andrew, I need more stickers. I need stickers, sticker stickers, sticker stickers, stickers. And so we had shit loads of Duncan stickers and maybe that's it. Yeah.
Speaker: Playmax, I vaguely remember there being like some Playmax stickers. I think at one point they sent Julius a bunch of patches and we're all like, what ah you going fucking do with patches, dude?
Speaker: Yeah, we had made patches for the tour, but we we made like a hundred because they were just for like nostalgia. we knew They were not a giveaway. Yeah, it was for shits and giggles. It was mostly for us, I think. Yeah, they were totally totally for us. It was like promo, like, you know, they had them at like fucking yo-yo contests leading up to the tour to let people know.
Speaker: So, so I'm curious how, well how much, uh, swag y'all came back from the tour with, I'm going lay mine out real quick, maybe do a little swag comparison. So I came back with, with the tour jacket and I got tons of obviously tons of yo-yos and Warped Tour shirts and stickers and patches and all that. The patch was so freaking cool. I actually snagged a few, quite a few of those.
Speaker: But I got all that stuff, obviously. The tour jacket, I have the i have the tour pass, but also I have the the case pass.
Speaker: So every night you could go and every every bus could get one case of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and they would stamp your pass. And I have the laminated pass. I can't find I actually looked for it the other dead i can't find it, but I had the laminated pass for that. was kind of cool.
Speaker: And then I made friends with the spawn guys on the comic book. They were in the merge area. So I made friends with him. So I had a trash bag full of figures like lemon edition, gold, this and that, all these weird ass killer spawn figures.
Speaker: ah What else did I have? Oh my God. Just so much stuff, dude. What did y'all come back with?
Speaker: trying to think. I mean, I've still got my tour laminate. I've still got that somewhere. Yeah. I have long since fatted out of all the t-shirts that I acquired in that tour. And man, I acquired a lot, like a lot. Holy shit. Um, And that's, you know, that's stuff that I just like, I wrecked them or are fatted out of them or gave them away or, you know, like I was never especially precious. ah I'll tell you what, the only the only shirt I got on that tour that I was genuinely bummed ah that I don't still have was less than Jake did a number of the beast T-shirt. hmm.
Speaker: And it was one of the white ones with like the black three quarter sleeves. And they did like they redid the full like Iron Maiden number of the beast graphic on the front. But it had, you know, it said less than Jake instead of Iron Maiden. i fucking loved that shirt. And I wore i wore that until literally one of the sleeves fell off of it.
Speaker: I love a good T-shirt, man. Yeah, I've still got some of the Fiend Tour stickers. I think I've still got one of the patches. um I had one of the shirts until very recently, and I actually like gave that away to somebody because they could still wear it. And I was like, fuck yeah, dude, go for it. um I still, I think somewhere I still have my What Would Dale Oliver Do tank top. Yes. No way! I never got one of those. Chuck short showed up with those for, for like a handful of us, which I feel like we need to reprint that, but maybe say, what did Dale Oliver do? Since none of these kids know who he is. man.
Speaker: and Well, I said, I sent one of my fiend tour shirts to doc pop after that podcast and said, Hey, you can do a competition and give it away, whatever you want to do I don't think he, I don't think he gave it away to anybody, but, but I've got, I got a few of myself, a few t-shirts. You know, i don't i mean, i don't know why, just, you know, how do you get rid of them at this point? I just got to hold on them for the rest of my fucking life. I guess it's like a curse on us. Right.
Speaker: Oh no, I've got a, I've got a box, like the deep box of like stored t-shirts from different parts of history. You know, there might be a, there might be a fiend tour one in there somewhere.
Speaker: Nice. Crazy fun. Good stuff. Good stuff. What else you guys got? I've got like, I've still got, so I've still got like stickers. I still got a selection of the stickers. I've got a couple the patches I've got.
Speaker: um Yeah. Like, I don't think I don't know if I have any t-shirts. That was the thing that for me, like Duncan gave me a bunch of black t-shirts at the beginning. And I bugged Andrew Arvison until he gave me a bunch of white t-shirts. So I just had like all the same, fuck like I wore the same fucking t-shirt every day. Like, you know, like I had ten and like five of the same white t-shirt.
Speaker: Just always had that on, you know.
Speaker: So Fiend had their stuff lined up. We had stickers, We had a pop-up booth, like one of those pop-up tents, the 10x10s. Yeah.
