Days of the New have once again renewed the absurd, infantile soap opera that has frontman Travis Meeks allegedly firing the entire band one day and then slapping them with reconciliatory high-fives the next. Last Thursday night, their melodramatic plot took another turn for the tedious when Meeks ended the quartet's club tour more than a month early with little warning to his bandmates.

According to Rick Smith at the band's management company, the nineteen-year-old Meeks first lost his voice after performing in Nashville, Tenn., on Oct. 25, and then again in Dallas last Thursday, prompting Meeks' decision to end the tour prematurely. "He's scared," Smith says. "The great Travis Meeks finally found something he could not bowl over."

Smith says Meeks, who has never received formal voice training, worried he would permanently injure his vocal cords, and thus opted to finish recording Days of the New II rather than risk his health in smoky clubs night after night. "Travis felt it was more important to seek medical help and learn to pace himself on stage before it was too late," Smith says.

At press time, Geffen said Days of the New would not likely reschedule their twenty-three canceled shows throughout the South and Midwest, but would tour in support of their sophomore album next spring.

Meeks has reportedly dismissed his bandmates at least twice now, once in an interview published on the Wall of Sound Web site two months ago and once on a fan's Web site earlier this summer. However, just hours before Meeks pulled the rug out from under the tour last week, Days of the New drummer Matt Taul was asserting the band's solidarity more firmly than ever. Though he conceded past squabbles, Taul spoke optimistically about the band's ninety-minute home video due out next month and their second album, tentatively due out May 1.

"We thought about [breaking up] and stuff because we were just getting used to the road," says a drowsy, distracted Taul from a cell phone backstage in Dallas on Thursday. "It's like when a husband fights with his wife -- it's no big thing. We just all didn't know what exactly we wanted to do and if this was going to be our career forever. [A break-up] was questioned, but we're not. We're together, we're here and we're ready to rock."

Or not.

While fans bite their nails and pray for divine intervention again, they can at least seek reassurance in Days of the New II -- the band's eclectic, world music-tinged album due out in early 1999. Recorded before and after a whirlwind summer tour with Metallica, the sophomore effort was pieced together at the band's own Distillery Studios in Louisville with producer Todd Smith overseeing and guiding Meeks' novice board work. Meeks has written and recorded twenty-one songs -- sitars, tablas and all -- with occasional help from Taul. The album will be finished next month in California.

Regardless of current touring troubles, Taul says Days of the New have lofty arena aspirations for 1999, including a "full-on stage show, the whole damn thing just packed with a bunch of different shit like a violent six- or eight- member orchestra and a full percussion stand up." As far as other future plans -- like speaking to each other again -- it's all a matter of wait and see.

"Travis has written most of the Days of the New stuff now, and I just hope we all start working harder as a unit," Taul says. "I hope we stay together as friends through this thing, and make this a long-term project."

ANNI LAYNE
(November 10, 1998)