You Shouldn’t Wake Me Awhile (Omaha, NE)

I’ve had dozens of jobs in my adult life, but I’ve never been anyone’s boss.  I never stuck around long enough at any one place to rise up beyond an entry-level position.  But in my band all the fellas like to call me Boss.  It started out as kind of a joke a few years ago and now it has replaced my name.  They don’t say Nick or Jaina or anything that other people would call me.  They just call me Boss.  And when they say it, their lips pop on the first ‘B’ like when a bass singer in a doo wop band crouches down and sings “doo-be-doo-wah.”  And when my boys call me Boss they plunge their hands to the bottoms of their pockets and kick at a stray piece of gravel and look off shyly.  “Hey Boss, can I get a payout?”  They adopt southern accents the further south we get, and I do too.  And the grammar gets all turned around as the sun gets hotter.  “Hey, Boss, where’s the gig at?”  “How much that is?” And we’re all Cool Hand Luke in the hot sun, working on some project just to work on it, forgetting what for or who sent us or where we’d go if we ever got out.  Digging a hole, filling it in, digging another hole.

Except that, instead of staying in one place we are instead sailing on a great ship.  Our ship was christened Rose before it ever reached our hands and it’s bad luck to rename a ship (or is it bad luck to NOT rename a ship?)  But this borrowed Rose is a large ship, built for comfort and luxuriating.  She is as wide as the horizon, longer than a beam of light.  A six foot tall human like myself can lay down in the back seat and entirely stretch his legs, and fall into a deep deep sleep and go through all the deepest parts of their REM cycle and experience the only kind of time travel that science will allow.  Three hours go by and you wake up and you have traversed time and space, ending up hundreds of miles from where you went to sleep.   And you wake up and you feel rested, unlike the normal kind of car sleep where you try to lean against the window and use your sweater as a pillow and your neck gets kinked like a pipe cleaner and you never really get to sleep.

Before we left our Port-land, we buckled down the straps and tied down the load.  If there was a hatch, we battened it.  If there was a sail, we trimmed it.  And we set our course down the heart of America.  And now every day is a new project, culminating in the night-time where we dig ourselves out of a hole of our own doing, and either jump up onto the ground and receive our applause, or fall back down and let the cool dirt bury us.  Either way, every town is a new chance.  We can dazzle Omaha and get carried off on the backs of the townspeople like conquering heroes, and then the next day we’re in Lawrence and nobody cares.  The same song that one night grips a dark roomful of people in a small midwestern town falls flat the next night in a different dark roomful of people in another midwestern town.  And you squint out to the audience and think, “Didn’t we decide this song was brilliant last night?  How come tonight it feels impotent?  Why that is?”

It’s because we are the underdogs, fighting with just a sling and some rocks, against an adversary as big as America itself.  We look out at the map of our tour route, and we see a swath of land that on the weather forecast is red with tornado warnings, and a swath of land that on the health cast is blue with swine flu warnings.  The purple overlapping portion is the path we must drive, the best-case scenario perhaps being a miraculous moment where a tornado comes and carries away a rabid pig and we hit a triumphant final chord as the assembled crowd erupts in applause that they are still alive.

As Malcolm Gladwell writes in a recent New Yorker article about the strategy of underdogs:

“David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.

In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. ‘I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,’ he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, ‘even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.’”

And so we must create our own rules.  Take on Goliath at the speed that we feel comfortable with.  Not change our uniforms or our tactics because we are afraid.  Despite how impossible it sounds, we are actually the favorites.

In our case, the battlefield is the stage.  And sometimes the stage is more like a castle with a moat around us.  It isolates us from the audience, distances us, make it hard for either of us to relate to the other.  So sometimes we have to get off the stage, disarm ourselves in some way, and let the audience in, slowly… slowly… slowly… Charm them with our flowers and our musical arrangements.  Let them walk right up to us, let them jump into our arms.  “It’s okay.  Everything’s going to be just fine.  Juuust fine.  And then…

We kill them!

With music, of course.  Kill them in a way that they thoroughly long for.

And so it was in Omaha.  A town we’d never been to.  A room that listened.  And a group of sailors who rose up and played their best.  And for the last song, I went to the back of the room and played an un-miked out-of-tune piano and shouted back towards the stage, where the rest of the band was swaying together and singing along.  A woman stood up, beaming with pride.  A victory against long odds.  We sailed off in our ship into the storms and diseases, to try once again the next night.

Snow is Still Falling, I’m Almost Home (Buenos Aires, Argentina)

I was at a loud bar in Buenos Aires, Argentina watching a three-piece klezmer band along with a bunch of new friends when one of them, Freddy, turned to me after some thought and said:

“Imagination is experience.”

I think that’s what he said.  It was really loud in there.  Maybe he said, “Experience is imagination,” or maybe he said something completely different.  English wasn’t his first language.  When he said the words to me, though, they made perfect sense.  I don’t know what he literally meant, but I imagine he was saying that you can create your own experiences through your imagination.  Or that thinking about things is the same as living them.  Or that the more experiences you have, the better your ability to dream becomes.

But I’m trying not to think about Buenos Aires, because what I intend to talk about here is the Southeast of the United States.  It’s just that I’m still here in Buenos Aires, and the weather is hot, we flew here standby and all the flights home are full, so we are here indefinitely, and the ice cream is tasty, and you can get a delicious steak for less than eight dollars.  This city is on my mind, in other words.  But perhaps it’s a prism through which we can more clearly see the past.  (Do you see things more clearly through a prism?  Did that make any sense?  Have you noticed when you try to learn a foreign language that there’s a period of time when you get worse at your own language?)

I’m trying to remember a time, just a month ago, when I was in North Carolina and touring around in a little van with my bassist William and my good friend Gill.  The tour was for just a week.  It began with me and William flying to Asheville and it ended with us flying back to Seattle for a gig that had already been cancelled.  Seattle was covered in snow by that point, and we had a difficult cab ride from the airport with a driver from Africa who didn’t speak much English and a co-passenger from Eastern Europe who also didn’t speak much English.  After an argument about why we couldn’t go where I wanted to go and exactly how much I owed him for getting me to nowhere in particular, the cab driver ultimately left us at a taqueria, where nobody spoke much English either.

Anyway, that was the end.  The beginning was in Asheville.  Gill lives there and so we stayed at his house for a few days.  He has a large piece of wooden furniture that doubles as a 78 player, and he has crates and crates on the floor full of heavy lacquered discs from bands like Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers.  You put a record on the turntable and close the cabinet doors and it sounds like the Skillet Lickers are right inside there, a little hobo band playing for you on their rusty instruments.

On Gill’s kitchen table there was a little cardboard tube with a long metal spring attached which rattled like a mini-thunderstorm when you picked it up.  I read the outside of the box that the toy came in and found it to contain a fair amount of hyperbole:

It said:

“THUNDER TUBE!

The THUNDER TUBE needs no batteries.  It’s all in the WRIST and the PALM OF YOUR HAND!

Is it a STORM approaching?  ALIENS communicating?

Swamp gas?

The Big Bang?

A LION?

The ghost of Uncle Joe?”

Which was going a bit far.  Would anybody really hear the sound from this little tube and think they were hearing the Big Bang?

We played a show in Atlanta and drove back that same night to Asheville.  On the three hour-ride Gill drove, as he always did, and this particular time told me and William a good part of his life story, including the part when he was fifteen and sold acid in Lake Charles, Louisiana and his friends got arrested and went to jail for twenty years for the same crime he was committing, but Gill himself was never caught and therefore didn’t spend the bulk of his life in jail and was instead free to play music.

From Asheville again we drove to Tennessee and had lunch at a Cracker Barrel in Lebanon.  The Cracker Barrel is a place where at least half of what you are there for is to listen to the waitress’s accent as she asks you if you want vinegar for your mustard greens.  You’re so intoxicated with how she forms her vowels that you at first decline the offer of vinegar, then you take a bite of the greens and almost gag and call her back to ask if you could still get that vinegar, please?  And then you bathe the greens in vinegar and still the taste of it makes you gag and you just put your napkin over the bowl so that the waitress doesn’t see that you didn’t know what you were getting into when you ordered mustard greens.

We played in Nashville a couple nights later and there was a distinct moment, when Gill had several guest musicians on stage– some of whom were in bands that had sold out multiple nights at the Ryman Auditorium, and some of whom weren’t– and they were all diligently and ego-lessly trying to play along to Gill’s songs because he had called them up onstage, even though they didn’t know the chords and two of them both played mandolin and there’s nothing good that can come from two mandolins on stage– there was a point in the middle of all that when I fell in love with Nashville, a city I never thought I’d fall in love with, like finally falling in love with the husband that your rich father forced you to marry.  It was a nice surprise.  The town had always struck me as an industry town full of strivers, but I realized that night that it was like Portland in some ways, just a town with an unusually large amount of musicians who just want to play music somehow, somewhere, even on a Monday night to no one.

