We left Zagreb two days ago. The train brought us over battle-scarred farmlands and shuddered to a halt at the creepy and desolate station at Knin. Knin was one of the key cities during the Balkan wars of the 90’s. Everyone there has felt the effects. There have been a lot of improvements, but the tension is still palpable. People we met in Zagreb told us that Knin would be strange. We shrugged it off at the time, but as soon as we got off the train, we felt it.
Yug, the owner of the A3 Club picked us up at the station. He was a friendly, energetic sort of guy. Yug brought us to the club and when we entered the club a group of teenage girls cheered. It was a good sign, but I couldn’t help but feel that we were going to disappoint them. The A3 looked a bit like an army tent from the outside, but it was large and warm inside. It was populated by a couple of groups of girls in their teens and twenties, a few musician-looking boys and a lot of guys in their 30s who looked like they could rip our heads off with very little effort. The girls were smiling and giggly and the guys were drunk, loud and surly. This could go either way, I thought.
We ate pizza with the soundman and his Canadian girlfriend. The soundman was a microtonal musician and we had a long conversation about Harry Partch. His girlfriend helped translate some of the more subtle conversation points. Then I wandered around trying to be invisible. I was nervous. It was a nice place, but the vibes were strange. I couldn’t make sense of it. Knin was a very small town, pop 11,000 or so, and everyone came to the A3 to hang out. I could feel eyes on me. We were the first American musicians to play at the club, and the room was conflicted.
I played first. During my usual opener, “St. James Infirmary”, there was a lot of talking. I tried to kick it into high gear, but the PA seemed to have lost some of the bass that it seemed to have had during soundcheck. The sound was tinny and there was a lot of feedback.. I tried to incorporate the screeching feedback into the song, but it was difficult. There was a shocking roar of applause at the end of the tune, but the loud talk continued into the set. As things went on, I started to realize that the girls and musician types were really into my stuff, but the thuggish older dudes in the back did not seem as enthused. I started noticing that there were a few derogatory sounding comments coming from the group of men in the back after each song. I finished up and packed everything quickly.
Micah fared slightly worse. Most of the girls had left by the time he played, save for a small group at the front, who hung on his every note and word. Micah played a fairly quiet set and the men got louder. I heard a few jeers in English that confirmed my suspicions. I watched his set sitting on the floor under a counter and people kept bumping into my legs. When any of the burlier types walked into me they looked down threateningly. My paranoia raged out of control. Things were starting look potentially ugly. Micah finished and the men in the back insisted that Micah drink with them, which he obliged. I stayed near the stage trying to avoid making eye contact with anyone. I watched a couple of pretty young girls dance wildly while Nirvana, The Pixies and other music from my long lost youth poured out of the speakers. It was oddly comforting to watch them. Nostalgia whirled through my brain and I got lost in it.
While I was milling about, a short beefy guy in blue (European) football jacket came up to me and bummed a cigarette. I offered him a Drum and he told me to roll it for him. He lit the cigarette and it began…“Your music…” he said, “is…how you say…very, very boring…very boring and very bad.” I told him that I appreciated his honesty and that he was not alone in his opinion, but that I did not care. I am firm in my convictions. My music is for me. Anyone wants to come along for the ride is more than welcome. “This is only my opinion, of course.” he said. “I know.” I said. I had hoped that this was the end of the conversation, but he would not let up. He went on a half hour long tirade about how bad my music was and how I wasn‘t fooling anyone. He also said that all American rock and roll bands were shit and that the only good rock bands came from Germany. I wanted to argue that the Americans invented rock n‘ roll, but I was clearly talking to a wall. I didn’t bother defending myself or my much maligned homeland. It was all too much and I was in no mood. I could laugh off a few comments, but he kept bludgeoning me and I started to feel pretty low. Maybe he was right. Maybe I am a fraud. But there are MUCH bigger frauds who are far more successful than I will ever be. At least I have some character and style. I eventually came to the conclusion that the guy was an idiot, but I still felt lousy. I can only take so much criticism, even if it’s coming from someone with whom I clearly do not share a worldview. After a while, he mercifully left and I went to look for Micah.
Micah was at the bar surrounded by the men from the back tables. He looked a bit uncomfortable, but he appeared to be having a good time. They called me over to join them and I did. They actually turned out to be pretty cool guys. A few of them were Serbs and a few were Croatian, and one was a Muslim, they appeared to be a pretty tight group. They good naturedly ribbed each other. “LOUSY SERBIAN BASTARD!” “FUCK YOU, CROATIAN DOG!” they shouted at each other, “THE ONE THING WE HAVE IN COMMON IS THAT WE HATE THE FUCKING MUSLIMS!”. The Muslim shouted something back and they all laughed uproariously. The Serb slapped the Croat in the back of the head while he was sipping his beer and the Croat slammed him into the wall. This pantomime was all for our benefit. They were fucking with us. I didn’t detect any real malice, though. They seemed to like us. They wanted to hang out despite their suspicions about us. We talked politics and the war for a while. Ten or fifteen years ago they would have been shooting at each other. Things were on the mend, but the tensions were not quite dead. The war had clearly fucked with these people. “You do not understand and you cannot understand what we have been through.” the Croatian guy said glaring intently into my eyes. He was right. We’ve barely had a taste and we couldn’t take it. 9/11 went down and the entire nation curled into fetal position and cried for mommy. It was two buildings and a few thousand dead, scarcely a scratch, compared to what went down in the Balkans. Imagine having half your country reduced to rubble over and over again for years. It really isn’t fathomable.
While all this was happening, Micah got cornered by the guy in the blue football jacket. He didn’t bother him about his music, but he talked some shitty pro-Bush politics and Micah couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Yug told me that we could leave to go to the apartment where were staying anytime we wanted. NOW seemed like a good idea to me. I was exhausted. I went to rescue Micah just as the guy was accusing him of being a hippie. “I am a hippie.” Micah told him and we left, feeling drained and feeling like pussies.
When I closed my eyes to go to sleep, a rush of images hit me in a spiraling tornado. It was like I was staring directly into the ancestral memory of all human history. The images were unfamiliar and they ran like rapid fire. I used to experience this sort of thing a lot when I was a child. Every time the lights went out, I hallucinated feverishly. This went on until I was 9 or 10 years old, then it was gone. It kicks in every so often when I’m sick. I’m not sure what triggered this round. Knin is a haunted city. I like to think that I was tuning into some ghostly radio transmission. Message received…can I get a translator?
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Saturday, November 24, 2007
UNLEASHED IN THE EAST
So far, the Balkans have been a blast. I have emerged from my coma of intestinal death and I am feeling bulletproof. We played a in Zagreb, Croatia at a place called Club Spunk. It was small pub in a strip mall just below the new colossal and ultra-modern national library. The club ordered us spaghetti for dinner which I ate at a table in the middle of the bar. The takeout place did not provide us forks, so we had to use plastic spoons. The results were disastrous. I made several unsuccessful attempts to twirl the spaghetti around the spoon and the people at the surrounding tables erupted with laughter. I apparently already had an audience. This was the pre-show. Micah played first and his set was again drowned out by the din of the bar. To counteract the racket, the soundman turned his guitar channel up to the max. The result sounded something like Merzbow and Mississippi John Hurt. He finished with a cover of “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World”. A ballsy move, knowing the history. I was determined to rise above the din tonight. I talked loud and I played loud. I cracked a few jokes. I played a very short set. The handheld cassette recorder tunes seemed to really floor them. It worked. I had a great time.
I joined a young Tom Waits fanatic named Vanja after the set and we riffed about music and books for close to an hour. He wanted us to go out clubbing with him and his lady friends, but we had to get to the hostel we were staying at by 1 am or we would be locked out. I had no interest in being locked out of the hostel. I remember being in Marseille in 96’ with my ex-wife and we had gotten drunk and missed the curfew at our hotel. We ended up having to sleep in the doorway. We got harassed by drunken Algerians and broke coke addicts all night long. It sucked. Never again.
We found the hostel and slept. In the morning, there was no coffee at the hostel so I went to a bar down the street. There was a slatternly barmaid and four old men, all piss-drunk at 10 in the morning. Croatian gangsta-rap blared from the speakers. No one seemed to notice or care about the music or the dirty half-awake American who had invaded their ranks. Over the course of my four wake-up espressos, the music moved from rap to bombastic nationalistic pop to heavy metal. I was curious to see where it would go next, but it was time to go.
We got to the Zagreb train station and found a ticket line that would have given Stalin a hard-on. The line was packed to the gills with scowling, irritable commuters. I parked by an ashtray in the hallway while Micah braved the enormous serpentine queue. I sat and smoked while discreetly slathering deodorant under the cover of my pea-coat. (even I have standards). A bearded, longhaired homeless man in an odd red vest buzzed me a few times, carefully scoping our bags and equipment. My paranoia kicked into gear and I was certain that he was planning to rob us. I imagined that if he made a move I would have to react. He’d be moving pretty slow if he got my suitcase, but the other stuff was light enough to run with. I went over it several times in my mind and tried to think of the best strategy. I figured a hard elbow to the nose or throat would do the trick, but if he got too far away, the other bags would be left undefended. He probably had an accomplice who would collect the real prize, while he absconded with the decoy. I threw a limb over each bag and stared hard behind my cheap aviators and tried to look menacing. He ignored me and walked past fishing a dirty half eaten croissant out of the garbage. I started to think that I might have overestimated him.
Micah emerged from the ticket room looking spent and confused. He informed me that the only available seats left on our train to Knin were in first class. We though about taking a bus, but first class wasn’t that much more expensive, so we decided to ride in style. Micah went back into the mammoth line and I waited and watched the man in the red vest. Micah eventually returned with the tickets and we went to a restaurant in the station to order some lunch. It was a dingy smoke filled cavern and nothing on the menu looked particularly appetizing. I was about to order some eggs, but Micah got an intestinal intuition and strongly suggested that we eat elsewhere. I didn’t feel like moving, but I had to respect his instinct. I did not feel like spending another 36 hours throwing up, especially without a cushy apartment in which to recuperate. We walked for several blocks and found nothing but bars. We stopped at a newsstand to ask if there was a good restaurant around, but we were waved away by the irritated shopkeeper. I gave up and went back to the station leaving Micah to continue foraging. I tried to find food on the way back, but the hot dog stand with the bored teenage girl inside looked terrifyingly filthy. I ended up buying a prosciutto sandwich from the bakery inside the station and walked back to our designated meeting area: the benches by the ticket office. I took a seat next to a toothless old woman in a sea of dirty bags who was openly scrutinizing a particularly disgusting porno mag with great interest.
I took one bite of the slimy and borderline rancid sandwich and realized that I had made a huge mistake. I thought about throwing the sandwich in the garbage, but I paused to consider the old woman who might be hungry. Now she was studying a page full of disembodied cocks and gaping vaginas all shot with all the love and finesse of a DMV photographer. She had her face buried in it like she was reading a map. She was into the hard stuff and didn’t give a rat’s ass what anyone thought. I felt an odd combination of admiration and nausea as I made the decision to not break her trance. A few minutes later the man in the red vest returned and they began chatting in Croatian. She was the accomplice. I offered him the sandwich to make up for the violent thoughts I had had about him a half hour earlier. He grumbled something in Croatian that could have been “Thank you!” or “Blow it out your ass!” based on his tone, and snatched the sandwich from my hands.
Within a few minutes, The Accomplice and Red Vest were loudly arguing over the contents of a garbage bag and he stormed off cursing at the ceiling, leaving me as her only companion. The parade of stylish and attractive young girls walking by sneered at both of us with equal disgust. Me splayed out with my filthy hair and clothes and she wiping the rancid coffee from a bag she had just dug out of the garbage. I am clearly moving to the wrong end of the social ladder. I need to choose my friends wisely.
The first class seats were a swindle. We had no more legroom than anyone else and we had paid three times as much. Thankfully, there was a smoking car on this train. I read a good chunk of Colin Wilson’s “The Occult” on the ride and was inspired to try my hand at the powers of suggestion. I failed. The attractive blonde-haired girl with high cheekbones on the next car did not come over and talk to me. My concentration was a bit off, I guess. Next time, I’ll remember to burn the sage.
