A Year With No Head

SLEEPWALK

2007-12-10T01:46:00.000-05:00

Returning to work tomorrow. The maelstrom begins again. I’m in the hole. I need to raise a couple of grand really quickly. The winter will be spent in joyless toil, working all the time and trying to catch my breath and keep my head. Patience will require focus. Sleep will be a commodity. The few days of rest I’ve had have been severely compromised by my preoccupations. I need focus. I need to tread more lightly. I need to conduct my affairs more cautiously. I need to forget about females for a while. I need to write like a madman…music and words. I have been commissioned to write a 10 minute accordion and string quartet piece and it is slated to be performed in February. I haven’t started it yet, but I tend to work fast and feverish when there is a deadline. Despite (or perhaps because of) my status as a card-carrying fuckup, I know how to work under pressure.
I received word a few days ago that the tour blog will be published. Joan d’Arc of Paranoia Magazine is putting out a coffee table book of Conspiracy, Supernatural and experimental literature. It will also feature some more straightforward fiction. My piece will be in it alongside writings by Paul Laffoley and Tracy Twyman, among others. My good friend Guy Benoit is going to help me clean up some of my lousy grammar. It’s pretty exciting, but I can’t help but feel a bit guilty. I have writer friends who have toiled for years and have been unable to find a home for their work. The tour journal is the first piece of prose I’ve ever written and it’s already found a home. I’m not used to things falling into my lap. I spent years writing music before I could generate any label interest. I guess I’m more accustomed to struggle.
The writing has been a great processing tool. I’m considering writing an autobiography. There’s a lot of material there. My entire existence has bordered on the absurd. I imagine that it will be entertaining, but I’m worried. I spent many years drunk, on drugs or so deeply preoccupied that I lost awareness of my surroundings, so I’m not sure how much I’ll remember. The traumatic moments certainly register, but the rest is foggy and dim. I’ll need to have some conversations with people to help piece it all together. I will probably have to go on the lam after it’s release. It’s bound to upset some people.
I played a show at my house tonight. I didn’t play particularly well. I’m exhausted and I have nothing left to give. I need some new tunes. I’ve got a couple brewing, but they need a lot of work. I’ve had a really hard time talking to people since I got back, so it was difficult to have so many people in the house. I probably should have waited a few weeks to play again. I’m out of that mode right now. I’m in repair mode. Things need to change.

LAST EXIT

2007-12-05T18:25:00.000-05:00

AIRPORT
I’m in the Athens Airport. In about half an hour I will fly to Brussels and tomorrow I will fly back to the states. It’s the end of the line. I hate this part. I wish I could be put into suspended animation and automatically awaken in my apartment with a joint in one hand and a coffee in the other, but we live in an imperfect world. I have 4 flights and they all have extensive layovers. I’m already completely pissed off and exhausted and I have only been waiting for a few hours. I think I’ve spent close to 50 euros on cabs and beverages. Airports are loathsome vacuous gas chambers of consumerism at it‘s worst. They always fleece the fuck out of you here. There’s too many people and they seem to have lost track of their manners. I’m starting to lose it. Perhaps I’ve had one too many 4 dollar cappuccinos, but I want to incinerate everyone here and I feel completely justified in my thinking. I just want everyone to stop cutting in front of me in line and bumping into me. It’s not all that much to ask, but I guess it’s still an unreasonable request. The most well mannered people turn into hyenas in this sort of environment. I can’t imagine what they’d be like if there was a fire or flood.
I had my own hotel room in Athens, so I was able to catch up on my jerking off and stumbling around in my underwear. It was a nice little taste of solitude, but it was cocktease at best. I slept until 3pm yesterday and then spent another hour in bed chain-smoking and watching Greek music videos. Then I stumbled blindly into the streets beneath the Acropolis trying to find a coffee and trying to get my phone card to work. I went to the convenience store and got a cheap strudel-type thing and a Snickers bar for lunch. Then I met up with Micah at his friend Elisa’s apartment. We rocked out to some Rembetica CDs and ate a delicious home-cooked meal and found our way to the venue.
We played at a place called Small Music Theatre. It was a fantastic show, definitely one of the best of the tour. The sound was impeccable, the audience was fully engaged and the owners were really cool. We got called back for several encores and I sold the rest of my merch. It was nice to go out on a high note. If the tour ended after my tepid performance in Skopje, I would have left in a much worse mood.
It’s strange to be going home, but I’m ready for this to be over. Touring is really a younger man’s game. I just don’t have the stamina or the tolerance for discomfort that I used to. I really love it and I really hate it. Ultimately, I am a settler, not a vagabond. I need quiet. I need creature comforts. I need routine. I am a creature of habit. But... I also need adventure. It’s a paradoxical mindset, and I’m not sure that I have been successful in striking a balance. One day I’ll get it, but I’ll probably drop dead as soon as do. That’s generally how my luck works. At least I’ll die content.

