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Well, it all starts with a show in San Francisco, Victor Krummenacher and Alison Faith Levy at the Hotel Utah March 6th 1999. I played a couple songs with Alison and then the whole set with Victor, we got back to Victor's at about 3am, so I dozed in a chair 'til 5 when the shuttle came to pick me up to take me to the airport.
a short layover in chicago, many people stranded by the weather there, but i got safely to Richmond, VA. where eventually i got picked up by Scott Minor and Mark Linkous in Mark's old diesel Mercedes wagon. out to the farm in Dillwyn to rehearse. on th eway we pick up a new instrument for Mark, a nylon string guitar that he is having a pickup put into. Already at the farm is David Dreiwitz, our new bass player. I met Dave originally may years ago when i was playing with Camper Van Beethoven and he was playing with Tiny Lights, but recently re-met him while doing shows in NY last fall with John Kruth. Dave also plays with Ween. So the band is Mark on guitar and singing and other weird sounds, Scott on drums and sampler, Dave on electric and acoustic bass, me (Jonathan) on guitar, violin, keyboards and glockenspiel, with both Dave and I singing background vocals.
During the rehearsal days, Dave walks in the woods every day with Barko the dog, one of four dogs there, but he makes the mistake of thinking that Barko can find his way home if he wanders in the woods; one day he gets lost and ends up on an ostrich farm! when Teresa Linkous goes to pick him up it turns out that they want to start up a vet's office there and she may get a job!
Rehearsals are fairly smooth, weather changes all around us, snow and such. Mark has gotten a sponsorship from Vox amps, and since our tour budget didn't allow me to buy a road case for my Fender Deluxe and we couldn't find a Deluxe in Virginia, I get the third of three new Vox AC-30s delivered to Static King, two with green speakers (25 watt speakers vs. the 30 watt amp) and one with blue (15 watt speakers vs. the 30 watt amp). I get one of the green ones, Mark uses the blue as his main and the other green as his extra overdrive kick-in. I have alot of trouble over the next week trying to get a good midrange tone for my guitar and violin. fuckin' vox. even one of Mark's AC-30's brilliant channel doesn't work...
our new guitar tech shows up, Paul Dillon, replacement for our beloved Duncan Swift who is still busy with Ash ( i think, could be Radiohead, his usual employers). Paul is a young irish guitar player who works in NY at Kim's (a huge alternative record store). he gradually learns to understand Mark's bizzare set-up of guitars, effects, Dr. Sample ["i didn't go through five years of sampling school to be called MR. Sample!"] and tape decks in connection to the pair of vox ac-30s. the remaining members of the crew are stuck in transit awaiting work visas! Eventually, the day before our first show Ivor Knox and Matt Johnson, our Front of House sound man and our tour manager get into the USA and by varied methods get to VA. Allan Hickey, the driver arrives with our bus, we load all the equipment into the trailer and head off to the Cat's Cradle in NC.
Our bus is vintage 1970's rock bus. it's got wood interiors and little personal space. sleeps 8. has a huge spacescape on the sides with saturn and a satellite, which i see as personally significant as i use the magsatellite email psuedonym when i travel.
the touring crew's nicknames are mostly established from previous tours. Scott is known as "Stoney" Minor, referencing the prodigious amounts of marijuana that he is able to smoke, and yet remain alert. or mostly alert, anyway. you'd never know. Mark is known now as "Stinky". it used to be "Smoky", or "the Smoky Link" (on account of his smoking unfiltered cigarettes all the time of course) but somehow it became "Stinky" Linky. Matt is really responsible for these nicknames, and his has always been "Judge" to the other bands he has toured with, but after viewing 'Dr. Stranglove' we have decided to call him "Mandrake". Ivor, due to strange food allergies that allow him to take no protein from sources other than cheese, is known affectionately as Ivor "the cheeseman" Knox. Occaisonally. Early in the tour Matt decides that Dave looks like an english comedian named Barney Dodd ( i believe that's right) but somehow Dave takes it as being Barney from the Simpsons. nonetheless, Matt insists on only calling him Barney, to the point where most of us call him Barney as well! fortunately or unfortunately, Paul and I have no good nicknames, they write "Seagull" on itineraries and such, but that joke is so old it never sticks.