The train to Knin rolled deep into the former battlefields of the Domovinski Rat (Croatian War of Independence) of the early 90’s. Stone farmhouses blown to rubble by Serbian tanks still litter the barren landscape. It would be a terrible place to be under fire. It’s flat and empty: nowhere to hide. This whole region is steeped in War culture. People have been left deranged from it. Skinny androgynous avant-folk musicians from the West are a bit out of place here. The men are men. They are like pit bulls: shorn and muscular, friendly but with the potential to turn on you. More on that later…
I joined a young Tom Waits fanatic named Vanja after the set and we riffed about music and books for close to an hour. He wanted us to go out clubbing with him and his lady friends, but we had to get to the hostel we were staying at by 1 am or we would be locked out. I had no interest in being locked out of the hostel. I remember being in Marseille in 96’ with my ex-wife and we had gotten drunk and missed the curfew at our hotel. We ended up having to sleep in the doorway. We got harassed by drunken Algerians and broke coke addicts all night long. It sucked. Never again.
We found the hostel and slept. In the morning, there was no coffee at the hostel so I went to a bar down the street. There was a slatternly barmaid and four old men, all piss-drunk at 10 in the morning. Croatian gangsta-rap blared from the speakers. No one seemed to notice or care about the music or the dirty half-awake American who had invaded their ranks. Over the course of my four wake-up espressos, the music moved from rap to bombastic nationalistic pop to heavy metal. I was curious to see where it would go next, but it was time to go.
We got to the Zagreb train station and found a ticket line that would have given Stalin a hard-on. The line was packed to the gills with scowling, irritable commuters. I parked by an ashtray in the hallway while Micah braved the enormous serpentine queue. I sat and smoked while discreetly slathering deodorant under the cover of my pea-coat. (even I have standards). A bearded, longhaired homeless man in an odd red vest buzzed me a few times, carefully scoping our bags and equipment. My paranoia kicked into gear and I was certain that he was planning to rob us. I imagined that if he made a move I would have to react. He’d be moving pretty slow if he got my suitcase, but the other stuff was light enough to run with. I went over it several times in my mind and tried to think of the best strategy. I figured a hard elbow to the nose or throat would do the trick, but if he got too far away, the other bags would be left undefended. He probably had an accomplice who would collect the real prize, while he absconded with the decoy. I threw a limb over each bag and stared hard behind my cheap aviators and tried to look menacing. He ignored me and walked past fishing a dirty half eaten croissant out of the garbage. I started to think that I might have overestimated him.
Micah emerged from the ticket room looking spent and confused. He informed me that the only available seats left on our train to Knin were in first class. We though about taking a bus, but first class wasn’t that much more expensive, so we decided to ride in style. Micah went back into the mammoth line and I waited and watched the man in the red vest. Micah eventually returned with the tickets and we went to a restaurant in the station to order some lunch. It was a dingy smoke filled cavern and nothing on the menu looked particularly appetizing. I was about to order some eggs, but Micah got an intestinal intuition and strongly suggested that we eat elsewhere. I didn’t feel like moving, but I had to respect his instinct. I did not feel like spending another 36 hours throwing up, especially without a cushy apartment in which to recuperate. We walked for several blocks and found nothing but bars. We stopped at a newsstand to ask if there was a good restaurant around, but we were waved away by the irritated shopkeeper. I gave up and went back to the station leaving Micah to continue foraging. I tried to find food on the way back, but the hot dog stand with the bored teenage girl inside looked terrifyingly filthy. I ended up buying a prosciutto sandwich from the bakery inside the station and walked back to our designated meeting area: the benches by the ticket office. I took a seat next to a toothless old woman in a sea of dirty bags who was openly scrutinizing a particularly disgusting porno mag with great interest.
I took one bite of the slimy and borderline rancid sandwich and realized that I had made a huge mistake. I thought about throwing the sandwich in the garbage, but I paused to consider the old woman who might be hungry. Now she was studying a page full of disembodied cocks and gaping vaginas all shot with all the love and finesse of a DMV photographer. She had her face buried in it like she was reading a map. She was into the hard stuff and didn’t give a rat’s ass what anyone thought. I felt an odd combination of admiration and nausea as I made the decision to not break her trance. A few minutes later the man in the red vest returned and they began chatting in Croatian. She was the accomplice. I offered him the sandwich to make up for the violent thoughts I had had about him a half hour earlier. He grumbled something in Croatian that could have been “Thank you!” or “Blow it out your ass!” based on his tone, and snatched the sandwich from my hands.
Within a few minutes, The Accomplice and Red Vest were loudly arguing over the contents of a garbage bag and he stormed off cursing at the ceiling, leaving me as her only companion. The parade of stylish and attractive young girls walking by sneered at both of us with equal disgust. Me splayed out with my filthy hair and clothes and she wiping the rancid coffee from a bag she had just dug out of the garbage. I am clearly moving to the wrong end of the social ladder. I need to choose my friends wisely.
The first class seats were a swindle. We had no more legroom than anyone else and we had paid three times as much. Thankfully, there was a smoking car on this train. I read a good chunk of Colin Wilson’s “The Occult” on the ride and was inspired to try my hand at the powers of suggestion. I failed. The attractive blonde-haired girl with high cheekbones on the next car did not come over and talk to me. My concentration was a bit off, I guess. Next time, I’ll remember to burn the sage.
The train to Knin rolled deep into the former battlefields of the Domovinski Rat (Croatian War of Independence) of the early 90’s. Stone farmhouses blown to rubble by Serbian tanks still litter the barren landscape. It would be a terrible place to be under fire. It’s flat and empty: nowhere to hide. This whole region is steeped in War culture. People have been left deranged from it. Skinny androgynous avant-folk musicians from the West are a bit out of place here. The men are men. They are like pit bulls: shorn and muscular, friendly but with the potential to turn on you. More on that later…
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
THROW A SICKIE
I’ve been knocked out for a few days. Food Poisoning…great cascades of acidic vomit have been exploding from my nose and mouth, followed by incredibly painful dry-heaves. I’m holed up in Micah’s friend Jaka’s place in Ljubljana convalescing. I’ve been asleep for the better part of 36 hours, waking occasionally to send incoherent emails and to drink water which immediately comes back up again. I missed my gig last night. I couldn’t move. Feeling better today, though. I choked down some earl grey and watched bad Brit-coms on BBC (Jaka has cable TV). Our gig for tonight fell through, so I have one more night to chill out.
Avoid the ham sandwiches that they sell on the train, people. It’s all too good to be true….
Avoid the ham sandwiches that they sell on the train, people. It’s all too good to be true….
Monday, November 19, 2007
EVIDENTLY CHICKENTOWN
Senigallia proved to be as frustrating as the last few Italian shows. It’s beginning to occur to me that perhaps Italy does not give a rat’s ass about our particular brand of American avant-folk music. Why should they, really? They have their own rich traditions. Maybe my diluted aesthetic is of no use to them. Isn't it enough to have heart? Perhaps not. Bah fungul, to you Mr. Redfearn! The small café had a few people in it at the beginning of my set and they were only moderately noisy and indifferent. By the end, the place was filled to capacity and my set was rendered inaudible by the loud, drunken chatter. My frustration and anger provided some fuel to my fire and I was practically screaming by the time I got to “The Way of All Flesh”, which I have been performing as a duo with my handheld cassette recorder. As is well documented in my last few entries, my energy has been on the ebb for the last few days. It’s been hard to stay enthusiastic. I feed off the energy of the audience. When they don’t give it up, I start crumbling.
Micah played second and he was almost lost completely in the din. I tried to watch his set, but the place was so packed that I ended up milling around outside, chain-smoking and attempting some awkward conversation with Giovanni and Massimo, our profusely apologetic hosts. Afterwards, I couldn’t wait to leave. The crowds are starting to kill me. I have reverted to a agoraphobic state of catatonia these past few days. During the train rides, I’ve been wearing a hat, headphones, sunglasses and hood to try to block out all outside stimulus. The little things are getting to me. Like Bukowski said, it’s the broken shoelaces. There have been a lot of broken shoelaces on this trip.
We eventually were driven to our hotel by our hosts, who were both half in the bag at this point. We all had a few laughs as we attempted to defy the laws of physics, cramming ourselves, our bags and cases into the Massimo’s microscopic Fiat. The cars seem to be getting smaller and smaller at each gig, and our packing routine has become more and more comical by the day. I’m convinced the cars will continue to get smaller with each gig and that there will be lawnmower waiting for us at the train station in Athens. I sat crunched in the back seat with Micah’s guitar case pressing against my jawbone. Micah and I had separate rooms, which we both appreciated. We’ve been getting along pretty well, because we are both pretty comfortable with hours of silence, but a night of space is not necessarily a bad thing.
The next day we got coffee and pizza and took the train to Bologna. It was another hellish over-packed nightmare and I was exhausted by the time we got to Club Locomotif where we would be playing. This was the first large venue of the tour and I had a really nice kick drum with a swift and responsive pedal. I was pretty satisfying to hear myself through a giant PA system. It was positively Wagnerian. I could really the work dynamics in a room like this. We were sharing the bill with a big band from London called Scarlet’s Well which featured members of Heavenly and The Monochrome Set. They were a really nice bunch of folks and they had some interesting tunes and arrangements. I dug.
The show was poorly attended, but the audience was attentive, enthusiastic and refreshingly quiet. Since we were no longer dealing with a cacophonous audience, Micah was able to play some of his subtler material which I had been itching to hear again. I was in pretty good shape, after the previous nights' struggles. I played fairly aggressively, but I was still able to work the dynamics. It was a great show. I sold a few CDS. I had my energy back and I no longer wanted to choke anyone to death with an I-Pod cable.
The promoter drove us to a small bar/underground bookstore where Micah’s friend Egle was working. We would be staying with Egle and his wife Chiara that night. We had a few hours to kill before Egle got off work so we ended up chatting with Chiara and her old flatmate, Mariella about accordions, jawharps, and La Cosa Nostra (who are still a strong presence in Sicily). We were repeatedly cornered by a large and very crazy man named Aldo who claimed that he was a noise musician and that he was institutionalized after telling his psychiatrist that his ex-wife had left him for John Travolta. Aldo kept trying to convince me to buy him drinks, but I really did want to see him drunk on top of everything else, so I politely declined. Aldo joined our table and the conversation veered heavily toward John Travolta for the next few of hours.
When Egle got off work we crammed everything into Mariella’s car (another Fiat) and drove to their flat near the center of Bologna. We stayed up until 4am and there was cake, wine and fajitas. We woke up around 11 to the sounds of moving men bringing a mansion’s worth of furniture and appliances into the small flat. Egle and Chiara had been married in October and it was a Sicilian wedding so there was an enormous amount of gifts. The delivery people came hours earlier than expected and it was pretty overwhelming. Egle and Chiara frantically stumbled around boxes, washing machines and refrigerators which consumed almost every inch of the flat while Micah and I tried to shake off the sleep and get to the train. My malfunctioning rib was still aching, so I decided to take some effervescent anti-inflammatory medication. I also had some effervescent Vitamin C tablets, so I thought “What the hell?” and threw them in together. The result was an angry, hissing, mushroom cloud of foam that spilled all over the table and made a huge mess. I cleaned it up, tossed back the remainder and we headed to the train in yet another Fiat.
We are now on the way to Ljubljana, Slovenia, which will be the first stop of the Balkan leg of the tour. Sun Ra’s “Sun Song” is on my headphones. I haven’t showered in a few days and I pity this poor woman sitting next to me. I am worried about the Balkans, particularly Serbia. We will now be dealing with crumbling infrastructure and corrupt border police. It should be an interesting week. If you don’t hear from me again, I hope that you will remember all the good times we had and not the money I owe you…
Micah played second and he was almost lost completely in the din. I tried to watch his set, but the place was so packed that I ended up milling around outside, chain-smoking and attempting some awkward conversation with Giovanni and Massimo, our profusely apologetic hosts. Afterwards, I couldn’t wait to leave. The crowds are starting to kill me. I have reverted to a agoraphobic state of catatonia these past few days. During the train rides, I’ve been wearing a hat, headphones, sunglasses and hood to try to block out all outside stimulus. The little things are getting to me. Like Bukowski said, it’s the broken shoelaces. There have been a lot of broken shoelaces on this trip.