From Nashville we drove down through Alabama, ate at another Cracker Barrel, this time with an Asian waitress, then at two Waffle Houses late at night (“At two in the morning, anything tastes good” as Gill’s girlfriend Leslie noted.)  We drove through Mississippi, where we started to run out of gas in between cities and literally coasted the last few feet to the only gas station for miles.  Like you see in the movies, except the van actually ran out of gas as we got to the pump.  “That could’ve been really really bad.”

It was warm out, in the 70′s at least, and I was getting phone calls from back in Portland from my band that our show in Seattle the next night would have to be cancelled.  If the venue wasn’t going to do it, then as a band at least we’d have to drop out, as it was getting dangerous and perhaps impossible for everyone to drive up the I-5.  It was hard to believe that there could be snowstorms anywhere in our immediate future as we drove into New Orleans on a beautiful warm night, but I took their word for it and cancelled the show.

Now, I’m not going to pretend that there are many similarities between Buenos Aires and most of the towns in the Southeast U.S., but New Orleans is a town that actually does have a lot in common with Buenos Aires.  I lived in New Orleans off and on for a couple years and always loved it, but thought of it as a rare jewel in the world, just some strange anomaly of a place that had somehow cultivated a slow pace, a unique collection of local customs, and a lot of broken stuff.  Traveling more through the Southeast, I realize now that some of those traits are in other towns as well.  Those towns might be more mainstream, in that they have allowed Chili’s and TGI Friday’s to dictate the cuisine landscape, but you can still sit in a little bar in Huntsville, Alabama and feel completely like you’re in your grandfather’s basement, that everything is okay, and that you’re not being judged by the clothes you wear (unless you happen to be wearing something GAY of course.  Don’t do that.)  And now being in Buenos Aires has shown me that there are many other places in the world where things move slower, where people are more receptive than afraid, where lots of stuff just looks cool because it’s old and dirty and broken.  Sure, this city has the inexplicable TGI Friday’s and Hooter’s down on the riverwalk that could be any river walk in the world (and why would you go all the way to Argentina and eat at a Hooter’s, you may ask– well, just keep on asking that question until you get a good answer, because I’d like to know too)… BUT… well, there is still a higher proportion of REAL THINGS here… blocks and blocks of territory that the modern world has overlooked.  And sure, the teeter totters in the park are squeaky and need oiling, and there are too many feral cats wandering around, but those are all things that make the heart leap a little bit, in some way.  TGI Friday’s has never made anyone’s heart leap.

So, what I’m saying is:

The Southeast of the U.S.
+
Buenos Aires
=
New Orleans.

Being in New Orleans for just that one night, though, was like being a prisoner on the last night out on parole.  We played in the tiniest bar in the world.  Fifteen people maybe were there, but no empty chairs.  The air was thick, that below sea level air that leaves you choking sometimes on your own spit.  It seems like it’s easier to make music come alive in New Orleans.  I’ve often thought that that’s why jazz started there and not in, say, Denver.  The people involved were important, sure, but the thickness of the air molecules had to play at least some part in that, right?  I mean, sound is just vibrating air, and if the air is thicker and more interesting doesn’t that make a difference?  But, like I was saying, last night on parole, walking down Royal Street with my friend Meghann, going to Mimi’s for some food at two in the morning, knowing the cab was coming at five a.m. to take us to the airport and back to the frozen North, but not caring.  Trying to make it all last, as Tom Waits says, squeezing all the life out of a lousy two-day pass.

Alas, you can’t change your fate, especially if airlines have any say.  I had to fly to Seattle even though I live in Portland and our Seattle gig had been cancelled.  We got stuck in Salt Lake City for five hours, watching planes depart for Portland as our Seattle-bound flight got delayed again and again.  “Can’t I just get on THAT flight?  That’s actually where I live…” I asked the gate agent.  “Sorry,” he said, “9/11.”  That’s always the argument ender.  You can’t ever say anything after someone says, “9/11″ or you’re just being a dick.

We eventually got to Seattle and were snowed in for 24 hours there, and then we skidded down quickly to Portland and got snowed in for a good week there.

It’s all hard to imagine now, here in Buenos Aires.  It’s summer here, for one thing.  Sara and I walked down the street in the San Telmo neighborhood the other day, both dressed in black.  I had just bought a new black shirt and was breaking it in.  She usually wears all black.  It seemed like we were overdressed for the hot upside-down summer, but then we found an enormous old church with some beautiful voices spilling out of it.  We walked in quietly and sat in the pew closest to the door.  It was the kind of pew that is as easy to kneel at as it is to sit in.  At the far end of the enormous building the pastor was giving his sermon, but even if it were in English I don’t think I could’ve understood it, because we were at the back of the church so far away from him, and all the reverberations were hitting my ear before and after the original waves of his voice came to me.  And then someone with a guitar started to sing, at first just verses by themselves, and then the choruses where everyone joined in and sang along.  The echoes of voices blended in with the voices themselves to create a sound that I hope God would be pleased with, if he has any taste at all.  At one point I felt a tug at my eye, like a dagger of a tear was making its escape.  I looked down at my body and noticed that my black clothes were flecked with white dots.  I looked over at Sara and it was the same with her.  She pointed up at the ceiling, which was made of plaster that was slowly peeling.  Every few seconds another tiny piece would fall on us.  And we would turn to the other with a look of, “Are you crying?” “No, just plaster.  Are you crying?”  “Plaster.”  Piece by piece this wonderful church in San Telmo was crumbling on us and its own parishioners.  How much can the ceiling fall apart until you can’t live under it anymore?  We stayed for one more song and then walked out, brushing the dust off our clothes as we left.

Going to Graceland (Memphis, TN)

Some of us walk the borderline between believing in something and believing in nothing.  Whether it is our country or a divine creator, we are certain that we feel something stirring inside us, but if it is a true feeling we are afraid to let it out, because we see other people with a strong love for their country or their God express themselves in such ugly ways.  We think of the symbols of our country, of the words we were taught to recite in school and think, “What is a flag?  What is a country?”  To the extent that we have one, our pledge of allegiance is more like,

“I pledge no particular allegiance to the codified symbol of this meaningless construct, and to the empty signifier for which it stands; one imaginary entity under another imaginary entity, not able to bestow liberty and justice on anything because those are natural rights available to all men and women just by virtue of being born in any country.”

Or, you know, something clever like that.

But is it wise to define your beliefs as a response to others’?  I’m open to a renewed sense of patriotism, one that is personal and well-managed.  I claim no superiority here, but due to a quirk of scheduling, in just the year 2008 I’ve been to 44 different states.  And in driving around to those states I’ve been pulled over by the cops five times.  I’ve eaten about 97 eggs benedicts.  I’ve watched every episode of the American Office at least twice and now I prefer it to the British Office, something that would make me from a year ago want to strangle me from now, if me from a year ago could hear me say that.

I’m trying to say that I really love America, and more so every day.  And somehow (again, no superiority implied here) I’ve managed to visit a lot of this country’s national monuments this year, and I’ve loved them very much in their cozy little granite and steel ways.  And so I thought I would offer to you the following, whose importance is implied by the use of capital letters and spacing:

NICK’S GUIDE TO U.S. NATIONAL MONUMENTS HE HAS VISITED THIS YEAR

Golden Gate Bridge

In August I was in San Francisco at the same time that my friend Chris was putting on a version of Macbeth at Fort Point, an old Civil War-era fort right underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.  The fort is pretty big, and unusually shaped.  I went to a rehearsal there one day to watch them try to organize their play and shout out their lines while the wind swirled around inside.  It seemed like quite a challenge.  And after a while I wandered off on that partly sunny but cold (i.e. “every”) San Francisco day and leaned on a railing and gazed up at the Golden Gate Bridge and fell in love.  The color of it is just so indescribable and bold and strange.  As a kid it took me a while to realize that the “golden” in the name referred not to the bridge itself but to the state of California, and that the bay is the gate to the golden state, and the bridge spans that gate.  I always tried to understand why the bridge was more orange than golden.  I swirled it around in my head, but I could never make it make sense.  Now I understand it: Golden Gate Bridge.  And of all the monuments, it has my heart.

Old Faithful

Later in August I was talking to my friend Ashley, who was living in Portland at the time but had just been offered a job in New York City.  She was saying that, since she had a lot of stuff to move and she was afraid of flying, she’d have to take the train to New York and ship all her belongings, which would be very expensive.  I told her that she should just rent a U-Haul and drive herself and her stuff across the country.  She told me that she didn’t have a valid driver’s license.  I jokingly said, chuckle chuckle, that she should rent a truck and then pay me to drive her across the country.

