Asa Chang and Junray

I first encountered Asa Chang on tour with Jana and John and Dan.  We had stopped by Revolver just to say hello and they gave us a bunch of CDs they had lying around for van listening.  I don’t remember what any of the others were.  And certainly none of us had heard of Asa Chang & Junray.

The first time we threw Tsu Gi Ne Pu on at random, Jana and I were both like woah.  I think that Jana pulled rank and claimed the CD for herself, although maybe I ended up with it.  If so, I have since probably lost it.  Oopsy.

In any case, besides just being awesome and weird, this “mini-album” and I shared a special moment. 

The last show of the tour, which was a financial disaster from beginning to end, was in LA and was fucking retarded (aren’t they all).  It was at some fancy jazz/singer-songwriter club, we got no drink tickets and drinks were retardedly expensive, no one was there to see Jana, we had to pay for parking, we were one of five acts (none of them local, I think) and, lastly and worst of all, the club paid us exactly $0.00.  So Dan peed on the bathroom floor and we bolted.  Fuck that shit.

The plan was to drive to El Paso (approx. 12 hours) and get a hotel room at the awesomely weird and moderately filthy Mesa Inn, a place my band had stayed at once or twice on various travels.

I’m not sure if I’m getting the timeline correct or not because I remember it being very late at night when we got there, which doesn’t make sense.  In any case, upon arriving we discovered that there were no rooms available there or at the equally cracktastic $25 hotel up the street.  After some exhausted and pissed-off conversation, it was decided that the thing to do would be to push through to Houston, another 12 hours.  Either it was about 4:30am when we got to El Paso and I agreed to take the first shift or I volunteered to start driving at about 4:30am provided that I was allowed to sleep immediately.

This, by the way, was the second time I’d participated in a 24-hour Los Angeles-to-Houston drive.  At least this time there wasn’t a deathly sick Heath trying to sleep on the floor of the van.

In any case, it was very early in the morning and I was the only person awake in the van.  I was alert and alone and happy in this warm little capsule containing my friends, hurtling through the mostly-otherwise-unoccupied West Texas interstate.  At some point when I’d run out of talking podcasts to listen to I threw that album on.

So this was the soundtrack as the sky started to slowly change colors behind a sillhouette of pitch-black mountains as I beat a path for our homes.  Have patience.  Download it. And listen to the whole thing–I think I actually pumped my fist in the air at the first climax midway through.  It was pretty fucking spectacular.

Asa Chang & Junray – Toremoro, from Tsu Gi Ne Pu

~ by mattbrownlie on November 16, 2008.