a little background is necessary here, so please bear with me. i have an old friend, david franklin (aka manta), who i met back in 2000 through pope who was, at the time, shooting neovoxer (www.neovoxer.org) and i was acting in the film and being part of the general mayhem. manta is a performance artist and a martial arts instructor for an esoteric japanese style called shintaido, and after being invited to attend some of his boston classes (which were often held outside in random parks) i was really turned on to the practice. i went to one weekend-long shintaido retreat back in 2000, where i found the whole shintaido community very tight-knit and welcoming. there are probably less than 1000 folks in the united states into shintaido. there are other small communities all over the world, but japan is where the style originated and where the largest number of folks practice. a brief history is difficult, but you can go to www.shintaido.org and get a basic idea. it was founded in the 1960s as a reaction against the violent and careless direction that karate and other japanese martial arts were taking, and was more or less developed by a bunch of artists through a long workshop process. watching someone practice it looks like a combination of karate, tai chi, primal scream therapy, and modern dance improvisation. on our second european tour, we invited manta to travel with us on the tour bus for the purpose of videotaping (it was on that fateful journey that the avril lavigne "karaoke verite" video was born) and kicking our asses awake in the morning to practice shintaido. some of my fondest memories of that tour were of running "Eiko" across a field in blackheath, england at dawn, screaming "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEEEEE" at the top of my lungs at the rising cloudy sun. anyway, as soon as we realized we were coming to japan i wrote manta straightaway to see if he could hook us up with some shintaido folks over here, and indeed he shot right back that his friend, jet, lived right near tokyo and would probably love to come to the festival and do some practicing. as fate would have it, there was a "waterfall training" already scheduled in a nearby town right after the festival, and jet invited us to come along. i knew little about this but figured it could only be interesting and probably wonderful, so i said fuck yes. everybody else but brian bailed out (emily wanted to stay at fujirock and see bands; sean slade, joel and robert preferred to have nothing to do with a potentially freezing cold waterfall and their potential submersion Into It and instead chose to go to tokyo and look at girls and temples) so we got on the train the next morning with jet and his friend mr. oi and began our journey.
jet spoke some english, but communication was limited to the basics. we took two trains, buildings disappearing and rice paddies growing, and then took a taxi from the last train stop to the mountain, which has been a holy buddhist place for centuries. there was a large shrine across from our small inn (which was run by a kindly old buddhist monk) and a path along a rocky stream leading up to the waterfall. during the day, it was an obvious tourist destination for japanese and there was a handful of families with kidlets bathing in the stream. our inn was very spartan and beautiful; each room was in the old japanese style, with only woven straw mats on the floor and one low table, otherwise no furniture, no beds. we slept on thin futons that were folded in the closet along with the quilts and pillows. after we arrived, we met the other shintaido folks who had made the trek to the mountain for the training. there were five other men besides jet and mr. oi and two women, everyone mostly in their 30s or 40s. we met goro, a beautiful long-haired guy who was the waterfall training leader, and we headed out to a beautiful clearing in front of the shrine to practice shintaido for about an hour in preparation for going up the mountain. mr. oi was the sensei (the teacher/leader) for the shintaido practice and gave his instruction in gorgeous broken english for our benefit, which was very kind, since my shintaido was fucking rusty and i'd forgotten a lot.
then we went to the waterfall. this is where things started to get very interesting. one woman who spoke excellent english interpreted everything that goro told us as we prepared, one by one, to go through this process which apparently has roots stretching back ages in the buddhist, shinto and japanese warrior traditions. all eleven of us walked the paths and stairs up to the base of the waterfall, which was about 20 stories high and loud as hell. on the way up we bowed at the small shrines built into the sides of the mountain and purified our hands and mouths (via swishing) with the water from the shrine, which was trickling directly, they said, from mount fuji. above the waterfall itself was built a wooden balcony on a gorge that overlooked the place where the crashing waterfall met the earth, and this is where we prepared and left our belongings. the trees and flora on the mountain were thick and rainforesty and there were luminescent black butterflies and spiders flitting about everywhere. goro passed out sandals made of rope that we tied to our feet for traction while walking in the slick, rocky white-water; then he determined an order in which people would enter the waterfall - basically from most to least experienced....there were men there who had done this training 100 times and a few total novices like us. a small wooden box of sea salt was passed around and we rubbed the dry salt on our bodies for purification ("private parts" area - very important). there was a short meditation and then we descended altogether into the rocks and water and goro took his place at a large rock that faced the waterfall (whose base was probably about ten feet wide). as we stood there, deafening waterfall bits bursting in our faces, goro began the ceremony with what i assume was a kind of blessing of the waterfall, though it appeared more like a exorcism. hands clapping powerfully together, japanese words shouted and muttered, the rest of the sea-salt scattered, a bottle of water from the mountain shrine splashed into the spray, and then mr. oi entered the water (fully dressed - we were the only ones not wearing a full "gi" - the traditional white martial arts uniform).
i don't know if you've ever tried to stay erect under a massive waterfall, but it's fucking near impossible. even the masters like mr. oi would get violently punched over by the sheer velocity of the water and have to re-find their footing. most stayed under for less than a few minutes; the hardcore would remain there, locked to the earth like human edifices, for what seemed like ages. it wasn't a question of man vs. nature with man emerging triumphant, it was more a vivid display of man triumphing over the division between man and nature itself. a teeny woman before me was knocked down four or five times and finally made it through a few moments in the waterfall without tumbling. my turn came, i waded through water and rocks trying to completely clear my mind, and i stood in a very light part of the waterfall (i knew we'd be returning the next morning and i figured it wold be ok to be a pussy the first time around). the water hit my head and i raised my hands. it all made perfect sense.
when everyone was finished we convened back up on the platform and bowed to each other and the water a final time. then we descended back to the inn, where we had strict orders from goro to spend fifteen minutes in the baths. so i was alone in the women's communal bath with the two japanese shintaido women (whose names i never knew), and we soaked there, naked in the big tiled tub. i talked to them a little about how grateful i was to be, finally, around people who were taking care of themselves. they listened and asked questions. i told them about Rock World and the many self-destructive and harmful people we encounter. then i went up to our room and fell asleep. everybody left except jet and goro, who spent the night in the inn with us. we all ate a late dinner together in the inn dining-room....the best food i've eaten here by far. the kindly monk prepared it for us and it was a lavish spread of sashimi, soup, tempura, salad and tofu. a smorgasbord of orgasmic food, eaten with jet and goro who were now my two favorite japanese people in the world, talking about Everything and laughing. after dinner the monk cut up a watermelon for us and proudly showed us the pictures of the sumo wrestler who got filmed by CNN doing waterfall training outside his inn. then we all adjourned to jet and goro's room, practiced sitting meditation for a half hour, and then went to sleep like logs (i was a log, at least. i think brian may have been more like a quaking aspen).
the next morning we awoke and ate a similarly incredible breakfast, then went to the temple clearing to prepare for waterfall training: day two. jet showed us a few good exercises to do before stage (they really liked our show by the way - "very strong. very powerful energy. yes. you two - very important - stay soft and connected") and then i sat and watched the two of them do some symbolic sword-fighting using long wooden staffs. the two of them would occasionally get locked together, each facing the sky with swords pointed heavenwards and clashing upwards like two coital birds.
then back up to the waterfall we went....rope shoes, meditation and preparations, salt, excorcism. this time it was only the four of us. i resolved to become a human rock and i entered the water (which was colder than the day before) and after getting knocked over multiple times i managed to stand my ground for a few minutes. your mind has no choice but to clear. maybe a stray thought to keep your balance, but there is just you and your body getting eaten and reborn by thousands of gallons of water pummeling your meaningless self. i knew it was time to go when it was, and i let myself get spit out back into the world.
we were exhausted by all this and went to rest again in the inn, we left a dresden dolls CD with the monk and thanked everyone there for taking good care of us, then started to head back towards tokyo with jet.
we talked about japan and america and europe. it's a small world while being very big. japan has been wonderful for me because it has forced me at every turn to be so humble. everybody here is very quiet and
respectful and i am overly self-conscious about seeming like the Ugly American. this has increased my general mindfulness about everything i do, from the volume at which i speak to the way i eat to the way i sit
down in a chair. this is good, this is very good.
after returning briefly to tokyo we went to kyoto by train, with robert and sean, to visit my friend zach. he's an ex-pat i went to college with briefly, now married to a japanese doctor named maki and fathering a gorgeous one-year old boy named gen. we were welcomed warmly into zach's house and got to commune with the youth a little bit (gen was pretty freaked by us strangers) and listen to zach play his shakuhachi, a traditional japanese bamboo flute that he's been studying on and off for more than ten years. then we spent a quiet night in a veggie-centric kyoto restaurant in a converted traditional townhouse, where we shared our large low table (completely coincidentally) with a band from okinawa called tink tink (pronounced "tinku tinku", a double reference to "twinkle twinkle little star" and the sound a shamisen makes when you pluck it). they were hyper and adorable and we took pictures and traded CDs and promised to try to make it to their show a few days later in tokyo. we spent the next day in kyoto staggering through the heat getting awestruck by temples and shrines and beautiful things. i bought some socks. we ate some sushi. i love this country.
back in tokyo now, everyone seems to be in great spirits, especially sean slade (our esteemed producer). it's been wonderful to combine the journey with a few scattered conversations here and there about the upcoming recording (we start september 10th) and choices we may make about this and that. but generally i haven't been giving a fucking thought to music. the only thing i've listened to over here is my "the best of fad gadget" cd, which is all i may ever need for the rest of my life. i love fad gadget. i do i do i do.
i have seen the collision of goth and disney and it is harajuku.
Thursday, August 04, 2005
Saturday, July 30, 2005
in japan - day 1
japan. in the DD east-side posse: yours truly, brian (excellent drummer), joel (our esteemed sound engineer), emily (our US tour manager and girl friday), robert (our romanian-born-german-and israel-raised-london-dwelling-jewish tour manager and die-hard kylie minogue fan who insist my life would improve if i shaved my legs), sean slade (our esteemed next-record producer and closet haiku master) and eric sussman (an old friend and american expat living near tokyo, who used to wear adam ant war paint to dresden dolls shows).
my knowledge was limited to general american chatter and stories from friends, lost in translation, gung ho!, the last emperor, memoirs of a geisha (great book), assorted films by akira kurosawa,
my japanese classes a few years ago, a book on etiquette that i read last week and a book on the hostess industry in Japan that i read in my early 20's while briefly fanasizing about moving here to work in the sex industry where apparently you don't always have to fuck your clients. you could just charm them, act wonderful and make a killing. mom: this idea lasted briefly and i didn't do it, did i. do not email.
the toilets (even some of the the public ones at gas stations) do warm your bum and play music and squirt water at your bunghole if you press a special button. everyone bows constantly. people are incredibly humble and gracious. there is, contrary to my assumption, a shitload of meat available and it's harder to find vegetarian food (i've been a pescitarian for ten years, i no red meat or poultry but i do eat fish). pork is everywhere. the tea is awesome. i am testing green teas by the bucketful. so far, i love this country. the language barrier is intimidating.
we flew into tokyo and were driven directly to the fujirock festival site (a door-to-door total of about 23 hours or travel - yay ambien) and checked in to our festival-provided hotel rooms at the ski lodge.
emily and i shared a room, as per usual, and she charged out heroically to see to see the foo fighters and coldplay, leaving me to slumber in solitary bliss. i don't think a disinterred beatles reunion could have kept me from collapsing. i received an unexpected middle-of-the-night visit at 3:30 from a british rock star. there was wine. not too much wine. i'm recording in six weeks. i'm recording in six weeks. i'm recording in six weeks. fuck. we're back on the road. it inspired a good song and i went back to bed at 6:30.
we ate a cafeteria-style breakfast in the morning (half pseudo-western, half japanese) and started to get our bearings. juliette lewis ate across from us, wearing sweatpants. yesterday turned into a meeting-lots-of-fancy people day for me, which i assume must often be more likely when you are among other whitey rock people in a foreign land. set time was a ludicrous 11:30 am, but the entire festival was up and happening and our tent was full - about 2000 people. we had no idea what to expect...none...our record came out here 4 days ago and we knew nothing in terms of what had been done to promote it. then we found out that it had already sold 2000 copies, the video was being rotated on MTV, and there was already press in 2 major rock magazines. this is why being on a major label is awesome...things like this happen without us knowing or lifting a finger...the machine is at work while we sleep.
so. we took the stage and played a kick-ass show. one-off shows like this can go either way, i've found....very rusty or a burst of pure brilliance. then a day full of non-stop japanese press in the festival press tent - 7 or 8 interviews and 2 photo shoots and 1 video shoot in under 4 hours. every festival has an area like this. it's a large cattle-like tent where the press camps out and artists show up (with their label representative, generally), vaguely scheduled, and make the rounds like a press-buffet. The "label rep" is an interesting phenomenon that is also a huge perk of being on a major. Everywhere you show up - any country any time - there is a label rep to ferry you around and take you to do your promotional bullshit. Roadrunner has reps who cover entire countries or chunks of states (there is a woman, for example, who covers 13 states of the midwest). if they have no reps in a particular country or continent, they borrow reps from universal, who is their parent company. when we toured in australia and new zealand all of the reps were universal folks. what they do is simple. they fly to meet you wherever your show is, they greet you at the airport, they herd you into a rental car (sometimes with a driver), and they take you to your hotel. they usually stay in the same hotel unless they have friends in town or happen to live in the city you're playing. then their main job is to insure that you do your press and get to your show (though this is basically the tour manager's job) and basically act like spies for the label to report on how you were received by the natives. if you are a label rep for roadrunner your life consists of wrangling the nine guys in Slipknot and making sure nobody sees them without their masks on, then going to the airport a week later to pick of 3 Inches of Blood and getting them some special decaf coffee, then making sure Deicide are safe and sound and checked into their hotel. it's a weird fucking job. but god love them, they make our life so much easier.
that was a gigantic tangent. back to japan.
