Here is the way the News page looked the last time there was any news. When is an Ambulance like a Time Machine? When you read this page! Take a little trip back through the mists of time to 2005...

AMAM HITS THE TOP40! The Ambulance has cruised onto the Americana Top 40 chart for the week of July 25, 2005! Keep spinnin' that wax!

MIDWEST MUSIC SUMMIT AmAm played the Midwest Music Summit on Saturday Juy 23, at the No Depression and Sirius Radio-sponsored Americana night. We had fun playing and then were psyched to catch Otis Gibbs doing his thing with full band. Otis's beautiful country-rock tune "I Wanna Change It With You" has been stuck in the play position on the AmAm CD player ever since. By night's end, the AmAm boyz were sitting in on some drunken singalongs with the great musicians from the Sin City Social Club crew from LA and Nashville, on such chestnuts as "100 Years From Now" (Scotty singing beautiful lead vox) and "The Weight." It was a blast to hang with the Sin City folks and an honor to meet and share equipment with some of the great roots musicians of Indianapolis (Thanx again Tad, Otis, and everyone in the Benders!)...

THE LOVELY ERICA SMITH Our friend and fave rave singer/songwriter Erica Smith is back in the studio working on her new album. (Erica put her gorgeous stamp all over our new record and ain't we the richer for it!) Chock full of unbelievable songs and some of our favorite players, Erica's next record promises to be even better than her incredible previous album, Friend or Foe. Buy her stuff! Visit her site early & often at www.ericasmithnyc.com!!!

AMERICAN AMBULANCE JUNE TOUR WRAP-UP The June American Ambulance Streets of NYC Tour was a gas, taking us to Nashville -- Billy Block and his Western Beat nights at Exit/In are the best! -- and Knoxville, Louisville, St. Louis, Memphis, Lexington KY, and points south and east. Thanks to Stoll Vaughn for playing with us a couple times, and to Marie Arsenault and Fred Friction for bringing us to St. Louis. We played live on the radio at WFPK in Louisville, which was great, and again at the coolest Americana station known to humanity, WDVX in Knoxville (a big shout-out to Red Hickey, Tony, and soul sister Mary Lou Cameron). We got pretty stupid on the road and dubbed the tour "Moron-athon 2005." But we never stopped having fun (Top-10 life-changing moment: catching the Time Benders, a sublime Western Swing band comprised of moonlighting Nashville session cats and kitties at the storied Sation Inn).

The last couple daze of the tour were booked seemingly with no regard to the physical confinements of the space-time contiinuum (check the map and chart the way between Lexington KY and Myrtle Beach SC some time and you'll get my drift). Imagine not sleeping for about 30 hrs, then pulling in to Myrtle Beach to a restaurant full of adorably drunken redneck gals who keep getting up to dance with the band and pull their cowgirl hats over our eyes while we're playing; the drunkest, largest one of them insisting on showing us her large drunk breasts ("Do you know where I can get my nipples pierced in Virginia Beach?" she asked me. "No, but I know where to get your nipples pierced on 23rd and Seventh in NYC." "Well I ain't goin' all the way up there just for that! I'm doing it tomorrow to celebrate my divorce!")

The owner of the club, an awesome guy, surveyed the scene and opined: "You all have been on the road too long if you're even looking in their direction.... That right there is why first cousins shouldn't be allowed to marry. They didn't have a decent set of teeth between 'em." Well it was either them or the gang of four cute, well-heeled Raleigh yuppie gals having a gals-only weekend away from their husbands (they were all over certain AmAm fellas like stink on a thrift-shop cowboy shirt, but the AmAm boyz all love their NYC wives! Cue the Mooney Suzuki's New York Girls at top volume here.)...

For the Myrtle Beach show, we found out on the cell phone call on the way to the gig that they were expecting THREE sets -- party all night at the beach complete with covers (news to us but who's complaining). So we rummaged through the CDs we had in the van and listened down to some stuff while driving: next thing you know it's like a 1975 frat party as we launched into Scotty's hot vocal on "Honky Tonk Women," "Born on the Bayou" into "Suzie Q," Pete trying to find the right road-weary key for "Dead Flowers," "Johnny B Goode" (which I changed to Scotty B Goode of course), and Rob singing his heart out on "Cry Cry Cry." Even with all that, everyone's fave of the night, as always, was "Raleigh and Spencer" into "Old Wheels" with the dirty slide "Amazing Grace" intermezzo. It's all about sin and salvation baby, and that's true in Red states or Blue, Demon North or Solid South.

We definitely left it all out there at the last gig, Virginia Beach Sunday at twilight as beach bums and bunnies start traipsing in from the sun and sand to get a head start on drinking the night away... Sold a lot of T shirts and CDs that night, and closed the show with the song "Streets of NYC" never feeling so real -- "The folks down in Virginia, they could never see why the streets of NYC looked so good to me... Gonna drive all night." And then we did.

Pulled into Times Square at 4:30 am, unloading gear and wondering why we live up here after all the pretty gals and warmth, kindness and nice houses and treelined streets and sweet southern air and cicadas and funny old hippies and helpful soundmen...

Then I walked into my house and saw my 2-year-old daughter sleeping curled into my wife in the sweet Brooklyn night, and I remembered why.