North Carolina at the Cat's Cradle, we meet Varnaline, our opening act for the tour. Anders plays guitar, Jud plays drums and John plays bass, their tour manager and sound man is Jason.
Anders has a big beard, we're a little scared. first show is a little weird, we're still trying it out. small audience, but appreciative. the local record store guys tell us that after the inital shipment of "Good Morning Spider", they sold out and haven't been able to get any more! I say, gee mark, I could run a record company like that..... er... anyway after the show we leave and experience our first try at sleeping on the bus and waking up in a new town. I realize right off that I ain't gonna sleep much on this tour.
we awaken in Atlanta, completely bypassing south carolina. (yay, sez I, for personal reasons.) we're playing in a new (to me) club called the Echo Lounge. as we spend the day drinking coffee in the local cafe and pestering the music store full of ethnic instruments, we find that danelectro has finally manufactured a baritone guitar, but they don't have one. haven't seen one yet. i want one. the music store has various flutes but no suling flute (Indonesian) but as i explain to the clerks about Indonesian music stuff, they offer me a job teaching there (!?). well, can't just yet, got another job at the moment.
The Echo Lounge is excellent, a new place put together by Janet Ridgeway. It houses a bar, club and a record label (Echostatic) that puts out film soundtracks to Hal Hartley's films among other things (bands like Dura-Delinquent and Super 5 Thor.) they apparently show films there as well. they also happen to have the most beautiful bartenders this side of New Orleans (which, coincidentally, is where they happen to be from. i've gotten in trouble before for noticing these sorts of things, but hell, it's my tour diary...) unfortunately we leave after the show again and drive to Alabama.
set list for the Echo Lounge Atlanta
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I think we played weird sisters after this....
as far as Alabama goes, I have to say I don't think the south is going to rise again anytime soon, unless it's due to fermentation.
We arrive at some motel near the civic center and Dave and Paul and I take a cab to little 5 points, "where the bars all are?" asks the cab driver. actually we're looking for something to eat, and coffee, i'm going into food freak mode. we get there just in time for the pancake house to close. i hate this place already. fortunately there is other food, and records stores with scads of Marilyn Monroe picture postcards....
the Nick, where we play, is the same as it was the last time I played there, in 1988 (where CVB battled drunk audience who kept spilling beer on our effects pedals. i called on one guy from the stage to find out where he worked, but he wouldn't tell me. his girlfriend eventually told me he worked in a supermarket, i said, hey i don't go spilling beer in your till, do i? he got pissed and threw a pitcher of beer at us, David Lowery jumped off the stage and wrestled the guy into the exit door which was unfortunately locked... meanwhile Greg Lisher starts playing Sweet Home Alabama... anyway...)
well, a small audience, but it's ok cuz we're still learning how to play the songs anyway. none of us feel really comfortable yet. we're starting to learn Varnaline's songs a bit, which ones we like...(Hammer Goes Down, No Disciple, Tonite..)
with a day off between here and texas we decide to go to new orleans, even though we don't have a show there. Allan is from there and would like to do some errands considering he didn't even know how long the tour was going to be when he arrived and hasn't done his taxes or anything and we'll be out 'til late april.
not sure what happens to everyone here. all i know is i found a guitar store and got a new strap, got some voodoo talismans... at night dave and i saw a freaky jazz band with drums, bass, two bass clarinets and a flute at a great little bar that had many cool areas for watching the band or sitting or smoking or watching traffic... as it turns out Dave is into the pot drug as much as Stoney, we may have the most relaxed rhythm section in the south... Dave has some friends in a band called Royal Fingerbowl there who sport him a bass stand for his upright bass.
