California Screamin'

Thursday, June 3 -- Tempe, Arizona: We have to keep the heat blasting in the van so the engine doesn't melt down. It's 108 degrees outside; I feel like I'm in a poorly shielded space capsule re-entering Earth's atmosphere. The cockpit's rocking Hawkwind and Hank Williams. When we finally pull into the parking lot of the Marquee Theater outside of Phoenix, I start to experience déjà vu. This is my final show with the guys on this tour, but Tempe was also the last place my old band played with Planes back in '98 before we headed back to Colorado and they to Illinois. Planes Mistaken for Stars has changed a lot since then -- but what hasn't? The world is by far a sicker place, and sicker times call for sicker music. Gared, Mikey, Matt and Chuck have heeded the call: The four of them may be burly, scary and strikingly Viking-like, but there's a sensitivity to them that can't help but react to all the apathy and ugliness that permeates this whole civilization from the top down. To paraphrase Sinatra, they eat it up and spit it out.

On the way back to Denver in a rental car the next day, I go into a gas station and fish around in my pocket for change. My hand comes out covered in sand from the beach in San Diego, where I was four days earlier. I remember asking Gared that day if he ever got homesick; he is, after all, the member of the band most rooted in Colorado, with a mortgage, a wife and a baby boy. "Yeah, I get homesick all the time," was his answer, "but then when I'm home, I get road sick."

Then Mikey, overhearing us, summed up everything with blunt, stoner Zen wisdom: "Never at rest, dude."