i’m going to do my best to journal our 7 day journey through the great European Continent! Love, Jon Lewis
Drunk, embarrassing, semi-informative posts from The Dopamines.
The Dopamines
EUROPE BLOG
WE’RE TOURING EUROPE!
dates. drinks. parties.
4/21 Solothurn, Switzerland @ Kofmehl
4/22 Grenoble, France @ A L amperage w/ The Zatopeks(UK), The Masculators(FR)
4/23 Genova, Italy @ Tdn w/ The Locals(IT), Mikey Erg Acoustic(USA)
4/24 Milano, Italy @ Blue Rose Saloon, w/ Low Derieve(IT), Teenage Gluesniffers(IT), SeeSaw(IT), Mikey Erg Acoustic(USA)
4/25 Geneve, Switzerland @ Au Cabinet, w/ Mikey Erg Acoustic(USA)
4/26 Lille, France @ Shaka la w/ Mikey Erg Acoustic(USA)
4/28 Meerhout, Belgium @ Groezrock, (Monster Stage 11:25am-12:00pm)
NEW SONGS
Just Finished 2 more last night. Brings the grand total to 7! a few more and then it’s off to record vocals for this bullshit!
TBR Tour - Day 2 - Madison WI
…so after we all woke up and dusted the shame off our bodies from the previous night, we headed in the general direction of Madison. Here’s a rando creepy picture of Michael and I on the drive!
Madison was the first of many fights i had with our vehicle. I don’t know the first thing about the physics of driving a trailer backwards and jackknifing it etc blah blah, so driving it can be a bit cumbersome. Not so much on the highway and on city driving, but parking pretty much sends me into baby mode. I’ll scream for a bit and pretend it ruined my day, but a few minutes after parking i’m over it.
So anyway i parked the van like 5 blocks away in a parking garage and finally get out of the deathtrap and on to a cushy couch in the green room at Majestic. After changing some strings and knocking back a few brews I was starting to loosen up and good thing because a gaggle of our Sheboygan buds showed up and that’s when things started getting weird*
*you see, we have an ongoing tradition wih our friends in Sheboygan/Madison/surrounding areas, namely with the bands The Jetty Boys and Side Project. in short, when we’re all in a room together, people, things, and surroundings get real fucked up. like “this picture/video can never see the light of day” kind of shit.
ok so we’re all drinking and there were a bunch of other rando calrissians going in and out of the green room and apparently the translation of the sticker on our case of beer that read “The Dopamines” translates to “Take all of our fucking beer please!” so our beer ran out quick. And SURPRISE! the price for a beer at the club was outrageous. so we opted to drink across the street at a nice little hole int he wall called WOOF’S!
don’t be fooled by it’s sports bar exterior. Woof’s is an amazing gay/bear bar with reasonable drink prices and reasonable patrons who all make me feel attractive with their wandering eyes. so yeah about 10 of us go in prior to our set and throw a few shots back and bullshit with the bartenders. one such bartender saw the wristband on my arm and asked if i was playing across the street. i say yes, and it turns out he used to be in one of the bands that was on the bill! and he was familiar with the Dopamines so we ended up talking about punk and life and blah blah blah, that’s when i noticed the clothesline above the bar, draped in what looked like a few hundred pairs of assorted underwear: boxers, briefs, boxer-briefs. you get the picture. that’s when i made the mistake of asking “hey, what’s the deal with the clothesline?” to which the bartender replied, “well, here, if you get cut off from the bar, we take it one step further and cut your underwear off…”
the night continues, we go back to the club, play, get more drunk, load out, and go back to woof’s…
and eventually i got cut off…
..somehow the night didn’t end after that. we all went back to Andy “Intruder”s place and pretty much drank until all the alcohol was gone. i got real messed up and ended up sleeping with this total babe under a dining room table:
…until her big brother (an even more massive pit bull) showed up showed up and decided he didn’t like his little sister sleeping with a human and proceeded to engage in a fight that not only shot me awake, but just out of frame Jon W and Kate (Lipstick Homicide) got pummeled by two tumbling dogs. It was pretty hilarious.
Ok so somehow after going to sleep at like 3am more shit happened. Well, only one really noteworthy thing happened, and it happened to Luke (Lipstick Homicide):
clutch brovertail/goro cut!
in conclusion: lots of shame to be dusted off from our night in Madison.
JonL
TBR Tour Diary - Day 1 - Ft. Wayne, IN
We haven’t met up with TBR at this point, but for the sake of consistancy on the blog it’s going to be called that. Back off.