next stop, houston. st. patrick's day. we are prepared for a drunken obnoxious audience as we're playing at a psuedo-english pub, but they are actually fairly well behaved and we get to play some quiet songs too. the opening act on this bill is the Blacks, a chicago based americana band with 2 girls and 2 guys, and incredible graphics (i am wearing one of their t-shirts as i write this - the bassist girl is the artist.) all the guys are interested in talking with the two girls in the Blacks, i mean the bassist is a six foot blond girl who paints naked ladies on her bass... the shirt depicts a man with his head below a woman's short skirt and she is either displeased by his performance or (i choose to believe) is extremely pleased and so overcome that she accidentally discharges a pistol into his head. it reads "the blacks blow your brains out." yeah!
our bus has a rotating placard on the front with many different choices. here it says Alice Cooper, which we think is all funny and shit, but the locals outside the club are pretty hyped to see Alice, they're yelling threateningly from their porches, "where's Alice?".
Varnaline seems to be changing their sets slightly toward stretching out rather than sticking with the rock songs... our sets are still slightly awkward. can't figure out why. i'm still struggling with my AC-30 for tones i want, when i try to get the guitar to feed back it jumps to wrong overtones. very frustrating, not predictable like my fender.
of course when we unload the amps in dallas the next day, mine doesn't even go on. we send it out to a repair guy who determines that not only are the contacts to the power tube not soldered (from the factory!) but in fact 8 contacts to the tubes aren't soldered! now fixed it has at much more oomph, more to play with.
the show itself however, well... the Galaxy club is huge and our audience is small and that's not inspiring. at least my friend Curt Haworth is there, a dancer with the David Dorfman dance company from NY who are in Dallas for two weeks. but he couldn't convince any of the other dancers to come.
next stop is Austin and the South by Southwest Music music and film festival schmooze-a-thon. like when we were at CMJ in NY last fall, where the cost of life is cheap, the cost of a musician's life is cheaper. We are on a bill with great bands, but it's a nightmare nonetheless. there were bands playing when we got to the club, La Zona Rosa, i can't remember which ones, but i went out to the side of the stage and watched Grandaddy before us. they were excellent, we've been playing their cd before our set for awhile so i knew the music really well and it was a treat to see it played. then Mercury Rev played, i couldn't hear the singing very well from the side and they jammed out with long noodly guitar solos on chord progressions repeated, very swirly. i watched the bassist, he had a beautiful old Fender Precision and he looked like he loved it. he rocked. they played a long time and the changeover was rushed, out set is getting songs knocked out of it before we even start. the stage crew have been dealing with so many bands every day for a few days already, they don't care. we set up as fast as possible, but now we can only play for 30 minutes, right as we're going on i notice no leads from the keyboard are set up still... and monitors? well, we're trying to play, there are idiots yelling "play faster" and that sort of thing. everybody's drunk. we're cutting whole verses out of songs in the middle, skipped the second verse of 'Sunshine', but while that may be easy for most of us, Scott has a sampler with the drum pattern to contend with...anyway, we play some nice songs and they are telling us to stop but Mark is ignoring them and we blast the end with 'happy man'. they want us off so bad the stage crew is trying to pull my instruments out of my hands when we finish, which pisses me off, especially with the violin. i end up being so pissed off i don't even stay to watch the Flaming Lips, whom i love.
I met one Capitol person there, Donna, who seemed to me to have a very punk rock music ethic, a refreshing person in the world of major labels... meanwhile all our management and A&R people are having words about who allowed us to play a set like that and whatever else. the PR people are all drinking with the journalists they pitch to, paying them petty cash to perform stupid tricks (showing their relationships in perhaps the truest light! and you wonder how to get your records reviewed...) well, for this i missed seeing Seagulls Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her who were playing at another club. when i go outside ot the bus, the Vox representative is there handshaking.....heh...he promises more amplifiers...
we got to see Dilly Gent, the woman who was the creative video rep for EMI and got Sophie Muller to make those excellent films for the new Sparklehorse videos (available on the Capitol version of the CD!), she's now independent and in Austin promoting the Radiohead film, "Meeting People Is Easy" which she produced.
