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.
