Aaron's Diary

11/5/02
So I'm trying to update at least once a month, but it's very rare that I get time what with only 3 computers and working all the time to promote ol JS. Stuff's been great as you might imagine, except for last nite Chris pulled Thor over and jumped out saying "the trailer's sparking!" so we all got out to examine the commotion and it turns out a trailer wheel exploded and took out the fender and we were dragging the lil guy on one wheel and a rim! So that was exciting, we got it towed to Lafayette, LA and fixed everything up with no problems. Luckily it was on a day off, otherwise we would have had to cancel a show or something!
That's the only exciting thing lately, except for playing with Andrew W.K., that was a riot, and Andrew is one of the nicest, most honest people ever. We chilled with his bass player who was a great guy as well. His act, while decidedly different, is in much the same spirit as our own, very positive.
We played two great Louisiana shows as well, one in New Orleans the day after all Hallow's eve, then in Baton Rouge. Halloween in the French Quarter was incredible, mostly it was rad costume watching and meeting all the people that we'd met in the mall all over again! Weird how small a town it is, we met these cool girls in the mall, then one of them turns out to be the girlfriend of an old pal of mine! Then I'm walking down the street on Halloween and some crazy looking guy jumps out at me and yells "Aaron!" Turns out it is my old friend Benji from Alaska who I haven't seen for 5 years! His band just got signed and is doing well, they're called "Supagroup" I believe. So that was pretty interesting, but not unusual, apparently I know a lot of people or am just in the right circles to meet them all the time. My mom called this hotel in Boston and an old highschool chum of mine who actually used to sing in a lil band with me answered as the concierge! Nutty. Well, till next time…

10/5/02
See, we've been really busy! At least, I haven't been able to use a computer for any amount of time lately anyway. A lot has happened over August and September though, as you might imagine. There's just too much stuff to do when we're not on tour, but now that we've got some long drives with nothing to do I can do so many things, like update my tour diary!
I'm not going to recount everything that's happened lately, but a few of the highlights I can remember. We played a show for a friend of ours in her garage 'cause it was her surprise birthday party! It was great, Mark called and said that we couldn't come bowling as per our original plan for her birthday, cause we we're (cough cough) sick and stuff, then we set up in her garage for when she came home, then we had an awesome rockin' time. Looks like we're playing a few more house shows in general this tour which should be great, as everyone at a house show is generally there for us.
Of course, we actually got our RV, Thor, replacing Zeus our big grey van. It's pretty sweet! We can refrigerate things, we can make dinner on a stove and bake stuff in the oven (I toasted some bagels the other day) microwave anything we want (I had pancakes this morning) then we get to roll up to our favorite suburban capitalist establishment (Wal-Mart) and get all sorts of fun stuff after sleeping in their parking lot. There's a ton of great benefits to having a rolling house to tour in, but it also has a few drawbacks, like it's really BIG! We can't park in too many places, we sort of have to pick and choose, the gas mileage is also, as we like to say in the biz: really freakin' bad!
There are a few less tangible benefits as well, club owners seem to treat us a little nicer and my neck's not always sore after sleeping on the floor or someone's house where I'm sneezing cause of their cat.
We played in Huntington West Virginia the other day with this band The Start, also from LA, sort of a new wave band, but one of the best bands we've played with in a long time! They had incredible energy and stage presence, with Jamie the guitarist doing these crazy spins with his legs flying all over the place and his arm sawing on the strings. We're hopefully going to play together in LA sometime.
Speaking of LA, we're going to get back there by December-ish then record a new album in January, one that I and the rest of the guys will actually be on! Should rock, cause we've got a bunch of good folks lined up to engineer and produce and some friends will hopefully come out to the studio for their input.
In other news, Kristen, who took photos you can see in the photo section of our Seattle show, came out to the East coast during our lil break and we went to NYC for a couple days. That was awesome, taking a lil jaunt around the big city that I'd never really spent much time in. Her friend bailed us out our first nite there by bringing us a coupon for a fancy hotel so we only had to pay the tax! The next day we checked out the natural history museum and saw a neato space show in the planetarium about extra-terrestrial life narrated by Han Solo himself, Harrison Ford. After that we went to ground zero which is an immense square in the ground with a lot of weight for an empty space. That nite we saw my pal in OKGO at their CD release party. If you haven't heard of these guys, go to okgo.net cause they rock, they've a real fun sound and a cool live show, they're doing real well with all the CD sales and stuff too.
And that's about it! Till next time, same Jupiter channel, who knows what Jupiter time! Over and out -Aaron

