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well, regardless of all this, I went out to dinner with another SF-bartender-in-exile, Janine, whom I used to work with at the glorious drunken triumvirate of San Francisco bars (Rat n Raven, Zeitgeist, Lucky 13). she's moved to San Diego and studying to be a real estate mogul. apparently her boyfriend is the son and heir of the restaurant 'Napoleon's' where Tom Waits used ot work (as in "after hours at Napoleon's") but being the young stud he is, he's been 86'd from the Casbah.... I am so happy to be near the ocean that we spend way too much on great sushi.
also at the show: Bill Tuttle, Geraldine Fibbers bassist ( now with Los Super Elegantes. I think) coming down to see a show avoiding the horrors of a show in LA...
our show goes surprisingly well! we play well, it's all fun, this is the first show that feels really fluid to me.
they tell us that last fall when Cornelius was there they had the same bus and it said Alice Cooper on the front....
so onto LA. we awaken in the lot behind the Hollywood Hills Best Western, which coincidentally is half a block from my apartment! and it's raining! (huh?) I get up and get my mail, luckily being able to pay bills in the middle of a tour rather than dealing with the collectors at the end. this is maybe the first time that has happened. plus my computer! we all get to check email for free rather than paying some kinko's the outlandish $12/hour rate with the added bonus of having filter that disallow dirty words... plus i had some pot i'd recently found thati had been given and brought to Burning Man the previous fall but forgot to smoke it, etc, so i gave it to Dave, Welcome to California!
LA is a nightmare for Mark, besides just the overwhelming Capitol Records thing (their building is two blocks away) and the major press/publicity/A&R/industry overdrive, Mark used to live here when he was in the Dancing Hoods, when they were all major junkies and generally horrifically self destructive, so the psychic weight of LA begins to bear down on him. We want to go to Capitol, we have an appointment to see the folks there and the famous studios in the basement with their famous echo chambers. I'm pretty excited cuz I live so close but have never seen the inside of the building. unfortunately when we get there everyone seems to be really too busy to deal with us, maybe they are understaffed at the moment or we are too big a group. I suspect they only want to see Mark, I feel like a hanger-on. not very comfortable. but somebody had made cookies! also Perry the press guy from Nasty Little Man is there and he's really nice. still, that doesn't prevent us from telling him that the cookies are loaded after he eats one...met Steve, the Capitol college radio rep, who appears to be really interested in us, and we're going to play the next day live on KCRW...
the studios are a separate entity from the record company, so the people down there show us what they can, but there are sessions in progress and we can't see much. Mark gets to ask a few questions about compressors and pre-amps that he's thinking about buying, but we don't get to see the echo chambers. Perry proves that he can actually play the piano!
after our tour Mark and I take a cab in the rain over to Black Market Music, one of the good used equipment dealers in LA (and SF, although flying in the face of the traditions of the normal world, the guys in SF are assholes and the guys in LA aren't...go figure..?) anyway, nothing bought, we get back on the bus and head to Long Beach to play and in-store at a shop called Fingerprints.
This place is great, Rand, the guy the runs it is truly wonderful and accommodating, really into music, plus they have great cd stock. And they made incredible posters for the show with rabbits and UFOs, which goes along with the masks that Mark wears during encores. we all spend alot of money on cds. (somewhere across the south i broke down and bought a cd walkman at a walmart, so i'm stocking up. I get some Cardigans singles, the new Built To Spill, Neil Young's 'Trans', Richard Buckner's 'Since'). we end up playing a beautiful semi-acoustic set to a quiet and appreciative audience ( which i believe was either recorded or web-broadcast!) with a bunch of babies in the front row. Mark loves babies. wants one himself, I believe.... myself, I was drawn to talking with a beautiful local girl.... um, anyway, we almost made it back to LA, but the bus broke a coolant hose and we had to wait somewhere off highway 5 while Ivor and Allan fixed it...
