Houston - Rocks Off - Muhammadali Checks In from Tour

Muhammadali Checks In from Tour

By Craig Hlavaty in On the Road

Wednesday, Jul. 1 2009 @ 11:15AM

Photos courtesy Muhammadali

See what happened to those towels a little later on here (NSFW).

Since January, Rocks Off has been a fan of Muhammadali. From the first house shows and split tape with Black Congress, we have been hooked to their Melvins and Jesus Lizard stomp.

A few weeks ago at ali's final Houston show before leaving for a quasi-national tour, we asked them to give us a glimpse into the touring lives of one of our town's hardest-working bands. The first dispatch appeared in our inbox Wednesday morning from bassist Dirty Jeff Smith; the band was presumably in Ohio.

And most excitingly, we finally get a definitive way to spell the band's name, directly from them. Turns out it's one word after all.

From Smith:

"Muhammadali goes on tour! One problem: no drummer."

Rocks Off's correspondent enjoys what is known as a "tour bath."

"Sudden DUI court date conflicts ultimately and obviously had to take priority for our current drummer, and the possibility of leaving for tour began to feel impossible. Luckily, earlier in the week we had played a house show/BBQ with Legsweeper at John's [lead singer and guitarist John Zambrano] and had kinda mentioned to them nervous thoughts about canceling the tour.
The day before the tour was to start, we called up Taylor, Legsweeper's drummer, and desperately pleaded that he drop everything to come on tour immediately with a band he had never played with before. He didn't need coaxing; he just said, 'Yeah, whatever it takes - as long as Boots (the other member of Legsweeper) can come along too.'
"So John and I played a quick acoustic set for my Mom in exchange for 25 tacos and took off for Austin to pick them up. And thus began a trend of miracles disguised as tour-dooming clusterfucks that would ultimately define the Muhammadali/Legsweeper tour."