The time I had a whole punk band move into my house
or 3 days in Grover Beach
I was hosting a punk radio show and running a Evil Empire Owned radio station at the time so our access to musicians was plentiful. Also this was in the halcyon days of Myspace where if you liked a band, you could just like become friends with them. Click and chat easier than ever before.
During this time my old roommate and I befriended The Band From Boston, who I still keep in touch with, to this day. We went out to see them play whenever they came to California. We went to see their friend’s bands when they played in California. We were like Boston West for awhile with all the people we met during this time. Even YEARS like I’m talking a decade later I was still able to walk into a Dropkick Murphys show in an entirely other city in California and hear “Hey Stephanie!” by someone working on their crew. All of those boys from back there are good dudes.
One summer though our friends in The Band From Boston were hopping back forth from picking up dates here and there on other tours during their off days from the Social Distortion tour they were support on. I have a pretty good relationship with Social Distortion’s people so the roommate and I were already planning on catching the show in my home town of Bakersfield, CA (Yes Social D wrote a song about the place, yes this show we saw them at was the first time Social D played the song live…) but imagine my surprise when the roommate and I were getting ready to go see Guttermouth in San Luis Obispo about three days before the Social D show in Bakersfield and I get this message on myspace asking if the roommate and I were going to the show…. you know from one of the guys in The Band From Boston.
What?
I said yes and they said “see you there!” They had picked up this show with Guttermouth and I went and told my roommate and we high tailed it up to SLO for a great show.
Surprisingly the guys had a few days off between that show and the one in Bakersfield. So what did my roommate and I do? We invited them to stay with us! What could possibly go wrong? So you live in a two bedroom apartment between a bunch of crazy people and you just invited like 7 dudes from Boston to live with you for three days!? Who cares?!
I don’t know how we never got evicted.
They took us up on our offer. At the time I was dating a guy who lived in not so very near by Santa Maria, so I wasn’t home over night very often so I gave up my room to whomever, the rest of the guys either crashed on my roommates floor or in the living room on the sofa or floor.
The Michael Jackson trial was going on in Santa Maria during this and my roommate took them to it to stand outside the courtroom. We watched all of our DVDs and ate ramen. One night we loaded up our trusty ice chest Frank and took him to Avila Beach with the guys and they built an illegal bonfire on the beach.
A baby seal came running out of the ocean at one point, being chased by a shark. It waddled right up to us, close enough to touch. The dudes were so stoked over this baby seal, the Party Animal that it became stuff of legend. Literally when we saw them another time in another city a road crew member who had never met us said “Oh the girls with the seals!” When I was in Boston years later on St Patrick’s Day I was introduced to someone as The Girl With The Seals.
The cops showed up at our bonfire. They completely ignored our cooler full of alcohol and focused on the bonfire. This is normally where I step in but no… those charming Boston accents came in very handy when the guys explained they were from out of the state and were very sorry sir and kicked sand on it while saying they didn’t know they couldn’t just light driftwood on fire while talking to seals on a California state beach. My roommate and I just shut the fuck up and let them talk.
It worked.
We went home but not before a quick stop at the grocery store for things for breakfast. The morning we all left to go to Bakersfield for the Social Distortion show I was made the best steak and eggs I’ve ever had by one of the guys. They also cleaned the apartment complex’s pool while we were there and insisted upon listening to me on the radio.
We only had one neighbor complain the entire time they were there and it was just because we were smoking cigarettes too close to her window. The rest of our insane neighbors were mildly afraid for those three days.
It was one of the best long weekends of my life.