HOME
I’m home. I’ve been in transit for 3 days. I shared a hotel room with my parents last night and we drove back in the morning. Christmas music is everywhere and I’m not ready to hear it. Laura cleaned the apartment while I was gone and it smells like sage. It was nice to come home to a clean apartment. I’m listening to Flipper and feeling like Hell. I’m trying to deal with the fallout of a sticky situation that I got involved in in Europe. It gets worse by the day and it’s followed me home. I bought 3 packs of Drum and they’re stale and dried out and they taste like shit. The airline sent my luggage to St. Louis. I went to pick up my car from where it has sat for 5 weeks sinking into the grass and looking like a beached whale. The clicker that opens the doors didn’t work. I changed the tiny battery inside, but it still didn’t work. I called the dealer and they told me to call AAA. I don’t have AAA. I’m stranded. It’s cold. I’ve been sitting in my kitchen for hours, staring off into space. I haven’t even taken my coat off yet. Annapurna is coming over in a few minutes to listen to me complain. I’m going to eat a Big Mac. It’s a little American ritual that I go through periodically. I’m looking forward to it.
It’s good to be here, though. The coffee is brewing and the nihilistic vinyl is crackling away in my bedroom. I’m back in the USA and the hate has returned. I want to disappear. I want oblivion. I want to feel something else right now. The coffee is done. I will continue this blog. The subject will become everyday life. I can’t promise that it will be entertaining, but I’ll give it a whirl. Goodnight.

