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US Tour Diary: The Gooch Palms
By LEROY MACQUEEN
Original page credit: Mess+Noise
Bubblegum punk duo The Gooch Palms recently did their debut US tour, from Las Vegas all the way to Memphis. Singer/guitarist LEROY MACQUEEN chronicles their many adventures – from pet wasps to meeting Andre 3000 – at great length, with the help of a few dozen exclamation points. Live photos by YASMIN NEBENFUHR.
Hi everyone! So I started writing down this tour diary and once I started I just kept going. I had so much I wanted to say and had to leave a lot out. But it’s still super long. So if you are bored or something, this will fill in some time. Enjoy!
The tour started with us standing at Hamilton station waiting for the slow and stinky train to Sydney, where we were playing one last show before we flew out the next morning. Kat had a wasp tangled in her hair but I flicked it out and it didn’t sting her, so we were off to a good start! We piled all our luggage onto the train and said goodbye to Newy! The show was amazing in Sydney and we played to a packed room full of rowdy folks and it was a great way to be sent off!
Fast-forward a lot of hours and time zones and we had just checked into to The Flamingo in Las Vegas, a.k.a. Sin City, a.k.a. where souls come to die. We had a few days to get over our jetlag before our first show. What’s the best thing to do in Vegas, you say? Get really, really drunk! It’s the only way to deal with the place. We went to Vince Neil’s bar [Tatuado] and I did a Roy Orbison song at karaoke. I looked like shit wearing a full Detroit Pistons basketball outfit and the people watching didn’t know what to make of me at first but then I sang and then they gave me a standing ovation. Great night out for all! Heeheehee!
“It is the nicest car I have ever sat in.”
The next thing to do in Vegas was to pick up our rental car that we’d be driving for the next six weeks. So we picked it up and practiced driving on the right-hand side of the road but not long after picking the car up the tire went flat, so we pumped it up then it went flat again!!! So we decided to take it back. The company were great and said we could pick out another shitbox in the “budget” range, but being the long weekend they had no shitboxes left! So the lady working there said we could have any car we wanted for no extra cost so we picked out a 2015 Chevy Impala with three miles (fuck-all kms) on it! It is the nicest car I have ever sat in.
Then it was time for our first show at the Beauty Bar in downtown Vegas. We were feeling a little nervous, as this was our first show EVER outside of Australia. Was anybody going to show up? Were people going to hate us? Was I going to get arrested for public nudity? These were all the things going through our minds! But not long after doors opened, people started to fill the room. The bands that we played with were great and really nice people and brought a good crowd. The merch table was red-hot that night and we got the crowd to chant “I-LOVE-SPACE”!!!!!!!
Next stop was LA and it was really cool driving through the desert! We had lunch at this cool diner and had cherry pie with that plastic orange cheese melted on top. Serious yum! We were excited to get to LA but first we had to take on the LA traffic on a long weekend. Somehow we managed to end up on the 110 where the exits are all at 90 degree angles and it was fucking terrifying but we are Da Goochies and made it out the other side!!! We got to our friend Dan’s house and it was great to see him. The show was great and we got cuddles from a cute cat called Humphrey all night long!!!
Next was Oakland. The drive was long and fucking boring, kinda like the Hume! We got to Oakland and we were staying with our friend Shannon. Before the show she took us to a party and as we were walking in we saw a cracked-out lady taking a piss on the street. Welcome to Oakland! The show was really fun and was at a really cool bar in the ghetto called Eli’s Mile High Club. We got to catch up with some friends, which was great! Then we stayed up all night at Shannon’s, filling her brother Paddy in on Aussie slang, and we watched a cool doco on cane toads. The next day Paddy took us on a tour of Oakland and we went to this really cool cemetery that you could see all of the Bay Area from. It was such a great day, thanks Paddy!!!
Next was San Francisco where Pookie, the headliner, had to pull out due to illness but the show was still really fun. We played with Elvis Christ, who mixed and mastered our album, Novo’s. It was great to hang out with him!
Next two days were meant to be days off but just before we left we signed to US label Urinal Cake Records and they wanted us to record a 7” while we where in the States! So we booked into Bauer Mansion in SF with Bob Marshall. It’s a really cool studio where Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees and White Fence all record! We recorded on a really cool old Tascam 388 tape machine. It was brutal two days, trying to record and mix the songs before we had to leave for Seattle, but super fun.
“I said Melbourne Bitter is 10,000,000,000,000 times better than anything microbrewers could ever make.”