Speaker: yeah And so Fiend was ready to rock and roll. Duncan didn't have jack for me. Like, I remember having black shirts, and I was like,
Speaker: Dude. yeah
Speaker: Tell me about the pain of having black shirts to wear on tour. Oh, God. Oh. Actually, didn't last that long, luckily. Like, I had said like i talked to Andrew Duncan and was like, OK, here's the deal. I'll do the tour.
Speaker: i need this. I need this. I need this. And so on and so forth. On the list was white cotton t-shirts. this is the summer kick We're there every day. We're outside, somewhere all over the country.
Speaker: um And he was having trouble getting an apprentice for some reason. I mean, how hard can itrick it freaking so the day So I get to Tallahassee where I meet up with you and Lau.
Speaker: And there's a box of the shirts that's waiting for me. They're all black and navy blue. Because that's all they have just kicking around.
Speaker: oh Oh, that was, yeah. Well, actually, I nailed it back that way. So anyway, so the joke was, the beginning so like the first chunk of the tour, I was running around in like alpine green, navy blue, and black shirts.
Speaker: Talk about like Death Wish. Oh, man, I remember in Phoenix, which was one the early shows, did the entire... day drank, we all drank like two gallons of water each the whole day.
Speaker: Didn't take a piss until 10 o'clock that night. That's a scary
Speaker: thing. I mean, it looked like we we were, we were in locations almost all summer where it was really hot, like really hot. A lot of times it was humid. Um, the the location that, that got me was Lake Tahoe because Tahoe, It actually felt cool. And and it was um it was almost like an overcast day, if I can remember. And everyone walked away from Tahoe with like their whole face and neck burnt to a crisp.
Speaker: Yep. Yeah. Because it was overcast and it was kind of cool and there was a nice breeze. And we were like, oh, this is fantastic. And nobody layered up with the sunscreen like we normally do. And we all paid for it. it was Yeah, that was a bad one.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah it it was also like a higher altitude. That was something. Somebody pointed that out that supposedly we're closer to the sun.
Speaker: we're out of the way, Mark. And Steve, being the idiot that he is, i I left my money at home. So Mark just spotted me in Arizona green tea. Shameless plug, Arizona green tea. It's good for what ails you.
Speaker: Here's a sponsorship or something. You know who he needed? Terry, the bus driver. Oh, my God. He needed it. He loved Arizona green tea. Steve, tell us about Terry. Terry was nuts.
Speaker: Terry was scary. Scary Terry, that's what we called him. No, he didn't. That's what I called him, but only when I was crying and curled up in a fetal position in my little tombstone of a bunk.
Speaker: often Oh, my God, it was horrible. Like, we literally, Jason, Tracy, and I slept in the very back of the bus. It was actually supposed to be a lounge, but it had bunks in it. We were on the slave ship of a bus.
Speaker: We had, what, like, 23 people on our bus at one point? they won't Yeah, I think it got up to, yeah, 23 or 24. So anyway, Tracy and I are like crammed into these little tiny pseudo bunks on the back of the bus.
Speaker: And Terry is driving up and down these mountain roads on the way to Tahoe. Like a bat out of hell, man. It was just insane. And we're bouncing around. I fell out twice that night. I was smart, though. I was smart.
Speaker: About the time I realized that ah I was going to be losing it, I got my belt out. And see, there's it was the top bunk. Like, Wow, Julius, me, you, and Tracy all had top bunks. We got top bunks because we got shit on by the Vans people, but that's another story entirely.
Speaker: Anyway, so, like, they're the top bunks, which means they're about, like, they're about chin high. And you have to, and there's handles in the back of the bunk that you can reach up, grab, to pull yourself up.
Speaker: So what I did, like, once it started getting really ugly, I realized that I grabbed my belt. Here I am, like, sleeping in my boxer shorts and an on old T-shirt standard, right, with my big leather black leather belt tied, put through the handle, and strapped around me like a fricking safety belt just to stay in, strapped in for the ride.
Speaker: We all ended up doing this at one point or another, strapping ourselves into our bunks for fear of, like, flying in the middle the night cracking our skulls open. Like one night we're sitting in the back and Terry starts hitting all these bumps and we're literally, a couple of people were like sitting in the lounge talking and Jason and I are up in our bunks trying vainly to get some sleep.
