GRITTY LITTLE TEETH
I am writing now, sitting on the couch at Darius’ mom’s house in Boise. First day off in25 days. I am somewhat incredulous that I am even thinking about our musical endeavors, after what amounts to a massive overdose of travel and loud music and the regimented obligations of the touring day. Arrive at this time, play at this time. There are many, many minor tasks to attend to—count in and display the merchandise, compile and submit the guest list. Determine the nature, distribution and amounts of the hospitality items—what are we being given for dinner, drinks, etc. The rest of the day has two huge main components. Play a furious, physical rock show for two hours—that’s what the whole day is about, what all this work is for, why people are staying up late on a Monday and what they are paying twelve bucks for. That show, what it costs me—bruises, a neck that’s practically immovable by about 5 days into the tour, and the worst: deeply bruised hip bones. Where they stick out in front is the point of contact for a flat wooden surface that I happen to be slinging over the front of me as I throw myself up in the air, hurl myself back and forth to the meter. It pinches the skin there, a place where there is literally no fat to pad the impact, and it hurts like a son of a b. You might see me during the show wincing, my eyes slammed tight. That’s me recovering from a guitar slam to the hipbones. Well—all that pain, it’s all worth it. I mean it! Sometimes I can’t even tell how the audience feels about a show—are they appalled? Do they get it? Are they indifferent? –and it still doesn’t matter. Sometimes I am totally annoyed by between one and three of my bandmates—and it still doesn’t matter. I need it. Why else would I spend months away from my girls? Go without seeing a movie, drinking a decent bottle of wine, or reading the NY Times for weeks at a time?
MADISON 10/10
Started the day with barbecue at our hosts’ home in the afternoon—I also called in to intro ‘Joe Dallesandro’ for Briskeby, onstage in Norway that night. They put me on speaker and I could hear the audience give me some love in the background—
Ah, Madison on a Monday night. What can I say? We got to play on the bill with Some By Sea, youngsters from Seattle…perhaps leaning a bit too heavy on the Death Cab influence, but they have time to grow and find their voice as time goes on. We had two outstanding audience MVPs: the ‘Viking’, a burly, 6’ 2” fan with Iron Maiden’s 1983 hair—who, towards the end of the night, started dancing—HARD. Tables, chairs and patrons were knocked over like tenpins, and no one from the club objected…no one who got knocked over seemed to care, either. Enraptured, or en-bored?
2nd MVP: ‘Burn out the Red’. An old punker, who was a Posies fan, said to me ‘he hears the music, man—he FEELS it. We should all wish we were like him.” His name was Jep. He had red hair and a red beard, and red trucker hat, and in my memory he was wearing a red tracksuit but I think that’s my mind playing tricks on me. He is basically young Santa Claus as an acid hippie skate freak. But damn if he wasn’t having a better time than everyone else. Right up front, shaking his head like an epileptic Fraggle, and he was at the bar after everyone else had gone home, obviously the staff knew him and didn’t mind. So…maybe he is on to something.
Historical note: Madison is where that classic of American Cinema, ‘Back to School’, starring Rodney Dangerfield, was filmed. In Korea the picture’s translated title translated back as ‘Back to School with Dad on my Back’. The ‘Twist & Shout’ band in the film is not, however closely they resemble them, Glass Tiger.
IOWA CITY 10/11
Nobody told me Dubuque was one of the prettiest towns in the country—I always thought simply, ‘rhymes with puke’. But it’s a little gem of a town. And we drove right on thru it, and on to Iowa City. Which isn’t a bad little town. Gabe’s Oasis, the venue, is atop a toothless hunter bar, and is itself a carefully preserved second floor tarpaper outhouse, with a tetanus-infested medieval set of torture stairs as the loading access. The monitors are old milk cartons painted black that contain the speakerphones from real estate offices that went out of business in the Reagan Administration. And for most of the show I had no idea what the fuck I was doing there…but we had the best encore ever, a 20 minute Medeski Martin and Wood jam where I devastated the keys—all of which had grown out of a drum solo by Darius…and we followed that with ‘Jungle’ which hadn’t made an appearance for some time. Get some, indeed!
KANSAS CITY 10/12
Sleeper of the tour. After the requisite gorging at Gates BBQ, we shlumped in to soundcheck at this tiny bar, the Hurricane. I really didn’t think 10 people were going to come to this show, but damn if we didn’t get a fantastic and populous crowd, who brought us lots of drinks and pounded the floor if we threatened to stop playing, and bought shitloads of copies of Soft Commands (hint: if you want me to write a favorable review of your city…). The area around the club seems to have lots of good stuff going on…KC, welcome back from wherever you were in my ignorance.
DENVER 10/13
We drove after the show in KC, leaving there at about 3am, and heading west across Kansas. Joe Norcio wins again for driving all night. At some point he ran out of steam, and slept in the driver’s seat at a rest stop til Jon rousted him and took over for a while. Then he ran out of steam and I got behind the wheel for the first time on this tour…driving pretty fast (they don’t seem to care about the speed limit in Colorado much) thru very dramatic scenery, including the remnants of the snow that had been dumped there 36 hours previously. We stopped for about 15 minutes as rescuers arrived at and tended to a horrible accident—a van and U-Haul trailer, apparently from the opposite direction on the freeway, that had hurled itself across the median and came to rest in a grisly concoction of twisted frame and exploded airbags, at the edge of our side of the Interstate. We saw the passengers on stretchers, all taped up in the hopes of saving their spines, lined up waiting for evacuation, as we passed. I gave a silent prayer, what else could I do.