We eventually were driven to our hotel by our hosts, who were both half in the bag at this point. We all had a few laughs as we attempted to defy the laws of physics, cramming ourselves, our bags and cases into the Massimo’s microscopic Fiat. The cars seem to be getting smaller and smaller at each gig, and our packing routine has become more and more comical by the day. I’m convinced the cars will continue to get smaller with each gig and that there will be lawnmower waiting for us at the train station in Athens. I sat crunched in the back seat with Micah’s guitar case pressing against my jawbone. Micah and I had separate rooms, which we both appreciated. We’ve been getting along pretty well, because we are both pretty comfortable with hours of silence, but a night of space is not necessarily a bad thing.
The next day we got coffee and pizza and took the train to Bologna. It was another hellish over-packed nightmare and I was exhausted by the time we got to Club Locomotif where we would be playing. This was the first large venue of the tour and I had a really nice kick drum with a swift and responsive pedal. I was pretty satisfying to hear myself through a giant PA system. It was positively Wagnerian. I could really the work dynamics in a room like this. We were sharing the bill with a big band from London called Scarlet’s Well which featured members of Heavenly and The Monochrome Set. They were a really nice bunch of folks and they had some interesting tunes and arrangements. I dug.
The show was poorly attended, but the audience was attentive, enthusiastic and refreshingly quiet. Since we were no longer dealing with a cacophonous audience, Micah was able to play some of his subtler material which I had been itching to hear again. I was in pretty good shape, after the previous nights' struggles. I played fairly aggressively, but I was still able to work the dynamics. It was a great show. I sold a few CDS. I had my energy back and I no longer wanted to choke anyone to death with an I-Pod cable.
The promoter drove us to a small bar/underground bookstore where Micah’s friend Egle was working. We would be staying with Egle and his wife Chiara that night. We had a few hours to kill before Egle got off work so we ended up chatting with Chiara and her old flatmate, Mariella about accordions, jawharps, and La Cosa Nostra (who are still a strong presence in Sicily). We were repeatedly cornered by a large and very crazy man named Aldo who claimed that he was a noise musician and that he was institutionalized after telling his psychiatrist that his ex-wife had left him for John Travolta. Aldo kept trying to convince me to buy him drinks, but I really did want to see him drunk on top of everything else, so I politely declined. Aldo joined our table and the conversation veered heavily toward John Travolta for the next few of hours.
When Egle got off work we crammed everything into Mariella’s car (another Fiat) and drove to their flat near the center of Bologna. We stayed up until 4am and there was cake, wine and fajitas. We woke up around 11 to the sounds of moving men bringing a mansion’s worth of furniture and appliances into the small flat. Egle and Chiara had been married in October and it was a Sicilian wedding so there was an enormous amount of gifts. The delivery people came hours earlier than expected and it was pretty overwhelming. Egle and Chiara frantically stumbled around boxes, washing machines and refrigerators which consumed almost every inch of the flat while Micah and I tried to shake off the sleep and get to the train. My malfunctioning rib was still aching, so I decided to take some effervescent anti-inflammatory medication. I also had some effervescent Vitamin C tablets, so I thought “What the hell?” and threw them in together. The result was an angry, hissing, mushroom cloud of foam that spilled all over the table and made a huge mess. I cleaned it up, tossed back the remainder and we headed to the train in yet another Fiat.
We are now on the way to Ljubljana, Slovenia, which will be the first stop of the Balkan leg of the tour. Sun Ra’s “Sun Song” is on my headphones. I haven’t showered in a few days and I pity this poor woman sitting next to me. I am worried about the Balkans, particularly Serbia. We will now be dealing with crumbling infrastructure and corrupt border police. It should be an interesting week. If you don’t hear from me again, I hope that you will remember all the good times we had and not the money I owe you…
Sunday, November 18, 2007
TEENAGE KICKS
I’m in a small crowded café in Senigallia where I will be performing in a few hours. It’s noisy, so I put Can’s “Tago Mago” on the headphones and let the sounds guide my fingers as I drum out this entry. I’ve had several cappuccinos and I am slumped in my chair with my pea coat buttoned to the top and my toaster-cozy hat pulled down over my eyes. The room is filled with young attractive Italians in their 20’s. I am watching a table full of girls with dark almond eyes and huge smiles. The one sitting directly across from me reminds me of my teenage Long Island sweetheart, Michele. It was 1986 and I was sixteen when I met her. She was fifteen, petite with big brown eyes, black clothes, black toenail polish, teased hair and a smile that set my burgeoning high school hormones into a rage. She was a sweet virginal vision and I was deeply smitten. I had met her on a camping trip in Maine one summer. We kept in contact over the next few months while my home life descended into pure chaos. Round about February, my parents tired of my constant whining and explosive temper tantrums and threw me out of the house. I quickly grew bored with surfing couches in the greater Attleboro area and decided that I needed to use this opportunity for a little adventure. I dropped out of school, pan-handled 50 dollars outside of the Cumberland Farms in downtown Mansfield, plunked down 30 dollars in loose change for a bus ticket and was off. A few hours later I was standing in a frantic mob of commuters in Penn Station with 12 dollars in change, my skateboard, my studded leather jacket, my dyed-black spider-plant hair and a ridiculously over-packed duffle bag. I spotted Scott Ian from Anthrax. New York City...holy fucking shit. I stumbled around feeling overwhelmed for a while and eventually found the train to Syosset. Michele and her parents, who were less than thrilled about my sudden arrival into their teenaged daughter’s life, greeted me at the station.
Michele’s dad immediately informed me that I was welcome to visit Michele in their home, but I would have to sleep elsewhere. I ended up the being the scourge of many a concerned Long Island parent for a few weeks. I was relegated to clandestine late-night meetings where I would be secreted away to sleep under beds, in unused spare rooms and even a shed or two. I spent a few entertaining nights with her friends, smoking weed, popping pills, going to hardcore shows and sleeping in cars. The fun only lasted a week and a half and then I was packed off to a runaway shelter by the Syosset police after I got busted trying to sneak into the house one of Michele’s friend’s parents. Syosset’s finest seemed to find my plight amusing as they sat in the station devouring hamburgers, grease dripping down their double chins.
The people at the shelter informed me that I would become a bum if I kept this lifestyle up and that I would be beaten and set on fire by gangs of roving juvenile delinquents. They confiscated the giant hunting knife I had brought with me for “protection” and gave me a bed. Over the next few days, I wandered around looking for a job and tried to find enough change on the sidewalk for a cup of coffee. I ended up being interviewed on the local news about the joys and perils of itinerant teenage-hood with three of my friends from the shelter. The first week went by without a hitch, but then I got my ass booted out for non-compliance. My afternoon makeout sessions with Michele had made me miss curfew three times and they had a three strikes rule. I was sent to a counselor and managed to wrangle a bus ticket home and returned to Mansfield with my tail between my legs. It was my first travel experience on my own, and it proved my lack of survival skills outright. 22 years later, I am slightly more equipped to handle things, but what I lost in teenage melodrama, I have gained in middle-aged ennui, so it’s still a struggle. I recently did a little research and got back in touch with Michele. She is doing well and she‘s still quite fetching.
The gig in Verona was very strange. We stayed with the promoters, a very sweet and accommodating couple in their beautiful apartment which overlooked the river. We had a quick dinner and walked down to the venue. It was called Circolo. It consisted of four rooms, a bar, a game room, a room called “the black box” which served as an art gallery and a middle room where we played. I found a wifi connection and was attempting to write, but this strange dude with an awkward half smile and thick glasses kept hovering around me and trying to look at the screen of my laptop. I had no idea what he wanted, but I could immediately sense that he was someone that I was not in the mood to deal with. I tried to ignore him but he continued to buzz around me like a mosquito. I could tell he wanted something, and I also could tell that it was probably something completely inappropriate to ask from a complete stranger. He finally walked up and shoved an
I-Pod in my face.
“Don’t you have the cord to plug this in?” he asked in a tone that suggested that I had already offered it to him.
“To where?” I said, trying to be patient.
“To your computer?”
(…who the fuck are you and why are you talking to me…)
“No, I don‘t have the cord. I don‘t have an I-Pod.”
(…who the fuck raised you, man? You haven’t even introduced yourself…)
“…but the battery is dead. I want to listen to it on the way home.”
(…I am not even slightly concerned with how entertaining your bike ride home is, you fucking presumptuous asshole. Now leave me alone…)
“Sorry, man, I can’t help you.”
(…go away before I throttle you with my bare hands…)
What the fuck? Even if I did have the cord, I wouldn’t have done it. I didn’t dig his tone and I certainly didn’t want to give him an excuse to hang around. He went away and I avoided eye contact with him for the rest of the night.
Under normal circumstances, this exchange wouldn't have upset me, but there was something about this guy that burned my ass. I had handled myself with politeness and grace, but my patience for this sort of shit was wearing thin and my hostility was becoming palpable. Personal space is a hot commodity for a touring musician and I am beginning to starve for want of it. The place had a strange vibe all night and many of the conversations I had been forced into verged on the surreal.
The adjoining rooms were loud with chatter and the PA had one blown speaker, so we were competing with heavy clamor. The shows in Italy have paid pretty well and the hospitality of our gracious hosts has been top notch, but the actually performances have been frustrating, With the exception of Milano, which was a great show, the audiences have been loud and indifferent. It’s been forcing me to push myself a little more, which I need to do, but it‘s still hard. About 10 people watched my set. My voice was blown by the end. Micah fared about as well. It was not a stellar performance for either of us, but we still sold some merch.
The next day, our hosts brought us on a short tour of the city before we caught our train. We encountered a Roman Coliseum and I wondered how many unlucky traveling musicians were torn apart by lions and hippos there while the bloodthirsty populace shouted and jeered. Some things never change.
We got on the train and we ran into Andre, formerly of the band Herman Dune, and his girlfriend, Clementine. They were touring on a similar circuit. We sat with them and discussed the difficulty of dealing with loud audiences. They had not been faring much better in the past few shows. They got off in Cesena. We got off in Senigallia.
Michele’s dad immediately informed me that I was welcome to visit Michele in their home, but I would have to sleep elsewhere. I ended up the being the scourge of many a concerned Long Island parent for a few weeks. I was relegated to clandestine late-night meetings where I would be secreted away to sleep under beds, in unused spare rooms and even a shed or two. I spent a few entertaining nights with her friends, smoking weed, popping pills, going to hardcore shows and sleeping in cars. The fun only lasted a week and a half and then I was packed off to a runaway shelter by the Syosset police after I got busted trying to sneak into the house one of Michele’s friend’s parents. Syosset’s finest seemed to find my plight amusing as they sat in the station devouring hamburgers, grease dripping down their double chins.
The people at the shelter informed me that I would become a bum if I kept this lifestyle up and that I would be beaten and set on fire by gangs of roving juvenile delinquents. They confiscated the giant hunting knife I had brought with me for “protection” and gave me a bed. Over the next few days, I wandered around looking for a job and tried to find enough change on the sidewalk for a cup of coffee. I ended up being interviewed on the local news about the joys and perils of itinerant teenage-hood with three of my friends from the shelter. The first week went by without a hitch, but then I got my ass booted out for non-compliance. My afternoon makeout sessions with Michele had made me miss curfew three times and they had a three strikes rule. I was sent to a counselor and managed to wrangle a bus ticket home and returned to Mansfield with my tail between my legs. It was my first travel experience on my own, and it proved my lack of survival skills outright. 22 years later, I am slightly more equipped to handle things, but what I lost in teenage melodrama, I have gained in middle-aged ennui, so it’s still a struggle. I recently did a little research and got back in touch with Michele. She is doing well and she‘s still quite fetching.