after the press was a little bit of dinner and then a signing session. we met a bunch of japanese fans and perfected our japanese "thank you". i found myself instinctively bowing my head a great amount. then the work day was over and we got to see the festival, which was an aesthetic masterpiece. it's nestled by a ski-resort and so every backdrop was a misted-over mountain covered with lush trees. i couldn't stop looking up. the lighting was brilliant and there was en entire field and wooded area covered with sparkling light from disco balls that were hung 20-50 feet in the air and illuminated by lights suspended elsewhere. there were recycling stations every 100 yards with 5 or 6 different boxes for very specific items, like paper cups and compost. there were boardwalks though the thick woods and big glowing blow-up creatures growing out of the forest floor. it was heavenly. within the space of a few hours, we had seen my morning jacket, gang of four and beck. beck took the cake by far. his band was tight as hell and he had a dancing dude in an eighties short-shorts warm-up get-up, sweatband and blu-blockers dancing around like a maniac, occasionally busting out a good-sized ghetto-blaster for no reason. but the highlight of my entire night was when beck started playing his solo songs. as he picked up his acoustic guitar, his band (instead of clearing off stage) sat down at a long table behind, which was set for dinner, him and started to eat. they just ate. while he played. the table was mic'ed and you could hear the perfect and comforting sounds, ever so slightly, of glasses being filled, forks being lifted and food being shared. genius. when he broke into the first track from "sea change", the band very gradually started to play the table (one banged forks onto wood, one started shaking a fruit shaker, one struck glasses that were perfectly tuned to the bells in the song) and by the end of the tune they were all in full swing. it was sheer brilliance. i can't wait to have a budget for a stage show. we are going to do some WHACK-ASS shit. the japanese audience were wonderful....completely into everything and loud and wild and smiling.
i had split up from brian, who favored seeing dinosaur jr. over meeting mr beck (or "Bekku" as he's known over here) so emily and i headed back into artists land and gave him a disc. he complimented the artwork and we chatted and emily was very happy because she had had a junior-high school crush on bekku. then we headed over to the dinosaur show, where we caught the very end of the very loud set. lou barlow approached me with the line "hi. you stole my melody", and indeed he was right. the melody for jeep song was ripped off shamelessly (but unconsciously, i assured him) from "skull" by sebadoh. he was very funny about it and we talked a while about how everything is essentially stolen. he quoted me the old adage "talent borrows, genius steals", and i felt much better. at any rate, the fact that lou barlow likes "the jeep song" made my life. i got to meet kevin shields, an old hero of mine from the My Bloody Valentine era of my life, and was pleased to find out that he had seen us at the patti smith meltdown festival in london. this man, as far as i am concerned, is an Actual Genius of Sonic Bliss and i sort of felt like an insignificant piece of fluff in his presence. it was pouring rain and time to leave and i managed to score a ride back to the hotel with all of these folks, plus the dude-singer from primal scream, and as i sat there in the van surrounded by all this great rock royalty someone pointed out that is was a Historic Rock Van, since there were so many generations of musician and they sort of looked at me, the kid, and i thought....wow. i am validated. my band is real. and that was also a very nice part of the night.
then i collapsed again.
my knowledge was limited to general american chatter and stories from friends, lost in translation, gung ho!, the last emperor, memoirs of a geisha (great book), assorted films by akira kurosawa,
my japanese classes a few years ago, a book on etiquette that i read last week and a book on the hostess industry in Japan that i read in my early 20's while briefly fanasizing about moving here to work in the sex industry where apparently you don't always have to fuck your clients. you could just charm them, act wonderful and make a killing. mom: this idea lasted briefly and i didn't do it, did i. do not email.
the toilets (even some of the the public ones at gas stations) do warm your bum and play music and squirt water at your bunghole if you press a special button. everyone bows constantly. people are incredibly humble and gracious. there is, contrary to my assumption, a shitload of meat available and it's harder to find vegetarian food (i've been a pescitarian for ten years, i no red meat or poultry but i do eat fish). pork is everywhere. the tea is awesome. i am testing green teas by the bucketful. so far, i love this country. the language barrier is intimidating.
we flew into tokyo and were driven directly to the fujirock festival site (a door-to-door total of about 23 hours or travel - yay ambien) and checked in to our festival-provided hotel rooms at the ski lodge.
emily and i shared a room, as per usual, and she charged out heroically to see to see the foo fighters and coldplay, leaving me to slumber in solitary bliss. i don't think a disinterred beatles reunion could have kept me from collapsing. i received an unexpected middle-of-the-night visit at 3:30 from a british rock star. there was wine. not too much wine. i'm recording in six weeks. i'm recording in six weeks. i'm recording in six weeks. fuck. we're back on the road. it inspired a good song and i went back to bed at 6:30.
we ate a cafeteria-style breakfast in the morning (half pseudo-western, half japanese) and started to get our bearings. juliette lewis ate across from us, wearing sweatpants. yesterday turned into a meeting-lots-of-fancy people day for me, which i assume must often be more likely when you are among other whitey rock people in a foreign land. set time was a ludicrous 11:30 am, but the entire festival was up and happening and our tent was full - about 2000 people. we had no idea what to expect...none...our record came out here 4 days ago and we knew nothing in terms of what had been done to promote it. then we found out that it had already sold 2000 copies, the video was being rotated on MTV, and there was already press in 2 major rock magazines. this is why being on a major label is awesome...things like this happen without us knowing or lifting a finger...the machine is at work while we sleep.
so. we took the stage and played a kick-ass show. one-off shows like this can go either way, i've found....very rusty or a burst of pure brilliance. then a day full of non-stop japanese press in the festival press tent - 7 or 8 interviews and 2 photo shoots and 1 video shoot in under 4 hours. every festival has an area like this. it's a large cattle-like tent where the press camps out and artists show up (with their label representative, generally), vaguely scheduled, and make the rounds like a press-buffet. The "label rep" is an interesting phenomenon that is also a huge perk of being on a major. Everywhere you show up - any country any time - there is a label rep to ferry you around and take you to do your promotional bullshit. Roadrunner has reps who cover entire countries or chunks of states (there is a woman, for example, who covers 13 states of the midwest). if they have no reps in a particular country or continent, they borrow reps from universal, who is their parent company. when we toured in australia and new zealand all of the reps were universal folks. what they do is simple. they fly to meet you wherever your show is, they greet you at the airport, they herd you into a rental car (sometimes with a driver), and they take you to your hotel. they usually stay in the same hotel unless they have friends in town or happen to live in the city you're playing. then their main job is to insure that you do your press and get to your show (though this is basically the tour manager's job) and basically act like spies for the label to report on how you were received by the natives. if you are a label rep for roadrunner your life consists of wrangling the nine guys in Slipknot and making sure nobody sees them without their masks on, then going to the airport a week later to pick of 3 Inches of Blood and getting them some special decaf coffee, then making sure Deicide are safe and sound and checked into their hotel. it's a weird fucking job. but god love them, they make our life so much easier.
that was a gigantic tangent. back to japan.
after the press was a little bit of dinner and then a signing session. we met a bunch of japanese fans and perfected our japanese "thank you". i found myself instinctively bowing my head a great amount. then the work day was over and we got to see the festival, which was an aesthetic masterpiece. it's nestled by a ski-resort and so every backdrop was a misted-over mountain covered with lush trees. i couldn't stop looking up. the lighting was brilliant and there was en entire field and wooded area covered with sparkling light from disco balls that were hung 20-50 feet in the air and illuminated by lights suspended elsewhere. there were recycling stations every 100 yards with 5 or 6 different boxes for very specific items, like paper cups and compost. there were boardwalks though the thick woods and big glowing blow-up creatures growing out of the forest floor. it was heavenly. within the space of a few hours, we had seen my morning jacket, gang of four and beck. beck took the cake by far. his band was tight as hell and he had a dancing dude in an eighties short-shorts warm-up get-up, sweatband and blu-blockers dancing around like a maniac, occasionally busting out a good-sized ghetto-blaster for no reason. but the highlight of my entire night was when beck started playing his solo songs. as he picked up his acoustic guitar, his band (instead of clearing off stage) sat down at a long table behind, which was set for dinner, him and started to eat. they just ate. while he played. the table was mic'ed and you could hear the perfect and comforting sounds, ever so slightly, of glasses being filled, forks being lifted and food being shared. genius. when he broke into the first track from "sea change", the band very gradually started to play the table (one banged forks onto wood, one started shaking a fruit shaker, one struck glasses that were perfectly tuned to the bells in the song) and by the end of the tune they were all in full swing. it was sheer brilliance. i can't wait to have a budget for a stage show. we are going to do some WHACK-ASS shit. the japanese audience were wonderful....completely into everything and loud and wild and smiling.
i had split up from brian, who favored seeing dinosaur jr. over meeting mr beck (or "Bekku" as he's known over here) so emily and i headed back into artists land and gave him a disc. he complimented the artwork and we chatted and emily was very happy because she had had a junior-high school crush on bekku. then we headed over to the dinosaur show, where we caught the very end of the very loud set. lou barlow approached me with the line "hi. you stole my melody", and indeed he was right. the melody for jeep song was ripped off shamelessly (but unconsciously, i assured him) from "skull" by sebadoh. he was very funny about it and we talked a while about how everything is essentially stolen. he quoted me the old adage "talent borrows, genius steals", and i felt much better. at any rate, the fact that lou barlow likes "the jeep song" made my life. i got to meet kevin shields, an old hero of mine from the My Bloody Valentine era of my life, and was pleased to find out that he had seen us at the patti smith meltdown festival in london. this man, as far as i am concerned, is an Actual Genius of Sonic Bliss and i sort of felt like an insignificant piece of fluff in his presence. it was pouring rain and time to leave and i managed to score a ride back to the hotel with all of these folks, plus the dude-singer from primal scream, and as i sat there in the van surrounded by all this great rock royalty someone pointed out that is was a Historic Rock Van, since there were so many generations of musician and they sort of looked at me, the kid, and i thought....wow. i am validated. my band is real. and that was also a very nice part of the night.
then i collapsed again.
Thursday, July 28, 2005
On NIN (and, Being Home).
It's so very hard for me to imagine what I would be doing with my life right now if I weren't sitting here at my kitchen table, bags packed and laundry in the dryer, waiting to go to the airport at 6 am.
i've spent the majority of my time in these past three weeks (the longest stretch of time off we've had - absolutely no dresden dolls shows - in almost a year) fighting an interesting fight inside my head. Fighting the urge to feel Constant Catholic Guilt about what i was Not Getting Done.
The first few days back were the inevitable freak-out and readjustment period. Then i was faced with the feeling that my time was up, i was no longer at liberty to freak out as there was too much work to be done, and this revealed
a deeper urge to freak out. i am not organized. i am not a grown up. i leave my clothes in a pile in the middle of the floor when i walk into my apartment, i leave pieces of paper scattered all around my life, every surface area in sight is covered, every turn i take begs a paper to be filed or an email to be sent or a project to be finished. my to-do pile covers my stove, my sink and every square inch of floorspace. it is inescapable. if i am home, i am doing. i find it almost impossible to do anything leisurely outside of bed. if i want to read a book or write in my journal, i can't sit on the couch (and not just becaus eit in generally piled with Crap). i leave. i found myself leaving a lot. i had a short list of two important things that had to get accomplished. one was to start on the sheet music book for the songs form the first album (i sort of did, but didn't get very far) and the other was to start arranging piano parts and re-writing lyrics for the new record. i basically ignored that one, but brian and i did have a few productive, albeit short, rehearsals. as is often the case, we ended up chatting, arguing or eating during the majority of the time we had set aside to rehearse...this is one many perils of being in a duo with your friend.
But despite my inner voices often simmering up and yelling at me that i am a lazy, unorganized piece of shit, i put forth a very solid effort to ignore them and think that i may have actually succeeded for the first time in my life. I attribute this almost solely to the fact that i have biked my sorry ass down to the power yoga studio every single morning. yoga is The Shit because it makes meditation easy for people like me who have very little success with sitting on a cushion in the kitchen. it is a disciplined chunk of intense exercise with a teacher constantly reminding you every minute to let go of the outside world and just pay attention, truly pay direct attention, to what you are doing. after about the first week of getting myself on this hardcore regimen i found myself often successfully ignoring the Constant Catholic Guilt voices, eating only when I was hungry and shutting my mouth more often than I was used to when i was about to say something hurtful or stupid. a miracle. speaking of shutting up, i will do that right now before i start to sound like a yoga evangelist. but my mat travels with me. when we were touring with NIN, i would break out the mat every morning and find some random place to do an hour of yoga to a CD i brought with me. most times we were at the venue beofre hte band showed up and the crew were very kind about the fact that we didn't always get our own room due to the small venue sizes, so they let me use the NIN space. i'll never forget the very peculiar feeling of doing yoga in trent reznor's dressing rooms. it took me only a second to place why that peculiar feeling was so familiar....an old, old, familiarity....the way his clothes were all set out for him and his dresser all set up with all of his toiletries and his big bouncy exercise ball and special trent reznor power bars and aromatherapeutic candles and whatnot. then it hit me: it was the exact same feeling i used to get as a wee child when going into my parent's bedroom when they weren't home, and looking at the sundry (and possibly forbidden) items on their dressers. creepy.
