By E.H. Stockton

December 13^th, 2018

1:30 AM

Somewhere on the South Carolina Interstate

The night was a blinding darkness as Justin, Igoe, and I drove through the night. Van the Good spent the night in Columbia while the three of us were Charleston bound. Justin put on a Bob Seger album to fend off the exhaustion. We were in the middle of some moon lit nowhere, buried deep within the lowland hills of South Carolina when “Turn The Page” came on. Justin sang along under his breath.

Here I am, on the road again,
There I am up on stage.
There I go playin’ the star again,
There I go, turn the page.

Hearing him sing as he stared into the endless, dark highway ahead, it was as if the lyrics had come alive in front of me. What those words mean to him is something totally unlike whatever daydream most people are lost in while they hum along to Seger’s words. These aren’t the poems of a fantasy, they’re an echo of reality to the man who is an hour removed from the stage and another hour away from his home and pregnant wife.

I woke up on the couch in Justin’s living room around noon. He’d taken his wife out for lunch, to celebrate being home for the first time in a couple weeks.

“Hope that’s alright,” he said on the way out.

Van the Good arrived in Charleston that morning. He and I smoked a quick joint in the backyard before the two of us grabbed lunch at an authentic Mexican restaurant. The first of two shows that night was still hours away when we met Justin at Woolfe Street Playhouse and loaded the gear in and onto the stage. The chairs were being set up for the audience and the staff were the only few people who wandered the halls.

It was around 3 in the afternoon when I told Van the Good, “I’m gonna take a walk.”

“Alright, bud,” he said from the stage, unwinding a series of cables. “Enjoy it.”

I walked for 20 minutes, taking deep breaths of the warm December air as I passed old churches and countless restaurants until I reached Meeting Street. I could see the waving arm of John Roberts, The Official Psychedelics Supplier for SUSTO, from across the street. I crossed to his side where we shook hands and carried on talking about this, that, and the holiday season while we walked to his hotel.

When I entered his hotel room, I emptied my pockets onto the bed nearest the door. Passport, wallet, smoke butts and all. If I’m going to be robbed, I may as well distance myself from my belongings.

“Don’t mind the Smith and Wesson,” John Roberts said casually as I unloaded my few possessions. There, sitting on the nightstand between the two beds, sat his pistol. “Do you want to hold it?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, taking it, feeling the weight of it, pointing it aimlessly at the wall.

He reached on top and clicked on a laser dot that hit the wall.

“I like to use this to play with my cat,” he said as he danced the red dot back and forth across the wall. “I unload it first, to avoid accidents.”

I sat in a chair next to the window as John Roberts explained how I was going to consume the DMT he had brought for me.

“Just try to hold it in as long as you can,” he said.

The room sat in stiff silence as I took drags that weren’t quite long or deep enough for the experience he had in mind. After the first two inhalations, I let go of the vaporizer and he held it for me as I began to tune out of the room. My eyes closed and I drifted off, beyond the room, to some distant psychedelic somewhere. He held the vaporizer to my mouth as I took another, then another. I was scared and didn’t want any more.

“Just relax,” he said in a soft voice.

I trusted him and took a couple more drags. My vision was overcome by a starlight brightness. I leaned back in the chair and hugged the throw pillow I held in my lap. I no longer felt myself in the room until, after three or four minutes the starlight faded, and my eyes slowly opened. Those four minutes felt more like 20 seconds.

The silence hung heavy around me.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“I feel good. I feel like everything’s good.”

“Did you see anything? Did you hear anything?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer. I didn’t have the words for any of it. Even now, looking back, I have no words for what I felt.

“How rough did the vape feel?”

“Smooth,” I said, relieved to finally know an answer to something. “I feel like I can breathe down here,” I said after a moment of thought. “I feel like I was smiling the whole time I was deep in it.”

“Oh yeah,” he laughed. “I got some pictures of the DMT smiles. It’s what happens to everybody. You just feel too good in the moment. You understand there’s no reason not to smile. Next time you do it, just hold it in, that way you’ll get so much more out of it.”

“I’d be willing to take a little more now,” I said.

“Let’s give it 10-15 minutes so you can come back down. It’ll take about an hour to get back to 100%.”

“What do I owe you for this?”

“Nothin’, just write about it.”

“I appreciate the shit outta that” I said, slowly, still regaining my focus. “That’s the best gift I can ask for.”

“Yeah, for the holiday season. If you wanna buy anyone DMT vapes as a stocking stuffer, I’m here for ya.”

We talked for a while about the experience I’ve had and the growth that will come from having come down South.

“All these experiences build you up and give you the confidence you need to excel,” he said as we sat and talked, waiting for me to come all the way down. “You need confidence to do anything in this world.”

“This is a beautiful country,” I said as I looked out the window at a church across the street that saw the cowardice of a lone gunman enter its front doors a few years earlier.

“It is. We are an experiment from the enlightenment and hopefully it will continue,” he replied. “Would you like to try it one more time?”

“I would love to,” I said. I sat back into the same chair I was in before.

“This time really hold it in. Count to 10 and close your eyes. And hopefully you’ll go into the room.”

“Sounds good” I said, unsure of what he was referring to, or if I wanted to enter such a place. “Thank you for facilitating this. And also for not robbing and killing me while I’m under.”

“Yeah, should I move the gun?” he said and we both laughed.

I leaned back and brought the vape pen back to my lips. The hotel room carried a soft hum as I took my first deep draws of the second round. The only way I can describe the experience is as an overwhelming wave of absence from myself before being settled down into a bed of well-being. Light overtook my vision once again like something interstellar. I felt completely removed from this plane of conscious existence, submerged into something indefinable.

I’ve read others refer to DMT as a blast-off experience, and that’s the most fitting description I can muster. I was blasted off from myself with such velocity that I could hardly hang on to what was happening. I was overcome by a deep euphoria that reached from the root of my soul and out to the tips of my fingers.

“I’m thankful that I get to be here,” I said through the soft chuckles that I couldn’t keep to myself. “How did I get to this hotel room in Charleston? How is it that any of this is actually happening? Is any of this tour even real? Everything seems perfect and I’m just so happy to be here.”

As I spoke, the words of this unguarded truth came slowly.

“There are so many good people in my life,” I said after a moment of silence. “I need to open myself up and accept the love they offer.”

“I try to keep that feeling throughout my whole life. But it’s clearest whenever I’m on psychedelics,” John Roberts said from the edge of the bed next to my chair.

We talked a little more about some book recommendations he had for me. As the conversation went on, the pace at which I spoke increased gradually until it was back to normal. John Roberts told me he had invited the ACID GIRL from the green room last night to come to tonight’s show.

“I’m gonna be shocked if that girl from last night really shows up,” he said as he looked anxiously at his phone as we descended to the lobby in the elevator.

“Oh, buddy,” I laughed, “I’d put money on her showing up.”

“Yeah,” he said, with a blank stare as he thought about the problem to come. “Oh well.”

We went for a walk around Charleston, through a hotel that was once a military school, a bookstore with nothing worth buying, and he beat me at consecutive games of pool. I’d be seeing him at the second show that night, so I wandered out of the pool hall and back toward the Woolfe Street Playhouse.

When I walked inside, Van the Good was in the lobby to greet me.

“Whatsup, man?” he asked, with a smile as he looked up from the merch table he’d just finished setting up.

