I spent days chilling at my dad’s place in New Canaan and watching torrential rains fall on Connecticut...occasionally the clouds took a coffee break and I was able to get my carcass on the tennis court for the first time in a year. Most of the time I was catching up on emails, having dinner with my dad, his family and friends, and enjoying some down time at home.
NEW YORK, 6/16
I zipped in to the city for a brief guerilla appearance at the
140 characters conference--I described it as an “ad hoc emergency council of elder geeks” (not that the attendees were old but they reign high in the Olympus of tech eggheads) to muse, debate and articulate the impact of Twitter and it’s short message universe. It was put together by Jeff Pulver, one of the developers of VOIP, and had Wyclef Jean, the Today Show’s Ann Curry, and many many more people speaking from their different business and personal perspectives. My role their was a little unclear, I called myself a a ‘palate cleanser and right brain stimulator’. Basically as the attendees returned to the theatre after lunch break, I played a couple of songs and told a couple of jokes, and that was that. But, the panel that preceded lunch, on Twitter’s impact on newsmedia, was quite fascinating. I really enjoyed Ms. Curry’s passion, integrity and her ability to articulate it. Our brief conversation afterwards was remarkable because of her ability to radiate that passion and inspire you to share it and take it on.
On Wednesday I was in the city that evening to check out Loudon Wainwright III’s free show in Madison Square Park--just down the street from the Gramercy Theatre, so, when I found I was there with time to spare, I returned to the Live Bait Lounge for more shrimp cocktail and oysters. The Ipod providing music was stuck in the ‘B’s so the Beatles, Beach Boys, and...Big Star were playing over and over. Reminded me that BStar is long overdue for a full length NYC appearance--we did the Little Steven Underground Garage show in 2004, but that was only 3 songs. We haven’t done a headlining show since the 90s. Big Star seems to be bubbling up in coolness again now in the US...on a morning talk show to promote ‘Year One’ Jack Black and Michael Cera spontaneously start singing ‘Ballad of El Goodo’...and evidently ‘Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist’ opens with a Chris Bell song. Vanessa Paradis was covering ‘El Goodo’ on her last tour, too. So maybe we can play Paris sometime?
I watched LWIII (has he ever played with Bob Log III?) for an hour or so. He had sardonic songs about the idea of Heaven as place to eat, drink, snort, smoke and screw with impunity; his grandad (No. 1 in the series) and more. About 1000 people were sprawled out on the lawn to watch. 9 songs in to the set I walked over to Madison Square Garden (which despite the names are not very close together) and checked out Earth Wind & Fire who were...well, on fire! They sounded totally vintage and played hit after hit of course. It was a weird co-bill with Chicago, where the two bands play together in a big jam, then EWF did 50 minutes on their own (the part I saw) then Chicago did a set of similar length, then another big love-fest at the end. I liked the fact that I saw 45 minutes of focused funk intensity and before long was on the train back to New Canaan.
BROOKLYN, 6/18
My tennis plans were washed out. It rained like vengeance, like a curse put on humanity by wronged and thirsty trees. Like the severed jugular of some clear-vesseled beast. I don’t have the stats handy but I’ve heard it’s rained some 28 of the last 30 days in and around NY. So, I loaded what I needed for the weekend into a town car and headed for Brooklyn. The rain had softened the ground enough to let a heavy tree break loose from the earth and fall onto the highway, so we had to dodge to an alternate route. Pulling up to Littlefield, a sustainable artspace in Gowanus, there was nothing to see, not even the street number, and the driver and I missed it. After circling and calling I had Caroline, the booker, out and waving us down. I know Caroline from when she worked for REM’s promoter in Australia 4 years ago, specifically taking care of Bright Eyes, our support for the tour. She tracked me down after my set with Robyn the previous week and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, in the race to get Littlefield on the map. It’s only been open for a month, and most of the locals still don’t know it yet. It’s a great space, tho, and I am sure they will develop a clientele over time. Now, the rain, the short notice, the lack of familiarty, and probably Andrew Bird’s Radio City show made for quite a series of obstacles to overcome but I did get some people out. The bar is in a separate room from the concrete-floored showroom. So my quiet show was eerily quiet, people sat on the floor and took it in. There were photographers there who were pinging me with flash shots every two seconds which was kinda weird but I do love attention, and it had a weird effect of breaking the ice--my show is so intimate that it’s kind of awkward, and with a new audience especially it’s very much like a high-school backseat grope--there isn’t an established checklist of procedures to get us from awkward silence to harmonious lovemakin’. So, I could play off the flashbulbs and put the audience’s attention on other aspects of the room than me, and the reverence is downplayed a bit. I played many ‘new’ (post soft commands) songs and lived up to my promise to play a couple of hours, and people were truly floored.
