The Juliana Theory – CRAZY TOUR STORIES

In this Crazy Tour Stories segment, the alternative rock band, The Juliana Theory, talk about some of their crazy moments from touring. You can check out the feature, after the break.

Crazy Juliana Theory tour stories? There are many – like the time we got to our hotel room in Poughkeepsie and discovered a bloody bag of cocaine. Or the time the band River City High shot fireworks at our heads and we threw a garbage bag into the window of their van onto the driver while they were moving and then consequently became best of friends the next day.

One story that always stands out in my mind might not be that crazy but it’s just funny to me is from a time early in the bands’ career when we took no crew on the road and only really played weekend shows because some of us were still in high school. At that point, we did a lot of weekend trips where we’d drive as far as we could from our home in western Pennsylvania to do shows on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights and then drive all night to get back just in time for school and jobs. On one such weekend, we had a 6-hour drive home after the last show – we’d do drives like these after the show was over. We’d play the show, hang out afterward with everyone, pack up our gear and merch and then drive through the entire night to get home. That means we wouldn’t usually start our drive until at least midnight and this is after we just played a few high energy rock shows and did all the driving and equipment loading and packing ourselves. We’d be pretty tired for that drive on Sunday nights and we wouldn’t do any hotels on the last night of weekends like these because we always just needed to make it home.

I can remember many things slowing us down on trips like these – flat tires, getting lost because there was no GPS back then, and snow storms that caused us to sleep in Wal-Mart parking lots and draw straws for who gets to sleep where in our van that was at that point a converted “math van.” (Math vans were classrooms in a van that drove around to local schools to teach kids math inside the van. They had desks and tables bolted to the floor and we bought one for our first tour van). No one wanted to get the spot under the math table because there were office chairs with metal feet welded to the floor and whoever got that spot had to sleep on the metal legs – not comfortable. Anyways, on these weekend trips somehow we always made it home safely. This is probably around 1999 so there weren’t Starbucks and none of us were coffee drinkers yet and I recall a long drive on a Sunday night when we were all particularly tired. Things were different in that era. There were no podcasts to keep you awake, I mean, we didn’t even have cellphones yet let alone smartphones. There was no satellite radio so we’d listen to CD’s or try to find interesting talk radio to keep our minds occupied and alert until we drove out of the reach of the station. We were trying to stay awake that night but nothing was working so we made a stop at a gas station convenience store in the middle of nowhere to find some sort of fuel to keep us driving without falling asleep at the wheel and crashing the math van.

In that gas station we stumbled upon the candy bargain of a lifetime, or so we thought. We found a sale basket with a ton of these little candy packages for only 10 cents each and each package had 10 candies in it. I think we bought 10 or more packages so that’s a minimum of 100 pieces of this candy that we all ate to give us a sugar rush to stay awake and finish our drive. Was it working? Did anyone have any more energy? We couldn’t tell but maybe we psyched ourselves into believing it was working. We got back in the van and cranked up the radio and got maybe another half an hour or so past the gas station when out of nowhere I hear our drummer yell “guys! Turn off Coast-to-Coast AM and let me read you the package on this candy!! I think you’ll want to hear what this says: Melatonin is an herbal sleep aid. Use it to fall asleep naturally. Take one before bed to fall asleep quickly!” So needless to say we each inadvertently took 5 or 10 herbal sleeping pills to help us stay awake. Ha! I guess it worked because we made it home in one piece.

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