We kicked off "Winter Tour '09: It Is Cold Out Here,Dammit" this past weekend at New Hampshire's WatervilleValley Ski Resort. Everything went swimmingly. Greatshow, nice accommodations, free lift tickets, and Icrashed a car into a snowbank and flipped it over on the way up.

Not wanting to waste even a single morning of tour time to create some good rock and roll stories, I decided to do the right thing and careen off I-93, nearly hitting several other cars on my way to landing upside down in a big, soft, well-placed pile of snow. After Dio (Andrew DiDio, manager and hapless passenger of The Help) and I took turns unstrapping each other from the seat belts that were suspending us from what was now the roof of the car, we crawled out, looked around, took a deep breath or two, and said ".............Well then. Well then indeed."

Before we emerged, a small crowd of witnesses had already gathered. Among them were an off-duty state trooper and a camera-bearing professional photographer, making this one of the most convenient groups of concerned citizens ever assembled. After snapping a few glamour shots of the car and reassuring everyone we were OK, our focus shifted back to the mission at hand: go to a mountain and rock the people on that mountain. Rock them good, rock them hard, rock them long. Rock them in such a way that they will never return to the mountain, for fear of being rocked so violently again.
This worked out pretty well. After the coldest load-in we'd ever experienced we spent a couple hours getting to know the patrons of T-Bars, the on-site bar we were playing at. Good people. There were children in the audience so we decided to have mercy and keep the rock at a non-traumatic level. The Amstel Light was flowing and everyone seemed to be having a pretty good time. Awwww yeah.

As part of our tour-granting contest victory, we also get free lift tickets at every mountain we play at this Winter. We used these the next day, and we SHREDDED and CARVED to the EXTREME and it was BODACIOUS. Most of us came in as novices, but we were still riding an adrenaline rush from the day before so we decided to man up and head right for the hardcore, extremely steep, icy, jump-inclusive, frighteningly named trails. As a member of a rock band, you hold a certain responsibility in society. People look to you to push to the envelope, to live life with no hesitation or regrets. Music is an escape, and there is an expectation that the people making it will live an adventurous, escapist life. I speak for the whole band when I say that we fully embrace this responsibility and always choose the most rebellious and intense option available to us at any given time. We are extremely serious about what we do, and part of what we do is to be seriously extreme. Always.

So after about an hour and half on the bunny hill in Lower Meadows, we decided to head up to our first Green Circle trail. We all fell down and hurt ourselves a lot. EXTREME. After taking a quick break to buy four-dollar Gatorades at the cafeteria, we hit the slopes again just to make sure that we had fully mastered biting it. As it turns out, we had.

The ride home was less eventful than the ride up. It is good to be back in Boston in one piece.

Next: Gunstock, 2/7.