Ninja Academy Interview

A little insight behind Ninja Academy.
Thanks Mike and Counter Media!

Final tour stop video – Las Vegas

Our good friend, Freesouljah, shot this video of our last show from our first national tour. It’s the whole set.

Tour reflection

Looking back on the past 5 weeks, it all seems like a blur. We’ve experienced so much and met so many amazing people. There were a lot of hard parts too; never getting any alone time, us 3 getting on each other’s nerves, speeding tickets, accidents, uncomfortable sleeping conditions, being away from loved ones at home, etc, etc. But I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. The thing is, now we have to keep doing this, to build on what we started, or else what was the point? I mean, I’m fine with that, but it’s not an easy lifestyle. And it’s a lot of fucking prep work. I spent 4 months preparing for this tour. At least it paid off! I just hope it gets easier the more we do it.

I’d like to personally thanks Joe and Amy for their hard work and patience with me. We would have been dead without Amy. A million thanks to her. I also want to thank all the amazing people who let us crash on their floors, couches and beds. I would like to name everyone, but I’m afraid I’ll forget some names, so I won’t name anyone. But you know who you are. We made a lot of new friends and I hope we will remain so. We’ll see you soon and I’m sure we’ll come knocking on your doors again.

See you in a few months when we’ll do this all over again! And again…and again.

05.16.09 – Las Vegas

Last show of the tour!

We were stoked for this show for different reasons. First, we couldn’t wait to get to Vegas and treat ourselves to a buffet at Mandalay Bay. Hell yes! We were there for like 3 hours! Gongis Khan, Shogun, and her brother came to meet us in Vegas too, so we met up at the buffet. We freaking gorged ourselves. I had serious food coma. I just wanted to sleep. One more show left.. must press on! After dropping the kids off at the pool and lightening my load we took off to the Bunkhouse Saloon.

Another reason I was looking forward to this show was because Scott and Macro-Fi always put on great events. Scott is one cool and talented motherfucker. I’m glad to know him (thanks for our Woven friends). I was anxious to see if people here had spread the word since our last show too. It turns out they did. Right before we went on the place filled up. These guys were into us! It was an AWESOME last show. I’m glad Gongis came out to play with us too. After we finished played, people bombarded our merch booth. Amy said that out of the whole tour, she had never experienced something like that. She got pretty stressed from that. I think that’s a good thing though! Not her getting stressed, but people wanting our shit that badly.

Since it was our last show of the tour, we three wanted to get home and sleep in our own beds, finally. We pretty much took off after the show and made the 4 hour drive home. I finally got home at 7:30am and slept until 4:30pm. Tired, but alive. I can’t believe it’s over. 33 shows in 39 days. Wow.

05.13-15.09 – Arizona

Coming towards the end of our tour! Only 4 shows left and we’ve visited all these cities once before so I’m anxious to see if word has spread since the last time we played here. Let’s see…

Tucson – Well, it seems that not that many people have spoken. It was hard to tell but there weren’t that many people there, maybe about 30. At least the crowd was into it but it was just an alright night. Maybe because it was a Wednesday night. Kind of disappointing, to be honest. Oh well. It was no one’s fault though. We still love Plush and want to go back. It’s a cool club with good sound. Plus, Fourfivesix were great and hooked it up for us. Thanks Mike! Because of the poor turnout, we didn’t meet our daily quota are were falling farther behind from meeting it. We at least wanted to break even on this tour. Doesn’t looks like it’s happening so far. We still have 3 shows left, so we’ll see how it goes.

At least we got to see our friends Jamie and Christina again. They have a cool loft apartment/studio and they let us stay there. (If you’re a band looking to record, you should check them out: Chamber of Sounds). We had a fun little jam session before we took off to Phoenix.

Phoenix – I was looking forward to this show because Modified Arts is supposedly one of the better places to play in town. Turns out this show sucked. It was a total last minute add-on type of thing, so maybe I expected too much. Plus, we were put on a bill with some bands we totally didn’t fit in with. The first guy, Live Sound, was good and cool at least. So there weren’t that many people there and those that were there weren’t even that into us so we made even less money on this night. Shit.