The drive to Seattle was AMAZING! We went swimming in some freshwater rapids in Northern Cali and saw some crazy big redwoods along the way too! We made it to Seattle late afternoon and we were lucky enough to be invited up to Sub Pop HQ, where we met up with fellow Aussie Andrea and got an awesome tour by a nice guy named Derek. There is a lot of history in that place and it was just amazing to be in such an amazing place! They had the gold record for Nirvana’s Bleach album above the urinal, which was funny. They also had a jar of Vegemite; it was nice to smell it. And as a bonus, some microbrewery from Chicago were there to show all the staff their range of beers. Score for us! The owner of the brewery showed me some super black beer which tasted like shit and he asked me what I thought of it and I said it tasted like shit and that Melbourne Bitter is 10,000,000,000,000 times better than anything any microbrewers could ever make, but they did have a nice summer ale. He didn’t like my Aussie frankness.
The show was amazzzzze balls in Seattle. We played at this cool biker bar called The 2 Bit Saloon. We played with a band called Universe People – it was their album launch so the show was mega packed! We started playing and the crowd were super into us. Everything was going so great until I could smell burning plastic coming from behind me. I looked around and my bass amp was on fire!!! But it was no setback, the nice guys from the other band we played with, called Killer Ghost, lent me their amp and the show was great!!! The next day I took my burnt-out amp back to Guitar Center and they let me swap it out for a new one, which still blows my mind that you do that over there, but sweet – nice one!
So with new amp in hand it was time for the short drive to Portland. We were staying with the promoter/sound guy called Robert. Before we got to his house we crammed down some Taco Bell, which me and Kat have come up with the best theme song for, but that’s for another time! We got to Robert’s house: he’s a super chilled cool guy he had a way cool guinea pig called Larry. We drank some weird non-alcoholic drink that his friend makes and it was super yum!!! The Portland show was fun and we played with a super cool band called The Bugs who you should all go check out! We got back to Robert’s place and drank some beer and he put on this cool VHS movie for us called Rubin and Ed with Crispin Glover but I fell asleep so I will have to hunt it down. Apparently it’s very hard to find!
It was now time for the VERY LONG three-day drive from Portland to Minneapolis. But we had some fun things planned – we headed to Yellowstone National Park, where we camped. We got to the campsite in late afternoon and quickly found out that we were the only people crazy enough to be camping that night. The lady at the campsite had told us there had been a bear hanging around the campsite the night before so she asked us if we want any bear mace? I said “Nah, I’m from Newy mate, she’ll be right!!” So she told us if a bear came to our tent to just make a shitload of noise and hope it runs off!!! The main thing is to have NO food laying around the tent or near by. Kat had rigged up the tent so if a bear or a pack of wolves tried to eat us we could jump out of the tent right into the back of the car. I think Kat's real father is MacGyver!!!
So night fell and the moon was the biggest I have ever seen in my life (it was a supermoon, duh Leroy) so we bunkered down for the night, both fearing for our lives. At about midnight (so fitting) a pack of wolves started howling at the moon and was one of the coolest things I have ever heard!!! Not much sleeping got done that night but the sun came up and WE HAD MADE IT!!! I went for a run that morning not realizing we were 3000ft above sea level. I thought I was just unfit! On my way back to the campsite about 800 metres from where we were sleeping I saw a HUGE bear footprint in this dirt. I used my mad I bushman skills to determine that it was fresh and must have been from last night!!! It was now time to leave and drive through Yellowstone. We went and saw all the natural hot springs and saw the Old Faithful geyser blow its lid. It was OK: bit overrated and way too many people!
“There was this seven-foot inbred-as-fuck guy sitting outside the gas station.”
We heard from a few people that there was some snow on its way and that the road to get out of the park could close so it was time to get the hell out of there so we could make it to Minneapolis on time. But we had to see some wildlife first. No bears but heaps of buffalo. They are so big and could fuck shit up quick!! And every few miles the landscape would change. We made it up to 8000ft above sea level and we started to feel really weird so it was time to come down and get to the campsite for that night! We got out of Yellowstone just before nightfall and we thought all the windy roads were behind us and thought we would just hop on a big four-lane highway but oh fucking nooooo!!! We started going back up through another national park. It was pitch black by this stage and there was so much fog you couldn’t see more than a foot in front of the car but you could see on the GPS how windy the road was for the next million miles. It was very, very, VERY nerve-racking but like a boss Kat a.k.a. Big Pappa got us out of there in that fog and pouring rain!!!!!!!!!
There was still another day of driving to go before we played Minneapolis. We saw Mount Rushmore and lots of cornfields. We stopped overnight in a small town off the side of the highway and no shit it was like something out of a horror film. There was this seven-foot inbred-as-fuck guy sitting outside the gas station. He resembled Jason from Friday the 13th. So it was time to lock ourselves in the hotel room and hope for the best!!!