“Van the Good,” I said, nodding in his direction. “How ya doin’?”

“Good, man. How was your walk?”

“Beautiful, man.”

The venue had large, century old cash registers in the lobby and at the main bar inside the concert area. I wandered by both registers and ducked into the green room while the pre-show setup carried on.

Come the time of the first show, the green room was filled with family and friends, including the rest of the members of SUSTO.

“Is there an entrance onto the stage from back here?” Pete asked before his time had come.

“Yup” Van answered.

“Great. Go ahead and show me that now so I look like less of a fuckin’ goofball come show time.”

The noise of the crowd in the next room roared between songs while Pete performed. Seeing Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster live was one of the great surprises of coming out on tour. I shook his hand before I ever heard his music and found getting to know him offstage was as much a pleasure as having the opportunity to watch him on stage.

Both shows that night were sold out and I stood in the back corner, nearest the green room entrance, as Justin and Igoe stepped on stage for the first performance. At each applause break, a man behind me Cah-Cawed like a mutant bird from a terrible fever dream.

Anyone who has ever heard the SUSTO album Live at the Australian Country Music Hall of Fame has heard this very same Cah-Cawing madman. It was a friend of the band named James, famed smoker of cigarettes and gatekeeper of Rialto Row.

At the midway point in the set Justin sang a song without Igoe backing him up. “Erlene”, written for his wife, was sung only in Charleston as she sat in the crowd.

“Erlene she is my baby, she stays up with me when I’m yellin’ through the night. I say ‘you think I’m crazy’, she says ‘you are, but that’s alright.’”

Toward the end of the song, Justin looked down with a laugh as he couldn’t keep himself from crying. James offered a consoling, tear laden, Cah-Caw from the back of the room.

“Shut up, James,” Justin laughed into the mic and wiped the tears from his face with a smile.

After the show, a group of us headed outside for a cigarette and a joint.

“So, do you accept my challenge?” James asked me as he pulled out his lighter and sparked a cigarette.

“What’s your challenge?” I asked, fishing in my pocket for the lighter I had lost three days prior.

“Alright,” he said in his coarse voice, “challenge accepted. Do you play ping pong?”

I shrugged. “Not really.”

“Pffft” is all he said through a billow of cigarette smoke that floated through his beard.

I would later learn that James was once a state champion ping-pong player, which explains his athletic physique. He and I took 10 minutes to set up the table before he rocketed two shots by me and said, “You’re not ready for this,” before disassembling the table and putting it away.

We scuttled back inside just as Pete took to the stage to start the second show. Between songs a fan standing at the back of the room yelled “Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster!” with a drink raised in the air.

At 10:00 it was time for Justin and Igoe to start their second sold out show of the night.

“I wrote this song the day after an acid trip and I had this sort of clarity,” Justin said, early in the set. “It was the day after a snowstorm in Charleston and the whole city looked like a snow globe. I’d just gotten home from Mexico that day and the heater in our house was busted, the plumbing was busted and our cat had an infection and a snowstorm was hitting. No one could come out to fix any of it. The acid trip ended up being a great escape from all that. We had one room with a heater that stayed warm if you kept the door closed. That room felt sort of like home, but the rest of the place didn’t. I started thinking, I wish I could take my family, my wife and my cat, to somewhere better. And this song is what came out of that.”

With that, he and Igoe stepped in to Weather Balloons.

The show wrapped on “Homeboy”. Once he was back in the green room, Justin told me he lost the rhythm of the song while they were playing. “I’m not super pissed about it,” he said, “you get one fuck up per show.”

A group of us stepped outside for another joint and cigarette. As Justin took a hit of the joint and passed it on, he told me, “Homeboy wasn’t even one of my favorites on the new album but the radio team chose it as the single. A lot of people say they don’t like the label people to tell them what to do but, honestly, my head’s just so far up in this shit that I’ll take some clarity about which one’s good and which one’s not.”

“Canuck,” James said to me in his grizzled voice as he passed me the joint, “I believe in you, for some reason.”

His kind words sparked a thought and I said “when I’m writing about this all, I won’t refer to you by name if-“

“I don’t give a fuck about anything” he interrupted. “Ain’t afraid of shit.”

“I guess that answers that,” I said with a laugh.

“You’re in it, dawg, don’t worry about it. We’re gonna have fun tomorrow ridin’ to Macon. I’m loadin’ in the van with the ACID BOYS cooler full of Budweisers, gonna have a shit load-a-jubbas ready to go,” he said, shaking his head, giddy at the prospect of what’s to come.

“Hey J,” he yelled across the group, “we’ll have to bring him by Rialto Row before he leaves.”

“He’s stayin’ there, man. We already talked about it,” Justin answered, confused.

“Ooh,” James said, his eye lighting up. “You’re the Canuck.”

“Do you get a lot of Canadians down here?” I asked.

“Honestly, I was just testing the market with that word,” he explained before asking in a hushed tone, “is that a racist term or somethin’?”

“No. I mean, we have a hockey team called the Canucks,” I said.

“Yeah, but we’ve got a team called the Redskins,” Justin answered.

The statement sparked a memory in someone’s mind who said, “I was telling James the last time I was in Macon, Georgia, I was at a bar watching the OJ chase.”

“What?” Justin said, his eyebrows raised as he took another drag from the joint.

“Yup. It was on every TV with full volume. They changed the drink special to vodka with an OJ chaser.”

As the group went inside, I bumped into John Roberts. He offered me a cigarette, so I stayed outside with him. He told me the ACID GIRL from last night had not only come to Charleston, but she had brought a couple of loud friends with her, all three of whom were drunk beyond reason.

“I’m still surprised she took me up on the offer,” he said while we stood in the light rain. Cigarette smoke drifted skyward.

Later in the night he came up to me with a look of mild concern. “Hey, have you seen those girls around? They’re awfully drunk and if they wander off too far, they’re intoxicated enough to get themselves arrested and then it’ll be a whole thing.”

“Can’t say I have, brother. Good luck,” was all I could say.

As the night wore on and the party broke up, Justin, Van the Good and I waited around inside the venue. Everyone had left save for an older man who stacked the chairs. I helped him stack a few dozen while Van and Justin packed the gear on stage. There is no glamour to this side of the job, the take down and clean up. You’ve knocked ‘em down, someone dragged ‘em out. The part no one sees is when you have to come back out to pack the guitars and wind the cables.

After cleaning up and packing out, Van, Justin, James and I drove through a gentle spattering of rain to The Royal American. We each grabbed a drink and walked onto the empty patio.

“Nice lil’ train track,” Van the Good said, looking behind the building.

“Man, the place I’m from was built as a train town,” I said. “All these tracks remind me of home.”

“Yeah? The town I’m from is a train city, too,” Justin replied.

“This place is the nexus of the universe,” James said as we took our seats. “If it wasn’t for this bar, me and him wouldn’t be friends.” He pointed towards Justin as he spoke.

“I moved to a brand new loft, directly across the street from The Royal American the day before it opened,” James went on to explain. “I didn’t know Justin was a musician or anything. I heard he lived in Cuba, so I asked if he liked Cuban food. After that we became best buds.”

“The Royal American,” Justin said, looking towards it from our table on the patio.

“This is the best establishment in America,” James said, leaning into the table.

“And they don’t close during hurricanes n’ shit,” Justin added matter-of-factly. “This place is indestructible. It was an old mechanics shop that was turned into a bar.”