One cool thing that came from this night was a couple of guys that we played with the last time we played Phoenix came out to the show to support us. I feel like an asshole because I can’t remember their bands name. Anyway, they hooked us up with a place to stay, a guy named Ken’s house. Ken is by far the most interesting guy we’ve met on tour. He is a psychic/medium and also a pool cleaner. He has an amazing house, surrounded by big boulders, trees, plants, water; every element. Inside he has a bunch of snakes and reptiles. Ay yay yay! At least he didn’t have cats. He told us a bunch of crazy stories, from how he tipped the FBI off to stop Bush’s assassination, to exorcising demons out of people, to healing people with his energy, to seeing UFOs, to blood dripping from his ceiling in his house. I’m usually skeptical about these type of things but I totally believed this guy. He was actually very inspirational. I wish I could speak to him every day. We also got to see his snakes get fed little mice, “Run, Jumper, Run!”. This night totally made Phoenix worthwhile. The question now is, do we go back to Phoenix and play again? We’ll figure it out.

Flagstaff – Flag is great to play because they hook us up with a hotel room and the place itself is just fun as hell. There are always only two bands there. Since we were headlining this time, Fourfivesix played with us again, we had to play for 2 hours. This show ended up being OFF THE HOOK! There were a lot of people there and they were all into us. It was great. Plus, all the staff there loved us. This show got us back on track as far as our quota was concerned. We were finally ahead! Two shows left and we finally got there. Phew. We turned a lot of new people on. I have a feeling Flagstaff is going to be a great city for us to play in from now on. *Fingers crossed*. Can’t wait to go back!

One more show left! Las Vegas, here we come!

2009.04.07-12 – Texas

Now that we’re on our way to Arizona, I can sit back and reflect on our 6 days in Texas…Crazy things happen in crazy states.

Denton – We got into Denton a couple hours early and went to the venue to just chill awhile. We also had nothing else to do, so this was fine. Indo ended up getting his all time personal high score in Galaga – about 400,000. We all ended up getting personally high.

As we were sitting around, another band starts loading in. From my understanding from talking with the booker previously, we were the only band for the night. Um.. hmm. Alright, so there are 2 bands, whatever. Would’ve been cool to know though. The booker finally arrives and I introduce myself. Long story short, he had forgotten that we were playing and booked another band! Ay yay yay. What the hell? After my irritation and shock (you know what I mean) subsided, we agreed we’d play after the other band. What else were we going to anyway?

The whole night ended up being cool. We played 2 long sets, people were there and into it, and the booker turned out to be a good guy. We also met another cool CSer, Josh, who let us stay at his house. Bitchin! All in all, a decent night.

Dallas – We got into Dallas a little early because I wanted to see where JFK got shot. It was pretty eerie. There are guys hanging around trying to sell you memorabilia and telling conspiracy theories. I love it. Once again we got to the venue early and kicked it. It was so hot and humid that we just wanted to be inside an air-conditioned room.

We were playing with Bastardos de Sancho this evening and we had been having a little back-and-forth-Internet-shit-talking-battle. These two guys dress as Lucha Libre. It was a battle of the duos! These guys were awesome and very cool fucking people. Sam, the percussionist who plays a homemade set-up consisting of buckets, film reels, saw blades and random shit, also offered us to stay at their place. Man, this guy took care of us. Seriously. Food, drinks, smoke.. Once again, we are so fortunate to be meeting bad ass people like this! Anyhow, the show was great. We played a good show to a really receptive crowd. I wasn’t sure if they’d dig it, but they did. Plus, the Bastardos brought a lot of people, so that was good for us. We’ll be going back to Dallas.

Austin – You are going to hear this a thousand times from me; we are fortunate to meet some amazing people. This time it’s Brian and Jerami, who are friends of a friend of ours. We had never met but these two are the sweetest and most nice people you could ever meet. They also let us stay there for two nights since we had two days off in Austin.