BLACK COFFEE

2007-12-04T23:03:00.000-05:00

I’m in a hostel in Macedonia. It’s 4am. I slept on the train all day so I’m wide awake. I’ve been online for a while and after I grew bored with my email, I made the mistake of doing a Google search to see if there were any new reviews of “The Blind Spot“. Whenever I do this I inevitably stumble across something that pisses me off. This time it was some dipshit irony-rocker’s music blog. He trashed a performance Sadlers and I did in Worcester last fall in a truly idiotic and uninformed manner. Some people just don't fucking get it. I wanted to send him a response, but I decided that it wasn’t worth it. The problem with the internet is that it has convinced every ignorant hipster jerk-off out there in cyber-land that he is Lester Bangs. Music criticism has reached it’s absolute nadir in the electronic age. The legit publications and websites aren’t really much better. It seems like every review I read these days consists of a couple of glib sentences that either paraphrase the band’s press release or dismiss the music outright with a few snarky and usually way off the mark comments. Ignorance is bliss in the world of rock journalism these days. So, to my friend out there in cyberspace, I say this: I hope you go blind jerking off to your Cat Power records and I hope you rot in Hell. Fuck you, pal.
The show in Belgrade was great. When we first got to the bar where we would be playing and we were informed that there was no PA, I assumed that we didn’t stand a chance. The drunken chatter would surely bury us again. I got really discouraged and sunk into terrible reveries. Much to my surprise, the audience was very respectful and enthusiastic. A couple of women began adding strange vocal harmonies from the crowd. It was especially interesting during “The Way of All Flesh” when they added a harmonic bent to the piece that I hadn’t previously thought of. It came off a bit like those Bulgarian vocal duo pieces. It was one of those rare and spontaneous moments that I need to document before my brain finishes disintegrating.
I stayed up all night at the hostel because we had a 6am train to Skopje. I was gloriously alone until this gang of kids who were in town for a “future leaders conference”, or some shit, arrived and started talking loud and blasting the same trashy dance hit over and over again. It’s a full 24 hours later and that fucking piece of shit song is still hammering away in my brain. Micah woke and stumbled in while that idiot dance party was still roaring at 5:30am and we packed up and left.
We found a cab and loaded up. I noticed that there was no way to open the doors from the inside of the cab. We had been warned that the cabbies might try to rip us off, so I was wary, but we got to the station without a hitch. The station was filled with crusty and vicious looking people. Everyone looked worn out, dirty and destroyed. I found a café, drank a coffee and walked out, forgetting to pay. One of the counter people chased me out and yelled at me. I paid him and he left me alone.
The train was old and decrepit and there was nowhere to sit. Micah and I crouched miserably in between cars wondering what to do. It was going to be an 8 hour train ride. We had to figure something out. Micah did some hunting around and he figured out that if we shelled out an extra 10 euro, we could get a sleeper car. We paid and I sank into oblivion. I woke with an hour left to go and surveyed the landscape out the window of the car. We were far from civilization. Tiny dilapidated shacks whizzed by. We took note of a small creek that was literally hot pink.
We arrived at the station in Skopje and I almost got knocked over by the barrage of people trying to get onto the train first so they could get a decent seat. A cab driver met us as we walked off the train and followed us out all the way out to the street, repeatedly offering us rides, cheap hotels, etc.. We made many attempts to get rid of him, but he was incredibly persistent. He didn‘t give up until we were practically yelling at him. No sooner was he gone before another cabby took his place, hounding us and not taking no for an answer.
Eventually our promoter picked us up and whisked us away from the vultures. He brought us to the hostel where we would be staying and introduced us to his friend Alexander, who would be helping us and showing us around. I’m not entirely sure that I describe Alexander effectively. He was short and stocky and had a an enormous head of frizzy hair and a thick beard. He incredibly wired and constantly in motion. I had a difficult time understanding his English, so I did a lot of smiling and nodding. He eagerly dealt with all of my Primadonna needs. He was just the man for the job.