“So,” James said, eyeing my fake beer from across the table, “how come you quit drinking? There had to have been something terrible that made you call it quits.”

“I just got a little too good at it,” I said after a moment. “The better I got at it, the worse I got at everything else.”

“Oh, cah-caw,” he said with a nod, raising his eyebrows.

“You’re talkin’ to a guy who drinks a case of Budweiser every day,” Justin jumped in.

“Oh yeah. I’m gonna freak you out,” James nodded before taking a sip of Budweiser.

“Two packs of Camels, an eighth of weed, and some chicken tenders,” Justin said, listing the rest of James’ diet essentials.

“You’re an oblivion seeker,” James said, pointing at me with an expression that said, I’ve got you figured out.

“Oh yeah,” Justin said. “He did DMT tonight before the show.”

“Twice,” I added before taking a sip of non-alcoholic brew.

“You did DMT tonight?” James asked, his chin low and his eyebrows raised, “Twice? Jiminy fuckin’ Crickets.”

“Guy gets after it, dude,” Justin said with a shrug.

“Well, I didn’t see that comin’. That’s a curveball,” James said, shaking his head.

“He hopped in the van with SUSTO and rode all the way to Charleston,” Justin said. “What did you expect?”

“My aunt isn’t going to like what I’m going to publish about this,” I said, picking nervously at the tab on my beer can.

“Well,” James said between drags of a cigarette, “ya can’t be rock and roll if you’re worried about what your goddamn aunt thinks. Man, tomorrow’s gonna be fun as shit!”

“Last show, how do you feel?” I asked Justin.

“Stoked. I just wanna get there and back alive. Put my Christmas tree up Saturday.”

“Guten tag,” Van said, raising his beer.

“So, I almost put a Christmas tree up in your house while you were gone,” James confessed, looking at Justin.

“What? That’s our thing, dude,” Justin shot back.

James explained how his girlfriend had pulled him aside and talked some sense into him before he could get away with it.

“She’s like, they’re about to have a child, this is their Christmas tree. Fuck you.”

“Man,” Justin said, imagining the catastrophe, “there’d be pines everywhere and sap on the couches. The cat’d be all bothered. I’m glad you didn’t.”

We stayed at the bar another half hour before we dropped Justin off at home. James, Van the Good and I went to the Rialto Row Compound. The plan for the night was for me to bunk in the studio house. When we pulled onto the property, I was amazed by the artwork painted on the interior of the house.

“That’s nothin’. Wait’ll you see the studio. That’s the real cool shit,” he said, as we walked through the yard to the recording studio.

I stood behind him while the rain came down as he put the key in the lock. He turned the key, but nothing happened.

“Huh,” was all he said at first.

The frustration grew as he tried the key over and over. He pulled it out, looked at it, and tried again.

“Okay,” he said cautiously, “I have no idea what’s going on here. This key works in this lock every single time, except it won’t work now.”

“Weird,” I said. In my head I wondered, did this guy get fired and I’m here when he’s learning that they’ve changed the locks out from under him?

We turned and headed back into the house.

“I guess I’ll show it to you another time,” he said as we stepped into the warmth of the building.

“No problem, man,” I said, though that nagging thought crept back: too bad there won’t be a next time, because you’ve been fired.

“Ho-ly shit,” he said suddenly, his face dropping. “I just got a goddamn text message. The reason we couldn’t get in there is because the owner of the lot is in there with one of the bands. They’re all trippin’ acid and someone was holding the bolt while I was trying to unlock it.”

I wasn’t sure what any of this meant, but I suspected it wasn’t great.

“You won’t be able to stay here tonight. I’m sorry Canuck,” James said with sincerity, “I didn’t realize there’d be a bunch of vegans trippin’ acid back there.”

The gravity of the situation remained airborne, but I broke out laughing. I felt tangled in this balanced chaos, so hilarious and absurd. Who else lives with problems like a shed full of acid fiends locked up out back? Such are the troubles in this little musical universe.

James only shrugged. “It’s what it is,” he said.

The plan turned into me sleeping in the van in the parking lot, but the group cleared out before long. James brought me in to the recording studio and showed me what the speakers are capable of.

“Don’t worry,” he reassured me, “this place is in an entirely deaf community. I used to think all my neighbors were dicks. Nope, just deaf.”

The speakers blared a Band of Horses record as the rain carried on through the night, leaving the streets and the yard flooded by morning.

As the night went by the rain picked up. By 4:00am I had set up the ping pong table in such a way that I could get some much needed practice. The Fighter and the Kid podcast carried on when I heard a scratching at the door as someone had walked up on the other side. I heard a key enter the bolt lock before it turned in place and the door opened. Out from the cold, wet darkness walked a tall man with shoulder length hair and a few days of beard growth. 

“Hey, man” he said as he came in.

He told me his true name but said “my friends call me Touc. It’s short for Toucan”

He stood in the doorway a few extra minutes as the key had become wedged in the lock and wouldn’t budge.

As it would turn out, Touc was rooming here temporarily. He sat to eat his dinner and we talked about this, that and the nothing in between. Soon enough it was past 5:00am and the night would soon turn to day. The last day of tour had arrived and I only had to blink to wake up there.

Go on to read Part Five

By Matt Harrison (@MattHurrison)

December 10^th, 2018

“4:20 arrival,” Van the Good yelled from the driver seat, “we have to make that. Everybody, hold your pisses.”

The drive from Mobile to New Orleans is a little over two hours, which is nothing compared to the hundreds of miles we had traveled thus far. We passed over endless miles of sun baked highway as we came into Louisiana while the bass of “House of the Rising Sun” rattled the windows. The bayou swamp grew thick and deep around us before it receded, and we climbed into the belly of the beast called New Orleans.

The music cut out for a moment as Justin took a business call. He takes a few calls throughout the day, every day. With the release of Ever Since I Lost My Mind just over two months away, there are countless moving pieces he needs to be involved with. The silent talking in the front seat carried on for 5 minutes, then 10. He hung up and sent a couple emails. The music turned back up, and the ride carried on.

It didn’t take long for us to pull up outside the one floor walk-up where the show was scheduled to be. We did a quick unload and set up for mic check.

“I’ve truly never seen anything so beautiful,” Pete said through his Arkansas accent as he stared at the barn-style interior of the house. “I swear,” he would later say, “I’ve had dreams about places like this.”

After setting up and checking the levels, Justin, Igoe, Van the Good and I each took a sprinkle of psilocybin mushrooms and went next door to the Mellow Mushroom. Whether you’ve taken anything mind-bending or not, the art on the walls inside the psychedelic-themed pizza chain have melting frames, and a two-foot-wide eyeball greets you at the end of an upstairs hallway.

The mushrooms took a gentle hold of us while we sat around gnawing on pizza. We hadn’t taken enough to mould our skulls like hot putty, but still enough to feel the gaze of the warped portraits on the wall staring back at us.

“As if we ate mushrooms and came to the Mellow Mushroom,” Justin said in a moment of realization while he sent a curious glance about the room.

“Yeah, yeah!” I said, excited he arrived at the same thought I’d been carrying. “There’s something deep and poetic at play here.”

“Man, I hadn’t even thought about that,” he answered, chewing slower on his pizza.

“I’ve been thinkin’ about it the whole time, man,” I said with feral eyes.