The show at Hole In The Wall was alright. For a Saturday night, the turn out sucked. Of the three Texas shows up til now, this was the weakest. I totally thought it would rock because Austin is a music capital and all that. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t exceptional either. It’s probably because it’s kind of like L.A., there’s a lot going on. It was cool seeing an old high school friend of mine that I hadn’t seen for years. Also, our friend from L.A. who now lives in El Paso flew out to Austin to hang with us. We were staying with him in El Paso too.

After the show Indo, Amy, Rene and I crashed a Co-op college party. Someone told us about it so we drove and tried to find it. We eventually did. It was pretty weird. And there was no alcohol, which sucked because we heard there was going to be 14 kegs! No problem, we still brought our own. We chilled there for awhile, exploring the place. it eventually got lame so we bailed.

Finally, a second day off in a row! This was a great day. We spent most of it at Barton Springs, a natural spring water pool. There were a lot of people there and it was hot. Let’s jump in the water… Damn, it was cold! You got used to it but dayam! I’m not the greatest swimmer and not in great shape so I couldn’t stay out there that long (you couldn’t reach the bottom), but it was nice to swim or lay out or walk around and look at all the women. A few topless ones too! Woohoo!

As the sun started to set we packed up and went back to the house where our hosts had steak and chicken fajitas ready for us. I couldn’t believe it. It was so good. This meal pretty much wiped us out for the rest of the evening. We just watched a couple of movies on TV and crashed. Thank you, Brian and Jerami.

El Paso – Amy’s cousin lives in El Paso and he and hi wife graciously let us stay at their place. Don’t make me say it again, but I will…! He showed us around town, took us out to eat and drink, and even went around the University campus to promote with us. He was down!

We were scheduled to play Zeppelin’s Underground. Bands, actually everyone in general, DO NOT GO TO ZEPPELIN’S. Fuck that place and more importantly, fuck that booker. If you want to know more, ask me and I’ll tell you. Let’s just say he is not a cool person. His name is Justin. Stay clear away!

So we had actually loaded into Zeppelins. When we finished we went to another bar upstairs to have a drink. We were all irritated because of the bad vibes of Zeppelins. We ended up talking to this guy who confirmed everything we felt and thought about that place. He said we should call up the Hush Gallery and ask if we could play there instead. I was down. I found there phone number, called and ask them if we could come down, right now, and play. He was like, go for it! Nice! So our whole group of people went back downstairs to Zeppelins and proceeded to load-out without even saying what was going on to the booker. And you know what confirmed our whole mentality of the place? This fucking guy didn’t even ask what was going on or why we were leaving. He didn’t give a fuck. Thus, we don’t give a fuck. Bands, DO NOT PLAY THERE.

We drove to Hush a minute away and these guys were totally cool. They even hooked us up a little gas money at the end of the night. The show was good. Rene said it was better than the Austin show even. It did feel good. After the show we went back to Rene’s apartment to party some more. By the way, for all two of you who are reading this, go be a member of Rene’s gym, Fighter Physique, if you’re in El Paso. We went in there the night before and were messing around with all the equipment he has. We are some silly, out of shape ninjas. Rene’s a homie and knows his shit. Go get in shape with him if you’re not lazy like us.

This was our Texas experience in a nutshell. I was kind of nervous before we arrived because I heard stuff about how conservative or racist or whatever parts of Texas are but we didn’t encounter any of that. We will be back soon.