The very next day, well, I could have stayed in my on bed I suppose, but we had to get up at 7 or so to get to KCRW by 9am to load in (if you're not on time, they may cancel! they warn..) and it's all the way across town in Santa Monica. a whole 13 miles. but I know how long that'll take, 'cuz for the year I worked at Danetracks I commuted over there and it took atleast 45 minutes at that time of morning, even on motorcycle!
we get there and Steve from Capitol has bagels and coffee, what a god. our manager Shelby and Dave Ayers, Mark's A&R guy are there too, and i unfortunately insert my foot into my mouth when i mention to her that our Capitol records tour was less than exciting in front of all of them.....oops, typical Jonathan maneuver. this whole tour diary is that way, as seen in next paragraph...
I haven't been to KCRW for years. played there with Camper, and I think they played there again without me later... I had kind of given up on the station in recent years, they always play the hippest of the hip and it reminds me of when I worked at the record store in SF, peer pressure , what's cool, etc... and when I mail out Magnetic CDs, last time I included response cards (pre-stamped) to ask whether the stations liked the cds, whether they played them etc...many stations who are in the boonies or otherwise out of the CMJ/Gavin loop wrote back gushing respones, loved the stuff. most of the stations that used to be the cool alternatives ten years ago are so important to the industry now that they are just like little middle of the dial FM stations... (I hear that KCRW, while on a college campus actually has no student employees (?).. and we all know many of the djs are payrolled at record companies as consultants...) I did get a response card back from them, none of the check boxes checked, just one word written in marker: "PASS".
well, whatever. they have a pretty good studio set up, especially for a radio station, good engineers (if a little brusk)... we played 6 songs of all sorts, loud and soft. I'm sure they're recorded somewhere.
after this show Mark is whisked away by Dave and Shelby for a grueling day of press and promotion.... yuck. Joey Peters came down to the station after hearing it on the radio 'cuz he lives a block away, hadn't seen him for a while. he's back from Grant Lee Buffalo touring for the moment...
we are left to our own devices until loading in at the Troubadour. my crew for this evening will be Clyde Wrenn, the singer from the Container, this evening connived into running our slide show of 60's motorcycle magazine ads....
Sound check doesn't look promising: Mark has been wrung out by overdoing the press and then having to listen to what they want to put out as a single, the new, improved version of HappyMan, produced by Eric Drew Feldman. this is a sore spot with me and Scott (well, mostly me, really; i get to feeling a little weird about spending a year promoting a record that not only do i not get any residuals form but i didn't even play on it in the first place. i joined the band the week it came out in the UK. and now that i've heard the new version i'm wandering what to do about the guitar melody I play because I've been doing it fluidly in the 3-against-2 rhythm over the bar lines of the chorus and on this recording it's all cut up to fit within the bar lines...), cuz we all rerecorded a great version of the song for this express purpose last fall. but apparently not good enough, so Mark went and redid it in december with other musicians... anyway I don't think he's happy with it and the weight of the LA sky is crushing into his brain, he has a major migraine. who knows if we'll actually perform.....
after sound check, Dave, Paul and I walk into West Hollywood to the Urth Cafe for food (last time I was there, Victor and i sat next to Martin Landau who, with his long greasy hair and trenchcoat, was regaling his young actor-looking dinner guests with entertaining anecdotes we could barely hear...) then back to wait in the club. saw a bit of the first band whose name i can't recall, but they had nice gear. Varnaline were slagged in the LA Weekly as being boring and jangly so they included some beautiful slow songs (In Your Orbit, ) to seduce the audience. the beautiful girl from Long Beach is at this show too, so I bounce around talking to her and my other friends who live here like Lisa Gerstein ( a NY actress relocated.. other guest listed film/TV people don't get the hint that it's going to sell out and think they can just show up late and get in but when they arrive can't get the carload of people they brought in so end up wasting those precious list spots...)
when we get to the stage Mark is overcoming his physical body and our show is spectacular, despite the idiots who keep yelling at us... in place of the CVB cover of Abundance for the encore, David Lowery joins us and we play another CVB cover, "All her Favorite Fruit" - this is the first time I've ever performed this song, despite having been there at it's inception and demo taping, I got kicked out of Camper right before Key Lime Pie was recorded and they threw out all my melodic ideas and got Don Lax to play violin... (except for Matchstick Men and Flowers, which Morgan actually played on..) so this is the first time this song has been played with the melodies I wrote for it, like the demo version, but, well, it's been ten years and was probably a little rusty. nonetheless, a major emotional performance. I think maybe the first time David and I have been on stage together since Hallowe'en 1988..?