On Friday I flew to Chicago, and started getting calls that the Posies were not going to be happily reunited that evening--Matt’s flight from Austin and Jon’s connecting flight from St. Louis were canceled due to weather. My flight from LaGuardia’s Marine Terminal was just fine, if a bit bumpy. The Marine Terminal as it sounds was built for the old ‘clipper ship’ seaplanes of the 1930s. Most of the building as you use it is bland modern non-architecture. But the main rotunda of the terminal, off to the side, is a fabulous WPA structure with a similar kind of vibe as Grand Central. But it’s quite compact. Built for times when travel was the rare haunt of the privileged, it has just one small bathroom for each sex. Not that the modern terminal offers much more. I liked that they were selling Clear passes just the week before the company that offers the service went out of business.
Of course there was nothing to eat on the flight, not even for sale, and as we sat on the ground for awhile I couldn’t take and ate my sandwich, balancing the plastic container on my already boxed-in knees. I had been lucky to ask about what was available and to grab something from the limited--and expensive--selection in the waiting area.
I arrived to Chicago Midway, and claimed my gear, and cabbed to our friend Vince’s place. I had a panoramic view of Chicago as we basically skirted the downtown, and saw the weather attacking it from all sides--lashing wind, snaking lightning, and whipping, bullet-like rain. It had, however, calmed down substantially by the time I got settled and decided to go out. In fact, as there were no cabs in Vince’s neighborhood, I thought about walking all the way to the Double Door, about 4 miles. It got boring after awhile tho, and I flagged a cab for the rest. I soon found Darius there--and as soon as I said hi this girl in a prom dress chatted me up about how humanity needs to move to other planets etc etc. she seemed smart enough, and she was young and pretty, but mystifyingly driven to make sure I never had time to respond. Was it a pickup? I couldn’t tell. And I certainly wasn’t going to find out. We were all there to see X, with Billy Zoom in the lineup it was a first for me (The Posies played a couple of shows with the
Tony Gilkyson lineup in the early 90s). They sounded amazing, but little did I know they would sound even better the next night. This was night #2 of a three-night stand at the Double Door (where the Posies had a near death experience in our two night stand in 2001 and a decent inning in 2005). I was tired, tho, and headed back before the show was over, just staying up late enough to beet
CHICAGO, 6/20
Matt and Jon arrived early in the morning. Matt managed to get on a flight at about 4am out of San Antonio and Jon was diverted to Minneapolis--he even played in a hootenanny that night. When I got back to Vince’s place he was still at the X show (Darius stayed with friends from hight school). I had the place to myself, and could have grabbed one of the beds upstairs in the attic/office. But I was too scared to go up there in the dark! I fell asleep on the couch in the front room. In the morning I was up early and Matt came in while I was pretty much starting my day. I went out and looked for sustenance. Vince’s neighborhood is a traditional Polish neighborhood--in most shops people speak Polish to each other, even the younger ones. There are a few Mexican/Ecuadorian etc restaurants and businesses. But the Polish community is very much dominant here. It’s old, working class, and yuppie free. So, no soy latte’s to be found. I did find a Polish bakery and enjoyed an apricot jelly doughnut. But no coffee to be had. I ended up in a Mexican bakery and had a very large cup of coffee that was a ‘chico’ so I had to wonder what a ‘grande’ would be like. I found out that in Mexican Spanish, a croissant is a ‘bigote’ (moustache). I thought that was clever and made the idea of eating one ever more amusing. Most intimidating item: a cone, basically of pie crust, laying on its side and filled with oozing, weeping custard. Knife and fork? Hands? How would you approach it? I was proud we conducted our entire transaction in Spanish, and in fact they made quite a fine sugar cookie.
While I was scouting the nieghborhood, I found a lot where one of the typical buildings--old, brick, square, not more than two or three stories--had once stood. There was concrete covering all of the lot--the light sandy kind, like around my grandparents’ swimming pool. In fact, the place had become a swimming pool. The perfect rectangle of the foundation had filled with water. Only one piece of the actual building remained--a door, floating now in the water that had filled up the rectangle to a depth of a foot or two. A few scraggly weeds had erupted from a collection of rubble that filled out one corner. On the floating door, there was a mating pair of mallards and one scrappy duckling. The tallest weeds had attracted the attention of enormous dragonflies.
Photo from my phone...made just before a local came up and delivered an anti-arab tirade since the 'arabs on the corner' were 'not treating the ducks right'. Then an old man in a green suitjacket and a cowboy hat walked by with a stuffed lion...