The gig in Verona was very strange. We stayed with the promoters, a very sweet and accommodating couple in their beautiful apartment which overlooked the river. We had a quick dinner and walked down to the venue. It was called Circolo. It consisted of four rooms, a bar, a game room, a room called “the black box” which served as an art gallery and a middle room where we played. I found a wifi connection and was attempting to write, but this strange dude with an awkward half smile and thick glasses kept hovering around me and trying to look at the screen of my laptop. I had no idea what he wanted, but I could immediately sense that he was someone that I was not in the mood to deal with. I tried to ignore him but he continued to buzz around me like a mosquito. I could tell he wanted something, and I also could tell that it was probably something completely inappropriate to ask from a complete stranger. He finally walked up and shoved an
I-Pod in my face.
“Don’t you have the cord to plug this in?” he asked in a tone that suggested that I had already offered it to him.
“To where?” I said, trying to be patient.
“To your computer?”
(…who the fuck are you and why are you talking to me…)
“No, I don‘t have the cord. I don‘t have an I-Pod.”
(…who the fuck raised you, man? You haven’t even introduced yourself…)
“…but the battery is dead. I want to listen to it on the way home.”
(…I am not even slightly concerned with how entertaining your bike ride home is, you fucking presumptuous asshole. Now leave me alone…)
“Sorry, man, I can’t help you.”
(…go away before I throttle you with my bare hands…)
What the fuck? Even if I did have the cord, I wouldn’t have done it. I didn’t dig his tone and I certainly didn’t want to give him an excuse to hang around. He went away and I avoided eye contact with him for the rest of the night.
Under normal circumstances, this exchange wouldn't have upset me, but there was something about this guy that burned my ass. I had handled myself with politeness and grace, but my patience for this sort of shit was wearing thin and my hostility was becoming palpable. Personal space is a hot commodity for a touring musician and I am beginning to starve for want of it. The place had a strange vibe all night and many of the conversations I had been forced into verged on the surreal.
The adjoining rooms were loud with chatter and the PA had one blown speaker, so we were competing with heavy clamor. The shows in Italy have paid pretty well and the hospitality of our gracious hosts has been top notch, but the actually performances have been frustrating, With the exception of Milano, which was a great show, the audiences have been loud and indifferent. It’s been forcing me to push myself a little more, which I need to do, but it‘s still hard. About 10 people watched my set. My voice was blown by the end. Micah fared about as well. It was not a stellar performance for either of us, but we still sold some merch.
The next day, our hosts brought us on a short tour of the city before we caught our train. We encountered a Roman Coliseum and I wondered how many unlucky traveling musicians were torn apart by lions and hippos there while the bloodthirsty populace shouted and jeered. Some things never change.
We got on the train and we ran into Andre, formerly of the band Herman Dune, and his girlfriend, Clementine. They were touring on a similar circuit. We sat with them and discussed the difficulty of dealing with loud audiences. They had not been faring much better in the past few shows. They got off in Cesena. We got off in Senigallia.
Friday, November 16, 2007
VENTILATOR BLUES
It’s another day and another train, this one headed to Verona from Arrezo. I’m listening to Iggy and The Stooges’ “Raw Power“. Raw Power is in very short supply right now. Not even The Stooges can kick my back brain into gear. I’m tired and depressed. Just going through the motions...dragging myself around with all the grace of an aged mule awaiting a bullet. I’ve been trying to muster the energy to play well, but my hands are weak from carrying my heavy suitcase up and down the endless series of stairs and my voice is hoarse from too many cigarettes. It’s been ragged and sloppy. I am getting old. I’m not sure how much of this sort of activity I have left in me. My rapidly swinging moods have left me feeling spent and weary. I caught my reflection on the train yesterday and I didn’t recognize myself. My eyes were dull glassy slits surrounded by wrinkled flesh and oily stubble. It was the face of a middle aged man trying to keep up with teenagers, the picture of Dorian Gray in reverse. My legs are burning and my injured rib feels like a knife in my polluted lungs. I need a transfusion. I need an electric shock. I need some fire.
The show in Arrezo was actually in a small town outside of the city. Our promoter Alez informed us on the way to the gig that the venue was not ideal for our kind of music. It was not what I wanted to hear. After soundcheck I received a phone call from a friend with very bad news. I took the cordless phone into the bathroom and crouched in the corner with my head in my hands unable to muster anything reassuring. I was powerless. I spent the rest of the night consumed by panic and anxiety. I needed to talk to someone familiar and trustworthy, but I was cut off. No call shops and no internet were within reach. I was trapped in my brain and I couldn’t get out. During dinner (which was really good), I attempted to be genial to our hosts but I couldn’t stay focused on the conversation. The terrible words and images in my mind kept interfering. I finally gave up and left the table to type a letter.
The gig turned out OK after all. During Micah’s set, the audience was loud and only a few people watched. He reverted to social music mode and played mostly instrumentals, but ended with a stirring version of “In The Pines” sung with all the cold vitriol the song deserves. The place was nearly empty by the time I started. It didn’t bother me. I channeled all of it and attempted to turn in a powerful set despite my failing hands and voice. I played a tortured rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on the Wire” as a subliminal confession. Micah told me that it was my best set of the tour. I felt slightly better afterwards.
We stopped to do a fast internet check at a friend of the promoter’s house and it yielded more bad news. I wrote a quick note to Gillian, and we sped through the countryside to the apartment in Arezzo where we would be sleeping. The place was really quite old and beautiful, but there were a lot of stairs and they were narrow. My rib pulsated dull stabs of pain as I lugged my bloated suitcase up the endless stairs. Micah went to bed and I tried writing, but it wasn’t coming. I gave up, quickly viewed a truly idiotic pornographic video on my laptop and went to sleep feeling insulted.
When we arrived in Cesena the following day, things were looking up. The Lego Café was a small and fairly cozy venue. They had WiFi and there was a call shop nearby. Orion Rigel Dommisse had written me to say that she sensed trouble and was worried. She told me that she was staying with Gillian and David in Philly and told me to call. I found her number and walked to the nearby call shop. Orion is my ex-girlfriend. She is a talented musician and an incredible songwriter. She has an uncanny ability to comfort me and an equally uncanny ability to push my buttons and make me incredibly upset. I‘m still terribly in love with her, and she with me, but we know our limitations too well to get back together in an exclusive way. We talked. She did not push my buttons. It was good to hear her voice. We had a few laughs and I told her not to worry. We made plans to meet in Philly after the tour. Afterwards, I called Annapurna, my confidant and personal assistant. Annapurna is very dear friend, but she is howling mad and I worry about her a lot. She told me that she was going slightly crazy and that she had smashed her stereo with a hammer while drunk on homemade absinthe. I reassured her that I would be back in Providence soon and we could resume listening to The Fall and waxing misanthropic deep into the night. I felt a lot better as I walked back to the club. Though they torture me, the ladies always cheer me up. My needs are simple.
The show was very short. I was told to play a 20 minute set. The place was loud, but there was a small group of people in front who all bought CDs afterwards. Micah played loud, ferociously tearing through a medley of “New Orleans Bump” and “The Sheik of Araby” . The crowd went wild. He was on fire. It was one of his best sets of the tour. He played his most high energy material. It rocked.
We stayed at a very cozy bed and breakfast and got some much needed sleep. In the morning I washed three days of disgusting road filth off myself in a shower that was almost as big as the bedroom we stayed in. We went downstairs for a breakfast of…you guessed it! BREAD AND CHEESE (Europeans eat an awful lot of this stuff.). Then more fucking trains…more teenagers….more lugging….
The show in Arrezo was actually in a small town outside of the city. Our promoter Alez informed us on the way to the gig that the venue was not ideal for our kind of music. It was not what I wanted to hear. After soundcheck I received a phone call from a friend with very bad news. I took the cordless phone into the bathroom and crouched in the corner with my head in my hands unable to muster anything reassuring. I was powerless. I spent the rest of the night consumed by panic and anxiety. I needed to talk to someone familiar and trustworthy, but I was cut off. No call shops and no internet were within reach. I was trapped in my brain and I couldn’t get out. During dinner (which was really good), I attempted to be genial to our hosts but I couldn’t stay focused on the conversation. The terrible words and images in my mind kept interfering. I finally gave up and left the table to type a letter.
The gig turned out OK after all. During Micah’s set, the audience was loud and only a few people watched. He reverted to social music mode and played mostly instrumentals, but ended with a stirring version of “In The Pines” sung with all the cold vitriol the song deserves. The place was nearly empty by the time I started. It didn’t bother me. I channeled all of it and attempted to turn in a powerful set despite my failing hands and voice. I played a tortured rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on the Wire” as a subliminal confession. Micah told me that it was my best set of the tour. I felt slightly better afterwards.
We stopped to do a fast internet check at a friend of the promoter’s house and it yielded more bad news. I wrote a quick note to Gillian, and we sped through the countryside to the apartment in Arezzo where we would be sleeping. The place was really quite old and beautiful, but there were a lot of stairs and they were narrow. My rib pulsated dull stabs of pain as I lugged my bloated suitcase up the endless stairs. Micah went to bed and I tried writing, but it wasn’t coming. I gave up, quickly viewed a truly idiotic pornographic video on my laptop and went to sleep feeling insulted.
When we arrived in Cesena the following day, things were looking up. The Lego Café was a small and fairly cozy venue. They had WiFi and there was a call shop nearby. Orion Rigel Dommisse had written me to say that she sensed trouble and was worried. She told me that she was staying with Gillian and David in Philly and told me to call. I found her number and walked to the nearby call shop. Orion is my ex-girlfriend. She is a talented musician and an incredible songwriter. She has an uncanny ability to comfort me and an equally uncanny ability to push my buttons and make me incredibly upset. I‘m still terribly in love with her, and she with me, but we know our limitations too well to get back together in an exclusive way. We talked. She did not push my buttons. It was good to hear her voice. We had a few laughs and I told her not to worry. We made plans to meet in Philly after the tour. Afterwards, I called Annapurna, my confidant and personal assistant. Annapurna is very dear friend, but she is howling mad and I worry about her a lot. She told me that she was going slightly crazy and that she had smashed her stereo with a hammer while drunk on homemade absinthe. I reassured her that I would be back in Providence soon and we could resume listening to The Fall and waxing misanthropic deep into the night. I felt a lot better as I walked back to the club. Though they torture me, the ladies always cheer me up. My needs are simple.The show was very short. I was told to play a 20 minute set. The place was loud, but there was a small group of people in front who all bought CDs afterwards. Micah played loud, ferociously tearing through a medley of “New Orleans Bump” and “The Sheik of Araby” . The crowd went wild. He was on fire. It was one of his best sets of the tour. He played his most high energy material. It rocked.
We stayed at a very cozy bed and breakfast and got some much needed sleep. In the morning I washed three days of disgusting road filth off myself in a shower that was almost as big as the bedroom we stayed in. We went downstairs for a breakfast of…you guessed it! BREAD AND CHEESE (Europeans eat an awful lot of this stuff.). Then more fucking trains…more teenagers….more lugging….
Thursday, November 15, 2007
AWAY OUT ON THE MOUNTAIN
I’m on the train to Arrezo. We missed the first train and left Milano an hour late. I spent the last half hour at the station leaning against a roughly hewn concrete abutment in the smoking area listening to the a loop of Italian commercials. The sounds of perfume, sex, generic jazz piano, a voice that I swear is David Thomas of Pere Ubu bellowing in Italian about a product called “pocket coffee“, something about Ben Stiller, and a few other sundry items rolled through my ears about fifty times as I chain-smoked Drum and stared blankly at the landscape of flesh and high fashion. I am tired and horny. I have either bruised or broken one of my ribs. I’m not sure how it happened, but it hurts to breathe. It took me about half an hour to find the toilets. I found them and had to pay 70 cents to use a filthy piss-soaked Turkish-toilet (this sadistic device, a mere hole in the floor that you are expected to squat over, has been a great source of constipation for me on previous European excursions). I was sad to leave France. I was just getting to the point where I could hold a rudimentary conversation in French. Now I’m in Italy and I can barely order coffee.