And so she did.  I stopped laughing around Montana, when I realized that I actually had to drive every one of the three thousand miles myself, because she REALLY didn’t have a valid driver’s license.  But along the way we visited Yellowstone and, shortly after entering the park, we had to stop our big yellow Penske truck (U-Haul having been too expensive to rent) because a large buffalo was walking slowly in the middle of the road.  After a minute of waiting, he moved to the side a bit and we crept by and I looked at his enormous head from about two feet away and I swear looking into that buffalo’s eye was like looking into the Eye of American History.  That buffalo had seen EVERYTHING and it was tired and if you wanted to get by you were just going to have to WAIT.

We arrived at Old Faithful as the sun was going down.  Unfortunately we were on such a tight schedule that we didn’t get to see the geyser erupt.  We sat on a bench for half an hour and nothing happened.  We looked at the time and said, “We’ve waited long enough, America.  We have to go find a hotel.”

Okay, we didn’t say that exactly.  But we were on a tight schedule.

Mount Rushmore

A couple days later we visited Mount Rushmore.  I couldn’t decide whether it was bigger or smaller than I had imagined it would be.  Everyone told me before I got there that it was going to be smaller than I imagined, but since they kept saying that, I had lowered my expectations for how big it was going to be to the point that when I looked up at it it looked kind of big.  Either way, it was bigger than it was on the South Dakota quarter.

But, oh dear.  Who would ever look up at a mountain– and not just these days, but like a hundred years ago, and not just any mountain, but a mountain in the middle of South Dakota– and think, “Let’s get some boys out here with jackhammers and carve some presidents on THAT!”  Well, actually, no one did it quite like that exactly.  The first guy to come up with the idea originally wanted to put actors on the mountain.  People who were popular at the time, which would have been Clark Gable and such.  Can you imagine that?  It would have been the first mountain to ever go out of style.

But now you drive up to Mount Rushmore and you look at it, and yes I have to say that it’s impressive, but it’s also just exactly what you’ve already seen in hundreds of photographs.  It’s Mount Rushmore.  You know what it looks like.

Statue of Liberty

I drove that Penske truck all the way to New York in six days, and we ended up at the entrance of the Holland Tunnel in New Jersey at eleven p.m. on a Thursday night, and the lady at the gate told us that we couldn’t get into New York because we were technically in a commercial vehicle and commercial vehicles weren’t allowed in the Holland Tunnel.  She said we had to take our big yellow truck and drive it to the Lincoln Tunnel, which was a few miles and many incomprehensible turns away.  I looked at this lady, my eyes blurry after hours and hours of driving and said, “You’ve got to be KIDDING ME!”

She was, of course, not.

We didn’t actually visit the Statue of Liberty, but that particular copper Lady was looking down on us the whole time, shining her guiding Liberty light.  What we needed, though, even more than the shining light of Liberty was a good map.  New Jersey (whose name comes from the old Native American word for “clusterfuck”) is a tangled mess of half-constructed roads, poor planning, and outright cruelly unreadable signage.

The Space Needle

I flew from New York to Seattle a day later.  I had been listening to the Walkmen’s new album on the drive to New York and had been out of town for their set at the Doug Fir in Portland, but now I was going to be at Bumbershoot the same time they were playing.  The only problem was that their set started just fifteen minutes before my band was supposed to play.  I lingered past the time we were supposed to go on, just hoping to see one more song.  Fortunately, for their fourth song they played “In The New Year” which happens to be the most awesome song in the history of sound.  The lead singer Hamilton screams it out in his high-pitched voice and holds the notes at the top longer than you believe anyone could or would hold out a note.  “My friends and my family, they all aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaassssssk me one thing…”  It was glorious.  After the song ended I raced across the festival grounds, past the Space Needle (an unusual monument, it looks kind of plastic-y from a distance, but when you get up close and touch it, it’s very solid, like the hull of a ship) and made it to our little event in time to play a couple of songs.  My band had forgotten to bring my guitar up from Portland, so I just walked around, holding a book in my hand, slapping it against my other palm rhythmically while I sang.  We’re no Walkmen, but it seemed to work.

Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial

After my six week fall tour, I took a trip with Sara to Washington DC.  At midnight on a Tuesday, exactly one week before the Presidential election, we weaved through the flagpoles around the Washington Monument, skipped down to the World War II Memorial, and then walked in silence on opposite sides of the reflecting pool to the Lincoln Memorial, all the while not encountering another person, except for a security guard.  It was strangely quiet and grandly stunning.  It was like climbing the beanstalk to the clouds and visiting the giant’s house while he was away.  Where was everybody?  Don’t people generally gather around monuments and talk or protest or do something?

A week later, as you might have heard, Obama won the presidency.  The night of his victory I was in Puyallup, Washington, playing to a crowd of teenagers at a coffee shop.  Even though the baristas had dimmed the lights the best they could, the glare still felt unnecessarily harsh.  To my left, and constantly visible out of the corner of my eye throughout the set was a table full of people on laptops– probably six of them crammed in together, with all of the screens showing election results.  I pretended not to look, but it was still early in the evening and the presidential race had not been decided yet. In fact, the results had just started to come in when I took the stage.  It looked like the electoral maps were mostly red whenever I glanced at them, but I tried to keep in mind that red states are geographically much larger than blue states, and electoral votes are not awarded by square mileage, even though that’s sometimes how the maps make it appear on television.

Eiffel Tower

Did you know we had one of these in America?  It’s in Las Vegas.  I met my family there for Thanksgiving.  We stayed in the pirate hotel and then walked over to the Paris hotel and saw the Eiffel Tower replica.  My dad made a point to say, “Well, now we don’t have to go to France.”

At several prominent landmarks in Vegas we lined up for a photo and gave our camera to a friendly tourist to take our picture.  This is a common practice around monuments.  Everyone wants to get in the photo and someone outside the family is needed to take the picture.  I saw other people constantly doing this.  I imagine Vegas has a higher incidence of “Can you take a picture of us in front of this?” than any other location in the world, but it would be hard to prove that.

Hoover Dam

If you’re gonna go see a dam, this is the dam you should see.  It totally and completely stops a lot of water from flowing down a canyon.  I went with my family during our trip to Las Vegas, and as soon as we got in the front door of the visitor’s area they made us all stand in front of a green screen as they took our picture.  It was on this green screen that the Hoover Dam was to be later inserted, and copies of the photo were offered to us for ten dollars.  It gave the illusion that the four of us were visiting the Hoover Dam and standing in front of it, which of course we were.  It would have been just as easy for them to take a photo of us in front of the actual dam, although perhaps the lighting was more manageable with the green screen.  We declined to purchase a copy.

Graceland

They tried a similar trick at Graceland.  Me and William were on a one-week tour of the southeast in the middle of December and we took a day trip to Memphis to see Graceland.  I’ve never been a big fan of Elvis, but I am currently writing a book proposal for the 33 1/3 series about Paul Simon’s Graceland album and I thought it would be relevant.  Anyway, the staff at Elvis’ home shuffled everyone past a painting of the Graceland gates and took a picture of us that they tried to sell us later, and all the while we were only a few feet from the actual gates and they could have easily taken a picture of us in front of the real Graceland.

I didn’t have anyone tell me beforehand that Graceland was smaller than expected, so I was surprised when I got inside the house and found that IT WAS JUST A LITTLE HOUSE.  I thought it was going to be a mansion or something.  I mean, it was a decent sized-house, bigger than any house I’ve lived in.  But not bigger than any house I’ve visited.  It could just be one of those things where the places of your childhood seemed bigger, but I feel like I had rich friends in high school whose parents had bigger houses than Elvis’ house.  Does that mean my friends’ parents were more important than Elvis?  (If so I should have said please and thank you to them more often.)

It cost me and William 62 dollars total to park and get in to Graceland.  This seemed a little excessive.  Actually, now that I think of it, Graceland was the most expensive monument on this list.  There was a sign across the street from the house with a quote from John Lennon that said, “Before Elvis, there was nothing.”  Indeed, I did gain more of an understanding of the importance of Elvis by going to Graceland.  But my overall impression was that it’s sad when someone is twenty years old and the whole world tells him he’s God and treats him like he’s infallible.  It leads to that person being trapped in a juvenile state, but with lots of power and money.  This can be dangerous to the world or to the person, or both.  For Elvis, it was mostly dangerous to him.  He just didn’t know how to decorate a house, and I’m sure nobody was going to say no to him.  He also didn’t know how to take care of himself, to be healthy, to not take tons of drugs.