7/26/02
Gosh, sorry guys, been a long time overdue for the ol' diary entry! We've fortunately (but unfortunately for diary entries) been extra super fan-tasti-busy. I went back to Alaska for a week and saw the friends and fam, my folks are really fit and my mom's applying for Survivor! That was a good time, my mom plugged JS in her application video and to all her friends, and she makes a mean bottle of Cherry wine (among many other flavors). I'm proud.
So many things have happened recently that it is a bit difficult to start so I'm going to shoot for the old stream of consciousness, whatever comes out in whatever order goes down approach…lets see…we just left Sacramento after a bit in LA promoting, we saw my pal Mouse in San Francisco and stayed in his nifty apartment after playing a show in Visalia, where we played our new song "Badge of Honor" that really rocked. After Visalia we stayed at Jamie's house with her 2 huge German shepards, 6 cats and 2 parrots, so I slept in the van in the interest of not filling my head with the allergic immune response mucus cats are so fond of generating for me. Last nite we stayed with this Amazing girl I met in the mall in Sacramento. Katrina and her roommate Maurine offered us a place to stay, but we had already set up our tents so they came out to our campsite and had some of my mom's aforementioned cherry wine and I whipped up a spicy curry dish.
By the way, I'm writing a cookbook of sorts, more of a pamphlet really that'll have lots of tips on how to buy, eat and cook, as well as recipes. Should be neat, I just need some time to finish it! We're on our way to check out the redwood forest which seems like it should be pretty cool, seeing as they're THE BIGGEST TREES EVER! But not the oldest, that's the bristlecone pine. Go college education! We're listening to my friend Aja West right now, check out www.mackrosoft.com for some rad underground progressive hip hop.

7/9/02
Well, we're on our way back across the country to NY. A whole lot of things have come to pass of late that have made us grow as a band. Gosh, where to start… how bout backwards, yesterday I went down to the van at 1pm after waking up in Las Vegas after playing an amazing show at café Roma after touring with Jonah's Onelinedrawing for the West coast. The doors to the van were wide open and everything was strewn all over the place inside! Apparently some kids had reached in through the cracked windows and unlocked the doors and taken many small electronic devices including about 4 portable CD players, a whole bunch of indy rock and punk CDs about 10 Jupiter Sunrise CDs (maybe they'll be fans later) and my bag of important stuff such as my wallet, phone numbers, journal, photographs and practice gear! Incredibly I found some of the stuff on the side of the road, such as my journal, photographs and computer disks, the irreplaceable stuff, but lost all the nice things. So that's a big bummer, that there are people out there who can cowardly hurt us so much, and that we lost all our video tapes! No tour videoooo!!! Those rat bastards. Look for an update to "the catalogue of near disaster" in the near future.
All that aside, our tour with Jonah's Onelinedrawing for the west coast was phenomenal in general, yet encompassed everything from super fantasto-amazing to crushing humiliation. We learned a heap of stuff about ourselves and our philosophy for playing music, being a band and wearing clothes through Jonah as a sort of mediator/devil's advocate while he rode in our van.
Sacramento was probably one of the best experiences we've had in a city so far. It all started when we were coming up to Seattle from LA and stopped in the mall to promote the show there. I met this girl who was already going to our Portland show (cause of Jonah, not us) and on top of that, she is pretty much the nicest person ever! She offered us a place to stay that nite, but we had already set up at a campsite so her and her roommate came out and hung at the campsite with us! We drank some of my mom's wine and waxed poetic, then the next nite we stayed at her place where she had just purchased the biggest screen television…ever! We watched some Beatles movies. Then we had big vegetarian feast, and Ben over cooked the Tofu Pups big time, but it was grand. There are some nutty photos from that nite of me in a wig and Ben in a hat that might make it onto the website at some point… When we came back to Sacramento, we couldn't stay at her house, but she had a couple friends who had no qualms with letting us crash their place at 2 am and sleep in their apartment! Also some of the nicest people ever! The next nite we met Jake the drunken fire juggler who lives across the street and discussed life on other planets and coincidence until the wee hours.
But I'm sure that's not all that interesting compared to what happened in LA a few days later! We whiffed one whole song and despite playing perfectly for the rest of the set, couldn't shake the feeling that we screwed it up big time. The industry people who were inevitably at our LA show really dug it though, so no ill will, and at any rate any bad feelings were totally eclipsed by our show the next nite in Orange county that was probably one of our favorite shows…ever!
This was about the time that we thought about going completely independent, giving the finger to record labels entirely. It's still just speculation so don't go blabbing off about anything, but I would be down with being the Ani Difranco of indy rock for sure. She in many ways actually paved the way for being a major recording artist without using the existing corporate system, so she might be a good person to talk to about it all.
We are now on our way back to NY, our first stop being Provo, Utah and we will soon be playing with Portuguese ska band, three and a quarter! That ought to be a little bit of nuts. Going from venerable indy rock solo artist to unknown latin ska group in three days!