speaking of NIN, i never really got to explain what that was like day to day. We were sleeping in our tour bus, whereas the NIN folks all travelled by tour bus but stayed in hotels. trent didn't like sleeping in the bus (or so the lore went) and so the band always slept in a hotel in one city, drove through the day, and showed up at the next city for soundcheck. in cities where we had two back-to-back nights in the same venue, the dresden dolls and their crew would live in the venue parking lot like city lizards and hope to find a place to take a shit in the morning (no shit on the bus, only liquids....eeewwww). this caused occasional hilarious solutions. i will not get into it. anyway, for the most part our morning view was a chain-link fence and post-industrial wasteland and i think this added to the general tour malaise significantly. our bus driver for the american leg was a sweetheart ex-cop from philly named bill who always said "godDAMMIT" every time he made a wrong turn. the day for the NIN crew would start at around 9 am and the lights were the first to get set up. watching these guys work was fucking fascinating....sometimes the stress level on that stage during the day was so poisonous you didn't even want to be near the building. then the sound would start to get set up and the PA tested with this HORRIBLE HORRIBLE soft rock music that the NIN sound guy always pumped through the speakers to EQ them. really, really terrible stuff, like, nightmarish. I always found this very poetic, as ten hours later these same speakers would be pumping loud loud loud hate hate hate, but for now it was Ooo Baby elevator music. lunch for the crew (and us, the starving urban lizards) was catered in the club and usually very delicious and healthy, unless we were in mexico in which case it was terrifying mystery meat. by around 4 or 5 the NIN-band would arrive and say their hellos and get to their soundcheck. by this time i would be back from any random excursion i may have taken into The Outside World, and would start to warm up my own voice for our soundcheck, in case we got one, which we did about half the time (though we'd rarely get more than 15 minutes). the whole NIN crew were very very kind and wonderful to us, they always tried to help us if we needed guidance and jason, the keyboard tech, even happily fixed my falling-apart black shoe after i had seen his skillful expertise at gluing and applying 7 drying clamps to a destroyed Trent Reznor Army Boot. The band was also very kind and we developed our own private jokes with each. Alessandro, the italian keyboard player, had three (THREE) mac tattoos. one of the mac logo on his wrist, one of the "sad computer" error icon on his forearm and another one i never saw. Jerome Dillon the drummer was tall and his angular hair made him spottable at a considerable distance. Every girl in our crew developed a crush on his at one point or another and he often came out during our set to play Karma Police with us, which always brought us Great Joy. Aaron North the guitar player was the youngest of the bunch and I always got confused, because NIN put out an album in 1989 and yet the guitar player was 4 years younger than me. this is where it is important to point out that this band was not A Band, but more a collection of hired back-up musicians. there was never any sense of NIN-camraderie. these guys were here to kick the shit out of the music every night and that was their job. there was no high-fiving and laughing and trent-reznor butt-pinching. the atmosphere was about at serious as it gets. and i always wonder if Trent Reznor wants a Band or prefers things this way, so that NIN remains Trent Reznor. Jerome, i think, was the only one who had been with him on the last tour in 1999. Jeordie White (aka twiggy ramirez) was almost aloof as T-Dog himself and rarely made conversation. the members of the band had apparently all gotten into a private joke of singing "Jeordie White" to the tune of every possible NIN song, and soon we followed suit to see what good ones we could come up with. The classic and original was to "Terrible Lie" (it went: "Jeordie White"...."Jerodie White" to the tune of "Terrible Lie"). We came up with a good "With Teeth" ("Ah-Jerodie White-ah") and a good "Closer" version ("I wanna fuck you like a Jeordie White"). I also came up with an interesting song called "The Hands That Sneeze" that went along with a hand-dance and garnered some attention in our tour bus. Back to the personell, we get to The Man Himself, Mr. Trent. He kept himself at a considerable distance and almost never talked to his crew, that we saw. He was always very quiet, polite and almost never stuck around the minute the show was over. Jerome, Alessandro and Aaron were all likely to go to an afterparty, but Jerodie and Trent were like ghosts the minute they left stage. I think they left through the roof by helicopter, because we'd often see fans waiting outside the stage door for HOURS, asking "where's Trent? where's Trent?" and we had to admit that he was gone and must have used the Bat-exit. who knows. when we got to mexico the whole NIN-band donned fake moustaches, cheesy sunglasses and wrapped bandanas around their so that they could pose as "locals" and thus not get disturbed while sight-seeing. But albino mexicans, i hear, are very rare and their ruse didn't really work.
There was a NIN vocabulary that slowly formed over the course of the tour. The NIN were such advanced technological creatures (and as internet-centric as we were) that they brought their own wireless to every venue, so we were never offline. If the venue also had wireless, we referred to it as "wireless". if we had NIN-wireless, we referred to it as "Ninternet". The kids who would wait outside the venue starting at 6 in the morning, wrapped in sleeping bags and pierced 6 ways to sunday, to insure a front-row Trent-Reznor-sweat-soaked experience were referred to as "Nincompoops" or the more affectionate "Nincompoopers". Evening mealtime provided by the catering was "Ninner" and the overbearing nag champa that the NIN tour manager would burn in his office five sticks at a time was "Ninscense". The entire world of the club and it's grounds, rather, anything that did not include what we referred to as "The Outside World", was "NinLand". This was most often used when referring to the tour as a whole as in "We've been playing solo shows and have had a day off. I miss NinLand." Missing NinLand was usually due to the fact that returning to smaller clubs on our "offday shows" usually meant coming to terms again with horrible sound, no catering, no Jerome Dillons to flirt with and no nice keyboard techs to fix our shoes. Alas. But in closing, I must say that having a Trent Reznor Life seems like a hard life. He was said to be often dissatisfied with the state of the crew and the shows and this usually left everyone in NinLand feeling anxious. As one of his techs said to us: "You don't bring your B-game to Trent Reznor". anyway, a good object lesson for the dresden dolls. We watched the band play almost every night and i was constantly astounded at Trent Reznor's ability to scream so loud and play so hard night after night after night. We always got a great view of the side-stage antics, since we watched from the stage, and my favorite part was when Aaron would kick over Jerome's drums during a song. Then the drum techs would scurry around like roaches on speed to get them set back up. Then Aaron would kick them over again. Etc. It was like a game. I made sure that almost every time Trent played "Hurt", I could see from somewhere. Sometimes I went out into the audience and lose myself in the crowd. But I always caught that song. It's a brilliant song. I cried most times I heard it. Cormac and I (speaking of Cormac, he opened up for my solo show a few weeks ago and was met with much applause: go see www.sleepshell.com) just covered a version on "Right where it belongs" from the new NIN album, and it ranks up there with "Hurt". Lyrics not quite as good, but still gorgeous. (Sorry, Trent).
Long out of NinLand, i have become fully happy at home again and am sad to be leaving tomorrow for Japan. In my three weeks home I have been to the Cafe Pamplona three times (too many people complained and the spanish 88-year owner, Josephina, caved in and re-opened), read three excellent books, made a calendar of Where I Have Been For The Past Year Of My Life (because I couldn't remember anymore and was starting to get scared), spent lots of Quality Time with various cherished and long-lost friends, and vacuumed my apartment. I prepared for and played a solo show which was wonderful....dusted out a bunch of old tunes and breathed a little life into them. Brian sang a sing for the first time alone on stage and broke everybody's hearts (it was a cover of Neutral Milk Hotels' "Oh Comely"....the best and saddest song ever written). We threw a rollerskaing party in Dorchester (known in these parts as The Hood...there was a metal detector at the door due to some shootings there last year) and about 200 people came and rollerskated their asses off. And at the rollerskating party (at which we played DJ...fun fun), we instituted shaving door prizes and gave one mohawk, cut one girl's hair, and shaved one pair of man-legs and one set of pubic hair. We used new disposable razors on everybody and it was very good clean fun. Days on end have been spent watching footage for the DVD downstairs with Pope, Zea and Noah and making changes. I daresay it's coming out pretty well and it should be hitting shelves before Xmas. Just very recently I watched my clothes tumble in the washing machine for ten minutes. I went to the basement, to see if the load was done, and there were ten minutes left, so i watched through the front-loading glass door. i never have time to watch. I didn't really have time. I should have been packing. I should be packing right now. it was really beautiful, i had never noticed how artful the spin cycles are. When it got to the last few minutes it went into a fast spinning frenzy in one direction and then came to a dead stop. then a few moments - maybe 12 seconds - later, it gave the clothes a brief (maybe 3 second) toss to the right and then stopped again. then it gave them a brief toss to the left. then to the right again. this last set of little tosses seemed so loving. i am very emotional tonight. i am listening to the mother cat outside calling her kittens. she;s an alleycat but we've been feeding her out of a dish on the front stairs. she started with three kittens but a few days ago andrew found one of them dead in the garden. sad things happen all the time. i love my friend and drummer brian but he's been very sad lately, so i try to be a good friend to him and not be too irritating like i can be. he is a deep motherfucker and i don't envy the way he has been plumbing the existential depths lately. drives a person crazy.
our flight is in 8 hours. i know very little about japan, well, no more than the average american, so i expect my mind to be turned inside out and i will probably find some interesting things to relate. this is one particular trip that i assume will yield good photos. i currently have a backlog of about 1498 interesting digital photos waiting to be put into a tour journal on the net but i can never seem to find the time. i would rather read. but someday.
recommended reading:
"The Art of Travel" by Alain de Botton. One of the most hilarious and honest pop-philosopher-essayists of our time. he also wrote "how proust can change your life" which is also a great read.
"The Anarchist and the Devil Do Cabaret" by Norman Nowrocki. Not insanely well-written, but very passionate, accurate and funny account of a montreal political cabaret/crust-punk band touring europe in a band while the singer searches for his long-lost polish uncle.
"Steppenwolf" by Hermann Hesse. On of my top 5 favorite books of all time, I am re-reading it for the third time right now. It was originally published in 1927 but makes more sense now than ever. For madmen only.
i've spent the majority of my time in these past three weeks (the longest stretch of time off we've had - absolutely no dresden dolls shows - in almost a year) fighting an interesting fight inside my head. Fighting the urge to feel Constant Catholic Guilt about what i was Not Getting Done.
The first few days back were the inevitable freak-out and readjustment period. Then i was faced with the feeling that my time was up, i was no longer at liberty to freak out as there was too much work to be done, and this revealed
a deeper urge to freak out. i am not organized. i am not a grown up. i leave my clothes in a pile in the middle of the floor when i walk into my apartment, i leave pieces of paper scattered all around my life, every surface area in sight is covered, every turn i take begs a paper to be filed or an email to be sent or a project to be finished. my to-do pile covers my stove, my sink and every square inch of floorspace. it is inescapable. if i am home, i am doing. i find it almost impossible to do anything leisurely outside of bed. if i want to read a book or write in my journal, i can't sit on the couch (and not just becaus eit in generally piled with Crap). i leave. i found myself leaving a lot. i had a short list of two important things that had to get accomplished. one was to start on the sheet music book for the songs form the first album (i sort of did, but didn't get very far) and the other was to start arranging piano parts and re-writing lyrics for the new record. i basically ignored that one, but brian and i did have a few productive, albeit short, rehearsals. as is often the case, we ended up chatting, arguing or eating during the majority of the time we had set aside to rehearse...this is one many perils of being in a duo with your friend.
But despite my inner voices often simmering up and yelling at me that i am a lazy, unorganized piece of shit, i put forth a very solid effort to ignore them and think that i may have actually succeeded for the first time in my life. I attribute this almost solely to the fact that i have biked my sorry ass down to the power yoga studio every single morning. yoga is The Shit because it makes meditation easy for people like me who have very little success with sitting on a cushion in the kitchen. it is a disciplined chunk of intense exercise with a teacher constantly reminding you every minute to let go of the outside world and just pay attention, truly pay direct attention, to what you are doing. after about the first week of getting myself on this hardcore regimen i found myself often successfully ignoring the Constant Catholic Guilt voices, eating only when I was hungry and shutting my mouth more often than I was used to when i was about to say something hurtful or stupid. a miracle. speaking of shutting up, i will do that right now before i start to sound like a yoga evangelist. but my mat travels with me. when we were touring with NIN, i would break out the mat every morning and find some random place to do an hour of yoga to a CD i brought with me. most times we were at the venue beofre hte band showed up and the crew were very kind about the fact that we didn't always get our own room due to the small venue sizes, so they let me use the NIN space. i'll never forget the very peculiar feeling of doing yoga in trent reznor's dressing rooms. it took me only a second to place why that peculiar feeling was so familiar....an old, old, familiarity....the way his clothes were all set out for him and his dresser all set up with all of his toiletries and his big bouncy exercise ball and special trent reznor power bars and aromatherapeutic candles and whatnot. then it hit me: it was the exact same feeling i used to get as a wee child when going into my parent's bedroom when they weren't home, and looking at the sundry (and possibly forbidden) items on their dressers. creepy.
