tell me thats not the cutest thing ever!!
12/3/03
A helicopter flies through the stagnant sedimentary air that reclines on the greater Los Angeles valley. There's a camera man strapped and bolted to the floor, leaning out of the open hull of the bird. He can barely hear what he's thinking above the scream of the knives, cutting through the pea soup sludge that elementary school children learn to be cumulus clouds. To the camera man, there are buttons and glowing lights, and cropping, and focus, and composition to worry about, but to the rest of us, we're flying free to an ambient techno breakbeat. There is no metal bird, gutted and screaming across the sky. We're flying alone, intently focused on the concrete veins and arteries, clogged with constant traffic. If Los Angeles could see a doctor, she would be writing her will. We're drawing closer, intruiged by a white fifteen passenger van with matching trailer in tow. Enter the Matches.
The first thing that you should never know about the Matches is that even though they are following the cryptic mapquest directions to a t, taking the sonoma street exit in Canoga Park, veering right onto a local road, and groping their way, like confident young men who have read up on the location of the clitoris, to the Cobalt Cafe, they are lost. If it weren't for the trailer full of thousands of dollars of musical equiptment that prevents Matt Whalen from doing anything but driving straight, and generally is the subject of eighty percent of juvenile name calling bouts between band members, they may quite possibly wake up in a truck stop off of the Jersey turnpike one morning, and have completely forgotten what strange business brought them so far from their parent's houses in the Oakland foothills.
It's a strange life, crossing state lines and time zones in restless sleep, heading towards destinations where we'll find a stage and people who are just as lost as us, and for thirty minutes, we'll feel like we've finally found what we've driven 80,000 miles in the past 9 months searching for. Then, it inevitably slips from our grasp as the house lights come on, and the last people trickle from the venue. Where we're going is never where we are for long enough, so we keep our calendars full, and our families at home, sticking colored pins in wall sized maps of the world.
If just three years ago, you asked a fifteen year old Jon Devoto where he dreamed of being one day, he might've said "In a band on Epitaph records". Here he is, tonight, sitting in Jerry's Pizza next door to the Cobalt Cafe in Canoga Park, with a fake ID, a glass of wine, and the other three members of the Matches, raising our glasses above the table, where our signatures are scrawled next to legal x's beneath a letterhead reading, "Epitaph records". Smiles are wide tonight, as a whole new surreal world of opportunities opens up to us.
Soon, we are surrounded by tables with chairs stacked on them. The owner locks the door behind us, and the neon sign in the window flickers off. Once again, we were there for a moment, sitting around that cheesy italian picnic checkered tablecloth, all of the disjointed fragments of our four different lives coming together to make a clear picture. But out on the sidewalk in the brisk evening, we can feel the destination changing once more. We load into the van, as we have done a million times before, but this time, with a new air of hope, because tonight, we know that we are on our way.
definitley more than local boys <3<3