We arrived in Milano at 3 O’clock in the afternoon yesterday after 15 hours of train-rides. Midnight to 8pm was spent in a sleeper car. The car featured 4 prison-like bunks, two of which were occupied by a sneering late-middle aged French woman and her son. One of them was exceedingly flatulent and the unventilated car filled with the choking, noxious odor. I wanted to vomit. My contempt for humanity which had been curiously absent for the past few weeks had returned with a vengeance. I wished a neutron bomb would drop. I wanted silence. I wanted solitude. I got this. Needless to say, it was not conducive to quality sleep.
I had been staying up past sunrise writing in the previous days, so I prepared for the sleep-schedule flip by not sleeping on my last night in Toulouse. Nico had woken up at 10am and found me that morning bent over the laptop in a frenzy of caffeine and cloud of smoke. The lack of sleep put me into a seriously psychedelic frame of mind. We took a walk and we observed a waste bin that someone had poured beer into and it was leaking in a piss-like fashion from the bottom of the can. “Even the garbage is pissed” I noted, pulling the drawstring on my hooded sweatshirt tight. We walked a little further and Nico told me that he and a friend had been stoned one afternoon and had used powers of telekenesis to make a dog defecate. I’m generally skeptical about the supernatural, but I believed him.
We had breakfast with Nico, Celine and Marielle and drove into the Pyrenees Mountains to go hiking. On the way in we stopped to find a post office in Ville de Foix and stopped at a bar to drink some coffee. I was half insane by this point and I riffed non-sequitors with Celine who helped me translate them into French so that everyone could figure out what the hell I was laughing at. The bar had a real David Lynch vibe. The walls were covered with old yellowing photographs of hunters and their trophies. I wanted to steal the one which featured a maniacally smiling man surrounded by the gutted and bled carcasses of at least a dozen wild boars, but I looked around at who I would be dealing with if I got caught and thought better of it. The place was filled with strange old men getting drunk, one of them twitching and jabbering to himself while swatting at invisible pests. A poker game started up and I tried to convince Micah that we should get in on it. Micah was unconvinced.
Celine drove us up the mountain at high speeds on a narrow and tortuous road. There was no radio so we sang “Riders on the Storm” and I attempted to play a crude and skeletal rendition of “96 Tears” on a melodica that I had brought from the house. We found a trail about halfway up the mountain and started hiking down. Nico and I broke into a brisk jog for about a quarter mile of it. It was good to move fast, but I kicked a lot of crap up in my lungs. I hacked up mysterious and terrible things. Celine and I ended up in the lead for a bit. She found a rusty jack knife stuck in the wet earth and pretended to plunge it into my heart. As we descended, the trail got narrow and muddy. We struggled through it and found a clearing where we ate ham and cheese sandwiches and passed the melodica around. I played a Scottish pipe band march that Eric M. Armour had taught me on a drunken afternoon at AS220 back in ‘91 (I miss that bastard. He died of a congenital heart condition last spring, swilling single malt, eating chocolate and chain-smoking right up until the end) and Laurienne played a Herman Dune song.
The way back was tough at first, but I hit a stride that carried me up the mountain with relative ease. I moved further and further ahead of everyone until I was alone with my breath, heartbeat and footsteps, all pulsating in an insistent, hypnotic rhythm. I was a machine. I felt great. I was hallucinating from lack of sleep. The leaves swirled psychedelic patterns of orange and brown and sand colored snakes coiled in my peripheral vision. The forest buzzed with a dark and mysterious energy. I startled some deer and stopped to watch them cautiously slink away from me and into the trees. I had a brief Ragnar Redbeard moment and felt an urge to kill one of them with my bare hands and drink its blood. I resisted the urge.
The others found me waiting at the top, sitting on the car with a cigarette. We climbed in and drove to Nico and Celine’s nearby apartment in Ville de Foix to drink coffee. Celine taught me a few chords on the ukulele and I picked out a clunky version of “Bird on a Wire”. Afterwards we drove back to Mathieu’s place in Toulouse and Celine made dinner while I had her help me translate such useful phrases as “Donnez moi un Big Mac! Je suis un ambassadeur!” The nonsense continued until it was time to board the train. I was sad to go. The Toulouse kids had been very warm and kind. I hope to see them again.
We arrived in Milano at 3 O’clock in the afternoon yesterday after 15 hours of train-rides. Midnight to 8pm was spent in a sleeper car. The car featured 4 prison-like bunks, two of which were occupied by a sneering late-middle aged French woman and her son. One of them was exceedingly flatulent and the unventilated car filled with the choking, noxious odor. I wanted to vomit. My contempt for humanity which had been curiously absent for the past few weeks had returned with a vengeance. I wished a neutron bomb would drop. I wanted silence. I wanted solitude. I got this. Needless to say, it was not conducive to quality sleep.
I had been staying up past sunrise writing in the previous days, so I prepared for the sleep-schedule flip by not sleeping on my last night in Toulouse. Nico had woken up at 10am and found me that morning bent over the laptop in a frenzy of caffeine and cloud of smoke. The lack of sleep put me into a seriously psychedelic frame of mind. We took a walk and we observed a waste bin that someone had poured beer into and it was leaking in a piss-like fashion from the bottom of the can. “Even the garbage is pissed” I noted, pulling the drawstring on my hooded sweatshirt tight. We walked a little further and Nico told me that he and a friend had been stoned one afternoon and had used powers of telekenesis to make a dog defecate. I’m generally skeptical about the supernatural, but I believed him.
We had breakfast with Nico, Celine and Marielle and drove into the Pyrenees Mountains to go hiking. On the way in we stopped to find a post office in Ville de Foix and stopped at a bar to drink some coffee. I was half insane by this point and I riffed non-sequitors with Celine who helped me translate them into French so that everyone could figure out what the hell I was laughing at. The bar had a real David Lynch vibe. The walls were covered with old yellowing photographs of hunters and their trophies. I wanted to steal the one which featured a maniacally smiling man surrounded by the gutted and bled carcasses of at least a dozen wild boars, but I looked around at who I would be dealing with if I got caught and thought better of it. The place was filled with strange old men getting drunk, one of them twitching and jabbering to himself while swatting at invisible pests. A poker game started up and I tried to convince Micah that we should get in on it. Micah was unconvinced.
Celine drove us up the mountain at high speeds on a narrow and tortuous road. There was no radio so we sang “Riders on the Storm” and I attempted to play a crude and skeletal rendition of “96 Tears” on a melodica that I had brought from the house. We found a trail about halfway up the mountain and started hiking down. Nico and I broke into a brisk jog for about a quarter mile of it. It was good to move fast, but I kicked a lot of crap up in my lungs. I hacked up mysterious and terrible things. Celine and I ended up in the lead for a bit. She found a rusty jack knife stuck in the wet earth and pretended to plunge it into my heart. As we descended, the trail got narrow and muddy. We struggled through it and found a clearing where we ate ham and cheese sandwiches and passed the melodica around. I played a Scottish pipe band march that Eric M. Armour had taught me on a drunken afternoon at AS220 back in ‘91 (I miss that bastard. He died of a congenital heart condition last spring, swilling single malt, eating chocolate and chain-smoking right up until the end) and Laurienne played a Herman Dune song.
The way back was tough at first, but I hit a stride that carried me up the mountain with relative ease. I moved further and further ahead of everyone until I was alone with my breath, heartbeat and footsteps, all pulsating in an insistent, hypnotic rhythm. I was a machine. I felt great. I was hallucinating from lack of sleep. The leaves swirled psychedelic patterns of orange and brown and sand colored snakes coiled in my peripheral vision. The forest buzzed with a dark and mysterious energy. I startled some deer and stopped to watch them cautiously slink away from me and into the trees. I had a brief Ragnar Redbeard moment and felt an urge to kill one of them with my bare hands and drink its blood. I resisted the urge.
The others found me waiting at the top, sitting on the car with a cigarette. We climbed in and drove to Nico and Celine’s nearby apartment in Ville de Foix to drink coffee. Celine taught me a few chords on the ukulele and I picked out a clunky version of “Bird on a Wire”. Afterwards we drove back to Mathieu’s place in Toulouse and Celine made dinner while I had her help me translate such useful phrases as “Donnez moi un Big Mac! Je suis un ambassadeur!” The nonsense continued until it was time to board the train. I was sad to go. The Toulouse kids had been very warm and kind. I hope to see them again.
Monday, November 12, 2007
PALE BLUE EYES
Micah and I have been in Toulouse for a few days. We have booked a midnight train to Milan for tomorrow night and we will arrive at 3pm. I’m not looking forward to being in transit for this long, but fortunately, we have a sleeper car from Midnight to 8am. We will have beds so we will, in theory, be able to sleep. This situation doesn’t help me too much since I have been staying up until 7am the past few nights seeking solitude and furiously typing. Toulouse is beautiful. We are staying with Marielle, Nico, Mathieu and Celine, a group of kids who book concerts under the moniker “Jo, Jack and Billie“. They have been very hospitable. There have been incredible meals and lots of laughs. We spent the past few nights in hootenanny mode, passing the guitar around playing every song we know, from Memphis Minnie to Gary Numan. I find myself revisiting (or reverting to) the repertoire that Steve Jobe and I used to play when we were working as “Recreation Leaders” at the Eleanor Slater Hospital, Rhode Island’s gruesome and depressing state mental institution, back in the drug-addled and love-sick days of my mid-20‘s. I recall child-rapist/murderer, Billy Sarmento’s sluggish Thorizine-drenched voice asking me, “Can you play that ‘Knoxville Girl’ song ?” and I shudder.
The gig was in a large record store called Mediatheque Association. It was well attended and the audience was entranced. Micah and I are at the point where we can draw them into our spheres with little effort at this point. Touring is good for this kind of thing. I am carrying a good deal of emotional baggage from the past few days and I pour it all into the songs. I gather all the beautiful, terrifying, heart-rending images in my head and throw them on the fire. It’s another exorcism for the Catholic ghosts that I haven‘t killed yet. The cigarettes have added an interesting layer of gravel to my voice. I am learning to harness it and it’s getting really good. There is a Texan in the audience, so I play “I Have Always Been Here Before” and “Lungs” as an encore and he thanks me.
Today was consumed by laundry and logistics. Micah, Matthieu and I ran errands. We stopped at a small market where I bought toothpaste while Micah and Matthieu gathered dinner supplies. I stepped outside for a smoke and was accosted by a drunk who had been thrown out of the store because he had no money to pay for his items. When he couldn’t make any headway with the store’s brawny security guard he turned to me and began jabber threateningly in French while making throat-slitting gestures with his index finger. Despite my repeated pleas of “Je ne parle pas Francais” and “Je ne comprende pas”, he continued ranting, gesticulating and breathing booze and halitosis in my face. After 5 minutes of this nonsense, he realized that I was of no use to him and moved down the street to holler at a fire hydrant. I turned to reenter the store, but was halted by the security guard who seemed to think I was in cahoots with the drunken psychopath. I reassured him that I was an innocent bystander and he let me in. I guess that wearing the same set of clothes for two weeks and rarely bathing or shaving has given me a shifty appearance. Knock me over with a feather!
Back at the apartment Micah cooked an unbelievably great dinner. It was a Spanish dish. A red sauce with vegetables, rice and eggs and a salad with avocados and almonds. Afterwards, the jamboree started up again. I played Warren Zevon’s “Carmelita.” and Micah sang a ridiculous, bawdy yodeling number from the 1920’s about a Hula-Hula Girl. It was unbelievably funny and Micah himself could scarcely get through it without laughing himself. We tried translating for the French kids, but it was tres dificile.
On a whim, I took a long bike ride to the internet/call shop just shy of midnight tonight. It felt good to work the muscles a bit. Touring can be a sedentary enterprise. I tore down the empty sidewalks, barely missing various poles, hydrants and moving cars. I channeled the spirit of Alfred Jarry and wished I had a set of pistols to shoot out the Toulouse Mercure hotel lights as whizzed by. I ran a red light and was berated in incoherent French by an angry driver. I eventually arrived at the call shop and settled in, but they were closing in half an hour so I quickly checked my email, had a short, bittersweet phone conversation with a good friend and split.
