Hey for all November UK tours dates go to our My Space page.
http://www.myspace.com/eveninblackouts

Here are the UK Tour dates so far. Plus the album release date is October 31st 2006. Scary!

Wednesday 01st November - Galway - Venue TBC
Thursday 02nd November - Greystones - Venue TBA
Friday 03rd November - Liverpool (Crosby) - Woodstock
Saturday 04th November - London - Venue TBC
Sunday 05th November - Nuneaton - The Wheatsheaf
Monday 06th November - Derby - The Vic Inn
Tuesday 07th November - Plymouth - Student's Union
Wednesday 08th November - Coventry - The Jailhouse
Thursday 09th November - Ipswich Railway
Friday 10th November - North England - TBC
Saturday 11thth November - Edinburgh - Venue TBA
Sunday 12th November - Aberdeen - East Neuk
Monday 13th November - Elgin - Ocean
Tuesday 14th November - Glasgow - The 13th Note Cafe
Wednesday 15th November - Dundee - Dexters
Thursday 16th November - Portadown - The Oak
Friday 17th November - Belfast - The Pavilion
Saturday 18th November - Derry - The Nerve Centre

EIB donations through Paypal

Hello, some interested in helping us out with the recording asked about paypal. I have set up my Hope and Nonthings account to take these donations for EIB. If you are interested please send a response to this through myspace with your e-mail, your address and what package you want to donate at. You will receive a response from paypal with an invoice. As soon as the invoice is confirmed I will send out the buttons, etc. through snailmail plus a receipt for your donation.
thanks


AS A MATTER OF FACT ALL EIB ITEMS ARE NOW AVAILABLE THROUGH OUR PAYPAL.
SO IF YOU ARE HAVING TROUBLE GETTING SOMETHING OF OURS JUST E-MAIL US AND WE CAN PROBABLY GET IT FOR YOU.
eveninblackouts@hotmail.com

EIB PROPOSITION

To All Even In Blackout fans and friends. We have very little time to raise money to pay for our upcoming record Fall Of The House Of Even. We have no money and no label yet has showed any interest in paying our recording bill. So we have come with a scheme that can happily also be seen as an interesting creative move and of benefit to you, yes you our fans and friends.

Here it is:

We are taking donations of any size to help complete this record. Any donation of more than 20 dollars will get your name thanked on the cd booklet.

A: Any Donator Donating an amount of $50 receives their name on the new cd an EIB button, keychain and sticker plus any three of the following items:

Books from Hope And Nonthings:

1: Weasels In A Box (signed copy) This is John Jughead Pierson’s fictional account of his days with Screeching Weasel.
2: 200 More Neo-futurist Plays from Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind
3: Neo Solo Plays from Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind
4: The Portable Mykel Board – I, Ameist
(more info about these can be found at: www.hopeandnonthings.com)

From Even In Blackouts:
1: Zeitgeist’s Echo cd (signed by the current band)
2: EIB T-shirt (any design still available) These items can be found for perusing at interpunk.com
3: Signed copy of Fall Of The House Of Even (on or before its release date)

B: Any Donator Donating an amount of $100 receives their name on the new cd an EIB button, keychain and sticker plus:
The donator will submit their voice recorded up to 10 second via telephone call to us, cd, or cassette. This message can be anything: an advertisement for you company, a call out to a loved one, a long string of obscenities. Whatever your heart desires. This sample along with all the other donators will get mixed into a song that will be featured on Fall Of The House Of Even

C: Any Donator Donating an amount of $150 receives their name on the new cd an EIB button, keychain and sticker plus:
The booklet for Fall Of The House Of Even will be divided by rooms. Each page will be a room in a house. One room in this booklet will be named after whom ever the donator chooses. (Their own name, a loved one, a strangers, it doesn’t matter) For instance page three of the booklet could be: Maynard Schmerson’s Kitchen or Jello Biafra’s Library. (You don’t actually send us a photo, all the photos are actually of rooms in an abandoned house in Scotland.)

Please contact us through my space or through our hotmail account: eveninblackouts@hotmail.com
Do not send money for the last two donating options without first contacting us.

THIS OFFER ENDS JULY 15 OR UNTIL WE EXCEED SOME LIMITS

All checks and money orders should be made out to Hope And Nonthings and send to:
Hope And Nonthings c/o John Pierson
5059 W Winona
Chicago, IL 60630


Thanks

Even In Blackouts

So, on this last tour after three weeks in Europe we flew from France to Scotland and from Ireland to Berlin and finished the tour in two more weeks. Does that sound easy? Well,it was. But the whole UK section was like a dream. There was no sleep, there was a deep fog over Scotland and Ireland and we were lead by the hand from gig to gig by three scottish guys known as Buzzbomb. We stayed at Billy Buzzbomb's amazing house (sanctuary). We made fun of our Irish promoter, daily, and gave him a long awaited nickname, Wheels (Sean McMully) Did I say we never slept? It was five shows in five days: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Belfast, and Derry. And then at 5 in the morning the next day we flew to Berlin for a show that night to continue our European Tour. Wow! We were giddy, we were sleep depravated, and we had the most amazing amount of fun! Here are some pictures.


