Stay Gold Pony Boy

I watched this guy spraying himself with gold paint while smoking a cigarette. Presumably getting ready to go to work.

When Wussy Went to New Orleans Part 2

It’s been a month since these shows. I’m pissed that I’m writing after the moment. Steinbeck wrote, “Travels With Charley” long after he got back but I’m pretty sure that has no relevance here. Regardless, I’m realizing what a luxury our summer tour was. And for the record everything, except Lisa and Rene seeing a roadrunner, that pissed me off has faded and I have only romantic, epic memories left. All that time to write and no real life to intrude. As soon as I got back from this one I was sick for the requisite week, and then back to keeping my head above water. I guess it just proves how little time we allow ourselves. Anyway now back to our regularly scheduled broadcast. I will finish this tour, it just may take awhile.

Tipitinas is a flat out legendary club in a warehouse district right within view of the dike separating us from the Mississippi. This kind of tour was a new experience for the band, if not Chuck and John exactly. (Throwing Muses tour in the ‘90s) When we got there the Whigs were done with their soundcheck, so we could load-in and head up onstage. It was a pretty small stage all told, and here’s the thing about being an opening band: all their gear is still onstage except maybe the pedals that might line the front of the stage. It’s kind of like sneaking your girlfriend into your buddies house because his parents are out for the evening watching Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera,” (with Justine Bateman and Lorenzo Llamas in the lead) and you want to be impressive in the hopes of boob touching but in no way fuck anything up in the house so you don’t get busted. I’m going to spend this tour stage left right next to the Whigs keyboard set-up, and I live in fear of messing up any of the million pedals and cables snaking everywhere. Add to this their tour manager spends the night yelling at us. (By the end of the tour we will be BFF’s and all, but tonight we’re new to the pack and it is necessary to let us know who gets to sniff whose butt and who had better like it) It’s also the first night where we get to have a rider. (the wish list you give to clubs) Our rider has things like towels (for Chuck), tea (for Lisa), beer (for Joe, me, and Rene), and a fresh fleshlight for John. And tonight we got it! Well except they put all our stuff into the Whigs dressing room. The Whigs don’t really use their dressing rooms much, (they have a bus) but people wander in and out. They also had bags of PopChips, which I love, and chocolate. Thus began the fine tradition of sneaking into their dressing room and helping ourselves to our things, and maybe a few of theirs, but once again not enough to get busted. We would offer up a prayer to Anne Frank and go once more unto the breach, only occasionally having to shove a whole handful of chips into our mouths and look casual.

We played OK. No one was particularly nervous, but as the tour went on we definitely got looser. Seems to take a few shows no matter what before we feel like we’re ourselves. The awesome thing about these shows was that very little of their audience knew who we were. So after the first song maybe some polite applause, a little more after the second, and slowly but surely you could feel the audience swinging around to our side, giving us a pretty good shout by the end. It’s an amazing feeling I tell you; didn’t happen every night of course but often enough to be encouraging. I mean really, the Whigs audience treated us great the whole time.

Now I haven’t seen the Afghan Whigs since back in the day and since I am not a born and bred Cincinnatian I didn’t even see them until the “Gentleman” tour. They were always good but nothing prepared me for how much better they are now. I stood off to the side and stared slack-jawed the whole show. Greg has never sounded better. I think he’s finally singing like he always thought he was. Listening to Curley night after night was like going to school. I should’ve gotten continuing ed. credits.  He somehow manages to keep driving the groove while still being very melodic. Just a joy to listen to every night. I watched most of every show on the tour and I wasn’t even close to tired of it by the end.  I’ll talk about the rest of the band later.