Denver revealed itself as a bubble—69 degrees, no snow, the leaves on the trees still green. It had been 45 degrees only 20 miles out, and we were higher in elevation now. How?
After a marvelous instore at Wax Trax, I paced up and down the club (earlier Jon & I had been interviewed for an online program called Mania TV, try and track that down and you’ll find us there, waxing cynically on several subjects!) in anticipation of Dominique’s arrival from France—she made it at last and I hustled her away for a superb dinner at the highly recommended rest. Potager. After such a joyful reunion, it was hard for me to get a grip on the show…in fact at one point I left the stage, unable to tell if things were going terribly (well, I knew they were for me, sound wise) and if we could deliver and connect with the audience. Things turned out OK tho. At least, when Dom & I got to the hotel, it was great! We signed our first joint tax returns, which had been fed ex’d to the hotel (we filed separately in 2003). If that’s not love…
SALT LAKE CITY 10/14
You will never be able to convince me this town isn’t bizarre. And tense. It’s warm, it’s surrounded by mountains, it’s clean, and the streets are wide enough for two-way 747 traffic. But try and convince me there isn’t a taut buzz of underlying tension there. It’s like the town knows a dirty secret, and is hoping to get you out of there before you find it and they have to kill you and use you for lawn fertilizer. There are some very friendly volks there tho. I met a ton of them at the show, and about 3 of them at our very first exo-store appearance. Orion’s Music had us scheduled for an appearance. I had a contact name, and as Jon & I headed there in a cab, I called the contact to tell them we were on our way and might be a minute or two late, max. The contact number was a cell for some guy at Overstock.com...what the?? We got there, and saw 2 or 3 people milling about in the store. And we were shown to a coffee shop two doors down. The coffee shop and record store share a performance space between them—with a stage, PA, and seats for 15-20 people. There was a performance there already. We were playing in the coffee shop itself—well, let’s put it this way, somebody wanting to see our instore, which as best as I could tell, was totally unadvertised, would have had to work extremely hard to know about it and subsequently find it. Miraculously, a couple of people did.
As for the show itself—well, we played well. The stage was high. There was a barricade! Total overkill. People enjoyed it. They pulled the tables right up to the barricade and got about 2 lbs. of pure rock & roll per head.
BOISE 10/15
Last in the unbroken chain of 25 shows…25 cities…25 days. At this point, we were like the guys at the end of Ishtar. Kind of laughing, kind of crying. Boise is where Darius went to High School, and being not the biggest city in the world, the first person we saw when we pulled up to the club was in his first ban with him—this guy was renting the PA to the club! The guy who was our point person was in Darius’ class in H.S. as well. Jon & I spent time at a radio station called the River, where a nice little crowd was assembled in a conference room, and Jon & I played a few songs and chatted live on air. At the club, we had to deal with dismal architecture, a huge post in front of the stage, which was itself triangular but with bites taken out of it, so a misstep could send you tumbling…eek. Consolation: dinner at Darius’ mom’s house, with lots of family friends and a home cooked Anglo-Pakistani (Darius’ late father was from Pakistan and his mom is from the UK) meal…oh, yes. This was superb. Doors weren’t opening at the show until 10, so, by the time dinner was done, it was only 8. Dom & I took a nap—big mistake. When Darius woke me at 10, I was wreckage, contacts glued to my corneas, my mind already fogging over in anticipation of the impending day off…I reapplied my lenses and brushed my teeth and just prayed to the Gods of Saturday Night in Boise to guide us. Another big mistake. The moon was on the point to be full, and everybody was only dimly aware of how bizarre they were acting. Drunker, ornerier than usual…and let me tell you, the Big Easy/Bourbon St. is one of those clubs that has ‘rules’. For example—after the show, there were several fans that wanted pictures taken with us—and the security intervened, saying there was a ‘no photo’ policy, and that there were signs ‘posted all over the house’? First off, when you book my band at a club—it’s my motherfucking show, I don’t care what your house rules are (which I toned down, and said—hey, whatever the rules are, let it slide for these people, and got my way). Second of all, there are no signs posted in the Bourbon St. Lounge—just in the building’s larger venue, the Big Easy. So, how were people to know about this stupid rule anyhow? Once again, it would be better if the venue just paid for the billboard space to say: BANDS—YOU WILL HAVE A SHITTY TIME HERE, THE SECURITY IS UPTIGHT, AND THE STAGE SUCKS. SO DON’T BOTHER COMING. As for me, I will not be coming back. How was the show? After all that—how could it be that good? The fucking post in my face, the treacherous stage, the uptight security…well…we probably have too much sound for that size of club, which is kind of our fault. But, we did, once again, make the best of it. People enjoyed it, we played as punk as it gets. Did a couple of acoustic songs, also punk. And…thus… we made it to the finish line…
Sunday was spent in bed, with brief forays to the fridge, the coffee shop, and the TV. I watched a football game, fer chirssakes; I haven’t done that since I was, like, 18 years old. We had leftovers to gorge on, the aforementioned TV and cable…no NY Times, no internet (except a brief log on at the coffee shop), and Dom wasn’t feeling well enough to go to a movie, so—I took the directive to veg as a divine order and obeyed with total sincerity.
Fine Seattleites: I urge you to be at the Neumo’s show on Thursday. We want to come home to a hearty welcome, and you get to see a band with it’s full tour-honed edge cut a stage, a club and an audience (and themselves) to shreds.
I finished this post in the van…couldn’t keep my eyes open last night. When we get to Eugene, 500 miles from now, I’ll post ASAP.
Love
KS
I-84, 6 miles from the Idaho-Oregon state line
