Far From Finished Web Exclusive interview

(by Jay Hale)

Six pages was not enough to contain Far From Finished's hilarity. Here is a transcript from the harrowing quest by vocalist Steve Neary and drummer Marc Cannata to track down a touring van Steve bought over eBay. It's somewhat less funny now that the band almost died in a horrible van rollover last month but ... just read it anyway ....

Jay: So tell me about this trolley you bought off of eBay. Will this be your new touring machine or what?

Steve: I just got a response back from that guy. Oh my gosh, that was a fucking nightmare. Ebay. Oh shit. The struggle with this band is to find a fucking van.

Paul [Christian, Far From Finished second guitarist]: Its our unicorn; our albatross.

Steve: We’re like let’s try to go with something that’s not so conventional and turn it into a touring vehicle. We were looking at buses and all that kind of shit. I find this 74 trolley; it’s not a trolley although it looks exactly like one. Its made by Winnebago, its half green and half red and its 25 feet long and its 1973. I bid on it when it first came out with like 7 days left. Six days go by and I’m still the top bidder. I sat down with the guys and said, “Should I go for this? Where’s it located? It’s in Iowa? Where’s Iowa? We had to get out a map and look it up. We sat there with stop watches to get it right to the minute because eBay is not in real time. We end up winning the thing and I made Marc promise that if I won he was gonna come out to Iowa with me and pick it up. As soon as we won it, we start celebrating and bought Greyhound tickets out to Iowa. A thirty-hour bus ride. Insanity. We had to get from Davenport to Dubuque which is like a 70-mile ride. We were gonna hitchhike but Rob told us to send out an email on myspace and see if we had any fans out that way who could hook us up with a ride. A girl emails back and says “I’m gonna be in the area, I’m gonna be traveling around and I’ll be able to pick you guys up. We get all the way out there and we start calling her an hour outside and get no answer. The wheels start turning and we’re like, “We got fucked. There’s no girl out here at all.” A bunch of phone calls later …

Marc: Basically, she couldn’t come out. There was a snowstorm in Davenport and she was coming from Colorado. We get into Davenport and we’re waiting in the bus station for about an hour and the snow is coming down really bad. What the fuck are we going to do now; we’re stuck in Davenport Iowa. We finally get the girl on the phone and she’s not coming but she’s sending a car. Long story short a fucking stretch white limousine pulls up. Steve and I haven’t bathed in days, we’ve got a cooler full of pork and beans and peanut butter and jelly, soaking wet and we get into the back of the limo. We’re wearing fucking long johns and we’re trying to charge our cell phones in jacks that don’t work.

Steve: We had a power converter and we ran it all the way through the little window in the front and plugged our phones in.

Marc: We’re calling everybody we know saying guess what we’re doing right now? We’re in the back of a limo in fucking Iowa. We never met this girl, we had no idea who she was but she spent all this fucking money to send us a limo and we’re eating fucking pork and beans in the back wearing fucking long johns.

Steve: Fucking shoes off feet on the vents. Airing them out and drying them up.

Marc: All that was missing was the Cristal.

Steve: They had no booze, we checked. We got out there and when we first saw it we were like, that’s it! That’s what was in the picture. It looked like what was in the picture from about half a mile away but it ended up not being what we wanted and it was hard because we felt we couldn’t go home empty handed. I was going insane, Marc was real pissed and we ended up spending more money staying in a cheap hotel to think it over. We ended up calling everyone and asking what the fuck should we do right now? We ended up going back home.

Marc: It sucked because when we got there the thing was infested with fucking spiders and bugs and half the wiring didn’t work, the thing ran like shit.

Steve: In order to drive back I had to pay him all up front so I could get the title sent back to me so I could get insurance and register it and get plates. I had everything. He ended up giving me everything back except my deposit. That was $300. It was a nightmare and a learning experience. You live and you learn.

Marc: We took a combination of buses and trains back home.

Steve: I got shitfaced on Amtrak in Chicago. I hung out with this crazy hippie guy from Mexico. He was showing me all his weed and I was just drinking Jack Daniels and beer. I love fucking Amtrak. I woke up the next morning with a hangover. How cool is that? And another thing, we had sleeping pills so we could go to sleep. We were taking Benadryl because the ride sucked. A little baby threw up on me. It was a fucking nightmare.

Marc: What about in Ohio when that lady was fucking yelling at us because we were taking up too much space?

Steve: You know the very back of the bus how there’s three seats? We were just two people sitting there with our bags and our cooler and she comes in with like 9 babies. We were just like pretending to be asleep. She was like, “If these guys would get up …” We didn’t even move. We were trying so hard not to flinch.

Marc: At the end of the bus ride she was collecting all her kids and she’s got some kid stashed under the seat.

Steve: I had to carry the kid out. I had a sleeping bag and a kid on me. The kid kept falling out and hitting its head on the seats clunk clunk clunk.

Marc: The kid was under the fucking seat. It had dirt on its face and it wouldn’t wake up. I thought the fucking thing was dead.

Steve: I literally picked the thing up by its arm and said, “C’mon!”

Marc: we get to the bus station and she ditches us with the fucking kid and Steve’s following her around with this fucking baby.

Steve: I was yelling, “Do you want your fucking kid? What are you doing? Come back.”