After soundcheck, Alexander, Micah and I went to look for food. Alex argued with the waiters at a restaurant that was filled to capacity, but made no headway. We eventually found a small place with table full of men who were shouting in cackling like madmen. It was a surreal scene, but I’m not sure that I can effectively describe it. It was just the vibe. There was one woman there who functioned as both a waitress and a cook Alexander must have had a 20 minute conversation with her about what we were ordering. I have no idea what they possibly could have been talking about, because the food we got was fairly simple (I had a piece of chicken with a small pile of raw onions and Micah had a salad.) Throughout our rushed meal, the roaring laughter seemed to be rising in pitch to the point of pure insanity. We finished eating and literally had to sprint back to the club so that I could jump on stage and play. The gig was OK, but the audience seemed a bit reserved. They were polite, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t into it.
The next day Alexander brought be out to look for a pack of Drum, but there was none to be found at little kiosks in the city. We ended up having to go the market place to the black market cigarette dealers. It was a crazy scene: vendors hawking cellphones, furniture, CDs, instruments and everything else you could think of. Several different Turkish pop songs blared out of sets of huge speakers creating a Charles Ives kind of vibe. Cars were driving down the narrow paths between the booths. There was much honking and cursing. We found a a group of cigarette vendors and Alexander spoke with them. They didn’t have Drum, but they said that they could get me some loose tobacco. A rapid exchange in Macedonian took place and one of the cigarette vendors ran into the bowels of the market place. Alexander told me that he was getting my tobacco. The vendor returned with a shopping bag. It was a fucking kilo. It was the most tobacco I have ever seen at once. Micah and I burst out laughing. “What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?” I laughed. “YOU SMOKE THIS FOR 3 MONTHS!” Alexander shouted, beaming like a madman. Too bad it will be stale in a week, I thought.
We bid Alex farewell. The train to Thessaloníki was 3 hours late. We waited in the cold and dirty station in Skopje with a mob of irritated commuters. The tobacco from the market was among the worst that I have ever smoked. I took two drags and felt like I had smoked ten packs of unfiltered Galloise. I threw the whole mess in the garbage and rolled the dried up shake from the few spent packets of Drum that I had neglected to dispose of.
We met a girl from Sweden named Molly Summer on the platform. She had been traveling around for a few years busking and crashing on various strangers couches. She was funny and very sweet. While we were talking, two filthy beggar kids high on glue started asking us for money. One of them couldn’t have been older than 7 or 8. He worked me while his friend stuck his face in a bag full of rubber cement. I was rolling a cigarette while he made a series of gestures. I handed him the cigarette. I’ve just given a cigarette to an 7 year old child. What the hell am I doing? I thought, as he eyed it quizzically. He handed it back to me and continued gesturing, this time more urgently. I gave him some of my Macedonian money, but it only made him more persistent. By this point the other kid, who was a few years older, started in on me as well. The 7 year old dropped to his knees and started kissing my shoes. I was getting a bit nervous about these kids. They were hovering a bit too close to my wallet and passport. I gave them the rest of my Macedonian money, a huge stack of bills probably barely worth ten bucks total, to get rid of them. It didn‘t work. The more I gave them, the more they hung on me. I physically pushed them off to keep them out of my pockets, but they just kept coming, passing the glue back in forth and frantically gesturing for more money. Finally, an angry dude in a red leather jacket chased them away.
We got a room on the train with Molly, a journalist and a law student. The conversation veered towards politics at first, but after the first hour we had digressed to trying tell the filthiest jokes we could think of. It was one of the more entertaining train rides of the trip and the 4 hours went by fairly quickly.
We landed in Thessalonica at about 10pm. After dicking around for a half hour, we finally found our bus and met up with some of Micah’s punk rock buddies that he had met while touring with Out Cold.
Micah’s friends brought us to a show at the university. We caught one set. The band was a five piece who was fronted by a very fetching young lady in a miniskirt and black leather boots. I had to hand it her- she looked pretty glamorous in the midst of a sea of crusty-punks. The band was great. They had a late 70s/early 80’s LA punk kind of feel, reminiscent of X or the Gun Club. I dug it, but I ended up sitting in this weird hallway for most of the set. These sort of punk scenes always leave me feeling alienated. Despite my punk roots, I’m pretty far from that world at this point.
The next day we got the train to Athens. Last stop. The end is near.

