Go, Greased Lightning! F Yeah Fest Tours U.S. on Veg-Fueled Bus

Los Angeles’ independent-music festival the F Yeah Fest just concluded a four-week continental loop around the Eastern, Southern and Midwestern U.S. in a vegetable-oil- and diesel-powered Blue Bird school bus. At various intervals, the inhabitants of this French-fried freight included Monotonix, Team Robespierre, Totally Michael, Josh Fadem, Matt & Kim, the Death Set, Crystal Antlers, Dan Deacon, Microcosm Publishing, Space 1026 art collective, Videothing, Sucka Pants photography and various tour managers, heartbreakers and foreign legionnaires (just kidding, but Monotonix are from Tel Aviv, so they’ve most likely had stints in the IDF).

Tod Seelie/Sucka Pants Photography

Tod Seelie/Sucka Pants Photography

It makes delicious French fries too: This vehicle, though unreliable, made it across the country and back.

Tod Seelie/Sucka Pants Photography

The dreaded ass mike: Ami Shalev on vocals

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More About

• Phil Hoelting
• Sean Carlson
• Merry Pranksters
• Totally Michael
• Josh Fadem

(Click to enlarge)

It makes delicious French fries too: This vehicle, though unreliable, made it across the country and back.

Tod Seelie/Sucka Pants Photography

(Click to enlarge)

The dreaded ass mike: Ami Shalev on vocals

The F Yeah Tour ended last week, with a show in Brooklyn headlined by the Circle Jerks (singer Keith Morris is one of the festival’s organizers). But Sean Carlson, the festival’s other organizer, and Phil Hoelting, one of the tour managers, have plans to continue this ecological and monetarily friendly way of touring the West Coast and abroad this fall. L.A. Weekly spoke with Carlson and Hoelting via telephone this week.

L.A. WEEKLY: What has surprised you most about touring by bus?

Phil Hoelting: How amazing it is to be able to find vegetable oil, the accessibility of it. Everyone that’s been touring now have their eyes trained to search for veggie oil. We get our hands dirty and dive into these oil troughs behind restaurants. When you find a grease trough filled with hundreds of gallons of oil, it’s like a gold rush. You’d never think these emotions exist. Finding good, clean grease and not being able to take it all in the tanks was the worst feeling. I’ll never forget Amarillo, Texas, for that reason.

Sean Carlson: Each bathroom break takes 45 minutes. The daily drama of getting everyone back to the bus. Everyone scatters at night to be with their friends, so if we have a noon leave time, we have to wake up at 9 a.m. If someone wants to sleep in at their friend’s house and not pick up their phone in the morning, we all end up standing outside the bus and waiting.

Does the bus have a name?

PH: Greased Lightning. The original name was Too Fast For Love. Ami, the singer for Monotonix, came up with that name. But then I was looking on the weather map on my phone and there were lightning storms everywhere, so we came up with the current name.

What’s been the most successful part of your journey?

SC: That the first show happened. That we got out of California. That the bus works. That we haven’t crashed. I don’t want to jinx it, but we’ve made it happen. Putting together a tour isn’t an easy thing. Phil and the crew help me a lot running the day-to-day. But there are a million other things, logistics, that go with it, which I’ve had to fly back and forth from the tour to L.A. to deal with — stuff for the F Yeah Fest.

Also, it’s amazing that we haven’t been pulled over yet, and that the bus hasn’t been broken into. In Atlanta, we had to park in front of a housing project, and it was my turn to sleep in the bus — every night, someone takes the responsibility of sleeping in the bus. But I couldn’t sleep because all night I kept hearing people muttering outside, “What’s in there?” I was holding a baseball bat and lying in the seat, and thinking to myself, “I’m gonna hit someone when they try to come in. I’m gonna hit someone and then they’re going to kill me.” Thankfully, none of that happened.

PH: Not counting oil scores? Well, we broke down three times, and each time, we un-broke down, which was a major success. We were leaving Alabama, after playing this amazing venue, the Bottle Tree, and Donovan [Lenker, one of the tour crew] was making a U-turn into a driveway, and our U-Haul trailer jackknifed and we got stuck. Eventually, we got AAA to come out, but by that time we had tried for so long to get unstuck that the wheels stopped turning. That was the first time the tour “was over.” I literally laid down on the ground and threw my keys, which I consequently lost, and fell asleep. But this local guy shows up, and he’s, like, “Hey, man, what’s the problem here? Let me have a look.” He brought a calm energy to the situation. Turns out we’d killed all the air pressure in the bus by trying to move, so we just had to let it rest.