On The Road With Pond And Doctopus Part One

The first thing to know about America is everything is bigger: the airport customs lines, the sandwiches, the stadiums and the highways are orders of magnitude larger than our humble Australian offerings. So when I met up with the Doctopus guys at a brunch diner in Williamsburg – the day after their inauspicious American debut in which they played to six payers in Queens – I was not expecting my $9 breakfast burrito to be the size of a baby seal. Australians are everywhere thanks to the comparatively easy time we have obtaining American working visas; our waitress at that diner is from Sydney, and I’ll hear no less than five Australian accents a day throughout the tour leg.

Driving in New York City is insane. It’s scary enough in a cab with a seasoned veteran of the roads. When it’s six dudes crammed into a car with guitars, bags and a surfboard, and a driver who’s still adjusting to the other side of the road, it can become ball-droppingly terrifying. I should introduce the party: our driver for most of the trip is Benny, a surfing enthusiast and killer photographer; Cody, who starts off tagging along for the ride but becomes Doctopus’ unofficial merch guy; me, whose main role is to write this little ditty you’re reading; and the Doctopus chaps themselves: Age of Empires and NBA superfan Stephen Bellair on bass and the mic; SciTech experimenter adept basketball power-forward John Lekias on drums; and on guitar, video store hero and incidental Zen master in a trio of stone cold chillers, Jeremy Holmes. Doctopus play a no frills brand of garage-y protopunk with subject matter spanning their favourite basketball players, social anxiety, chronic fatigue, marijuana and being cool. (For sake of ease, songs pertaining to the same subject are usually grouped together: the first and only setlist they write is for the first show in Boston, which includes Cool x 2, NBA x 2 and Underwater x 2.) They’re joining Pond on a three week stint across the US after having supported Perth’s premier quintet-named-after-a-water-body on an Australian tour earlier in the year. This is the first part of the story.

Some serious tunnel vision's goin' down here!

We’ve got Beastie Boys on the speakers and crunchy pretzels in our tummies as we exit New York City, northbound to Boston for the first show of the Pond tour. 30 minutes in as we wait in line at the first of many toll road checkpoints, Steve finds the Perth Wildcats theme song and blasts it full volume with the windows down, much to the bemusement of neighbouring drivers. The first two hours are a breeze aside from Ben’s occasional veering into the right lane, which at one point earns us an angry horn (Americans fucking love honking their horns) and a six-way stinkeye. We stop at a gas station and the self-important clerk takes a break from sweeping and living the American dream to scold Ben for not wearing shoes inside. We have to pay the attendant to unlock the pump, then again to get fuel, because people in this country love doing things in the most counterintuitive way possible.

Ween’s on the speakers as we travel deeper into a New England through Connecticut. New York weather was miserable when we first arrived – rainy and humid, a world away from the pristine stretches of browning leaves forming picturebook archways in streets lined with activity and love and dreams all that crap we’re promised in the movies. But the drive through Connecticut is everything Hollywood promised: the green Fall leaves giving way to a deep auburn-brown, the golden reflections of the American wilderness silhouetting the road ahead. It’s easy to forget how vast this country is when you’re in a city, but on the highway system you realize you’re but a speck amidst big open spaces.

On the next two hours of that journey to Boston, it became clear that touring is tedium with occasional bursts of activity and interest. It’s made easier by the presence of good buddies and good tunes, but drag of time is inescapable no matter how you slice it. That fact that became all too clear when, upon arriving in Boston, we were left waiting in a limbo somewhere between a Kafka novel and the Seinfeld episode set where everyone gets lost in the parking lot, as we waited for America’s snail-paced bureaucracy to settle an issue with our rented car. Rushing to the venue we almost cleaned up a lady with a pram, having yet to grasp Massachusetts’ pedestrian-sympathizing road system.

Doctopus' Jeremy Holmes in action.

Six hours after leaving New York, we arrive at The Sinclair to Pond soundchecking for the first show of the tour. Technically, this is Cambridge, the college town across the river from Boston and home to Harvard and MIT. Doctopus have their own backstage room, which still feels like a novelty. We eat upstairs with the Pond guys and the speakers are playing only Tame Impala, as far back as B-sides and the first release, much to Jay Watson’s amusement. Some neighbouring fans buy the Pond guys a round of beers and a college student joins us to talk music for an hour while we wait.

The crowd’s mostly younger – the drinking age in the USA is 21 but venues like this allow under 18s with a different wristband, which accounts for about 60 of the 120-or-so bodies in the room. It’s a beautiful venue – a stage maybe one and a half times the size of The Bakery. The crowd receives Doctopus politely at first, but within 10 minutes they’re sold, faces beaming and bodies rocking out to the dudes’ charmingly sloppy garage jams. Earlier in the day we talked about Americans’ taboo around the C word, but it doesn’t take Steve long to start calling the crowd “you cunts.” The first time it’s met with a gasp; the eighth time it’s all laughs. Mid-set, Steve shreds on his bass with a beer can, dousing half the stage in booze. This is America though, and efficiency (and avoiding litigation) is key: the stage manager, visibly perturbed, jumps on stage to clean things up with a towel.

There’s something intensely satisfying about watching a group of dudes from your hometown win over a foreign audience who’ve never heard of them before. It’s not quite hometown pride, but it’s a definite satisfaction and validation even when you’re not on stage. Pond kill it as they always do – those chorus riffs in ‘Whatever Happened to the Million Head Collide’ are fucking tremendous in the flesh and get better each time, and crowd is in full agreement. Jetlag catches up as we load out and ready for the next night: Doctopus’ New York debut at the Bowery Ballroom.