“I have a tumor. It’s you guys. You’re growing on me.”

That would be a direct quote from Alex of All Time Low to a stoked Bakersfield, CA crowd last night. We’re going to forget proper blogging chronology for this entry because I’ve got to share a little on Bakersfield because it was so . . . we’ll go with unique. The venue was a little less concert hall and a little more, as I came to learn, former furniture department store. We were playing the upstairs of a mall, but not just any mall. This mall contained such wonders of the world as a bootleg Panic At The Disco, My Chem merchandise specialist, a store that had a shirt that said “window shopper” with a wad of cash sticking out of the pocket displayed in its window display and a liquor store that sold only tequila and a single bottle of Jack Daniels. But lets go back to the bootleg band merch lady. You name it, this woman has bootlegged merch for it. If you walk through her store you find Panic At The Disco lunch boxes, door hangers, scarves and cigar boxes. This isn’t the kind of merch you’d actually want tough. We’re talking total novelty, side-splitting laughter inducing merch. What this woman does is cut pictures, mostly out of copies of AP, and essentially scotch tapes them on various afore mentioned items. The gentlemen in the Matches were so impressed with the quality of her work that they asked the woman to fashion a custom lunch box (or humidor, depending on your perspective) for them, which she obliged. Scattered through out the store you could also find such high-ticket items as I Love Lucy bumper stickers and assorted Sno-Globes. Next time you’re at the Golden State Mall please, please, please check this store out. You’ll love it.

Among the other completely genuine scores were 4 genuine family portraits picked up by Indy and the All Time Low crew. Both the All Time Low and AP/Matches bus now have wholesome 18”x12” family portraits to remind us of home. Never mind that we have no idea whose families the portraits are of and the fact that the portraits are easily the creepiest things we’ve seen on this tour. It’s totally the thought that counts. I don’t know what’s more disturbing, the fact that someone was selling random family portraits, or that we actually bought them. Also, we witnessed a man totally rocking a coonskin headband. Not a coonskin hat, a coonskin headband. So feel free to picture that.

Rewind a night to an utterly jam packed Soma in San Diego. This was the biggest crowd we’ve seen at the tour so far and it showed, so thank you lads and lasses of the beautiful Whales Vagina for making the stop great. One of my good, good friends, Mindy, from Fox Racing Co stopped by to hook the tour our with some staple items like socks and boxers, and some less staple, but equally welcomed items like sun glasses and guitar straps. Either way, I big ole thank you goes out to Fox for keeping us in fresh clothes for one more day. Today: off in LA and a sushi Easter dinner. Very traditional. Deets to come.

XOXO
ChrisAtAP