DEAD CITIES

2007-12-01T16:36:00.000-05:00

I’m sitting in a small café in Mostar, It’s part of small complex of buildings along with a bar, a theater and a live music venue. Surrounding it all sides are buildings that were bombed into rubble during the 90s. It’s a little oasis in the midst of a post-apocalyptic nightmare. Mostar has been a hotbed of religious and ethnic tension for more than 500 years and it got hit really fucking hard during the war. It makes the Detroit Ruins look like the Hollywood Hills. I wandered through several blocks of it. Old stone buildings shattered by bombs and tank fire. Carcasses of crumbling Tito era apartment buildings sprouting like broken teeth from the sidewalk. Bullet holes in the cracked concrete. Abandoned storefronts full of trash and empty beer cans. Trees growing out of the broken windows. Whole neighborhoods left to rot. Terrible shit went down here a scant few years ago. Unfathomable atrocities. Death and torture. Intolerance followed through to terrifying ends. It’s everything you could possibly imagine and worse.
A few blocks later and I was back among the cobblestone streets and Muslim-run restaurants. Historic mosques and Cathedrals surrounded by vast mountains that stretch as far the eye can see. There so much beauty and so much destruction here. The rebirth of the city seems to be in gear. It’s pretty exciting to see. The Balkans seem to be slowly crawling back. So far all my fears of corrupt police and crumbling infrastructure have been for naught. The trains run on time and we haven‘t had to bribe any crooked officials. We were supposed to play at a venue down the street from here, but we got stuck in traffic in Dubrovnik and missed the only available bus. It was bummer because this was the most highly promoted of all the Balkan gigs. We continue to kick ourselves over this.
I’ve gotten a second wind and I’m really enjoying myself again, but I’m eager to get home and start writing some new music. This has been an incredible tour but my mind is on home now. There’s only a few days left. I stayed up all night last night so that I would be sure to sleep on the 12 hour bus ride to Belgrade, Serbia which we’ll be taking in a few short hours. Dragan, who booked the Balkan leg of the tour has asked me to be less ironic on the blog, so I’m going to try to be less of an asshole and keep this entry on the positive tip.
We played at a small pub in Split, Croatia 3 nights ago. It had a large terrace that was enclosed by palm trees and other plant life that I am too ignorant to identify. There were several cats, a dog and 3 large peacocks roaming about in the yard and terrace. The owners are from Sydney and the inside of the bar is decorated to the hilt with various paraphernalia from Australia. We ate an incredible home cooked meal that was prepared by our more than gracious host, Jaika. Jaika had several pictures of herself hanging out backstage with The Stranglers (she gained some punk-cred points for that). She and her roommate Helinka were most kind. They helped us deal with a huge problem that I can’t discuss at this time*. It was way above and beyond the call of duty, and we are incredibly lucky to have met them.
The show was a lot of fun. There was a small appreciative crowd and I got some great feedback. A crusty old rocker kept offering me cocaine, despite the fact that I explained my complicated history with hard drugs to him several times. I think he just kept forgetting …cocaine ain‘t so good for the memory. We left the next day and took a train to Dubrovnik.
In Dubrovnik, we played at a place called the Orlando. It’s the only rock club in town and it’s fairly new. It was the first really punk rock venue of the tour. Micah remarked that it was comforting to play on a sticky stage again. There were a lot of metalheads there and I felt right at home, arguing the merits of old vs. nu metal. We ended up spending two days there due to the fact that we missed the bus to Mostar. One of the guys who worked there was a great cook. He rolled the largest joints I have ever seen and prepared a couple delicious meals for us. He told us a great story about giving his friend Mandrake root as a joke. Mandrake root apparently grows wild in in Dubrovnik and is a very potent naturally occurring psychedelic. His friend ended up tripping for days and he stole and crashed the car of some government official while he was high. He ended up having to flee and stay out of the country for a while…good stuff. The people there are young and the excitement is palpable. It was a good energy for my tired brain to absorb.
We went into the old city to check out the castle and cathedrals. The place was swarming with American tourists. We were among our own, for better or worse. It was incredibly beautiful in the old city. Mountains on one side and the Adriatic sea on the other. We stumbled over the cobblestones with all the other American clowns gawking at the old cathedrals and watching for pickpockets. Micah and I sang in the chapels. I felt like a tourist and I suppose that I am a tourist. The bus is leaving...onward to Belgrade.