And that was it. First show over. We got yelled at some more, (“You need to not park behind the bus ever again.”) and loaded out. Then we sat in the van (hence all the quotes from around the van) for around an hour and a half waiting to get paid and watching our shot at a decent nights sleep slip away like sands through the hourglass these are days of our lives.*  Ask Rene sometime about why it took so long to get paid, not my story tell but a good one.  We get back to the hotel and configure ourselves for the night. It was a tiny room being an old hotel right in the Quarter. We had three people in the king sized bed and one on the rollaway. Chuck and Lisa had bought two blow up mattresses that day and Lisa had wedged hers in the little foyer next to the door. Chuck was wedged between the bed and the air conditioner. John however is not a late sleeper and gets squirrelly in the morning. So he tried very gently to open the door and escape. Lisa said she felt her mattress rise up in air on one side until she rolled up against the wall. When the door closed the mattress quickly began losing air until she was on the floor. The son of a bitch had a hole, lasted less than 24 hours in Wussy world. Then it was time to get up and bust ass to Atlanta.

* My grandmother’s favorite “story.” It was a good time to visit because she’d be on the couch with her notebook that had the weather and any visitors for that day written down going back for time immemorial. Ah, I miss them so much.

Better Than Sun Studios*

The hat and the studio. (It's a very nice hat)

*Well I won't go that far. Didn't see no Rattle and Hum sessions here know what I'm sayin'?

Omnia Ab Uno*

Nicholas Cage's tomb.The only thing he didn't have to sell in New Orleans.

*translates to "No Accounting for Taste."

Better than Graceland

Maria Levaeu's tomb with offerings. You tap on the tomb three times, spin three times, make your wish, trace three x's on the tomb, leave an offering, and then your wish comes true. Tour guide said that last year somebody left a $50 bill there and nobody touched it for months because you do not want to piss off a voodoo queen.

When Wussy Went to New Orleans (part1)

New Orleans – w/ Afghan Whigs at Tipitinas

Quotes:

“665 – the neighbor of the beast.” – My son. I had texted him that we were in room 665 and that the devil was next door. That was his response. He’s already smarter than me.

“Mom he has a flesh moustache.”  - Chuck telling his mother as a child why he didn’t like Bob Braun (local Cincinnati celebrity with his own show. I still don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. Apparently Lisa thinks William H. Macy has one too.)

(quick aside – all the remaining quotes are from random people who just came up to us in New Orleans. I’ve never been anywhere like where this happened as much. I’m just sharing the memorable ones but this happened all day; people randomly walking up to one of us, saying something strange and walking off. None of them became a nuisance or asked for anything. Awesome in a disconcerting way.)

“Can I fit a car battery into a pipe?” - Man at Coop’s Place Restaurant

“ It would have to be a big pipe.” Rene (tour manager)

“Yeah. (pause) That’s something I’ll have to consider.”

He was at a table with a group of about 6. He got up from the table, walked over to Rene, asked the question and then went and sat back down with no fanfare or response from his group.

“We’re assholes, and when you act like assholes you’re going to have asshole things happen.” Nice Biologist lady

(Maybe my favorite post show conversation ever. A former Cincinnati native who is a marine biologist working on the gulf coast. This statement was her assessment of humanity. It is obviously a dire, if not entirely accurate view and one shared by every biologist I know. They know first hand exactly how bad we’ve screwed the earth and they all say it’s not going to get better. Habitat is going to continue to shrink or be fouled. Species are going to continue to be marginalized and die off. The earth will bounce back just fine. You know, after we’re gone. Her specialty is mercury poisoning being transferred to birds via fish. She works on oil spills as well of course. She also told me that pelicans do not go blind after a lifetime of diving into the ocean after fish. Those urban myths are pernicious things.)

“Well both bands are from Ohio and there’s nothing to do there so everyone’s in bands.” Two woman overheard smoking (cigarettes) (they were hideous) (hence the caveat in case you got the wrong impression) outside the van.

(I’ll paraphrase these next two the best I can. Just assume that both stories rambled on in the same vein for much longer. Because they did.)

“I’m from Buffalo I know what you mean.” Woman at the merch table referring to my “Ohio Against the World” shirt.

