The Road Beneath My Feet by Frank Turner

Author:Frank Turner [TURNER, FRANK]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO004000
ISBN: e9781468313284
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2016-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

SHOW #658

Starland Ballroom, Sayreville, NJ, USA, 7 July 2009

One of the more surreal phone calls that I’ve received in my life happened when I was stopping over at my sister Jo’s house in Colorado in April 2009, just after the end of the run around the USA with Look Mexico. Charlie called me to say that, out of the blue, he’d received a request for me to open up a bunch of outdoor arena shows in America for The Offspring.

The Offspring were one of the punk bands of my youth, just like for a whole generation of kids whose introduction to the scene was through their record Smash and Green Day’s Dookie. Smash is still the biggest-selling independent record of all time and I can sing along with the songs on it in an almost Pavlovian fashion. The prospect of touring with The Offspring in the USA was both exhilarating and daunting. These would be miles and away the biggest American shows for me to date; but I’d be playing solo, completely unknown to large, restive, punk-rock audiences and I really wasn’t sure how things would go down.

I called my friend John Berna (Fake Problem’s tour manager) and arranged for he and I to drive the tour in a hired car. It wasn’t a particularly long run of dates, though it did meander down from Canada and the north-east to southern Florida. The tour began in Canandaigua, upstate New York. John and I ended up staying with a guy called Donny Kutzbach, a promoter from Buffalo who had seen me play in Austin at SXSW that year. He also put on a show for me at his venue, Mohawk Place, on an off day. To complete his hat-trick of kindnesses, as we were pulling out of his driveway and heading for Toronto, he asked if we had somewhere to stay that night. When we said no, he gave us the number of his friend Michael, who dutifully came out to that gig (my first one in Canada) and put us up. Michael and Donny are both part of a group called Postcard From Hell, a network of music fans that began as an Uncle Tupelo appreciation society but that has grown into an organization with a will of its own. I think of them as a musical illuminati and I’ve run into and been kindly treated by their members all over the world.

Playing before The Offspring (and the main support band, Sum 41) was a strange experience. Pretty much no one at the shows knew who I was and my arrival onstage each day was generally greeted with some consternation. In fairness, it was a reasonable reaction to an English guy with an acoustic guitar onstage at an arena punk show. But night on night (or more usually, afternoon on afternoon), I was just about holding my own and making a few new fans here and there. The Offspring guys were all thoroughly welcoming and I was having a good time.

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