I spotted David Immergluck in the audience at some point in the set, but as to whether or not he saw it is anybody's guess. I also saw him at the show Victor and I played on March 6th, but he only stayed for Mike Levy's set....
here's our set list, it's been transforming slowly into this:
Los Angeles-Troubadour
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I think we did a second encore of 'Someday' (maybe the only time we played it on the tour?) and a slow quiet song like 'junebug' to get people to go home...
One other weird thing at that show was the guy who came up afterwards and asked me if i thought the record company was doing well for us, i had to say, yeah they seem to have posters everywhere we go....he said then that he too worked for Capitol (!) checking up surreptitiously, perhaps?
afterward we partied on the bus, dude. Dave had a couple friends in LA, german girls he knew from Berlin and Dilly was in LA with the Radiohead movie. this sounds very rock and roll, i know, but really we just sat around and drank beer. (or most of us drank beer anyway. i drink fake beer.)
I awoke the next day realizing that there was no way the lay of the road beneath me could be the 580 into SF, so i got up and discovered two things: 1) we had kidnapped Dilly and she was coming with us to San Francisco, and 2) we were on Highway 1 south of Big Sur (one of the windiest and most beautiful roads in California - on a huge bus with a trailer!). this put us at least 4 hours from SF, so obviously I was going to miss a date I had for coffee that morning... I eventually settled into it and enjoyed the scenery, which i hadn't driven over for perhaps ten years. all the brits loved it of course, and many of the americans had never seen it either. we got into SF in time to load into the Great American Music Hall at 5pm like we were supposed to. We reposition the bus placard to read "Journey" for our entrance to the City by the Bay. Victor came down to be crew, Dilly stayed to be our merchandiser. After sound check Victor and I went over to meet friends at El Bobo, had a great dinner and walked back to the venue. unfortunately missed the first band, a French band who live in Tucson called the (something) Amor Duo. I later heard tapes, they're great. many familiar faces at this show, John from MK Ultra, Shiela Schat fom Liar and the New EZ Devils, Eric Drew Feldman, most Magnetic musicians including Jane and Russ, El John and Chris X. Russ informs me that Jud from Varnaline is also Space Needle and Reservoir and Russ has interviewed him for KALX, the Berkeley radio station... Russ is a big fan..
Our show is electric and spectacular. or at least I think so, I was probably showing off for all my friends. We played a second encore of 'Cow' (maybe the only time on this tour, but not the best version...,) I had fun. After packing up I made it to Zeitgeist for last call. during our stay in SF I kept trying to get Sparklehorse into Zeitgeist becasue I knew they'd love it. it's my home in SF, a motorcyclist bar with a huge backyard and bike paraphernalia everywhere. they show videos of races, that sort of thing. I think Scott made it by for a bit the next day, but they were showing the Simpsons...
a word on San Francisco: I lived in SF for many years, even when I didn't it was within 75 miles. I love it and will eventually go back, I fled two years ago for dubious reasons. it certainly carries with it the opposite of the psychic weight that LA has. As any moral majority member will tell you, San Francisco is debauched. in LA sex is so commodified that I believe maybe it doesn't really exist, certainly no intimacy exists there, but San Francisco, in opposition to LA, is sex-positive. So finds out Paul, also finding that affinity that roadies have for the people who work in the clubs the bands play in, a trend that he hopes will continue. Paul's brother who works at Capitol in NY starts a score chart for the tour....this also proves that despite all rock traditions, it's really the roadies that get the action, as we knew all along.
