Together Pangea are simply one of the hardest working bands around.
The garage punk outfit live for the road, filling up their van and setting out on lung-bursting tour after lung-bursting tour.
Returning to the UK later this month, Together Pangea are set to bring a few surprises with them, with new album 'Bulls And Roosters' becoming their most successful to date.
Here, bass player Danny Bengston looks back on almost 10 years of thrills and spills on the road for Good Trip, Bad Trip…
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Best Trip…
Our first trip to Mexico City was really rad. Mexico City has to be one of our favorite places to travel to. We drank this stuff called 'Pulque' that people kept telling us was fermented human shit but it totally isn't. It was great, kinda like alcoholic horchata.
We went to the Soumaya museum and took a bus south to play a show in Cholula, Puebla that was beautiful and had a pyramid and underground walkways.
Worst Trip…
We were playing some shows in the mountains in British Columbia, Canada and a spark plug blew a literal hole in the engine of our van and we had to rent a U-Hual that our tour manager drove all of our equipment back to Los Angeles in and we flew home.
We had that tour van for years, it was like a second home. We were all super bummed out. We still need to get matching tattoos with the final odometer reading.
Our favourite foreign venue…
Vera in Groningen, the Netherlands. It's just one of the best venues in the world, they treat you like royalty and there's even a comfortable little band apartment upstairs.
It's community run by volunteers and they all really care which makes a difference. They have a wall of fame there which we somehow made it onto after our first show we played there.
We’re surprisingly popular in…
Los Angeles.
Best or worst exotic foodstuff…
I ate a taco de ojo (eyeball) in Mexico City once. It wasn't bad but I don’t know if I'd do it again. We also ate horse in the Netherlands once which was pretty game.
Most interesting individual you've met on the road…
The first time we went to Europe our tour manager Dick couldn’t make the first week in the UK so he sent a friend of his named Kelly. Kelly was tuff as fuck. He did not have a smart phone or GPS, instead he had a tiny pocket sized map-book of the UK which he frantically flipped through when he needed to find out which way to go. That coupled with his serious road rage made for some white knuckle drives.
Worst on-tour injury, or infection, or accident…
One time 10 years ago, we did an acoustic set in Phoenix, Arizona, it was just William and I and we didn’t have a place to crash after the show was done so our friend Dan who wasn’t drinking offered to just start driving back home to LA.
Sometime around five or six in the morning during the dawn we got woken up in the middle of the air. Dan had started to fall asleep at the wheel and William woke him up but it startled him so he over compensated and flipped the van off the 10 freeway into the desert.
The van flipped three or four times and the people who stopped to check on the wreck were all certain they were going to find dead bodies. No one in the back had a seatbelt on but somehow we all made it out. I still have a scar on my head from that crash and Williams' acoustic guitar we used for that show still has holes in the back of it from when it got launched from the van into the desert.
My essential travel item…
Hot sauce, especially in Europe. Y’alls hot sauce game is tragically weak.
My essential travel tip…
Eat the local favorites! Try everything you can and stay away from the typical fast foods you can eat back at home. If you're gonna travel, travel.
I still haven’t gotten used to salt beef but maybe this time around I will, gimme black pudding all day though.
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Catch Together Pangea at the following shows:
November
7 Newcastle Think Tank
8 Glasgow Stereo
9 Manchester Gullivers
10 Leeds Headrow House
11 Birmingham Sunflower Lounge
13 Brighton Hope & Ruin
14 London Thousand Island
For tickets to the latest Together Pangea shows click HERE.
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