The 502s - BUS INVADERS Ep. 2138

You guys smashing back here? Oh, jeez. Hold on. Get decent. I sit down, I aim down and we stay down. That's my liquid drawer. Room temperature liquid. My liquids go in there. Come on in to the 502s tour bus. Let's go. My name's Ed. I'm the lead singer and banjo player for the 502s. We just dropped our new album Easy Street and are at the start of a, geez, I don't know, eight, nine week run across America, East coast, West coast, everywhere in between. So we want to give you a quick little tour of our tour bus. Uh, it's at the early stages. So before it gets too messy. So up here we got the driver's quarters. He's got this nice little butt pad. Ooh, that's actually pretty nice. Like a little massage. I have to sit up there and probably get mad at me. This is honestly the highlight. He's got pictures of his little puppies, which are really cute. And uh, yeah, I don't spend too much time up here. Our tour manager Nolan loves to come sit up here and talk to the bus drivers, probably to keep them awake throughout the night. But that's the driver's quarters for the most part. So let's go into the main section here. We got Nick, bass player. So tell them a fun fact about Nick. I, uh, well right now I am, uh, troubleshooting. I'm, I'm, I'm cable guys. So I'm trying to, I think it was some Superman happening and I can't. Addington. Oh, see, this is what I deal with on the bus right here. So that's your favorite channel. But this is, this is my favorite channel. That's how weird I am. Nick, Sean, what do you got going on? Sean? Sean's a tea man, right? I'm a tea guy. I just had some tea in here that I had in here and I'm steep in here so that the tea comes out, believe it or not, in here. And then I sip on some tea just to calm the nerves, get a little caffeine going. Um, and yeah, getting excited for the show that we're about to play. Um, eight, nine weeks, you said? Sounds right to me. We're excited. All right. This is Ken and I, please pay for us. Likes drawing, I guess. Uh, this is a, a thing Sean let me use. It's like a little, it's a reverse coloring book. So instead of like having the lines drawn in and then you work on the colors, the colors are already there and you work in on the lines. Um, so it's, it's Sean's version of therapy and he's letting me try it for free. Therapy is also in, uh, get my head out of my phone and into like a real paper kind of thing. So you should charge him for it. Um, $5 a session. Oh, $5 a page would be fair. Oh, $5, $5 and two cents. I don't get it. Okay. Let me get this. They'll love this. They'll love this. So the very first show a fan of ours brought this out. They made this a five Oh twos and Taylor Swift era's version of all the worst photos they could find of me. That's out of merch shoot. I don't know where that one's from. That's obviously a bad photo. That's a 0.5 wearing Gracie's glasses. I had my like an internal nose surgery. That's after that. So we did a bit, where we all straightened our hair one time. So we took it. If you bring us really, really embarrassing stuff of us, we'll hang it up in the bus at some point for any band member. We'll put it up. Um, that's a good guy. I call him Mr. Bones. We can ask Gracie about that. She got that last tour. Nobody knew he was on the bus except for her. And, uh, one of our texts, Katie got the little duck that was up there recently. So big knickknack group, we've got a slide out on the bus. It's not slid out right now, but the nice thing about it is this little tiny space here probably doubles or a little bit more than doubles, which is nice. Cause then, uh, anybody with long legs, you kind of get all this space. You can kick your legs out and sit like that. You actually can't reach the other side. Just adds a lot of space. I don't know. Sean can do pushups up here if he wants to. That or a blanks or, you know, any sort of inside workout. But for reference, the, um, this wall over here, this goes to about here. So I don't know if that's like one of two feet, two feet ish of space that gets advantage. I feel like people watching are like, what's the big deal with a slide out? But it actually makes a huge difference. Like when you're after the show, you get on the bus, you start driving. And I feel like we're always kind of sitting up here and relatively close knee to knee. You don't have too much space to kick your feet out or anything. Or if someone's like trying to go up here, you know, just falls. So whatever it is for that, but yeah, the slide out, like it's really comfortable when you're stationary. It makes it feel more like a living room in a place where I feel like we can actually hang out and uh, yeah, not bump knees with each other. Give each other trolley horses. But I don't think there's anything revolutionary in these