I didn't get time to ride a bike in LA, but luckily I have one in Victor's garage in SF and we get a day off the following sunday after the show. I spend the day riding spastically around with my friends Zan and Penny, searching out food, getting coffee from Peet's (for the espresso machine on the bus and a french press that i get). racing back to the bus to drop this stuff off, we see Mandrake approaching, who has done the proper tour manager thing and got tickets to see Lisa Germano and the Latin Playboys who are playing at Bimbo's AT THAT VERY MOMENT! we convince Matt to don the extra helmet and we tear off toward North Beach and frighten the hell out of him (hee hee..) and only miss two of Lisa's songs. I should state that I am a huge fan of hers, especially her latest cds... when she gets off stage i have to tell her, so I introduce myself as another violinist, from CVB... and her reaction is the same as mine toward her, she says "you know, i hate the violin, but I like your playing". ( actually i like another violinist too, that would be Warren Ellis. but that's it! fuckin' violin....)
when we leave we take Matt on a short roller coaster ride over Gough street, but i kept it fairly slow 'cuz I thought he'd flip out and fall off...
anyway I had a great time in SF and got back to the bus at 6:30 the next morning...before Paul I think... and we left at 7am.
I first awaken to the sound of either the transmission grinding itself to bits or one of the wheels is spinning a bearing... I don't care however and go back to sleep. so I wake up again when i hear metal hit the pavement. getting up, I see that we're on Gilman Street in Berkeley (?) and the bus trailer hitch holder has broken and we're going to a welder's shop nearby. Nearby, as it turns out, is near Fantasy Studios, but when i look for Dan Olmstead inside he's not at work that day. oh well, so much for improvising entertainment in West Berkeley.
several hours and many layers of metal later, we have a new set up for the bus that will hold that trailer on forever, so we're off to Portland... now what puzzles me is that itch in Allan's brain that, despite the fact that we agreed to drive up the coastal route, he didn't leave SF to the north, like there was some bizarre psychic connection between the bus and its driver that said "drive to an industrial area soon..." and we ended up crossing the bay bridge instead of the golden gate....hmmm.
next day we're up in Northern California, on the coast. the weather is cold, north of Eureka it's snowing on the ocean ( i've never seen this in California). Brits are seeing redwood trees for the first time, very exciting. we drive off the coast over the Six Rivers area to Grant's Pass ona winding road in increasing snowstorm, ok, it's beautiful but a little scary in that bus... but we made it to Portland.
I'm not so fond of Portland. it just rubs me the wrong way, like the sketchy guy who's high on too much speed and won't leave your party and keeps swilling budweiser and trying to pick fights...
and we're playing at the Satyricon, which has been there forever, and it sounds that way. it's always too fucking loud no matter what you do. we've used this to our advantage before, the first time there was 1986 on CVB's first NW tour, right after our first jaunt across the country and Greg Lisher quit. so, without a lead guitarist, we compensated by bringing a strobe light and a fog machine and hairspray to light our instruments on fire all the time, and ith it so loud, it worked... even recently i've played there to few people with Dieselhed or Magnet and you just can't get the volume down for some reason.
ok, so the Satyricon people are nice anyway, and they have a new restaurant next door that feeds us. Despite that, Dave goes out to dinner with friends. at this show a few familiar people: Larry Crane the former Vomit Launch bassist and studio god who runs Tape-Op magazine and Jackpot Studios, which if you don't know of and you record anything you should find. also Jamie Smith, former Granfaloon Bus and Lords of Howling guitarist, in Portland producing Rollerball...
maybe the band was drinking. at least they were by the time we were on stage. it seemed like a good idea at the time to have Zia from the Dandy Warhols play tambourine, she really wanted to, but after playing Hammering the Cramps she revealed that what she really wanted to play on was Weird Sisters, and whatever went in between, so she played tambourine and did interpretive dance (this show was videotaped, by the way). So afterwards perhaps it seemed like a good idea for her to play more, I don't know. I walked into the dressing room and heard words like "drop you off in Virginia" and "hey guys I have a little C...". I turned around right there and fled to the bus, earplugs in, into my bunk. mind you i'm not scared of crazy girls, nor am i scared of drugs, it just all felt sketchy and portland-like and I wanted no part of it. they all came out to the bus to drink the night away ( except maybe Paul, off experiencing the good old American tradition of shagging in the back of a car...) and I remember Mandrake's 6am pronouncements of "Get off the bus. Now. You are not coming with us. Not even just to Vancouver." Rock.
ok. so. on to Seattle.