Speaker: He starts hitting these bumps and we're hitting, bouncing so high. First off, we're hitting our heads on the top of the bunks. People are bouncing out of the seat. Shit's flying everywhere. So there's a little phone in the back that you can use to call the driver. So we pick it up, we call Terry and he's like, hey, what's going on?
Speaker: We're like, dude, Terry, what's going on? And the back of the bus is bouncing like it's on hydraulics or something. What's going on? Hey, man, there's something up here maybe you heard of. called a road, man. called a road. Why don't you boys just shut up get some sleep?
Speaker: At which point, we all just kind of looked at each other and realized it was a lost cause. Terry also felt the need to make himself his own tour shirts. Oh, God. I love Terry.
Speaker: Terry had laminate passes for, which, because anyone who's on a tour, I give you laminate passes so that you can... that you can get backstage, all access, all that fun stuff.
Speaker: And george Terry has done, like, he's standard bus driver. He's done all kinds of rock and roll tours, off-season, sports on-season kind of rock and roll tours. But they actually were, every single one of his laminates, with the exception of, like, one or two from previous Warped Tours, every single one of his laminates was for super Christian music.
Speaker: rock tours. No, yeah you had like you know ah and he had like a Parliament Funkadelic, and I swear to you, I swear to you, had... I think that was just wishful thinking. I think if he did have a Parliament Funkadelic, it was wedged right in between Kids for Christ and Adults Against Satan 97 or something crazy.
Speaker: i don't I don't doubt that part. I mean, there was, there was a think there was like a celebration of Jesus 99 at least.
Speaker: It was nuts. Terry was crazy, but you know he always got us there like two hours earlier than any other bus on the planet, which was nice. Yeah, it was kind of nice to be places earlier, but at same time, you know you lost four hours of sleep bouncing in and out of your bunk all night.
Speaker: Rick was the first person to hit four, though. Rick first person to Those of you who are following the bet on the website, you bet on Rick, you win. Oh, sorry, Mr. Terry was nuts. We liked Terry, but at the same time, we were all very much.
Speaker: but Yeah. Tour life. i remember the other things about tour life too, or it'd be on the bus was those drives, you know, like we'd you'd have bus call anywhere from maybe eight to 11 or something. Right.
Speaker: You get on the bus and then we drive. Our bus driver was the shit. Y'all remember that? We were always there like first, right? Bus driver was killer. yeah and ah But almost always you'd you know get on the bus and you know you'd goof off and play some poker or whatever you're going to do You'd fall asleep and you'd wake up and you're already there and you'd get off the bus. This is what I tell people a lot. It's like six weeks on tour, Monday's off.
Speaker: you play it You do a show in San Diego. You get a bus tour from like 8 to 12 or whatever and you get on the bus and then Next thing you walk off, you take a step off. You go, I guess we're in LA. Let's do it again. You know, but that's what it was. so You'd sleep, you'd sleep the whole drive. So you just get off and you go, I guess we're in Lake Tahoe. Oh fuck. I need pants.
Speaker: free right I did. I stood off the bus in Lake Tahoe freezing. Oh my God. But, uh, I remember on the way to Lake Tahoe, there's windy ass road and our bus drivers humming along. And people are like falling out or close to falling out of the box.
Speaker: Yeah. I ended up taking taking my belt. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was the, that was the one I think, I think it was Mark who figured it was either you or Mark. yeah figuring out Like if you just, if you just undo your belt, pull it out of the loop and then, you know, wrap it through the bar in the top of the bunk. Yeah, that's what I figured out how to do that on that windy road into, into town. And it's because you and I allow had the top bunks.
Speaker: Yeah. I was falling out in, I was worried about it. You and I had the top bunks. I remember you being right across from me. Like Rick had grabbed a bottom bunk. Steve had, I think you had the top bunk in the back. I had um I had a middle.
Speaker: You had a middle, you were in the back. No, you were, I don't know where their middle bumps in the back. The back had a big V-burst kind of thing, didn't it? I don't remember. Like a larger bed. I i honestly don't remember. well and i i mean like Because you were telling me that like my bunk was in the back lounge, but i don't remember I don't remember there being bunk. Were there only bunks on one side?
Speaker: the i think it was only a top row. It might have been only one row. But I just remember you... but like Like said, I remember it because you were the one going, motherfucker. Like I got, i got all the fireworks and I'm worried that everyone smokes. yeah That's right. Yeah. So it was, there was a top bunk.
