GLAZED

For around two weeks in the summer of 2017, I hit the road in an old borrowed Ford Expedition with 5 other guys that make up the alternative emo, post pop-punk band, Glazed.  These 5 guys also happen to be some of my longtime best friends and they consist of Justin Belichis on vocals, Brian Wright on bass guitar, Reid Johnson on lead guitar, Liam Murphy on drums, and, at the time, Michael Gibson on rhythm guitar.  The band kicked off the tour at their home base of Jacksonville, Florida, then made their way through towns such as Gainesville, Atlanta, Columbia, Virginia Beach and eventually up to Philly and New York; all the while traveling along with a band that shared the ticket with them, Good Thoughts, another alternative punk band that hailed from Atlanta, Georgia.  It was a small tour, but dignified, the boys of Glazed put on shows with unwavering intensity night in and night out; shows in places that at their capacity didn’t hold but 200 hundred people, but each performance was as if they were performing in front of sold out amphitheater’s.  Whether the venues were attached to a coffee shop or in a basement; the DIY punk seen knows how to turn any space into a safe haven for the misplaced youth to donkey kick and sing along to raw and melancholic lyrics to their heart’s content.  

These are a collection of photos that show what a DIY tour looks like; the cramped “tour bus” wrought with gas station delicacies and marijuana smoke, the make-shift venues riddled with the scents of cigarettes & domestic drafts, the summer nights spent at crash pads, camaraderie amongst struggling artists over a Jack Daniels, all of the ‘Cook Out’ that our intestines could handle, and the mid July heat magnified by the lack of showers and proper air conditioning.  At the start of the tour, I gave each bandmate a disposable camera with 32 exposures on them, this a mixed media collection between my own documentations taken on my DSLR and those captured by the band members themselves on good ole Fuji disposables. The goal of this project was to blur the quality of the media and lack there of, and tell a stripped down and raw story of a band touring with nothing but do-it-yourself recourses.