speaking of NIN, i never really got to explain what that was like day to day. We were sleeping in our tour bus, whereas the NIN folks all travelled by tour bus but stayed in hotels. trent didn't like sleeping in the bus (or so the lore went) and so the band always slept in a hotel in one city, drove through the day, and showed up at the next city for soundcheck. in cities where we had two back-to-back nights in the same venue, the dresden dolls and their crew would live in the venue parking lot like city lizards and hope to find a place to take a shit in the morning (no shit on the bus, only liquids....eeewwww). this caused occasional hilarious solutions. i will not get into it. anyway, for the most part our morning view was a chain-link fence and post-industrial wasteland and i think this added to the general tour malaise significantly. our bus driver for the american leg was a sweetheart ex-cop from philly named bill who always said "godDAMMIT" every time he made a wrong turn. the day for the NIN crew would start at around 9 am and the lights were the first to get set up. watching these guys work was fucking fascinating....sometimes the stress level on that stage during the day was so poisonous you didn't even want to be near the building. then the sound would start to get set up and the PA tested with this HORRIBLE HORRIBLE soft rock music that the NIN sound guy always pumped through the speakers to EQ them. really, really terrible stuff, like, nightmarish. I always found this very poetic, as ten hours later these same speakers would be pumping loud loud loud hate hate hate, but for now it was Ooo Baby elevator music. lunch for the crew (and us, the starving urban lizards) was catered in the club and usually very delicious and healthy, unless we were in mexico in which case it was terrifying mystery meat. by around 4 or 5 the NIN-band would arrive and say their hellos and get to their soundcheck. by this time i would be back from any random excursion i may have taken into The Outside World, and would start to warm up my own voice for our soundcheck, in case we got one, which we did about half the time (though we'd rarely get more than 15 minutes). the whole NIN crew were very very kind and wonderful to us, they always tried to help us if we needed guidance and jason, the keyboard tech, even happily fixed my falling-apart black shoe after i had seen his skillful expertise at gluing and applying 7 drying clamps to a destroyed Trent Reznor Army Boot. The band was also very kind and we developed our own private jokes with each. Alessandro, the italian keyboard player, had three (THREE) mac tattoos. one of the mac logo on his wrist, one of the "sad computer" error icon on his forearm and another one i never saw. Jerome Dillon the drummer was tall and his angular hair made him spottable at a considerable distance. Every girl in our crew developed a crush on his at one point or another and he often came out during our set to play Karma Police with us, which always brought us Great Joy. Aaron North the guitar player was the youngest of the bunch and I always got confused, because NIN put out an album in 1989 and yet the guitar player was 4 years younger than me. this is where it is important to point out that this band was not A Band, but more a collection of hired back-up musicians. there was never any sense of NIN-camraderie. these guys were here to kick the shit out of the music every night and that was their job. there was no high-fiving and laughing and trent-reznor butt-pinching. the atmosphere was about at serious as it gets. and i always wonder if Trent Reznor wants a Band or prefers things this way, so that NIN remains Trent Reznor. Jerome, i think, was the only one who had been with him on the last tour in 1999. Jeordie White (aka twiggy ramirez) was almost aloof as T-Dog himself and rarely made conversation. the members of the band had apparently all gotten into a private joke of singing "Jeordie White" to the tune of every possible NIN song, and soon we followed suit to see what good ones we could come up with. The classic and original was to "Terrible Lie" (it went: "Jeordie White"...."Jerodie White" to the tune of "Terrible Lie"). We came up with a good "With Teeth" ("Ah-Jerodie White-ah") and a good "Closer" version ("I wanna fuck you like a Jeordie White"). I also came up with an interesting song called "The Hands That Sneeze" that went along with a hand-dance and garnered some attention in our tour bus. Back to the personell, we get to The Man Himself, Mr. Trent. He kept himself at a considerable distance and almost never talked to his crew, that we saw. He was always very quiet, polite and almost never stuck around the minute the show was over. Jerome, Alessandro and Aaron were all likely to go to an afterparty, but Jerodie and Trent were like ghosts the minute they left stage. I think they left through the roof by helicopter, because we'd often see fans waiting outside the stage door for HOURS, asking "where's Trent? where's Trent?" and we had to admit that he was gone and must have used the Bat-exit. who knows. when we got to mexico the whole NIN-band donned fake moustaches, cheesy sunglasses and wrapped bandanas around their so that they could pose as "locals" and thus not get disturbed while sight-seeing. But albino mexicans, i hear, are very rare and their ruse didn't really work.
There was a NIN vocabulary that slowly formed over the course of the tour. The NIN were such advanced technological creatures (and as internet-centric as we were) that they brought their own wireless to every venue, so we were never offline. If the venue also had wireless, we referred to it as "wireless". if we had NIN-wireless, we referred to it as "Ninternet". The kids who would wait outside the venue starting at 6 in the morning, wrapped in sleeping bags and pierced 6 ways to sunday, to insure a front-row Trent-Reznor-sweat-soaked experience were referred to as "Nincompoops" or the more affectionate "Nincompoopers". Evening mealtime provided by the catering was "Ninner" and the overbearing nag champa that the NIN tour manager would burn in his office five sticks at a time was "Ninscense". The entire world of the club and it's grounds, rather, anything that did not include what we referred to as "The Outside World", was "NinLand". This was most often used when referring to the tour as a whole as in "We've been playing solo shows and have had a day off. I miss NinLand." Missing NinLand was usually due to the fact that returning to smaller clubs on our "offday shows" usually meant coming to terms again with horrible sound, no catering, no Jerome Dillons to flirt with and no nice keyboard techs to fix our shoes. Alas. But in closing, I must say that having a Trent Reznor Life seems like a hard life. He was said to be often dissatisfied with the state of the crew and the shows and this usually left everyone in NinLand feeling anxious. As one of his techs said to us: "You don't bring your B-game to Trent Reznor". anyway, a good object lesson for the dresden dolls. We watched the band play almost every night and i was constantly astounded at Trent Reznor's ability to scream so loud and play so hard night after night after night. We always got a great view of the side-stage antics, since we watched from the stage, and my favorite part was when Aaron would kick over Jerome's drums during a song. Then the drum techs would scurry around like roaches on speed to get them set back up. Then Aaron would kick them over again. Etc. It was like a game. I made sure that almost every time Trent played "Hurt", I could see from somewhere. Sometimes I went out into the audience and lose myself in the crowd. But I always caught that song. It's a brilliant song. I cried most times I heard it. Cormac and I (speaking of Cormac, he opened up for my solo show a few weeks ago and was met with much applause: go see www.sleepshell.com) just covered a version on "Right where it belongs" from the new NIN album, and it ranks up there with "Hurt". Lyrics not quite as good, but still gorgeous. (Sorry, Trent).
Long out of NinLand, i have become fully happy at home again and am sad to be leaving tomorrow for Japan. In my three weeks home I have been to the Cafe Pamplona three times (too many people complained and the spanish 88-year owner, Josephina, caved in and re-opened), read three excellent books, made a calendar of Where I Have Been For The Past Year Of My Life (because I couldn't remember anymore and was starting to get scared), spent lots of Quality Time with various cherished and long-lost friends, and vacuumed my apartment. I prepared for and played a solo show which was wonderful....dusted out a bunch of old tunes and breathed a little life into them. Brian sang a sing for the first time alone on stage and broke everybody's hearts (it was a cover of Neutral Milk Hotels' "Oh Comely"....the best and saddest song ever written). We threw a rollerskaing party in Dorchester (known in these parts as The Hood...there was a metal detector at the door due to some shootings there last year) and about 200 people came and rollerskated their asses off. And at the rollerskating party (at which we played DJ...fun fun), we instituted shaving door prizes and gave one mohawk, cut one girl's hair, and shaved one pair of man-legs and one set of pubic hair. We used new disposable razors on everybody and it was very good clean fun. Days on end have been spent watching footage for the DVD downstairs with Pope, Zea and Noah and making changes. I daresay it's coming out pretty well and it should be hitting shelves before Xmas. Just very recently I watched my clothes tumble in the washing machine for ten minutes. I went to the basement, to see if the load was done, and there were ten minutes left, so i watched through the front-loading glass door. i never have time to watch. I didn't really have time. I should have been packing. I should be packing right now. it was really beautiful, i had never noticed how artful the spin cycles are. When it got to the last few minutes it went into a fast spinning frenzy in one direction and then came to a dead stop. then a few moments - maybe 12 seconds - later, it gave the clothes a brief (maybe 3 second) toss to the right and then stopped again. then it gave them a brief toss to the left. then to the right again. this last set of little tosses seemed so loving. i am very emotional tonight. i am listening to the mother cat outside calling her kittens. she;s an alleycat but we've been feeding her out of a dish on the front stairs. she started with three kittens but a few days ago andrew found one of them dead in the garden. sad things happen all the time. i love my friend and drummer brian but he's been very sad lately, so i try to be a good friend to him and not be too irritating like i can be. he is a deep motherfucker and i don't envy the way he has been plumbing the existential depths lately. drives a person crazy.
our flight is in 8 hours. i know very little about japan, well, no more than the average american, so i expect my mind to be turned inside out and i will probably find some interesting things to relate. this is one particular trip that i assume will yield good photos. i currently have a backlog of about 1498 interesting digital photos waiting to be put into a tour journal on the net but i can never seem to find the time. i would rather read. but someday.
recommended reading:
"The Art of Travel" by Alain de Botton. One of the most hilarious and honest pop-philosopher-essayists of our time. he also wrote "how proust can change your life" which is also a great read.
"The Anarchist and the Devil Do Cabaret" by Norman Nowrocki. Not insanely well-written, but very passionate, accurate and funny account of a montreal political cabaret/crust-punk band touring europe in a band while the singer searches for his long-lost polish uncle.
"Steppenwolf" by Hermann Hesse. On of my top 5 favorite books of all time, I am re-reading it for the third time right now. It was originally published in 1927 but makes more sense now than ever. For madmen only.
Monday, July 04, 2005
the fourth of july.
july 1st
Things have reached that point.
We've just finished our second-to-last festival gotten into a van for a ten hour drive to Roskilde (one of the biggest, 70,000 people in denmark) and Brian was already at the end of his rope five days ago. Emily just handed back a clipboard and paper so we could put our signatures down for something and brian (instead of simply signing the thing) spent a good ten minutes kind of twitching and giggling and drawing a creature that looked like edvard munch's “the scream” with giant vulture wings and feet like shrivelled elves'. We didn't even find it funny, just....brace for drive and shut up.
Things have reached that point.
-
july 3rd - 11:30 pm
well fucking brilliant. arriving back home at 11 pm, 5 am body-time and listening to the boston cab driver blaring bad synthesized R&B while the skyline
greets me covered in haze. it's enough to make me want to turn around and go back, as much as i was sick of being on tour. we fully hit the wall about a week before the end. now i am home, water boiling, and refusing to go to bed until i can make some sense of anything. i always have to do this, i don't know exactly why.
-
tea is done. cathode is injected into the stereo. i'm already feeling better.
i just feel a little lost. this is when i want my guidebook to this life, to tell me where to start, how to come to terms. my voice teacher told me a few months ago that some of the huger performers he's known will often take tour breaks in their hometowns without going home. they just check into a hotel and keep their rote touring schedule so that they don't have to deal with the mindfuck. i feel like i don't live here anymore. i walk into pope's apartment upon getting out of the cab a few hours ago and nobody blinked an eye. they're just as used to me being a ghost of a human being as i am. my heart is breaking a little bit. the more i tour, the less i feel like myself. the constant people, the constant working out of interpersonal drama and other people's issues is something i can actively escape when i'm at home. i just close the door. on tour, there are no doors. everybody's shit is in each other's shit constantly. my nerves weren't built for that. if i had a few magical hours a day in wehich i could beam myself back home, to my safe place, alone, where i process and write and get free from the ragged wreck of humanity, i'd be far more equipped to survive the schedule. but it's all or nothing. when you tour, you just go. and you're just there, which is always sort of somewhere but never really anywhere.
"i'm in italy."
"where?"
"some festival near....padova." i'm not sure which part of italy because i forgot to check the atlas.
"but WHERE?"
"outside...wandering around...trying to get to a place where i can be alone....in a weird concrete landing, behind the tour bus." this is where most of my conversations take place. sort of nowhere.
"i miss you."
"i miss me too."
"i'm in berlin."
"where?"
"just kind of walking down a street, somewhere near the venue." i don't know which part of berlin; i forgot to check my map. i don't care, really. we're not staying and if i knew where i was, it wouldn't help me.
"what's there?"
"nothing much....apartments....i just passed a pawn shop and bought a cigarette tin. it's one of those typical streets in berlin where you just feel like your'e lost in the middle of nowhere. no signs of life but yet there are people who apparently live here and call it home." the spectre of every building having been thrown up in 15 minutes in the 50's may be part of the problem.
"what's the plan today?"
"eh. i have about two hours til soundcheck, and we may not even get one. i'm going to wander up and down this street...warm up my voice, it's all fucked up, and then head back to the venue." where i will also feel like i'm nowhere.
"i feel like i'm nowhere."
"you've been on the road for a while, now. i miss you."
"i miss me too."
"i love you."
"i love you too. i think i'm going a little crazy."
"i'm not surprised."
"i'm in the bus."
"where?"
"somewhere between two cities. we've been driving for 14 hours. i knocked myself out last night."
"fucking."
"i'm in england again."
"where?"
"glastonbury."
"where's that?"
"in the south, somewhere...look at a map, fucking." why is it my job to fucking know these things?
"i trust you."
"don't trust me, i'm losing my mind." and i am. the sun is starting to shine. it's simultaneously t-shirt and heavy jacket weather.
"what's going on?"
"i'm in the parking area for the tour busses. just some strange big fenced in sandland. i'm truly alone for the first time in 72 hours. it rained like a motherfucker here and everyone is wearing industrial rainboots. it's crazy."
"when do you play?"
"tomorrow. i need to be careful tonight. no drinking. no smoking. the show tomorrow is important."
"i'll let you go and warm up."
no! never let me go, never stop talking and giving me this human vocal thread by which to connect myself to what i know my life was and is. i don't want to warm up, i don't want to go back to being nowhere in this parking lot with no stove and no bed and no door that closes and i don't want to take my luggage to the dressing room and make myself a cheese and bread sandwich and a weak cup of tea in a plastic cup which will melt.
