PIEBALD
Touring on Vegetable Oil
When I was in first grade my family moved to Andover, Massachusetts. One of the first neighborhood kids I met would sometimes have me do his paper-route when he wasn’t available, his name was Travis. Whenever Travis came over after school my mom would always hope he would play the piano because he would shred that thing.
By middle school, Travis, and a bunch of us, started skateboarding with Aaron Stuart because he could ollie the Nelson’s at Phillips Academy, and he was funny as hell. Travis and Aaron started playing music with Andy Bonner and Jon Sullivan in high school and then the craziest thing I’d ever heard happened. . .
Aaron told me he wasn’t going to skate as much because he really wanted to prioritize music and didn’t want to break another wrist. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, he was about the best skater I’d ever seen at this point. That being said, I was hyped to see what that level of commitment, and sacrifice, would produce between all of them.
THE GREASE CONNECTION
The timeline on this period is pretty fuzzy for me, but I think I was living with Aaron in Los Angeles when we converted his van. I believe we had already done the Grease Brothers project and next was their van.
[There’s lot to read about the vegetable oil side of it here, if you’re curious.]
Once ‘Big Red’ was fully converted we put a sleeping loft in the back which could just barely fit two people and still lay totally flat. A key ingredient on a successful cross-country drive, the ability to comfortably lay flat from time to time.
I think I did the first full United States vegetable oil tour with Piebald and then certain legs of subsequent tours after that, it’s fuzzy like I said. We covered a ton of ground though, and eventually in Thor, which was a shuttle bus with lots more space and a bigger grease tank.
Along the way, I was tasked by their record label to film the tours, the live music, as well as the vegetable oil experiences, and they’d put out a DVD, with a CD of B-sides. Video on the internet was definitely unheard of in these days and music was just starting to get weird with Napster, which was a major sea change to observe directly. To technologically date it, I think I got my first flip phone specifically for this first grease tour, which was in support of the ‘All ears, all eyes, all the time’ album, so early 2000s. By this time Luke, from ‘In My Eyes,’ was playing drums instead of Jon and he, their sound engineer Matt Sutton, and their new tour manager Ryan McGaffigan felt like family.
In fact, half-way through the tour, Ryan and I would come to the realization that we were second cousins, but I’ll save that story for later.
LIVE SHOWS
Here’s an edit of ‘The Stalker’ with Cuz going nuts on the cowbell, a joyful nightly occurrence on the tour. This audio was recorded live in Berlin and it’s not the best sound-quality, but does a good job of illustrating how fun these shows were to experience and document. Also, the 4:3 aspect ratio of my Sony TRV900 does a good job of dating us back to the early 2000’s.
The Stalker - 02:27
This next edit starts off with a rendition of ‘Look, I just don’t like you’ then suddenly jumps into the studio and then works its way back to a live performance of ‘Haven’t Tried It’. It was fun to catch up with them for the recording of an album and see a bit of the process with their producer, Paul Kolderie, who had recorded the Pixies, Radiohead, Warren Zevon, and Dinosaur Jr.
Live / Studio - 03:36
FREE TO ROAM
The Piebald vegetable oil tank could hold about double what the regular diesel tank could, which is nice because often times when you find good, clean grease there’s a lot of it and you want to take as much as you can. Sometimes we would come across the five-gallon ‘cubies,’ which grease is often shipped / disposed in, so we’d toss them in the trailer with the instruments.
On the back of the tank (which you can see in the image below) we had a simple sight-gauge to get a read on how much fuel was on-board. You can also see the heater lines entering the bottom right of the tank. On the top left you can see the inline, ten-micron filter. The clear basin on the bottom of it is a water separator to ensure we don’t damage the injection pump. (Peace of mind if it’s raining when you fill up.)
There’s a profound sense of freedom when your vehicle is low on fuel, you scavenge alleys for a good source, top off the tank, and know you can get close to a thousand miles before you have to fill up again. Not only that, but the next city will supply you with more free fuel, and the one after that, and the one after that.
THE TONE
Piebald was the perfect band for me to grease-travel with, not only because of our childhood roots, but also because they don’t take life too seriously and are always up for an adventure. This is pretty clearly illustrated in this image below.
Travis would sometimes stand up on his rickety keyboard stool during a guitar solo, which was always daring and sensational, in and of itself, but then Aaron or Andy would somehow creep up behind him, poke their head between Travis’s knees and then have him ride around the stage on their shoulders, all the while never missing a note between any of them.
I’d seen them do this dozens of times over the years and I don’t think I ever saw them not pull it off. It was impressively optimistic, ridiculous, and fun, a great metaphor for how they live their lives and support one another.
That’s it for now, but don’t worry, I’ll keep adding more to this page over time. I have insane amounts of Piebald photos, videos, and stories and hope to create even more some day.