It’s always like that, isn’t it? The time at home shoots by like water thru a narrow part of the arroyo, and it’s suddenly time to recap. Most of the time I was home, when I wasn’t running from one appointment to another, I was working on overdubs and editing for Red Jacket Mine, picking up the story where I left it four months ago, working from my flat, playing keyboards, singing and doing a bit of editing here and there. In a nice cross-pollinization, Patrick Porter from RJM ended up providing some incredible pedible steel for several songs on the upcoming A Life A Song A Cigarette album, coming out in November. It was lovely to revisit these tracks, I am really chuffed with how these recordings done in Seattle this spring turned out. I have a bit more work to do when I get home, and then I send off the files (not unlike a digital version of sending in the clones) and move on to the next bit of mouse click mixing.
This week I managed to take Dom out for our anniversary to the restaurant Goumard, a funny little place in the center of Paris, a mix of that carpeted vibe of an old school Parisian resto, with outrageously cool Art Nouveau bathrooms (Charles de Gaulle was said to have ‘admired them’, what ever that means, I shudder to think) and rather atrocious painting IMHO. We giggled and shared a delightful Chassagne-Montrachet, and fought (in a nice way) over the braised figs.
VOLDA, 9/26
Two hours of crawling thru Paris traffic, horrible waits at security, but I still made the flight Oslo, despite the fact I left more than three hours early with a shuttle pickup at my front door. I immediately fell back asleep til we hit the tarmac in Oslo. After debating whether or not a run to Tim Wendelboe’s was worth it, and I actually believe it would have been, I opted to set up camp in the ‘tapas’ bar (tapas is a concept adopted all over Europe when prospective restaurateurs hit upon the golden ‘charge more, serve less’ opportunity it provided) and catch up on email, and eventually my bandmates arrived in time for our prop hop to Volda, another little town dramatically placed on Norway’s wild west coast, like a pearl in the undulations of a scallop’s flesh. The wind seemed to be repelling us from the ground as we headed towards the runway, the landscape was decidedly Chinese, with mountains forming upward semi-ovoids, ascending out of pure mist. In fact, where we had dinner that evening, pretty much the only game in town, was a Chinese place called ‘Landscape’. They knew what’s up. We were met at Volda’s tiny airport by part of the ‘Veka 08’ staff, Veka being the back-to-school festival for the uni students in this little colony. Visible from the hiway into town is a striking piece of architecture, the library/museum devoted to one Ivar Aasen, who came up with a new version of Norwegian that you see as an option on Wikipedia or a language choice for some software programs, a sort of Scandinavian Esperanto.
We loaded in, did a kind of soundcheck (Bjorn was to arrive on a later flight) and checked into the rather grim hotel (called, invitingly “TOURIST HOTEL”. Like a little bit of Soviet bloc set in the fjords. We were told the only game in town for food was the aforementioned Chinese place, so, we acquiesced—I pretty much avoid Chinese food in small European towns at all costs; spoiled as I am by the excellent Chinese restaurants in Belleville, not far from where I live. We did an interview with the local paper over dinner, and Bjorn eventually joined us.
Back at the hotel, we were told that the show was being pushed back 45 minutes, for whatever reason. I mean, this is a really small town, and I can’t imagine that people had other stuff to do, but, hey, I’m not in charge of the proceedings, obviously. So, I finally strolled back, in the dark, past skeptical looking sheep, wind stirring leaves around me, and arrived as the first band was finishing. We had a few tech problems, took awhile to get Bjorn’s guitar going, but finally we commenced, and in the meantime Baard’s bass was not going well for him. In these cases, it’s best to just go forward, but I was aware he was having a hard time and it made it a bit hard to concentrate. The show did eventually take off into a good flow, and the audience was pretty loose by this time, around 1am, and it was a fun show, definitely. I had a fun mic stand, all bent and short, to abuse for comic effect. I managed to balance in different ways on the barricade, and use it like a gymnastic tool, swinging over it, hanging off it backwards by locking my legs to the bars, etc. Had quite a few audience members take the mic and sing and shout with me—some were really good!
Bjorn and I walked back to the hotel in the deep of a Norwegian fall night, and I tuned into the debates from my hotel room. I am glad that the world viewed Obama as the winner on technicalities, as I had not been expecting John McCain to perform as strongly as he did, he seemed quite in control of his facts and presentation (tho I disagree with many of his conclusions); by comparison Obama seemed to occasionally stumble, ever so slightly. And I felt his roundabout response linking his Russia policy to American energy dependence solutions was technically correct but I could hear a collective ‘huh?’ from the American public. Both men have admirable qualities, I just feel like McCain is not as honest as he proclaims to be, and the Palin addition makes his potential presidency absolutely toxic IMHO. And since her arrival, he has been bending to the right—the old big-business-gets-a-free-ride philosophy, family values arguments coming to the forefront, and the plutocrats get so sweep up all the chips while we argue whether or not stem cells are sentient beings.
