By Danelle Petersen
The five-piece emocore band Taking Back Sunday is from Amityville, N.Y., a town notoriously known for horror since the 1979 release of The Amityville Horror. The band not only found a little horror on the tour this summer, but also went on the adventure of a lifetime.
TBS, currently signed with Victory Records, has been around since November 1999 when the members slowly joined together. Now-frontman/then-bassist Adam Lazztra went around Long Island asking people if they knew anyone who would want to start a band. He finally got lucky and found the perfect elements for his band. One of those elements was Ed Reyes, who was in the influential emo-pop band, Movielife.
TBS guitarist John Nolan found a moment while on tour to fill The Gateway in on what he calls “a complete mixture of the most amazing experiences and the most horrible things ever.”
Beginning the tour in July in Chester, N.Y., and meeting up with friends Brand New and Rufio later on in the tour that month, the boys in this band knew there was adventure in their futures. They just didn’t realize what the future had in mind for them and their friends as they traveled across the United States.
Once the tour got rolling, TBS played mostly sold-out shows nightly, which led the band from its home state of New York to California. Nolan said the tour schedule was very tedious and left them with probably only about four days off the whole tour. Most of those days involved a good 24-hour drive to the next show. All that time on the road was needed to recover from the almost ironic injuries the band members received from the show the night before.
It turns out TBS and Brand New had a friendly rivalry going on to see who could out-do the other with the most outrageous stage performance. It did get a little out of hand one night when Brand New’s singer decided to climb 15 feet above the stage and jump into the crowd. He actually broke one of their female fans’ noses.
The pain didn’t stop with the fans in the crowds.
Nolan says: “There was one night on the tour when Adam was doing one of his ‘wacky mic tricks’ when he throws the mic into the air and it just so happened to hit me in the side of the face. My face was gushing blood the rest of the night. Then about 10 minutes later, he was throwing the mic around, he does this trick when the cords go around his neck and he lets the mic swing around and it ended in a painful smack in the front tooth. He broke off half of his front tooth, finished the show and then rushed off to the hospital.”
The excitement did not end there. Later on in the tour, one of the members of Brand New got scarlet fever and ended up being pretty sick for a while. If that was not scary enough, the band members thought Reyes had a minor heart attack when he passed out in New Jersey from heat exhaustion, dehydration and some minor nerve problems. Nolan says this whole tour was probably one of the most amazing tour experiences he has ever lived through, but he wouldn’t want to relive it again.
When asked about some other memorable tour moments, Nolan recounted a time where he stayed in a house in Los Angeles that was two houses down from Brad Pitt’s house and his room had a gold Korn record on the wall.
Now fans can understand why these worn-out kids were ready for a break and prayed for a more laid-back schedule for this fall’s Best Revenge Tour. Nolan says by the end of the last tour it felt like the three bands were a team and belong on tour together now. He said it was a “bonding experience for everyone on tour,” and that going back out this fall without them seems a little weird.
Although TBS is not coming to Omaha, you can check them out on the in Ames, Iowa, at the Maintenance Shop Sept. 23 with Midtown, Recover and a local opening act.
