By Colin McLaughlin-Alock  |  Send to Friend

Rock and roll is an expensive business.  In between cutting albums and touring, musicians still need to  eat.  Robo-rocker Mose Giganticus (Matt Garfield) lives on the brink of financial ruin. But he doesn't let money woes slow him down.  He'd rather eat out of the garbage or work as a medical guinea pig than miss a good tour. 
 
Last spring, Mose left Philadelphia with plans for a 7 month tour that would take him all the way to Alaska.  He was driving a newly-converted vegetable oil bus (that would not hold up to the rigors of the road) and he was flat broke.

When Mose returned, we were eager to meet up with him and find out how the trip went and how he made ends meet while on the road. 

two.one.five: First of all, why did you want to go to Alaska?
Mose:  The whole idea originated years ago.  I was in a two-man band called Hulk Smash, and we were really into touring.  We booked a lot of ridiculous tours. We did the entire U.S. and Mexico in 18 days.  We talked about going to Alaska next.  “If we took this tour and redirected it up there, we could totally make it,” we said.  It was stupid, basically.  We were trying to put together the stupidest tours we could.

But then I forgot about it until last year, when I was on tour around the country and ran into two or three bands that actually did play in Alaska.  I talked to these bands and they gave me some information.  They put me in touch with a production company that helps bands who want to play Alaska—and once I got the green light from them, I started seriously putting the tour together.

The Emotron and I had toured together that June, and it had gone really well.  So I pitched the idea to him:  “Hey, we did a really good tour together, what would you say about touring to Alaska next year?  Why don't we test the limits of our new friendship and put it all on the line?”

 He said “Fuck it, lets just do it.'” So we started hatching that plan.

two.one.five: The Emotron (Kyle Knight) has a very intense reputation.  His act is halfway between pervert and preacher.  He shits and pisses onstage, lights his balls on fire, and is generally decadent and outrageous.  What was it like touring with, and sharing a bus with this character for 7 straight months?
Mose:  When The Emotron and I met—he wasn't doing The Emotron at the time.  He was in another band called Treephort and I was in a band called Fire Down Below. We played together in 2002. They played a show in Philly and then helped us out down in Atlanta.

In 2006,  he was doing this new solo project called The Emotron, so we started talking about doing a tour together.  This was in 2007.    I saw him perform and I was like “wow, man, I don't know how this is going to work...” 

At the time all the bands that I had been in were very PC and socially minded. The Emotron throws all that stuff in peoples faces.  He's very not PC and he's comically offensive. He's a caricature of the redneck style of thinking that he's grown up around.  Somehow, he manages to get away with it.  Some people are offended, but most people who I think would be offended end up being okay with it.  They end up liking it.  He's very charismatic and I'm often surprised with how much he's able to get away with. 

We started that tour and I was blown away by how intense his performance was.   I really had to step up in order to follow that performance.  I had a lot to learn from him. 

Anyway, we really got along great on tour.  Kyle and I became best friends.   Kyle as a person is not the Emotron, his act,  but, of course, that character comes from something.

two.one.five:  You raise money in a lot of unorthodox ways.  This year, you and Kyle worked as medical guinea pigs, which is a job that frightens off a lot of people...
Mose:The med studies is something I've been doing for quite a while.   At fist, I would do short term ones, and make about 400 bucks.  It was nice to have a little bit of extra money. Then I started doing long term studies and it really opened up my schedule.  You live in a hospital for 2 weeks and when you're done, they hand you a check for two or three thousand dollars. It's fast money, and while you're there, you can do whatever you want.  You can read books, watch movies, or be on the Internet. Anything you can do at home, you can do while taking a med study and make tons of money. It's kind of the perfect thing.  I was doing research for the vegetable oil conversion and booking the tour.  Kyle was writing tons of music.

I had suggested that Kyle do it too.  Of course ,when you talk to somebody about this, it's kind of off-putting. After I explained how it works and he got into his first one, Kyle realized that it's great.  Together, we were making 6 or 7 thousand dollars at a time.  We could put that money into the bus and into our gear.

two.one.five: Have You ever had any nasty side effects?
Mose:That's the question everyone asks, but most of the time it's pretty uneventful.  The side effects you might expect are nausea or a headache or something like that.   These are common side effects in almost any medication you might get over the counter. They're testing to see how many people get a headache how many people get a stomachache.  I wish I had more to tell you, I mean, I don't wish anything bad would happen to me, but the truth is, it's pretty boring.

two.one.five:  You got a lot of attention for touring in a bus that used vegetable oil for fuel.  How did that come about, and how did that work out?
Mose: This was something that I had wanted to do for a while: both the tour to Alaska and the vegetable oil conversion.