Next up, Arizona for the second time. Let’s see how this goes…

05.05.09 – Nashville, TN

For once on this tour we got into a city early enough to chill and check out what’s the haps. I’m glad we did. Nashville really is a music capital of the world. Notice I say “a” and not “the”. There was music in practically every bar and club on Broadway, and at 3 in the afternoon! We ended up going into a few of these bars and checking out the music. There were some great musicians I saw one guy named Chicken play 2 songs simultaneously on guitar! He was badass. Apparently, though, all these bands play for tips. I wondered if they all did this for a living but I didn’t ask anyone. I did see something pretty crazy. There was this one band with 3 hot girls and 1 guy. These chicks were pretty hot. And also high on coke. Dude, I saw one of them taking a bump right on stage! That was crazy. I told Amy about this and she said she had just saw that same girl do a line in the bathroom. Damn girl! Nashville=big coke town? I don’t know. That’s too bad too, because that girl was pretty hot but seeing her like that was a turnoff. Oh well.

Being Cinco de Mayo, we went to eat Mexican food before we played. It wasn’t as good as L.A’s Mexican food but they had a deal on a pitcher of margaritas, so whatever!

The Muse is a dive. It kind of reminded me of Gilman St in Berkeley but way smaller. The sound was really good. Leon knew what he was doing and he actually gave a shit. Real nice guy. So there were only about 5 people there. We thought this show was going to be a total bust, since no one was there. It totally wasn’t and this turned out to be one of the best nights of the tour. Why? Because of 3 people who drove 45 minutes from Clarksville to see us. I had spoken with Andy on Myspace a couple of times before but I totally forgot about it because I had a lot of stuff to worry about. When he came in he noticed how empty it was and said that we should have played Clarksville instead. That triggered my memory. Anyway, by the end of our show Andy, Tim and Crystal ended up buying all our merch and then some. Wow. And to top it off, they were such cool, genuine people. They took us out to downtown and totally got all of us so drunk. We all had the best time. I can’t say it enough, meeting people like this make this whole thing worthwhile. Next time around, forget Nashville, we are going to their town and playing for them and their friends. I’m sure they’d appreciate it way more. All in all, an amazing night. But not because of the show, but because of the cool people we met.

Right now we’re on our way to Hope, Arkansas. We had a show scheduled in Benton, AR but no one (except for Wendi, who we’re staying with tonight) was getting back to me about the show. We didn’t even know where the hell the venue was. it was obvious that if the show was this poorly handled from the beginning, it was going to suck. I even called the club owner and left an urgent message but the fucker didn’t even return my call. Fuck ‘em. We cancelled the show. So instead we’re driving all the way to Wendi’s house since it will cut the drive-time down tomorrow. Texas, here we come! Yeehaw!

05.02.09 – Philadelphia & Pittsburgh

Pennsylvania is a beautiful state to drive through. There is a lot of greenery and beautiful landscapes. I wish I could’ve taken pictures but I was driving, so I didn’t.

The two shows went pretty well. Philly’s show had a pretty good audience. There were a lot of people there and they were very receptive. We turned a lot of people on at this show. The bands we played with were also all good. One of the bands, Zinc Pony, offered to let us stay at their place. Little did we know that it was 30 miles from the venue, IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE. Literally. It took FOREVER to get there. We were like, “they’re taking us out here to murder us.” If we didn’t have GPS, we would have seriously been fucked getting out of there. The guys we stayed with were way cool though. They basically lived on a farm in a converted barn. It was pretty cool. We stayed with Craig and Scott from Zinc Pony. Scott is an amazing fine artists (as well as guitarist). His work was all over the place. These guys were pretty crazy though. It was like 5 in the morning and they were still running around. Okay, it was mostly Craig running around. Us three were all in bed and Craig was like “I might turn the TV on and play video games. Is that cool?” It was right next to where we were sleeping! What are we going to say? It’s his place. We were like, “Um, okay…?” Funny shit. He never did turn it on. Thank God. We got up in the morning and booked. Found our way out of there. Beautiful countrysides.

Made it into Pittsburgh. Strange city. It’s supposedly a pretty big city but it seemed like a ghost town. Not many people milling about. Unlike Old City Philly. The streets were packed with people there. It was dead in Pitts. We had to lug our shit up a huge flight of stairs at Brillobox. Great. You know how we LOVE stairs. The Brillobox is a pretty cool place though. The booker is a really cool guy. The bands we played with were also cool. There were only maybe about 20 people there. We did meet a young girl who is a marketing major who wants to help us out. Hopefully something good will come of that! All in all, Pennsylvania was good times!