Sometimes when you talk to Justin you forget he has the words ACID BOYS tattooed across his knuckles. Then you catch a glimpse of them, and you remember you’re talking to the King Kid of the ACID BOYS, the head of something whimsically psychedelic. He told me at some point he was one paper away from finishing his anthropology degree when he decided to steer headlong into music, getting his knuckles tattooed as an act of commitment.

“When I got my knuckles tattooed people hit me up like, ‘Hey, are you alright?’ I guess it’s a pretty intense thing to do. It didn’t seem like such a big deal to me at the time.”

Before we went back to the venue, two fans from Fort Worth, Texas came up to the table and bought a round of shots for the group. They also offered a gift: a beautiful glass marijuana pipe, which was immediately dubbed The Gift Bowl.

The table threw back their shots before going back to the venue next door. We each took more mushrooms and hid away in the green room while Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster performed. We could hear him singing “False Dawn” through the walls.

“He’s so good,” I said to Justin about Pete’s singing.

“And we just get to sit back here and listen to him play,” Justin answered with a look of disbelief. “Pete’s honestly one of my heroes. I’m so lucky to be able to be on the road with him.”

Justin told me about a side project he and Igoe have with their friend Darby Wilcox. “We sing a cappella but we only do one song. You ever heard “Down By The River To Pray”? We just do that one over and over.”

“Maybe we should do another song,” Igoe suggested, between sips of her drink.

“Yeah, but we just keep crushin’ that one. If it ain’t broke…” he said, trailing off and shrugging.

The room breathed a quiet laugh as Pete’s singing continued through the wall.

A train wailed in the near distance and it was time for Igoe and Justin to take the stage. A wire outline of a bull’s skull hung above the bayou-themed stage.

“Hey everybody. Thanks for comin’ to hang out. It’s good to be in New Orleans tonight,” Justin said to the crowd as they took the stage. “This story actually involves this guy whose walkin’ down the stairs right now,” Justin said, watching his friend Nick Woodley come down the stairs.

“Fuck you,” Woodley said, laughing as he stepped into the room and took his seat.

“Proper,” Justin said with a smile. “Woodley and I used to live together in a house with about a dozen other people. Around that time, I started getting to know my granddad. I knew he was a shithead, but I thought maybe he was cool. The thing about my grandad is he’s a world class Shag dancer. Every Friday night he’d go down to this place called the Circle Fountain and shag.”

“One night, me and Nick were there, and we went outside with him to smoke a joint. He says, ‘Now boys, the reason why I smoke a little marijuana before I dance is because it helps me feel the beats between the beats. Now that’s deep, that’s far out.’

“We’re just like, yeah, Larry, far out.

“This song is also a medley because at the time I was single as hell. This is so embarrassing to say, but I was creepin’ some people on Facebook. You know when you wanna talk to someone, but you never do? This song’s partially about that feeling of never sending the message. So, this song is about those two things that have nothing to do with each other, but they worked well as a song. It’s called ‘Circle Fountain’.”

As the show went on, I felt the mushrooms peak. I knew it wasn’t real, but I feared with a psychedelic certainty I would feel every person standing behind me if I ran my fingers through my hair.

Before long the show ended, and we retreated into the green room.

“Great show, man,” I said once Justin stepped into the room.

“Guten tag, dawg,” he said, cracking the top off a Budweiser.

“I was fucked up while you guys were up there,” I said.

“So was I, dude,” he said, turning toward me with wild fear in his eyes. “I wasn’t even sure if I was playing the songs right for a while. The mushrooms had me feelin’ real anxious up there.”

You could tell at the outset, as he told the first story of the night, that he was tuned into the room at a different frequency. But Justin Osborne is a professional, and as the night carried on, he shook those psilocybin jitters, and put on another unforgettable show.

We all chewed up a bit more mushrooms, and Justin grabbed an acoustic guitar and strummed the chords to “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”, singing along with the small group standing around him.

“My aunt used to make so much fun of me when I would sing that song,” he said once he finished. “It was one of the first songs I ever learned to play and sing, and it was just bad.”

An hour or so later we left the venue, smoked The Gift Bowl and took more mushrooms before arriving at a bar that sent bass vibrations through the wall and down the street. The dance floor appeared immediately as we walked inside, and the drummer on stage carried a smooth rhythm. The piano rode his groove like a wave and the bass player at center stage leaned into the mic as he sung us a question through his raspy voice: “Lord, can you feel that it’s true?”

“That bass player,” Nick Woodley leaned in to tell me, “he’s from a classic New Orleans band. His name’s George Porter. He was in a group called the Meters.”

Woodley would later tell me, “That’s one of the things about New Orleans; everywhere you go, the musicians are top notch. Do you feel that? It’s that New Orleans funk. It hits you right in the soul, man.”

Once it came time for last call, Igoe, Justin, Van the Good and I piled once more into the van and rode through the deceptively quiet streets of New Orleans.The neighborhood we spent the night in seemed somewhat shady, so we did a full unload when we pulled up to the Airbnb.

“Should we get the groceries n’ shit?” Van asked after the last guitar case hit the floor.

“Nah,” Justin replied. “If someone breaks in over that, fuck ‘em.”

Pete was already in bed when we arrived, so the four of us sat around the living room. Justin took a seat in an absurdly large yellow chair, looking happy as can be in the thing.

“Any of you guys ever been arrested?” he asked after the conversation died down. “One time I pulled a gun on this guy and I almost got arrested for it. I got detained in the back of a cop car for a while. That’s what the ‘shotguns at my chest‘ line is about. One other time I was coming home from Cleveland and they stripped the van. That guy let me go, but I thought for sure I was going to jail that day. I’m not very cooperative with cops, though. Except with the gun, because they had guns and I had to make sure I gave them no reason to shoot me. It was my fault, though.”

---

The next morning, we packed up and headed into the French Quarter. The sun glowed brighter than any other day on tour, making it the perfect day to get stoned and walk around New Orleans. Justin took a business call once the van was parked. The lighter flicked as soon as he hung up, and the van filled with smoke. The doors flew open and a reeking grey fog billowed out as we took deep breaths of the morning heat.

“I can already hear the tubas n’ shit out here,” Justin said as we stumbled out into the streets.

We wandered a few blocks in no particular direction before stopping at a random restaurant on a random street. When we stepped inside, the stink of weed still hung fresh on us. Accordingly, the server put us in the back in a separate room.

“VIP seating,” Justin said with a glossy-eyed charm.

We met up with a friend from the night before and started to share stories about our experiences with edible weed.

“I have a buddy who’s afraid of edibles,” I began. “One time he was at a fishing tournament and he took some edibles and sat in his boat in the middle of a lake, surrounded by 30 other fishermen. He started worrying about how he would react if he caught a fish, so he reeled his lure within 2 feet of the boat and sat like that for two hours so he wouldn’t catch anything.”

“Yeah, man,” Justin laughed. “One time me and a friend ate a medical candy bar and we had no idea what we were getting into. We were in Denver and I started having a panic attack and I couldn’t breathe. I was all stuffed up already. She was out of her mind, too. She said she just kept doing math problems in her head.”

“My sister never smoked weed and she texted me one day and said she took a half a candy bar that said 100,” Igoe said, and a nervous hush fell over the table. “She had a blast. That woman has the tolerance of a linebacker. She said she was so high she was at a kiosk to buy snacks and she turned around and everything on the shelf knocked on the floor. She just looked down at it and smiled and walked away because she was so high.”