First thing is a little live noon-time radio on the UW radio station (KCMU), Mark and I did it as a duo. Steve from Capitol is there again with bagels and coffee.. still a god.
after many nights on the bus we get to stay at a hotel, the famous Edgewater, transient home of many musicians and famed for their debaucheries. (even the bar there is called 'the Mudshark' - I kid you not!). what I did there is none of your business, but I must say no actual Seattlites were harmed in the process. All I know is they ain't cutting the carpet into bits to sell like they did after the Beatles stayed there.
We play at the Crocodile Cafe. I've played there before, last time with Victor when we played as Fifth Business and some horrid band called the Presidents of the USA opened for us. the club is owned by a woman named Stephanie who had been a coworker of my old college friend Suzanne, both lawyers in Seattle. a few years ago after playing with Granfaloon Bus in town, Suzanne and I got on the ferry to go out to some brewery on Bainnridge Island. As we parked, Suzanne says, "there's Stephanie" who is approaching with her boyfriend after parking their cars. I'm looking at him thinking, "oh god, isn't it pathetic when people have to dress like members of REM..." then we lift our sunglasses and look at each other and ok, it's actually Pete Buck... ( and they're on their first serious date, he's thinking he's going to move there.) we head to the ferry lounge for quarts of redhook (which thankfully he pays for from his distended wallet..)
well, years later, Peter and Stephanie are married and have children. Scott McCaughey, from the Young Fresh Fellows, used to book the Croc, now he plays with REM too... I had played on one of the YFF records years ago, and had Scott known that I was in Sparklehorse, he would have repeated the after sound check kidnapping into the recording studio for the Minus 5. oh well, someday soon... anyway nice to see these guys again and they seemed to enjoy the show. we drank at the bar after with them and Peter from No Depression magazine who claims his first interview at an Austin radio station years agao was with me....I have no recollection of such an event, but that doesn't mean much....
our opening band this evening is a young psychedelic band called Voyager One. pretty cool, very spacey but without noodling around. the bassist girl plays a fretless Rickenbacher (? what a weird instrument). Their CD is nice, like early Floyd in some ways..
Varnaline have been having good sets the past two shows, I think there is some NW connection with them...
our show goes well, almost stunningly, but then Mark breaks a string and the bridge saddle flies off, then the next guitar fucks up somehow and at the end of Happy Man he decides to wreck it and fall down, we were rocking. I nearly fell over the glockenspiel at the same moment he was bouncing the guitar around...
well, he doesn't want to do any encores, I never really understand this. sometimes I feel like Mark would be a harsh dad, he's always so mean to audiences who love him when they don't love him enough, he'll punish them by refusing to play more if they talk at all... I think maybe he focuses on the talkers and ignores the listeners. Paul diligently fixes a guitar into working and we do end up playing another tune... this time....
the next morning I am taken to the Lighthouse Cafe for perhaps the best latte ever, and then to the Longshoreman's Daughter fo breakfast, served by the daughter herself I think. a fantastic time in Seattle yet again, and we're off to cross the border. Dave ceremoniously leaves his pipe on the pilings near the Edgewater for some wayward stoner to find.
Here we begin Part One of the Great T Shirt caper, smuggling merchandise into Canada. it actually wasn't that tough, the border people looked but didn't seem to want to get really involved so we got into Vancouver by sunset.
In the past I have loved this city, but i'm not gettin gany sort of feel for it this time at all. I walked over to the area where all the restaraunts were on Granville in Gastown near the cluba dn ate perhaps the cheapest Japanese food ever ( and spent those old $2 canadian bills that had been kicking around my desk for years.) but it all seemed pretty seedy. and we were well burnt out by the previous week of shows, and it looked like nobody really cared about seeing us here. to top it all off, apparently Zia had gotten Mark's home phone number and had called there and now Teresa was calling to find out who the hell this Zia was!
nobody got close to Varnaline at all so Anders picked up his mic stand and brought it to the center of the dance floor for a couple tunes...
however, despite ourselves, when we played, we rocked, and the audience came forth and it was good. despite ourselves we played a bunch of songs, and encores too. you just never can tell.
we left late at night and went through customs at 4am, they always make you get off the bus so we couldn't sleep til after that. then began the long journey to Salt Lake City.
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