Buzzbomb and EIB somewhere on the road in Scotland


Chilling and Chowing at Billy Buzzbomb's Suburban Pad


Bellies Over Aberdeen


Bice and John up to some mysterious "No Good"



Phillip and Liz preparing for the flight to Berlin


Picking on Wheels while he was asleep. Awwhhhh... Hehehehe.... Awwwhhhhh



Oh Yeah. We played when we were in Aberdeen too.

Hey, we just had a great rehearsal. We all traveled and flew in for two days to learn new songs for the upcoming record The Fall Of The House Of Even. We laughed alot, slept very little and now my ears are ringing and my nose is running. We are intensely excited about the new material, you can see sparks flying from Gub's head and Bice destroyed a cymbol (poor cymbol). The record has an insane amount of influences but seems to flow smoothly as well. We have allowed these inspirations to flow over us: Tom Waits, Violent Femmes, Screeching Weasel, The Clash, Tool, Benny Goodman, The Ramones, and yes even Nick Drake. We hope you all will like it. We do. We hope to have it out sometime before November 2006. Possibly much sooner.
We are talking with Insubordination right now about releasing it, but all is up in the air at this time. It WILL live!!
By the way the tour was made so much more enjoyable by the great hats that we were given by www.TheFedoraStore.com Please check them out and support the wearing of classy hats.

thanks
John Jughead Pierson

John was surprised to wake up in France - IN THE 19th CENTURY!


Phillip stuggles with his glove.  He is master of his glove.


Those Darn Swedes! For a moment we thought Thore would actually do it.


The Head Of Bice situated in Rome


Liz doing her Time travel trick

Living Room Show Audience in Denmark



Carmen and Sonny Bono


Liz Yelling at voltar


John giving away Screeching Weasel secrets

Here are some pictures taken by some friends on the road:
Renske Van Gennep
Bart Jonkers
Caramel Apple
Someone in Denmark (I don't know who - let me know)
Marc in germany (plus he has these too - http://www.photo.marc-gaertner.de/ )

Here they are in no order:

Fall Of The House Of Even


Well Blackoutville. The day has finally dawned on the EVENs. We are diving head first back into the studio (Sonic Iguana) on May 7th and will not peak our heads out of that Indiana hiding place until we have a new full length record. This record will feature about 12 new songs and perhaps about 6 live songs recorded in France and Spain on our last tour.

The Lineup will be:

Liz, John, Bice, Gub and Phillip

This record will have a much more raw edge and faster and slower songs. And we will be incorporating electric guitar, electric acoustic, and of course acoustic. We will also be having Phillip Hill playing his newly discovered instrument on a few songs: The Stand Up Bass. We are very excited and will have more precise information of its release soon.

thanks for your patience and continued support.

EIB

Just a quick directive. Sadly I don't have much access to my own band's website, so I have been doing most of the changes on our My Space account. Check it out if you haven't been there:

