State Quarter Review: Kentucky

Kentucky’s state quarter features a thoroughbred racehorse behind a fence, a mansion looming on a hill, and the caption, “My Old Kentucky Home.”

Those last words are the title of a song written by Stephen Foster that is now the official state song of Kentucky. The original lyrics started thusly:

“The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home,
‘Tis summer, the darkies are gay;”

This song was written in 1853 and adopted as the state song in 1928. Its lyrics were not officially revised until 1986, when the word “darkies” was replaced by the word “people.” That means that there was a fifty-eight year period where people singing the state song of Kentucky would have had to say the words, “the darkies are gay.”

But it’s a fine song and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be on a quarter. I’m definitely supportive of references to music of any kind on our currency. It feels slightly… very slightly… revolutionary. For currency to acknowledge anything other than presidents and monuments is what is exciting about the possibilities of the state quarter series. (It’s an excitement that is completely squandered in the new series of nickels, where the Mint takes us through a tour of… all the presidents of the United States! As if this group of forty-three or so old men haven’t gotten their faces circulated enough.)

This quarter is just average. Horses can make fine symbols, but there are so many intriguing poses and angles from which to depict a horse, and I would have to say that “profile of the horse while he stands stiffly and looks straight ahead” is not one of them. The artist of this scene makes the horse seem as lifeless as a children’s toy. And also, the mansion behind the horse comes off looking like a dollhouse. A scene that could have illustrated the stately grandeur of the rich southern whites of Kentucky comes off looking instead like a drawing from a children’s book.

Now, let’s just think what could have been. This is the quarter for Kentucky, so you have to put a racehorse on there. But why not depict the racehorse actually, I don’t know, RACING? You could have had a scene from the Kentucky Derby, where several horses are tearing up the track, hooves all akimbo,

jockeys spurning them on, with genteel people in the stands throwing their old-timey hats in the air. You could have had Secritariat, breaking away from the pack. Would that have been too exciting for a quarter? It’s just a thought. Just because we’re etching onto metal doesn’t mean everything has to look like it’s cold and frozen. When I look at a state’s quarter, I want to feel like I’m in that state. I want to ache with a yearning to actually go and visit that state. This quarter does not do that.

I Shall Now Review All 50 State Quarters

In 1999, the United States started printing a series of commemorative coins to honor each of the fifty states. They decided to introduce five new state quarters each year, and this year, 2008, we have seen the final five states.

Why a review of state quarters? Quarters are not only microcosms through which we can better understand the systems that we operate in, they are also undeniably a part of our aesthetic sphere. Quarters are little metal pieces that we touch every day, and the icons on them– even if seen only briefly– catch our eye and enter our consciousness. The printing of commemorative currency is ostensibly an effort by the government to promote pride in state- and nation-hood and to assert some sort of pleasing aesthetic qualities on our money. However, it is actuality primarily just an effort by the government to make a profit, as collectors who take the coins out of circulation have essentially paid the US mint for a souvenir.

It is interesting to consider what the government of today deems important enough to put on our currency. The faces on our current coins and bills were mostly chosen before the general population was even born, in line with the long-running desire of the ruling class to protect their own power and yet promote unity amongst the working classes. Promotion of past leaders like Lincoln and Washington to god-like status makes the power of the elite seem inevitable and unattainable. Putting these figures on the currency with which we use to exchange goods and services seals the deal. It says, “Money is power. These people had power. You do not.”

What does the government of today want to promote through the money it prints? And how aesthetically pleasing are these state quarters? Those are the two questions I will focus on in my 50-part series. Please check in frequently to read new reviews.

He Strummed His Way Into Trouble (West Texas)

Olivia Pepper gave me a haircut on a bench in a small park in Austin, Texas. The park was filled with strange birdfeeders that looked like Scandanavian condominiums. A random man walked by and saw what was apparently the first outdoor haircut he had ever seen and shouted, jokingly, “Hey! I’m next!” Olivia yelled out, “OKAY!” and said under her breath to me, “Someone always says that…”

I had seen Olivia the night before at a small house show I was playing. I was standing in the kitchen opening a bottle of Shiner Bock while the opening act played in the living room, and a young woman sitting in the small audience very deliberately winked at me. As usual, I figured that she was winking at someone else, but turned around to see that no one was standing behind me. It wasn’t the kind of wink that someone gives you to tell you that they think you’re handsome (does anyone give those kinds of winks? I’ve never gotten one). Rather, it was the kind of wink that was saying, “You should recognize me, but I’m sure you don’t because you don’t ever recognize anyone.” When I talked to her after my set I realized that I had met her twice before in different cities, and she told me that she couldn’t stick around longer that night, but that I should meet her the next day at noon for coffee.

We met for coffee and in the course of our conversations I told her that I was looking for a haircut in Austin. (I had actually been looking for a haircut for four weeks.) She said that she could cut my hair. I asked her if she was actually any good. She pointed to a large tattoo on her right forearm of a pair of scissors. That was proof enough for me.

She also mention that she did Tarot readings, so after the haircut I asked her to do one for me. I wasn’t skeptical of the reading at all, but there was a moment where I wondered how good she would be at it.

She spread her cloth on the table and laid out the cards in front of me and then looked intently at them while she reached into her bag for something. For a moment I thought, “Please don’t let her be reaching for a book with Tarot interpretations– that would be so disappointing…” Instead, she pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, squinted at the cards and told me a startling amount of things about myself that I knew but had never before heard together so coherently. I will never again doubt Olivia Pepper.

I told my friend back home about the reading and my friend asked me what I thought of Tarot and astrology and such things. I wrote her the following:

“Look at it from a physical standpoint. There are planets and stars that are composed of matter and they are spinning around the universe,as we are. Nobody denies this. All these objects either emit or reflect light, and all of them have a gravitational pull of some sort. The sun is the most obvious example of one of these bodies that effects our world with the light it gives and the pull it exerts on us. In fact, if not for the sun, we would have nothing. Stars are just suns that are far away. Just because something is far away doesn’t mean it doesn’t effect us. Light never stops traveling through the vacuum of space. Even if a star is long dead, the light from it is still racing towards us. And scientists have learned that light is not just a wave or a particle, but in fact BOTH. So that the light from a long dead star that has traveled a million light years to get to Earth and is shining in the sky at night as you step onto the roof of your apartment for a cigarette, that light hits your eye and enters your body with a very real amount of matter. Now, we can agree that things that enter your body affect your well-being in some way, yes? Perhaps the light from the far-away star is not nearly as bright or noticeable as the neon sign across the street, but consider that this star’s light has steadfastly marched through millions of light years of cold dark space to penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere and enter your eye, and doesn’t that imbue it with a little bit more– as political pundits would say– gravitas? I would give that particular particle of light a lot of credence. I think that particle of light has a lot to tell me. I want to know what that particle of light has to say. And there are millions of those stars, all arranged in interesting constellations in the sky, all streaming towards your eyeball just as they are streaming in the opposite direction towards alien eyes, and they all have some sort of meaning, if anything in this universe has any meaning at all, which I believe it does. Not to mention all the planets in our solar system, which are much closer to us than the stars (not that distance means anything) and which exert gravity and reflect light in very real ways and are circling around us in interesting ways and affecting our lives. Not to mention the moon, which is RIGHT THERE, very close and very bright and pulling very strongly on the oceans, which are salt water, and your body, which is
mostly salt water. So how could all this not exert some sort of order and effect on our lives? I want to know more about it. I find it comforting.”

Me and William drove the next day to a small ghost town in West Texas called Terlingua. We were now a two-piece band plus our friend Dustin from Run On Sentence, who would join us with some percussion and back-up singing. After New Orleans Scott and Nathan had flown back to Portland to work a little and make some money and wouldn’t rejoin us until Phoenix, and we were to face the harshness of Texas with a depleted army.

