The following is taken from
Greg Jacobs' excellent book Hell On Wheels: A Tour Stories Compilation. It's got tour stories from
a zillion different (mostly punk) bands, from All to X, with stops in the middle for Mary's Danish, Butthole Surfers,
Dwarves, Superchunk and L7.
I broke it up into paragraphs, as the original in the book is just one big stream of text, which is hard enough to read in the book, but would be harder onscreen. Parenthetical comments are direct from the text.
Pierre Kezdy was interviewed by Greg Jacobs at the Casbah in San Diego, CA.
Pierre: This is when John (Haggerty) had just quit Naked Raygun, so we had a new guitar player, Bill Stevens [sic]. Our regular roadie couldn't make it, so I got this marine friend of mine to do it. He's a total marine! We had to do some special gig in New York. The roadie and Bill drove out with the van. We all, the rest of us (in the band) flew out. (After the show) everybody else except me the roadie and Bill Stevens drove back. We figured, "Ah fuck you know, New York to Chicago, 17 hours, we'll just go right through."
So we get out of New York, it's about 5:00, and the roadie says, "I gotta get something to eat, I'm fuckin' hungry." I go no, let's just keep driving. And he has to stop at a gas station in "podunk" Pennsylvania. And this place was ancient, it was from the 1930s. He looks through the dusty old menu and he sees stromboli on there. He has to have a stromboli. So he orders his fuckin' stromboli. It literally took two-and-a-half hours to make this stromboli. We just sat in this fuckin' gas station and they kept saying: "Oh, it's coming, it's coming." Two-and-a-half hours at this gas station for this stromboli. So finally we got back on the road, we kept driving and we got tired, so we pull over at a hotel.
The next morning we get out, get right on the Ohio State Turnpike and I'm driving the van. All of a sudden just hear this explosion, and smoke starts pouring through the dash. White smoke starts pouring through the dash, and I thought, "White smoke... it must be a radiator host." So I pull over to the side of the road. We pile out of the van. And the smoke is starting to come out the front now. We were thinking, "Shit, a little radiator host?" And then we though "Oh jeez, I hope it's not on fire!" All three of us looked down below the fan and as soon as we looked down flames shoot out from underneath the van. All theses semis pull over; they've got their fire extinguishers out, they couldn't put it out. We start hauling our gear out, throwing it down the dith, so we had drums rolling down the ditch, amps rolling down the ditch. We were trying to get everything out.
Now the smoke is turning black, the flames are up in front. We were all trying to pull all of our personal shit out of there but the smoke got too bad, and the big amps were still in there. I said "Fuck it, just it burn." The marine guy says "Oh no, we've gotta go in and get it." He fuckin' goes in there. So I figured if he's going in there, I'm going in there too. Luckily the wind direction changed towards the front of the van. We got the amps out. When the two amps were out, flames started shooting out the back. The guitar player says, "I left my leather jacket in there." What does the marine do? He says, "I'll go get it." Fucking flames were shooting out of the van, he jumps in there, grabs the leather jacket and comes out totally unscathed. By then, the fire department showed up and they just let the thing burn. The fuel line was feeding the fire. It burned to a crisp.
Then I called Jeff (Pezzati the singer), he had already gotten back and he was at work. He had all the insurance papers and stuff. I said, "Jeff guess what?" He said "what?" I said "The van burned!" And he goes, "just get it fixed and drive back, you know, put it on your credit card or something." And I said, "No you don't understand, the van is toast!" He goes, "Well stay overnight somewhere and get it fixed and come back." I said "You don't understand; the van is fucking gone!" There was literally nothing. All the tires burned, everything burned. It was just a metal hull sitting on the highway. It took Jeff 5 minutes to realize that the van was gone. Plus, we had 1,000 T-shirts that were not insured, so we lost about $5,000 in shirts. That was pretty hairy!
Greg: How did you guys get home?
Pierre: It was weird, they had the whole tollway closed off, traffic was piled up for miles. It was about an hour before the van burned down. The State Troopers drove me to the Toledo airport and arranged for me to get a van somewhere. We got a van, and some other guy with a pickup truck in the meanwhile had taken our gear off the highway for us. We gave him $25 or $50, whatever. Yeah, so it turned out alright except for losing those shirts. It was pretty fuckin' hairy though!