Ant Farm Crawl Back

With their new album, truANT, due August 19th, Alien Ant Farm will showcase the new material with a twenty-two-date club tour to launch on July 5th in Las Vegas. The set of dates will be the band's first since an ill-fated European tour last year when the band was involved in a bus accident. The driver was killed and frontman Dryden Mitchell suffered a fractured vertebra.

After surgery and physical therapy, Mitchell made a brief return to the stage late last year, joining 311 during a set. "I hope that I'm excited like our first time around," Mitchell says. "But I'm really paranoid to go and travel. I stepped on 311's bus a while ago and had really bad anxiety, and the bus wasn't even moving. You can't do anything but just get on it and hope nothing happens. Obviously I'm not gonna say, 'I'm never touring again.' It sucks that it jaded me in that way. Even the whole, 'Oh you'll get to see the sights' . . . I don't really care. I wanna play the shows and that's it."

The band is hoping to set up dates at larger venues, possibly as an opener, later in the year, but for now Ant Farm are looking forward to keeping things small. "We want to play the really, really dirty, dingy clubs," Mitchell says. "There's some cities where we're good for more tickets. But, we've been gone for a long time, so we don't wanna pretend like we're gonna book these big venues and be bummed when no one came. We just have to take a step back and try to build it back."

Alien Ant Farm tour dates:

7/5: Las Vegas, House of Blues
7/6: Tempe, AZ, Bash on Ash
7/8: Salt Lake City, DV8
7/10: West Hollywood, The Troubadour
7/11: Palo Alto, CA, The Edge
7/12: Orangevale, CA, The Boardwalk
7/14: Seattle, Graceland
7/15: Portland, OR, B Complex
7/16: Boise, ID, Big Easy
7/18: Minneapolis, Quest Club
7/19: Chicago, Metro
7/21: Detroit, The Shelter
7/22: Toronto, Opera House
7/23: New York, TBA
7/25: Philadelphia, Theater of Living Arts
7/26: Washington, DC, 9:30 Club
7/27: Boston, Axis
7/29: Atlanta, Cotton Club
7/30: Jacksonville, FL, Jack Rabbit's
7/31: St. Petersburg, FL, State Theater
8/2: Dallas, TBA
8/3: Houston, Engine Room

ANDREW DANSBY
(June 9, 2003)