We played at the Starlight Theatre, a little adobe structure that would probably be the ideal place to see Willie Nelson perform. We played all night for the dinner crowd and the bartender gave us as many drinks as we wanted. We had nowhere in town to stay, so we slept in the backyard garden, under the stars. William was afraid of tarantulas, but I assured him that if he got bit I would suck out the poison, thinking to myself, “do tarantulas even have poison?”

The next night was El Paso. I once wrote a song called, “El Paso Is One Kind of Purgatory”. We were supposed to play in a hookah bar that was celebrating its two-year anniversary. However, instead of reaching their two-year anniversary, the bar closed the week before and our show was moved to a different hookah bar. We had dinner in a Mexican restaurant before the show. It was deep in the endless side streets of El Paso and while we ate a very old Hispanic man was playing on a thrift-store organ in the corner with a basket for tips. I am now indebted to every musician performing for tips, so I dropped a couple dollars off for him.

Our show in El Paso was the first one of the whole tour that I didn’t want to perform. We were following belly dancers who were dancing to electronic music. The stage was something you’d expect to find in Saddam Hussein’s presidential palace, where he would make someone dance for his amusement. What would we add to the situation? Dustin wanted to go through with the show, so we did it, and I swore to never again stop in El Paso. Not even for gas.

We reached New Mexico the next day and decided that we sorely needed to make an offering to the Traveler King. This would be difficult since it was just me and William and neither of us had done an offering before. We always just watched Nathan read his beautiful poems and then rip them up. We didn’t even have an old one we could reuse. We’d have to come up with something new. We stopped in Truth or Consequences and walked down the main street until we found a dried up old rowboat sitting in a little garden. “Let’s do it there,” I said. I picked a few desert flowers and me and William stepped into the rowboat.

“Dear Traveler King…” I started hesitatingly, clearing my throat,

“aka Papa Hobo…”

I got no more than a few words further before an old man walked by and said, “Hey, there are nails in that rowboat. Be careful.”

“Okay,” I said, looking down and seeing no nails.

He stopped walking and said, “No really, it’s dangerous in there.”

I honestly thought he was over-reacting. “Alright,” I said, “We’re just making a little offering to the Traveler King.”

“You know what? Just get out of that rowboat.”

“No it’s okay. We’re alright.” I laughed nervously.

“Look, Silly,” he said, “Get out of the rowboat. Now.”

He actually called me Silly. I remember that clearly. We slowly stepped out of the rowboat, ending the most pathetic and ineffective offering to the Traveler King ever. But as the old man walked away I said, “You know, of course, who that was. THAT was the Traveler King.”

William nodded.

We made our way through Albuquerque and up to Santa Fe, where we had a couple days off to resurrect our spirits. Out at dinner one night, in another fine restaurant with incredible food, celebrating Dustin’s birthday, I excused myself for a minute and went to find the bathroom. The restaurant was another of those exquisite adobe structures, with winding halls and low doorways. I finally found the bathroom and while washing my hands I looked at a colorful little drawing hanging to the right of the sink. It was sort of a parody of a 50’s Western-style pulp novel cover. It showed a cowboy sitting around a campfire at night, playing a guitar with a surprised expression on his face, while lying next to him in a lawn chair, improbably, was a beautiful woman in a bikini. The caption above the scene was spelled out in a lasso-style font: “HE STRUMMED HIS WAY INTO TROUBLE.”

I smiled and thought, “Hold on there, little guy. Things’ll get better.”

Repair is the Dream of the Broken Thing (New Orleans, LA)

The sickness grew and mutated. It had a name and a face, though I promised the sickness that I wouldn’t tell anyone what it was. It tormented me like a bully at school. It pushed me down and let me get up and then pushed me down again. It was psychedelic. It entered my brain and made me hallucinate. It distorted the edges of reality. It became a new reality.

We had to drive from Chicago to New Orleans in one day, down the entire spine of the United States, and I was still deathly ill. And actually, for awhile, being behind the steering wheel was a salve that made me feel better. I thought I could actually drive us the whole distance, but once we stopped at a restaurant– or, rather, a “roadhouse”– outside of Memphis and our meal took too long to arrive, I was done for. Scott took the final leg, and I got sicker and sicker as I sat in the passenger seat. At one point, one hour from New Orleans at three in the morning, I felt completely dehydrated and told Scott to pull over at a rest stop, as there was not a drop of water in the car. I ran out in the sticky sweet air of Louisiana and started putting quarters in a vending machine. I finally dug enough of them out of my pockets to get to a dollar fifty, and when I pushed the one button for bottled water the digital readout said, “SOLD OUT”. I started kicking and punching the machine. I overheard Scott, on his cell phone with a friend back home, narrating, “Nick is now beating up a vending machine.” I went over to the drinking fountain and swallowed as much metallic water as I could handle.

New Orleans is the worst place in the world to be sick. Alcohol is everywhere, the air is heavy and moist, and everything is broken, backwards and upside down. It is not a healing place, it’s a destructive place. If you’re healthy, a little bit of destruction can be invigorating. But if you’re sick, it’s just destruction on top of destruction.

New Orleans is a city of wonderful food and drink. My dad, a civil engineer, was in town on a six month contract to help work on the levees. He went out with us to the Napoleon House, a restaurant in the French Quarter where I used to work long ago. Somehow nothing in New Orleans changes, and even after nine years and one horrible hurricane, I still saw at least four people at the restaurant who I knew from my time there, still working the same shift, still with the same look on their face. One of them was a man who worked in the kitchen who inexplicably used to call me “Robocop”. I don’t know why, but one day he just started to call me that and everyone laughed, so he kept calling me that. Ironically, one day while I was working there the actor Peter Weller came into the restaurant for a drink and I said, “No look, HE’S Robocop. Like, for REAL. The actor who played him.” But no one would listen.

After the Napoleon House we went to my friends Meghann and Luke’s wedding. I had gotten the “Save the Date” card three months prior, and it was remarkably the exact weekend that I was already planning on being in New Orleans. So, on our one day off in New Orleans, with me still deathly sick, we went to the wedding. The ceremony was outside and was still beautiful even when it started to rain. Later on in the night, the groom asked me to play a song, and I agreed, even though my voice was worse off than it was in Chicago, and I felt broken and confused. We played one quiet song low in my range and I managed to just get through it. Everyone cheered and called for another song. “What do you want to hear?” I asked Luke. He suggested “Bottles on the Tracks” a song with some notes that go fairly high in my range. My voice cracked and gave out during the song, but it was a wedding and people were happy, and it seemed to work out alright.

The next day I laid in bed and slept, in preparation for our show. While onstage I was still sick, sicker than ever, to the point that every sound we made came back distorted and weird to me. I couldn’t figure out what was real and what was in my head. I thought everything sounded wrong. Strange frequencies poked through and made it sound like we were out of tune. And my voice was still in shreds. It was, even considering Pittsburgh and Chicago, the most difficult show I had ever played, and would ever hope to play. The band and the audience thought it was alright. I didn’t believe them.

But enough of the sickness. The saddest part about being sick in New Orleans was missing out on all the food. We’ve had so much great food on this trip, from the sushi in Boise, to the chicken curry in Wichita. Most of the good meals have come in the morning, when our own Scott Magee, aka Cookie Parker, makes up his special eggs and bacon. I asked Scott for the recipe, and I will finish this post with his words for you to enjoy and share with those you love:

(clip ‘n save)
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Eggs Cookie Parker

Ingredients
2-3 eggs per person
Butter
Good shredded cheese: sharp cheddar, parmigiano reggiano, gorgonzola etc.
A single vegetable, optional (I like roasted red peppers or asparagus)

Preparation:

I know it may seem this dish is childlike in its simplicity given the ingredients list, but it’s in the preparation that the eggs take on their beauty and deliciousness.

