We leave Portland late. Around 8 PM, we arrive at a cabin outside of Weed. There are three dogs and our hosts make clam chowder and salad. It‘s a dream meal with dream company. I sleep in a cozy bed for 10 hours. Then we go to lunch at a bar. We stop by our host’s office. I am drunk so I brag that I can do 20 pushups. No one believes me. I drop and give them 20. Nick announces that I’m drunk. We go to a townie bar called the Vet’s club, which is oddly Marilyn Monroe themed.
Then we drive to Chico. It’s finals week so almost no one comes except a few really lovely people who are our heroes. Still, it’s the best show so far—at least in my mind. Fishboy have kazoos. They are fucking funny. I make us get a hotel so that I can sleep in.
#oregon
Sunday, December 9–Portland
Back in Portland, I take care of business, doing laundry, hitting the gym, and doing other chores. The show is at Slabtown with Gingerbread Patriots, who we’ve been meaning to play with for about a year after two botched attempts.
Finally, I’m loosened up this night. Anna Shee Bee Gee sings the Christmas song with us. Ellen SBG is sick, sadly. We miss her.
Speed Freaks
We barely make it back. The last three hours we’re limping along—pounding M and M’s and Gummi Worms to stay awake.
At 2:00 AM, we are finally, finally home again.
The instant we pull in the driveway, I wish we could do it all again.
Just kidding.
California Love
Chico–Friday September 1
We try to leave Portland as early as possible, but as usual, we take much longer than expected. Even waking up at the ghastly hour of 6:00 AM (I played a show with Shee Bee Gees the night before) we don’t hit the road until after 10:30. There’s the dog to be dropped off, food to find, the triple checking of our packing list. Last tour, I held on to the idea of eating well, long after I had crossed over into survival mode, but this time we’re honest: it’s Burgerville for breakfast. I contemplate getting an espresso milkshake—asking if they make them this early–but Nick advises against it. All day I will mourn the ghost of this lost milkshake.
We pull into Chico a bit later than we like, but the headlining band is still 2 hours behind us. As long as there’s someone worse off than us. . . I called before we arrived to apologize for our tardiness and Connie, the wife of the show organizer Jason, offered us a place to stay and went so far as to ask what I like for breakfast.
After we play, someone tells us that he’s been listening to “Le Projet Citron” for the last year, never knowing who sang it. He had assumed that we were covering the song live. He says, “You mean YOU wrote that song? No Way!!”
The last band is the single weirdest band I’ve ever seen. In a good way. A woman who goes by Pixie sings and “plays” a lamp hung with windchimes. While accompanied by guitar, she holds her ears and writhes around. It’s spooky, made even spookier by her truly incredible voice.
Outside of the venue I notice they too are in a normal car—theirs an eighties-era Chevy Nova which is smashed in the back. Steve the guitarist says they got rear-ended on the highway. A car was barreling up behind them and Steve tried to pull aside but the car smashed him anyway. Now, two months into a four month tour, they have no way to open the hatchback. They load their heavy gear into the backseat over the folded-down front seat. “Were they drunk?” I ask. “More like on acid,” Steve says. “Or both—drunk and on acid.” Pixie says, “Yeah, that’s like the military.” She pauses. “Just like a lizard.”
We all end up staying at Jason and Connie’s even though Jason and Connie are trying to get to San Francisco early the next day. I am once again reminded of the unreasonableness of this lifestyle. These are hard-working people who just want to take a quick vacation, and yet they are kept up and crowded by four freaks sprawled on their living room floor, overrunning their bathroom, raiding their food. Back at the venue, I had spoken with a woman Renee who had hosted our last show in Chico, at her record store. Recently, she finally closed the store after years of crushing bills. She was spending a couple thousand a month to keep it open. She’d work a day job and then go to the store and host shows until three in the morning, then get up and do it all again. Her subsistence was bulk bags of beans and rice. And she wasn’t complaining—in fact, she’s just resting so she can dive back in. She loves music that much.
Going down the only road I’ve ever known
Thursday, August 31-Portland
Just firing up the ol’ tour blog and getting ready to hit the road tomorrow…and we’ll be chronicling the whole thing for you again. I say “we”, but it will probably mostly be Heather, as it seems to usually work out that way. Hopefully, we’ll see some of you out there!
