Episode 14: Frank Hurricane

Frank Hurricane: She takes us out into the desert and there's all these bald eagles flying around and I jumped in the lake and there was all these people with AK-47s just blasting them into the air and there was like NASA moon buggies and it was fucking wild.

Josh Caldwell: Welcome to Atypical Daydream, a podcast about life on the road. I'm Josh, your host, and thanks for stopping by. My guest today is Frank Hurricane. He's a musician, songwriter, and a storyteller. Frank's stories are straight out of rock and roll lore, and take us on tour to witness a life few can imagine.

Frank Hurricane: Yeah, I was on a tour. It was one of the first long, long tours that I ever went on. It was a little over two months, like a 65 day tour. It was me and my friend Invisible Dave, his music is called Invisible Circle. I was playing as Hurricanes of Love, now I go by Frank Hurricane. We recorded a split record during those months, had that vinyl pressed, and then went on tour with this split. So we were together nonstop already for three months before the tour even started. He's one of my best, best, best friends. So it just made sense. And so it was me and Dave, two large bearded homies rolling in this mystical 2001 dark blue Volkswagen Bug cruising down the road.

We started out the tour in Boston. Then we played in New York and played a bunch of shows going down the East Coast. They were, for the most part, really good shows. And then we got to Florida where shit started to go crazy. That's where it started to get real wild. When we got to Jacksonville, the show was in the suburbs in what you would imagine like a rich grandma's kind of house, huge mansions and a nice place, but it was all these crusty homies. This guy, he was like a computer programmer or something, renting this suburban house and just letting all these crusties live up in there. Tons of people living in this crazy house on this paved over swamp suburban paradise. And the house was trashed.

There was this psychedelic dude living there in the living room. He had this huge protrusion coming out of his forehead. His third eye looked like it was about six to seven inches coming out of his head. He was chugged out of his mind, an extreme alcoholic. Everybody in there was addicted to spice, the fake weed stuff, the K2. It wasn't recognized yet how messed up it was but people were getting crazy addicted to it. Just herbs with bad chemicals sprayed on them that everybody would puff. And this house was just trashed and covered in spice. Dune style. The spice was everywhere. There was a gravity bong in the sink.

Frank Hurricane: And the show was horrific. Like 12 bands played or something. Some of the acts were really good and some of them were existential make you wanna quit playing music bad. There was this guy and he played a Natalie Imbroglia cover on his guitar, that song Torn, and he had an iPod backing band playing along with it. And when I saw that, I almost quit playing guitar at that moment. I said, I'm not playing guitar tonight. So I did a hip hop set instead.

So then we partied all night. Homies are doing spice. We went to sleep and the AC was just blasting. Woke up in the morning and it was freezing cold in there. And this dude comes out and it's 50 degrees in there and he's pouring sweat. He's going, it's so hot in here, it's so hot in here. Losing his mind. And my boy Invisible Dave said, dude, it is cold in here, what is wrong with you? And the guy said, I need the spice. And he was scraping the counter trying to find little remnants of spice.

Then we had some good shows, a nice little run, and then we ended up in Lubbock, Texas. It smells horrific. Just cows everywhere. The whole town smells like cows. Back in the day there was doDIY.org, a website you could look up places, people's houses, they'd book shows for you. I'd met this girl on there and she said, yes, I can hook you up in Lubbock, Texas. A hundred bucks at a show was like life changing at the time. But it turns out she's in high school. It's all high schoolers at the psychedelic art gallery and they're all doing yeti powder. They are wilding out.

There was a prog band of high schoolers that was completely insane. And then there was a 311 Sublime tribute band of all these high schoolers who were all on crazy drugs. It was called Stay Same. And they had this pit bull and the pit bull would jump up and hit you in the face. All the band members had black eyes from this pit bull slamming them in the face.

I went down to the gas station and they were like, don't walk down there, it's going to be real sketchy. I said okay and went anyway. There was a dude inside with a 40 in each hand spinning around like a windmill trying to knock people over with the 40s. Inside the gas station. I was like, man, Lubbock is off the chain. The girl told us there's a special STD in Lubbock called the Raider Rash. Like a special STD you can only get in Lubbock. This place was just nuts.