“Run away!” Justin laughed.

We payed up and walked out, into the warmth where musicians were hidden away around every corner, the echo of their instruments ricocheting off every building. We wandered elsewhere, the sounds of these silent daytime streets broken only by the fading noise of the brass bands and the cuh-clop of horse carriages.

We met up with some others from the previous night’s show before stumbling upon the “Oldest Bar in America“, which we had apparently parked next to. By mid-afternoon, the van hit the highway with New Orleans jazz turned all the way up. Igoe passed The Gift Bowl and a cigarette to me over the seat while we tore through the first part of what would be a seven-hour drive.

This felt like an important place to be; with good people who shoot the straight and narrow, the parameters of which they define for themselves. To them, that’s a life deep within music where they are good to each other, and good to the people around them.

Trucks of all sizes flew past us down the highway and we drove until the sun cast a horizon light.

“Everyone’s got a small pecker compared to God,” Justin said, not quite out of nowhere.

“God is the beginning, brother,” Van added at the heel of Justin’s observation.

“God is the beginning and the end, dude,” Justin said with a tone of ecclesiastical correction.

“Yo, there’s a hawk or a falcon or somethin’,” Van said, pointing out the window.

“Yo, I believe in those kinda signs,” Justin answered. “People really wanna think that they know what’s going on when they commit to believing in God. What you have to commit to is not knowing. Just try to feel the vibrations and ride the wave and try to make life, which I believe ends at death, as good a ride as you can.”

As he finished his thought, we pulled into the parking lot of Outback Steakhouse and piled in.

“Hi,” Justin said to the host, “we have a family of four.”

Once we hit the table, Justin and Van fell into a conversation about merchandise distribution.

“Actually, you shoulda been on these calls” Justin said referring to an email chain Van was seeing for the first time. “We thought we’d just tell you about it, but you shoulda been in on the calls.”

SUSTO is farther along than most bands at their level as they already have a system in place for sales and merchandise production. The two of them weighed the benefits of changing or keeping various attributes of merchandise distribution. They talked for another 10 or so minutes, getting Van caught up on what he missed and what their options are moving forward. The conversation changed when our food arrived, and “Jingle Bell Rock” came on over the restaurant speakers.

“Holy shit,” Justin said, staring at his phone. “I just got a text from my mom that says, ‘I just wanted you to know how much I like your new song, Homeboy. It’s catchy and I’ve been singing it to myself all day. Love you and hope you’re doing well on the road. Stay safe.’”

He put his phone down on the table and looked around at us with a look of shocked disbelief. “She has never said anything like that to me about SUSTO.”

Once we were back in the van and ready to clear out, Justin said, “I can’t believe my mom texted me, man. It almost scared me.”

We got up to the usual business when we got to the hotel that warm night in Opelika. Van the Good and I stayed up a little later than Igoe and Justin. We sat in the van with the music turned all the way up, passing a joint back and forth while we shattered the silence of the night.

We cleared out of the hotel by 11:15 the next morning, and arrived in Columbia, South Carolina by late afternoon. Justin and Jordan played a few songs for Scene SC in a large warehouse attached to the White Mule that was once a taxi garage. The warehouse held a damp chill and the show lights cast a dim ray from the open ceiling beams.

At this point I refused to accept there would soon come a day where I would go back to my real home. I found myself clinging desperately to the trip and the excitement of being on tour. I rejected the thought that my life is anything other than what it had been for the two weeks I had been there. Though it hadn’t even been that long. It only ever was 13 days.

Justin, Igoe, Van the Good and I sat around the green room at the White Mule when Pete came off the stage.

“Man, there’s some people out there,” he said of the sold-out room.

“Were they nice to ya, Pete?” Igoe asked.

“Well, no one said anything mean or unkind.”

“Does that usually happen?” she asked again.

“No, but I’m just up there a-pickin’ and a-singin’ so their attention is the least I can ask for.”

“I’ll need a couple bottles of water and a shot of tequila,” Justin said to Van before it was his time to hit the stage. “Up there, can I get a glass of water and a shot of tequila. A Budweiser or something, too. Something light. Maybe two waters.”

“How do you feel at a time like this?” I asked as Van left the room to place Justin’s order, minutes before show time.

“I feel pretty fine. I’d probably be more anxious if I wasn’t more anxious about being home. Tomorrow I’ll probably be a wreck. Now that you mention it, I’m starting to get nervous. Closer to home, the harder it is to separate my anxiety. Once I’m up there I’m fine, it’s just leading up to it I feel like this.”

He paced back and forth in room, rubbing his hands together. “It feels like a tease to get to go home for just one night.”

Van came back with Justin’s pre-show order while the rest of the order awaited him on stage. He threw back the shot before Van lead the way out of the green room. The noise of the crowd grew as we came closer to the door. The house music thumped along as we walked down the cement corridor, turned right, and entered the show room. The few people who saw Justin come in looked at him with excitement. A few people whistled when the house music fell silent.

Justin strummed a couple notes on his guitar and the chatter of the crowd fell away.

“Hey y’all. How ya doin’?” he asked before the crowd cheered, raising half empty drinks as they did.

“We’re gonna play some old songs, some new songs, and I’m gonna talk a lot, which y’all should have expected, because that’s how we advertised it.”

When I came down south, countless SUSTO songs reminded me of people I know or situations I’ve been in. As I watched these many shows, and heard these stories, I realized how much I had taken Justin’s music as if it was my own. Not that I ever thought these songs were written about my life, but I had somehow lost sight of the fact these songs were written about someone else’s real experiences. Throughout this tour Justin’s music was reclaimed from my greedy mind. It put real faces and real names to these stories. These songs, these hymns of hard times and “Hard Drugs”, these are pieces of Justin’s life.

He said to me some forgotten night before he took to the stage that telling SUSTO Stories feels like telling ghost stories. Each night, as he tells these stories, he resurrects the spirits of his past for the hour he’s on stage before the amps cool off and these memories are laid once more to rest.

“Alright, we’re gonna do something special now,” Justin said, looking over his shoulder as Van the Good stepped on stage with his own guitar. “For this next song we’re gonna bring our Tour Manager Van onto the stage. Van lives right here in Columbia, and for his hometown show he’s gonna play with us on stage.”

Van gave a nod, and together, Justin, Igoe, and Van the Good played “Wasted Mind” for the sold-out room.

They finished the show on “Homeboy”. The crowd screamed and applauded as Justin and Igoe left the stage, leaving through the same door they came in through. They stopped in the back hall and decided what songs to play for an encore while the crowd roared louder and louder. The two of them came back through the door, the room erupted, and the show carried on.

The show finished with a two song encore. 

“Is this my first life, or is it my last life? Am I ever gonna make it to Nirvana, am I ever gonna see God?” Justin sang at the outset of the last song of the night, “Cosmic Cowboy.” The whole room raised their drinks and sang along as he sang the final chorus: “Always screamin’ fuck the cops! I’m a Cosmic Cowboy.”

“I’m so glad you guys are meeting,” Justin said, pointing from me to a gentleman named John Roberts while the three of us sat around the green room after the show. “John is the official psychedelics provider for SUSTO. You two have a lot to talk about.”

Just after we shook hands and fell into a bit of small talk, a drunk young lady stumbled in. “I didn’t mean to come in here,” she said, slowly.