On the way back, I got lost and had to find my map. I had it, but I couldn’t find it. My pockets had so many scraps of paper in them that I was starting to look like I was wearing a black Santa Claus suit. After nearly fifteen minutes of digging, I found the crude map that Matthieu had drawn for me on a stained and rumpled piece of paper and tried to find Blvd. Hubert, but all he had written was “BIG BOULEVARD” on the street in question. He had obviously mistaken me for someone with powers of observation and a sense of direction. I started noticing some shifty looking people on the street and I wondered how long it would take for me to get beaten half to death and robbed if I had to ride around all night looking for the apartment. I was an easy mark: Skinny, long haired, American sissy-boy riding a tiny purple girl’s bike with loose handlebars with about 600 euro and a valid American passport in my pocket. I cursed my stupidity. I wished I had taken the vicious, black 6 inch switchblade that Matthieu had jokingly offered to me before I left…or at least a cellphone. Eventually I found my street and made it back it back to the apartment.
When I returned, everyone had gone to the bar and they had left me a cellphone and note telling me to join them. I was glad to get back on the bike. I rode along the river and had an opportunity to try out some of my awkward pidgin French phrases while asking directions. It took a few phone calls and a few incoherent conversations with strangers, but I eventually found my friends at the bar, getting drunk and rocking out to P.J. Harvey. Energized from the ride, I began ranting and raving and laughing maniacally. Micah and I had a lengthy discussion about hardcore shows we had seen when we were teenagers. We bonded over DRI and The Circle Jerks. It was good to connect with him. He’s been a little distant and hard to read these past few days.
Everyone drank for a bit longer and then we headed back. My friends walked and I rode the bike in slo-mo, swerving around poles and circling in and out of parking garages. I was 9 years old again. It was good fun. Back at the apartment, there were more songs and merriment until everyone crashed and I retired to the kitchen to write this missive. It’s now nearly 10am and I haven’t slept. I made a pot of coffee and I drank it in 15 minutes. I am listening to the Velvet Underground and smoking stale Dutch tobacco…it‘s truly, truly a sin.
The gig was in a large record store called Mediatheque Association. It was well attended and the audience was entranced. Micah and I are at the point where we can draw them into our spheres with little effort at this point. Touring is good for this kind of thing. I am carrying a good deal of emotional baggage from the past few days and I pour it all into the songs. I gather all the beautiful, terrifying, heart-rending images in my head and throw them on the fire. It’s another exorcism for the Catholic ghosts that I haven‘t killed yet. The cigarettes have added an interesting layer of gravel to my voice. I am learning to harness it and it’s getting really good. There is a Texan in the audience, so I play “I Have Always Been Here Before” and “Lungs” as an encore and he thanks me.
Today was consumed by laundry and logistics. Micah, Matthieu and I ran errands. We stopped at a small market where I bought toothpaste while Micah and Matthieu gathered dinner supplies. I stepped outside for a smoke and was accosted by a drunk who had been thrown out of the store because he had no money to pay for his items. When he couldn’t make any headway with the store’s brawny security guard he turned to me and began jabber threateningly in French while making throat-slitting gestures with his index finger. Despite my repeated pleas of “Je ne parle pas Francais” and “Je ne comprende pas”, he continued ranting, gesticulating and breathing booze and halitosis in my face. After 5 minutes of this nonsense, he realized that I was of no use to him and moved down the street to holler at a fire hydrant. I turned to reenter the store, but was halted by the security guard who seemed to think I was in cahoots with the drunken psychopath. I reassured him that I was an innocent bystander and he let me in. I guess that wearing the same set of clothes for two weeks and rarely bathing or shaving has given me a shifty appearance. Knock me over with a feather!
Back at the apartment Micah cooked an unbelievably great dinner. It was a Spanish dish. A red sauce with vegetables, rice and eggs and a salad with avocados and almonds. Afterwards, the jamboree started up again. I played Warren Zevon’s “Carmelita.” and Micah sang a ridiculous, bawdy yodeling number from the 1920’s about a Hula-Hula Girl. It was unbelievably funny and Micah himself could scarcely get through it without laughing himself. We tried translating for the French kids, but it was tres dificile.
On a whim, I took a long bike ride to the internet/call shop just shy of midnight tonight. It felt good to work the muscles a bit. Touring can be a sedentary enterprise. I tore down the empty sidewalks, barely missing various poles, hydrants and moving cars. I channeled the spirit of Alfred Jarry and wished I had a set of pistols to shoot out the Toulouse Mercure hotel lights as whizzed by. I ran a red light and was berated in incoherent French by an angry driver. I eventually arrived at the call shop and settled in, but they were closing in half an hour so I quickly checked my email, had a short, bittersweet phone conversation with a good friend and split.
On the way back, I got lost and had to find my map. I had it, but I couldn’t find it. My pockets had so many scraps of paper in them that I was starting to look like I was wearing a black Santa Claus suit. After nearly fifteen minutes of digging, I found the crude map that Matthieu had drawn for me on a stained and rumpled piece of paper and tried to find Blvd. Hubert, but all he had written was “BIG BOULEVARD” on the street in question. He had obviously mistaken me for someone with powers of observation and a sense of direction. I started noticing some shifty looking people on the street and I wondered how long it would take for me to get beaten half to death and robbed if I had to ride around all night looking for the apartment. I was an easy mark: Skinny, long haired, American sissy-boy riding a tiny purple girl’s bike with loose handlebars with about 600 euro and a valid American passport in my pocket. I cursed my stupidity. I wished I had taken the vicious, black 6 inch switchblade that Matthieu had jokingly offered to me before I left…or at least a cellphone. Eventually I found my street and made it back it back to the apartment.
When I returned, everyone had gone to the bar and they had left me a cellphone and note telling me to join them. I was glad to get back on the bike. I rode along the river and had an opportunity to try out some of my awkward pidgin French phrases while asking directions. It took a few phone calls and a few incoherent conversations with strangers, but I eventually found my friends at the bar, getting drunk and rocking out to P.J. Harvey. Energized from the ride, I began ranting and raving and laughing maniacally. Micah and I had a lengthy discussion about hardcore shows we had seen when we were teenagers. We bonded over DRI and The Circle Jerks. It was good to connect with him. He’s been a little distant and hard to read these past few days.
Everyone drank for a bit longer and then we headed back. My friends walked and I rode the bike in slo-mo, swerving around poles and circling in and out of parking garages. I was 9 years old again. It was good fun. Back at the apartment, there were more songs and merriment until everyone crashed and I retired to the kitchen to write this missive. It’s now nearly 10am and I haven’t slept. I made a pot of coffee and I drank it in 15 minutes. I am listening to the Velvet Underground and smoking stale Dutch tobacco…it‘s truly, truly a sin.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
THE SONG OF THE DISEMBRAINING
I’m in a kitchen in a small apartment in Toulouse. It’s a day off. We spent seven hours on the train today. The trains are beginning to make me insane. Micah nearly went ballistic when the two kids with Rod Stewart haircuts sitting next him wouldn’t stop playing terrible pop songs on their cellphones. Neither of us could speak enough French to express our extreme irritation to the little bastards so we sat in silence and endured the insipid music blaring tinnily out of the tiny speakers. Micah and I are deeply appalled. Haven’t these morons heard of headphones? This is exactly why we left the States. The stupidity is spreading. Soon it will take over the world. There won’t be room for people like us soon. We are dinosaurs. Our only option is to keep moving or die.
I decided that I couldn’t take anymore so I sat in the hall between the cars where I had found the only power outlet on the train. I put Roky Erickson on the headphones and started writing a letter to one of my friends. It’s a rant about sex and death that goes on for pages. I’m on fire. While typing a particularly nasty passage, I notice that there is a young girl, probably 5 years old, dangling from a railing, smiling and staring at me intently about three feet away. I like kids, but I‘m not having a kid-friendly moment. I need to get off this train. I can’t find any space to think here. I badly need a cigarette. The train stops and I leap off and take two drags of a cigarette. The door closes on my arm as I leap back onto the train, barely making it. I give up, return to my seat and stare blankly. I love touring but there are always moments like this. My coping skills go out the window and I become despondent. It will pass, but right now I’m in it and it’s eating me alive.
Lille was a blast. We played to a small but very engaged audience at a club called La Malterie. Lovely Lila Park and Tall Paul Grundy are there. I met them the last time I was here and we had a great time. We are well fed and there. (scene missing. I need to shut the fuck up.) Things are complex and I’m not sure what to do with it..
Rennes was the home of one of my heroes, Alfred Jarry, the pataphysician and author of the Ubu plays. He was a diminutive, arrogant bastard who only spoke in the royal we and was fond of lighting people’s cigarettes with pistols. He was engaged in full-on war against reality. Reality won and he died penniless at a very young age on All Souls Day in 1907. He left behind a body of work that spawned Dada, Surrealism, Cubism, Punk Rock and just about every movement that matters. In his honor, I decide to reject reality for my entire stay in Rennes.
We stay with Romaine, a musician, and his girlfriend Marie, a dancer. We immediately hit it off and have a great time. They seem charmed by my rapid-fire wordplay and tales of ridiculous adventures. The gig is at a small art gallery called Le Bon Acceuil. It’s a bit of a sausage party, but I meet a few other accordion players and I was among my kin. Our sets go very well. I play a cover of Townes Van Zandt’s “Lungs”. After the gig, Romaine and I stay up half the night talking and there are many laughs. Romaine turns me on to a band called Radical Satan from Bordeaux. Mindblowing stuff.
There is a Jarry exhibit in town, but I overslept and we missed it. We got on the train to Nantes. The Chateau de Gilles De Rais is nearby and I kill several children to honor his memory. The gig is in a pub.I don’t play particularly well, but Micah’s set is possibly the best of the tour. Afterwards, I meet an Australian jazz drummer and we exchange ex-junky horror stories. I eat a steak dinner and we go back to the promoter’s house. I keep bumping into things and knocking things over. I jokingly inform him that I plan to destroy his home and he gets visibly upset. Afterwards, I stay up until 7am typing a private screed and exchanging highly inappropriate emails with a female friend in the states. I unwittingly keep Micah up all night and feel terrible about it.
Now I am at the venue in Toulouse. I’m holed up in a small room typing and listening to Nick Cave’s “Let Love In”. We play at eight. I’m waiting for the phone to ring.
Monday, November 5, 2007
Je suis L'Homme à tête de chou
I am on the train from Liege to Lille listening to the first Kluster album. A creepy wash of early 70’s German electronic music roars and blips around my cranium like a bad surf. It blends well with the sound of the train. I find it oddly soothing. I am back in the womb for a little while. The manic energy of the first week of the tour has waned a bit and I have receded into introspection. Micah and I is getting over a cold and I am fighting one. I have fallen behind on my entries, so I’m writing 3 in one. Here goes…
FRIDAY: NIJMEGEN, NETHERLANDS: THE ONDERBROEK
The train rides (there were several transfers) to Nijmegen are made arduous by my pathetic and ineffectual luggage cart. I do my best to lash my accordion, merch, laptop and kick pedal to the flimsy little bastard, using straps, rubber bands, chewing gum, cum and spit, but the whole operation disintegrates whenever I encounter any stairs….and there are a lot of stairs. The cart has become severely misshapen due to the weight of my equipment and my accordion case is dragging on the rainy pavement and making card-in-the-spokes-style scraping sounds.
We are met by Wim (a different Wim than the aforementioned Wim in Ghent) at the Nijmegen station. We’re exhausted and starving so he buys us each an egg roll from a nearby vendor. I devour mine (chicken) and the grease runs down the sleeve of my pea coat. It’s a ten minute walk to the venue and every second of it sucks. The cart drops a different item every ten feet and I have to disassemble and reassemble the fucker every time. Micah just shakes his head and laughs. He seems to find my trainwreck nature entertaining for the time being, though I bet that the charm will wear off before this tour is over. I am trying to be conscientious, but I am as God made me.