Speaker: There was just two tops in the back, like above the lounge. Fuck. Yeah, i can't I still can't believe that I slept underneath.
Speaker: I slept on three brown grocery bags of fireworks in the smoking lounge. What the fuck were we thinking? We weren't thinking.
Speaker: I mean, that's that's the moral of the story for the bulk of this tour. We weren't thinking.
Speaker: You know, reading through the the log, you know, side note, that's a proto blog that you made 25 years ago, a log on the internet before they were called blogs.
Speaker: Yeah. oh But yeah, thinking about that. Yeah, winding through on the night, like getting to Tahoe, and like, Terry driving like a madman through the mountains of, through like Sierra Nevada mountains and stuff. Like, it reminded, know, that was what I was hoping from all of this was like, oh, yeah, maybe we'll jog some memories.
Speaker: um Yeah, i have a clear recollection now, thanks to you, of like being in the top bunk in the back of the bus, right, where it's like you're feeling all the movement and just like every turn.
Speaker: Yeah. And just going like, I don't know if we're going to make it through this. Like, I don't know that. I like having having my, like, coming to peace with my life. You know, like, it's been a good life. Like, you know, if you're going to go out somehow, like, this is a much more glorious way to go than something else dumb. So, like, I really remember being, like, just that feeling of, like, letting go being, like, all right.
Speaker: Like, this might just, this might be a But, know, what's I can't do anything about it from the third bunk in the back of this bus. so
Speaker: right. So I do not have the tour journal in front of me. Do you?
Speaker: I do. You know what? Let me open drive because it's in our folder, right? It is. in the theme Scene two, season two.
Speaker: Season two. Okay. All
Speaker: right. We need to label this shit better. Brad Scribbles, Warped Tour, Tour Blog. There we go. Okay.
Speaker: amazing. love that we still have this.
Speaker: With pictures and all. I know. That's fucking wild. When I have the higher resolution, okay. hey Here's the thing that's hilarious is that I've got the full res photos and then I had to down res them for the internet.
Speaker: And so all the quote unquote internet res ones are like the size of quarters. yeah
Speaker: Like the full res version is still smaller than anything that's on a modern website.
Speaker: Just to back up, to back up, just so people understand what you're talking about. You had like yeah some little, some little shitty Nokia phone or something like that. Right. Like, I mean, at the time it was not a shitty, but it like, it was shitty just because it was 1999, but it was a pretty, like it was for today's, today's standards. It was fucking trash.
Speaker: Oh, you were all like go like doing daily updates to the internet, which was trash. I don't know how the fuck you did that shit. I remember taking a long time though, every night, a long time fretting over that shit, but. You got to tell that story a little more, Mark, because I don't know how the hell you did that shit.
Speaker: Greg and I had the idea that we were going to do a daily update on the website for Fiend.
Speaker: Now, as I say, the other first what that we've talked about is that we did a weblog. Yes. Yeah. I got you an early digital camera. yeah It was a little Nikon. It was a weird format. A vertical thing it was really expensive. That was my biggest purchase for you. It was like 800 bucks. No way.
Speaker: you Well, yeah. There were none out there and I needed a way for you to upload it.
Speaker: Okay, now this is 19 fucking 99. Yes. Okay. Here's the thing. We're all still on like Nokia's. We're on Nokia's and like More than that, we're on dial-up modems.
Speaker: Yeah. okay The world, like, here, we're to, like, this sound.
Speaker: Most kids don't know what that sound is. That's the sound of a fucking dial-up modem. So, the way the internet used to work, is that it would plug into a phone jack.
Speaker: Your computer would make a phone call to get to the internet. And so the... And while your computer was talking over the phone lines to the internet, nobody else in your house could make a phone call or it would fuck up your connection.
Speaker: Yeah, you'd pick up the phone.
Speaker: What the hell? So I was like, okay, well, if we're going to do this, we, what we'll do is we'll get a, we should be able to do this over a cell phone. Cause I had, I had a mental image of like the old eighties war games movie where, um, Matthew Broderick would like, you know, put the phone on the receiver on the thing. Yeah.
Speaker: And I knew that it was like cross a phone line. So i'm like, fine. Okay. Now that's actually not how it works. No, that's how I thought it worked. Yeah. And, So I literally ran around the city of Los Angeles. No place outside of Tokyo is would there be a better place to find the technology to get a cell phone to connect to anything.