When I looked at the logistics of this tour, I said “the only way were going to be able afford it is if we're not paying for gas.”   So I sold my van and bought a bus and started researching vehicle conversion. I already had ties with people who did vegetable oil conversions for a living, and I knew some bands that had toured in conversion vehicles, but I didn't know much about it.

I figured, in the worst case scenario, we can always get food.  People feed us a lot, or we can dumpster some food.  So food is covered.  If we can avoid paying for fuel, then we can do this tour no matter what happens.  Even if we don't make money on the shows.

On first day of tour, we still didn't have a filtration system.  It was supposed to be done a few months before that, but we were short on time and money. The bus was ready.  It would run on oil, but we didn't have a way to get the oil processed.

We built the oil filtration system while we were on the road.  We would play a show, make 50 bucks, and I would go to buy a bunch of pipes, things like that.  Anytime we had any money, I would put it right back into parts that we needed.  About two weeks in, we finally had everything together.

Then, the issue was getting the oil.  We didn't know if the towns were going to be big enough for the oil we needed. There were some days where we would need 70 gallons of oil to get to where we were going. We always had the option to run on diesel, but we were so broke that if we had to run on diesel, our cell phones were going to get shut off or we weren't going to have money for food.   We also had to learn what works when you're asking people for their oil.  A lot of times, we didn't actually have permission. The shows would be over around 2am and everything would be closed.  So we would just take the oil.  That's kind of shady, but we had to keep going.  Other times, people didn't understand what we were asking. The idea of running a vehicle on vegetable oil was foreign to them and it seemed really suspicious. 

two.one.five: Tell me about the breakdown.
Mose:  The bus actually broke down 3 times.  Our first happened as we were crossing the rockies.  The bus was overheating.  That got us a couple of days behind schedule and cost a thousand dollars, which we weren't really able to afford.  We had to borrow the money from friends.

The big breakdown happened on the Al-Can highway.  We got a flat, which happens.  We didn't think it was a big deal.  We asked a mechanic to patch the flat so that we could keep our spare.  He was a cool guy and didn't charge us because he liked what we were doing. 

When he put the wheel back on, he used the impact gun to screw it back down. I found out later that you shouldn't do that.  Use the gun to start it but then hand tighten it. If you impact all the way down, you strip the bolts that hold the wheel on. 

We were driving for another hour or so when the bus screeched and swerved. It felt like I had just hit a big patch of ice, but it was 70 degrees out.  At first I thought we hit an oil slick.  Then I thought we blew another flat.  I pulled over and looked at all the tires.  They were full, but the one tire just looked funny. I found out that there were no bolts holding it on.  The weight of the axle pressing down on the rim was all that was holding it. When I kicked it, the wheel just fell off of the axle.  If we had driven another 10 or 15 minutes, the wheel probably would have fallen off the bus while we were driving.  

At first I thought, okay, we need to figure out how to get new bolts. But I looked again, and all of the posts that the bolts screw onto had snapped off.  There was no way to attach the wheel back to the axle again.

I hitched a ride to a town about 20 miles back and found Frank, the only mechanic around.  He was not a very friendly guy. He actually asked right out if I had money.  I said I had credit cards, which was a lie. they were maxed out.  I was thinking, if I get this guy to fix this, I'll figure out how to pay him. 

He told us it would take 6 days to get the parts, and it would coast 600 dollars. Our guitarist emptied his bank account,  but we still only had only about 400 dollars between us, so we didn't have enough to afford it. We also didn't want to wait that long because we'd miss all of our Alaska shows, and my band members had flights to catch out of Anchorage.  We ran into another mechanic who was passing through town and asked him what to do.  He said to use the pins from the other wheel and then drive slow, with four pins on each wheel instead of eight. 

We drove really slow all the way up to Whitehorse.   Every 15 minutes I would stop and check the wheels. 

We had a show in Whitehorse, and that was really great.  We made 350 dollars, which is more money than we usually make, and it paid for the parts that we needed. Also, It seemed like everyone at the show ran a restaurant.  Everybody came through with some oil for us and we wound up having more than we would carry.  We had our reserves full.

We picked up all the parts we needed and spent a day doing repairs in a parking lot.  We got done at 11 o'clock at night and had to drive straight to Anchorage.   It should have been a 16 hour drive, but the bus was slow; the highways were torn up, and we missed a turn.  It ended up being a 21 hour drive.  We got to Anchorage a just before we had to play. 