We arrive at the venue in one piece, but I am feeling seriously fried. I dismantle the cart and scatter my equipment and personal effects all over the place. I attempt to practice a bit, but my nerves are shot and my hands are weak. We are served huge, steaming plates of cous-cous and vegetables and drink several cups of coffee. I am revived to some extent, but my voice is ruined from smoke and my hands are shot to shit from dragging the awkward cart all day. The place is a clean and very well organized squat (or former squat…I’m not sure) and the performance space, which is in the basement, is called The Underbroek ( which is Dutch for “underpants”). I decide to use my Line 6 pedal to make some drone loops to provide a little extra menace, but it all goes horribly wrong. The dumbass salesman at the Radio Shack back in Providence sold me the wrong kind of voltage converter and the Line 6 is fried before I can even finish the soundcheck…another item to jettison and another 300 dollars down the drain. This is turning into an expensive tour.
I don’t play particularly well at this show, but the small audience is very generous. I even get a few laughs, which is rare in Europe due to my very American sense of humor. Micah’s set also goes pretty well despite the fact that he is afloat in a sea of snot. His voice maintains its clarity and power. After the gig, Micah, Wim and I argue over whether or not humanity is inherently evil. Micah is an optimist and feels that despite our history, mankind is ultimately, or at least has the potential to be, a benevolent race. I am a nihilist, so I believe that good and evil are arbitrary terms but I feel that humanity is a brutal and pathetic self serving cancer upon the earth . Wim falls somewhere in the middle. We agree to disagree.
We forsake the Netherlands’s many exciting tourist attractions (hash, whores and other bad craziness) for an early night, but I am feeling fairly restless. I pace around on the roof of the building where we are staying, chain-smoking and glaring at the gigantic eerie clock tower across the street with it’s two neon clock faces glowing blue in the grey rainy mist and displaying two different times, both wrong.
Afterwards, I go inside and re-read about half of Steven Jesse Bernstein’s “I AM SECRETLY AN IMPORTANT MAN”. SJB was a Seattle area poet who had struggled with drug addiction and mental illness for most of his life. Sub Pop released a record of his poetry set to music by Steve Fisk in 1991 entitled "Prison". It's one of the darkest and most disturbing CDs that's ever been released and it's definitely the best thing that Sub Pop every released (though that's not saying a lot*). He never got to hear the recording, because he suicided, stabbing himself in the throat 3 times with a kitchen knife before most of the music was finished. It's a damn shame. I would have liked to have met him, though he was rumored to be fond of chasing his friends out of his squalid apartment with various weapons.
The next morning, Bart, our host for the evening, a friendly and idealistic young fellow accompanies us into town so that Micah can buy a sim card for his cell phone and I can replace the worthless cocksucking, motherfucking, piece of shit baggage cart, that is ruining my life, with something a bit more practical. We find a rolling suitcase in a department store and pack it up right in the aisle. I leave the corpse of the Target cart on a shelf for the stock boys to dispose of, pay and roll on out. It’s smooth sailing. The new cart is a dream. The sun comes out and I suddenly feel and look years younger than I am. There is a gleam in my eye and a spring my step. My cart and I skip down the street hand in hand and I quietly sing “Eruption” to myself in honor of Nijmegen’s wunderkind cheese-metal progeny.
I stand outside of the phone shop guarding the gear as Micah buys a sim card. I briefly consider buying one of the gigantic black dildos that I am looking at in the window of the adjacent sex shop for a friend’s birthday gift but then I imagine the conversation at the customs desk and think better of it.
Then it’s goodbye to Bart and more trains, stations, cigarettes, coffee, metal toilets, eye candy, stairs and reading. We head back into Belgium.
SATURDAY: LOUVAIN LA NEUVE, BELGIUM: FERME DU BIEREAU
This is a very intense night for me. The electricity is palpable. I shoot a movie in my brain and pan the camera long and slow, trying to absorb everything and burn it deeply into the memory banks to be enjoyed many years from now when my brain is dissolving into the foggy grey mush of Alzheimer’s that I will surely have due to all the crack I smoked out of metal pipes and soda cans in the 90‘s. I’m not sure that I can or even want to put it all into words, so I’ll keep this one brief.
I rarely feel this much warmth and love from a group of people on tour. The people at La Ferme are a kind and nurturing lot. The gig goes very well, the best yet, really. I feel like I am finally able to effectively command the audience as a solo act. A moment of comic relief happens in the middle of the set when I accidentally inhale saliva during a jaw harp solo and I erupt into a frightening and consumptive coughing fit onstage which last for about three minutes. The audience roars with hysterical laughter at the out of control coughing that is emerging from the very sphincter of my soul. Hot tears of pain are streaming down my face, but I recover (barely) and finish the set to wild applause.
(scene missing)
SUNDAY AND MONDAY: LIEGE, BELGIUM: L’AN VERT AND A DAY OFF
Liege has always felt like a second home to me even though I have never spent more than a few days there. I first came here with The Eyesores in 2003. We had contacted a promoter named Katrin by way of an Italian drummer friend of mine named Jacopo Andreini. Since we had a day off, so Katrin suggested that we play at her friend's party. Katrin called Denis and Stephanie who were throwing the party and mentioned that she had a few American musicians with her and that we were interested in playing a few tunes. Without realizing that we were a seven-piece band who hadn't bathed or eaten recently, Denis and Stephanie obliged. They were incredibly accommodating, despite the fact that they had to cook a separate meal for us due to our ridiculously fussy dietary needs (several of us were dabbling with a vegan diet. I've since come to my senses and have grown more comfortable with my place in the food chain: the top). We all loaded into their tiny living room and ended up playing for close to 2 hours. They loved us and it was a great night. Nicolas is Denis' brother. We have visited them on every European tour since and they have been extremely kind and hospitable. Denis and Nicolas are in a fantastic band called Cyclo whom you all check out.
We play at a club called L'An Vert. It's a great show. I sell the rest of my merch ( I sold most of it at La Ferme). Belleclose, who open the show, end with a cover of Fern Knight's "Awake Angel Snake" translated into French. Our friend Joel plays the accordion part that I played on the record. We have the next day off. I hang out with Ingrid while Nicolas was at work and she gives me an awkward crash course in French with much fumbling through the Anglais/Francais Dictionaire for both of us. Over the course of several tours, Denis, Nicolas, Stephanie and Ingrid have taught me most of the French I know and they have been infinitely patient with me forgetting basically all of it. Micah and I go out to do laundry and get coffee and vitamins and I am forced to hold several conversations in French. I try, but it's a struggle.
We have dinner with Joel, Denis, Stephanie, Ingrid and Nicolas. It's a much needed moment of calm.
By now, I have arrived in Lille, France and I am crammed into a tiny pantry where I am typing this missive. I am hungry and my voice is going. We play in a few hours. Bon Nuit.
*Apologies to my friends in Combustible Edison, Six Finger Satellite, Death Vessel and the ghost of Mr. Cobain. Sub Pop has released some fairly adventurous records, but I can never forgive them for spawning the egregious and atavistic "grunge" movement. Grunge marked the official death of punk rock as far as I am concerned. It was a bullshit movement that was more about posturing than anything else. I had no time for it in '89 and I certainly have no time for it now.
FRIDAY: NIJMEGEN, NETHERLANDS: THE ONDERBROEK
The train rides (there were several transfers) to Nijmegen are made arduous by my pathetic and ineffectual luggage cart. I do my best to lash my accordion, merch, laptop and kick pedal to the flimsy little bastard, using straps, rubber bands, chewing gum, cum and spit, but the whole operation disintegrates whenever I encounter any stairs….and there are a lot of stairs. The cart has become severely misshapen due to the weight of my equipment and my accordion case is dragging on the rainy pavement and making card-in-the-spokes-style scraping sounds.
We are met by Wim (a different Wim than the aforementioned Wim in Ghent) at the Nijmegen station. We’re exhausted and starving so he buys us each an egg roll from a nearby vendor. I devour mine (chicken) and the grease runs down the sleeve of my pea coat. It’s a ten minute walk to the venue and every second of it sucks. The cart drops a different item every ten feet and I have to disassemble and reassemble the fucker every time. Micah just shakes his head and laughs. He seems to find my trainwreck nature entertaining for the time being, though I bet that the charm will wear off before this tour is over. I am trying to be conscientious, but I am as God made me.
We arrive at the venue in one piece, but I am feeling seriously fried. I dismantle the cart and scatter my equipment and personal effects all over the place. I attempt to practice a bit, but my nerves are shot and my hands are weak. We are served huge, steaming plates of cous-cous and vegetables and drink several cups of coffee. I am revived to some extent, but my voice is ruined from smoke and my hands are shot to shit from dragging the awkward cart all day. The place is a clean and very well organized squat (or former squat…I’m not sure) and the performance space, which is in the basement, is called The Underbroek ( which is Dutch for “underpants”). I decide to use my Line 6 pedal to make some drone loops to provide a little extra menace, but it all goes horribly wrong. The dumbass salesman at the Radio Shack back in Providence sold me the wrong kind of voltage converter and the Line 6 is fried before I can even finish the soundcheck…another item to jettison and another 300 dollars down the drain. This is turning into an expensive tour.
I don’t play particularly well at this show, but the small audience is very generous. I even get a few laughs, which is rare in Europe due to my very American sense of humor. Micah’s set also goes pretty well despite the fact that he is afloat in a sea of snot. His voice maintains its clarity and power. After the gig, Micah, Wim and I argue over whether or not humanity is inherently evil. Micah is an optimist and feels that despite our history, mankind is ultimately, or at least has the potential to be, a benevolent race. I am a nihilist, so I believe that good and evil are arbitrary terms but I feel that humanity is a brutal and pathetic self serving cancer upon the earth . Wim falls somewhere in the middle. We agree to disagree.
We forsake the Netherlands’s many exciting tourist attractions (hash, whores and other bad craziness) for an early night, but I am feeling fairly restless. I pace around on the roof of the building where we are staying, chain-smoking and glaring at the gigantic eerie clock tower across the street with it’s two neon clock faces glowing blue in the grey rainy mist and displaying two different times, both wrong.
Afterwards, I go inside and re-read about half of Steven Jesse Bernstein’s “I AM SECRETLY AN IMPORTANT MAN”. SJB was a Seattle area poet who had struggled with drug addiction and mental illness for most of his life. Sub Pop released a record of his poetry set to music by Steve Fisk in 1991 entitled "Prison". It's one of the darkest and most disturbing CDs that's ever been released and it's definitely the best thing that Sub Pop every released (though that's not saying a lot*). He never got to hear the recording, because he suicided, stabbing himself in the throat 3 times with a kitchen knife before most of the music was finished. It's a damn shame. I would have liked to have met him, though he was rumored to be fond of chasing his friends out of his squalid apartment with various weapons.
The next morning, Bart, our host for the evening, a friendly and idealistic young fellow accompanies us into town so that Micah can buy a sim card for his cell phone and I can replace the worthless cocksucking, motherfucking, piece of shit baggage cart, that is ruining my life, with something a bit more practical. We find a rolling suitcase in a department store and pack it up right in the aisle. I leave the corpse of the Target cart on a shelf for the stock boys to dispose of, pay and roll on out. It’s smooth sailing. The new cart is a dream. The sun comes out and I suddenly feel and look years younger than I am. There is a gleam in my eye and a spring my step. My cart and I skip down the street hand in hand and I quietly sing “Eruption” to myself in honor of Nijmegen’s wunderkind cheese-metal progeny.
I stand outside of the phone shop guarding the gear as Micah buys a sim card. I briefly consider buying one of the gigantic black dildos that I am looking at in the window of the adjacent sex shop for a friend’s birthday gift but then I imagine the conversation at the customs desk and think better of it.
Then it’s goodbye to Bart and more trains, stations, cigarettes, coffee, metal toilets, eye candy, stairs and reading. We head back into Belgium.
SATURDAY: LOUVAIN LA NEUVE, BELGIUM: FERME DU BIEREAU
This is a very intense night for me. The electricity is palpable. I shoot a movie in my brain and pan the camera long and slow, trying to absorb everything and burn it deeply into the memory banks to be enjoyed many years from now when my brain is dissolving into the foggy grey mush of Alzheimer’s that I will surely have due to all the crack I smoked out of metal pipes and soda cans in the 90‘s. I’m not sure that I can or even want to put it all into words, so I’ll keep this one brief.