http://www.myspace.com/eveninblackouts

Should I have brought a journal along on this last European tour? No... Yes... well, I have the feeling it wouldn't have made much of a difference. I would have still sat in the van shocked into paralysis because we were all still getting along smashed into a van for the past few weeks. I am hoping that many of the unbelievable good memories will manifest themselves once again. I want to talk endlessly about the creation of Gubland where you could only get a visitors pass to spend the day with the Gubernor Scott Conway. It's a land that was created for Gub, so that he could be excused from the planet earth without feeling bad. We are all slightly insane, we all have our oddities and Gub stands king. On this tour we learned to respect and trust his strange meanderings and tangents including the one about him "loving us more than Jesus" or wanting to ride on the shoulder of a giant from gig to gig. It amazed us that this bulky, bearded mad wanderer charmed every European he met. We learned that he was kind beyond measure.
Can I even begin to tell the stories of Phillip Hill? This is the man who manufactures bits of hysterical history at least once a day. The only guitarist I know who doesn't sweat and can go at least a week without a shower or changing close and still smell fresh as a powdered baby’s bottom. He can drink for days and only sleep while standing up for a few minutes and still he shows up on stage on time and plays all the right notes and rhythms. It's unbelievable! He eats faster than anyone I know. Liz asked him how he can enjoy the taste if he swallows the food before even chewing, and he responded, "I don't taste it with my tongue or my teeth I taste it with my stomach." It is hard to relay the humor in his many costumes and mutations. He transformed himself into Idiot Boy with his ears sticking out and his belly making him wobble as he walked unevenly around a dressing room in The Netherlands. He then put on a cape and Gub stuffed a shirt under it and he turned into the hunchback roadie and spoke grimily as he said to us "The venue is ready for your performance master." But none can top his masterpiece transition from Phillip Hill to Vultar for our final show in Gemert. All it took was a silver silk cape and a large Halloween tarantula which he fastened to the back of his cape like Ming the Merciless and wrapped it around his face like a mustache similar to an Amish Lemmy. He played the entire show with dead seriousness and we all laughed until we cried when we watched a video of it later that night. I know that I come from a band that helped to inspire this kid from Nashville but the tables have turned and I am in awe staring at the talent of this boy.
Bice, who started this tour as an unknown to the European's is my rock. The Italians even put a question mark above his head on the poster for the show in La Spezia. They didn't know what I knew. They didn't know that he was one of the loudest, most intense, spontaneous drummers that they would ever see. They didn't know that he was going to impress the beJesus out of them. They didn't know that his facial expressions alone would make them pay attention to that guy sitting helpless behind a bunch of cymbals and drums. And Bice didn't know that each night would be a party, and each night he would say, "Johnny, this can't go on. Tomorrow we go straight to our hotel and get some sleep." And the next day would come and there was Bice at 3 or 4 in the morning dancing and arguing and hugging burly Swedish and Scottish men, promising to return and toasting to our health every five minutes. Every night we'd laugh ourselves to sleep as the sun rose above our cheap hotel rooms scattered along the deserted highways across Europe. Most of all the business was taken care of for us on this tour but still Bice and I, men who need to take charge would work out all possible ways in which to expedite parking, leaving, arriving, drinking, setting up equipment. We would confuse ourselves with our over thinking and then we would stare at each other and say, "At least we have options." On my Birthday card he wrote that he has never enjoyed playing music with someone as much as he enjoys it with me, and it made me smile because it was exactly what I was thinking but hadn't yet said about him.
The night before leaving for our first show we sat in our booking agent's (Manny from Teenage Heads) living room silent, embarrassed. Why embarrassed? Because while I was away visiting my friend for the night my band got drunk, drunk, drunk and stumbled into Manny's house and woke up his two kids and wife (who had to work in a few hours). Bice, yes the responsible one threw up in the sink and even Liz stumbled around the bedroom with heavy feet. And Phillip tore the cover off our soon to be driver and yelled, “Who the hell are you?” I was not there to witness these stupor riddled shenanigans but Manny informed me when he picked me up from the train station, sitting with our soon to be driver Carmen, that my band had reeked havoc and kept his family awake late into the early morning. Luckily he said it with a bit of a grin, and I knew that instead of getting mad he would spread the word and gloat over the infamous night. And also he would never get tired of offering Bice a barf bag for the tour. (Side note: Bice never barfed again, it is not a regular occurrence for him and so his physical shows of humility and verbal apologies to the family were earnest and copious.) And here is where we met our Swiss Miss, Carmen Fiechter, who we would lovingly name Caramel, and then Caramel Apple, and for a short time Dirty Whore, but that's a long story that doesn't involve anything whorish. It soon became apparent that this bleach blonde petite punk girl spoke more languages and had more spunk than all of us put together. Though we also soon found out that she couldn’t parallel park and that she drove slower than my mother, but she was endearing and took care of us and all other business professionally, promptly and with extraordinary cuteness and finesse. No promoter would refuse her money owed or the courtesy deserved. She took the best pictures of the tour; she has an eye for a frozen moment that speaks volumes about relationships. Even though we made fun of how she said “Guddemn!” and even though we accidentally taught her how to snore louder than anybody else in the band, she happily became one of us and it was a sad moment when we had to say goodbye.
And then there is Liz, my girl. I gave her the challenge of taking more control of being the front (man) we talked about having her move around more, and she was overly concerned about faking a stage performance. She didn’t want to be ingenuous. I told her to be ingenuous for a moment and more than likely the honesty would follow. She surpassed my expectations and now we are a stage of musical jumping beans bouncing into each other, dancing and smiling. We are told by audience members that the fun we have and the compassion we show for each other is infectious. There really is no front person in this band but Liz floats as an individual among us, an angel fraternizing with grungy devils. She is my dream come true, a sign that there is life beyond Weasel. She is the voice and she instinctively feels my musical and emotional intentions and incorporates them with her own. That is a gift.

This has turned out much mushier than I had expected, but I can’t help it. The memories are flooding my brain and they can only escape as mixed and magnified emotions. I can’t help but see the poetry made manifest by the magical combination of these musicians, my friends.