Tour Diary: Supercrush
GUEST POST: Mark Palm
Supercrush, a Seattle-based band that masterfully blends guitar-heavy alt rock with killer hooks, recently embarked on the ‘More Melody Making in North America’ tour. The road-tested quartet played 24 shows in 26 days across British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, Texas and New Mexico, variously sharing stages with Militarie Gun, Spiritual Cramp, Death Lens and Pile of Love.
Supercrush got in the van to support their 5-song Melody Maker E.P. (2022). The tracks for Melody Maker were recorded during the sessions for their debut album SODO Pop (2020), an excellent 10-track collection featuring standouts like “On The Telephone,” “Be Kind To Me” and “I Can’t Stop (Loving You).”
Supercrush is a modern update to the sweet and heavy space that exists between classic rock, alternative and power pop. If you like fuzzed out Dinosaur Jr. guitars mixed with Teenage Fanclub pop hooks, this band should definitely be on your radar.
And like any good indie rock lifers, the members of Supercrush are no strangers to the glitz, glamour and grind of touring. So I asked guitarist/vocalist Mark Palm to share a few of his favorite photos and memorable moments from their recent run of dates.
Supercrush Tour Diary
By Mark Palm
“I sleep in the van every night…”
A beautiful sunny motel morning that I was not present for. I sleep in the van every night when we’re on tour so I tend to miss out on most of these pleasant moments of comfort and relative luxury.
On the other hand, I also miss out on crying babies in neighboring rooms, domestic disputes, housekeeping pounding on the door at 7am despite our noon checkout time as sanctioned by the front desk, cigarette burned sheets, murder scene bathrooms, and all the rest of the indignities of the budget motel experience.
“We haven’t had a single van issue on this whole trip!”
On a drive through the California desert with 3 days left on a month long tour I found myself thinking “Wow, we haven’t had a single van issue on this whole trip!” My next thought was “Uh-oh, I shouldn’t have thought that—I just jinxed it.”
I get superstitious about that sort of thing. For example, for decades I’ve had the personal policy to never utter the “T word” (transmission) while on tour. Anyway, at the very next gas stop I peeked under the van and whatdoyouknow, there was a steady stream of radiator fluid spraying out onto the ground underneath the vehicle.
Already running late for our load-in in Riverside that evening there was no time to replace the punctured hose at that moment so I climbed under and plugged the gouge with my finger while TJ ran inside the truck stop to buy flex tape and adjustable clamps to fashion a temporary patch. TJ’s on-the-fly solution was masterful and we made it to the gig.
This photo is from the following day in Los Angeles when we spent the afternoon in an Autozone parking lot draining the radiator and replacing the faulty hose for real (although I’m convinced TJ’s patch would have gotten us through the rest of the tour and home to Seattle no problem if we had dared risk it).
Note the pastel pink SLAYER van in the background.
“Tearing through all the garbage bags in the dumpster…”
It had become Sean’s habit to wear his pair of “lucky” sunglasses every night on stage, oftentimes forgetting that they were on his face and continuing to wear them all night, even while sitting shotgun, driving through the 3am darkness of a West Texas overnight haul.
At a Buc-ees in Waller, TX he bought a second pair—and then almost immediately mistook the plastic Buc-ees shopping bag that contained his new glasses as trash in our van and threw it into the garbage can at the venue in Houston. He realized his folly the next morning—not to mention the original lucky glasses had also mysteriously gone missing—leaving Sean shadeless.
So we drove back to the venue in hopes of finding the new sunglasses in the trash can where he threw them out. Of course, after the show all the garbage in the trash cans had been bagged and emptied into the dumpster behind the bar. I love a mission like that and we got to work tearing through all the garbage bags in the dumpster and sifting through all the empty beer bottles, cigarette butts, and other refuse.
Soon enough we unearthed a Buc-ees bag, and within it, the brand new sunglasses. This photo is from the precise moment of total elation when the glasses were recovered. A couple days later while sitting shotgun in the van, the original pair of lucky sunglasses inexplicably fell into Sean’s lap as if dropped from the sky and all was right with the world again.
“The randomness of the makeshift DIY music venue…”
I love playing an unusual venue. Playing professional rock clubs is also enjoyable and has it’s own benefits, but there’s something about the randomness of the makeshift DIY music venue that is fun to me. There’s a uniqueness to a spot that wasn’t designed and intended to be a performance space.
At the same time there’s something very familiar about them as I’ve played hundreds and hundreds of shows in those sorts of places going to back to when I was a teenager playing some of my first shows in a repurposed slaughterhouse shack on a farm in Surrey, BC. There’s always an element of improvisation required to make it work, which is part of the fun I suppose.
Here we are setting up to play in a small arcade/record store in Las Cruces, NM with tour-mates Pile of Love. It ended up being a fun show, with Sean playing guitar tucked behind an arcade game and Phil pinned against a vending machine.
If you’re looking to break up the Phoenix to Austin trek give Eyeconik Records a try!
“Our favorite rest stops…”
Along with California’s Imperial Sand Dunes, Texas Canyon Rest Area in Arizona is one of our favorite rest stops and a usual break for us. Here’s TJ stretching his legs en route to El Paso from Tucson.
“It’s always a bit of a nostalgia trip…”
Soundcheck at the University Theater in Berkeley, California. It’s always a bit of a nostalgia trip for me to play in the Bay Area because wherever we end up playing inevitably has some sort of relationship to the years I spent living in the Bay, whether it’s a tiny art space down the street from my old house in San Francisco’s Sunset District, or the record store in North Oakland that I used to deliver mail to on my route while working for the USPS.
In this instance, the UC Theatre happens to sit on the same block as the now bulldozed all night cafe that I used to leech free wifi from in the middle of the night during the year that I spent living in my van in Oakland—and a block up from the South Indian restaurant where I celebrated a lonely (but still pleasant) Christmas that same year.
Irrespective of my nostalgia, this was a great gig. It became immediately apparent at soundcheck that I was not accustomed to playing such large stages as I had to sheepishly borrow a longer instrument cable since mine could not even reach from my pedalboard at the front of the stage back to where my amp was positioned at the rear.
“Pulled over at an abandoned gas station…”
A quintessential tour moment in the middle of nowhere. Pulled over at an abandoned gas station for a momentary stretch before getting back in the van to continue the endless drive from San Antonio, TX to Las Cruces, NM.