When we pulled up, I was probably the most exhausted I've ever been in my whole life, but it was still worth it.  I had driven the whole way because I wanted to be sure we made it there.  In retrospect it seems so cliché that there was such a  critical problem right before the pinnacle of the tour.  But that 's the way it happened.

Then  we played a show in Girdwood which was awesome.  And then we played another show which actually wasn't scheduled.  We were offered this house show in somebody's kitchen and we decided to play it.  That turned out to be the most amazing show of the tour.  There were 120 people packed into this tiny little kitchen.  people were packed in so tight that anytime one person would move, the whole crowd would move. People went nuts and everyone was drunk, and by the time we played our last song, everyone was freaking out so much and pressing up against me so that I couldn't even play my keyboard anymore. People were pressed up against the keys and people were falling into the drum set and stuff.  I handed my keyboard over to the side. I didn't want to get it broken.  People were already singing along and grabbing at the mike,  so I just  said, 'fuck it,' went out into the crowd and rocked out with everyone.  They were great. It was complete mayhem.

two.one.five:  After that you went to work in a salmon cannery.  What was that like?
Mose: A lot of things came together for this tour.  Alaska was a ridiculous goal, and in order to make that happen we had to get the vegetable oil bus together.  Those were both things that I'd wanted to do for a long time.  I had heard that you could make a lot of money really fast by working in salmon canneries. I thought this would be a good chance to try that out.  We were going to be touring for 7 months and it would be nice to earn a couple thousand dollars halfway through. 

I started calling around to a lot of canneries that were in the area. Nobody would guarantee anything over the phone because they were scared of getting burned, but everyone said “if you come up here, there will be work.”

After our last show in Anchorage, we drove down to the cannery.  They gave us a 30 second interview   and put us on the line.  It was very intense work, and it's gruesome. You're cleaning fish and gutting fish and packing fish and you're doing it by the thousands, so there's a lot of blood and guts. We started with a 12 hour day and then 14 hour days and then 16 and then 18 and then we had a string of 20 hour days.  And then that kind of slowed down towards the end of our stay.  We were sleeping in the bus in the parking lot of the cannery.  And we would just get up in the morning, start on the line, be working for 20 hours and go back to the bus for sleep.

I had written a budget thinking about how much money we could make. On tour all the money that we made was going back into the tour.  So we had cell phones getting turned off, bill collectors calling us because we hadn't paid the credit card bills. 

My plan was to be able to pay our bills and have some extra money to get home with.   But the taxes in Alaska were way more than I expected.  After paying the bills, we basically had to start again from scratch.  We  only had $50 to get home with. The experience of working in the cannery was awesome, and we made a lot of great friends and got a lot of great stories to tell, but it financially did not pay out the way we expected it to, so I don't know if we'd do it again. 

two.one.five: Would you go back to Alaska?
Mose: People often say, “once you get up to Alaska, be careful. If you're the kind of person that will want to go to Alaska then you probably won't want to leave.”  Both Kyle and I fell under the Alaskan spell. The most common sights there are the most amazing sights anywhere else.  Everything looks like the cover of a National Geographic. I thought I would get numb to it: the beautiful mountain ranges and the crazy animals that I had never seen before, but I never did.  

Also, culturally, Alaska is very different.  Geographically it's separated, and those geographic differences cause a difference in culture and daily life.  It's part of the U.S., but it feels like a different country.  Lives are much more communally based.  People look out for each other much more than they do down here.  You may not have a neighbor for 4 or 5 miles but everybody knows everybody and everybody helps everybody out.  I loved it.

I could see living up there, but the thing holding me back is that I can't fathom a winter up there.  I'm open minded to try it, but I'm such a crybaby about the Philly winters already.  I'm not sure I could handle it.

two.one.five:  What's next?
Mose: I'm planning to release another full length album.  The songs are more “robotic apocalyptic stoner metal” than ever before.  The Emotron and I are going to be touring again.  We want to do South by Southwest and all of the US east of the rockies.  We don't want to cross the rockies because of all the difficulties we had there this year. 

In November,  I'm going to spend a month in Europe.  Thats the big thing I want to do next year: see how that works. 

We've got to make a ton of money in the next few months to pay off the debt that we've acquired this year.  The tour itself did pretty well, but we went into debt getting the bus ready and getting the gear ready.  We've been trying to keep up with credit cards and a lot of the time can't even do that.  So we want to pay that down as much as we can.   Next year should be better because instead of having to get the bus ready, we already have it. 

If everything goes well, we might go back to Alaska in 2010.