Crack open and put all your eggs in a dish, and this is important even though you are going to scramble them. Do not whisk them!

Bring a saucepan (preferably calphalon or other non-stick) to a medium heat, give it a few minutes to get the pan to the proper temperature.

Next you add the butter to the pan. It is important to use more butter than you otherwise would (the secret to all French food.) About a tablespoon per 3-4 eggs. It should melt and start to bubble but show no signs of browning. After you have melted all the butter and swirled it around the pan, add the eggs as if you were going to fry them whole (if 1 or 2 have broken yolks don’t worry but still do not stir them.)

This is where the magic happens!

Let the eggs cook until you notice the whites starting to actually turn white and at this point the yolks should start showing early signs of hardening as well. Turn the heat to a low-medium. Throw your cheese and optional vegetables in and start to gently stir with a wooden spoon, breaking a yolk here and there. As you continue to stir (give a few seconds here and there for other bits of egg to cook before they mix together) the eggs will become a medley of textures; a bit of hard cooked yolked here, a bit of hard cooked white there and a goodly amount of blended light yellow throughout. The last step is determining when the eggs are done and if you cook eggs like most American folks do, they are done sooner than you think. The eggs should have a glistening quality to them but no obvious liquid still floating around.

If you want to feed yourself and hopefully your friends like I feed my band, serve your “Eggs Cookie Parker” with 3 rashers of bacon, toast and juice (if you’re feeling extra salubrious, add some hash-browns to the plate, a dish I also have a special recipe for and will gladly give out if asked).

All My Favorite Singers Couldn’t Sing (Chicago, IL)

My friend Dave Depper has contributed a lot of good to my life, like the one time that me and him played an informal set at the Roadside Attraction in Portland that consisted of nearly half the songs from the White Album, done spontaneously as best we could from memory, switching off between guitar and drums. (Luckily for us the bar was nearly empty.) And so I regret pointing out in such a public forum an instance where he was completely and totally wrong in a way that negatively affected my life. And I can quote here from a Norfolk & Western Tour Diary he wrote in late 2006:

“I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: Pittsburgh is the best-kept secret in the United States. An incredibly unique and beautiful city, I have never experienced a greater disconnect between my expectations of a town and what I ended up finding there as I have in the Iron City… I really, really, really love Pittsburgh.”

The only way that this statement is true is ironically—in the way that his words made me think Pittsburgh was going to be a great town. The disconnect between that expectation and the reality that Pittsburgh is a dark and dismal place was like a cold punch in the face.

(Now that I’ve reread his whole entry I see that he also says he “hit it off with the wait-staff” of the venue he was playing at. Which means he met a cute waitress at the club, they hit it off, and that, in his mind, makes Pittsburgh a good place. Well, I didn’t meet that waitress.)

We had come to Pittsburgh from Boston to steal a gig. We had nothing booked. “A day off” is what a normal band would call it. But for us, there is never any rest. When we finish playing a show, there is always the possibility that we will find a party or another bar to play at later. If there is time during the day we will busk on the streets. If there is no gig at all, we will drive a long way and then try to get on a bill in a city we’ve never been to. Why do we do this? I don’t know. We are insatiable.

We had to get to Bowling Green, Kentucky, the next night to meet up with our friend Dustin for a reunion show. Pittsburgh was the most appealing city in between Boston and Bowling Green. It was a Monday night. We had one tip that there was a bar with an open mic night where we might be able to get featured for twenty minutes or so. We went there and found the scene a little lacking. I ordered a fish sandwich. Scott went across the street to another bar and then called me five minutes later. “We’ve got a gig,” he said.

The place across the street was a little bit more our style, but downward rather than upward. A band from New York was supposed to be on the bill and canceled. We could have their slot. “Could we just set up in the bar instead of the music room?” we asked. No need for a PA.

While waiting for our chance to play, I started ordering drinks. I’m not normally much of a drinker. There aren’t many alcoholic concoctions that I can handle. My drink used to be vodka and Coke with a lemon, which I called a High Roller, and which I drank exclusively for about six months primarily because it pissed so many people off. One day, however, I realized that I was drinking something that tasted like a bad Slurpee. I needed to find something else, and I settled on vodka with half orange juice and half cranberry juice. Something that is normally called a Madras, but which I prefer to call a Matador. (Said defiantly with a clenched fist and a trilled R. “Mata-DORRR!”)

I was feeling a little tapped out in Pittsburgh. The gig itself wasn’t very inspiring. We were about four weeks into the tour, and by that point we had only had two actual days off. For one of those I was sick, and for the other I had to work all day on my graphic design work. We had played 24 shows in 26 nights by that point, having travelled about six thousand miles. I had driven maybe two thousand of those myself, sang my heart out every night, choosing every song off the top of my head as the set unfolded. I say that not because I think I deserve a medal, but just to explain my actions to follow. (I was tired, okay?)

While waiting to play I ordered what amounted to five or six Matadors, dwelled too long on an upsetting email I had just received, and suddenly sank into a state where I really really didn’t want to play music in a bar in Pittsburgh. Just when I had gotten to that moment, I looked over at the corner where the boys had set up a little stage with candles on the floor. Oh gosh. They told me it was time to start. I picked up my guitar, which felt as heavy and musical as a dead car. They all looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to start a song. And I just started laughing. Not because anything was funny, but because I didn’t have the energy to do anything else. Nathan was crouching like a soccer player defending the goal, just hoping I would start a song. I couldn’t do it. I was cracking up. Four weeks on the road had broken me at that moment in Pittsburgh. It will happen to everyone sometime. (It gets lonely on the road. A few days earlier when I was walking towards the restroom of a coffee shop, I glanced longingly for an inappropriate amount of time at the icon representing a woman on the outside of the ladies’ restroom door. Such round corners, such a cute dress… Wait, have I really gotten to the point that am I ogling a two-dimensional blue and white symbol?)

I eventually played a song, but it was at a much slower tempo than that song—or any song—should ever be played at. The next song was slightly better, but everyone in the band was looking at me like they wanted me dead. After the fourth song, I put my guitar down and walked out the door. I couldn’t play another note. I walked over to the Circle K and bought a Snickers bar. I apologized to Nathan afterwards and he made me promise to never play music in such a situation again.

(And THAT was Pittsburgh. I blame Dave Depper.)

The next night—a reconciliation with Dustin in Bowling Green—was completely the opposite. We played fast and loud, like Vikings discovering the New World long before the Europeans. We absolutely murdered those poor people.

And then it was off to Decatur, Illinois, to play in a venue that a kid had set up in his grandmother’s basement. The whole basement was covered in Christmas decorations, leading to the name of the place, “Luminous & Merry.” His grandmother came down between sets with pizzas she had just taken out of the oven. We played all of our quiet songs for those twelve kids and prayed that they would all someday get out of Decatur. The kid who lived there played after us. He stood up and played a keyboard and sang songs about how he was going to move out of that town as soon as possible and that you wouldn’t see him anymore after the fall. His grandparents had come down and sat on the basement steps to watch. We all had tears in our eyes. Someone singing honest sentiments without couching it in irony or obscuring it in any way. Why is that so rare?

We drove to the Quad Cities after the show so we could wake up in the morning and do a Daytrotter session. Unfortunately for me, I woke up with a new sickness. It was different this time, with aching and coughing and general dismay. (Is that a symptom? Dismay?) I dragged my mortal remains through two sets at Daytrotter— ours and Dustin’s—and then drank some hot tea to try to repair my cracking voice. We had to drive immediately to Chicago to play an early evening gig at Schuba’s. Scott drove the whole way through pounding hail and snow (Was it sleet? Have I ever seen sleet?), and when we got close to Chicago we got stuck in traffic. I felt myself getting sicker with every minute, and making our sound check time seemed impossible, and as the traffic grinded on, making our gig time started to seem unlikely, too. Someone from Daytrotter called to inform us that Scott had left all his drum sticks there. William was starting to get sick too. My throat had gotten so bad that I couldn’t actually talk. We pulled up to the venue twenty minutes before we were supposed to go on. The sound man was stern but forgiving. He gave us an extra fifteen minutes before we had to start. I left the room to go drink some hot water with lemon and try to rescue my voice. The venue was beautiful. By far one of the best in the country. But still, for us
there was no audience, there was no hope.