Speaker: Los fucking Angeles. I found one place, one guy like who was just like, oh yeah, we got we could do that. And he had to like special order the part. And then the all all the all-time famous, oh, no, what you need is the Nokia this and that.
Speaker: And then you get these cables for it. Do you have those cables? No, we're out. When are you going be getting them in? Well, they stopped making them. What you mean they stopped making them? They did. They're going to be putting on, they've got new cables coming out.
Speaker: Great, can I order some of the new cables? Yes. When are they going available? In a month. They're in Finland right now. Finland, Finland, Finland. It's where I want to be.
Speaker: God. yeah, we could order this from this kind of thing. And so we ended up with the tour phone was the Nokia that was supposed to connect to the modem. But the problem was that there was no, like, while the phone connected to the computer, the phone didn't connect to any towers because there weren't that many there weren't that many data towers.
Speaker: Nope. Right. Because Warped Tour locations were always like kind of out somewhere. They were never yeah particularly close to like good population density. i'd I had this bright idea that you'd be uploading video. Yeah, right.
Speaker: ah Oh my gosh. I was lucky. I was lucky that I was able to upload web web posts. So yeah, I would shoot photos every day and then I would have to go through, write up the daily log of what we did, you know, the web log for people. And on top of it, this is the, like, I swear that that photo was probably like,
Speaker: It was less than three megapixels. So it was probably one megapixel phone, but I still had to go through and shrink the photos and crop them because, because a thousand pixel photo was too big for the internet. It's too big. It's too big.
Speaker: And so I would, yeah. So that was like be the other back of the the tour bus every night doing that, going through all those each day. I wrote a post for the website.
Speaker: It wasn't a posted website. It was literally, I would FTP up a HTML file and photos. This was not like this.
Speaker: You're coding HTML and then FTPing it through a fucking Nokia soap bar. Yeah. Yes. Yes.
Speaker: You Greg's fucking one of Greg's PD dot net fucking servers. Yes.
Speaker: Now, here's the thing is this sounds rickety because it is. Yeah. But at the same time, it is kind of insane how technologically advanced this was for the day.
Speaker: Like this was realistically compared to like what the average person knew how to do, had the capability to do and could figure out. This was like next level hacker shit. It truly was. But I didn't think about it. It seemed obvious. It was just kind of like, well, I mean, we got cell phones and a phone goes to the Internet. I don't see why this is a thing. Yeah.
Speaker: But, you know, as far as like what you were actually trying to do, you should have been wearing shiny silver pants and yelling, hack the planet while you fucking did it. Like, i mean, this was just ridiculous. The thing that's bonkers, though, is that like the data connections, though, were so sparse that it actually became easier for me to run around and poach an open phone jack.
Speaker: at whatever venue we were stopped at than to find a self code. Actually, like the first few stops, I was like in fields, walking around, holding up my cell phone, trying to find a connection. And, but by the, but like by the back half of the tour, I would literally just pick up myself, pick up, like I would do all my, know, I do all my work on the tour bus the night before. And then in the morning before things were happening, I would literally just grab my laptop and just start snooping around the venue. And there was always an office with an open office with a phone jack that just nobody was guarding. And I would just plug it in and download pictures, download the text, all that stuff. enough You actually managed to still make sure that we had a log for every single day of the
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was interesting. They, they had everything so that, uh, so that you lab you could get a landline later. I know that Ice-T was on it every day.
Speaker: Every time I walked to the production office to use the landline, Ice-T was there, or his computer, one of the two.
Speaker: The one acute high point, which again, i don't think this is that high point. The whole thing was a thing. But when people ask me that, when I say one of the greatest compliments I ever got was Ice-T being like in an office. with It was one of those things. Again, like I would be running around like having to find a port to plug in the my laptop to upload the daily log.
Speaker: And by the end of the tour, Lau had taken the cell phone that I was supposed to be using for it, and it wasn't working very well anyway. And so I was running around, like trying to find, you know, just open offices where and whatever venue we're at, and as many of us were, and just sitting in a tiny little office with iced tea one day, like just doing this, like letting this upload go at like, you know, 14.4 bot or whatever it was at the time.
Speaker: and and And just be like, oh, hey, yeah. Oh yeah, no, I'm on with the yo-yo guys. And him just being like, man, whoever got yo-yos on a tour is a smart motherfucker.
Speaker: And I went like, yeah it was me. And I was like, cool.