“Hi, yeah, you’re really not supposed to be back here,” Justin said with a light smile, sending a glance my way that said I’m not sure what’s about to happen.

“I was just trying to find the bathroom and yet here I am,” she said.

“Yep, there ya are,” Justin said with a nervous laugh as she slowly walked toward him.

“I didn’t mean to come in here, and here you are,” she said, alluding to premonition of some sort.

“We’re actually in the middle of a conversation about drugs right now,” Justin said pointing at John Roberts who, judging by the reaction that crossed his face, didn’t expect that level of honesty to come about.

The young lady was harmless and just happy to be there. She showed Justin a tattoo she had on her ankle that, if memory serves correct, said ACID GIRLS. A few minutes after her came another fan who was equally shocked to have come into the green room through the door.

“You inspire a lot of my songwriting,” he told Justin once he’d settled into the room.   

“That’s a big honor,” Justin said. “There are a lot of bands that have been a big inspiration to me, so to be that for you means a lot.”

The young man played a song he wrote called “Rusty Knife” and sang with a powerful and passionate voice for Justin, John Roberts, the ACID GIRL and I.

Van the Good came in for a minute, confused and ready to throw out the newcomers. Justin gave a brief explanation of the situation, telling him all is well. As Van left the room, he told me, “make sure everyone’s out in five minutes.”

“Sure thing,” I said, unsure of how to clear the room but thrilled to have been promoted from Roadie to Bouncer.

I leaned against the green room door frame while the two guests talked to Justin, hanging on his every word. Down the hall, a woman in her 20’s rounded the corner. She looked at me the way a drunk tiger might.

“Is Justin in there?” she asked, a hip cocked in my direction. I looked into the room at Justin and his already full hands.

“Nope,” I said with a shrug. She stared at me a moment longer before she wandered off to become someone else’s problem.

After the two people left, John Roberts and I went for a walk about the venue. We talked about some books each of us had read and he explained to me the role LSD plays in his meditative practice. 

“I would offer you some, but I don’t have any in my hotel room,” he said, looking disapointed.  

I had wondered if the chance to try LSD would come my way while I was on the run with the Acid Boys. This appeared to be my answer, and I was just fine with it. 

John Roberts helped me pack the van and I told him I looked forward to seeing him at the show the next night. Van the Good stayed in Columbia for the night while Justin, Igoe and myself smoked a joint and hit the road for Charleston.

By Matt Harrison (@MattHurrison)

December 8^th, 2018

We hammered down some drowning stretch of Alabama highway, trapped on each side by forests caught in the downpour. The rain came down lightly as we crossed the Tennessee state line. Now, an hour later, the windshield and the world around us were awash as we plowed through a hydroplaning nightmare.

The drive from Nashville to Waverly, Alabama is five hours but the rain came down harder the longer we drove, making the trip take a little more than six. Jordan Igoe drove the first shift, while Justin Osborne sat in the front passenger seat answering emails about the upcoming album and gauging the reaction on social media of the newly released single, “Homeboy”. Hungover or not, the business aspect of the musician’s life is never ending.

The driving seemed endless and nobody had all that much to say. Van the Good sat in the middle row, picking the music. I asked for one song and watched the semis fall behind us and out of sight while “Mississippi Kid” by Lynyrd Skynyrd played.

It was out of nowhere from behind these torrential curtains that The Standard Deluxe appeared as a haven hidden within the darkness of the forest. We did a quick unload and ran inside the building where the show would later be.

The building was cozy and warm. It felt like walking into an old church house. The rectangular building was over a hundred years old and had been a house before having a stage and seats installed. The first few rows on the floor level were old church pews, and the back wall behind the raising seats was painted with a setting sun. Every step echoed inside this little place as the four of us wandered around, drinking it in.

The clasps of guitar cases flicked and rattled while Justin, Igoe, and Van the Good set up for the show. Even the silence between words rode the acoustics, echoing a sweet, indefinable nothing.

“It’s gonna feel so good in here tonight,” Justin said. He surveyed the room from the stage, his words half buried by the hollow drone of his guitar being tuned.

After a minute or two of setting up, Justin and Igoe sang “Weather Balloons” for mic check. I sat in the second pew and listened as their voices danced through the empty building. Van was tasked with working the soundboard and he tinkered with it until the balance of everything came to a point of audible comfort.

“Man,” Justin said after soundcheck, “this place reminds me a lot of where I grew up.”

We ran through the rain, across the yard to the house where we’d spend the night just as Pete arrived and began his own setup.

The four of us were overwhelmed by the beauty of the main room in the guest house. The interior of the living room was covered with posters from the bands who had come through over the years. Once Pete had set up, he came in the house to have a look around with us.

We all grabbed a bite to eat from the buffet set up on the porch, which was stocked with pulled pork, homemade pecan pie, and homemade stew. The $10 charge was waived for each of us, but Justin dropped $20 in as he went by the admissions bowl.

“That’s the thing about a place like this,” he said as we walked back inside, away from the noise of the rain, “you’ve gotta support it to keep it goin’.”

We spent the next hour or so sitting around the house, relaxing and drinking in the atmosphere while Justin and Igoe took long sips of tequila and whiskey.

“Look what I’ve got here, Mr. Van,” Justin said from the kitchen table. He raised a freshly rolled joint in the air. “I’m gonna start callin’ you Mr.Van.”

“The Vanimal,” Pete said as he looked over the many posters, his setlist in hand.

“Are we gonna smoke on the porch or in the van?” Justin asked.

“What in Vannation,” Pete hollered from across the room.

“What in Van Halen?” Justin added at last. “Do you wanna smoke in the Van Halen or on the porch?”

“Let’s smoke on the porch,” Van said. “Have a good set, Pete. We’ll come check it out.”

Pete stepped out the front while Justin, Igoe, Van the Good and I stepped onto the back porch. We gathered under the overhanging roof and did our best to coax a cat into coming toward us. The rain carried on mercilessly, and the cat stayed hidden away beyond our reach.

Once the joint had been smoked, and we gave up on petting the cat, we went back inside. No one said much once we were back in the warmth of the house. The room, the building, were caught in silence except for the soft squeak of a sharpie writing out the setlist and the continual drumming of the rain.

We had been inside 10 minutes when someone came around with a joint to offer as a token of appreciation for Justin and Igoe. Although we had just finished smoking, in the name of true Southern hospitality Justin said, “we’d all love some.”

Back out the door we went, into the rain and into oblivion. I looked over at Justin once we came back in the second time.

“I’m pretty fucked up right now,” I said with glossy eyes and a worried tone.

“Me too, man,” he said with a shrug that said what can ya do?

One at a time we stumbled across the yard to the old house where Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster was a few songs into his set. Once I found a seat and began watching Pete perform, I took deep breaths and reminded myself not to freak out. I felt every note and word break the membrane of my mind while I watched him sing his heart out.

“When I die, do not mention grace,” Pete sang, eyes closed and head back, “don’t speak of a sweet bye-and-bye. We live alone in a quiet place; the dirt, the bells and I.”

Van the Good was sitting a few rows ahead of me. I saw Justin come in and duck over to where Van was. There were no chairs available, so he sat on the wide step next to Van, joined soon after by Jordan.

The owner of the venue, Scott, saw what was going on and went over to tell the duo to find proper chairs. Van responded by taking a seat next to the two of them on the step. Scott came back with two extra chairs and pointed an authoritative finger at the seats. His intentions were clear, the line in the sand had been drawn.