Meanwhile, we have to remember that despite the fact the economy and world events are often narrowing the possible courses of action to fewer and fewer sane ones (not that sanity is part of the decision making process of the Current, on-a-mission-from-God (Mars?), Occupant) that Obama offers to at least attempt to integrate us into the world community in a more realistic way than the tough-guy approach that’s just not serving us well. With a military man in the White House, I believe the patience of the world to keep finding something likable about the US will absolutely run out, and we will find ourselves beset from pretty much every side. We need him as the antidote for the disease we have no idea how much we are suffering from…
SKIEN, 9/27
*Always* up early. That’s rock, right? Even after being up til almost 4 watching McCain and Obama duke it out. Rain beat upon the curving mountains around Volda, and we were driven to the airport. Security/check in/bag drop is all one swift motion at this tiny airport, and despite the fact we had tons of gear they gave us break on the overweight charge, big time. There is nothing in the Volda airport to eat except for what you can pull out of a vending machine, so Baard went somewhere and came back with a bag of pancakes! Really! There is free wifi, however…good to know!
Our plane left late, and bobbled in the air currents as we lifted off. Oslo was clear and bright. We claimed our stuff, and ran into the proprietor of Big Dipper records as we came out of baggage claim; he was there to pick up the Zombies, whose show he was promoting in Oslo that night.
We were met by our tech (soon to retire) Fredrik, and a slick Merc van with trailer, and we drove down to Skien, a small town in the same general area as Larvik, my bandmates’ hometown, etc. South of Oslo a ways. We made very good time so at one point we stopped for waffles (a very Norwegian thing—and you should eat them with your hands, I got weird looks using cutlery) and coffee and some little cabin café overlooking a pond. Eventually we pulled into Skien and found the club, which is a cave under a brewery. I immediately thought—amazing wine cellar potential here! It’s a thick plaster building and makes for a nice, dank rock club. We spent a LONG time soundchecking—in fact, I was standing by the sound guy, EQing and repatching trying to get things up to speed. Finally we either found a solution or gave up trying, hard to remember now. Our promoter, Kjell, had cooked up some chili con carne in the kitchen, and as skeptical as I’d been at first, it was delicious. Skeptical too was I that Skien had enough inhabitants to actually make doing this show worth it for all parties. We went off to the sister venue of the Katakombene, a little pub that boasted lovely c. 1900 décor, and a little stage, and had a round before the show (me: coffee). Came back and I chased the opening band to get onstage—they ended up doing 5 songs, so we managed to get on before too late. In fact, we had a really decent crowd, the room was plenty full. And, being that we’re always better after a show to warm up, we played an electric set, very charged up—battery, indeed. We were plagued by big whoomping sounds whenever I moved around too much, low end feedback, so I had to choose when that would be worth it, but other than that, it was a great show, and everybody loved it.
After the show, Fredrik and I drove in the van back to Oslo—a two-hour drive—and unloaded the gear. I crashed on Freddie’s couch, and listened to the mayhem of very drunk Norwegians stumbling out of the bars that close at 4.
Up at 7.45 the next morning, I took in one of my favorite pleasures—being up on a crisp fall day, end being the sole recipient of morning sun. There wasn’t a sole on the streets as I walked to the train station, and it was just a glorious morning. Even a tennis fan like me couldn’t help but think of this as college football weather.
Back in Paris, the sun was out and it was much warmer, the trees barely turning yellow around here—in Norway they were in full autumnal scarlet. We three went to the park, and dinner included that winter classic, os a moelle—bones full of Indian butter.
Last night I went to see Stevie Wonder at the Bercy. I went out of a sense of can’t-miss-this duty; I had seen him do a rather businesslike medley of hits on the Live 8 DVD, and was worried that it was going to be a gooey cheese fest.
Let me tell you, when Stevie came onstage, and the place (sold out, so I guess since it was a seated floor it was about 10,000 people) erupted, all expectations went out the window. His opening number was a jam, with SW on chromatic harmonica, on Miles’ “All Blues”. An esoteric choice that really set the tone for the evening. It was his first tour of Europe in over a decade, and he mentioned that it was an emotional night for him, since Paris was the first place overseas he performed in, accompanied by his recently deceased mom. At one point, after an impassioned vocal run, he had tears streaming down his face. “Knocks Me Off My Feet” was like song number 4 in the set! With the formidable Nathan Watts on bass/keyboard bass, the band had a solid center, and no doubt Stevie rocked it, playing a real Clavinet (with just a Boss auto wah for ‘Higher Ground’), a real piano, and a digital keyboard that was generally set to a kind of vintage electric piano sound, a bit sharper than a Rhodes, but not crunchy like a Wurli. But it worked. At one point, he played a magnificent run, an octave apart, but on two different keyboards, right hand effortlessly following the left at, erm, blinding speed.
But it’s Stevie’s voice that is his most magnificent instrument. We hear the pyrotechnics and technical command of say, Mariah Carey, or some other soul diva, and here comes 58-year-old Stevie Wonder, who has all of their technical prowess, plus the gospel euphoria of an Al Green, and the playfulness of an Andre 3000. His voice is perhaps even more flexible then when he was young—his top end is still pure, his low end still growls, and he just…it’s a cliché to say, put the soul he puts into each performance is at a depth that modern contenders just don’t seem to have developed yet…his heart is open, he’s not posing, he’s just giving it to you, and he has so much to give.
I tried singing along, but most of the night I had a huge lump in my throat, formed of joy, and gratitude that such a man exists…I hope there are more like him. We need him.
Not to mention he provided a gospel-infused endorsement—nay, plea—for Obama. France seemed to agree with him.
Note: Stevie brought up a guest, a fantastic harmonica player, and they jammed together, it was brilliant--who was he? I couldn't understand his name. Fabrice Yanne? He was a smooth dressed guy, complexion and hair reminded me a bit of Smokey Robinson, a bit. Healthy and energetic. Any ideas? email me....
Love
KS
Paris