“Oh yeah, Buffalo and Ohio are a lot alike.”

“All snow and cold. Miserable.”

"I’m from northern Ohio, I get it. Always gray…”

“Yeah, but you can get out. My sister has a daughter who was born with a really big head. I mean abnormally large. She’s a great kid but she has a really big head. “

“Wow.”

“People were worried that there was something wrong. But she won. My sister won. She found a doctor who said everything fine. You know, there’s nothing wrong with her, she just has a big head.”

“Well, nothing wrong with a big head…..”

We stare at each other a bit.

“Ummm…. So what does that have to do with Buffalo?”

“She lives in Tallahassee.”

“So she got out.”

“Yeah.”*

Next story. I’ll paraphrase the best I can. He talked fast and in the cadence of a wack-a-mole.

We were sitting in the van waiting to get paid. Well after 2 in the morning. Guy walks up to the window and motions for John to roll the window down.

“Did you see the show? Wasn’t it fucking great?”

“Uh, yeah.” – John

“The Afghan Whigs saved my life man.”

“Oh yeah?” (said in a way that to the skilled interpreter of social skills would obviously indicate no interest whatsoever in pursuing this conversation)

“The last time I was at Tipitinas was in ’91 to see Primus. “

crickets….

“So there was this time where I was suicidal. Long time ago and the Afghan Whigs saved my life. My girlfriend had broken up with me, like standing on a bridge suicidal and I went to a therapist and he said I was full of shit so I went to the Carmelite nuns and they gave me holy water. So it was like two years later and my girlfriend was dying of cancer. I mean she’d had two or three boyfriends since but I was shaking the holy water on her and she was like, “What the fuck are you doing?” And I said, “I’m doing what the nuns told me!!”  

The whole time Joe had been laying down out of sight on the first bench in the van giggling. At this stage of the game he shouted out, “I did that too.”

The dude, with no transition stopped talking and walked away. He never said in particular how the Whigs had saved his life. I'm assuming John gave him the Heimlich. Man's a master at the maneuver.

I woke up kinda early because basically I could get a whole day in New Orleans before we had to be at Tipitinas. Started out at Café Beignet because I’m not coming all this way and not getting beignets and hot chocolate. I love this place. It’s right next to the police station and has a nice patio. A bunch of cats wander around and birds fly in and about. Lovely. Next up was a cemetery tour. Kind of expensive but I wanted to go on one with a real historian or at least not one of the many cheesebag tours. It was awesome. I went to the St. Louis Cemetery #1. If you know all about this skip ahead but if not, it’s really cool. So people are buried above ground in New Orleans because, as the tour guide put it, the water table is so high the grave holes fill up with water. You plunk the body in, huck dirt on it and hope it doesn’t rain or else you’re gonna see grandma floating down the river. (to quote the tour guide) Because it’s a Catholic town though everyone needs to be buried for at least a year and a day or they wont ascend to heaven. The solution of course is to bury everyone above ground in tombs. (a generous reading of the word bury I feel but moot in the end) Here’s the cool thing though, they stick the casket in the tomb on a shelf and it’s so hot that after the requisite year and a day the body has practically been cremated in the oven like heat. They then take the casket out, dump the remains (ceremoniously I’m sure) back onto the shelf and push them back until they fall off the end and onto a pile of relatives. Some of these caskets have people going back to 1790 in them. And if the family is still around they’re still getting buried there.

The cemetery has the second most visited gravesite in the country. (Elvis is #1) Maria Levaeu (and her daughter) is famous for being I guess what you would call the first celebrity voodoo queen. You can look her up on Wikipedia, I’m not fucking Rick Steve’s here. (although I assume he would be gentle) Anyway, people believe if you do a series of rituals at her tomb (bring your own kitten, they cost an arm and a leg outside the cemetery) your wish will be granted.  Let’s see, Nicholas Cage’s tomb is in here, (presumably his dignity, hair, and career are already buried) and it’s a beautiful, if completely sore-thumbish pyramid.

