To judge from their road stories, the members of Chapel Hill's The Old Ceremony seem like a magnet for weirdness whenever they leave town. For example there's this. And I've heard plenty of gross tales in years of interviewing bands, but maybe the most disgusting ever came up in an interview recently with TOC's Django Haskins and Mark Simonsen. It involved their accomodations for the night following a poorly attended show in Houston last year.
"A kid offered to put us up, bless his heart," Haskins recounted. "First our van and trailer got stuck in a foot of mud at his place, then we get inside and there are wires in the ceiling because he was stealing electricity from the neighbors. But the worst was the bathroom. He'd cut a hole in this brown corduroy recliner and put it over the toilet."
Ewwwwww...
"The smell was so awful, I went in there once and never went back," Simonsen added. "If I had to go, I went outside and down two flights of stairs. We've, uh, started getting hotel rooms when we can."
Still think life on the road is glamorous?
On a more pleasant note, see the story in Friday's paper for some talk about TOC's very fine new album. The group plays an album-release show Saturday night at Cat's Cradle.
ADDENDA(2/16/09): TOC live, and the "Walk on Thin Air" video.