drawers. We've got our ice box. Look at that. I wish I had that in my house. It's a party. We've got a bunch of bottles of water and one white cloth. I think that pretty much tells you you want to drink that. No, I think that pretty much tells you what kind of band we are. We're not super big partiers. Is there anything in these drawers? Um, just personal stuff. Um, we try to, we try to keep things. That's Sean's shoes right there. Old shoes, some slides. Those are his day to day shoes. What else we got? I think the low use a Joe drawer. Oh boy. Those are some shoes too. I don't know what's in here. That is a Joe drawer. That's a mess. I want to go through it, but he'd probably get mad at us. Nothing. I'll take that door later on. So these drawers are pretty much just for us to put more extra stuff, extra personal items, easy things. I got a door in the back, but I will move to the kitchen. It's a very nice living unit. We got some food, nothing really. Honestly, we're just at the start of the tour. So like, I feel like it's not too messy yet, but we got our plates, we got our protein bars, our hydration packets. You got to stay hydrated. Got our bagels down here. Yeah. Just random bread. I guess I don't know who's using that. We got a toaster. That's nice for toasters. We got a Doritos, big Dorito band. I think we would all agree. This is the best flavor. Sweet, spicy, sweet chili. I just call them the purple Doritos. So the best of both worlds. We've got our bottle of Jack Daniels. That's how much we all drank on the first night was one fourth of one fourth of Jack Daniels. So again, not big partying band, but we do like to supply it for videos. So we look cool. I honestly think we have more hydration and vitamin C packets than we do. Uh, alcohol on this bus. I think that says a lot about us. I actually haven't gone through any of this paper towels. I feel like the fridge is going to be the best thing. This is actually kind of cool. Little, little latch to the fridge. Doesn't open up trash can. What do we got in here? We've got cleanest. It'll look, we've got some green juices. Here's some more white cloth. Okay. So what we've done last year when we did the tour on the bus, we found that we'd get a lot of takeout and it would sit in the bus for way too long. And this year we've decided you got to put your name and you got to put the date that you got it. And, uh, I think after two days, if it's still in there, we can just throw it out. Anybody can throw it out. So that's the bus driver, Dave. He's got his orange juice. We won't throw his stuff out. Um, all the drinks are good. These are some eggs that Joe and I got for breakfast at some point in time. A couple of the girls got their, I don't know if that is a salad or something in a sandwich. So Alyssa, Mindy. Yeah. We just like try to all more Joe. We kind of just try to, this is a pretty clean group, but for the most part we named stuff so that it doesn't, uh, oh boy, that's stuck on camera. Here we go. I don't know. We got ourselves a free tray. I can't even get that out. So I'll never be eating that. Okay. So the rider, most of this stuff comes off of our rider, which a rider is you show up to a venue, you're traveling and the venue will provide you with certain things. So our rider is like a fruit platter, a veggie platter, hydration packets, uh, some cold cuts, some protein shakes and green juices. There is a bottle of Jack Daniels on there. Some white claws, some protein bars, the bagels. Most of the stuff honestly that you've seen so far food wise, that's what's on our rider. But most of the time I feel like the breads make it onto the bus. The fruit and the veggie tray make it onto the bus. We eat the protein bars a lot. We drink the protein shakes. We drink the water. I don't know. I feel like that's the gist of it. We eat the chocolate. We definitely do eat the chocolate that's on there. And uh, yeah, that's pretty much what the fridge looks like. I don't think there's anything in the freezer. Honestly, there's not a single thing in the freezer. Here's the bathroom tour. Oh, this is kind of cool. So when you live on a bus, everything operates with these push buttons. It's all electric. There's no door handles anywhere, as you can see. Um, so you gotta push this. If it's green, that means it's opening. And then you can step right into our luxurious bathroom. It's beautiful. It's not incredibly spacious. Nick and I probably have a hard time in here, but uh, here I'll step in. You can see the size of it. It's not super, not super large, but it works. Definitely like in the middle of the night when you're peeing, you got to kind of brace back and hold yourself like that. Cause I'm curious too, cause the bus moves. So it's kind of hard to pee. Sean, come here real quick. What's your, what's your, this