After the tour I ate a French fry po’boy. Have I mentioned New Orleans might just be the worst town in the country for vegetarians? It is. When I came down last time I still ate seafood so I got a taste of the amazing things they do down here. Still, they give Pittsburgh a run for their money in the dubious honor of putting French fries in a sandwich.

I bought a vastly overpriced hat from a beautiful goth woman whose name I’ve now forgotten. It was a cool name and I swore I'd never forget but there you are. I've also forgotten #3 Dale Earnhardt, 9/11, and where I was when Kennedy died.  I went to the site of the former J&W Studios where Fats Domino, Little Richard and a bunch of others did their early recordings. (it’s a laundromat now) I then walked across the street into Louis Armstrong Park and stumbled onto a talk being given by a priest, a rabbi, and a minster, (what is this, a joke?) (actually I don’t know their denominations but there were three holy people on a stage) about the history of the Treme’ neighborhood and singing acapella renditions of old soul songs that got turned into religious songs. This was just happening in the middle of the afternoon on a Friday. What an amazing town.

*She didn't buy anything

Intro to Fall Tour 101 - No Audits No Credit

Beginning of Fall Tour: En route to New Orleans

It’s been awhile seems like. Can’t remember when we did those east coast dates but I guess I could look it up. We haven’t been exactly idle eric though have we now? We played some shows I didn’t write about because they didn’t feel like tour shows. A nice show in Chicago at the Bucktown Arts Festival where we drove up and back the same day, (5.5 hours each way) which is the first time we’ve done that. Economy has probably never been more pressing than these days. That’s not a bad thing, in many ways it’s the result of having maybe the best year we’ve ever had. Regardless, I don’t want to get ahead of myself, as the compromises and costs of being in a band after the bloom has come off is what’s on my mind this trip. We played some swell local shows, including one on Fountain Square in front of several thousand (i.e. around 2,000) people and got to chat with the charming Kelley Deal. (formerly of the Kelley Deal 6000) After that Chuck and Lisa spent a good hunk of September touring England in support of a compilation of our first 4 records that Damnably Records put out called "Buckeye." It’s weird to have a record out and feel so disconnected from it.  Other than Lisa doing the artwork we didn’t really have a damn thing to do with it. Anyway, the tour went pretty well I guess. They said everyone was ridiculously nice. One night the former sound guy for Gary Numan did their sound. Most of their stories revolved around the shitty food and shit-filled toilets. I won’t share those here though as I’m still getting yelled at by the squeamish about how poop-centric the summer tour posts were. Harumph, I say; the human body is beautiful and I won’t be held in thrall by all you shame-filled puritans.

I have to admit I’ve been looking forward to these Afghan Whigs shows for months. We all love John Curley. He’s produced pretty much all our records. I love the Whigs. Most of the shows are sold out and we’re going to get to play some venues that are legendary. It’s just really exciting. There’s always a balance to things though and touring in the fall is complicated for me. I’m the only one in the band with kids at home and I’m a single dad. I love my kids more than anything and I’m not complaining, I have a great life, but I’m a school teacher too and I have to keep the mortgage paid until/if music pays the bills. I’m also not saying I have it harder than the rest of the band. They may have more flexibility but also they’re practically starving by not being able to work. My schedule for the Whigs tour goes like this: Work Thursday, fly down to New Orleans, (the band is driving the van down) play the shows, fly out of Raleigh Monday morning early and work. Wednesday, drive up to Detroit after teaching, play show, drive back that night. Work, play Cincinnati. Work, fly to Chicago. Play those shows and then fly out of Minneapolis early Monday morning and hope to make it back in time to work that day. Again, none of this is by way of complaining. On the contrary, I feel ridiculously lucky that I get to do this tour.

So this blog is going to lag behind the tour more than usual. We averaged four hours sleep this first weekend and spare time is spent sleeping.