so we stay in Austin for another day, it's heaven for Mark cuz he gets to go see two of his favorite musicians - Tom Waits is playing at a theatre and Guided By Voices are playing for free in the park. Dave and I decide to get high and go look at the state capitol building, it's very pretty, then head over to the park. we see Spoon, (liked them) the Gourds ( hated them) and the Guided By Voices. GBV is a difficult band to me. Mark loves Robert Pollard, gets hooked on occaisonal songs and plays them loudly and often over and over, lately one that goes "i've got bones of skin" or something like that and "i am produced" or something like that. well, it always sounds like second tier seventies bands to me, like listening to Mott the Hoople when you could be listening to David Bowie. when they played it was such a microphone-swinging rock show spectacle thing that it really gave off that Mott the Hoople vibe even more. I really want to like this band, but I just can't. it still all sounds fake. he's a great craftsman, whatever.
[!!!**new info**!!! i have gone to the Guided By Voices records to discover that the song is actually "I've Got Bulldog Skin", which just goes to show you how my hearing is lately. or Mr Pollard's pronunciation...]
so Dave and I left and ran into Liz Penta, who manages Medeski, Martin and Wood, who may tour with Ween in the summer, so we go off to see other bands and get food. first we saw Asian Dub Foundation, which was very cool, then we ate, then we saw Right Said Fred WHO ROCKED without even a drummer. best show I saw for a while. then we went back to the outdoor place and saw the Original Parliament, who played all the Bomb hits, with the original vocalists ( I think). we danced. at 2 we walked over to the Spin party with the full intentionof seeing Built to Spill and the Flaming Lips ('til 4am..) but somehow couldn't stay and went back to our hotels to sleep.. I heard later that Paul did stay at that show...
left Austin and drove to somewhere where they have famous chicken fried steaks for breakfast for the limeys to get a taste of the true texas....driving, more driving, more driving, the best parts are watching Ivor as he sits in front rolling a cigarette while allan tells him about all the motors on the American cars and trucks going by, or his own Corvette, while Ivor just nods and says, "yeah..." i don't even know if he drives...
Allan knows we like motorcycles so he stopped at a huge Harley dealership in El Paso. let me take this opportunity to explain a bit about Sparklehorse and motorcycles: we're into European bikes. Mark and Teresa own several old Moto Guzzis and a Triumph basket case, Scott (the pro among us) has owned several different Moto Guzzis and BMWs, now not only owns a Guzzi Le Mans mk.1 but also a Benelli single and a Ducati 750 GT. During february when we weren't touring, Scott was racing little Italian singles at Daytona! I have owned several sizes of old Ducatis and Triumphs, but through it all still have my Moto Guzzi V65 and two BMWs (a GS and an ST). So, all this said, pretty much none of us like Harleys. In fact we all think they suck. well, it was a nice thought, and at least Matt and Ivor were impressed by the sheer numbers in a row.
We stopped somewhere in New Mexico for a meal, I left the book I was reading on a park bench when I finished it. ("Housekeeping" I think. mosty I try to read as much as I can on tour to keep my eyes and brain active and elsewhere. for a tour like this it takes a lot of SciFi and trash cuz there's not much sleeping and difficulty concentrating. i started the tour with T.C. Boyle, but quickly went to Gregory Benford and then Greg Bear.)
we changed the bus placard to "Deputy Sheriff" but decided maybe that wasn't a good idea for Arizona, so we moved it to "Governer's Staff"...
Our next show was in Scottsdale at a venue called the Cajun House. David Lowery warned us of it... it's a theme park of a restaurant based on bourbon street, a big room that apparently fills up as you play with silicone injected republican nubiles on the hunt, waiting for the band to stop so they can dance to nondescript beats. all true! Varnaline had an audience of three, but at least Anders has shaved his beard off... when we play our set is constantly interrupted by the apologies of a drunken Australian who apparently saw us at the Big Day Out festivals in the audience of thousands and can't believe that in our own country people could be so unnappreciative. well, that's the breaks, boy. at least they fed us good food there. we flee to the west coast.
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