Justin stood partially for a moment before he shook his head and sat back down on the step, behind the seats that had been brought over. Scott took the move with a laugh and a shake of his head. The music, the rain, and the good vibes carried on in Waverly.

Before long, Justin and Igoe took to the stage to rock this rain beaten little house.

“I’m not gonna tell y’all the name of this next one. You’ll know it right away, anyway,” Justin said with a smile toward the end of their set.

“Feel free to sing along” Igoe added before the two of them began singing “I’ll Fly Away”.

The crowd sung along through every chorus. “I’ll fly away, oh Glory, I’ll fly away,” the room sang. Southern ancestry came alive in the room as they sang together. Those beautiful three minutes I was lucky enough to witness felt like a religious experience, greater than the words they sung, alive in the unity of music. The connection of these many strangers as their single voice drowned out the downpour.

Once the show ended, and Justin had met all the fans who wanted a picture or an autograph, we ran across the yard to hide in the big house. The rain carried on pouring, harder now than it had been thus far.

Justin, Jordan, Van the Good and I slipped outside, under the shelter of a large porch to smoke a joint and help Jordan carry her bags from the van.

“Just a guten tag,” Justin sang to the tune of Waylon Jennings’ “Just a Good Ol’ Boy”. “Never meanin’ no harm. Just-a-rootin’and a-tootin’ and-a-taggen and-a-guten since the day he was born.”

“I love that song,” I interjected. “It was played it at my grandfathers funeral. Not the Guten Tag version, though.”

“Really?” he said with surprise as he took a hit of the joint. “You Canadians are so Country-Western.”

The night in Waverly ended with the group of us watching a video of Pete performing some months ago. The Blu-ray was a gift from a friend of Justin’s who filmed the show. “We’ll keep the Canadian downstairs,” Justin said as we decided the sleeping arrangements for the night.

---

The building awoke the next morning one piece at a time. When my eyes opened, Pete was playing a bluesy run on his guitar while he sang softly to himself. Footsteps carried down the stairs and echoed through the mighty house.

Before we left the Standard Deluxe that morning, Justin bought his first article of baby clothing from the gift store. We smoked a joint and crossed the street to eat from a gourmet buffet complete with grits, collard greens, fried chicken, sausage patties, bacon, and fresh salad. We took our time with breakfast before we piled into the van and drove on through the sprinkling rain. Houses and forests soared by on each side of us as we made our way toward Mobile, Alabama.

“Stay healthy,” Igoe said, handing me vitamins over the seat.

As we drove deeper into Alabama, the rain picked up again, sending the wipers rolling as quick as they could manage. A half empty case of Budweiser jingled at my feet while the album 21, a Million by Bon Iver played. Van the Good was behind the wheel and full stereo control went along with the chore of driving.

It was three and a half hours until we hit the dry streets of Mobile. The rain stopped an hour before we got there, though the clouds still hung low and grey. We loaded into the hotel and came right back out to the van, giving Pete a wave as he pulled up next to us.

“There’s not enough weed for a joint,” Igoe said. She pulled out the one-hitter.

“We’ll have to get some tonight,” Justin said before flicking the lighter once his turn came around. “I wonder,” he said, passing the one-hitter back. “If we posted on Instagram that we need weed, do you think Jah would provide for us?”

“Let’s put it out there and see what happens,” Van said.

“Alright, everyone get in on this pic,” Justin said, pulling his phone out. “Put on your best we’re real bummed to be out of weed face.”

We drove over to Callaghan’s Irish Social Club, the venue for the night’s show, where the green room was decorated with setlists and posters of bands from years past. The walls throughout the bar are filled with band posters, some signed, all framed. One is of Robert Plant, two are of SUSTO. In the center of the green room is a poker table with a few chairs set up around it. Pete sat at the far end of the poker table, working out his setlist for the night in a rectangular metal book made for writing baseball lineups.

“Do you wanna get audio levels?” the owner, JT, asked as he leaned in the green room door.

“Should we go check or should we just do it before we go up?” Justin thought aloud. “Hmm,” he said, deep in thought, “I’m too stoned so I don’t know what to do.”

“We’ll go check it out,” Igoe and Van said at the same time.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Justin agreed through a laugh, as if that’s what he meant to say. “You seen my liquor?” he asked me as he walked by.

“Can’t say I have,” I answered, looking around.

Once the three of them left, it was just Pete and I in the green room, and we got to talking.

“I’ve been writing songs and playing them since I was 14, 15. So about 20 years,” he explained to me at some point. “It was just the thing that felt right, or was just my instinct, I guess. To have a guitar and try to make sense of things with songs. It’s been that way as long as I can remember.”

He thought for a minute before adding, “it’s more of a compulsion than anything.”

“And you use that compulsive behavior to your advantage?”

“Well,” he said with a laugh, tilting his head as he thought, “there have been many, many times where I felt that it’s not to my advantage. I’m glad and grateful that I am where I am and get to do what I get to do. But it certainly is not always to one’s advantage to choose to do this kinda thing for a living. I mean, I spent most of my 20’s working shit jobs and doing things like touring whenever I could take enough time off to do it. Then I decided to try pursuing music no matter what, however hard it is. I would not ever want to go back to those pointless jobs. I learned that however hard it is, this is what I wanna do. Nothing else is worth it. In terms of the short amount of time human beings are allowed on this earth, I’d rather do this, no matter what.”

“That’s beautiful, man,” I said after a moment.

“That’s one word for it,” he laughed. “It’s just like anything else. If it’s something that you work at there are days where it can be great and days where it’s not so great. And you have to take the not so great along with the great. If you had told me 6 or 7 years ago, when I quit everything to do this, that I’d actually get to do this for a living, I’d have said, you’re fuckin’ crazy, man. There’s no way it’ll ever happen. To me, getting to do this every day is all gravy.

“Whenever it becomes hard or not fun is when most people who aren’t serious about it decide they don’t really wanna do it anymore. I’m sure there are a lot of people who’d love to be in a band or would love to be on tour. But when the realities, the parts of it that are not fun come around, a lot of people are just not interested in having that part of the deal.”

“You’ve got to take it all,” I said.

“You’ve just got to,” he said with a shrug.

Pete carried a beat with his pen on the baseball lineup sheets while he wrote up his setlist. The chatter of people outside, waiting for the show, grew steadily. Justin and Jordan came back in just as Pete stood up to go perform.

“What’s his name again?” a friend of Justin’s who met us at the venue asked after Pete left the room.

“JPKS: Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster” Justin said.

“Justin Kinkel…”

“Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster,” Justin interrupted. “Say it three times daily. Anytime you pass a church, say it and make the cross on your chest. Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster,” he said, faster every time. He drew a cross on his chest with his right hand as he said it the last time.

“Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster,” the friend answered, slowly.

“The gospel of the Constant Stranger,” Justin answered, nodding.

Through the walls, we could hear Pete singing “Brake Dust”. The volume grew, then faded as the waitress brought in four shots; two tequila, two whiskey. Pete’s voice grew then faded again as she walked back out.

“Well, we’re stacked up, dawg,” Justin said, looking at Igoe.

“Fuckin’ stacked, man,” she replied.