So I get to Jon’s place with my wife, ready to get into a van that may or may not survive the tour at all. I kissed her a lot and tried to get some clutch groping in before we hit the road, and after a few dummy checks we were on the road. I brought my Wii with me, because i hacked that shit and had every Nintendo and Super Nintendo game EVER-ish on it (DASWASSUP). And we have a TV in our van. Need to mention that. So yeah i get that shit up and running en route and we were playing Mega Man 4 in no time (DASALSOWASSUP).
i’m pretty much drawing a blank up until we get to the Brass Rail, probably dude to Mega Man 4. But yeah we got there a bit late, but caught up immediately. We drank a ton and played like shit. I think it might have been because it was the first night jitters, or maybe it was the beers we were bonging out of the Flamingo beer bong throughout the set. Such is life. Lipstick Homicide, Flamingo Nosebleed, and fuck me I can’t remember the opener (we missed most of their set, but i have a CD somewhere, ill correct it) all played great.
After the set, while loading out, i decided to relieve myself in and around our trailer, which was met with a lot of screaming from Jon and Michael. So Michael see ‘s Dave (our bud/roadie) exiting the club with door money, and proceeds to put his suitcase in the pee puddle i just made. But all Dave sees is his luggage in a pile of piss, and assumes I pissed all over his luggage, which spins him into a dimension of pissed off that resulted in him throwing all of our cash in the street. It was pretty hilarious.
After the pee debacle, someone comes up and asks us to sign a copy of our original demo. So we all drunkenly sign a 6 year old CD-R, including Michael (who wasn’t in the band at the time of that demo), Jon W drops it on the ground (i think it avoided the pee) and then we dust it off and happily give it back to the owner.
The after party was pretty great, I hung out with this little man:
…and everyone convinced me that he liked it when you blew in his face, so eventually i did and he bit MY face. whatever, we still hung out. But yeah a bunch of us got real fucked up and listened to records, and then some Ergs fans forced Mikey to play some acoustic Ergs songs so most of us went up stairs cause it was real awkward. Pat Mitchell also peed the bed i think. Did i mention Pat Mitchell was there? If you don’t know Pat, he co-started the Halloween House in Indianapolis. If you don’t know what THAT is, well then you’re not one of the few people that got the glorious opportunity to play/party there.
In the morning i saw this little guy that bears a striking resemblance to Seymour, Fry’s dog in Futurama. You know, the episode (Jurassic Bark) that made you cry? If you didn’t cry, you’re either not a pet owner or a fucking robot.
So, in conclusion, that all happened. Jon L
TBR Tour Diary? Day 0?
Hey fuckers! I wasn’t able to blog everyday about our recent tour with Teenage Bottlerocket, mostly due to Dave needing to be cradled and fed poutine every two hours, but I managed to take 200 or so pictures along the way, and it’s drumming up some foggy memories! So over the course of the next two weeks, i’ll be going over the bullet points of every day of tour!
Day 0:
I worked, came home, took my wife out to dinner (i think, i mean, i should have) and then went to practice. At practice we learned that we don’t know how to play a few of our new songs anymore, and just settled on playing 4 VICES songs that we were confidant playing while drunk, because we were pretty drunk at practice.
after practice, we loaded up all of our gear in our trailer (that we borrowed from our clutch bud Pat Cost!) and then proceeded to watch our van not start.
turns out we had a bad battery. Jon W said that the mechanic told him this 3 months ago, but he wanted to wait until it ACTUALLY died before replacing it. Which is pretty smart considering i’m a whiz at making a brand new battery in the middle of nowhere in the middle of tour. Thankfully, our little guy met his maker in front of the practice space.
Jon L
We All Fall Down - punk rock radioshow on CiTR: Interview with Jon Lewis (The Dopamines)
Hello Hello Hello my friends!
This whole episode was based around my interview with Jon Lewis of The Dopamines. The Dopamines are a sexy pop punk band from Cincinnati, Ohio. They are known for being hated by Ben Weasel, loved way too much by punknews.org, winners of Cincinnati…
(Source: rocketfromrussia)
Coming up! Vices release shows in cincinnati at mayday and chicago at subterranean!
Mayday ticket link: click
(hard tickets available from mayday during bar hours)
Subterranean ticket link: click
A Couple Podcasts
Jon L just did the “Life is a party” Podcast which features a handful of unreleased demos and alternate versions of some Dopamines tunes, as well as an exclusive song from teh new album “VICES” due out late spring! take a listen!
Also, check out this gem recorded with our buds Matt and Replay Dave (who’s in the legendary band Grabass Charlestons). Listen as they sweat it out in a hot cramped studio in Gainesville FL, drinking Modelo and dissecting the Dopamines album “Expect the Worst” song by song, the day before the FEST10 good times!