I rarely feel this much warmth and love from a group of people on tour. The people at La Ferme are a kind and nurturing lot. The gig goes very well, the best yet, really. I feel like I am finally able to effectively command the audience as a solo act. A moment of comic relief happens in the middle of the set when I accidentally inhale saliva during a jaw harp solo and I erupt into a frightening and consumptive coughing fit onstage which last for about three minutes. The audience roars with hysterical laughter at the out of control coughing that is emerging from the very sphincter of my soul. Hot tears of pain are streaming down my face, but I recover (barely) and finish the set to wild applause.
(scene missing)
SUNDAY AND MONDAY: LIEGE, BELGIUM: L’AN VERT AND A DAY OFF
Liege has always felt like a second home to me even though I have never spent more than a few days there. I first came here with The Eyesores in 2003. We had contacted a promoter named Katrin by way of an Italian drummer friend of mine named Jacopo Andreini. Since we had a day off, so Katrin suggested that we play at her friend's party. Katrin called Denis and Stephanie who were throwing the party and mentioned that she had a few American musicians with her and that we were interested in playing a few tunes. Without realizing that we were a seven-piece band who hadn't bathed or eaten recently, Denis and Stephanie obliged. They were incredibly accommodating, despite the fact that they had to cook a separate meal for us due to our ridiculously fussy dietary needs (several of us were dabbling with a vegan diet. I've since come to my senses and have grown more comfortable with my place in the food chain: the top). We all loaded into their tiny living room and ended up playing for close to 2 hours. They loved us and it was a great night. Nicolas is Denis' brother. We have visited them on every European tour since and they have been extremely kind and hospitable. Denis and Nicolas are in a fantastic band called Cyclo whom you all check out.
We play at a club called L'An Vert. It's a great show. I sell the rest of my merch ( I sold most of it at La Ferme). Belleclose, who open the show, end with a cover of Fern Knight's "Awake Angel Snake" translated into French. Our friend Joel plays the accordion part that I played on the record. We have the next day off. I hang out with Ingrid while Nicolas was at work and she gives me an awkward crash course in French with much fumbling through the Anglais/Francais Dictionaire for both of us. Over the course of several tours, Denis, Nicolas, Stephanie and Ingrid have taught me most of the French I know and they have been infinitely patient with me forgetting basically all of it. Micah and I go out to do laundry and get coffee and vitamins and I am forced to hold several conversations in French. I try, but it's a struggle.
We have dinner with Joel, Denis, Stephanie, Ingrid and Nicolas. It's a much needed moment of calm.
By now, I have arrived in Lille, France and I am crammed into a tiny pantry where I am typing this missive. I am hungry and my voice is going. We play in a few hours. Bon Nuit.
*Apologies to my friends in Combustible Edison, Six Finger Satellite, Death Vessel and the ghost of Mr. Cobain. Sub Pop has released some fairly adventurous records, but I can never forgive them for spawning the egregious and atavistic "grunge" movement. Grunge marked the official death of punk rock as far as I am concerned. It was a bullshit movement that was more about posturing than anything else. I had no time for it in '89 and I certainly have no time for it now.
Saturday, November 3, 2007
MY WAR
My war with the plumbing of Europe continues unabated. My second bathroom oriented tragedy of the tour (I’m not comfortable discussing the first) occurred this afternoon. Our promoter Phillip’s girlfriend Benedicte’s house, where we are staying, is under construction, so we went to their friend’s house to shower. I was pretty rank, so I took a long one, carefully inspecting the shampoo and body wash labels to make sure that I was not scrubbing my genitals with drain cleaner (you can never be too careful when playing around with a language barrier). When I stepped out of the shower I noticed that the floor had about an inch of water and that our shower-hosts were already trying to deal with the enormous river pouring out from beneath the bathroom door, threatening to drown them and their new baby. I’ve only known these people for 15 minutes and I’ve already begun destroying their home. What a first impression! Of course, this was not my first experience flooding a European bathroom. On my first tour of The Continent, I ended up creating a deluge at 3AM in our friend Klaus’s apartment in Frankfurt. Klaus graciously had woken up and spent an hour cleaning it up despite the fact that he had to be at work at 8 am. I am wise to the secret now. The way not to flood a European bathroom with a hand held shower nozzle is to actually hold it in your hand. There seems to be a design flaw with the holsters so they never point in the right direction…either that or I’m just a fucking idiot (the latter, most likely).
We played in Benedicte and Phillip’s living room for their housewarming party. The house was filled with incredibly beautiful and well dressed people. The Belgians really have it down, both in terms of genetics and fashion sense. I’m particularly impressed with the bone structure and the boots...damn good boots. I ran into Wim and Analise whom I had stayed with Amsterdam on the dreadful Eyesores European tour of 2005. I remember that I had dumped a pile of pennies and chocolate dust from my suitcase outside the door to their house. My bandmates were not impressed with my lack of decorum. It hadn’t seemed like a huge mess until we saw it in the light of day. There was a good deal of grumbling. I had been in the doghouse in general on that tour anyhow (for other more complicated reasons which I will not get into right now). Wim and Analise seem to have forgotten the incident or at least they didn‘t bring it up in conversation. We had a pleasant chat. They are very nice.
The show was great. I played very well, despite the fact that I was using Micah’s guitar case for a kick drum and the kick pedal kept sliding all over the place. I had a coughing fit in the middle of “Amplifier Hum”, but I think it just enhanced the mood. The audience was rapt and very appreciative. I got a lot of great feedback from people after the show. A friend of Phillip’s described my performance as being “almost religious”. Maybe I should work that angle…Father K. Redfearn from the Providence Church of St. Nihil, delivering the word of NO GOD to Europe. YOU‘RE ALREADY IN HELL, BROTHERS AND SISTERS, SO LET THE VIOLENCE AND WILD-DONKEY-FUCKING BEGIN! ...I’ll never pull it off. I lack both the conviction and the theatre training. I’d be preaching to the choir anyhow.
It’s been great hanging with Micah. It’s good to tour with New England kin. He’s a man of few words, and he chooses them wisely. He’s a funny bastard with an incredibly dry sense of humor and a keen eye for the absurd. He also has a very compelling act. His voice has a presence that commands a room with the simmering energy of a revival preacher (he lacks the theater training as well, but he doesn’t need it) and he plays the 12 string like a motherfucker. His right hand is a blur. His music is certainly anachronistic, but he doesn’t wear it like a mask. It all seems very natural and very sincere. His songs are gorgeous and are filled with melancholy and barren images. And the guy has an enormous repertoire. He’s played a completely different set every night. It’s a difficult act to follow, which is why I’ve insisted on playing first every night.
After we played, everyone got drunk on wine (but remained cordial and friendly) and I went for a walk to find a call shop. It was All Souls Day, so almost everything was closed. I ended up walking until I was in the Turkish neighborhood. The only places that were open were the pita shops and weird little gambling houses where brawny Turks shot craps and yelled at each other. There were also a few typical European sports pub-type places where sad, bloated and spent middle aged men and women nursed strong beers while their shrieking children ran around among the billiard tables and thick smoke. After walking about a mile I found that all the call shops were closed. I gave up and went back to the party.
Things had pretty much wound down, so Phillip and Benedicte took us on a tour of the sights. We saw a several refurbished medieval churches and castles and the bar that had once been the gallows pole. Benedicte pointed out the section of the river where Diamanda Galas had performed a few months earlier on a makeshift platform to confused and horrified tourists who probably thought they were there to see Celine Dion. We went to a crowded jazz club that was tucked away in a long cobble-stoned alleyway. The band were pretty young and had obviously listened to a lot of that terribly antiseptic Chigago post-rock shit that everyone was so gaga about in the late 90‘s, but they transcended their misguided influences by playing really well and creating a dark atmosphere that fit the room nicely. After their set ended, we found another bar where I was too distracted by my wildly spinning brain and the presence of too many attractive females to participate in the conversation. Fortunately, Micah held down the fort.
We parted company with Phillip and Benedicte the next morning after breakfast. They were incredibly good hosts and fine people. Now it’s an endless series of trains to Nijmegen and I’m lugging 3000 dollars worth of equipment on a 10 dollar cart through the rain. My system is flawed and in bad need of repair.
We played in Benedicte and Phillip’s living room for their housewarming party. The house was filled with incredibly beautiful and well dressed people. The Belgians really have it down, both in terms of genetics and fashion sense. I’m particularly impressed with the bone structure and the boots...damn good boots. I ran into Wim and Analise whom I had stayed with Amsterdam on the dreadful Eyesores European tour of 2005. I remember that I had dumped a pile of pennies and chocolate dust from my suitcase outside the door to their house. My bandmates were not impressed with my lack of decorum. It hadn’t seemed like a huge mess until we saw it in the light of day. There was a good deal of grumbling. I had been in the doghouse in general on that tour anyhow (for other more complicated reasons which I will not get into right now). Wim and Analise seem to have forgotten the incident or at least they didn‘t bring it up in conversation. We had a pleasant chat. They are very nice.
The show was great. I played very well, despite the fact that I was using Micah’s guitar case for a kick drum and the kick pedal kept sliding all over the place. I had a coughing fit in the middle of “Amplifier Hum”, but I think it just enhanced the mood. The audience was rapt and very appreciative. I got a lot of great feedback from people after the show. A friend of Phillip’s described my performance as being “almost religious”. Maybe I should work that angle…Father K. Redfearn from the Providence Church of St. Nihil, delivering the word of NO GOD to Europe. YOU‘RE ALREADY IN HELL, BROTHERS AND SISTERS, SO LET THE VIOLENCE AND WILD-DONKEY-FUCKING BEGIN! ...I’ll never pull it off. I lack both the conviction and the theatre training. I’d be preaching to the choir anyhow.
It’s been great hanging with Micah. It’s good to tour with New England kin. He’s a man of few words, and he chooses them wisely. He’s a funny bastard with an incredibly dry sense of humor and a keen eye for the absurd. He also has a very compelling act. His voice has a presence that commands a room with the simmering energy of a revival preacher (he lacks the theater training as well, but he doesn’t need it) and he plays the 12 string like a motherfucker. His right hand is a blur. His music is certainly anachronistic, but he doesn’t wear it like a mask. It all seems very natural and very sincere. His songs are gorgeous and are filled with melancholy and barren images. And the guy has an enormous repertoire. He’s played a completely different set every night. It’s a difficult act to follow, which is why I’ve insisted on playing first every night.
After we played, everyone got drunk on wine (but remained cordial and friendly) and I went for a walk to find a call shop. It was All Souls Day, so almost everything was closed. I ended up walking until I was in the Turkish neighborhood. The only places that were open were the pita shops and weird little gambling houses where brawny Turks shot craps and yelled at each other. There were also a few typical European sports pub-type places where sad, bloated and spent middle aged men and women nursed strong beers while their shrieking children ran around among the billiard tables and thick smoke. After walking about a mile I found that all the call shops were closed. I gave up and went back to the party.
Things had pretty much wound down, so Phillip and Benedicte took us on a tour of the sights. We saw a several refurbished medieval churches and castles and the bar that had once been the gallows pole. Benedicte pointed out the section of the river where Diamanda Galas had performed a few months earlier on a makeshift platform to confused and horrified tourists who probably thought they were there to see Celine Dion. We went to a crowded jazz club that was tucked away in a long cobble-stoned alleyway. The band were pretty young and had obviously listened to a lot of that terribly antiseptic Chigago post-rock shit that everyone was so gaga about in the late 90‘s, but they transcended their misguided influences by playing really well and creating a dark atmosphere that fit the room nicely. After their set ended, we found another bar where I was too distracted by my wildly spinning brain and the presence of too many attractive females to participate in the conversation. Fortunately, Micah held down the fort.
We parted company with Phillip and Benedicte the next morning after breakfast. They were incredibly good hosts and fine people. Now it’s an endless series of trains to Nijmegen and I’m lugging 3000 dollars worth of equipment on a 10 dollar cart through the rain. My system is flawed and in bad need of repair.
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