The dude could sing, though.  Several televisions were on in different spots in the house, showing off his various appearances on Ed Sullivan, Milton Berle, and the later years when he had the clout to just have his own network specials.  At one point there was a video playing of him from a performance close to the end of his life, singing a medley of three American songs– I can’t remember which exactly, I think it was Dixie, God Bless America, and something else.  Songs that you’d think a singer couldn’t possibly make exciting.  But somehow his voice and his magnetism just made for a compelling five minute version of patriotic songs, to the point where the dozen of us tourists who happened to be walking by that television at that moment stood frozen and in awe.  I never thought God Bless America could give me the chills, but Elvis did it.  Once again, I was proud of our little country.  Rock and roll.  Freedom.  Elvis. America.  Things to be proud of, if you just forget about all the bad parts.

After we left Graceland, we walked past the little podium where they were offering copies of the photos they took of us in front of the painting of the front gate.  Instead of buying one, I ran back to the mural and stood in front of it while William took a photo of me with my camera phone.  And that’s how we swindled Graceland out of ten dollars.

See You In Heaven If You Make The List (Burlington, VT)

Sometimes there are coincidences in this world that are so incredible that you can’t actually appreciate them. For example, the sun is about 400 times larger than the moon at the same time that it is 400 times further from the Earth than the moon is. This creates the illusion in the sky that the sun and the moon are the same size, while of course they are not. It also allows for the opportunity once in a while for the moon to pass in front of the sun and perfectly block out all of its light. Can you really appreciate the coincidence of this? If the sun were just a little bit bigger, or we were closer to it, the possibility of total eclipses would vanish. There is no reason, when you think about it, that the sun and the moon had to be the proportions that they are. It’s just a coincidence. And since this happenstance is so remarkable, we actually appreciate it less. It’s so improbable that it just makes sense. I think that is unfortunate. I am interested, therefore, in being a part of the worship of remarkable coincidences such as these.

I am not implying that my band is remotely as important as the movement of the spheres, nor that our proportions are as celestially miraculous. No, no, we are just five ungainly hobos. But because we are out in the world, we are at the mercy of strangers and at the whim of certain coincidences that sometimes break our way and sometimes don’t. This is all the more sharply delineated when we play music on the street, as we often do.

Most days on tour consist of driving to a city, getting to the central area of town, finding an appropriate place to set up and play on the street, loading our instruments out and then parking the van, then setting up and playing for people that sometimes ignore us and sometimes treat us like we are the god Quetzalcoatl and they are the humble Aztecs who will give us anything to please us. Mostly the reaction is somewhere in between. It is always interesting.

For example, on the streets of Minneapolis a couple weeks ago during a half-hour of rather fruitless busking, a strange-looking man came up to the band and held out a gold ring for Nathan. This man asked if Nathan wouldn’t mind proposing to this man’s girlfriend for him. This man was shy, apparently, or looking for a romantic opportunity to ask the question or (maybe?) scamming us. It was hard to tell at first. I was leaning towards thinking it was a scam, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what the scam would be. He had grabbed one of our CDs and said that he wanted it but didn’t have any cash on him. He said he would get money from his girlfriend. That sounded a bit like a scam, but just a tiny one. He indeed went across the street and grabbed a woman and brought her over to us. He explained to her that we were this nice band and we had a CD and then he gestured to Nathan and Nathan held out his palm with the shiny ring in it. Nathan communicated some sort of marriage proposal, and the man kind of nodded in agreement, and the woman seemed to accept the offer by kissing him. We all cheered and played the most romantic song we knew and then the man asked his new fiancee for twelve bucks to buy our CD.

In Madison a few days later, we set up in the evening in the middle of a city-wide music festival. We played for an hour and handed out flyers to our show that night. At the club later that same night, we started our set to a fairly empty room. A polite golf-clap followed our first song. But people filed in throughout the set and the room got rowdier and rowdier, to the point that after the last song they cheered wildly for an encore, something no one would have predicted after the first song. The next day, still in Madison, someone told us there was going to be a farmer’s market around the capitol building. We went down in the late morning and there were thousands of people milling about in the bright sun. We played on a street corner and gathered a large crowd for a good while. Little children sat in a row at the front and then boldly asked their parents for a dollar bill to put in our case. One by one, they would stumble nervously up to us, drop the dollar bill in our case and then run back to their parents. The day was beautiful and yet cast in an interesting light, with the capitol building always looming overhead, like we were there to protest something.

After a show in Eau Claire that night, we drove back down to Madison to spend the night. We got up early the next morning to drive to breakfast and on the way we ran into another street fair. We had no particular plans to busk that day, but faced with a crowd of people on the street we basically had no choice but to do it. This fair was in a narrower area than the day before and already featured about six stages of musical acts along the four blocks of the fair. It was hard to find a good spot to busk, but we parked our van and set up our instruments opposite one of the stages and waited for the band to finish. We started our first note right when they were done and played until the next act was ready to go. You know that a day of busking is going to go well when people start lining up to watch and investigate your CDs before you’ve even played a note. We jumped about during another sunny day in the middle of a crowd of pretty girls and dancing children. We sipped on smoothies afterwards and laughed about not having to go into an office the next day.

I often tell people about our habit of playing on the street, and they look at me with a bemused, sort of pitying look, as though they’re talking to a homeless person or something. They apparently misunderstand the aim of our busking. Maybe they think that it is a sign of abject desperation, like we are playing for spare change so that we can buy day-old bagels as our only sustenance for the week. And then they ask if we made a couple bucks out there that particular day, and I tell them how much we actually made and their eyes light up and they say, “Really?” And I say, “Yes, really.”

And they want to know how it works, and I tell them that it doesn’t necessarily make sense to me. I’m generally a soft-voiced, introverted person, and yet I am now often standing in the middle of a crowded street on weekend mornings and yelling out “BATTLEGROUND!!!” Years ago I made a living painting faces on the streets of New Orleans for Mardi Gras, and playing music on the street is a very similar discipline. And yet, while painting faces I never once had any interest in engaging in the hustle aspect of it. I learned how to face paint from friends who went about attracting business by walking down the street and shouting out come-ons to the crowd, “Hey y’all, how ya doin’? Come get your face painted for the MARDI GRAS!” But it just wasn’t in my personality to do such a thing, so I decided that I was going to be myself, and either I would succeed or fail as a face painter on my own merits. And I never once hustled people or yelled out to anyone, I just put on a big cardboard hat that said, “FACE PAINTING” and people would slowly come up to me and ask me to paint their faces, and someone would see me painting that one person’s face and then it would grow and grow until I was making $400 or so a day. And that was remarkable to me, but I also felt I could always take it or leave it. I didn’t love the art of the hustle, and so I didn’t care about being a face painter as a career. It was just a way to be doing something creative and get paid for it.

And it is the same now with busking, with the added benefit that it is a job that is closely aligned with my chosen field, and so when we are playing on the street and selling CDs, we are not just making money but also promoting our band, and that success spills over into the shows. But still, I have no particular interest in becoming a better hustler and finding ways of getting the crowd riled up. I just want to play my songs, shout them out there as loud as I can, and the people can choose to freak out about it or not.

After Madison was of course the night of comedy in Chicago and our failed attempt at getting into Canada. We drove around the Great Lakes and got to Burlington, Vermont late on a rainy day. We played a gig to a room that people told me was emptier than it should have been, because of the rain. The next day was luckily sunny even though the forecast called again for rain (celestial spheres moving coincidentally, thank you to whoever’s in charge…) and so we set up in the middle of crowded Church Street and—as I said before—I screamed “BATTLEGROUND!!” for two hours and when we counted our money afterward we were astonished to find that we had made eleven hundred bucks. If that sounds like a lot to you, consider how much it sounded to us. Our goal for the entire tour was to bring in ten thousand dollars, and so in one afternoon in Burlington where it just happened to not rain, we made more than ten percent of our planned goal for the whole six-week tour. And keep in mind that this was just a random segment of the population, who had no idea who we were or that we were going to be there at that time. They were just people walking around on a nice day, looking for something to do. Why on Earth would they respond to us in that way? And so that’s what I mean when I talk about coincidences.

From Burlington we went to Boston and tried to play in Harvard Square. I dropped the guys off to set up and I drove the van around and looked for parking. The streets in Boston are such that one street forces you to turn a certain direction, and another forces you to turn a different direction, and then in five minutes you haven’t seen one parking place and you are suddenly three miles away and across a river. At the far point of my wanderings, I got a call from Scott back at the busking spot saying that the police were telling us we couldn’t play on the street. Which had never happened to us before, surprisingly, but then what could we do… if he said we couldn’t play unless we had a permit, then he was the guy with the gun and we had to believe him.

