Warbringer - BUS INVADERS Ep. 2042

Hey, what's up? This is John Keeble from Warbringer. Welcome back to Warbringer Bus Invaders. We are here in an alley behind Reggie's in Chicago where I'm in my natural habitat in a parking lot in front of a van where I spend much of my life. You want to come take a look? Let's go show you this van. Well, here is the commander's chair of the van right there. I do a lot of driving. I actually had to take this thing out from Nashville to Los Angeles solo to kick the tour off because that's where the van was in Nashville and we got a good deal on it. So I was there for two and a half days basically and it was pretty wild. Usually we'll have somebody waking up in the morning to drive. Someone drives like an hour or two after the show. If the drive is like eight hours or more, we have to haul all night in which case we need two people up here so someone has to sit here and basically decide what albums we're listening to and do that. There's also random stuff here. Water bottle, flakes, broken shakes, my shirt from three shows ago. Let's see if it's dry. Not quite. Sodom and the sign of evil. Oh, geez. Baby wipes. Random stuff that people left here. Garbage. That is the stock and trade. This thing is constantly filling with garbage and you have to keep throwing the garbage out like you're bailing water out of a leaky boat. One of the things we'll do is generally full records only because we don't want to have to think about a new song every five minutes or whatever. You get an interesting mix here. Chase Bryant, the bassist, tends to favor prog and full extended Rush album times. If you get me, it's usually like old heavy or thrash metal and then Blake does a weird mixture of all this eclectic shit and then composers and Luke likes to listen to power metal and anyone with a shredding guitar. Between that, it's nice because you just get exposed to a lot of music in this setting. For me personally, I hadn't been listening to a ton of new music at home because eventually one gets old and jaded. Just being here and having a bunch of dudes flooding the zone with music all the time is great. The other one is a lot of time when I'm driving in the morning and it's alone, not at night and I'm not hanging with anybody, I'll put on episode 115 of the Age of Napoleon podcast so he'll break down troop movements and battles and the geopolitical situation. Guy does a great job. All right, this bag here is all of Blake's shit and he just left it there and you have to step over it all the time. Sometimes stuff that you want, like your wallet or whatever, lands in there and you have to rummage through his shit, but that's just how it is. So here we're going to try to make it to the back here. Yes! All right, and this here is my house. I live in this tiny cube. It can be sealed off from the outside land, so usually I just leave it about like there when I'm sleeping because it's loud anyway. We actually, this is a pretty well kitted out van. I have a cup holder, I have a light, we don't have the auxiliary power on, which we can put. Now we can light it up back here. I usually have a few bottles of water on here. Here's other junk. There's multiple blankets because these aren't warm enough. Here's various clothes that aren't mine and random stuff that I don't know how it got there. That's the downside of having the front bunk. This is a shirt from a show days ago that was also not dry. What else do we got? I got a few pillows. I got my book. I almost never end up reading, but I've gotten through a bit of this, so I want to be more highbrow. I have that. I have a little mesh thing, phone charger, and all in all, it's a pretty good setup. I've definitely slept in far worse conditions, so if one's willing to be an absolute beggar, you can call this luxury. The window could be an upside or a downside. One of the downsides is sometimes people behind you want it open and you don't, but it's fine. We actually have amenities, but we never use them. We have a cooler and that's useful. I think we got some beers in here. No, we drank all the beers. There's some fruit that needs to be thrown out and some honey for tea and stuff. This can actually go into the venue and it's powered and stuff, but it's limited in usefulness because we don't have the van on most of the time when it's parked, so it's not like a proper fridge, though in theory, if we had shore power and stuff, it would be. This TV has not been used once because nobody has time to watch TV. We're all just sleeping and stuff, and honestly, who wants to sit around watching TV when there's all these dudes making consistently hilarious and dumb commentary? Way more entertaining. It's pretty cool. I almost scraped it with my head, but it definitely lets you know if we ever forget that we're playing music in this van, it will remind us. This is Andrew, the tour manager's bunk. This one's really hard to get into, and you kind of have to do that. So then you're here, and it's kind of like a tomb, but you can sleep in it. Now we're back here. I don't sleep back here, so I'm not back here too much. Let's get some lights on. Here we go. As you can see, it's like a mixture of everyone's shit piled around Luke's bunk, I think Chase down here, Adam's there, and yeah, we just got this. This is the junk bunk here, and another there. At night, this is called the WB lounge, and people will be back here while someone else drives basically. I don't come back here too often because I'm located a distant five feet forward of where I'm standing, but yes, this is the back of the van. It's got seven bunks. I don't think you could actually sleep seven people in here, but we have six in this, so it's fine. So here we have just a shit load of water, because you kind of can't have too much. I have to drink like eight or ten of these a day to maintain myself and not disintegrate. That's an enormous bag of trash. That's the trash that was correctly put into the trash, which is about half of it. The rest is scattered throughout the winds, and yeah, we pretty much pile stuff from the Ryder in here, and everyone drinks all the beer and leaves all the water. So now we are in a different section of our luxury parking lot with our trailer. This is actually Conan from Ex Mortis' trailer that we've borrowed from him. We tore the freaking wheel well off it in Albuquerque, and due to the relentless tour schedule with no time off for anything, we have not been able to replace it. So watch out when we're making a right turn. On the other side, you'll see a fully functional wheel well. Oh my God, you won't believe it. Check this out. A fully functional wheel well. That's how it's supposed to look right there. Now, Adam usually is the lord of the trailer. We actually just want to have two different locks. Conan, fix your goddamn locks. So we need multiple different keys. We're used to it now, but I was really confused at the start. We aren't really hauling much gear this time, so it's pretty much stacked to the high with just merch, which is awesome, because that is the lifeblood of tour. We're mostly using a backline with a Legion, because we wanted to minimize the amount of load in and load out, and we're working hard enough already. So you might say, wait, your vehicle doesn't have a bathroom. But it does. It's actually here. If you ever find yourself in a public place, you can stand right here and just piss behind the trailer. That's the closest we get to a bathroom. Yes, but no one ever has shore power. So we have this shore power outlet, and we could, in theory, power the van, but no one has ever done it, and we have not used it once, just like the TV. We are traveling and driving this van around to go and wreck a club near you with the power of thrash metal and our new record, Wrath and Ruin, which was released two weeks ago on Napalm Records. We're on the tour called Vortex of Violence, catchy name, with Summoning the Lich, Skeletor Rains, a Legion, and of course us, Warbringer. Come and see us, and we'll fall out of this van in disarray and hit the stage with organized precision.