Lost At Sea – CRAZY TOUR STORIES

In this Crazy Tour Stories segment, the post-hardcore band, Lost At Sea, shares one of their stories from being on the road. You can check out the story, after the break.

Our first east coast tour was much more eventful than we could have hoped for. It was fall 2016 and was the furthest we’d ever traveled as a band. We bought a beat-up suburban and borrowed an old trailer from some friends and hit the road.

We hadn’t even left Texas before things started going wrong. On the way to our show in Oklahoma City, the steering gave out. On I35. During rush hour. The steering wheel was barely connected to the front wheels. Somehow, we limped that poor suburban to a mechanic without dying. Right out the gate, our DIY tour was almost a grand in the red and the mechanics weren’t even able to completely fix it. They put a bandaid on the problem and we just decided to get used to driving a van and trailer with a nearly disconnected steering wheel.

Right after the OKC gig, we drove overnight to Illinois. As the sun rose, we stopped for gas and noticed that our trailer was kind of sitting funny. Upon closer inspection, we discovered that the frame of the trailer had completely cracked in front of the axle on both sides. The only thing holding our trailer together was the plywood floor. On top of all of that, the friction from the trailer had completely melted the sidewalls. If we would have driven just a few more miles our trailer would have disintegrated on the highway.

We limped our poor rig to a welding shop to see if the frame could be fixed. The guy picked it up in a lift and it disintegrated. So we abandoned our friend’s trailer at that shop and got a replacement Uhaul trailer.

We pulled that one for a few days and played some wild house shows, then decided to stop and trade it for the smallest Uhaul possible to save some money. That’s where we met Eugene.

Eugene was an old punk rocker that had done the damn thing in his day. After starting a family, this angel of a man hung up his leather jacket and climbed the U Haul corporate ladder. After hearing our story, Eugene worked some magic and rented us a trailer with all fees waived and every discount known to the Uhaul Gods. I think he dropped the $900 rental to $200. He legitimately saved our asses and our tour.

The rest of the tour went on without anything breaking. I could talk forever about the shows we played, the friends we made, and the weird house with a murder basement we stayed at…but we’ll save all that for our memoir.

Eugene if you’re reading this, Thanks man.

If anyone at Uhaul is reading this, Eugene isn’t his real name.

Keep up with the band on Facebook and Instagram.