Nick can’t drive 55
Thursday, June 8–Oregon
On the way out of town we see a giant Caveman statue and we exchange looks. Nick promptly heads right for it, intuitively, as if we’ve been on Caveman quest all along. At the base of the Caveman, a plaque explains that Grants Pass is famous for a “booster group” from the 1920s called—get this–the Cavemen. They gave themselves names like Big Bone and Fluffy Pelt, wore animal skins, and claimed to be direct descendants from Neanderthals. Supposedly, their activities included appearing at a Broadway show (wha?!?!?), which seems very 2006, Broadway-aesthetic wise. This season, they could open for Menopause: the Musical.
We stop to get an espresso in Yreka, California. It’s a a drive-thru, which sounds fast, but will actually the single slowest coffee experience I’ve ever had, partly because the woman working there is going crazy from being locked up in a box all day. Maybe it is our fault; we walked up to the window. While she’s making our coffee, a man drives up to the window and wants to know the maximum number of espresso shots that could be fit into a coffee drink. She guesses she could cram five into a 20 ounce cup. He then wants to know the most “exciting” drink she could make him with him with these five shots. She keeps describing different drinks and he says “nope, not exciting enough.” This is all while she’s supposed to be making my coffee. Right as she flips the blender on to make his “Crazy Caramel MindFreezer” she informs me, apropos of nothing, that she didn’t care that Kurt Cobain died. Then as if in consolation, she concedes that she really loves tiramisu.
For lunch we eat at Burger King. I can’t believe it, but I don’t want to waste time looking for something else. On the Today Show recently, Eric Schlosser said that McDonalds is one of the largest toy retailers in the country. I happen to find kid’s meals perfectly-sized (for me), so now, after two of them in two days, I own a disturbingly “hot” troll-teenager doll and this Bratz thing—a perfume bottle?–that looks like a buttplug.
So, here’s a debate for you. Are fast food places really grosser at gas stations? We keep snubbing the truck stop McDonald’s, as if they’re somehow inferior, like the fries will be cooked in diesel fuel. They’re probably the same, but we just can’t do it.
Nick is wearing an outfit that looks like Larry David. Sorry, that is not grammatically correct. The outfit looks like that of Larry David. Grey slacks and a polo shirt and white tennis shoes. I wish we were driving a Prius—then we could get into a “situation.”
Grand Funk Railroad keeps popping up in the ipod mix. Do you think they really got laid in Omaha? “four chiquitas in Omaha. . .we tore the hotel down.” I’d be pissed if I were those chiquitas and heard about it on the radio. Makes a bathroom wall look discreet, you know?
Fights:
One. Brief. I was working on an article and failed to acknowledge Nick’s celebratory honk as we entered the state of California.
Driving division of labor: Nick 10 hours Heather: 3
Place names that could be euphemisms for sex acts:
1) Balls Ferry
2) Junction City
And…liftoff
Wed. June 7th–Heading South
Early in the drive we pass the 45th parallel, the halfway point between the North Pole and the Equator. Perhaps that explains the Oregonian penchant for equanimity. A couple of hours later we pass a yellowed billboard that screams “Big Mac Attack!” and Nick points out that the slogan hasn’t been in use in twenty years. Perhaps someone left it there that long?
Anyhow, it is an omen, as our first meal is, a bit later, at McDonald’s. I have a feeling I’ll be eating a lot of McDonald’s. After a late night trip to Taco Bell last week, I have exceeded my yearly fast food quota already, with only two visits.
We decide to stop for the night in Grant’s Pass. The name is kind of romantic, as if we’re crossing over a momentous threshold. The first hotel we try, I am in a line behind an amorous teenage couple. They paw each other as they are making the transaction. At first I think they are just dying to have sex but then their friend, a bounding, punky girl, barges in and says, in a very loud kid-whisper, “Get Room 205; we’re all over there.” I immediately walk out and suggest another hotel. The Travelodge is more amenable but the woman who checks us in is clearly in training and the owner is growing frustrated with her. The trainee keeps complaining—as if to explain her difficulty with credit card machine, finding the keys, and the retractable pen– that her glasses are too smudged to see through. This seems strange, because in the time it takes to utter the complaint, it could be fixed. Sort of like saying, “My finger’s in a light socket and it really hurts.” Pull it out, you know? The room mildly smells of fish and urine and we watch a VH1 documentary on heavy metal which details Iron Maiden’s evolution. Bruce Dickinson, who seems oddly like a Christopher Guest character—in a good way—is explaining how he developed these enormous gestures to give the people in back of the arena a sense of proximity. So I’ll be working on that. I’ll let you know what I come up with, once I find a spare appendage. Perhaps my hair can do the talking. Also, Iron Maiden employed a fail safe trick: a mascot, this skull thing. It has a name. Like Curly or something.