A couple days later in New York City, our luck changed back again. We set up in Union Square in Midtown Manhattan and played for a couple hours. At first, the jadedness of the New Yorkers seemed like an insurmountable obstacle, but slowly we gathered together a group of upwards of a hundred people. And it was New York, so you had every color and type of person imaginable. An old Asian man danced goofily while his wife stared at him with an embarrassed look. Young punks held their skateboards and looked out from under the sweep of their haircuts. A man who I imagine was from Nigeria came up and asked me what kind of music we were playing.

“You mean the name of the band?” I asked.

“No, what TYPE of music is this?” He asked.

And I said, “Well, we sometimes like to call it… Hobo Gospel.”

It stunned him for a moment and then he repeatedly the phrase slowly with a smile on his face as he turned away, “Ho-bo Gos-pel!”

We collected our money in Union Square while another busker set up next to us and started to play. We did pretty well for a busy city in the middle of the week. The other busker was just one man, playing all sorts of percussion. He was really good and very entertaining, and quickly gained a crowd as large as ours. But after about ten minutes, two New York City police officers came over and talked to him for a few moments. The man turned to the crowd and said, “These police officers tell me I have to stop, so I’m sorry, but you’ll all have to go.” And the crowd went, “Awwwww” and booed the police officers. I went over to the street musician and gave him ten dollars from our pile. “Sorry about getting shut down, man. Better luck next time.” He thanked me and we went off to play our proper gig in Manhattan.

Two days later we were in Nashville, Tennessee, playing on Broadway. That town calls itself Music City, which means that there is a guy with a guitar and an open guitar case on every corner, strumming away to “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine…” Which made us seem less novel. We spent half an hour playing and had trouble gathering a crowd. One guy walked by and flashed a ZZ Top backstage pass and said, “This might be your lucky day… I’m with ZZ Top…” But wandered off and never really elaborated on how ZZ Top could be lucky to us in any way. When we finished and counted our money, we had only about forty bucks, which was about what we had made that day in Minneapolis where the man asked Nathan to propose to his girlfriend.

But we are not about to complain. It would be like looking up on a sunny day and complaining that there’s NOT an eclipse. There can’t be an extraordinary coincidence every day. Just knowing that they have happened before gives hope that they can happen again.

The Misuse of the Bassoon (Outside Toronto, Canada)

As we were being thrown out of Canada the other day, the immigration officer coldly said to me the words that truly hurt:

“You’re just not offering any benefit to Canada.”

And I know he meant that in an economic sense. But still. Ouch.

We were driving from Michigan to play a show in Toronto. We had no work permits, but we did have a letter from the promoter of the show saying that everything was on the up and up. And yet at the Port Huron border the Canadian man gave us a yellow slip and waved our van to the side and searched it and made us go into a little office and stand in front of the window while the officer behind the window sighed and shuffled his papers and pulled out a large binder with lots of information in it. After an hour of looking through that binder, making phone calls and talking to his co-workers, he told me flatly in legal language that we weren’t going to get in to Canada that day. I felt like we were on trial and I was the lawyer, me in my blazer leaning on the counter, my rag-tag band sitting on the hard plastic seats behind me. I can’t even remember any of the words that he said to me, save for the ones I quoted above which have been ringing in my head ever since. And maybe Canada is just a trifle to some people, just another barren state too far North to bother with, but to me it is a special place. I was married to a Canadian for four years. I had my heart broken by a different Canadian. My first real tour was across the long expanse of Canada, from Montreal to Vancouver. My first real shows were in Toronto, playing with The Be Good Tanyas, and Geoff Berner and Veda Hille. (At one show, Geoff Berner was playing accordion after having probably seven whiskeys, and at the end of his set he said, “This next song will be my last… unless you all cheer wildly, in which case I’ll play The Greatest Song Ever!”)

Well, in any event, we weren’t allowed in, and the real drag was that we had to drive the long way around Lake Erie, which just happens to be so big that it’s technically Great.

This was the second show of the week where we were supposed to play but didn’t. I’ll tell you about the other one, but first I want to mention Igor Stravinsky.

On May 19th, 1913 Igor Stravinsky debuted his new ballet, “The Rite of Spring” in Paris. All indications were that this would be a lovely evening. Many prominent composers and members of high society were there. Cultured people.

“But from the opening bars of the music, played in an unexpectedly high register by a solo bassoon, many of the audience became outraged. Saint-Saens stormed out, furious about the “misuse” of the bassoon. As the music’s barbarous qualities became evident and the Pagan nature of the ballet’s story began to emerge, it became obvious that this was not the genteel evening starring delicate ballerinas in tutus that ballet-lovers had been expecting.

The shouting and restlessness increased until the dancers were having difficulty hearing the orchestra at all. Diaghilev tried turning the house lights on and off several times, both Ravel and Debussy tried to calm the audience—all to no avail.

The wonder is that the conductor, Pierre Monteux, and the orchestra didn’t give up. And one also wonders how some of the audience managed to remain enthralled by what they were hearing given the noise of a large number of angry rioters. Yet one man reported afterwards how he was so captivated by the music that it took him some time to realize that the pain in his head was caused by the man behind him pounding out the rhythms on it with his fists.”

(excerpt taken from here )

It got worse. People tore up the theater. They actually rioted.

And so, things didn’t go well for Stravinsky that night. Which is comforting in several ways. First, it’s charming to think that less than a hundred years ago someone could actually care so much about the integrity of music that they would be upset about the “misuse of the bassoon.” This was a ballet after all, and it ended in a RIOT. A man pounded on the head of the man in front of him! Also, it makes even the worst show my band has ever experienced seem not all that bad. Which, come to think of it, brings me to:

The Worst Show My Band Has Ever Experienced

We drove into Chicago last weekend to play a gig that we had just set up last-minute. (This was before our failed attempt at getting into Canada.) We had found a place that hosted a comedy night on Sundays. Via email, the owner told me that he liked to have a band follow the comedians. The nights usually went well, he said, and there was a good crowd of people who would stick around to listen to the bands. (By the way, don’t ever believe what people you’ve never met tell you via email. Sometimes they’re honest, but sometimes they are pretending to be Nigerian kings with massive fortunes.)

We got to the club and set up our gear before the comedians went on. There were maybe five people in the audience, all of whom were comedians waiting to go up and talk. A drunk MC named Junior gave long rambling introductions that went nowhere as a means of bringing up comedians who gave long rambling monologues that went nowhere. One guy got up onstage and said the following, verbatim:

“So do you think girl penguins are happy to get menopause? I mean it’d be like you’re in the arctic and whoa! wait! here comes another hot flash… Ah, that was nice… Well, I think they’d like it… You know, no more periods… or hormones… Well whatever, it makes sense…”

But it didn’t make sense. Nothing anybody said made any sense. It’s like they had been given a couple boxes of refrigerator poetry magnets and were told to make up stand-up routines from the available words. And this went on for two hours. And the whole night it was just the comedians, the bartender, the owner, and our band. And nobody laughed after any of the jokes. Not even the other comedians would laugh. Many of the jokes were so poorly executed that the comedian had to say afterwards, “That was a joke.”

Did I mention this went on for two hours, while we, the band, were sitting there patiently? A couple people wandered in and said they were looking for the hip-hop open mic. Junior said he that he listed the show as that on some website to trick people into coming. At one point, Junior pointed at our musical equipment onstage and said it looked like “Arcade Fire after the rapture.” Even if that reads funny, believe me, his delivery didn’t back it up. While all this was going on, Nathan was writing feverishly on a piece of paper. Nathan asked Junior if he could go up and deliver something. “Is it funny?” Junior asked. “Well, it’ll make you laugh,” Nathan said, “Is it a poem?” Junior asked. “Well… no,” Nathan said as he looked at the piece of paper he was holding. “It’s sort of a… a tribute… to our band’s deity.” Junior was stumped by this and so ceded the microphone to Nathan, who proceeded to give an offering to the Traveler King, right there on that stage in front of those ten or so people. And this might not sound blasphemous on the surface, but keep in mind that offerings to the Traveler King have only ever been performed in dark alleyways at two in the morning, around bonfires in front of one or two people, or in empty fields and so on. The offerings are not done for applause, and they are torn up immediately when Nathan is finished reading them. They are solely for the benefit of the Traveler King, who protects us on the road. Doing it onstage into a microphone was a first for Nathan, and even though he was the most entertaining performer on that particular night, and even though he was funnier just by being honest than any of those comedians, he did feel bad afterwards, as though he hadn’t done right by the Traveler King.