Now it was finally time for our show in Minneapolis. We could not wait to play after all we had been through and to make it even better we were playing with our BFFs Real Numbers! We were doing a run of three shows with them. We got to the venue called the Turf Club. It’s in a college town called St Paul so the venue was crazy good and we had our own green room and full rider with food and all! The show was amazing and we slept like babies that night.
The next day Johnny from Real Numbers took us to a vegan café and I had a vegan Philly cheesesteak. Let me tell you straight up: 10/10 mate. Everything was back to normal, out of the wild and back playing shows!! As we walked out of the café, Kat noticed the trunk of our car was wide open and we thought “Fuck, everything we own is in that car” so we ran over and by some miracle everything was in the car even though it was in a sketchy crackhead part of town. We later realised that our super cool 2015 car from the future had a function on the keys that could open the boot from 2km away! So we worked out I must have sat on it with my fat ass and popped the trunk. Woooooops! It happened one more time in NYC as well. Again, nothing was stolen.
“It was the worst experience of my life and a bad way to see those cheese curds reappear.”
Now as you may all know by now I’m not a very shy guy. I like to get naked in front of hundreds of people! So here’s something very personal that not many people would talk about but fuck it, it’s my diary and I’ll do what I want (said in Eric Cartman’s voice). So long story short, the American food we’d been stuffing our faces with had really done a number on me and my bowels and I hadn’t pooped in about a week! I was getting super depressed because I was feeling so bloated which makes me feel sad in my sports bra, so Kat gave me a laxative and I thought no more of it. We were told being in the Midwest we had to try cheese curds so we decided to cheese squeak our way across the USA. Cheese curds are these weird little orange squeaky cheese lumps; they were just heaven. It was my turn to drive and Kat was feeding this orange goodness to me, then Kat decided to have a nap. About 15 minutes into her nap the laxatives hit me and like a madman I pulled into a truck stop. A cold wave of “I'm about to spew and shit myself all at once” had come over me!! I flew into the bathroom and let me just say it was the worst experience of my life and it was a bad way to see those yummy cheese curds reappear. I probably won’t be able to stomach them again after what happened. So I came walking out like a green Martian and Kat brought it home into Milwaukee.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Feeling much better after a long shower and watching some old TV show about the days of doo-wop music, we were ready to go to the show! We turned up to venue but it didn’t look like the sort of place you would play a show then we realised it wasn’t. It was the wrong place so back in the car and off to the real venue to meet up with the Real Numbers guys! We had some beers and played some darts and the show was great! Really small place so the vibe was great. Then we drank some more beers and played more darts! Turns out we really like darts!
Then the next day it was time for the short drive to Chi Town - Chicago. We decided to stay a little out of Chicago about 40 minutes or so, at this amazing motel that has all different themed rooms. We got the space-themed room because I love space!!!! The bed was a spaceship: it had a jacuzzi next to the bed and no door on the bathroom. Me and Kat put two and two together and quickly realized it was an old sexy swinger motel from the ’70s. It had about 10 free porn channels on the TV to get you in da mood and it was run by these Russians who where all old and Russian but you could tell that they would have been super hot back in their prime!!! We slept on our sleeping bags that night. After a quick hot-tub soak we drove back into Chi Town for the show and to meet up with the Real Number fellas again and we had some amazing Mexican food and Johnny from Real Numbers looked like he was going to cry he loved it so much! The show went off and Johnny and Eli hopped up on stage with no shirts and sang some backing vocals and played tambourine for our song ‘Don’t Cry’ with us. After the show we all went around the corner and shot-gunned some motherfucking beers which will now forever be known as S-G-ing some M-F-B’s!!! It was sad to say goodbye to Real Numbers – we love those guys!!!
The next day it was time to drive to Detroit, which I was sooooo excited about!!! Not only is it the home of the greatest basketball team in history, but the home of our new label!!! We were staying with our friend Larry, who came to Australia last year with Tyvek. He lives in a super nice house, which was great after the weird sexy space room in Chicago. We went and had dinner with Larry and Eric from Urinal Cake and some of their friends and everyone was super nice!!! Real good vibes in the D! We were also very excited for the show because Dan [Kroha] from The Gories was DJing at it and they are the biggest inspiration for us starting The Gooch Palms! So we got to the venue and drank some beers and played some darts again; this time I won!
“I looked to my right and there’s Dan from The Gories. I looked to my left and there’s Andre 3000.”