And then, somehow, a miracle happened. I managed to scrape together a bit of a voice. I talked to the band and told them we’d be doing the slow songs and that I’d be singing particularly softly. As we took the stage and played our first song, a crowd of people filtered in and filled up the room. At first 50, 60, then up to a hundred. We started with the slow songs, and I felt my voice crack a couple times.Then I tried some faster songs and remembered that when I’m sick, I always feel much better playing the uptempo songs. That magical juice called adrenaline somehow paves over any problems. The songs got faster and fiercer and the crowd got more into it. The audience had no idea who we were; they were all there for the headliner, who was releasing a new CD that night. But the kind people of Chicago gave us a listen and forgave my few vocal cracks and carried us through the night.

My aunt, who was also at a very mediocre show we played in Chicago the week before—at a place called the Subterranean, which is nice but not quite as nice as Schuba’s—was really impressed with the Schuba’s show. “So much better than last week,” she said. “Must be the venue.”

Ah yes, the venue. Of course.

I Need to Play Music With My Friends in the Street (Boston, MA)

After the glory and wonder of Wichita had to come the confusion and awkwardness of Oklahoma City. As all things have their beautiful rises, they must also have… well, Oklahoma City. We played in a small juice bar with an adjoining music space and no one knew why we were there. Everyone looked stunned at us and kept saying, “What are you doing in Oklahoma City?” (Our explanation was long and convoluted. It made sense to us, but became too hard to tell over and over again, like the story of why your spleen had to be removed.)

It was one of those shows where you set up your equipment in a completely empty room and then sigh softly and think, “Well, at least we’ll get some practice in.” While we were setting up, another band drove up in their van, a heavy-rock band from Seattle on their way to South By Southwest. (They couldn’t believe that we were on tour and in Oklahoma City and NOT going to Austin the next day… “South By Southwest is like Disneyland for bands!” one of them said. I thought to myself, “I never liked Disneyland.”) They were looking for a gig—in fact needed a gig—as their van was almost out of gas and they were completely broke. We said they could play after us, but I looked around the empty room and wondered how they could make any money doing that. At least we had a guarantee from the bar. We played our set to a maximum of maybe eight people, and when we took down our stuff, half of the crowd left. I was still feeling sick and just wanted to get out of town and I knew that I couldn’t physically stay and watch the other band, even if they were desperate for an audience. As we finished packing our van, they started playing and it was so loud it rattled all the walls. I just wanted to leave, but Scott went up to the room they were playing in and peeked in the door. He started waving frantically at us.

“Come here! You have to see this!” he yelled.

“No. I’m sick,” I shouted back, stepping into the van. “I can’t handle loud music.”

“But you have to see this! Come here!”

We reluctantly walked up to the door and saw this scene that changed our lives, I swear to God, in Oklahoma City. And may it change yours:

Three people in the audience of a nondescript concrete box, watching a band of three kids dressed in dark clothes playing loud rock music on the stage. One of the kids was playing drums, one of them was playing bass, and one of them was playing guitar…(I would not just make this for the sake of a story)…while hanging upside down from a water pipe near the ceiling. It was absurd. It was ridiculous. It was awesome. He was hanging from the ceiling for the benefit of three people. It was obviously a part of their show that he included whenever the proper ceiling fixtures were in place, and even though the audience was so small this particular night, he still did it. We put a twenty dollar bill in their tip jar and left. The lesson: if your thing is that you hang from the rafters, then you do that thing no matter how many people are in the audience and no matter that you’re in Oklahoma City. You just hang from the rafters and everything else will take care of itself.

Not that I would ever hang from the rafters. But there was a thing that we did well that we hadn’t really done yet on this tour, and that thing was playing music on the street, or “busking”. It was something we stumbled upon randomly in San Francisco last summer, and since that moment we began to look at every square-inch of this country as either “buskable” or “not-buskable”. And now we routinely drive slowly past public squares and promenades, plazas and esplanades, look out at the people and try to determine what kind of mood they’re in, how open they are to new things, and how much money they have. We are sometimes mistaken, like in Lawrence, Kansas, where the night after a gig where I finally broke out of my sickness we played on the main street during the middle of the day. Nobody stopped to listen. Nobody would even look at us, or in any way acknowledge our presence. And we were four odd-looking boys with weird instruments playing music on their street. Granted, we might not be as amazing as we think we are when we are playing in San Francisco and everyone is dancing and smiling and throwing us money. But surely we are not as bad as the passers-by in the town of Lawrence thought we were that day. We were apparently not even worth someone pulling an iPod earbud out of one ear as they strolled by so they could listen for a few seconds. The one person—the only person—who stopped to listen to us that day on the street in Lawrence was a little girl, maybe five years old, who made her embarrassed mother stop walking so she could watch us and jump up and down continuously for a few minutes while we played. And, per our lesson in Oklahoma City, it is always worth playing for the one little person who is jumping around and freaking out. Her mother gave her a dollar to put in our case, the only dollar we made that day in Lawrence. We packed up our instruments and drove on.

We played in Kansas City, then drove up through the frozen cornfields of Iowa, played in each of the Twin Cities of Minnesota (one of the twins being much more well-endowed than the other, in my opinion, though I won’t say which) and then on down to Chicago where we stayed in another mansion and ate more wonderful meals. Then quickly through the toll-roads of the Midwest (”This road sucks! I don’t want to pay for THIS!”) to Philadelphia and New York, cities of a grand scale, where one gets swallowed up in all the transportation and the commerce. There Jason Leonard flew out to meet us for a few shows. He checked his glockenspiel in the underneath luggage department and they apparently tossed it around wantonly until the case busted and they lost it. He had to wait around all day to get it delivered to him. The show in Manhattan was at the Knitting Factory and occurred on Ingrid’s birthday, so she too flew out from Portland to see us and spend time with her boyfriend Nathan, and invited all her New York friends to the show. Daniel Flessas from Portland was in town as well with his family, coincidentally, and after the show all of us walked out onto the cold lower Manhattan streets where Nathan read another poem, yelling it out to the canyon of buildings and tearing it up immediately after. I’ve started to enjoy more watching people’s reactions to Nathan’s poems than watching Nathan himself. When they see that he is actually going to tear up the poem, they always wince a little, as if the dove from a magic show is inexplicably getting eaten by the magician.

We went up through Vermont, where we soon found ourselves at another gourmet dinner in a fancy house. Scott made some beet salad, a specialty of his, and we all sat around the table talking about the Civil War and its effect on Vermont. Emboldened by two childhood viewings of the complete Ken Burns series, I excitedly told one of our friends, a Civil War buff, that I thought that in a past life I fought in that war and was bayoneted in the stomach, and that’s why I have a sensitive stomach now. She said that everyone thinks they got bayoneted in the Civil War in a past life, but the reality is that bayonets were rarely used. I sheepishly stopped talking about the Civil War and went back to eating my beets. (Does everyone really think they were bayoneted in the Civil War? How unoriginal are some of my other thoughts?) At one point during the dinner a guy with several tattoos and piercings who was sitting with us at the table turned to William and me and said, “So you’ve been on tour for three weeks? This must be a nice change for you, getting to eat a nice meal instead of eating White Castle in a dirty van…” Me and William looked at each other and stifled an embarrassed laugh. Perhaps we were spoiled. White Castle? Do some bands really eat that every night on tour? Dear God, the worst thing we had eaten all month was an Egg McMuffin when we had to get out of Chicago at six in the morning to make it to a gig in Philly that night. I was eating better on the road than I ever have at home. Sleeping better too, in better beds. When I wrote before that touring musicians should get a really bad bed for their home so that all the beds on tour seem luxurious, I was actually kidding. But now I’m in the position where my bed at home is a terrible broken-down thing, and every night I find myself for some reason in somebody’s mansion, sleeping on Egyptian cotton sheets with a high thread count. How had we slipped through the looking glass so completely? At what fancy dinner party would some authority figure break in and drag us away, and send us back to a lesser life? Would that ever happen? It would be best, I figured, just to keep chewing my beets and not say anything.

