Everrest – CRAZY TOUR STORIES

In this Crazy Tour Stories segment, the hard rock band, Everrest, shares one of their stories from being on the road. You can check out the story, after the break.

We were on a West Coast tour and played our set in Albuquerque New Mexico one night and the show was great! After the show, we were all tired and ready to call it a night and just pass out in our bunks on the bus, but one of our guitarists Mason was still all hyped up and insisted that he wanted to knock out at least half of the drive to Flagstaff Arizona for our show the next day. So we let him.

We all go to sleep, and it turns out that Mason pulled an all-nighter and drove us all the way to Flagstaff, so when we woke up, we were on a mountain covered in snow. Most of us are from Texas and don’t get to see a lot of snow, so we were excited to see so much. We go exploring for a little while and then decide it’s time to go get some food and get ready for load in at our next show that night. But when we tried to start the van, it wouldn’t start. We tried jumping it, and a few other things but eventually realized that it was probably the alternator that went out.

The unfortunate thing about this is that there is a blizzard on the way, and no one could tow a big bus like ours with all of our equipment in a trailer attached to the back. So we had to call a mobile mechanic. He said he could be there in about 5 hours and would bring a new alternator with him and fix it on site. We realized at that point that we were going to be stuck in a blizzard inside our tour bus with no heat and no food for quite some time.

So we decided, why not just make good use of this time and scenery we have here and just TRY to film a music video ourselves for one of our upcoming releases. So we trek out into the snow with our equipment and start filming each individual member’s part as quickly as possible so that we didn’t ruin any of our equipment, and also because our feet were frozen solid. (We obviously were not prepared with the proper footwear for this kind of weather.) We finally get everyone’s footage done and the snow starts to come down hard.

We were all freezing and starving at this point, so we went back to the tour bus, changed into dry clothes, and wrapped ourselves up in as many blankets as possible. We got lucky and convinced a Papa Johns not too far from us to deliver us a couple of pizzas to where we were at, and THAT was a miracle in itself. I don’t think I’ve ever had pizza that tasted as good as it did in that moment.

Eventually, the mobile mechanic gets there and gets the new alternator in and has us on our way. We had already contacted the venue we were supposed to play at and told them we wouldn’t be able to make it in time for soundcheck because of our situation. They were very cool about it, and just told us to get there as soon as possible and that we would still be able to play. We get there just in time for our set, so we load everything directly onto stage and play our set minutes after. It was a surprisingly good show despite our lack of soundcheck and despite the weather. We were worried no one would show up because of the blizzard.

We finish the tour, review the footage, and send it off to a good friend Alex Kouvatsos (BlackWolfImaging) and he sends us back a video that we LOVED and would never have gotten the footage for if we hadn’t been stranded in the first place. This single/video premiere is in a few days on 02/13/20 and is entitled “Gravity” so be sure to check it out!

-Travis St. John – Vocalist of Everrest

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