"ok."
but then again, it can be wonderful. it's work. after watching such a collection of huge folks close-up and backstage over the past week, i feel like my rose-tinted music glasses have been finally fully crushed and replaced with a stark reality of routines, gigs being called in from distant planets, nodding teen heroes being propped up by crutches backstage because their heroin habit has reduced them to 89 pounds, the mechanical nature of it all, the cocaine, the hangers-on, the wandering hipsters, more pointy shoes and blazers than you can shake a dying tambourine at, the lack of love, the whole fucked-up-ness of the inevitable disaster when you take a trade and artform fundamentally rooted in the expression of pain, suffering and insecurity and organize the shit out of it. does anyobdy feel like they're really in the middle of the party? not from where i was sitting. it seemed like everybody was always hovering around the edges, looking into a collective void.
the deadliest part: i'm home, and it feels closer to nowhere than ever before. this is bad, very bad. the british, i found out recently, have a name for this. they call it The Fear. it's a general sweeping mental malady that sets in after living in the UK with it's suicide-inducing weahter after a while. I have contracted a strain of The Fear. maybe not quite so bad. The Ennui. The germans call it Weltschmerz. Do we have a good english term for this? we will know. I hereby dub it The End.
don't get me wrong, it wasn't like this every day and every where. i'm exhausted. i want more. i want my drummer back, i feel like i'm losing him to the dark side again.
i want to skip over the part where i climb into my empty bed and wait to see how long it will take me to fall asleep on this fucked up schedule and get to the part where i wake up to the beautiful day and i'm magically compelled to immediately practice and open 67 pieces of mail and fly into a general manic creative frenzy and clean my whole kitchen from top to bottom and forget that i just spent five weeks doing absolutely nothing but listlessly watching life wander by between rock shows. i want my life to come back to me, because i don't fucking know where to go to find it. it's terrifying.
i want the fourth of july to just go away. i want the sound of people practicing fireworks outside my window to vanish. it sounds like war to me.
emily and bri stayed in europe and went to the G8 summit to reckon with The Man. i will live vicariously through them and their emails about how the resistance is going. reading todays' paper about live 8 and the general response of the experts and then watching the BBC coverage of Iraq on the plane and then watching a film about the last few days of Hitler's life in the bunker couldn't be doing much to improve my mood, come to think about it. simultaneously getting my period upon boarding the plane and having no sponge and no underwear didn't fucking help matters either. it all sucks, man. everybody's dying and complaining and trying and it's always this way. there is absolutely nothing to be upset about.
it's the fourth of july.
it's the fourth of july.
this is hilarious and sad to me, for some reason.
if i wasn's so tired, i'd find a sarcastic reason why.
i must have also been going through a hormonally challenged day when i had that unforgettable fourth of july image burned into my brain, i think it was 1998 or 1999. i was seeing will, and he lived near the mass ave bridge, where thousands of people always gather to watch the fireworks over the river. we walked onto the bridge but somehow lost each other. i looked and looked and coulndn't find him. the relationship wasn't working out anyway at that point. i'd never seen the fireworks before, i watched from the bridge, alone, surrounded by families and lovers and drunk people and the whole typical assortment. then they were over. and thousands of people started walking off the bridge, but i just stood there, in the middle, facing them all coming at me and thinking about america and patriotism and loneliness and people's lives in general and jsut started bawling my brains out (i'm not a crying-in-public kind of person generally. to myself, quietly, over the paper when i'm PMSing, yes, but not like this. no way.) and the people passing me, who were all in a kind of a fairground headspace, just looked at me with that "damn, what the fuck is her problem?" kind of look and they kept streaming by, thousands of them, bearing lawnchairs and coolers and it got uglier and uglier and i got sadder and sadder until somehow the whole thing ended and i made my way back to will's house, where his father offered me a beer and a piece of watermelon and i felt better. i wonder the hell was wrong with me in those days.
Things have reached that point.
We've just finished our second-to-last festival gotten into a van for a ten hour drive to Roskilde (one of the biggest, 70,000 people in denmark) and Brian was already at the end of his rope five days ago. Emily just handed back a clipboard and paper so we could put our signatures down for something and brian (instead of simply signing the thing) spent a good ten minutes kind of twitching and giggling and drawing a creature that looked like edvard munch's “the scream” with giant vulture wings and feet like shrivelled elves'. We didn't even find it funny, just....brace for drive and shut up.
Things have reached that point.
-
july 3rd - 11:30 pm
well fucking brilliant. arriving back home at 11 pm, 5 am body-time and listening to the boston cab driver blaring bad synthesized R&B while the skyline
greets me covered in haze. it's enough to make me want to turn around and go back, as much as i was sick of being on tour. we fully hit the wall about a week before the end. now i am home, water boiling, and refusing to go to bed until i can make some sense of anything. i always have to do this, i don't know exactly why.
-
tea is done. cathode is injected into the stereo. i'm already feeling better.
i just feel a little lost. this is when i want my guidebook to this life, to tell me where to start, how to come to terms. my voice teacher told me a few months ago that some of the huger performers he's known will often take tour breaks in their hometowns without going home. they just check into a hotel and keep their rote touring schedule so that they don't have to deal with the mindfuck. i feel like i don't live here anymore. i walk into pope's apartment upon getting out of the cab a few hours ago and nobody blinked an eye. they're just as used to me being a ghost of a human being as i am. my heart is breaking a little bit. the more i tour, the less i feel like myself. the constant people, the constant working out of interpersonal drama and other people's issues is something i can actively escape when i'm at home. i just close the door. on tour, there are no doors. everybody's shit is in each other's shit constantly. my nerves weren't built for that. if i had a few magical hours a day in wehich i could beam myself back home, to my safe place, alone, where i process and write and get free from the ragged wreck of humanity, i'd be far more equipped to survive the schedule. but it's all or nothing. when you tour, you just go. and you're just there, which is always sort of somewhere but never really anywhere.
"i'm in italy."
"where?"
"some festival near....padova." i'm not sure which part of italy because i forgot to check the atlas.
"but WHERE?"
"outside...wandering around...trying to get to a place where i can be alone....in a weird concrete landing, behind the tour bus." this is where most of my conversations take place. sort of nowhere.
"i miss you."
"i miss me too."
"i'm in berlin."
"where?"
"just kind of walking down a street, somewhere near the venue." i don't know which part of berlin; i forgot to check my map. i don't care, really. we're not staying and if i knew where i was, it wouldn't help me.
"what's there?"
"nothing much....apartments....i just passed a pawn shop and bought a cigarette tin. it's one of those typical streets in berlin where you just feel like your'e lost in the middle of nowhere. no signs of life but yet there are people who apparently live here and call it home." the spectre of every building having been thrown up in 15 minutes in the 50's may be part of the problem.
"what's the plan today?"
"eh. i have about two hours til soundcheck, and we may not even get one. i'm going to wander up and down this street...warm up my voice, it's all fucked up, and then head back to the venue." where i will also feel like i'm nowhere.
"i feel like i'm nowhere."
"you've been on the road for a while, now. i miss you."
"i miss me too."
"i love you."
"i love you too. i think i'm going a little crazy."
"i'm not surprised."
"i'm in the bus."
"where?"
"somewhere between two cities. we've been driving for 14 hours. i knocked myself out last night."
"fucking."
"i'm in england again."
"where?"
"glastonbury."
"where's that?"
"in the south, somewhere...look at a map, fucking." why is it my job to fucking know these things?
"i trust you."
"don't trust me, i'm losing my mind." and i am. the sun is starting to shine. it's simultaneously t-shirt and heavy jacket weather.
"what's going on?"
"i'm in the parking area for the tour busses. just some strange big fenced in sandland. i'm truly alone for the first time in 72 hours. it rained like a motherfucker here and everyone is wearing industrial rainboots. it's crazy."
"when do you play?"
"tomorrow. i need to be careful tonight. no drinking. no smoking. the show tomorrow is important."
"i'll let you go and warm up."
no! never let me go, never stop talking and giving me this human vocal thread by which to connect myself to what i know my life was and is. i don't want to warm up, i don't want to go back to being nowhere in this parking lot with no stove and no bed and no door that closes and i don't want to take my luggage to the dressing room and make myself a cheese and bread sandwich and a weak cup of tea in a plastic cup which will melt.
"ok."
but then again, it can be wonderful. it's work. after watching such a collection of huge folks close-up and backstage over the past week, i feel like my rose-tinted music glasses have been finally fully crushed and replaced with a stark reality of routines, gigs being called in from distant planets, nodding teen heroes being propped up by crutches backstage because their heroin habit has reduced them to 89 pounds, the mechanical nature of it all, the cocaine, the hangers-on, the wandering hipsters, more pointy shoes and blazers than you can shake a dying tambourine at, the lack of love, the whole fucked-up-ness of the inevitable disaster when you take a trade and artform fundamentally rooted in the expression of pain, suffering and insecurity and organize the shit out of it. does anyobdy feel like they're really in the middle of the party? not from where i was sitting. it seemed like everybody was always hovering around the edges, looking into a collective void.
the deadliest part: i'm home, and it feels closer to nowhere than ever before. this is bad, very bad. the british, i found out recently, have a name for this. they call it The Fear. it's a general sweeping mental malady that sets in after living in the UK with it's suicide-inducing weahter after a while. I have contracted a strain of The Fear. maybe not quite so bad. The Ennui. The germans call it Weltschmerz. Do we have a good english term for this? we will know. I hereby dub it The End.
don't get me wrong, it wasn't like this every day and every where. i'm exhausted. i want more. i want my drummer back, i feel like i'm losing him to the dark side again.
i want to skip over the part where i climb into my empty bed and wait to see how long it will take me to fall asleep on this fucked up schedule and get to the part where i wake up to the beautiful day and i'm magically compelled to immediately practice and open 67 pieces of mail and fly into a general manic creative frenzy and clean my whole kitchen from top to bottom and forget that i just spent five weeks doing absolutely nothing but listlessly watching life wander by between rock shows. i want my life to come back to me, because i don't fucking know where to go to find it. it's terrifying.
i want the fourth of july to just go away. i want the sound of people practicing fireworks outside my window to vanish. it sounds like war to me.
emily and bri stayed in europe and went to the G8 summit to reckon with The Man. i will live vicariously through them and their emails about how the resistance is going. reading todays' paper about live 8 and the general response of the experts and then watching the BBC coverage of Iraq on the plane and then watching a film about the last few days of Hitler's life in the bunker couldn't be doing much to improve my mood, come to think about it. simultaneously getting my period upon boarding the plane and having no sponge and no underwear didn't fucking help matters either. it all sucks, man. everybody's dying and complaining and trying and it's always this way. there is absolutely nothing to be upset about.
it's the fourth of july.
it's the fourth of july.
this is hilarious and sad to me, for some reason.
if i wasn's so tired, i'd find a sarcastic reason why.
i must have also been going through a hormonally challenged day when i had that unforgettable fourth of july image burned into my brain, i think it was 1998 or 1999. i was seeing will, and he lived near the mass ave bridge, where thousands of people always gather to watch the fireworks over the river. we walked onto the bridge but somehow lost each other. i looked and looked and coulndn't find him. the relationship wasn't working out anyway at that point. i'd never seen the fireworks before, i watched from the bridge, alone, surrounded by families and lovers and drunk people and the whole typical assortment. then they were over. and thousands of people started walking off the bridge, but i just stood there, in the middle, facing them all coming at me and thinking about america and patriotism and loneliness and people's lives in general and jsut started bawling my brains out (i'm not a crying-in-public kind of person generally. to myself, quietly, over the paper when i'm PMSing, yes, but not like this. no way.) and the people passing me, who were all in a kind of a fairground headspace, just looked at me with that "damn, what the fuck is her problem?" kind of look and they kept streaming by, thousands of them, bearing lawnchairs and coolers and it got uglier and uglier and i got sadder and sadder until somehow the whole thing ended and i made my way back to will's house, where his father offered me a beer and a piece of watermelon and i felt better. i wonder the hell was wrong with me in those days.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
On Glastonbury
A Chronicle In Three Parts.
-
glastonbury! we've been here for about four hours. We play tomorrow and up until now every festival that we've played has been an excercise in patience but generally good. having to be a cog in a large machine and only getting 30 minutes to explain your band is a difficult fucking task. We've been driving from country to country on our tour bus, landing in the middle of nowhere and trying to orient. Every crowd has been crazy and great excpet for yesterday, in london at the wireless festival in hyde park, where we encountered our First Real Unresponsive Audience in the history of the band. British Corpses on a drizzling field. But watching the acts that followed was heartening; the psychedelic furs, moby, even new order (I gave a disc to the furs, who watched our set and were very kind, as was moby) also greeted a pretty much catatonic crowd. We got to glastonbury late (and missed our shot to streak during the Kaiser Chief's set) and here I am, sitting in the catering tentative outside the john peel stage, one bottled-water worth of wine inside me and working on a second, enjoying life and the rain.
Glastonbury is a british rite of passage, in a way. 140,000 people, hundreds of bands, torrential rain. Passing these thousands of brits wading through 2-foot deep mud proclaiming with their bloody existances “I love music and I suffer for it” and smelling the burn of sausages and wine in the air makes me feel like I'm at summer camp, or what I imagined summer camp mustve been like, because I never went. There is an ongoing catwalk of wellington rainboots, sneakers wrapped in plastic bags, scooby doo body costumes and all other vareities of freak.
-
Next day
-
I found where I belong at this festival: it's a land in the corner of the edge of nowhere called Lost Vagueness and that's where people are sporting full period ballroom dress and other fancy clothings (and wellington rainboots, which makes for a beautiful and poetic sight). I found a secret bar last night and there were laced and hatted people within, playing a skeleton of a piano and drinking fine whiskey. If I hadn't had to sing today I would have gotten all sorts of inebriated.
But there's tonight, and inebriated is a possibility. Our set is over, it went well...about four to five thousand people
came to our tent. I escaped afterwards to go see garbage (not bad, but didn't hold my attention), rufus wainwright (charming and half naked, yay!) and am waiting to see bright eyes in the john peel tent. Bright eyes has replaced avril in my cd player and I can honestly swear that it's (the fevers and mirrors record) the only thing I've listened to since coming on the european tour. I tried to listen to a garbage mix that becca gave me, but it skipped, so I took it out and that deosnt count. I can fully understand why people just can't stand it. overdramatic, pitiful, needy and all that. but I love it, I think people don't see the humor in it. The poor guy. The album has some of the most beautiful production I've ever heard and really, I feel sorry for the fact that the voice and the woe-is-me subject matter probably turns away so folks from this band. For me, it's a guilty pleasure and I can't only be grateful that someone is taking the self-depricating, self-aggrandizing, self-loathing tendencies I often want to put into music but censor for fear of turning everyone off. Add to list of projects: write a record for only conor oberst to listen to.
Anyway, he's on in an hour or so, and i can't wait to see. I think I have a bona fide crush.
