Tales From The Road: Santa Barbara/SLO

We woke up Friday morning a tad bit hung-over from the night before. Thursday night we ran through a practice of our set and out of nowhere, people started showed up for an impromptu party. So we raged it a bit on Thursday to prepare ourselves for a little mini-tour action. 

Packing for out of town shows is very much a “learn-over-time” process and we’re getting pretty damn efficient at it. We did a little Tetris action to accommodate all of our gear and by the time we got on the road we were only 2 hours late (which is really good for us).

On the road I found myself pondering what the hell I’m doing with my life as I always do on my journeys. I now take a profound amount of pride when I thinking about Vibrant EYEris and our retrospective accomplishments over the 4 years we’ve been doing what we do. There is a very solid force of talented musicians that has formed between the 4 of us and we’ve been through so much as a band together.

When VE started, I had no idea where we were heading or what exactly we were trying to do , we just wanted to make music. Now, feel like the future is more wide open than it has ever been before and each day brings a new step in this incredible journey.

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It was a cold quiet evening at home, I was planning on a long night of web work and event promotion, then I stumbled on the post I was waiting for… a raid was possibly going down at Occupy Santa Cruz that evening.

It had been almost two weeks since I had paid a vist to OSC. From the beginning I was deeply involved  with helping set the foundation of what would grow to become today's Occupy Santa Cruz movement. After about 2 ½ weeks of involvement I had to tend to my normal life (work, recording our new album, sleeping more often etc) and my involvment with OSC became more and more distant.

Well, now that it seemed a raid was a likely, I decided it was time to head down and visit my fellow occupiers on-site. The only true force we have against the brute police force at the present moment is our power in numbers. In general, we have committed to non-violence and the most effective way to combat excessive force from law enforcement is to overwhelm them with support from the community. So I took my call to action and headed down there.

The tempature was incredibly cold… but the vibe was anything but frigid. Never before had I seen so many people here, and everyone was singing, dancing, even howling like wolves from time to time. Make-shift drums out of half cut out garbage cans along with real drums provided the beats, and we provided the vocal melody.

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