After Nathan finished, Junior again picked up the microphone and rambled on with another incomprehensible joke as the last of the remaining people in the audience filed out. He kept making allusions to having the band come up and play, and then he would just keep talking, talking until everyone left, even when we screamed out, “How about letting the band play?” And so, ultimately, we just quietly went up to the stage and unplugged our equipment, packed it up, loaded up our van and left, while he was still talking into the microphone. We didn’t say anything to the owner and he didn’t say anything to us. I’m sure we were both thinking that we would just pretend that the whole night never happened.

I guess that’s not really analogous to a riot at a ballet. Mostly I was just thinking of what it would be like to be Stravinsky on that night in 1913, going home to sleep after the debut of his new work, thinking to himself as he brushed his teeth, “What happened? Did I do something wrong? Did I do something right?” I know I said before that our show wasn’t as bad as his, but on second thought, at least Stravinsky got to experience the actual performance of his music, even if the theatre he was performing it in was getting torn up while it happened. What made it the worst show we had ever experienced was that we didn’t even get to play music at all. The one redemption for the long drives and the heavy equipment and dealing with all the people who don’t care about your band is the few minutes you can get onstage and play your songs. Which just makes us more appreciative of the times when we do get to play music for people who care. And plenty of those days are to follow.

An Easy Chair on the Chopping Block (Denver, CO)

We drove down from Salt Lake City to the redder and redder rocks of Southern Utah on Friday, to the little town of Torrey, Utah. There lives David Williams, a man who looks like Jesus, and who humbly and Jesus-like puts on shows in a little pizza place in this tiny town and asked me several times over the last couple months if I would stop in with my band and play a show there on this tour. I initially didn’t think we had enough time to do it, but he persisted and I’m glad that I finally agreed because it’s a magical place.

They put us up in a hotel room right at the edge of a brilliant red canyon. I walked into the Rim Rock Patio, where we were to play, ordered a pizza and sat at the counter. A weathered-looking man sat next to me. His face had as many layers of tan as there were layers of sediment in the canyon, and it was as red as the rocks all around us. He looked at me with a bit of confusion.

“You work in town at the A/C repair place, right?” he asked in a buzz-saw voice.

“No,” I said, “I’m a musician. I’m playing here tonight.”

His face didn’t change at all.

“I went to high school with Eddie Van Halen AND Stevie Nicks,” he said.

“Oh. Okay.” I didn’t necessarily get the impression from him that he was drunk, but he certainly wasn’t NOT drunk. I couldn’t tell if we were actually having a conversation or not.

“What color is a stop sign?” he asked quickly. “What’s the capital of France? What did your grandmother always say?”

I didn’t have time to answer after each question, so after three of them I tried to catch up:

“Red! Paris! Chew your food!”

“No!” he said and repeated slowly, as if to a child. “WHAT DID YOUR GRANDMOTHER ALWAYS SAY?”

“Chew your food?” I said again, tentatively. He shook his head disappointedly. I tried to think of what my grandmother might have actually said to me, as if this is what he was looking for. “Uh, ‘Say please and thank you’?” I offered.

“YES!” he shouted out, as if it were an objective, verifiable fact.

This was—I later learned—Terry from Torrey, a regular at every show that David puts on at the Rim Rock Patio. While our band was waiting to play, he walked around and told each of us that we looked tense and then put us in a half-nelson position and gave the most un-relaxing massage to our shoulders for about fifteen seconds. “Loosen up!” he said. During our set, he danced as only a somewhat-crazed middle aged man in Southern Utah could dance: he imitated pulling the cord on a chain saw and reeling in a ten-pound bass. When we started playing a song and the tempo or rhythm pleased him, he would shout, “That’s what I’m TALKING ABOUT!” Although nobody ever knew what he was talking about. Our set was for about 30 people on that cold patio at the edge of the canyon, but about half of them were dancing. Most of them were hippies, and you can say whatever you want about hippies, but for God’s sake they at least have dropped enough inhibitions to just dance at a show and have fun. And when people start dancing at a show, all I want to do is keep them dancing as long as possible. Even if they’re hippies.

The next day we drove east, stopping at a roadside farm to get a smoothie, which was mellon because all their other fruits had frozen over night. And mellon turned out to be perfectly acceptable. We drove across Interstate 70 through the rest of Utah and the western part of Colorado, which for a few miles felt like Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at Disneyland. Jagged mountains all around, and the road curved around peaks and ducked through tunnels. If there are going to be any toll roads in America, it should be that stretch of road. Much more thrilling than the broken roads in Ohio and Pennsylvania. (Not that I want to pay for any roads, but it seems that’s where things are headed, and if we’re going to be charged money it should at least be for the most exciting experience, not just to serve some archaic malfunctioning state bureaucracy.)

We got to Denver and landed at the City Park in the center of town. The Tour de Fat festival was just ending, and March Forth Marching Band had just played. We set up outside the gates and tried to play for the people streaming out, but it turned into more of a rehearsal for us, as we had many songs that we wanted to work out. Even when a few people gathered to listen, we were more focused on getting our harmonies right and figuring out where the trumpet comes in.

After dinner, we went to the mall so I could find a charger for my phone. The boys decided to stay in the parking lot and throw a frisbee around. As I was walking into the mall I heard a horrible moan behind me. It was Nathan saying, “NOOOOOOO!!!” With his first throw of the frisbee, he had sent the disc over Scott’s head and directly into the sewer drain. I left them to sort this out and wandered through the mall, remarking on all the identical looking couples walking hand in hand, wearing the same clothes to denote their gender. When I exited the mall, the boys were rejoicing. They had successfully pried open the man hole cover and Nathan climbed into the sewer to retrieve the frisbee. Scott excitedly showed me photos of the whole sequence on William’s digital camera.

The show that night was a good time in a small bar called the Meadowlark. The sound man offered to put us up at his house for the night, which was good because all of our other Denver connections had fallen through. He said he had a three-story house that we could stay at. When we got there at two in the morning, he said that none of his roommates were home because they all worked in bars. We didn’t at first recognize the significance of this statement, or fully digest the fact that the house was decorated with punk-rock artifacts and that the general upkeep was more to the standards of anarchists than to, say, monks. But as we were slipping in to sleep around three in the morning, several of those bartending roommates came home and instantly turned on the angriest, screamiest punk music in the world at full volume and proceeded to scream along with it. The second the music came on, we all collectively woke up and said, “Fuck!” either out loud or to ourselves, and I personally started to wonder how, when, or if we were going to get any sleep that night. I pictured us all gathering our stuff together at three in the morning, marching out of this house into the cold Denver night and driving off to look for a hotel room. Somehow, thankfully, via a series of barriers that included ear plugs, iPods, and transcendental thoughts we were able to get to sleep. But it was a fitful, uneasy sleep. We weren’t sure if someone at any moment was going to rush up the stairs and punch us in the face. What would they think of OUR music, after all? Compared to the music they listened to, we were a My Little Pony cover band. And no doubt we were certainly happy that someone had offered to shelter us instead of leaving us to sleep outside and fend off the wolves in the streets of Denver, but there is a certain point between three or four in the morning when Lamb of God or some such band is blasting on the stereo and you realize that the carpet you’re sleeping on probably has significant detectable deposits of cocaine that are rubbing off on your sleeping bag, that you’re so tired and past the breaking point that you would rather just go out and take on those wolves, maybe sacrificing the least important member of your band to satiate them for a few hours until the sun rises and you can get some breakfast and get out of town.

What I’m trying to say is that a good night’s sleep on the road is important. We’ll try to plan ahead in the future.

A Brief History of Western Pop Music (Salt Lake City, UT)

One problem that we human beings have that won’t endear us to our future alien overlords is the way that we tend to take personal, subjective experiences and try to turn them into universal, objective truths. Probably 3 billion or so murders could have been prevented throughout the history of the world if we were not cursed with this trait. (Also, there would be no religion.)

We tend to do this because our egos tell us that we are more important than we actually are. Which is okay, really. That’s just what we do. Entire industries have risen around our need to quiet our egos: alcohol, television, and music, for example.

As a writer and a (sort-of) musician, I am guilty of the over-statement of my own importance perhaps 370 times a day. But since I usually move on to another town every 24 hours, I’m hoping it won’t catch up with me.

All that said, I would like to offer my humble and brief perspective on the last 50 years of Western pop music.

Pop music is one of the few fields in this modern world that is not moving towards specialization. In fact, it seems to have started out very specialized and is moving the opposite way. Most fields that you could make a career out of, say for instance civil engineering, started out very broadly and have since become more complicated and full of subdivisions that one person can’t easily move between. With pop music, however, everything started out very specialized: you had the singer who had a killer voice and the pretty face, like Elvis. You had the lyricist who could turn a good phrase and convey a feeling in a small amount of words. You had the songwriter who could put together a memorable melody. You had the arranger who could figure out what instruments should go on the song and who should play where. You had the musicians themselves who played all the individual instruments. You had the producer, the engineer, the second engineer, the mixer, the manager, the A&R man, etc., who all had important roles in the delivery of a song to the audience. The expense and complexity of the recording of music back then meant that not just anyone could do it. You had to audition for someone, put together a band, prove that you had songs and could perform them before you were allowed inside a studio. There were many filters to weed out untalented people at every step. This is not to romanticize the music of the past or to say that it was all high quality, but just to say that it was certainly produced by a large team of people who each had a specialized role.

