Squelch ’94

Mrs. Fasnacht leased two coaches from a charter line in Hutchinson. They were assigned the morning the tour left Wichita. Bus A was the quiet bus. It carried Mechanical, In BRRRRRRT We Trust, Red Screen of Death, Strategic Dehydration and God's Lunatics, and a cooler of sandwiches made by Brenda Mullins.

Bus B was not the quiet bus. It carried Sass Master Flash, Church of the Holy Donut, Machine Gun Kitty, Questionable Sushi, Sloth and Sin and Amputated Frog. Four seats on Bus B were marked with tape for Incarcerated Kittens. The driver, Merle Koontz, never saw them occupied. He saw the band at every show.

Tony Reyes of In BRRRRRRT We Trust inspected both buses each morning before departure. He was not asked to. He wrote up Bus B's air conditioning in Pensacola. It was repaired in Kansas City.

Charcoal Crusted Chicken did not ride a bus. Reggie Pope towed the trailer behind his own truck: two offset smokers, and three sheets of plywood bolted across the bed behind them for a stage. It followed the buses to all twenty-two cities.

The smokers were lit at noon in every city. The band played from the deck in forty-five-minute sets, because that was the interval between fire checks. At the end of each set Lu Strickland set down her bass, checked the firebox, wrote the temperature in the fire log and picked the bass back up.

Lu Strickland's fire log for the summer of 1994 fills most of one spiral notebook. It records twenty-two cooks. Every entry is in pencil. The trailer arrived first in every city and left last.

The Council of Sleep did not play the main stage. Mrs. Fasnacht rented them a tent, forty feet by sixty, and two hundred and twenty folding chairs. The chairs were set before the flaps opened, as the Council required. The session began after dark. No time was posted.

Sleeping bags were permitted from the first night. Mrs. Fasnacht had read about the residency in Albuquerque the year before. When the tour reached Albuquerque in July, thirty-one sleeping bags were on the tent floor. The Council noted this in no public statement.

Gerald Pickett distributed donuts to the audience before every Church of the Holy Donut set. He had done so at every show since 1993. He did not intend to stop for a package tour.

Travis Muncie handled the donuts. In each city he located a bakery the night before, ordered at closing and collected at six in the morning. He kept the receipts in a shoebox. In Winston-Salem the donuts came from home. Gerald said that was a different kind of correct.

The tour closed on July 22 at the county fairgrounds in Huntsville, Texas. Incarcerated Kittens played last. It was the band's hometown. About eleven hundred people paid.

The promoter's settlement sheet records payment to the band in cash, signed by all four members. All four have since denied playing the date. Asked about the settlement sheet in 2011, Tammy Rhodes replied in one line. The line was signed in full. It is not reproduced here.