Then we did a big West Coast tour, which was pretty fun. But then we got to Vancouver. We were crossing the border and my boy Invisible Dave was really worried about it. He'd done it before and heard legends and horror stories. At that time it was really hard. You had to have all this paperwork. You had to lie about all this stuff. They'd search your car really crazy sometimes. So he was really paranoid.

We pulled over to a gas station and spent hours vacuuming everything in the car and making sure all the stuff was out. But there was this joint roach that he knew was in the car. We'd been puffing a joint and I threw it out the window and he saw it come back in the back window, like the out and in style. He knew it was in the car and he couldn't find it. I was like, dude, it probably just flew out on its own. And he was like, I know it's in the car.

Before we even get to the border, US people stop us and say, hey guys, what are you doing? And we were like, we're playing a show. Here's our paperwork. They were like, what kind of music do you guys play? My dumb ass said, psychedelic folk. And they said, get out of the car.

Frank Hurricane: So they put us in this little steel room. A little bunker like something out of Saving Private Ryan. The windows are big. There's no bathroom. My boy Dave had to pee really bad and he's losing his mind. We sit in there watching them remove everything from the car. They rip the panels off the doors. They opened up parts of that car I didn't know existed. They're searching every bag, everywhere. Then they come into the shack, unlock it, and say, we found the roach, we found the roach. We were like, where was it? In the back of the guitar amp. The roach had flown out the window, back in, and landed in the back of his amp that he was using for a keyboard.

We're like, we're fucked. And they were like, don't worry about it. Then they said, where are the shrooms? Where are the shrooms? Screaming at us. And I'm like, we don't have any shrooms. And then they said, we found the rolling papers. He used rolling papers to clean the reeds of his oboe. The gumless rolling papers. He was like, we use those to clean out the oboe. And they were like, we found the roach, we found the roach. And then they said, have a great day guys. And just let us go.

Josh Caldwell: Hey, Josh here. I love making this podcast and I'd love to make it my full-time gig. Besides telling the stories, I'm basically a one-man band and that takes time. If you're enjoying the podcast, please consider becoming a patron. You'll have access to loads of great bonus stories and you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that you're supporting a truly independent podcast. Find the Patreon link in the show notes. And thanks.

Frank Hurricane: It was a mellow show in Vancouver. Like some hinted poets put it on. Pretty grim scene but fun to be in Vancouver. Some of that Canadian pizza is really bad. We had one of the worst slices I've ever had in my whole life, which was hilarious. And then we rolled back out and went to Olympia where we played this amazing house show. It was awesome.

Me and Invisible Dave had been doing great but for some reason in Olympia we just got into a fight. Wilding out on each other. I guess the stress of all the crazy. At this point we'd probably played 40 or 45 shows. I apologized. I kind of wilded out on him. But there were tense vibes. So we're cruising down the interstate and we pulled off in that town Snoqualmie, the native reservation town where Twin Peaks was based. The vibes are just really intense. We knew something was going to happen.

We're driving through the Cascades going from Seattle to Spokane where we were supposed to play that night. And the engine starts to heat up. The car had been acting weird all tour. It would overheat and then not really overheat. We just didn't know what was going on. But all of a sudden the engine was really really overheating and started smoking real bad. We pulled over and turned out we were in this town called Coeur d'Alene, this tiny little place on the eastern side of Washington right where the Cascades end and you hit flat land. That's where the car died. We're sitting in a grocery store parking lot just like, well, the car's obviously cooked. We're screwed.

Frank Hurricane: The car is maybe done, maybe the whole tour is canceled. The problem was we had all these records. Probably 200 records, his keyboard, his amp, our bags. It wasn't like we could just hop on a Greyhound. We just didn't know what to do. Losing our minds a little bit and stressing.

And this guy pulls up right next to us in the parking lot and gets out. About 60 something years old, lonely psychedelic dude. Becomes apparent pretty quickly that this guy is probably like a killer, a murderer, a serial killer kind of vibe. He's pulling out all these books. Books on woodworking, books on reading, books on writing. He's like, I'm gonna give you guys a ride to Spokane. Just get in my car. Get in my car right now, we're going to Spokane, I'm taking you to Spokane. And we were just like, I don't know man, this guy is gonna kill us if we get in the car, for sure.