-
Next day
-
My bona fide crush is officially over.
this story must begin with the fact that brian and I were fully prepared to streak during the kaiser chiefs' set (we even invested in matching garterless stockings while in camdentown in london) but we arrived at glastonbury literally an hour after their set, so I had a latent urge. “All sorts of inebriated” is certainly a decent description for where I found myself at nine last night, when bright eyes were supposed to hit the stage. The schedule was running over an hour late, so Brianna (who was also birthday girl, 21 at glasto!) and I sat backstage having fun and drinking and smoking like fishes and chimneys(the perils of four days off in a row - I'm like an idiot kid in a candy store when I get off my fascist touring regimen). Bright eyes took the stage, led by a be-hoodied and bitter-looking c-dog (em's affectionate nickname for mr oberst) and they immediately began to be plagued by the same monitor problems that we had. And then it started happening. My crush started deflating. I mean, the sound on stage was horrible, and perhaps the mud had gotten to him, but poor c-dog was out of control. Between every song (and it got progressively worse as the set wore on) he berated the crowd, berated the festival, and basically dripped a kind of acidic sacrasm all over the stage. Standout quotes: “put your credit cards together! Come on! Visa in one hand and mastercard in the other! Put your credit cards together!” and in reference to the fact that glastonbury was supporting Make Povery History “great. yay. we're all here and poverty's going to go away. awesome” and things to that effect. He even rolled his eyes at John Peel and referred to him as a cokehead (on the john peel stage! this is wrong, conor! he just died! have some respect!), but after people started yelling “you're a cunt!” from the audience he apologized for that one. he truly sounded like an asshole, a twelve-year old with a bad attitude.
Emily came and found me and brianna by the side of the stage and we watched this all going down and then I decided it would be a good idea to streak and when em brought me another whiskey and the band struck up “lover I don't have to love” I decided that god wanted me to do it. what perfect way to puncuate a song about casual sex, loneliness and a lack of caring about the universe than random nakedness? emily, being the mom-like tour manager that she is, reacted first with doubt but then after thinking it through and looking at the way the show and crowd were progressing decided that "this needs to happen for so many reasons". the voices in my own head were somewhat of a blur, but it was a familiar "something interesting has to take place now" kind of amanda head-refrain. so I waited til the song ended, got undressed, walked to the middle of the stage, and made out with conor oberst for ten seconds. he quite seemed to enjoy it, and he was an amzing kisser even if he's a brat. I was pried away by a burly security guy who didn't seem to think it was at all funny and told to get the fuck out of the tent so we went back to the bar and I freestyle-rapped a song about how emily is the best tour manager in the world. I did talk to c-dog before his entourage left but I think “all sorts of inebriated” wouldn't suffice to explain his state. gone, just gone......gone.
mom, please don't send an email. i'm already been wracked with guilt now that i realize that i took part in what was probably the most shameful sets at glastonbury. oh well. fuck guilt! rock and roll and onward and upwards and there will be plenty of rock shows to wear clothes at for the rest of my life. and No More Streaking for me lest i get a bad reputation. promise. at least not until next summer. i remember feeling this same sort of guilt after making out with evil-jock carl easton at my high school reunion and now i look back at it with a kind of a fondness.
and for the record, though conor oberst has proved himself whiny to the max on one night, he's still incredibly cute, a good kisser and put out a really well-produced record with great songwriting that I will probably have to wait a few years to listen to again. i even, upon going into my amazon checkout cart today, cancelled the bright eyes albums i had on order. too painful. i have hope. i want to think, in my hope for all humanity, that conor had a terrible night and will wake up to a brand new day and realize that things aren't all that bad, that while we can't end poverty by putting on rock shows it's better than doing absolutley nothing, and that insulting the dead in their namesake tent at a festival is a bad career move. and becasue i still think his music is brilliant, i will try to go see him play again to make up for the bad dream.
emily said that the singer from primal scream was so drugged out that he refused to leave stage at the end of their set and had to be dragged off. hard drugs = bad. alcohol has it's moments but it's pretty dangerous as well. back to juice for amanda. i think my bigggest guilty feeling is that instead of drinking and hanging out at the john peel tent watching conor oberst berate the audience and pulling a weird naked stunt i would have been much better off back over at Lost Vagueness, where i could have found jason webley and my other spiritual brothers and sisters and had an authentically good naked time with the real freaks. i want the sixties in my head back.
Anyway, I need to find a new rock crush. top candidate: andre 3000.
-
glastonbury! we've been here for about four hours. We play tomorrow and up until now every festival that we've played has been an excercise in patience but generally good. having to be a cog in a large machine and only getting 30 minutes to explain your band is a difficult fucking task. We've been driving from country to country on our tour bus, landing in the middle of nowhere and trying to orient. Every crowd has been crazy and great excpet for yesterday, in london at the wireless festival in hyde park, where we encountered our First Real Unresponsive Audience in the history of the band. British Corpses on a drizzling field. But watching the acts that followed was heartening; the psychedelic furs, moby, even new order (I gave a disc to the furs, who watched our set and were very kind, as was moby) also greeted a pretty much catatonic crowd. We got to glastonbury late (and missed our shot to streak during the Kaiser Chief's set) and here I am, sitting in the catering tentative outside the john peel stage, one bottled-water worth of wine inside me and working on a second, enjoying life and the rain.
Glastonbury is a british rite of passage, in a way. 140,000 people, hundreds of bands, torrential rain. Passing these thousands of brits wading through 2-foot deep mud proclaiming with their bloody existances “I love music and I suffer for it” and smelling the burn of sausages and wine in the air makes me feel like I'm at summer camp, or what I imagined summer camp mustve been like, because I never went. There is an ongoing catwalk of wellington rainboots, sneakers wrapped in plastic bags, scooby doo body costumes and all other vareities of freak.
-
Next day
-
I found where I belong at this festival: it's a land in the corner of the edge of nowhere called Lost Vagueness and that's where people are sporting full period ballroom dress and other fancy clothings (and wellington rainboots, which makes for a beautiful and poetic sight). I found a secret bar last night and there were laced and hatted people within, playing a skeleton of a piano and drinking fine whiskey. If I hadn't had to sing today I would have gotten all sorts of inebriated.
But there's tonight, and inebriated is a possibility. Our set is over, it went well...about four to five thousand people
came to our tent. I escaped afterwards to go see garbage (not bad, but didn't hold my attention), rufus wainwright (charming and half naked, yay!) and am waiting to see bright eyes in the john peel tent. Bright eyes has replaced avril in my cd player and I can honestly swear that it's (the fevers and mirrors record) the only thing I've listened to since coming on the european tour. I tried to listen to a garbage mix that becca gave me, but it skipped, so I took it out and that deosnt count. I can fully understand why people just can't stand it. overdramatic, pitiful, needy and all that. but I love it, I think people don't see the humor in it. The poor guy. The album has some of the most beautiful production I've ever heard and really, I feel sorry for the fact that the voice and the woe-is-me subject matter probably turns away so folks from this band. For me, it's a guilty pleasure and I can't only be grateful that someone is taking the self-depricating, self-aggrandizing, self-loathing tendencies I often want to put into music but censor for fear of turning everyone off. Add to list of projects: write a record for only conor oberst to listen to.
Anyway, he's on in an hour or so, and i can't wait to see. I think I have a bona fide crush.
-
Next day
-
My bona fide crush is officially over.
this story must begin with the fact that brian and I were fully prepared to streak during the kaiser chiefs' set (we even invested in matching garterless stockings while in camdentown in london) but we arrived at glastonbury literally an hour after their set, so I had a latent urge. “All sorts of inebriated” is certainly a decent description for where I found myself at nine last night, when bright eyes were supposed to hit the stage. The schedule was running over an hour late, so Brianna (who was also birthday girl, 21 at glasto!) and I sat backstage having fun and drinking and smoking like fishes and chimneys(the perils of four days off in a row - I'm like an idiot kid in a candy store when I get off my fascist touring regimen). Bright eyes took the stage, led by a be-hoodied and bitter-looking c-dog (em's affectionate nickname for mr oberst) and they immediately began to be plagued by the same monitor problems that we had. And then it started happening. My crush started deflating. I mean, the sound on stage was horrible, and perhaps the mud had gotten to him, but poor c-dog was out of control. Between every song (and it got progressively worse as the set wore on) he berated the crowd, berated the festival, and basically dripped a kind of acidic sacrasm all over the stage. Standout quotes: “put your credit cards together! Come on! Visa in one hand and mastercard in the other! Put your credit cards together!” and in reference to the fact that glastonbury was supporting Make Povery History “great. yay. we're all here and poverty's going to go away. awesome” and things to that effect. He even rolled his eyes at John Peel and referred to him as a cokehead (on the john peel stage! this is wrong, conor! he just died! have some respect!), but after people started yelling “you're a cunt!” from the audience he apologized for that one. he truly sounded like an asshole, a twelve-year old with a bad attitude.
Emily came and found me and brianna by the side of the stage and we watched this all going down and then I decided it would be a good idea to streak and when em brought me another whiskey and the band struck up “lover I don't have to love” I decided that god wanted me to do it. what perfect way to puncuate a song about casual sex, loneliness and a lack of caring about the universe than random nakedness? emily, being the mom-like tour manager that she is, reacted first with doubt but then after thinking it through and looking at the way the show and crowd were progressing decided that "this needs to happen for so many reasons". the voices in my own head were somewhat of a blur, but it was a familiar "something interesting has to take place now" kind of amanda head-refrain. so I waited til the song ended, got undressed, walked to the middle of the stage, and made out with conor oberst for ten seconds. he quite seemed to enjoy it, and he was an amzing kisser even if he's a brat. I was pried away by a burly security guy who didn't seem to think it was at all funny and told to get the fuck out of the tent so we went back to the bar and I freestyle-rapped a song about how emily is the best tour manager in the world. I did talk to c-dog before his entourage left but I think “all sorts of inebriated” wouldn't suffice to explain his state. gone, just gone......gone.
mom, please don't send an email. i'm already been wracked with guilt now that i realize that i took part in what was probably the most shameful sets at glastonbury. oh well. fuck guilt! rock and roll and onward and upwards and there will be plenty of rock shows to wear clothes at for the rest of my life. and No More Streaking for me lest i get a bad reputation. promise. at least not until next summer. i remember feeling this same sort of guilt after making out with evil-jock carl easton at my high school reunion and now i look back at it with a kind of a fondness.
and for the record, though conor oberst has proved himself whiny to the max on one night, he's still incredibly cute, a good kisser and put out a really well-produced record with great songwriting that I will probably have to wait a few years to listen to again. i even, upon going into my amazon checkout cart today, cancelled the bright eyes albums i had on order. too painful. i have hope. i want to think, in my hope for all humanity, that conor had a terrible night and will wake up to a brand new day and realize that things aren't all that bad, that while we can't end poverty by putting on rock shows it's better than doing absolutley nothing, and that insulting the dead in their namesake tent at a festival is a bad career move. and becasue i still think his music is brilliant, i will try to go see him play again to make up for the bad dream.
emily said that the singer from primal scream was so drugged out that he refused to leave stage at the end of their set and had to be dragged off. hard drugs = bad. alcohol has it's moments but it's pretty dangerous as well. back to juice for amanda. i think my bigggest guilty feeling is that instead of drinking and hanging out at the john peel tent watching conor oberst berate the audience and pulling a weird naked stunt i would have been much better off back over at Lost Vagueness, where i could have found jason webley and my other spiritual brothers and sisters and had an authentically good naked time with the real freaks. i want the sixties in my head back.
Anyway, I need to find a new rock crush. top candidate: andre 3000.
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
caged bird blurs
i just don't give a shit. i'll just have to work backwards. the diary turns into a curse, the more that happens and the more clever things i think about to relate, the less time i have and the less motivated i feel to sit down and take hand to keyboard. i don't write songs anymore. i write diary entries. it's a start. i wrote the rough outline of a song in mexico and tried to flesh it out during my 2 hours off in boston. it centers around a moment a photograph is taken at disney world. three voices: minnie stuck in her oppressive fucking costume, the housewife, and minnie's boyfriend the junkie with a view in the projects three miles away that overlooks disney world. main theme (like i can't relate): WHY AM I DOING THIS?
backwards number one.
so tonight was out first show of the european tour. we landed in deutschland yesterday and hung out with a huge bunch of caged exotic birds (all colors of green and blue and in a box sort of shaped like mini-bird-kennel with a few square inches per exotic bird) at baggage claim D, while british airways figured out where on the planet our luggage had migrated. they were destined for a german zoo. we felt for them. brothers. we bussed to the hurricane festival and slept over in the bus (on the grounds) and woke up with just a few hours til soundcheck. europeans know how to take care of artists...everybody says it and they're right. we had a nice little cubicle in artists village and we were the first band of many on the main stage. the show was fine despite the fact that it was in the fifties, bright yet drizzling, windy as fuck, and we were jetlagged and unpracticed. being the first band of the bill had the huge advantage that we could wander and observe for the rest of the day. so we ate and watched boy sets fire (punk and effective). then we watched NIN (nin-like and great).
then we watched rammstein (german and hilarious. i decided that making fun of rammstein is as pointless as hating the circus. the people must have their fun). then we watched oasis from the side of the stage. i was pretty unfamiliar with their music though i have checked out a few CDs.
the point HERE is that emily, our tour manager, is an oasis FIEND and had been looking forward to this day the way a....i can't think of a good metaphor. the way a crazed teenage obsessor looks forward to meeting the band they obsess over. which isn't a metaphor.
but you understand. this was the girl who had three complete walls covered with oasis posters and magazine centerfolds and spent every allowance on the latest maxi-single. to pick up, we watched them form the side of the stage with NIN (all five in a line, which was poetic and lovely) and then i wandered backstage to where emily had secured a concrete spot hanging with oasis and was introduced to each member of the band, including liam, the singer who was the most opinionated fuck i've ever met (guess what - i sorta liked him), noel his brother, who was very nice, and zach starkey, ringo starr's son, who is drumming for oasis on this tour. truth be told, they'd had a pretty terrible set. it was freezing for them too (i empathized) and they faced massive feedback problems. so i asked liam, the singer,ß what the difference was, for him, between a good show for himself and a good show for the audience.
it's a mystery. sometimes you play like shit and the audience goes nuts and cries and sometimes you're completely on and the audience just isn't there with you.
according to liam, it only works if you play well. don't you feel the tide turn when you talk to people after the show and they shower you with love and you-changed-my-life-tonight?