We’re now driving 9 hours to get to Nashville, or near there at least. It’s our day off and we woke up late, did our laundry and hit the road. We figure we should get close to Nashville so we can chill around there tomorrow. Our Arkansas gig is cancelled because everyone over there (except Wendi) is a fucking flake. We don’t even know the address of the place we’re playing. I called the club owner. No return call. No one knows shit. Retarded. So I cancelled since it’ll probably suck anyways. How can it be cool if no one even knows we’re there or where it even is!? Days off kind of suck. No work=no pay. Oh well.

05.01.09 – New York City

I love NYC. It was great seeing my friends again. I love the hustle and bustle and the noise of the city. Good times. That was the best part of these two days here, which basically consisted of eating, drinking and spending more money than we should have. That’s New York for you! The shows themselves were alright. Brooklyn was better than New York’s show.

Ninjas good deed for the day and Craziness…
Yesterday in Brooklyn we witnessed a hit and run accident. It could’ve easily been us because we were right in back of the car that got hit. That kind of shit trips me out. Wrong place, wrong time. We were lucky. Anyway, this car comes from the right and broadsides the car in front. We were probably going 25-30 mph. The car in front swerves and runs onto the sidewalk. I thought he was going to run into the businesses. We stopped before the accident and waited. Then the Suburban that hit the car took off, passing right by us! Luckily I had the foresight to get that person’s license plate. “DEEVAH”. As we passed the victim we told him the license number. That’s fucked up; hit and run. Wtf? Our deed done, we continued to our friend’s house where we were staying.

Show report:
Lit Lounge in NY. Fucking stairs. I hate stairs. We had to carry all our heavy shit down to the basement. Not fun. Turnout=so-so. We were supposed to play at 10:30 then when we got there they made us go on at 10:15 SHARP. It was ridiculous how on time they were. Because of this some people showed up as we finished. SUCKS. Plus, they only gave us a 30 minute set. I hate that. In L.A. it’s fine, but when we drive thousands of miles across the country, 10 extra minutes would be cool. There was also this asshole who worked there that I almost got into it with because I put my shit down for ONE minute and it was in his precious little way. Fuck him. Also, the opening band here didn’t show up either. What the hell’s up with bands not showing up?! How fucking unprofessional.

MonkeyTown in Brooklyn:
Very cool place, cool vibe. Christian, who worked there was very cool. Took care of us. They have great food there too. The thing that stood out the most about this place was the set-up. The band sets up in the middle of the room and everyone sits on couches which are against all walls. It felt like we were under a microscope. Plus, those couches were so comfortable, some people looked like they were falling asleep. They weren’t, but it was funny. The place was out of the way but we liked it.

All in all, fun times! Can’t wait to go back. Let’s hope for a good show in Philly!

04.28.09 – Rochester, NY

Well rested and relaxed. Ready to hit the road again (we’re already in route to Albany).

Rochester was good times. We luckily hooked up with a great guy, Charlie, on couchsurfing.com and he let us stay at his home for 2 nights. Very cool. He showed us around town on our day off (yesterday). We had a mellow day of eating, drinking, smoking, playing Wii, eating, drinking, smoking, catching up on 24, sleeping. I wish everyday was like that. Hehe.

Our show the night before at Bugjar was pretty cool. Bob the owner is a really cool guy. We met this guy Phil who seemed to be a really big fan of ours. Took our pictures, asked for autographs, bought our shit… Pretty cool. So far we have been to a few cities where there were some “hardcore” NA fans. It’s fucking amazing that we have this, but it’s also a little strange. We’re nobody’s and people are nearly fanatical. I’m not questioning it though. Anyway, there was an okay amount of people for a Sunday night. We played with two other bands, both experimental. Apparently, the experimental scene in Rochester is pretty big. Huh. The first band, Crush the Junta was pretty good.