In Burlington we discovered another magical place to busk, a place with the holy name of Church Street.. (You know you’ve found the right place to busk when the crowd starts forming as soon as you start setting up your equipment. “What is that instrument?” “Well, this is a glockenspiel…”) The weather was cold, in the thirties, but the sun was shining on that particular pedestrian walkway that day. I had to blow on my fingers between every song to keep them from going numb, like Brett Favre at Lambeau Field, calling out the plays, directing the boys, trying to win the game. And the crowd was on our side. And the other team was only in our heads, in the form of insecurity and doubt. In fact, now that I think of it, the other team didn’t even show up that day. We were able to just walk right down the field and score every time. We won the game.

And the next day it was down to Boston, to a gig near Harvard Square, with enough daylight to try busking again. Could we find a new magical busking spot two days in a row? The prime space seemed to be just off of Church Street (again! could the secret be to find a Church Street in every town?) There was a plaza with a great open space that was unfortunately taken up by a lethargic singer-songwriter with a tambourine tied to his foot and who was singing through a PA. Not cool at all. We found a spot just around the corner from him where there was a business that had been boarded-up with plywood and a lot of people walking by. We set up our gear and put out our cds and a poster advertising the gig that night.

And again, it went amazingly well. We have found the right rhythm. Play a few songs without much time in between, and then stop for a few minutes to give the assembled crowd a chance to come up to Jason (whythey always choose to talk to Jason I’m not entirely sure) and buy cds and then we can tell them about the show that night and then another crowd comes up and we play a few more songs and the whole process makes everyone happy and leaves us with a lot of money. It’s really a miracle solution that helps promote the show and helps us to sell cds at the same time. The crowd that we play to is as much of a random sampling of the population as is possible, with all age groups and economic classes and political affiliations drifting by that particular patch of a city. And if someone doesn’t like the music, they can just keep walking. And if they do like it, they can stay and buy a cd. Our band is in the unique position of being able to play on the street in that we have all acoustic instruments, including an upright bass instead of electric, and lots of curious things that you don’t see on the street everyday, like a clarinet, or maracas. Yet we have enough rhythmic songs that can catch people’s attention, with certain repeated phrases that people can grab onto. And all I have to do is project my voice as proudly as I can (PA’s are for cheaters) above the music and the traffic and all the other sounds of the city. Pro-JECT like in the thea-TRE, where your voice has to reach the person in the back of the room. And sometimes the band sings along and makes it all easier for me. And on a day like that in Boston’s Harvard Square, there is truly no better place to be. People smiling, people dancing, me having conversations with strangers I never would’ve met…

From there we had dinner and then we went to our gig down the street at the Lily Pad. It was a small room, with maybe 50 chairs in it and a grand piano. Nathan, who had taken a couple days off from the band to stay with his girlfriend in New York, re-joined us at the last minute and was stunned at the crowd that had assembled to see us. “Oh, we played on the street today,” we told him. And the people that had come to see us were so amped up they jumped in the aisles and danced, they cheered so loudly and laughed and cried at all the right moments. At one point I looked out at the crowd and asked who had seen us play earlier that day in Harvard Square, and about half of them raised their hands.

“Well then,” I said. “I’m glad we did that.”

Sad Songs and Waltzes Aren’t Selling This Year (Wichita, KS)

We play music.

We live to play music.

We play music to live.

And we are so blessed. We drive in a Pontiac Montana, a mini-van that is literally the size of Montana. We sleep in abandoned mansions, with refrigerators full of food. We have the coordinates to the mansions sent to us ahead of time, and we open up our little treasure map and we locate the proper spot at the end of the night, and the band member who only had one drink that night drives the Pontiac Montana. The Pontiac MONTANA. Imagine the state of Montana driving down the highway. Presidential candidates campaign in our car because our car is so big that it will be sending seven delegates to the Democratic convention. (Actually, it’s just a little mini-van, but the psychological effect of naming it after the fourth-largest state has had quite an effect on us.)

We are insatiable. We want music all the time. We steal shows. In a sliver of a park in late afternoon in the middle of Denver, just running through some of our quieter songs, people get off work, get off busses, walk across four lanes of traffic to find out what we are doing and buy our cds as the sun sets and we tell them we have to get to Boulder. “I saw you had a clarinet… I love the clarinet!” On our one night off in the first three weeks, we find a dive bar in Spokane and tell the people there that they WANT us to play there but they just don’t know it yet. And we set up on the floor and play. And during the poppiest song in our set everyone in the bar is jumping up and down and I look over to Nathan, but Nathan– sweet violinist with a long cord so he can wander– is out on the floor too, in the middle of everyone, jumping up and down while still playing the violin.

We write poems to our deity The Traveler King, aka Papa Hobo, aka Any Weird Guy Who Comes Up To Us And Says Something Weird. “You know who that was, don’t you?” we’ll say as whatever stranger hobbles away from us and down the street. “That was the Traveler King.” And we’ll each brush off the exchange and realize it for the divine moment it was, instead of the creepy awkward interaction that it seemed at first.

The Traveler King, in case you don’t know, is in charge of everything out THERE, in the WORLD. Everything outside your house. If you hoist drinks to him and write poems to him and read those poems aloud on street corners and then tear them up and throw them into the air, he will be kind to you. He will, as they say, HOOK YOU UP.

And we are so grateful to him, because he has turned the world upside down. And when you’re touring the country playing music, you need the world to be turned upside down. Because the world is a little strange. And so if you go out into the world and you embrace the crappiest situations, in fact SEEK THEM OUT, then there is nothing that can go wrong. And so it is, for us, out here on the road.

Nothing can go wrong. And I am hesitant to even write about this. Even four paragraphs in, I’m still considering deleting this whole thing. But it’s been five weeks, and I have to say that WRONG is RIGHT. And BAD is GOOD. And GOOD is EVEN BETTER.

I haven’t wanted to write about this, because it’s so much easier to write about the bad times. “There were five people at the gig and at one point in the middle of my set, a baby goat walked in, and everyone was so much more fascinated with the goat than with my songs…” but although bad times might be entertaining to read about, they are really painful to live through, so if I can possibly avoid being onstage and wanting to kill myself—even if that leads to a less entertaining tour diary—I’m willing to make that trade. My friends don’t know this yet, however. I call them from the road and they don’t answer. They just text back and say, “I’m fine, I’ll just wait to read the tour diary.” Even my own mother does the same, and I thought she didn’t even know how to text. “tour diary pls” she says…

We are on tour for two months supporting our new album entitled WOOL, which is comprised of piano-based material. Mostly ballads. This has posed a challenge on the road for a few reasons: (1) ballads are quiet and often don’t get people’s attention, (2) I don’t like to play on digital pianos, (3) real pianos are heavy and impractical to carry with us, (4) most venues don’t have real pianos, and (5) if they do, the piano is usually out-of-tune.

