Here's a recipe for a bad gig: One converted Roto Rooter van, a pinch of Toulon, Illinois, a crowd of Primus-loving cowboys and a fake license to transport two domestic cats across county lines. Ok, the license is a stretch of the truth, but my story does involve the transportation of two felines. Surely, I have your attention.

Most likely, you have never had the pleasure of hearing a band called "Los Vaqueros Locos" from Jacksonville, Illinois- but there never was a group of guys so close with music so…ridiculous? Mainly, we performed around central Illinois but on one occasion I convinced The Vaqueros (myself, Mark Westenberger, Tim Harlin and Matt Meyer) to do a show two hours north in a town near Kewanee, Illinois. At the time I was dating a girl who attended Black Hawk College, which was well known for its outstanding agricultural program…Yeah, now the story is going somewhere.

We didn't do a lot of long-distance traveling and we decided that if we were going to make such a trip that it would be nice to do it in style and together, to savor the adventure. My father owned an almost roadworthy van that was once used for Roto Rooter service calls. It had since had the lettering stripped from the side, but you could still easily identify the vehicle's original purpose. You had to make certain that you were always in the right gear because the shifter on the dash was broken and always indicated that you were in park. We laid plush carpet inside the van and on the day of the adventure we loaded it with our equipment, another girlfriend, a buddy and we were off, not knowing that we were destined for a life-changing experience.

The first leg of the trip went well. My girlfriend had booked us a little gig at a "farmer's frat house" in a small town outside Kewanee called Toulon, Illinois. The gig went ok. Like any gig where the band is getting paid in beer, there were a few mishaps, a few songs were forgotten as soon as they were played and the front man (me) got upset that the crowd grew more and more out of control, shouting out the names of Primus tunes and songs we had never heard of before.

The real adventure began the next day on the way home. It had been a long night so we decided to get breakfasts at Denny's on our way out of town. As we left town we cranked up the music and tried to forget about the night before. I was driving and I guess the music was loud enough that I wasn't able to hear the groan that an engine makes when driving 60 mph in second gear. That van was a good sport. It made it about twenty miles before the radiator erupted several gallons of radiator fluid all over the windshield, and before we knew what had happened, the van came to a bucking halt alongside Highway 78.

We didn't know it at the time but the engine was so hot that the pistons had melted and fused to the inside of their casings. At this point all chaos broke forth. We were in a state of disbelief and confusion. To make matters worse, as these were the days before cell phones were common, we had to hitch a ride back to town to find my girlfriend and call my father to explain our situation. Before our departure from Kewanee, we had agreed to transport my girlfriend's cats back to Jacksonville; so there we were, stranded on the side of the road between two cornfields, with two cats and nothing to show of our earnings from the night before.

Somehow we managed to videotape almost the entire experience. The emotional scares run deep. In fact, I still won't travel to Kewanee, Illinois, but in retrospect it was an experience that I wouldn't trade for the world.