man, I didn't make the video. How do you pee in the middle of the night if you get up? If I get up in the middle of the night with the bus driving and the bus is shaking, we have to do the most logical, sensible thing. I'm going to pretend this is up. I go in and I sit down and I aim down and we stay down and it all stays in one spot. It's all sanitary and we get up and then we flush with pressing this, pressing this right here. Um, I'll actually show this to you now. It's just this, but when you press it, it goes down and then there's some water that goes and flushes away any sort of unnecessary things we need in our life. Um, number one rule on the bus is no, number two, we only pee, only pee goes down here and is, there's a little note, no solid waste sign, no solid waste. They take that very seriously. Yeah, that is a, we're a fun band, but I'm on a very serious note. Do not you number two on a bus. Nick, I want to see, I'm just curious now. And if we use it, we use it. If we don't, I'm not sitting on the toilet. Cause I brace myself like this. So I brace myself right up against here. Let's get myself, you know, you aim down, but you gotta make sure, you know, just stationary. Cause the bus is doing this. I mean, you're crazy to miss, even if you're completely wasted, which we're not, you're going to make it in there. There's no way. Like if I got, I got plenty of room here. So, you know, you just do your business and then, you know, you know, put your stuff away and then, uh, you know, yeah. All right. So we've got two standing. One said, yeah, I'm not sitting one night. There you go. Did not think the video was going to go there, but, so then you close the bathroom door and then right next to it is the door to this mirror. It seems like a mirror, but really it leads to the bunk alleys. Push it open a couple of times. This has been broken. So we've had to like force it open, but that's the bunk alley if you want to get a shot of this. So this is the bunk alley. We all sleep in here. There are 10 people on the crew slash band and 12 bunks. So we got two junk bunks, this one and that one down there. Real quick, a junk bunk is literally what it sounds like. It is a bunk with everybody's stuff in it. Uh, bags, wardrobe, blankets, stuff that you don't have a place for underneath or that you want to keep kind of safe or accessible. You just throw it in the junk bunk and uh, you can claim it when you want to. Pull your bag down, get your toothpaste out and brush your teeth. So that's what junk bunks are. Um, otherwise, obviously you can see we got top, middle and bottom bunks. Last year when we toured, we all kind of experimented a little bit with what bunks we liked and we eventually ended up figuring out what we prefer. So this was a nice look at a middle bunk. It's not mine. This is Joe, our sax player's bunk. You can see how nice he has it laid out. We are a very prima prima Donna band only when it comes to bedding. I think in most things we're very easy going, but uh, you can, I don't know if you can even tell, but on here this is a very thick mattress pad on top of a second mattress pad that Joe has. So he stacked it up. I put a mattress pad on, at least half of us have put mattress pads onto our stuff so that we're comfortable when we sleep and bring our pillows. And I think when I was loading my stuff onto the bus, I had one suitcase and five bags of bedding. So that's good. My bunk's down here on the bottom. I really like the bottom bunk because let me see if I can pull it this way. I like the bottom bunk. There's a bottle of water. Because I don't know, it's something about being close to the ground. It feels like I don't move as much. And also that, uh, yeah, I just feel like the roar of the road and it kind of like wolves me to sleep. But as you can kind of see down here, pretty nice, lots of bedding. I got a body pillow here and another body pillow over here. I put nice thick mattress pads on it. Uh, for me, my number one priority is air circulation. So I've mounted a fan here. It's kind of falling off actually already. Probably need new tape, but I mounted a fan here and plugged it in. So I just, when I go to sleep, I turn that on blows directly at my face and uh, keeps me cool. That's nice. Like I got my little phone charger up here. I keep my sleep mask and my earplugs in here. I love it. I'm, I don't really like light or noise when I'm sleeping. So that, and then I got like a little, like a safe travels metal that my mom gave me that I keep up there, take next to my pump. Um, actually also my wife's here. So she's sleeping in this bunk tonight. There's not enough room for two people, but she gave me this one. I left two from our dog. So I keep that in my bunk, his little toy as well. So that's kind of the bunk deal. Um, Gracie's got