They laughed and eyeballed the two shots sitting in front of each of them. Pete’s gentle finger style picking echoed through Callaghan’s as Igoe’s laugh ran loose through the green room.

“Guten tag,” they each said, clinking glasses. Their faces each grew sour, twisted at the rotten taste of their shots. They’d each gone through a good bit of their personal bottles to this point and would carry on drinking through the rest of the night.

“I wish we could do another full band tour through here,” Justin said, looking around the green room. “I just love this place. I’m glad that we’ve outgrown it, but I love it still.”

Just then, there was a gentle knock at the door and a bearded man walked into the room.

“I got y’all covered,” the bearded man said. He tossed Justin a baggie full of weed. “I heard SUSTO was out of weed and I had some in the car. I got the third to last ticket on my way in.”

“You did?” Justin asked. “Well, we were gonna put you on the list either way.”

“Nooo shiiit,” Igoe said from her chair, swiveling back and forth.

“C’mere my man,” Justin said, bringing the guy in for a hug.

The weed came our way after someone in Birmingham saw on Instagram that the group needed weed. He sent a message to his buddy, who gave the weed to the guy who was in the room with us. The person who supplied this guy with weed was also at the show, meeting Justin afterward in the green room.

Once the bringer of weed left, and the room fell quiet again, Justin looked over at Jordan.

“We still gotta blast one of these,” he said, pointing at the shot that remained in front of each of them.

It wasn’t long after those two shots that Pete’s time on stage ended, and Justin and Jordan’s time began.

“This next story’s gonna be a bit longer, so before I begin, I’m gonna take a little swig of tequila,” Justin said from the stage after a few songs.

A few ceiling fans rotated gently overheard, too slow to feel but just enough to hold the room at a comfortable temperature. These Alabama crowds drank their fill and sang along a little louder than people in other places. I stood in the back corner by the bar with the two folks who helped contribute to us getting good and stoned over the next few days while a painter stood in the other corner, painting Justin and Igoe.

“I was in this rocky relationship for three years or so. And uh, it was kind of on the way out and I found this place to live in an upstairs suite. The bottom was a different unit and she says, ‘it turns out the place right below you is available for rent.’ I was like oh, sweet. So, she moved in there and we broke up like, two months into a year long lease. We were tryna be friends and this was before I realized that’s a myth. A few months passed and Valentines Day rolled around. I wanted to do something that showed her I still care, and you’re my friend and whatever.”

“I bought her a Valentine’s Day card and inside it I wrote, ‘Friends or lovers, ex-lovers or whatever, I hope you know I’ll always care’. And I was like, okay, that’s a pretty clever Valentine’s Day card, but does she deserve it? I showed it to my buddy Nick Woodley and asked if he thought I should give it to her, or if it seemed pathetic.”

“He looked at it, he looked at me, he looked at it and then back at me and said, ‘brother, I don’t give two shits whether or not you give her this card, but if we don’t write this into a song right now, we’re gonna regret it for the rest of our lives.’”

“I said ‘I’ve gotta be at work in 45 minutes’ and he said ‘that’s plenty of time.’ So, I was late for work and we wrote this song”

Regardless of how much either Igoe or Justin had drank or smoked, the shows went on without a hitch. His voice still carried strong and she still harmonized in beautiful patterns with him. The two of them put on a show you felt in your heart through one song, and they’d have you laughing through the next. They put on a show that would rattle around your mind for days to come, weeks even.

“JPKS’ Constant Stranger changed my life,” Justin said toward the end of the set. “Go buy his stuff and if you have any money left you can check out our shit.” 

After the show, Justin and Igoe hung out in the green room and rolled around on computer chairs.

“We did a good job gettin’ drunk before the show,” Justin said. Igoe was spinning in her chair.

Van the Good and I loaded up the van while a few lingering fans threw back shots with Justin and Igoe. The fans glowed with excitement as they talked to Justin, laughing hard and loud at his jokes. Soon enough the van was packed, the party ended, and the crew carried on.

For the fans, tonight’s show might be a highlight of their week, their month. For this four-person crew, barreling across the country, it’s just another stop. Come tomorrow, we’ll be gone for New Orleans by midday, leaving nothing but a plume of dust and a shred of memories in our wake.

Van the Good drove us back to the hotel where we dropped off our bags and came right back out to the van at the stroke of midnight. We stumbled across the parking singing various songs: “Just a Guten Tag”, “The Boot Scoot Boogie”, “The Gut Tag Boogie”.

“Just chillin’ with your shithead friends, huh?” Justin said to me once we got back to the van.

“I feel like I’m home,” I admitted.

“Man, as if we met because of the Lumineers,” Justin said, referring to the first show I saw SUSTO perform, opening for the Lumineers two years prior. “Deeeead sea,” he sang, his face twisted with the words, “I told you I was like the deeeead sea. Man, you’ve gotta be in one of those arenas and hear them. Those boys mean that shit. They’re a couple of New Jersey Irish who didn’t make it in the city and got burned out by it. It’s very authentic. Nothing about it is fake or cookie cutter.”

He took a long drag of the joint before continuing.

“I’m ultimately on a mission to connect with as many people as possible. If I ever get to connect with 9000 of them at once in an arena? Goddamn,” he said, shaking his head at the thought.

“I’m just picky because a lot of people have worked and worked and worked and haven’t gotten anywhere,” Igoe said from the front passenger seat.

“That’s the name of the game though,” Justin replied. “The sad reality is there are a lot of people who work a long time. Even us, we could work a long time, but we’ll never be like Bruno Mars. I love this scene, though. Grassroots music is where my soul is.”

He passed me the joint and continued.

“I think if the world goes to shit, pop stars lose their job, but we don’t. If someone has a guitar, we’ll play it, and someone will feed us and put us up and we’re used to living like that.”

The joint continued its rotation while he talked.

“That’s rock and roll. Rock and roll needs to be about feeling the moment and letting loose, and gettin’ primal. Rock and roll is about lighters in the air and seeing the spit comin’ out of someone’s mouth as they sing.”

“It’s just so vicious,” Igoe said softly. She looked out the windshield into the night. “The music industry is so vicious.”

“It’s cutthroat. But it bothers me when people get angry at big bands, big rock groups, calling them sellouts and stuff like that just because they’re successful now and they’re working with Rick Rubin. It’s like, yeah, of course they are. They’re more famous now and that’s a part of it. It’s bullshit when people call that selling out.”

The lighter sparked, the tone changed, and the re-lit joint came around again.

“Man,” Justin said, turning to me, “you’re part of the fuckin’ SUSTO family. I don’t know how you got into it. I don’t know how you weaseled your way in, but you’re in it.”

“I’m a Harrison, man,” I said, laughing. “You don’t even really notice we’re there and then we grow on you.”

“I believe that. Because I didn’t know you and now you’re hanging out with me and my friends on the road. You got me, somehow. Good on you, dawg. Welcome to the family.”

“Glad to be here,” I said, and we bumped knuckles.

And I was glad. I came aboard a stranger and now I was just another buddy out on the road. These people were strangers to me only four days before this, and myself less known to them. I felt like I had come home to an extension of myself living in the hearts of these vagabond adventurers, these pushers of the all mighty envelope, running from one stage to the next in the name of music.

“Do we have another joint or did we smoke ‘em all?” Justin asked the moonlight.

“We smoked ‘em all,” Van the Good replied.

“Well, maybe we’ll lock up and call it a night,” Justin said.