TOTAL WAR

2007-11-27T06:07:00.001-05:00

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?

UNLEASHED IN THE EAST

2007-11-24T13:15:00.000-05:00

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…

THROW A SICKIE

2007-11-21T08:41:00.000-05:00

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….

EVIDENTLY CHICKENTOWN

2007-11-19T17:08:00.000-05:00

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…

TEENAGE KICKS

2007-11-18T21:32:00.000-05:00

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.

VENTILATOR BLUES

2007-11-16T15:00:00.000-05:00

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….

AWAY OUT ON THE MOUNTAIN

2007-11-15T07:31:00.000-05:00

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.

PALE BLUE EYES

2007-11-12T17:04:00.001-05:00

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 SONG OF THE DISEMBRAINING

2007-11-10T12:10:00.001-05:00

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.

Je suis L'Homme à tête de chou

2007-11-05T18:35:00.000-05:00

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.

MY WAR

2007-11-03T15:20:00.000-04:00

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.

NOVEMBER COMING FIRE

2007-10-31T13:34:00.000-04:00

Joyeux Samhain, filthy American pigs! It’s Halloween in Belgium. Halloween is just not the same here. The Belgians have only been celebrating this holiest of holies for the past 5 years and everyone here seems genuinely confused about the whole mess. I’ve tried to explain it, but it’s but it‘s untranslatable. The sad part is that they’ve been celebrating All Souls’ Day instead of Halloween here. Belgium has been getting screwed out of the best holiday of them all. I weep for Belgium.
I am in a much better mood with a bit of sleep and the hotel debacle behind me. My father kindly deposited some money in my bank account, so I’m in the black again. Yeah, I know, I’m now in debt to both Steve and my father…but who cares? I’m in Europe for a month, Goddammit! Fuck all y’all!
I’m in Ghent in the aforementioned Northern section of Belgium where they speak Flemish, a dialect of Dutch, which, from what I understand bears some similarities to German. I haven’t the slightest handle on any of these languages, but it doesn’t matter because most of the people I met seem to be better English speakers than most of the Americans I deal with on a daily basis. Micah rolled into LaCurie/RTT in the late afternoon while I was playing bucket brigade trying to deal with an errant toilet. I greeted him, but told him that it was probably better if he didn’t shake my hand. Once that fire was out, we caught up over homemade quiche which one of the promoters mother had prepared. England had gone well for him. He had opened for Simon Finn the previous night in London and it had been a killer show.
We played on an old bus which had been transformed into a quiet music venue, complete with a hardwood floors, a small heater, and stage lights. I played first. I played quite badly. I rushed the tempos on everything, played clumsily, sang out of tune and without confidence and had a few complete train wrecks. The audience was hard to read, but they did call me back for an encore. I played a slow version of Roky Erickson’s “I Have Always Been Here Before” using my famous shaky-knee technique throughout. It actually went fairly well because I kept it simple. Micah’s set was quite good, though he seemed a bit more reserved than usual. He ended with a cover of Jimmy “The Singing Brakeman” Rodgers’ “Away Out on the Mountain”…a truly psychedelic masterpiece from the depression era with complex yodeling patterns and descriptions of grizzly bear coats and beavers paddling on walking canes. I was thrilled. I love this tune. Jimmy Rodgers recorded a good deal of his music while suffering from tuberculosis, which eventually killed him. It didn’t seem to effect his voice, though. He could yodel like a motherfucker and all the while he was drowning in mucous and coughing up gobs of blood. That’s a tough bastard. And here I am whining about a smoker’s cough and a minor sinus infection. Always the pussy.
After the gig, I smoked some hashish and spoke with an attractive young sculptress from France named Tatiana. I found myself defending Mathew Barney again. I feel like I‘m constantly defending Matthew Barney. He should put me on the payroll.
Later, we were driven to the band quarters in an old beat up BMW limousine. Micah had to share the front seat with a unicycle, which I was trying to convince him to work into his act. Micah was unconvinced. After tearing through a strange network of alleys while being followed by a friend of the driver’s on bicycle, we arrived at the apartment.
It took us about half an hour to get the keys to work, which we realized was because we were at the wrong apartment. After righting this issue, we ascended the four flights of stairs with all of our bags. It was Hell. I had to lighten my load or I would never survive this tour. I left the huge duffle bag and most of it’s contents with the promoter (don’t worry Annapurna, I’m picking it up on the way back) and I crammed a bare requisite amount of clothing and personal effects into my pedal and accordion cases. In the morning there was coffee, but no coffee maker. Micah tried to make cowboy coffee in a saucepan on the stove, but it tasted like boiled shoes. We decided to wait until we got to the train station for the morning fix. We ate some eggs and descended the endless stairs.
We got to the station, drank copious amounts of coffee while fending off a drunken ex-hippy beggar, got the train and arrived in Ghent forty-five minutes later. We quickly found a small park to collect ourselves. We sat on a rock. I chain-smoked, Micah paced and we both sat in awe of the seemingly endless parade of unbelievably hot European women, none of whom we would ever have the opportunity to touch or even talk to. It’s probably better that way. Later, while walking along the river by giant weeping willows I pointed to a window where a woman was creating a comically profuse amount of steam while cooking dinner. It looked like she was cooking in the shower. We glanced upwards and saw a tall woman in a turtleneck sweater in the apartment above the steam-bath staring back at us. We waved and she waved back. “We’ll call her the one who got away” Micah said and went on to call it the perfect interaction. On the walk back we noted that her blinds were drawn. I guess it was unrequited.
We played at a small pub for a drunk, and very noisy, audience. There was no PA or amplification of any kind and I almost lost my voice trying to be audible above the obnoxious din. I played far better than I did last night, but I don’t think anyone heard me. I had great time playing, regardless. “Elzabet” was particularly vengeful. Micah’s set was fantastic, though he cut it short due to a jackhammer headache which he later had to drown in whiskey. He played a killer version of Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire”. The Boss generally leaves me cold, but I have soft spot for this one.
Outside the bar, we met a grizzled and surly American ex-patriate street performer who told us ludicrous horror stories about the former Yugoslavian border patrols. It got me genuinely worried, but Micah reassured me that it was bullshit. He described these gentlemen as being corrupt, but in a very endearing way. Apparently, they tend to want a little bribe money to get drunk with. It seems like a fairly innocuous abuse of power. I can get behind it. I can't imagine that I would act any differently given their circumstance. We decided to start a bribe fund.
Now we’re back at Phillip and Benedicte’s house. It’s a beautiful place and I have my own bed. My luck is on the rise, but the tour is only beginning.

