Heeb

Here is the story of how one band turned roadtrip thriftiness into stinky, non-kosher deliciousness. Check out Heeb‘s Music Issue for We Are The Fury’s Steven Lublin’s much more refined recipe for "Warm Lobster Salad" and hold the gas station mayonnaise as Lublin is now attending culinary school in Paris.

By Aaron Short

For the Ohio-born Lublin brothers, of the indie classic rock group We Are the Fury, their summer of 2006 East Coast tour was among the most exciting times of their lives. One of the lowlights, however, was being limited to the Warped Tour food budget— a measly $5 per day. Short of foraging for berries along the New Jersey Turnpike, this left very few options. Out of this reckless anxiety for satiation, the crab salad sandwich was born.

“It was devised out of pure desperation. It was actually imitation crabmeat. Pretty much white fish with crap juice,” says Stephan Lublin, then-drummer of We Are the Fury. “Then it was mixed with gas station mayonnaise (your gas station of choice) and packets of relish and onion. Put it on the most preservative-rich bread—to last you on tour as long as possible—and try to enjoy,” he says.

Word quickly spread to other bands on the tour about the smell of this barely edible invention. It reeked of rotting crab coupled with the aroma of a car full of sweaty rock stars, cooked in stifling 90-degree summer heat. Lublin sometimes alternated the StarKist-brand “crabtastic” concoction with tuna or salmon, packaged in plastic containers that could keep for months without expiring. Either way, the truck stop crab salad had the protein the drummer needed to power his way through the next performance.

“Truck stops are weird places where you get a lot of diverse group of characters,” says Jeremy Lublin, the band’s lead singer. “We’d stop at six in the morning sometimes. In the Midwest or down South during hunting season tons of tough guys with camouflage on would be walking around before they went hunting, and we’d go in there with glazed eyes from the night before. During the middle of the day, kids with their families would come up and ask for autographs. Late at night, we’d run into drunk assholes who wanted to start fights,” he says.