Then came someone like Buddy Holly, who could write his own songs and sing them. Then came The Beatles, who after a while would ONLY play original material, and sing and play almost all the instruments themselves. Then recording technology progressed to the point that you didn’t have to record a song in one take anymore; you could do different parts at different times, which eventually led people to realize that, for instance, maybe they didn’t necessarily need to hire a drummer to play the song. Maybe they could just learn to play the drums themselves and be their own drummer. What a revolutionary concept!

And then just in the last 10 or 20 years, it became possible to have a relatively decent recording studio in your own house, so you no longer had to go into someone’s office and beg them for thousands of dollars to make a record. You could just buy a few devices and set them up in your room. And then in the last five years, certain internet sites made it possible to distribute music without getting approved by some giant corporation. To have a band today means something very different than it meant 50 years ago. You can literally decide to start a band, come up with a name for it, write and record songs and have them out in the world within an hour. And so, to break through in pop music today, it’s quite an advantage to know many different skills; to be able to play multiple instruments, to know how to work a microphone, to know how to book a show, and more importantly, to have a good sense of how to run a business. The more roles that you can take on for yourself, the better.

And so… is this a good thing or not? Well, who can say for sure? I know that if I were alive 50 years ago and trying to make it in the music business, I probably would have been encouraged by other people to be a lyricist, if anything, and probably, well, DIScouraged from attempting to sing into a microphone. And maybe THAT would’ve been a good thing, I don’t know. But now that I’m out here living the life I’m living, I can say thank God for Bob Dylan and John Lennon and all the folks down the line who learned how to do more than one thing in music and move us along into the future.

Now, given all that, me and my band took a few steps backward this summer by recording an album completely live in the studio. At times there were 10 of us playing in the same room, plus an engineer, a producer, and a mixer in the next room. And it was all mixed directly to tape as we played it, so any mistakes that were deal-breakers meant that we had to play the song over again. But it wasn’t as stressful as it sounds. In fact, it was kind of a relief from the tension and heaviness that I’ve always felt in recording studios. In a lot of ways the burdens were gone: all each of us had to do was go in and perform our role, and there was no time to over-think things or get caught up in our own heads. The playing of the music was the only thing that mattered. And that album, A Narrow Way, is the album that we bring with us on this current tour, which takes us around the country in a clockwise motion. Whether that album is good or not, whether the results were fruitful, whether I should be allowed to sing into a microphone even in the modern age is not for me to say. I just wanted to mention the process, for what it’s worth.

Ultimately I say all this to bring up my main issue about the making of music today, in a time where it seems that a musician has to assume so many different roles: that often times the actual creative music-making becomes an afterthought. And it’s an easy thing to fall into. I know I’ve done it many times. And in a place full of such musical excitement as Portland, Oregon, there are certainly a lot of things swirling around in the air that are about music, but which somehow distract from the music itself. I’ve had many conversations recently with fellow musicians about split-points and record deals and such, which is all important and purposeful, but often we hug and say goodbye and I’m walking to my car and I realize that I just spent an hour with a brilliant songwriter and I forgot to ask him or her about songwriting.

Anyway, this is a tour diary and not a religious tract, so I’ll move on. We drove through the Gorge on a sunny Wednesday morning in our little van, this time with five of us packed in there with an upright bass and a drum set. There is a plastic torpedo on top to carry extra things, but really, I’m not sure how we all fit in there. We’ve made some concessions and sacrifices and are very conscious about extra weight, just like when Charles Lindberg flew over the Atlantic and was concerned about a fly who entered the cabin adding too much weight. Squeezed into our little van, we drove past a burning brushfire in the high desert of Eastern Oregon and arrived in Boise, Idaho to play two shows in one night. The first was two sets outside in the courtyard of the Modern Hotel. The second was two more sets in a crowded bar called Pengilly’s. After four hours of playing we had gone through most of our catalog twice, which was a good way to sort out tempos and remember parts, in the cases where they might’ve been forgotten.

The next day we drove to Salt Lake City, where every band gets lost in the bizarrely named streets. The street names are comprised of a direction, a number, and then another direction, all apparently radiating out grid-like from the Mormon Temple, so that you can be on the corner of S 300 W and W 300 S and you, as a non-Mormon, have no idea where you are. And every band gets lost in the streets and eventually finds Kilby Court, the coolest venue in town, and goes on stage and tells the audience that they don’t understand how the streets work in Salt Lake City and the audience lets out a soft chuckle, because they’ve heard the joke dozens of times before.

This particular show we happened to team up, purely by coincidence, with fellow Portland band Blitzen Trapper. It was a pleasure to meet up with a professional, tight, and totally awesome band from Portland on the road. They are a rare band that arranges their songs well, and new sounds bubble up in every song and you have to scan around the stage to see who’s making them. At one point I heard a harmonica and looked at every member of the band and saw that no one was playing one, and then I noticed that the drummer had stopped playing the drums and was covering the harmonica riff for a few measures before he picked up his sticks again. Music-making! Let us never forget again.

Take This Child, Lord (Tucson, AZ)

Take This Child, Lord (Tucson, AZ)

I recently had a dream where I was asked to play second base for the New York Yankees.  Just me, in my street clothes, with no particular baseball skill, suddenly asked to jump into the middle of a game and start playing.  And instead of saying no I just stalled for a bit, looked for a uniform and a glove, made some weak excuses about what was taking so long, but otherwise prepared myself to go into the game.  To play second base.  For the New York Yankees.

Perhaps the Dream Messenger was telling me that I need to learn to say no to more things.  And perhaps, Dream Messenger, you are right.  Perhaps I take on too many things and get overwhelmed and try to keep all plates spinning at all times.  Yes, perhaps fifty shows was too much to handle.  Invariably some plates would fall to the ground and break.  It’s been over a month now since the end of the tour and I can finally think again, so I couldn’t just let the tour diary end at West Texas, getting kicked out of an splintered row boat by a mean old man.

As I said before, the band started the tour as a seven-piece.  Then three of us left, and we became a proud and resilient quartet for about a month.  And then two more of us left and another one joined, making us a trio for about a week. And then our extra person stayed in Santa Fe and we carried on, me and William, now six weeks into a tour and suddenly a duo.  This was difficult for several reasons.  First of all Nathan had been our cd salesman, pushing our product on everyone at the shows.  He was doing a remarkable job, especially with the “Two cds for twenty dollars” deal, which he managed to push, on more than one occasion, onto people who hadn’t actually seen us play.  People who had wandered into the bar after our set was done.  I was never privileged to hear those conversations, but I still wonder how he could convince someone to spend twenty dollars on music they had never heard.  Nathan is also a thrilling stage performer, often capturing people’s initial attention in places where no one knows us.  Losing Scott meant losing a driver and a cook (at one point in Colorado he made us all oatmeal on a butane stove while we were driving down the highway– good oatmeal too, with fruit in it.)  He is also a brilliant performer and an outward personality, good at getting a bargain on a bottle of whiskey, or convincing a club owner to give us more money.  Another reason why it was hard to be a duo suddenly, was that you would hope after six weeks on the road you would have built up a certain momentum.  Since you’re generally tired from all the playing and traveling, you would want to have some sort of built-up act that you could rely on.  Things that you know work well onstage.  But we’d have to throw most of that out.  And me and William are both quiet folks.  What were we going to accomplish as a duo?

Our first show as such came in an art gallery in Phoenix.  There were about ten people sitting on the floor to listen to us play.  I was actually surprised at how much fun it was to play as a duo.  The setlist had changed so much throughout the tour– songs that worked as a seven-piece didn’t work as a four-piece, and then some of the material we were doing as a four-piece wouldn’t work as a duo.  Some venues had pianos and featured piano songs, other gigs had no pianos.  Luckily we were blessed by the Song God with a big repertoire so we could change things when we needed to, but losing certain members of the band meant losing certain songs, in effect doubling the loss.  Playing as a duo with William was like connecting with some old friends.  “Oh hello there, song that doesn’t work with drums!  Welcome back!”