But what would life be without challenges? It would just be sort of ick. So we’ve adapted the new songs to the guitar, a real instrument that is also portable and can sometimes approximate a piano. The only difference is that songs that are easy to play on piano are often in keys that are awkward and painful to play on guitar. I’m unwilling to buy a capo out of some foolish sense of pride at having spent too many hours sitting around campfires in Texas watching folk singers play song after song with the same three chords and just moving the capo around. But God bless those folk singers. They weren’t saddled with an unrealistic sense of their abilities as a musician, as I am. And so we have worked out guitar versions of these piano songs, even the ones that are in the key of E-flat, which is a noble and heroic key on the piano and a wrist-straining and tiring one on guitar.

As to the problem that Willie Nelson once sang of—specifically, that, “Sad songs and waltzes aren’t selling this year”—well, that would just have to be worked out on the road, in the bars, in the middle of whatever the Traveler King would bless us with. On the road we usually play rowdy songs, with parts to shout-along to, and moments where Nathan can walk out into the crowd and get people’s attention. That would be harder to do with soft songs.

The first three nights of this spring tour we had the entire band with us, me and six well-dressed and good-looking gentleman. We could walk up to any venue and people would just start handing over their money before we even played a note. After a few of those shows, three of the band had to go back home, and it was just the four of us to continue on. For 50 shows. We had lots of work to do to get good as a band without all those extra handsome and talented men, so we practiced in the van, each of us holding our instrument the best we could, Scott in the back seat playing clarinet, Nathan in the other back seat playing violin, me awkwardly in the front passenger seat playing guitar (let me just get this seat belt out of the way…there!), and William driving the car and singing out his bass lines.

Us all, driving across Wyoming, working out songs. Did I mention that we are insatiable?

Meanwhile, in a similar van to the north, fellow Portland band The Builders and the Butchers were driving through North Dakota. We were two ships charting our way across the amber waves of grain of America, and our ships were destined to collide in Wichita, Kansas in a large warehouse called the Fisch Haus. There lived Eric and Jamie, two inventors who have invented for themselves a spectacular life. She makes a line of lip balm called Chicken Poop, whose package makes clear that it “contains no chicken poop”. He is currently working on designing the fastest bicycle in the world, has a wind tunnel and everything, and the preliminary tests show that it might be able to get up to 80 miles per hour…pretty fast for something you have to pedal! He also carves little wooden cones that go into a guitar’s sound hole that are supposed to help the sound come out better and tame all the strange frequencies that sometimes get created by the boxiness of your average acoustic guitar. Even though I was sick while we were in Wichita and sequestered myself on the bottom bunk of a bunk-bed somewhere on the second floor of the enormous warehouse that was venue, home and factory, Eric would come up to me in the middle of the night with a home-made guitar and say, “Can I show you something?” and halfway through his explanation of vectors and frequencies he would say something like, “Now this is the part that all my mathematician friends say shouldn’t work, but I think it will…” and then he would describe something that you would only think would work in a Dr. Seuss book, but he would say it with such tenderness and passion that you believed it would work too. You wanted it to work. Of the world’s fastest bicycle, he talks about the rear of the vehicle, which includes an optical illusion which is supposed to fool not just the eye but also air molecules, in the hopes that if the air molecules don’t know exactly what’s going on they won’t slow down the bicycle. Dear God, I hope he’s onto something.

The show was to be held downstairs in a little theatre that they built. Behind the stage was a giant parabolic dish, basically an old satellite dish facing out towards the audience so that anything played onstage– even anything whispered– would be directed outwards with more focus and intensity than you would get at your normal venue. And likewise anything in the audience would get directed back up to the stage. Indeed, standing up onstage, I could hear Nathan 50 feet away, rolling a cigarette. Well, if there’s a crowd, I hope they’re quiet!

A couple hours before the show, the Builders rolled up in their similarly green (though not quite as large) mini-van. We realized a week before that they were going to be in Kansas the same time as us and could use an extra gig, so we invited them to play with us in Wichita. Once they arrived in town, we all concurred that we had a similar need to go to a Guitar Center, so I hopped in the van and rode with the band. I was disappointed at first to be riding around in the middle of Kansas with the Builders and Butchers and hear the word “paradigm” spoken.

“Don’t you guys talk about other things?” I asked.

“Like what?” they said.

“Oh you know, like… boobs or something…Not that WE talk about boobs… I just thought you guys would…”

We got back in time to sound check onstage in front of the parabolic dish. And there I was standing, in my sickness everything was strangely muffled but also amplified, and it was fifteen minutes before the show was to start, and Eric was at my feet stapling bunting to the stage, and I looked out at the completely empty theatre of 150 chairs and I had the following thought:

“What if this whole thing is just a delusion? Eric and Jamie convince bands to come here, and they talk about how there’s going to be a big show and how all these people are going to come, but really it’s all just in their head, and there’s really no show, just decorations and lights and chairs and… that’s it. Just us playing our music in a big warehouse on a stage with a parabolic dish, and no audience except for the inventors and our friends who drove many hours to be here. Kind of like in Field of Dreams, where he builds that baseball field in the middle of nowhere and everyone is like, ‘who’s going to come to this? For Christ’s sake, what are you doing?’”

And as the clock ticked closer to show-time and the room was still empty I thought:

“Well, if that’s the case, if this is all a delusion…that’s fine with me. We’ll still play music and either there will be people here
or not and it doesn’t really matter.”

But of course many people came from the thickets of Wichita and they sat down in those chairs and they were so quiet that I couldn’t hear any of them talking during our set, even during the quiet songs, and even considering the fact that a large parabolic dish was behind me. And the crowd ate us up whole, loved us in all our strengths and weaknesses, tossed us around jovially, and a local band played after us and then the Builders and Butchers went on and played without any amplification, save for of course the parabolic dish behind the stage, and at one point Harvey the banjo player turned his back to the audience and aimed his banjo notes right into the dish and they bounced off and went directly into my ear as loud as if it were going through an amp. And the show went deep into the night and we didn’t have to worry about getting in our vans because we were already home, sleeping in a big invention, living in someone’s dream. Our dream. Their dream. All the same dream, for one night. In Kansas.

Nick’s Guide to Touring (Phoenix, AZ)

We played one of those shows in Phoenix, Arizona, where you get on stage and you’re just astounded at how few people are there. Where you think that it couldn’t possibly have been worse, even if you had told everyone that if they came to this venue on this particular night that they would undoubtedly contract smallpox. And you ask what went wrong, when you’re playing a show with two local bands and there was a nice article in the paper, and Goddamn, even the people you’re STAYING WITH in Phoenix didn’t come out! And everyone says, “Oh, well AIDS WOLF is playing down the street,” and “It’s too bad that this had to be the same night as AIDS WOLF,” and you’re like, “Who is AIDS WOLF and why are they negatively effecting my life so much? AIDS WOLF? Like the disease AIDS? What kind of band is that?”But those nights are just going to happen every now and then. Perhaps this is a good time to reprint an essay I wrote a couple years ago. Well, maybe ‘reprint’ is not the right word, since the essay was never printed in the first place, as the music magazine I was writing for went all defunct, and especially since posting something on the web is not ‘printing’ something in any conceivable way.

But, still.

NICK’S GUIDE TO TOURING

You Will Die Alone in America

By Nick Jaina

I just got back from a two-week tour. Two weeks doesn’t sound like very long, but when you’re on the road, every day feels like a week, and every week feels like a month, so it FELT like I was gone for two months and fourteen weeks. And then as soon as you get back home it feels like you never left, except that everyone suddenly has a new haircut and a new girlfriend.

My tour went really well, but that’s because I had very low expectations. I was expecting to die in a fiery bus crash in West Texas, so the fact that I made it all the way to New Orleans and sold a few CDs along the way was quite a triumph.