i asked liam. no, he said, i fucking leave the venue immediately. well, liam. ah, whatever. they also clued me in on the motto that i would have believed if i had really truly wanted to: "drink and smoke whatever you want, you'll be fine tomorrow." fuck. really? two marlboro lights and one vodka orange juice and one heinekin later i lost my faith. what am i doing? you're going to lose your voice, you fucking idiot. quit thinking that being in the presence of rock stars is special dispensantion for vice.
you'll be just as hung over tomorrow, asshole.
backwards number two: the DVD shoot.
so while back in boston, for a grand total of four days between tours, we shot our first DVD and played an additional show at avalon for WFNX. it really honestly looked kind of like a fast-motion cartoon in my house as i dropped my suitcase on the floor and started talking to pope downstairs about the shoot. beautiful marie and emilie flew in from france to take part and so did casey from san franscisco, the gentelman beyond reason who has been organizing the brigade through the magic of the interweb. the house was packed from top to bottom with people buzzing 24/7 getting things ready for the shoot...film interns, art department, piano tuners...madness.
the shoot itself began the moment i woke up (good morning Camera In My Face, i know i invited you in but now i wonder if this is truly healthy) and the day was a fuzzy soup of mania that I can luckily go back and watch now that i've forgotten. the power went out shortly before soundcheck and about 300 people patiently waited on commonwealth ave for three hours while we waited for it to come back on and finish soundchecking and readying the club. despite this disaster, the show did get filmed and we will see what becomes of it. we were tired. i gave the show a B- overall. maybe the visual will make up for any terribleness. in a stroke of true randomness, we did get christopher lydon to play the MC. i am strongly considering releasing the DVD without the musical performance, i think it would make more sense.
the show at avalon was a typical radio-station-throws-20-hip-bands-together kind of awkwardfest. pointy boots and sunglasses everywhere. i got to see one of my rock-crushes (the singer of the kaiser chiefs) and i streaked across stage during their set to keep the night interesting.
backwards yet still more: ....and everything before that must have been on tour with nine inch nails in america. we did do that, didn't we? it all gloms together in a blur of bus, dressing room, show, gas station, people and sharpies (both black and silver). i do not love the blur, i do not hate it, and i certainly don't try to focus on it any more, it's like trying to make sense of a film playing on fast fast forward. just appreicate the images for now and we'll take a closer look later. not that i am not enjoying myself. i am, actaully.
i have more free time lately to do as i please. i'm in the tour bubble. as the NIN stage manager, bitter and hilarious name-a-tour-i've-been on-it british chap,would put it in answer to everyone else's crass "living the dream" mantra: i'm "circling the dream". you're only in the picture when you look back at the photos. as he also says, after he takes a moment to sigh, order another few people around, yell into his cell phone that any other color WILL NOT DO and puts his hands on his hips while looking around for a moment, fully convinced that the venue will not collapse within seconds: "Time for a fucking hot pocket." that too.
NIN needs it's own chapter. it is it's own world. later.
forwards.
right now it's three days later than i started this entry, we've played two more festivals and frozen our asses off, brian's faith in music has "been restored" now that he's seen motorhead, and i can't fall asleep and it's 4:30 am. we've been driving almost an entire two days. we re-unite with NIN tomorrow for vienna and it will be nice to see the whole crew again.
the only thing i can remember that, for some reason, i felt it was important to relate was the food on the way back from san diego when the NIN tour finished. we were flying some typically cheap ticket and the food was brought. i always get vegetarian (though i do eat fish) because it's almost always better than the standard fare but brian, who was sitting next to me, was brought some really unidentifiable meat. it was sort of saucer-shaped and had the consistency of meatloaf. in his defense, he did actually TRY a bite before turning it into entertainment. it came in a sad bed of peas and corn and so he took two of the peas and gave it eyes, gave it a leafy hat and split it lengthwise to create a frighteningly mean-looking mouth, and made it sing all sorts of beatles songs and impromptu operatic numbers about how it's life was a misery because it was neither beef nor foul, chicken nor pork, and it was going through the most wonderful musical existential crisis and
i was peeing my seat with laughter and we were of course irritating the fuck out of all the nice families around us. then he made things worse by exchanging one of the peas for a corn kernel, so the little mystery-meat-beast had two different colored eyes, and making it sing a medley of marilyn manson songs. here i fully lost it, and needed to either throw up or fling the thing so we gave it a burial at the empty tray table next to me under a blue cocktail napkin.
backwards number one.
so tonight was out first show of the european tour. we landed in deutschland yesterday and hung out with a huge bunch of caged exotic birds (all colors of green and blue and in a box sort of shaped like mini-bird-kennel with a few square inches per exotic bird) at baggage claim D, while british airways figured out where on the planet our luggage had migrated. they were destined for a german zoo. we felt for them. brothers. we bussed to the hurricane festival and slept over in the bus (on the grounds) and woke up with just a few hours til soundcheck. europeans know how to take care of artists...everybody says it and they're right. we had a nice little cubicle in artists village and we were the first band of many on the main stage. the show was fine despite the fact that it was in the fifties, bright yet drizzling, windy as fuck, and we were jetlagged and unpracticed. being the first band of the bill had the huge advantage that we could wander and observe for the rest of the day. so we ate and watched boy sets fire (punk and effective). then we watched NIN (nin-like and great).
then we watched rammstein (german and hilarious. i decided that making fun of rammstein is as pointless as hating the circus. the people must have their fun). then we watched oasis from the side of the stage. i was pretty unfamiliar with their music though i have checked out a few CDs.
the point HERE is that emily, our tour manager, is an oasis FIEND and had been looking forward to this day the way a....i can't think of a good metaphor. the way a crazed teenage obsessor looks forward to meeting the band they obsess over. which isn't a metaphor.
but you understand. this was the girl who had three complete walls covered with oasis posters and magazine centerfolds and spent every allowance on the latest maxi-single. to pick up, we watched them form the side of the stage with NIN (all five in a line, which was poetic and lovely) and then i wandered backstage to where emily had secured a concrete spot hanging with oasis and was introduced to each member of the band, including liam, the singer who was the most opinionated fuck i've ever met (guess what - i sorta liked him), noel his brother, who was very nice, and zach starkey, ringo starr's son, who is drumming for oasis on this tour. truth be told, they'd had a pretty terrible set. it was freezing for them too (i empathized) and they faced massive feedback problems. so i asked liam, the singer,ß what the difference was, for him, between a good show for himself and a good show for the audience.
it's a mystery. sometimes you play like shit and the audience goes nuts and cries and sometimes you're completely on and the audience just isn't there with you.
according to liam, it only works if you play well. don't you feel the tide turn when you talk to people after the show and they shower you with love and you-changed-my-life-tonight?
i asked liam. no, he said, i fucking leave the venue immediately. well, liam. ah, whatever. they also clued me in on the motto that i would have believed if i had really truly wanted to: "drink and smoke whatever you want, you'll be fine tomorrow." fuck. really? two marlboro lights and one vodka orange juice and one heinekin later i lost my faith. what am i doing? you're going to lose your voice, you fucking idiot. quit thinking that being in the presence of rock stars is special dispensantion for vice.
you'll be just as hung over tomorrow, asshole.
backwards number two: the DVD shoot.
so while back in boston, for a grand total of four days between tours, we shot our first DVD and played an additional show at avalon for WFNX. it really honestly looked kind of like a fast-motion cartoon in my house as i dropped my suitcase on the floor and started talking to pope downstairs about the shoot. beautiful marie and emilie flew in from france to take part and so did casey from san franscisco, the gentelman beyond reason who has been organizing the brigade through the magic of the interweb. the house was packed from top to bottom with people buzzing 24/7 getting things ready for the shoot...film interns, art department, piano tuners...madness.
the shoot itself began the moment i woke up (good morning Camera In My Face, i know i invited you in but now i wonder if this is truly healthy) and the day was a fuzzy soup of mania that I can luckily go back and watch now that i've forgotten. the power went out shortly before soundcheck and about 300 people patiently waited on commonwealth ave for three hours while we waited for it to come back on and finish soundchecking and readying the club. despite this disaster, the show did get filmed and we will see what becomes of it. we were tired. i gave the show a B- overall. maybe the visual will make up for any terribleness. in a stroke of true randomness, we did get christopher lydon to play the MC. i am strongly considering releasing the DVD without the musical performance, i think it would make more sense.
the show at avalon was a typical radio-station-throws-20-hip-bands-together kind of awkwardfest. pointy boots and sunglasses everywhere. i got to see one of my rock-crushes (the singer of the kaiser chiefs) and i streaked across stage during their set to keep the night interesting.
backwards yet still more: ....and everything before that must have been on tour with nine inch nails in america. we did do that, didn't we? it all gloms together in a blur of bus, dressing room, show, gas station, people and sharpies (both black and silver). i do not love the blur, i do not hate it, and i certainly don't try to focus on it any more, it's like trying to make sense of a film playing on fast fast forward. just appreicate the images for now and we'll take a closer look later. not that i am not enjoying myself. i am, actaully.
i have more free time lately to do as i please. i'm in the tour bubble. as the NIN stage manager, bitter and hilarious name-a-tour-i've-been on-it british chap,would put it in answer to everyone else's crass "living the dream" mantra: i'm "circling the dream". you're only in the picture when you look back at the photos. as he also says, after he takes a moment to sigh, order another few people around, yell into his cell phone that any other color WILL NOT DO and puts his hands on his hips while looking around for a moment, fully convinced that the venue will not collapse within seconds: "Time for a fucking hot pocket." that too.
NIN needs it's own chapter. it is it's own world. later.
forwards.
right now it's three days later than i started this entry, we've played two more festivals and frozen our asses off, brian's faith in music has "been restored" now that he's seen motorhead, and i can't fall asleep and it's 4:30 am. we've been driving almost an entire two days. we re-unite with NIN tomorrow for vienna and it will be nice to see the whole crew again.
the only thing i can remember that, for some reason, i felt it was important to relate was the food on the way back from san diego when the NIN tour finished. we were flying some typically cheap ticket and the food was brought. i always get vegetarian (though i do eat fish) because it's almost always better than the standard fare but brian, who was sitting next to me, was brought some really unidentifiable meat. it was sort of saucer-shaped and had the consistency of meatloaf. in his defense, he did actually TRY a bite before turning it into entertainment. it came in a sad bed of peas and corn and so he took two of the peas and gave it eyes, gave it a leafy hat and split it lengthwise to create a frighteningly mean-looking mouth, and made it sing all sorts of beatles songs and impromptu operatic numbers about how it's life was a misery because it was neither beef nor foul, chicken nor pork, and it was going through the most wonderful musical existential crisis and
i was peeing my seat with laughter and we were of course irritating the fuck out of all the nice families around us. then he made things worse by exchanging one of the peas for a corn kernel, so the little mystery-meat-beast had two different colored eyes, and making it sing a medley of marilyn manson songs. here i fully lost it, and needed to either throw up or fling the thing so we gave it a burial at the empty tray table next to me under a blue cocktail napkin.
Thursday, May 19, 2005
burns shaped like stoves
Sometimes I realize that touring life is real, but mostly it feels like an accident happening and I keep thinking real life will resume. And then there are the moments where I am able to stop and say “I am truly happy right now.” It's happening right now, sitting in the back of a stranger's car watching the sunlit pensylvania countryside rushing by, feeling my sore neck and my lost voice, listening to classic girl by jane's addiction on the speakers. It happened two nights ago, backstage at the hammerstein in NYC, sitting alone in the dressing room twenty minutes before our set, when my bloody valentine came over the house speakers and I could only half-hear it, but that was perfect. The music I love ties me to reality.
Things that should make me happy (from the outside) often don't. This or that thing related to the band, this or that achievment, how many records and tikkets sold...it all tends to blur together in one place in my brain. There's a lot of space left in there.
The diary checklist in my head of musical/rockstar accomplishments stays constant. I might has well just list them this time around, instead of trying to pepper them into the prose of the past two weeks, here goes
1. Met David Bowie backstage. He likes the band and complimented the record, which he said he got ages ago. Bowie is plugged in. Does it matter? Met David Bowie and feel complete/ok with dying.
2. Brian Bell, the guitarist from weezer, found us backstage. He likes the band too.
3. Jerome (the very wonderful drummer from NIN) suggested sitting in with us, so we've been playing “karma police” by radiohead in the set (I wanted to play an avril song, but jerome heavily vetoed)
4. Tom Hamilton, the bass player from Aerosmith, came and found us after the boston show. Boston Rock Powah. He likes the band too.
5. We've been invited to play the Royal Albert Hall in london as part of the patti smith-curated meltdown festival, we'll be playing songs by Brecht, as it is a Brecht tribute night, with the likes of Ms. smith, wonderful Antony (with or without the Johnsens I'm not sure), Sparks, Martha Wainwright and others.....
6. Margaret Cho gave us a shout-out at her show at the Orpheum in boston. I sort of want to run away to a desert island with her.
I'm not sure where this accomplishment goes in the box of life, but we made trent reznor a creative birthday surprise involving a living statue in a beautiful green dress, a dark and dank boiler room in therpheum basement, a fruit tart with candles and a neutral milk hotel cd (he'd never heard of it). He smiled.
Mid-tour malaise has set in and the throat-porcupines have returned to set up camp. This was not at all aided by the party we threw in boston, where I deemed it a reasonable idea to stay up til sunrise. I was actually saved by further debotchery that night by a freak accident at the party which found me and the NIN guitar tech driving the NIN PA tech to the emergency room in ye olde volvo. We had lit a fire in the old woodstove of the cloud club and the PA tech, a very sweet guy from france named Florent, stepped right through the floor plexiglass in front of it and fell through. Luckily he didn't fall into Lee's apartment, but he did break the fall by putting his forearm on the stove, which is from the 19th century, and so his burn is very beautiful and covered with tasteful lines and arabesque little curly-q's.
Things that should make me happy (from the outside) often don't. This or that thing related to the band, this or that achievment, how many records and tikkets sold...it all tends to blur together in one place in my brain. There's a lot of space left in there.
