Matt Sharp's tour diary: 2002-2003

Originally posted on MattSharp.net.
==Tour Diary Entry #1==
brooklyn
it's 10 in the morning the end of September. Sunday, September the 29th. The morning of the show in nyc and just like with my personal diary I was supposed to start writing this along time ago, but i am having an impossible time getting started. We're already two weeks into the tour and already there are so many strange memories.
In houston we played this place sharing the space with as erotic theatre company (i didn't see their performance, but there was something going on involving a strap on and other sexual devices). although, even without those folks the evening was rather strange on it's own, there were torrential rains all day and night. so, we're all taking shelter from the storm. the porn people were intensley rude talking through our whole set, so we decided to punish them by playing as long as possible, to see if we could outlast them, put them to sleep, and send them back into the storm. i think we played over two and a half hours.
Anyways, god bless the people of houston that had to put up with all that and in the end overcame it all by singing all of the girls parts on all old rentals songs. that always gives me the chills. what else, the waitress at i.h.o.p. in jackson called josh a bowlegged freak. i'd say so far, atlanta was the best show for us performance-wise. i know somebody video taped it so maybe we'll put some of that up when i get a copy. i got a chance to return to leipers fork. it's was such a beautiful and haunting experience.i wish i could explain what i mean.
Anyways, every night we've met genuinely cool people. so, the last two weeks has truly been a humbling experience for me. it's so nice each night to meet everyone and realize, that audience isn't filled with a bunch of idiots, but rather with bright people with good style that same passion music for the we do.
love you all
talk to you soon.
m.s. 
==January 1, 2003==
2002 Year End Reivew - Matt Sharp
==February 14, 2003==
All About "Mrs. Young"
honestly, i have a pretty good memory for most of the music i recorded a long time ago. although, i am pretty foggy on all the versions of "mrs. young" a.k.a. "jamie mach 2". the song was written for my old attorney and all the new found sense of confidence and security she instilled in me and the lads. the earliest version was recorded on mr. cuomo's tascam 8 track cassette machine and was intended as a b-side for a possible "jamie" 7" indie single (which was aborted) long before the release of the blue album. like i said, my memory on this one is awfully fuzzy, but as far as i remember rivers did most of the instrumentation except the bass and lead vox, i thought jason cropper played some acoustic guitar (i know he showed me how to play the chords for it on his acoustic), but then again i'm not so sure, it sounds like r.c. on drums, but it could be pat. the drums are so low in the bootleg mix you have, i can't tell and don't remember. later on the song morphed into "please, let that be you" and the lyrics changed, because i probably didn't want to sing about weezer related issues on "return of The Rentals" .
at that point i took most of the images from this depressing building that felt like goverment housing in a russian ghetto, that's where i lived for a short while. that's where we shot the video for "friends of p." and that's all about "mrs. young" i can recall. hope that helps to clear the fog, but most likely, it just makes it all more confusing.
m.s.
==2003 Tour Diary # 1==
hello everybody,
as you may know by now i'm back on the road. we're one week into the first of two five week head-lining tours in the US and Canada (is that confusing ?). tonight we're in Orlando, we play here tomorrow. i'm a little brain dead from all the driving in the RV, so this may be a little brief. tour number one is with my good friend scott johnson (who is filling in for greg on this round) and josh hager (we're only four shows into it and josh is thinking about changing his name to Garvey J.)
our stupidity is keeping us good and numb and really dumb.
scott and i talked about starting a fictitious British rock-n-roll band called "diamond star" ...he's name would be "birdsey starmaker" ...my name would be "kaz davies" or as the NME calls me "kaz diamond" so we'll all either have bad brit accents or even worse southern accents.
we're playing lots of new songs and it's all going well. except for the fact that i wrecked the RV (known as the "wiennie-wabo") into a lamp post before we even got out of LA.
we got about 4 weeks to go on this first part, then we'll take a couple weeks off and greg will join up with us for another round.good newswe're planning on releasing an EP with "in music we trust records". the EP will be under my name and titled "puckett's versus the country boy" , it should be out in around four to five weeks.
here's the track listing.
01. Goodbye West Coast (radio edit)
02. Some Come Running Through (this is a song we recorded in Leipers Fork that didn't make it to the record, you may remember it as the sing-along from the last tour)
03. Visions Of Anna
04. Hey, What You Gonna Do ?
hopefully, soon after that we'll have the full length record out.
there's lots going on beyond that, i'll let you know about it a little down the line.
talk to you soon,
m.
==2003 Tour Diary # 2==
Hello everyone,
It's Sunday night, the night before our show in Buffalo at the Continental. We're held up in a hotel and working on a few new songs to add to the set. The last couple shows have come off really well I think.
