Tucson

Tucson:

Quotes: I looked where I write quotes down and there wasn’t a damn one. I was navigator today and there’s a weird invisible wall that makes it hard to hear when you’re up front. I heard John and Chuck giggling like fools in the back seat but you’ll have to ask them what was so funny.

Fauna: Jackrabbit,  Dove (looked like a Eurasian collared dove but the range isn’t really right. Could’ve been a white-winged dove sings the song sounds like she’s singing ooh baby ooh I said ooh….)

The tour blog looks to enter a bit of a lull. We’ve hit a perfect storm of travelling across the southwestern desert with a feeling of exhaustion that has begun to wear thin spots in the veneer of civility covering the festering, simmering, gangrenous, hatred like bed sores in a cut-rate nursing home. No one was particularly eager to leave the Hyatt and Palm Springs, but we had a long ride to Tucson ahead of us. Thus, with much feet dragging we finally entered our first of what I assume we can call low desert. It really is beautiful. For awhile. The whole tour we’d heard that Arizona could be a rough for bands. One guy in a band going so far as to say, “keep writing the blog, I can’t wait to find out what happens.” Then we started to hear rumors that we’d have to cross some sort of checkpoint in El Paso. Just kind of added a soupcon of anxiety.

The cool thing about our show in Tucson was that were going to meet Carl, the man who has done press for Wussy since Funeral Dress. He had even worked some of the Ass Pony records but we’d never met him. This is the man who got us in Rolling Stone and really has done probably more than anyone to ensure that people actually come to our shows. Plus, we were opening up for Bob Log III. He’s a performer who wears a motorcycle or ski helmet with a microphone stuck in it. He plays slide guitar and has a set-up where he plays drums with his feet. He’s hilarious and an amazing showman. He hadn’t played his hometown in Tucson for awhile so a good crowd was expected. Plus Carl, who lives there, had got us some good press. Tucson reminded us of Dayton but the street we were on was a hopping place with five solo performers on the street and I got my kid a vampire cat shirt. Carl took us to a Guatemalan restaurant next door to the club (Plush) that was so freaking good I can still taste it like I can still taste my first kiss of a women’s sweet love nest.  Carl was a gracious host and a super nice guy. So that was cool.

As I was walking off my dinner a local walked out of a bar and exclaimed, “God, it’s like living in a fucking dryer.” Because it was hot. Apparently notably hot as the local rag had an unfunny cartoon of the devil hitching out of Tucson with a Bound For Hell sign saying he needed to go back to cool down.

So we got onstage, (holding a beer brewed in Roswell called Alien Amber Ale!) Chuck was hot and his amp was acting up, Lisa felt like shit, I was cranky, but the place was packed and the audience was into it. I was proud of us and I think we put on a pretty good show. We decided to drive about an hour and a half out of town to Wilcox and by the time we got there we were beyond done. Lisa and I got into a screaming match over something that at a different time would have been resolved with a pleasant conversation.

That was our day. Tomorrow is a driving day.