Well, I came back from my breakfast run, sweating. Having no other clothes, I was dressed for the show--long sleeve shirt, tie. The evidence of yesterday’s storm was completely obliterated and it was now about 85 degrees. I built up my strenght and convinced Matt to go out with me to look for more eats, for lunch. I had spotted the small supermarket with the giant deli counter earlier, offering sausages in a remarkable variety of sizes, shapes and colors--from cadaverous grey to deep purple. Now, I thought it was funny that this place was next door to a pet store, and I hope you do too. I mean, surely there must be some two-way trade on leftover, expired stock. America recycles! Except this store, too was a little slice of Poland. You could get Polish magazines, DVDs, and even bottled water, which was exactly as cheap if not cheaper than Dasani or some other American product. Because we can’t read Polish and didn’t pay attention, Matt & I ended up buying water that was strawberry flavored. But also...smoked kielbasa, enormous blood sausage with chunks of tongue, smoked pork ribs, and other wonderful meat treats. A little more than we needed for lunch, but it wasn’t expensive.
Vince had warned me that calling a cab to his place would take a long time, and it took even longer than his estimate--so we arrived to the grounds of the Taste of Randolph St. Festival a little later than our 4pm get in. But the band preceding us was still in full swing, and Darius had already arrived and sorted out the backline. We got settled and I started tour managing--making sure we got the French white wine we had been promised, and more importantly...making sure there was bottled water in our trailer. It was still very hot out even tho the sun had done its worst. When the band before us finished, we went into action but it was such a smooth set up that we had time to kill even after setting up, taping everything down, setting our monitor levels, etc. The crew was very good. I had time to indulge my pre-show need to pee every 2 minutes. And then the Poetry Man, who writes poems about bands right before they go on and reads them as an introduction, did his poetry thing before us. Unfortunately, he was on Jon’s mic and I had earplugs in and couldn’t really hear him.
So, we took off in the hot sun, and did our Frosting on the Beater show. And you know, we were really good. It’s hard to rock in the daylight. Sound just doesn’t travel as far as it does in the suggestive dark. I hit plenty of weird notes and I was beaten down by the heat but it didn’t matter. We pushed it and played with some seriously unrehearsed fire, giving back what was being dumped on us from above, heat and light. I saw familiar faces in the crowd and just lots of people singing along. Awesome. I broke a string and changed it all in the first verse of “Lights Out” and didn’t break a sweat. Darius had some things fall apart due to heavy rockin’ and used the guitar/organ breakdown in ‘Burn & Shine’ to repair them. We were quick on our feet and played with passion and a kind of elephantine grace. Yes, it’s possible. After our set Matt had agreed to help get my stuff offstage and Jon & I jumped down to sell merch on the pavement.
From that point, we were free to enjoy the rest of the day/night which was truly and epic night of music: there was our show, in which we shared a bill with Urge Overkill and Tinted Windows; there was the X show at the Double Door; there was the Lemonheads show at the Abbey Pub; the Church and Adam Franklin at the House of Blues; and Wooden Birds at Schuba’s. All friends, in a way. And we saw almost all of them. And many of them saw us-- I was pleased to find John Doe backstage at the festival saying wonderful things about our set. Evan Dando was there too but in a rather...otherworldly state. John from Starling Electric drove from Ann Arbor to see the show. And so on. We got a big time shout out from the Urge, who were on fire and have a great new lineup. Tinted Windows were quite cool too, it’s like you’ve heard it all before but that’s also what makes it great--it’s a tribute band in many ways, but the quality is extremely high.
About halfway into TW’s set Jon & I hopped cab to the House of Blues where the Church were in encore mood. We got to hang backstage with Adam Franklin for a bit, and spent some time with Stephen from Second Motion, the Disciplines’ label, while he worked the merch table. It was amazing that everywhere we went that night, people recognized us. Chicago is really our town. We cabbed to The Double Door and watched X, all four Posies, from the soundboard. And they were even better than the night before, and played the songs I missed from Friday--White Girl, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts...etc. They were just astonishingly good and the benevolence of John Doe makes me like them even more. After the show we spent some time in the creepy basement of the Double Door and I had a great chat with D.J. Bonebreak. Note: they should really consider using the Double Door’s basement as the set of the next installment of the ‘Saw’ franchise.
So, the Posies, Vince, Ed from Urge and mrs. Ed, aka Beth, who has become something of a superstar in the burlesque/burlesque fashion world, piled into Vince’s van (it should be noted that Jon & I each had a guitar plus a bag with pedals and merch to carry to all of these different places), the van itself being from slasher film central casting, and headed to the Abbey Pub which is a long way from Tipperary. There we watched the Lemonheads who were very very strange. If Evan was trying his best, then his best days are currently on suspension. If he was phoning it in, then he should retire. His drummer was really good, and the two teenager who play guitar and bass wouldn’t even *look* at him. Other then the obvious references to blood additives, I’ve never seen *less* chemistry on stage. It just wasn’t on. They looked like they were paying a debt, not playing a show. Matt was starting to fall over, speaking of cooked geese. It was time to go. We went back to Vince’s and I nodded in and out of ‘New York Doll’ the biodoc on the late Killer Kane. It was a great film and I really wanted to get into it but look at my day--I was spent.