6/18/02?
I think that's the date… who keeps track of that stuff anymore? Anyhow we're in Louisiana camping out at a state park. There's plenty of great bugs and humidity here, and even more last nite when we were on Bourbon street. There was plenty of good ol' fashioned excitement last nite, the kind that's readily available in New Orleans. There were flashers and fights, horses and strippers and in amongst it all were some really cool folks. We met Abbey, who apparently wrote a song that Ani Difranco used on her "not a pretty girl" album, but would not take credit for it, because songs aren't for credit. The first bunch of people we met last nite were 4 girls from (Hartford) Connecticut, who were also the very last group we ran into at about 2 in the morning, though in a slightly different state… That was right after we were standing next to an honest-to-god, knockdown, drag out fist brawl. One of the guys knocked a drink onto my leg, but before I could show him who not to soak with a daiquiri, he took a hand to the face giving him a bloody nose. It ended up being a classic street scuffle with all the braggadocio and drunken jumping around that involves and the big tattooed guy won over these two little jerks essentially cause he was a little more intimidating (and inebriated).
Florida, despite having a bad case of the rains until the day we left, was a grand ol' time. We had a bunch of dates with Legends of Rodeo, a great almost classic rock outfit from Palm Beach who recently toured with Dashboard Confessional. They had just lost their bass player however, about 4 days before their tour started but luckily they brought along a friend of theirs who was a guitar player and subbed bass for a bit. He had to go home early though and I ended up filling his shoes for a few gigs. That was excellent fun, as it is pretty much no fluff rock n' roll, songs about America and how the devil started rock and roll, you know how it is!
Legends also party's a bit more than us (understatement), which was fun to do a bit with them One of our last shows was in Jacksonville at this bar , but behind the bar in the dusty parking lot was where the action took place. Legend's new merchandise manager was the designated driver that nite, so he hadn't consumed any alcohol, which is important background for what comes next if you believe that rock bands are just a bunch of crazy drunken guys. Nope, these are just a bunch of crazy guys! He starts by stripping down to his tighty-whities and crankin' the classic rock in the van, then proceeds to get everyone involved to follow suit, at least by taking their shirts off, then a few folks were dancing on top of Legend's van and trailer, he ran back into the club in his new outfit (or lack thereof) alternately alone and carrying this girl they had just met, and generally made a real rock and roll nite of it. That's all for now!

5/25/02
We're on our way to our show in Concord, NH. I just finished writing this article for "BASSMASTER" magazine, we'll have the first page of that up on the website pretty soon. The guys at that magazine are pretty cool, but something did seem a little fishy…I mean, we've only been together for a few months, so it was quite surprising that I was asked to write a big article for "BASSMASTER", but hey, not gonna complain.
So we saw Star Wars, episode II, I don't know about you guys but everyone in our theater cracked up when Amidala fell out of the aircraft onto the sand, and that clone runs up and says "are you okay?" and she stands up and says confidently: "Yes!" and then of course Yoda kicking ass was pretty great. Other than that…GL has a little 'splainin' to do, cause these last two movies are not even in the same room as the others! Did they just decide to go with their first draft of the script?! Well, enough of that, don't want to get all riled up.
Right now we're talking about our songwriting prospectus for the future, the next album, the album after that… we're thinking of calling the next one "The Best of Jupiter Sunrise" but we'll see. Now Ben's talking about building a pipe bomb or something, this is right after we discussed the possibilities of actually hearing ancient cultures by playing their clay pots and urns like a phonograph, then overhearing Osama Bin Laden's private discussions about the Taliban cuties, so as you can see, we have a wide ranging batch of topics, frequently shifting from one intensely interesting and world shattering idea to jokes about Ben!
Chris has finally convinced me to be vegan. It was really the osteoporosis statistic that did it for me, 'cause in countries that don't drink dairy, there is a very low incidence of osteoporosis, whereas in countries like America, we're big on that problem. Sounded suspicious, and besides, milk makes you flatulate so I'm not gonna do it anymore.

5/11/02
So Connecticut is pretty great, we got here yesterday (Danbury) and stopped at the mall (as many of you know our MO is stopping at malls along the way, drumming up support and selling the CDs to put gas in the tank) met a bunch of great kids, told em about the show at the Empress ballroom, then went to the gig. Well, that was a large sentence, there's probably going to be a few more like that too, cause periods are a silly piece of punctuation, if you ask me… shoot.
We got to the show at the Empress Ballroom… and it is a lot like an actual ballroom, very huge, can't even see the ceiling, so it had excellent natural reverb. Then we had an awesome time playing our sissy rock, even though I was a bit under the weather. My friend Leona showed up too, from across the state, which was flattering, she was at our other Connecticut show last week, she's cool.
The other bands were all excellent, probably one of the most consistently great lineups we've played with. I think that was helped by the fact that the first two bands didn't even show up! Never Heard of It, the Getaways and West Beverly (whose basement we stayed in later, I slept next to the doll house) all rocked their pop punk brains out.
After waking up at the crack of 11 we watched cartoons and ate salad (what a bunch of vegetarian sissy lalas we are!) and Mark worked on the booking for the south a bit (always working too), then we hit the mall, in all its mother's day glory and did a little shameless self-promotion. Now we're on the road to our next show in Kingston!