FRIGHTENED

2007-10-30T15:29:00.001-04:00

Well, the first major catastrophe of the tour has happened and I haven’t even played a note yet.
I returned to the hotel yesterday after getting a sandwich and a pouch of tobacco and was settling in for a night of bad Belgian TV and softcore porn when I decided to assess my financial situation. I was going to need to find an ATM and take more money out if I had any plans to eat dinner. So I found an open wi-fi connection and checked my account balance. I nearly shit my pants when I read “Available funds: THIRTEEN DOLLARS.” I figured that the hotel must have run my card and put a hold on the money for the room, so I called the front desk. They informed me that this was not the case. They were going to charge my card when I checked out. I was sitting in a very expensive hotel room with all my clothes and equipment scattered all over the place. I had no way to pay for the room. I had no money to eat. Checkout was in 16 hours. My bank was only open for another 2 hours. I was doomed.
I decided to find a call center so I could call my bank on the cheap and straighten this mess out. There had to be a mistake. When I had checked my account at the airport to determine whether or not I could afford a hotel, my available balance was several hundred dollars. I knew the hotel would be a financial strain, but I figured I had money coming in and I would make it back. Now I was fucked. It also occurred to me that I wouldn’t even be able to go to a call center because I had spent my last few euro on a cup of coffee at the clip joint bar in the lobby. I began chain-smoking and pacing furiously. I had to think. Instinctively, I open the window. As I suspected, it was too high to climb out and make a break for it, and too low to throw myself out of. I was doubly screwed. I also couldn’t discreetly make it past the hotel clerk in the lobby with the amount of shit I had to carry. Escape was not an option. It was raining so I couldn’t play on the street. I wouldn’t have made shit doing that anyhow- I had sworn off busking years ago. I thought of crime, but I’m no good at crime. I wouldn’t rob anyone or suck anyone off when I was a drug addict and I wasn’t about to start now.
I had to think fast. My only salvation was the phone in the room with me. I was sure that the rates for overseas phone calls would be seriously unreasonable, like everything else in the hotel, but it was my only hope. I called the bank first. They informed me that I had pending charges coming in and that once the charges were authorized, there was nothing they could do. If I could get a few hundred dollars into my checking account, the problem would be solved, but the bank was closing in an hour and a half so I would have to work fast..
I called my father hoping he would have mercy on me and get me out of this. He doesn’t usually loan me money because I bled him dry during my junkie years, but this was extenuating circumstances. He wasn’t home. I tried his cell. No dice. He never even turns it on. I called everyone I could think of, but everyone I know is as fucked as I am: living paycheck to paycheck and in debt up to their assholes. Anyone who could have helped me was not picking up their phones. Everyone else was broke. I called work and asked for a salary advance. It was not possible with two hours notice. I was beyond fucked and now I had a 90 euro phone bill on top of the already astronomical price of the room. Now it was starting to get funny. I began to laugh and roll around on the floor.
I finished my last hand rolled cigarette and ripped open the fresh pouch of Drum that I had bought earlier. This is when I learned that the rolling papers are sold separately in Europe. I laughed even harder. I searched the room for sharp objects. Nothing. I remember that I had a few American Spirits left in a pack in my bag and I ripped off the filter and lit one. I wondered what Belgian prison would like. I always wanted to improve my French skills, With my luck they’d send me up north and I would have to learn to speak Flemish.
I reached my friend Steve, who had some money, but not enough. Besides, the bank was a 45 minute drive for him and it closed in half an hour. My last resort was to call Cuneiform, the Eyesores’ record label. I got Steve Feigenbaum on the line who was more than willing to help, but our only hope was a wire transfer and the bank’s business office was closing in an hour. I got all the wire info from the bank and called and gave it to Steve and told him to call back when he found out if it was possible. Then I fell into a deep jet-lag sleep while attempting to drown my sorrows in a torrent of internet pornography. I dreamed that I got into a fist fight with my ex-girlfriend.
An hour later I awoke in a panic. It was 11:30 in Belgium and 6:30 in the US. I hadn’t heard back from Steve Feigenbaum. I figured he would have left the office by now, but I tried anyhow. He answered. He hadn’t had any luck, but he had an idea. He would pay the hotel bill with his credit card. We tried it. It worked. I was in the clear. Steve had bailed me out. He had already been indoctrinated in to my personal canon of saints, but he has now been promoted to archangel. I had no money for food, coffee, cigarettes or the train, but at least I would not be screaming in Flemish while my cellmate violated me with a broom handle. I fell back to sleep.
In the morning I found one euro in change in my pocket and wandered back to the tabac to buy rolling papers. They cost exactly one euro. My luck was turning around. I found the number of the people promoting the show ( it should have occurred to me to call them in the first place, but jet-lag makes me stupid). The clerk who was beginning to get really irritated with me let me call from the hotel desk. I was picked up in an hour and loaned 20 euro. I ate chicken and drank multiple cups of coffee. It was glorious. I hadn’t been deprived of my morning coffee in years. I can’t be deprived of my morning coffee. Call me a bourgeois pig, but I need my creature comforts or I become apoplectic with rage. Ask anyone who’s ever toured with me.
Now I am at the venue. It’s a squat-like network of buildings called LeCurie/RTT It‘s cold and I‘m being dive-bombed by a deluge of mosquitoes. I thought the cold was supposed to kill the mosquitoes, but apparently, these are mutants. I have been trying to keep them at bay with cigarette smoke, but they seem to be in love with my face. I put a hat on so they would stop buzzing around my ears. It’s been raining for two days. Micah will be here soon. We are playing in an old bus on the grounds of the squat. It’s a interesting place. There is a circus tent in the back and lots of people tearing around in the dirt on mopeds. Dogs with cones around their heads are running all over the place. I have been given an amazing sounding kick drum for this show. It’s got a heavy low end and it sounds like war. I will be rusty and will not play very well but I have plenty of to exorcise, so I‘m sure it will be good.
The lesson for the day is to always have a backup plan. One day I will be an adult and this won’t be an issue. Today I need to thank Dagon, Odin and Satan for providing me with such reliable friends. For I will always be a fuckup and I will always need to be bailed out. Remind me to marry into money. It’s my only hope.