We had been playing for about twenty minutes at the art gallery when we started to hear a horrible moaning coming from the apartments upstairs.  It was obviously some animal or human that was really distraught.  I truly had never heard anything like it.  It was as if all the suffering of the world was gathered together in one primal howl.  It was as if someone had just woken up from a ten-year coma and instantly became aware of every horrible thing that had happened while he was asleep and his first utterance was an expression of that pain.  The gallery owner went out to check on who or what was making the sound and then walked back in with a solemn face.  He walked up to me onstage.

“A man who lives upstairs is crying because his $40,000 dog just got run over by a car.”

“Oh,” I said.  “… Should we stop playing?”

“Maybe play one more song,” he said.  “For the dog.”

An awkward moment, perhaps, but I happen to have a lot of songs that are appropriate to sing for dead dogs.  In fact– and I am not proud to share this with you– I have more songs appropriate for dead dogs than I do for weddings.  So I sang a song for the dog:

“You don’t need ornaments,
vestments, sacraments, or armaments.
You’re as pure as the source of the Nile,
so I think I’ll go missing awhile.”

The next night was Tucson, the last night as a duo before Scott and Nathan would come back to join us.  Things would get easier for us after Tucson.

We played in a long narrow room with a piano in it.  In the audience was an old friend of mine named Lisa, whose van I jumped into about nine years ago to go on my first trip to see New Orleans.  We both lived there for a time and I hadn’t really seen her at all since the night my red bicycle was stolen outside her house.  She was the one that got me started on the long road of traveling and seeking.  I always wondered what she thought of me, like an older sister whose approval you always hope for.

Right before I started the first song on piano, a group of about seven people, all from different countries in Europe, sat down at a table right in front.  I was a little worried that they would be loud and disrespectful, but they listened to and enjoyed the whole show.  They looked like a little table of United Nations.  I asked them why they had all gathered in Tucson, and they said they were there for a conference on Consciousness.  “Really?” I asked.  “A conference on consciousness?”  “Yes,” they said.  “A conference on Consciousness.”  No more needed to be said, apparently.

Things finally clicked for me and William as a duo.  He banged on his upright bass to simulate drums.  He sang along loudly on the parts where the whole group is usually singing.  I didn’t even know what his singing voice sounded like before, as it was always buried by the louder members of the group.  I played more aggressively, made some jokes, tied some bells to my ankle for percussion.

I don’t want to over-romanticize things here.  I know that because I’m telling the story, details can get distorted in my favor.  However, I also don’t want to understate the fact that, on that night in Tucson, Arizona, I just might have saved the world from destruction, or at least saved it from withering obsolescence.  Our United Nations table communicated to their corresponding countries that the United States was in good hands again, finally, with young Jaina playing folk music to 30 people in a bar.  Lisa sweetly gave me a hug and told me I was incredible.  Disagreeing neighbors everywhere mended their disagreements.  The blind could see again.  The shy kid asked the girl out on a date.  Dead dogs walked again and leaped into their owners’ arms.

State Quarter Review: Mississippi

Mississippi’s state quarter is an interesting failure.  It does something right that most quarters don’t: it chooses one image and displays it boldly.  Mississippi is the Magnolia State, so their quarter presents the caption “The Magnolia State” along with two beautifully composed Magnolia blossoms.  It is truly some of the best artwork on any of the quarters: the veins in the leaves and the texture of the petals are deliciously rendered.

The problem is this: flowers are colorful and quarters are not.  If there had been some plan to paint all the quarters with a couple spot colors, this would have been one of the most glorious ones.  But there never was any plan for that.  Quarters are a silvery color.  Depicting flowers on a quarter is not effective.  The flowers come out looking eerily still and lifeless, like Han Solo in Return of the Jedi when he gets frozen in carbonite: not dead, but certainly not able to respond to our affections.

(And, by the way, what a waste of one of the greatest characters of all time, to have Han Solo frozen for most of that movie.  I remember being disappointed in that development when I was watching in the theater, and I was only six years old.  Even at that age, I knew I was getting screwed.  It was the first intimation that George Lucas did not have our best interests in mind.  Likewise, Mississippi’s quarter designers like to show us something lively and invigorating, and then delight in taking away its essence, leaving only the frozen shell.)

Just to spend a minute thinking of alternate quarter designs, what about an image of Nina Simone singing in concert, with a few musical notes over her head and the words “Alabama’s got me so upset, Tennessee’s made me lose my rest, and everybody knows about Mississippi GODDAM.”  Can a state quarter reference other states?  Can a state quarter have a swear word on it?  It doesn’t matter.  You’re Mississippi.  You’ve been pushed around enough.  Just send it to the Mint.

State Quarter Review: Illinois

Good Lord, Illinois, what is going on here?  When you had your quarter design contest, did you whittle it down to the top ten ideas and then just paste all those together into one design?

Let’s review what we have here.  Abraham Lincoln, apparently from his school days, is about to step through an outline of the state of Illinois.  To the left of him there is a farm and the inscription “Land of Lincoln.”  To the right of him is the modern Chicago skyline featuring the John Hancock tower and a sailboat on Lake Michigan, and then another inscription– this one reading, “21st State Century.”  And then on the outside ring of the quarter there are twenty-one stars.  Whoa whoa whoa, Illinois!  Slow down!

First of all, state outlines– except for the state of Texas– are never a good idea.  It’s a too-literal interpretation of what a state is.  Is a state best summed up by an outline of its border as seen from space?  Only Texas has a totally awesome and iconic state-shape, one worthy of being put on belt buckles and fashioned into door mats.  Do you think there are any belt buckles in the shape of Illinois?

Next there’s Lincoln.  Now, Lincoln is totally rad.  He totally healed the nation and pretended to free the slaves and then got shot in a dramatic way.  But he’s also on every five dollar bill AND every penny.  Every single one.  Have we not gotten our point across with Lincoln?  He’s totally rad.  We get it.  We don’t need any more Lincoln on our currency.  Granted, depicting a younger Lincoln is an interesting idea.  Showing him with a book reminds us that he was a real person who had to study to get where he was.  And showing his full body, with his fancy 19th Century clothes and an exposed hefty forearm shows us that he could wrassle with the best of the presidents.  But we’ve seen enough of him.  Aren’t there some other people from Illinois that could have been featured on this quarter?

Luckily, this is one of only two state quarters that overlaps with a corresponding Sufjan Stevens album.  Stevens’ 2005 album “Illinois” mentions many great figures who lived in this state, and some of them might have made for a great quarter design.

Frank Lloyd Wright could have been an inspiration.  He designed some pretty neat buildings and houses.  Particularly Fallingwater, his multi-tiered house that incorporated a waterfall, would have come across really well (although that particular house was built in Pennsylvania, which might have been confusing to see on an Illinois quarter.)

Sufjan Stevens also reminds us that the tallest man who ever lived was from Illinois.  His name was Robert Wadlow, and he had a horrible disfunction in his pituitary gland that made him grow and grow until it killed him.  He stood eight feet eleven inches when he died.  The Illinois quarter could have been a drawing of him standing next to a normal-sized man, perhaps Frank Lloyd Wright.  Or, there could have been a drawing of just the lower part of Wadlow’s body, with his head cut off by the top of the quarter, like he was too tall to fit in the frame.  That could have been the funniest quarter in this whole series.  I understand that you don’t want to turn these quarters into Ripley’s Believe It Or Not?, but… actually, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to do that.  That could’ve been a really interesting creative tack for some of these states… odd and unusual people, record-holders and strange occurances.

Speaking of which, John Wayne Gacy was from Illinois.  It would be difficult to imagine him depicted on currency, but this could have certainly shaken things up in the quarter series.  Like, what if the Illinois governor pulled the purple velvet sheet off their new design and everyone in the audience gasped when they realized that John Wayne Gacy was on the quarter?  And the Illinois representatives just stood there and said, “Yup.  That’s our quarter.”

Another famous Illinois native: Ronald Reagan.  Yes we are tired of presidents on our money, but he is a recent president, and it would be pretty exciting for people to see someone who was alive in their lifetime on a quarter.  It would instill in young people the idea that they can become currency too.

Illinois is one of many states who took the easy way out when coming up with a quarter design.  There is no edge to this quarter, no risk-taking.  It’s all just safe.  And then there’s the inscription “21st State Century.”  What is that supposed to mean?  I suppose we are supposed to draw a connection between the fact that Illinois is the 21st state and that they are somehow primed to be an important player in the 21st century, but it just doesn’t come across well.  Plus, there is already another motto on this quarter, so two just starts to feel like cluttered billboards on the highway.  Just have your slogan be your slogan and don’t try to have it both ways.  (Wait, isn’t that someone’s slogan?  Burger King.  No, that’s “Have it your way.”  Right?)

In conclusion… two mottoes and three seperate tableaus plus a state outline: Illinois, you’ve gone too far.