2012.
The mother of all Chaos tours… the 2012 Dismantled tour. Is now over. This was the last Dismantled tour in North America for a while. I can honestly say that this was the most gritty and fucked up adventure I’ve ever had in my life and although we had much less technical difficulties on this tour than others… the drama was tenfold. But. In my head, tours are supposed to be suicide missions that should be the opposite of normal, boring life. This was the closest I’ve come to crashing a plane into a building and coming out alive. But burned beyond recognition. Whatever doesn’t kill you… makes you stranger.
The tour was with two other bands, Accessory and Cyanide Regime, who hung on for dear life as the chaos unfolded and soldiered on through the entire mess and kept their cool like no other bands would. We had a 24 hour drive to a show in La Crosse, WI from Seattle that we only later find out was a super early show that our agent failed to inform us of. That fucker still owes us money. We had our member TZA leave in the middle of tour because shit got too intense. We had Nero Bellum kicked out at the Gramercy in NYC. I had a missing persons report filed on me in Dallas, TX and Jon Siren became scarred for life at a strip club.
But somehow, the Admiral spared everyone and left just me and Jon Siren in the hollowed-out carcass of a van which smelled like something died inside, trekking through the Southwest desert, broke, sleep-deprived, exhausted but not broken. Somehow we found our way back to Phoenix where we briefly formed a supergroup with Hardwired and manage to cram some things of ours into a compact vehicle while leaving the rest in storage. Finally, we leave to Los Angeles where I fall asleep in the car as soon as Jon loads out his drums.
The dream I have next was amazingly filthy and nightmarish. Our whole crew was zombified with rotting holes in their skulls where TV monitors played out what they saw through their eyes. We had a duffel bag full of drugs that we were trying to hide and a police officer questions us about the whole thing. Our only way to prove that we were innocent was to playback what happened on the skull monitor but the cop refused to look into a rotting head. So we do the next best thing. Someone takes their arm, snaps it while white, milky foam sprays everywhere, and pulls out a telescope that can take videos. Problem solved, but I pass out from the stress of watching that unfold. And wake up.
A night later, I have another dream. Me and a friend are in a building. There’s a man trying to kill my friend. The friend tells me to leave. I jump out through some window that puts me out of the building. I run and tell people to call 911. The cops arrive. Apparently the man killed my friend. But the police leave. Some bystanders stick around and tie up the man. They get bored and leave. I watch in frustration as the last bystander talks to me irritated and in a hurry. He wants to leave too. I watch him leave and watch the man who killed my friend frantically undoing his ties. I believe he will succeed.
And that is the moral of this whole thing. Is. That there are no morals. Some things start. Some things end. And some things just hang. In purgatory.
The End.
The scariest shirt you will ever wear. Available at http://www.dismantled.org/store.
A free “The War Inside Me” CD. Click the image above to be taken to the Facebook “event.”
Most people’s lives are summed up in this magnificently shot video.
Amazing story, thank you very much for sharing. Let’s hear more stories, hmmm? For the Insecthead video… I was very much inspired by the movie “The Fly.”
