Lighthouse Music has a cool bus

By Ant Perrucci

The bus was late.

The school bus that Lighthouse Music was using for transportation on its tour of Florida this summer was very, very late.

The bus that the band purchased for $2,000 at auction. The bus that Lighthouse Music’s Davis Hart raved about. About how cool it was. About how its diesel engine runs on used vegetable oil. How Mark Garrison, another member of Lighthouse Music, provided the oil thanks to his parents, who own Madre’s Fish Tacos. That bus.

Around 1 p.m. on a cool, breezy Saturday in May, the members of Lighthouse Music and Reptile Theater were sitting in Hart’s parents’ front yard. Hart was growing impatient. The front yard of the Hart home was piled high. Drums, amplifiers and other musical equipment sat in a jangled pile.

A milk crate of DVDs and X-Box games sat off to one side. Boxes of clothes were scattered here and there, a crushed-velvet suit hung from a tree and a woman sat on a mattress, holding an infant.

“I just kind of got the idea [to use a bus],” Hart said. “We could not tour in a van.”

The previous day, Hart said, the bands performed in Orlando. They needed two cars and a van. The tour was scheduled to take the bands across Florida to New Orleans. That would be the last stop for Reptile Theater, but Lighthouse Music was scheduled to travel along the eastern seaboard, up to Rhode Island and back.

“A school bus,” Hart said, “was basically the only option.”

About 2 p.m., the bus was still nowhere to be found.

“We’d be spending three grand on fuel alone [without the bus],” Hart said. So Hart called Clancy McCotter, owner of C-Further Fuel Technologies, in Titusville.

“[McCotter] hooked it up for us. It’s got two 75-gallon tanks, so we can go 1,500 miles without stopping,” Hart said.

He continued: “The engine runs cleaner, runs stronger, it’s better for the environment.”

And, he added, “I’d rather smell french fries than diesel, honestly.”

McCotter explained how the centrifuge-based system worked. “[Within] two weeks, we build it from scratch,” he said. The system “pays for itself in a year,” he added.

Idle the engine using regular diesel fuel, McCotter said, while watching a temperature gauge that monitors the vegetable oil. Once the oil is hot enough, McCotter explained, simply flip a switch, feed the oil to the engine and off you go.

Let’s take a break, Hart said, and come back in an hour and a half. The bus, Hart said, would have arrived by 3. Definitely, Hart said.

By 3:30, with all members of the two bands present and accounted for, there was still no bus.

Ten minutes before 4 p.m., the bus had still yet to arrive. The members of the two bands discussed who would be driving.

“Can you drive stick?” Hart asked each member of Reptile Theater.

“I talked to [McCotter] 15 minutes ago,” Hart fumed. “And he said he was just getting off the exit. It does not take that long.”

Hart paused. “Where the f— IS he?”

Five minutes later, the bus pulled up. Finally. A 1989 Chevy, painted (by the band) to look like the lighthouse. Black and white stripes wound down the sides, and the cab was painted bright red. The band got to work.

Swarming like ants over the bus, in rapid order the vehicle’s floor was pressure-washed and bunk beds were installed.

TWO WEEKS LATER …

After the two bands returned from New Orleans, they suspended the remainder of the tour. Rather than barrel straight up the East Coast and back, Garrison said that the members of Lighthouse Music were going to take some time off to “regroup and book more shows up north” before setting back out in “a few months.”

The change in plans, he said, was to allow the band time to reorganize its focus.

“This [was] actually our first tour,” Garrison said. “We just kind of jumped right into it.”

“Everybody’s spirits were really high,” he said, but he also said that the band hopes to “focus on shows and not bus maintenance” on their next tour.

As for the bus, Garrison said, it held up “really well, actually.”

Garrison continued: “The only problem was needing a [replacement] fuel filter,” a problem that was fixed in a matter of hours.

The cramped quarters on the bus necessitated a few impromptu solutions; when the bus stopped to afford the bands sleep, members of Reptile Theater “slept on the roof of the bus,” Garrison said.

The bus was also a hot topic of conversation while on the road, Garrison said.

“There was a bunch of people who would come on the bus [at stops on the tour],” he said. “Davis would give them a tutorial.”