So he won't leave. He's just there. We're coming up with excuses. Engine cools down, I try to drive it a little farther. We get about five minutes on the road and it starts smoking crazy again. We pull over. The engine's cooked. We call AAA and this guy is still chilling with us. He followed us and now he's sitting on the side of the interstate with us.

Then AAA comes rolling up and the guy's like, man, fuck them cars, man, VW, that's a piece of shit you got right there, buddy. And then serial killer guy rolls out. But before he does he says, listen man, I know where you guys need to go. We said, where? He said, Moses Lake. And we were like, what is that? He was like, you just gotta go there.

So we get in the tow truck, me and Dave. We are losing our minds. I've just accepted the fact that we're gonna have to chug and chill and figure it out. The tow truck driver tells us about what's going down and says we should go to Moses Lake. We said, what's Moses Lake? He was like, there's a desert on the eastern side of Washington state and Moses Lake is like in the middle of the desert there. NASA tests their moon buggies there because I guess the surface is the closest to the moon.

A friend of a friend calls us up and says, I know these people in Moscow, Idaho, across the border, call them. They're closer to where you are than anyone else. So we call them and they say, we know someone that lives in Moses Lake and there's a chance she may be able to help you out. So after eating some deeply hated jalapeno corn dogs from the gas station, we call up this person. And this woman is just this magical person. She says, you guys can stay with me.

She picks us up. Takes us to a burrito truck. Pulls out a big old bag of weed. We start puffing down. She takes us out into the desert, shows us birds. She's a bird watcher and there's all these bald eagles flying around. And I jumped in the lake and there was all these people with AK-47s just blasting them into the air. And there was like NASA moon buggies and it was fucking wild.

We get back to her place and there's this big old dude out there with his whole butt hanging out the back, fixing a car in her driveway. We're like, who's that? She's like, oh, that's my brother. By that time we'd gotten a call from the car place. They said, your head gasket's blown. How much? Like $3,000. I see this guy working on the car and I'm like, is he a car mechanic?

Frank Hurricane: Actually, he is. So I said, hey, could you fix our car? And this was his voice. He was life changing. Yeah, I can fix your car. I could do it for like $1,000 but you have to supply me with as many snacks and drinks as I require. And I was like, okay, hell yeah, dude.

This guy was so psychedelic. He loved Tilts, which I don't think they make anymore, like an energy drink, alcohol, sweet tea thing. He was the worst snorer I've ever heard in my life. It didn't bother me that much but Invisible Dave is a very light sleeper and was deeply disturbed.

The guy was kind of working on the car and kind of just chilling too, chugging and puffing. One day he was like, I'm just gonna take a break for a second. Let's sit down and watch some television. We're sitting there watching TV and he goes, what's on? It was Carpool, that movie with Tom Arnold. And he goes, we gotta watch the whole movie. And then we watched Carpool with Tom Arnold and he goes, I think I'm just gonna chill the rest of the day. So every day we're canceling shows we're supposed to be playing.

Finally we got the new head gasket in and sealed everything back up. Time to put the key in the car and start up the engine. I turned the car on and it was worse than it was before. And we were just like, no, no. And he goes, hold on a second. Let's go down the street to AutoZone. We gotta go get some five minute epoxy. We got some five minute epoxy. Stuck this one part on with the five minute epoxy. Car turned on. I threw the thousand dollars at the window at him and we peeled out that mofo.

And I drove 27 hours to Minneapolis and it was the most mystical drive I've ever taken in my life. Me and Dave are still really good friends. We didn't murder each other or anything like that. And these people that saved us, they just were the most magical, magical people. Linda and Ron were their names, and they really saved the day. If it wasn't for them, we would probably be in Moses Lake still working at a hamburger place or something like that. They were really the angels of the trip.

Josh Caldwell: I want to thank Frank for sharing his experiences. Make sure to check out all his fantastic tunes and find him on Instagram at Frank Hurricane. This podcast was created and produced by me, Josh Caldwell. Music by Visual Aid, my side music project. General support and copywriting by Miranda Caldwell. If you like the show, please follow, subscribe, rate, and review wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to financially support the show, check out my Patreon page. You'll have access to loads of great bonus stories. You can find the link in the show notes. Thank you for listening, and I hope you come back next week.