If you’re thinking of going on tour, you’d do well to lower your expectations. Lower them A LOT. Lower. Lower still. A bit lower. Hmm… I don’t think you know what I mean when I say LOWER.

There are a few things that I realized while on the road that I wish I had thought of before I left home, and I’d like to share them with you here in the hopes that someone, maybe just ONE PERSON… well, I hope it would be more than one person… maybe two… in the hopes that at least THREE TO FIVE PEOPLE can get something out of it. And then share it with their friends.

What you should do before you go out on tour:

1. Get a really uncomfortable bed for your home

If you already have a comfortable bed in your home, get rid of it. Drive it to Mexico and leave it there. Then get the most uncomfortable bed you can find. A free mattress on the sidewalk is a good idea. Something with mites and stains. Broken springs sticking out. The point is to make your home bed really uncomfortable so that when you’re on the road, sleeping on someone’s wet floor, you don’t wish you were back home. Instead, you will relish the wet floor, snuggle in and enjoy your hard, cold, bad night’s sleep, because it’s much better than what you’ll get when you’re back home on your dirty, painful bed.

2. Let go of any notions of getting any sleep while touring

This is a noisy world. Have you noticed that? Not only does every home in America now have a phone, but every individual in America has their own cell phone, and EVERY ONE OF THOSE is set to the cutest/most annoying ring tone. In addition, every home has a front door that is repeatedly knocked on by delivery people and landlords, and every square block of this great country is under construction and will be until AT LEAST October. There is no chance of you getting any sleep EVER.

Oh, did we mention roommates? They work at odd hours and they didn’t know that you were going to be staying in their house, and they MUST lift weights every day or their definition will ATROPHY and they MUST listen to speed metal while they work out. They’ll apologize hours later, after they’ve realized that they woke you up, but you can’t unfry an egg and you can’t UNWAKE SOMEONE UP.

3. Resolve to not drink so much while on tour

Drinking sure is a sticky wicket. On the one hand, it kills the pain, and on the other… Hmmm.

4. Resolve to drink quite a lot while on tour

Be aware that there are still some DRY counties in the south. Isn’t that bizarre? Chart your tour around them.

5. Understand that the price of gasoline will bankrupt you

Remember all those people protesting the Iraq war, saying “No blood for oil”? Well, if we went to war in the Middle East to secure cheap gas prices, it sure didn’t work. If we REALLY want to get prices back under two dollars a gallon, we’re going to have to invade FINLAND, ARGENTINA and ALASKA. And that’s just a start. It might make sense to start drilling on the moon, even though there was never life on the moon, and it’s necessary for some sort of creature with bones to die and become a fossil so it can turn into a fossil fuel. On the off chance that there was once some random creature that died on the moon, it’s worth drilling there.

One of the things that we don’t fully appreciate as Americans is just how big our country is. Not all countries are made the same. When someone in Ireland tours their country, that’s like the equivalent of you or me taking a drive around the block. An AMERICAN block. Things are big over here, especially Texas (where, at best, you can hope to die in a fiery bus crash). The point is that you should budget a large amount of money just for the gas expenses on your tour. Then take that number and double it. And then add a zero to the end of it. And then get a credit card, because even if you don’t detour at all and only drive your car straight from city to city, coasting down the hills, not using the air conditioner ever, you’re still going to break an exhaust manifold in New Mexico, where there is only one expert on exhaust manifolds, and he KNOWS he’s the only expert on exhaust manifolds and prices his services accordingly.

6. Understand that the sound won’t be any good

Pack accordingly.

7. Understand that people in other towns don’t care about you

Think about how long it takes you to build up a community of people in your own town who care about you and the type of music you’re making, who are eager to see you play and buy your new album and hear your new songs. Those people don’t exist in other towns. In other towns there’s your friend’s cousin who’s not really into music. There are also the random people who happen to be in the bar or coffee shop at the exact moment that you’re playing. These people have no reason to care about you. They CARE about coffee and beer. However, you must realize that their lack of affection for you is important. If you use their apathy in a constructive manner, it will humble you, build your character, shape you as a person—”tear you a new one,” as they say.

Not that you need a new one.

8. Understand that the sun has a finite amount of fuel and will some day no longer burn, rendering the solar system a cold, dead place

This is probably the most important thing to realize before you set out on tour. Meditate on this thought for a few hours in a dark room with your phone off. Think about all the things that you love in the world, and how—even if global warming and nuclear war and all that don’t come to pass—it’s STILL all going to crumble and die and there’ll be nothing left. That will give you the proper perspective on how to feel when you’re playing a show in Los Angeles to four people while LENNY KRAVITZ promotes his new line of hair care products at a packed arena full of beautiful, beautiful people who will never know your name.

9. Have fun

Help me get back to your arms (Boise – Salt Lake City – Flagstaff)

I had never been to Idaho before, so I was surprised when—three songs into my set at Pengilly’s Saloon in Boise—the bartender walked up and put a napkin in front of me that someone at a back table had given him. The napkin said, “Request: ‘Wrecking Ball.’” I’m of the disposition (I like to call it “anxious realism”) where in such a moment as when I see the bartender walking up to me with a napkin, I’m thinking that it’s going to say something like, “You’re too loud. Stop playing.” Like in Back to the Future when Marty is auditioning with his band and the guy with the megaphone stops him and says, “I’m sorry—You’re just too darn loud.” But no, the napkin offered a request for an old song of mine, unexpectedly.The set in Boise went well. I’ve been doing these shows with my friend Dustin, who plays as Run On Sentence. I produced his new album, so I’m familiar with his songs enough that I can usually pick up a shaker and shake it on the right beats to back him up. And when I play my songs, he grabs a couple of piano keys that he got from a dismantled piano and around which he wrapped socks tied with rubber bands. These are a simulation of mallets, and it is with these that he beats an old bass drum that is standing upright like a floor tom. We knew we were going to have a good show when, in the middle of the first song, Dustin burst into a mouth-trumpet solo (which he often does) the crowd erupted in disbelieving cheers. We traded off sets for a few hours until the bar got lonely and Sunday night-y.

Speaking of the lonely hours, I’ll stop here to give an update on the success of my new drink. You might have heard of it already. You probably have, actually. It’s kind of a sensation in the drink world. It’s vodka and Coke with a lemon, and I call it a High Roller. I started drinking it in the springtime, and now it’s the only thing I can drink. And I don’t mean that it’s the only thing I want to drink, I mean it’s the only thing that I CAN drink. For some reason (and I’m not saying this will happen to you when you start drinking High Rollers, but would that really be such a bad thing?), the chemical balance in my body is such that wine makes me sick with one sip, and if I drink one beer I’ll have a headache for the next 24 hours. All the other liquors are too harsh, but somehow vodka and Coke with lemon is something that I can drink in all those lonely moments where there is nothing else that will soothe the pain (i.e. most nights). And there’s the added comfort of knowing that I’m ordering a drink that alienates my friends and upsets bartenders without fail. I still haven’t received a reasonable response to my question of, “Exactly what is so weird about vodka and Coke with a lemon?” The only answers I’ve received are “You don’t mix clear and dark,” and “It’s just weird.” Not enough to change my mind, so I keep drinking the High Roller, to everyone’s embarrassment. However, I have actually found pockets of acceptance for my drink. When I was in Finland, everyone was very understanding. Apparently the Prime Minister there takes her High Roller into the sauna with her. A friend of mine saw the Prime Minister in a public sauna in Helsinki once, completely naked, High Roller in hand. (Of course, they don’t call it a High Roller in Finland—they call it something unpronounceable and unmemorable…which isn’t helping my cause at all.) And when I was in New Orleans, my two bartending friends told me that the drink is actually somewhat common, although they’ve noticed the only people who order it are Canadian. (That was quite comforting to me, as I was once married to a Canadian, and so maybe there is something about the Canadian way of life that has stayed with me through the dissolving of bank accounts.)