I AM THE UGLY AMERICAN

2007-10-29T06:46:00.000-04:00

Jet lag is not conducive to thriftiness.
I'm sitting in a Mercure hotel room in Brussels. I have overpacked. The flimsy baggage cart that I purchased at Target is buckling under the weight of my bags. I need to begin jettisoning immediately. The first thing that will have to go is the accordion and all of my pedals and cables. This will be followed immediately by the jawharps. As a result, I will need to change mediums for this tour. I'm going to choreograph a solo dance piece to commemorate the victims of Hurricane Katrina. I will be accompanied solely by hand-held tape recorder. Although I have never danced before, I imagine that it will come fairly naturally and I think I should have a solid act by the time I get to Ghent. The press will herald me as a genius and women will throw themselves at my lithe and graceful dancer's body which should well developed within a few days due to the rigorous training that I will begin after I finish smoking the rest of this pack of cigarettes. Due to the violent, emotional nature of the choreography, the hotel room will most likely reduced to rubble before the 17 euro continental breakfast is served, but I'm certain that I will not be held financially responsible for the damages because I believe the owners of the Mercure hotel chain to be great supporters of the artistic process. They will waive the bill for the damages and send a string of expensive escort girls up to my room who will demand to be showered in my urine. Everything will be paid for and I will never have to work again.
I had a 6 hour layover in Philly last night, so I left the airport and had dinner with Gillian and David Chadwick of Ex Reveri e/Golden Ball fame. I love these people. We had a lot of laughs and they didn't seem to mind my disjointed, sleep deprived rants, despite the fact that I rarely allowed them to get a word in edgewise.
Afterwards I went back to being treated like a criminal and being moved around like cattle. I did everything that I possibly could have done wrong at the passport control desk. I was nervous, I stuttered, I had no information about the people we were staying with and I kept changing my answers. Miraculously, they allowed me to enter the EU sans cavity search, but they needed to see a credit card to prove that I had a job and a place to live.
Tomorrow I'll have to find Micah and the club and deal with my packing troubles, but tonight is all about overpriced food, porn and hopefully sleep. I really need to sleep.

I AM DAMO SUZUKI

2007-10-28T11:25:00.000-04:00

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