It was time to play now and as we were setting up I saw this guy who looked very familiar, then Eric came up and said, “Andre 3000 from OutKast is here.” I was all like, “Oh my lord!” Eric said to come meet him so I did and we posed for a photo then I said, “Well, I better go and play,” thinking he would leave or just sit at the bar but no, he came and stood right up the front and rocked the fuck out. It was crazy. I looked to my right and there’s Dan from The Gories; I looked to my left and there’s Andre 3000. Then oh no, what’s that familiar plastic burning smell coming from behind me? Not now, not tonight, but yep I had blown another fucking amp! Agrhhhhhhhh!!! But we handled it like pros and just played through one amp and kept the show going! Andre loved the show and grabbed a t-shirt and record and we talked about surfing for a while. It was a very cool moment.
The next day we went for a drive around Detroit as we had a day off!! We went to the Heidelberg Project, where that guy did crazy stuff to all the abandoned houses. It was amazing to see that someone would put that much effort in to fix up a whole street like that.
Next we headed to Ohio ’cause we had two nights off. We stayed in a cabin in the woods in Amish Country! Whoever owned the cabin had a good sense of humour cause they left a DVD of Cabin Fever for us to watch and we did and it was great!!! But we didn’t drink the tap water after that! As we went to leave, a HUGE shiny black wasp with yellow legs flew into the car. This was the second wasp to inject itself into our tour, which was weird. It was a big one. We couldn’t get it out so we just had to leave with it in the back of the car somewhere. We would say “WASP-UP!” every time it would appear on the back windscreen and we would also sing “Wasp new pussycat” to it as well. It was terrifying but fun. We started getting used to him being around.
Next was Cleveland, which seems to have more bridges than cars; we just filled in time before the show driving around over hundreds of bridges and replacing my burned-out amp. Then onto Baltimore! We love John Waters so we were very excited to be there. We had booked a private Air BNB that was not so private! It was owned by a really weird lady that loved to just burst in when she felt like it. Even while we were sleeping. The show was great and we met some awesome people that night. We visited Hampden the next day, which is a cool neighborhood of Baltimore. We loved Baltimore so much we are considering moving there next year when we come back to America!!!
“Then we played Boston. They talk funny like Marky Mark, oh cute!”
It was now time for the Big Banana a.k.a. NYC! We were playing three shows there and we were very excited!!! We caught the subway train like the Ramones to our show at The Cake Shop! The show was a smashing success then we walked up to the street and saw a girl passed out on the road and her friends crying and then the paramedics turned up and took her away. We ate pizza and watched the whole thing. The next day we caught up with our good friend Ceara who lives in Brooklyn. We all had brunch at 3pm with some Bloody Marys then headed to Death By Audio for the show. There was a shitload of people at that show and we played with a really a cool band called Ed Schrader’s Music Beat.
Then we played Boston. They talk funny like Marky Mark, oh cute!!! It’s our favourite accent. The show was super fun and we had a great night hanging with our hosts Brendan and Lauren. Then it was back to the Giant Prawn a.k.a. NYC to play one more show, this time with Aussie mates Nathan [Roche] and Angie! It was a fun night and the guys from Scott & Charlene’s Wedding came along to show and we had a few (too many) drinks. It was a great show!!! It was good to catch up with our pal Mike Spyros, who drives Aussie bands around a lot over there too.
Now it was time to get to Memphis and play our last show at Gonerfest and we couldn’t wait!!! As we started driving, Wasp-up appeared in the back seat and he looked like he was ready to get out so we pulled over on the highway and opened the door. He flew out and we waved goodbye to him. I don’t know what happens to a wasp when they are thousands of miles away from their colony. I still think about him.
But back to Gonerfest. It was such a great way to cap off what was the best 6 weeks of our lives!!! Our show at Gonerfest couldn’t have gone any better. The room was soooooo packed for us and I got super naked and it was great!!! I gave away my undies to a girl and I saw her later in a fight with another girl over who should get them. Craig from Scott & Charlene’s Wedding took my sports bra home as a gift.
They were really great that day as well and such great guys. We had been carrying around a big firework that we were too scared to let off so it was just sitting in the car for weeks but we decided that it was the right night to let it off with all the Aussies that were there, so we did it in the Murphy’s car park after the day wrapped up and it was amazing and everyone was smiling like children! Yay!!! Later that night it was time to let the mullet down and P-A-R-T-Y!!! The Gizmos asked me to come up and sing ‘Human Garbage Disposal’ with them and it was great!!! We got back to the place we were staying as the sun started to come up. What a day/night! We had a few days off in Memphis and then flew home back to home to Newcastle.
We can’t wait to go back next year!!! Thanks to everyone that put us up, helped us out and that came to the shows!!! We’ll be seeing you all again next year!!! For now I’m happy to be back in the greatest city in the world with all the fat mums, freaks and bogans!
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