On Sunday, I was up before everyone else. I helped myself to the rest of my blood sausage and cabbed it to Midway. Despite my delayed flight I made it to LaGuardia just a few minutes late and my dad was soon there to pick me up. We drove into New Canaan and as sure Mussolini’s trains the rain came crashing down again. But we had a lovely father’s day dinner and after I had drained the house of dessert wine my half brother Scott, his g.f. Sam and I got in a town car and drove to Hoboken, where I crashed on his couch.
Monday morning I was picked up by Tony Shanahan, my lovely friend who plays bass for Patti Smith, and is a major part of my album Touched. He and Emery Dobyns have a studio in Weehawken (next door to Hoboken). Emery is a gentle and modest man who makes incredible records--Antony & the Johnsons, Noah & the Whale, and now--Strings & the Angel. Well, I was guesting on recordings for Tara Angell. Tony & Tara go way back and he plays with her on occasion.
Originally, I was coming over for one Posies show in Brooklyn. That became two when we added the NYC show the next day. From there I was planning on going to Nashville and producing an artist there, and playing a show or two while I was in town. I don’t know if I witnessed a breakdown or if one had already occurred and was just well masked at first but it soon became apparent that my potential client was not going to come thru and was in the midst of some kind of crisis. The plane tix from NY to Nashville were never bought, no deposit was sent in, but it was always ‘just about to happen’. Well, I had made my return to Paris two weeks after my arrival to accomodate the session. When it didn’t come thru I tried to make the best of it, and in fact, this trip was full of rewards that I wouldn’t have been able to reap, and all in my best interests--the NY solo shows, the Chicago Posies show, getting to see all those great bands. And I got to spend some time with my dad, which of course is something that has no price tag. Now, the client finally admitted the session wasn’t going to happen some time ago, sometime in May. Travel was purchased. The calendar started to fill up with these new activities, but the days after Chicago remained open.
Tara Angell made a record for Rykodisc around the time that my solo album and the Posies album were released. I picked up a copy from our Swedish distributor when we came thru town at one point and really enjoyed it. And one day, I received an mp3 in my webmail inbox, from Tara herself. A demo, with not much explanation. I liked it and asked her to send me more as she wrote more. And now and then I got some more. In recent months, the frequency has been increasing--and so has the quality. Seemed like a record was soon to be made. I really wanted to be involved, but there wasn’t a budget to hire me at my normal rate. And normally I might have to pass because of budget concerns. I gotta go with the stuff that pays over the stuff that doesn’t, unless it’s *really* exceptional. However, Tara’s stuff is. It was worth it to me to be involved simply because I detected a great record in the making. So, with days free on the calendar, I wrote her with a challenge--find the studio, and my services to whatever end she needed--playing, writing, engineering--would be free. I figured I should at least be productive and here was a chance to give back a little generosity. And when she arranged for us to work with Tony and Emery--well, i knew it would be a great meeting of musical heads and the hang would be ample reward. And in two days we did 4 amazing tracks. Some adapted from her Garageband demos, some done from scratch. Emery is a minimalist drummer but somehow hits everything that needs to be there. Most of the drum sound is a Wunder Audio mic just out in the middle of the room and it sounds incredible. I also loved singing on this mic. Over the course of the days I sang, played guitar, and some keyboards. Results: fabulous.
After the second day we went for a celebratory drink as Emery has a really big gig coming up. Not only that, but Noah & the Whale are on Radio 1 so he has plenty to be happy about. He’s one of those wonderful people who treat every project with the same enthusiasm, are never negative or dismissively opinionated. A reminder that the truly great--think Rafa--are humble, and stick with the important stuff. I can think of a few people who are less impressive, crying over the fact they didn’t get handed the right statuette at the right time, and telling everyone who can’t get away how great they are.
I spent my last night in the US at the Renaissance Inn by Newark airport. I chose it not only for its proximity and free shuttle but because it had a swimming pool. I tried to watch American TV and get all excited about the hotel experience, but the programming is so awful I turned it off after 5 minutes. Up in the morning I had a swim and did some excercises, and then had a photo shoot with Jen Maler, who was at the Posies show and offered to do some work. I didn’t have my best clothes to work with, being the end of the travel, but I just tried to be my natural self and see if we got the goods by chance. One thing, tho, is when we were done it was time to hop the shuttle to the airport and I totally forgot to take out my contacts until long after my bag was checked. So, I still have them in. No place to buy contact lens stuff after security either. You can buy a toenail clipper, but not a lens case.
As usual, Lufthansa has horrible movies. Goodnight!
Love
KS
Lufthansa flight 403 to Frankfurt
