I AM DAMO SUZUKI

Today I embark on a month-long tour of Europe with one of my favorite musicians, Micah Blue Smaldone of Portland Maine.
We start in Brussels and end in Athens. I plan on surviving this one. My personal assistant, Annapurna, worked some protective magic prior to my departure so I feel fairly confident that I will not only survive, but I will be incredibly wealthy and even more handsome by the end of this tour.
After a 6 hour layover in Philly, I will fly to Brussels at 9pm and will arrive jet-lagged and half insane at 10am. I'm still not sure where I'm staying tonight. The first gig isn't until tuesday. I'm back to teenage-runaway mode. I will probably sleep in an a pigeon shit-drenched gutter where I will be abducted and have my organs harvested and sold to feed someone's opium habit... That's what they do to yank vagrants, right?I suppose I'll figure it out.
For the time being, I'm crammed in a little metal coffin that serves as phone booth in the airport in Manchester, New Hampshire. New Hampshire is the Florida of New England. I don't see much of it, though. All I see is airport.
My week-long anxiety attack has ended. The chips have fallen and I'm no longer concerned. I haven't slept. I had set aside all of yesterday to pack, rehearse and generally get my shit together and instead spent the entire day fucking around. I ended up having to stay up all night attempting to pack after doing about 50 bong hits in the basement of AS220 after the Made in Mexico set (which fucking killed). It didn't go very well at first, but I took some sudafed and drank 5 cups of coffee and it all came together. My apartment looked like a hyena cage, but I managed to get it spruced up enough that I won't want to put a bullet in my head when I come home.
But first I have to backtrack:
I played in the Providence version of The Damo Suzuki Network (from Can) on Friday. I've been a huge Can fan for about 20 years, so it was a pretty big thrill. Damo travels from city to city picking up a different band of improvising musicians in each town. In Providence, he had half of the Eyesores and half of Xerxes: Josh Kretzman and Matt McLaren on drum kits , Dave 'Manbeard' Lifrieri on guitar and bass, Frank Difficult on electronics, Jason McGill on saxophone and brake drums and yours truly on accordion and bass. We had spent some time preparing and we ended up sounding pretty damn good, if I don't say so myself.
I half expected Damo to have some instructions for us, so when I got a phone call from Frank Difficult telling me that we were meeting with Mr. Suzuki in the basement of AS220 (I've been spending altogether too much time in the AS220 basement) I went in ready to be given the holy orders. When I reached the top of the stairs I was hit by a wall of weed. I wasn't surprised. I found my fellow "sound carriers" sitting in a circle with Damo looking nervous. I was late for the meeting so I immediately sat next to Damo and asked him what the game plan was. He blew out a plume of smoke, paused thoughtfully, and said "No concept." The man is not terribly precious about what he does. That was fine with me. Concept is constipation. Intuition is where it's at. Just fucking play.
And we did.
When he started singing, I realized why he didn't need to give us any direction. The man drives the bus like a hell-bound drum corps using his voice alone and we did our best to keep up. He followed every twist and turn in the music effortlessly growling and intoning, changing the character of his voice for each little mood we set up and leading on a few of his own strange ecstatic tangents. The audience slowly went into a Shaker-like trance state and began to vibrate in a vaguely autistic fashion. I played accordion for half of the show and switched to electric bass for the second half. We had the bass running through 2 amps so it was thunderous. I felt powerful and very manly (I really need to start a metal band when I get home and really get this midlife crisis underway). The set ended after an intense 45 minutes with Damo finally breaking his trance, drenched in sweat. He wandered through the audience shaking everyone's hand, while we tried to recover from what just happened. It was one of the most terrifying experience I've ever had on stage and one of the best. I'm still processing it.
I'm severely under-rehearsed for this tour. I'm not sure how I'm going to do this. I'm trying to coordinate accordion, jawharps, a loop pedal a kick drum and my miserable failing voice. I'm just not sure if it's gonna go. My stupid scattered brain has been running tight little rat circles around itself for weeks and I just simply didn't get it together. I started smoking again. I'm already up to a pack a day and my voice sounds like a slightly huskier Katherine Hepburn. I'm going to have to slow down a bit or I'll be sick and useless before I even make France. Micah's going to back me on 12 string for a few numbers, so at least those will be good. I'll figure it out. Something will happen. It always does.
I'm just waiting now. Feeling exhausted, but fairly calm for the first time in weeks. I'm leaving my jobs, my parking tickets, my vast and many girl problems and all the other day to day bullshit behind. Things are simple on tour. There is a mission and very little time for rumination. But, that's still 48 hours away. Now I'm being treated like a criminal and being moved like cattle through a string of airports. Just another asshole on the bus.