Hoboken was Scott's night. There were lots of his crew in attendance and they served as a catalyst to loosen us up and liven' up the rest of the crowd. After New Jersey was the show at the University of Vermont. We played in this great gothic library with enormously high ceilings. The ghostly acoustics and the mood was perfect and I thought it was the best show we've played so far, but I think the guys disagree. After the show, the university girls had gone wild, those who didn't see the show or knew who we were surrounded the RV and wanted us to put our John Hancock's on their Winnebago's, hilarious.
The east coast still hasn't thawed out, I can't believe it ! Some nights have been frigid and one night when we lost heat in the winnie-wabo and I had to sleep under our slide projector screen. Anyways, after tomorrow we're making our way back west. Can't wait for the shows to come. See you soon. take
care, m. 
==2003 Tour Diary # 3==
The Ascot Room looked and sounded amazing, then we drove from Minneapolis to Denverbrain dead - staying in a crack head hotel in Denver,watching a terrible Christopher Walken / Anne Heche flick on tv ...terrible
We've listened to every CD i have twice ...we all temporarily hate all music.
Only 4 more shows left on this run!
Talk to you soon.
m.s.
==2003 Tour Diary # 4==
Stuck in seatle with the wenebego blues again well, i did it again, the morning after the seatle show i scrapped up the driver's side of the wenne-wabo up against a telephone poll. So, my driving machismo has taken another dip into the red.
After, the 30 hour drive from Denver to Seattle i was beyond crispy. I had such high hopes for that show after our last triumph at U.W.
I was kind of in a funk after the show and the accident, but we listened to a board tape of the show on our drive down to oakland and it sounded pretty good, so that started to turn things around.
We spent last night in el cerrito and i took a trip down memory lane, you see, i lived there for around nine months the year before we formed weezer. I lived on san pablo ave. in a studio apartment above a tropical fish store. It kinda of looked like a place that Humphery Bogart would of used as an office in one of those old detective flicks. I spent nine months moping around listening to the coctuea twins, reading depressing books i probably couldn't understand, working at the berkeley hat company and as morrisey said "wearing black on the outside, because that's how i feel on the inside". oh, woe-ways-me.
So here we are, we have a couple days off before the San Francisco show. We're going to try to do a bit of recording on saturday at my friend Ty's place. i think we'll try to record "colorado" and maybe one other new song.
After San Francisco, we head home to L.A. and finish up this tour at another old stomping ground of mine, Westwood, C.A. and U.C.L.A.
I never went to school there, but i did have a short stint of selling "luxury" dog shampoo and tanning lotion over the phone with Pat Wilson by my side slinging the junk to whoever would buy it. That's when we tried to write a song called "get people to buy what they don't need" the only words were "get people to buy what they don't need, that's my job ! , that's my job ! , that's my job ! " and it just repeated them over and over again.
talk to you soon,
m.s. 
==June 2003==
june 2003
ridin' shotgun in ford 450, heading to nebraska. things have been strange, drama's been high and life rolls on. first few shows were pretty rough around the edges, too ugly for my taste, but then, out of nowhere, a miracle, a light switch was turned on and we had a three show pass. portland, seattle and spokane all went off without a hitch. nocturnal in portland and the gals that run the joint were awfully suave, seattle was in top form, back to the UW magic, we waited for the sun to set and played in a lobby of this church and mood and comedy show flowed with ease. onto spokane for the first time ever, so we're told, spokane is best known as the crystal meth capitol of the world and by the look of cab drivers i met, i'm inclined to believe them. we played on a lo-fi AM radio show, the DJ looked like Robert Downey Jr. and after talking, we layed down "please let that be you" and "goodbye west coast", then scrambled to find our way back to the club. side bar : the great northwest has the absolutely most confusing street layout and city plan in all of the U.S., anyways, the show was lighter than most, which was a good change of pace, a little joy never hurt anyone, so we had some laughs and i capped off the night by playing the worst game of pool any sad sack has ever played.
the curse of canada.
we had such great plans for all of canada, but once the first domino falls, they all gotta go ! vancouver had a fit over the fact we ask the audience to sit on the stage with us and declared "absolutely no sitting allowed" and we did everything to push it through, but it fizzled into thin air, next the calgary jazz fest took up every all ages venue within a billion miles, and finally during the previous week at the club in winnipeg band members were beatin' up outside, somebody had been shot and the club closed it's doors. well, we still got regina, the only problem, after all the cancellations, we were left with a three days of straight driving, after all those wide open flat lands and little sleep, left my brain fried and my memory suffered, i dropped chords and lyrics like marbles.
so now, it's on to the spiritual home of the "bright eyes" and "about schmidt", omaha, nebraska. i have big hopes for this one, last time, we played ok, then i told the audience we were apart of a merger that included saddle creek records, burger king and myself. we were told some saddle creek people there and they weren't too happy, but the audience was incredible, better than we were, so, this time i'd like to give 'em some of the good stuff. ...we'll see talk to you soon.
m.s.
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