Go away, come home.

Seattle band Spanish For 100 at S&S Cafe – Emporia, Kansas. © Ryan Schierling

"It was somewhere near The Crazy Mountains in Montana – day 17 – when I began to lose my mind. The air conditioner had just given up the ghost after 14 straight hours driving out of Denver and the early July temperatures were climbing. I was moist, sticking to my clothes and my clothes were attached to a red fold-out bench seat. I had dim memories of seeing the sun coming up, but that could have been one of at least five other sleepless nights on this summer tour. 

Polaroid pictures secured to an overhead rail with strips of duct tape swung back and forth beneath the blue and brown headliner. A pink stuffed ape wearing a mortarboard sat across from me in the captain’s chair, the butt of a yellow flashlight unceremoniously shoved into a break in the stitching in it's ass. Where was the Uriah Heep that had kept us going for so long? Everyone was silent, a little lost and glassy-eyed, moving in slow motion. The energy drinks for shift-driving were gone. The ice was melted.

I tried in vain to think of some type of candy that has a crunchy exterior and a chewy center. That’s what Horchata, the Spanish For 100 bus, had become – crusty on the outside and moist and tender in the middle. We were bad nougat that was quickly heading south, churning west over mountain passes at 47 miles per hour. I couldn’t think of the damn candy."

In 2007 and 2008, I documented two consecutive summer tours for the Seattle band Spanish For 100. 

I stopped shooting live music in Seattle, for all intents and purposes, in 2005.