Staff Blog
The Hermit Thrushes harbored a fugitive!
posted by Patrick Rapa
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| Would you share a van with The Hermit Thrushes? |
Okay, so I’m reading this amazing story in Wired about a writer who ditched everything to start a new life for a month and challenged a world-wide web of hackers and cyber sleuths and such to find him. It’s a crazy, amazing story. And then I get to this part:
I left LA with a band called the Hermit Thrushes, trading gas money for a spot onboard a converted retirement-home shuttle van that served as their tour bus. An indie rock group composed of college grads from Philadelphia, they’d responded to an ad I posted on craigslist, under the name Don, needing a ride to Austin or New Orleans. We rattled along from show to show: LA to Tempe to Las Cruces, up to Lubbock and Tulsa, east to Fayetteville, then north toward Chicago. The band played whiskey bars, coffee shops, and rowdy house parties. We crashed on living room floors or crammed into the seats of the bus, and, once, on the grass at a rest stop in Texas.
The band was serious about its music but unperturbed about much else, and I settled into a role somewhere between lazy roadie and moneyed patron, pulling $100 bills from my belt at gas stations. On board, I staked out the bus’s backseat, where I could use my laptop without anyone looking over my shoulder. With a $150 wireless broadband card from Virgin Mobile, the only nationwide service that didn’t require a credit check, I had almost uninterrupted online access.
Now, astute readers will remember that Philly band The Hermit Thrushes features CP writer Sam Tremble, who had a web-infamous encounter with the so-called Hipster Grifter. I mean, what the hell? Two run-ins with wanted people?