a nice bunk too. Yeah, see we're showing off the good bunks. She really goes above and beyond with her bunk in a good way. She's got hangs hanging, you know, she's got her switch, her headphones, all that kind of stuff. So she had her silk pillow sheet right there, a bottle of water. So bunks can be what you want them to be. Nick's got a pretty chill bunk up here. He's up top. Just classic man right there. Got his pillow, got his blanket and that's what he's doing with it. So everybody kind of figured out their bunks and we've all done a good job of respecting everybody's bunk preferences. And uh, yeah, it's pretty fun. It is honestly pretty fun to get in and out of bunks. It feels like a little coffin in a lot of ways. So, uh, last but not least, we'll take you into our smash room, which is exactly what it sounds like. There's a lot of smashing going on back here. Let's open it up. You guys smashing back here. Oh geez. Hold on. Get decent. Okay. They're decent. Come into the smash room. Here you go. You gotta get decent. Oh, there it is. Dang. Right when the camera came on. Did I win? No, I won. Okay. All right. Well we did it in your honor I guess. This is Gracie. That's Joe. This is the back lounge. The smash lounge. Yeah. We were talking about Jersey shore. We were like the smash lounge like the squish room or whatever that thing was. Oh the squish room. What was that? Smush. Yeah. Nick said it was a smush room. Sure. Yeah. This is the back lounge. Super chill. I lived, I took a nap in here earlier. Very comfortable seats. Uh, right now we've been playing super smash brothers and uh, I want to say I haven't played in like years, so I'm just kind of exploring the characters and I'm liking Ridley. It's kind of a big guy. It reminds me of Donkey Kong or like a Bowser. Uh, that's, that's Ed over there. He's Donkey Kong, but yeah, that's what we're doing back here. Yeah. I, uh, I'm a big Kirby gal, so I've been playing Kirby, uh, in smash, but we also, I think there are like five Nintendo switches on this bus, so everybody kind of has their own flavor. I'm a big animal crossing gal, so I play a lot of animal crossing and we were playing this game called whole IO for a while where you're a whole and you go around and you try to try to swallow stuff and that's really fun. So this is like, this is the, uh, what did they call it? This is the war room. We're either, we're either doing conferences back here or we're, you know, we've actually got our conference room up there for our social media posting to make sure that we're posting enough. Yeah. So welcome to the war room. That's the highlight of the whole bus. It's my, my water and protein shake drawer and sometimes there's Jack Daniels in there also. When we start to load up on the Jack Daniels, that's my liquid drawer, room temperature liquid. My liquids go in there. Yeah. We talked about how, how we, uh, she'll laugh at this. We talked about how do you pee in the middle of the night when you get up to go to the bathroom? So you sit, Nick and I stand and brace. I'll tell you what, sitting is a great idea because I have stepped in pee more than one time on this bus and I'll tell you what, it's not mine. And it's dark in there and sometimes the door doesn't lock all the way. So you got to hold on to it while you go. I'm just saying, the door doesn't lock and sometimes if you're driving and someone knocks, you either don't hear the knock or they don't hear your answers. You have to be real quick to hold the door closed. You can do if the door is shut. I pretty much use my arm like a piece of plywood and like brace it shut like that. So if they try to slide it open, it hits my elbow. Yeah. I'm usually turned the other direction. Yeah. Right on. Yeah. That's the liquid drawer. So if you ever come on our bus and need to put a liquid in there, you just throw it in, make sure it doesn't leak, but otherwise it's good. Sweet. Well, thanks for coming on our bus, getting a quick tour of it. As you can tell, we're starting to fill it out for the tour. And uh, yeah, the next eight, eight weeks we'll be on tour and our new album, easy street is out now. Spotify, Apple music, whatever you want. You can go listen to it. Literally every social media. We're just at the five Oh two. So we'd love if you check it out. And uh, yeah, we got to go get ready for the show and see you soon. We got one more little guy friends with tiny Mason and that duck up here. This is my drawer. We're still trying to find a place for him, but whoever this man is, Captain, Captain Seamus, Seamus, Seamus McGonagall, Seamus McGonagall, Seamus McGonagall. He just told us his name. There you go. Seamus McGonagall. That's him. That's our little guy. He and tiny Mason are pretty close. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just like that.