But no more living in the distant past! Instead, it’s on to the slightly more recent past. On to Salt Lake City!

The streets in Salt Lake City are six times as wide as the streets in Portland. The blocks are six times as long as a Portland block. Every church is six times as large as a church in Portland. And “Why?” you ask. Well, the whole city is preparing for the return of God, and so everything in the city has to be God-sized. When He comes back, He’ll need a place to crash. He’ll have to be able to walk down the streets comfortably. No low-hanging wires over the streets either. God has to be able to hold His head high. And somewhere in one of the enormous churches of Salt Lake City, there is no doubt a giant fold-out couch, where Our Lord can stay while He sorts some things out. Thank you Salt Lake City! Putting the Lord up for the night, when no one else was capable.

(My friend David tells me that the streets are actually as wide as they are because when they were originally designed, they were supposed to allow a horse-drawn carriage the ability to turn completely around. Thank you, David, for this actual fact—the first such fact in this diary entry.)

One of the peculiar things about Salt Lake City is that if you want to go into a bar and have a drink—say, a High Roller, for instance—you have to either be a member of that bar, or you have to be sponsored by someone who is a member. Luckily we were hanging out with Anna and Chris of Slow Train Records, so they pointed to us in the bar and said that we were reasonable people. Anna and Chris had moved up from Arizona a couple years ago to try to start a cool record store in Salt Lake City. And God bless them, it seems to actually be working. They are in love with everything on HUSH Records in that store, and on your way to the bathroom in the back you pass by about seven different Laura Gibson posters. I was surprised that someone would find Phoenix to be an artistically oppressive town and would want to trade that in for the freedom of Salt Lake City, but perhaps I’ve met the wrong people in the wrong places. Anna and Chris certainly seem like the kind of people who could make Salt Lake City cool on their own. We, on the other hand, were going the opposite direction, headed for Arizona.

You know you’ve crossed the border from Utah into Arizona when you walk into a bar and order a drink—vodka and Coke with a lemon? Don’t mind if I do!—and instead of asking for your membership card or somehow trying to limit the amount of alcohol you put in your body, the bartender informs you that it’s after 8pm, so the drink special is that you can get a double of top-shelf liquor for the same price as a single. Even though the addition of Coke pretty much nullifies the superior taste of a top-shelf vodka, it was a deal I had to take. We were in Flagstaff and we had driven all day past the beautiful buttes of Utah, and we had a last-minute show opening up for three heavy metal bands… Zombie Religion was the name of one of them… I’m sure they were all to be fine bands, but when I walked into the club and saw the crowd, I said to Dustin, “How about we just play your songs tonight?”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Our set was actually quite well-received. When we first started, it looked like some people were mocking us by pretending to line dance, but after the first song the applause was louder than it was in Salt Lake. Who knows where we belong? We’re just looking for acceptance of our music and our awkward cocktails.

A Baby Unicorn! (Pendleton, OR)

Touring the country, every town you go to you hear a variation on the same thing: “This local band with a great draw was gonna play with you tonight, but they couldn’t do it because the bass player had to work.” Or, “I would have brought out all my friends, but they each came down with a different ailment that prevented them from leaving the house tonight.” Which leaves you, the touring musician, feeling quite wistful and unfulfilled. They know you’re only passing through town this one night. What are you supposed to do with this information? But still they carry on, “Oh, if you were just here ANY OTHER night there would have been a HUNDRED more people here… But the rodeo’s in town tonight.”Yes, the rodeo. And so it was off to Pendleton, Oregon, where they have a real rodeo—THE rodeo in fact… the Pendleton Round-Up—which was thankfully NOT occurring the same night as our show at the Great Pacific Wine & Coffee Emporium Restaurant and Lounge etc., etc.

What was occurring was a memorial service and a bluegrass jam. This was a bit of a surprise for us. The bluegrass jam apparently happens every Saturday in Pendleton and has been going on for fifteen years or so. The memorial service was for the father of the guy who was opening the show. Unfortunately he died of cancer just a few days before. This made us a little tentative about the show. How do we follow a memorial service? Don’t sing about death? ONLY sing about death? Just go about our normal business? Certainly going outside to tune would be a start.

Remember all those starlings that some guy in the 1800s brought over from England because they were mentioned in one line of King Lear? Well, all those starlings apparently roost in ONE TREE in Pendleton, Oregon, conveniently located right outside the Great Pacific so that young musicians who want to tune their instruments in silence before a show will walk out of the restaurant at sunset and stand under the tree and get berated and besotted by these starlings, leaving the musician no recourse but to look up and shake his fists at the sky and angrily shout, “ShakeSPEARE!!!”

The show ended up being fine. JD Kindle played a spirited set and everyone was very emotional and supportive. Pendleton is a town where 65-year-olds and 12-year-olds are not ashamed to come out to the same show and sing and clap along.

We played one of those sets where you think nobody’s really that into it until you finish and then everyone stomps and claps for an encore. “Really? Are you sure?” And then silver-haired ladies come up to you afterwards and tell you how they listen to your record when they go on their morning walk, because it’s just the right length and mood, and they tell you how they read your tour diary out loud to their friends (although hopefully they won’t be reading THIS one). But, you know, one of THOSE shows.

Afterwards we went to a bar down the street called the Rainbow. (And if you think that the Rainbow would be some sort of gay bar, remember that this is Pendleton, Oregon, home of the Round-Up, where men rope cattle and tie them up. The name of the bar doesn’t refer to the rainbow that includes all types of people regardless of race or sexual orientation. It refers to that place where you can get gold.)

I went to order drinks for everyone. Nathan and Ingrid wanted whiskey neat. I said to the bartender, “Yes, I’ll have two whiskeys, neat—” He instantly interrupted me, “What do you mean NEAT? What does that mean? This is 2007, not the FIFTIES! I have no idea what ‘neat’ means. Is that ’straight-up’ or ‘on the rocks’ or what? You want a shot or you want a drink? What is this, ‘NEAT’? Come on!” He literally got out all those words before I could stammer out a response. “Uh, it just means, you know, straight-up.”

I went back to the table and the conversation naturally turned to jerks. I think there are fine distinctions between all the words we have for people who are lame. Naturally that would be the case, otherwise why would we have different words for the same thing? I put it thusly:

“An asshole is ill-intentioned and selfish. A dick is similar, but a little worse. A douche bag is just uninformed and has unearned confidence. A son of a bitch likes to fuck with people, but doesn’t want to screw them over. A prick is like an asshole, but just for a short period of time. A bastard is someone who’s fucking with people for the betterment of society. If you’re going to be anything, be a bastard.”

My position was that people cry “asshole” too soon. If someone cuts you off in traffic, you’re naturally inclined to think of them as an asshole, but that doesn’t make them one. Maybe they’re just in a hurry, or they’re having a bad day, or they’re not a good driver. I posited that people who seem like assholes—even that bartender—should still be given 27 chances before you definitively call them an asshole. Perhaps I would invite that bartender over for Thanksgiving dinner. Give him more chances.

Nathan mainly objected to my definition of prick. He thought a prick was on the same order of severity as a dick, while I think a prick is something bad but short-lived. You know, like when the nurse pricks you for blood. Prick! Nathan thought that since prick and dick are synonyms and they rhyme, they are of the same order of jerkishness. (By the way, Nathan is a prick AND a dick.)

The subject turned to frowning, and we each tried to frown as much as possible. When Ingrid attempted to do it, however, she couldn’t even get further than straight across. We all found this to be the most delightful and joyous thing that we had ever seen: a girl who couldn’t frown! It was like finding a baby unicorn in a forest clearing.

Maybe there is hope in the world after all. Maybe there is a future for us all? If we can find it in Pendleton, surely we can find it anywhere else.