The diary checklist in my head of musical/rockstar accomplishments stays constant. I might has well just list them this time around, instead of trying to pepper them into the prose of the past two weeks, here goes
1. Met David Bowie backstage. He likes the band and complimented the record, which he said he got ages ago. Bowie is plugged in. Does it matter? Met David Bowie and feel complete/ok with dying.
2. Brian Bell, the guitarist from weezer, found us backstage. He likes the band too.
3. Jerome (the very wonderful drummer from NIN) suggested sitting in with us, so we've been playing “karma police” by radiohead in the set (I wanted to play an avril song, but jerome heavily vetoed)
4. Tom Hamilton, the bass player from Aerosmith, came and found us after the boston show. Boston Rock Powah. He likes the band too.
5. We've been invited to play the Royal Albert Hall in london as part of the patti smith-curated meltdown festival, we'll be playing songs by Brecht, as it is a Brecht tribute night, with the likes of Ms. smith, wonderful Antony (with or without the Johnsens I'm not sure), Sparks, Martha Wainwright and others.....
6. Margaret Cho gave us a shout-out at her show at the Orpheum in boston. I sort of want to run away to a desert island with her.
I'm not sure where this accomplishment goes in the box of life, but we made trent reznor a creative birthday surprise involving a living statue in a beautiful green dress, a dark and dank boiler room in therpheum basement, a fruit tart with candles and a neutral milk hotel cd (he'd never heard of it). He smiled.
Mid-tour malaise has set in and the throat-porcupines have returned to set up camp. This was not at all aided by the party we threw in boston, where I deemed it a reasonable idea to stay up til sunrise. I was actually saved by further debotchery that night by a freak accident at the party which found me and the NIN guitar tech driving the NIN PA tech to the emergency room in ye olde volvo. We had lit a fire in the old woodstove of the cloud club and the PA tech, a very sweet guy from france named Florent, stepped right through the floor plexiglass in front of it and fell through. Luckily he didn't fall into Lee's apartment, but he did break the fall by putting his forearm on the stove, which is from the 19th century, and so his burn is very beautiful and covered with tasteful lines and arabesque little curly-q's.
Saturday, May 07, 2005
first night in chicago with NIN
the set in st. loius was rough. i'm having a "aliens invading my brain" experience with the new in-ear moniters i'm using.
not only that, we hadn't played a dresden dolls-only (no NIN) show in a week, and i hadn't taken into account how rusty we would be without having practiced our other material. but the crowd seemed to love it. brian and i have been struggling with these mindfucks lately. what makes a good show? brian can play the shit out of those drums some nights and then go lock himslef in a closet after the gig, banging his head against a wall sobbing "i'm a bad drummer" (well, i exaggerate, but it can get dramatic.). sometimes i will feel like i played like total shit and, nonetheless, will get the most tear-jerked-you-changed-my-life-tonight comments from people after the set. one thing we've definitely determined (and this supports an overall theroy of mine) is that where brian has more musician in his blood, i have more performer. if i feel that the audience has gotten off, even if i've had a rough show for any number of reasons, i leave stage satisfied. if brian feels he didn't perform his absolute best, he feels he has let the audience down. Even if the audience is none the wiser and loves the show and his drumming, he leaves stage frustrated and unfulfilled. i only made this connection tonight as we were talking about this on the bus; it's like two schools of thought about acting. One school (the method acting camp) says that if you're "acting" and not directly experiencing the drama, tears and pain of your character, then it's fucking fake and you're phoning it in. The other school would say that only a true perfomer/actor/entertainer can fake it and convince you that the experience is real. I suppose, like gayness, everyone falls somewhere in the middle, but generally towards one side or the other.
the show tonight in Chicago (night 1 with NIN) was as dramatic as all get out. We had no soundcheck (not even a quick one), so we hit stage cold and the audience was THE most hardcore NIN-fanatic bunch we've seen yet. They warmed up, but they were a distant bunch. NIN hit the stage and two songs into their set, the house PA cut out and they halted the show for half and hour while the problem was figured out. The natives got restless. People started a sing-song-y "BUUULLLLLL-SHIIIIIIIT, BUUULLLLLL-SHIIIIIIIT, BUUULLLLLL-SHIIIIIIIT" chant and Brian and I, who were eating our dinner on the floor right above the stage, said
"bad fans.
poor trent and nails, this isn't their fault.
thank fucking god this didn't happen during our set."
it was amazing to see the Evil Trent that came back out on stage. finally i got a taste (or so i was told by the tech guys) of what NIN tours used to be like every night. jeepers, that guy was pissed (or maybe he was just acting pissed very convincingly. see above). lights kicked in, mic stands hari-kari'd into submission, instruments flung, mr. reznor writhing on the floor. the audience that had been forced to wait a half an hour was rewarded well with the most balls-out show i've yet seen on the tour.
in news:
and if you haven't seen, we've just announced a contest to win tickets to any of our shows between May 18th and June 2nd (yes, including NIN shows). All you have to do is send us a picture of a living statue in front of your local Police Station.
details at: www.theshadowbox.net/ddbb/viewtopic.php?t=2877
deadline is May 9.
not only that, we hadn't played a dresden dolls-only (no NIN) show in a week, and i hadn't taken into account how rusty we would be without having practiced our other material. but the crowd seemed to love it. brian and i have been struggling with these mindfucks lately. what makes a good show? brian can play the shit out of those drums some nights and then go lock himslef in a closet after the gig, banging his head against a wall sobbing "i'm a bad drummer" (well, i exaggerate, but it can get dramatic.). sometimes i will feel like i played like total shit and, nonetheless, will get the most tear-jerked-you-changed-my-life-tonight comments from people after the set. one thing we've definitely determined (and this supports an overall theroy of mine) is that where brian has more musician in his blood, i have more performer. if i feel that the audience has gotten off, even if i've had a rough show for any number of reasons, i leave stage satisfied. if brian feels he didn't perform his absolute best, he feels he has let the audience down. Even if the audience is none the wiser and loves the show and his drumming, he leaves stage frustrated and unfulfilled. i only made this connection tonight as we were talking about this on the bus; it's like two schools of thought about acting. One school (the method acting camp) says that if you're "acting" and not directly experiencing the drama, tears and pain of your character, then it's fucking fake and you're phoning it in. The other school would say that only a true perfomer/actor/entertainer can fake it and convince you that the experience is real. I suppose, like gayness, everyone falls somewhere in the middle, but generally towards one side or the other.
the show tonight in Chicago (night 1 with NIN) was as dramatic as all get out. We had no soundcheck (not even a quick one), so we hit stage cold and the audience was THE most hardcore NIN-fanatic bunch we've seen yet. They warmed up, but they were a distant bunch. NIN hit the stage and two songs into their set, the house PA cut out and they halted the show for half and hour while the problem was figured out. The natives got restless. People started a sing-song-y "BUUULLLLLL-SHIIIIIIIT, BUUULLLLLL-SHIIIIIIIT, BUUULLLLLL-SHIIIIIIIT" chant and Brian and I, who were eating our dinner on the floor right above the stage, said
"bad fans.
poor trent and nails, this isn't their fault.
thank fucking god this didn't happen during our set."
it was amazing to see the Evil Trent that came back out on stage. finally i got a taste (or so i was told by the tech guys) of what NIN tours used to be like every night. jeepers, that guy was pissed (or maybe he was just acting pissed very convincingly. see above). lights kicked in, mic stands hari-kari'd into submission, instruments flung, mr. reznor writhing on the floor. the audience that had been forced to wait a half an hour was rewarded well with the most balls-out show i've yet seen on the tour.
in news:
and if you haven't seen, we've just announced a contest to win tickets to any of our shows between May 18th and June 2nd (yes, including NIN shows). All you have to do is send us a picture of a living statue in front of your local Police Station.
details at: www.theshadowbox.net/ddbb/viewtopic.php?t=2877
deadline is May 9.
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Christpher Lydon
Christopher Lydon just emailed me and told me that he owes me dinner.
I think I'm going to die.
I think I'm going to die.
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Vegas is Deceitful Above All Things
I've been waking up earlier than everybody else. Sometimes the bus is still moving, sometimes we're parked in a club lot or a Generic American Truck-stop, but either way it's glorious privacy and I can almost pretend I'm at home. I shock and awe myself at the pleasure I derive from doing the dishes in the sink of the bus kitchen. It feels like being home. When I was at home over this last break, I did the dishes first thing every morning, practically before the crust was out of my eyes. I don't know why but there they were and I was always drawn to them. I think it was the beauty of the mindless task, those few moments of freedom before the thoughts set in, before I realize that there are defintely priorities above the dishes, that the dishes can wait, that there is email in the inbox, phone calls to be answered, clothes to be laundered and bills to be looked at....before that avalanche came down on my poor little head would just stand there and scrub, throw teabags into trash, and put away the dry ones from the morning before. Amanda, the enemy of routine, actually deeply enjoying this. Something is not right. But as I feel myself aging and the little wrinkle lines appearing, I find myself enjoying things I never have. These things creep into my life surreptitiously, some dish-doing here, some exercise there, some terrible pop music here, a lack of typical inhibition here. It's all fine with me. I'm just watching. I think I spent so many years convincing myself of what would anchor me firmly in a wonderfully cool neverland of admirable recklessness, sexy carelessless, and an artistic-devil-may-care lifestyle that it's taken years of resistance to old habits to actually become a free man.
So in the morning, I wake up early and do dishes and clean and pick up JT LeRoy where I left off. Bill H sent me a copy of "Sarah" before out last european tour and I devoured it (that book left me feeling more sad than any other in recent memory) and I've started this tour off with the book that came out after that, "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things". Bill H sent it via secret messenger to the Paradise show. And as we bump along the Great American Highway I plummet myself into his world of ten-year-old prostitutes and anal rape and mothers who leave their children out to rot and other unspeakable horrors, and I make reality collide with Semi-Fiction as we stop to shower at a truck-stop and I eyeball the big burly men sitting there in the Driver's Lounge, eyes glued to the screen, wondering if they too fork over greasy twenties to little boys dressed as girls when the sun goes down over the cemetery of shining Peterbilts outside. I read long after everyone else seems to be asleep, like the good old days with the flashlight under the covers long after I'd been warned a second time. But I still wake up earlier than everybody else. Napping is key.
My birthday came and went under the tacky Vegas sun without much incident. I had been to Vegas twice before, once on a cross-country trip when I was five (my mother let us each gamble a dollar at Circus Circus)
and once in 1999, when I went to visit with Brett and his uncle and tried to make some money on the strip as the Eight Foot Bride, my living statue charater. I set up illegally in front of different casinos until they chased me away. Brett put on his tuxedo and we got married by a mime in the Venetian. Brian had never been, so I took him for a walk on the strip and we indulged in AquaMassages and ten minutes of Oxygen Inhaling at a kiosk next to an outdoor cover band playing Eagles covers. Vegas fascinates me. It is a place, and yet a non-place. A tourist attraction from the ground up, a disneyland for the depraved. But somwehere off the strip must be a real town, i wonder where....maybe The Killers could tell us. But they're mormons. Ah, who cares.
The show with Nine Inch Nails that night went well and the NIN folk sent an Amanda birthday cake over to the bus. All Black, one solitary candle. Very NIN. The band and crew have been wonderfully kind. The NIN keyboard techs went to town on my abused Kurzweil the other night and I watched like a nervous mother watching her child get a appendix out as they spent a solid half-hour trying to get it open to see if they could repair a broken key. You can tell when people are passionate about gear, they get this gleam in their eye that reminds me of little boys pulling the wings off of flies. Mr. Trent Renzor and some of the other guys in the band and crew came out to our non-NIN show in San Francisco and apparently loved it. Trent loved the Brigade and the performers....it was an A+ night in the world of the Brigade, Casey pulled out all the stops and there were painted crazed people everywhere, stilts, puppets, evil, costumes that had to be seen to be believed and the crown jewel of the Vau de Vire Society, a wonderful troupe of vaudelvillian pranksters who did a choreographed stage show to both Missed Me and Girl Anachronism. Little Sunday, one of our youngest fans (i think she's 4) wheeled her toy piano backstage in a red wagon and played me the opening chords of "Coin-Operated Boy" on it for my birthday.
The Coachella festival was a surreal experience and felt like a historic landmark for the band....the desert filled with music and illuminated palmtrees and sound sculptures, made me regret that my hallucinogenic days came to an untimely end long ago. All of the artists (there were at least 40 bands on our day including Bright Eyes, NIN, Gang of Four and New Order) were set up in this wonderful David Lynchian Trailer Park with Picket Fences, so that every band had a little home and a yard set up in a grid about the size of a city block. The Arcade Fire hung out in our yard because it was in the shade and I felt very honored. They were amazing, though we only got to catch about 6 minutes of their set as they went in right before us. I can't wait to see them again. Our set was in a large tent and it was packed to the brim with about 3000 people. We played one of the most intense 45-minute sets of our career and left stage delirious. More unreality set in as Peter Murphy grabbed me back stage and told me that he loved the set (important note: Amanda was a Bauhaus Fanatic for a while in High School). He came back to our
yard and we drank wine while I pinched my proverbial arm every fifteen minutes or so. I went and forraged for cigarettes for all of us.
Brian and I just bought airbrushed T-shirts at the Generic American Truck-stop in Arizona yesterday. His is reddish orange has a big Wolf and mine is blue and purple and has two Dolphins.
l
a
p.s. media lately:
Antony and the Johnson's new CD "I am a bird now" is fucking genius, a cd to cry and die to.
kathleen edwards' new cd - "back to me" is growing on me, still very standard alt-country but brilliant songwriting.
just finished "the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime" by Mark Haddon and highly recommend, it can be a long one-sitting read....
So in the morning, I wake up early and do dishes and clean and pick up JT LeRoy where I left off. Bill H sent me a copy of "Sarah" before out last european tour and I devoured it (that book left me feeling more sad than any other in recent memory) and I've started this tour off with the book that came out after that, "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things". Bill H sent it via secret messenger to the Paradise show. And as we bump along the Great American Highway I plummet myself into his world of ten-year-old prostitutes and anal rape and mothers who leave their children out to rot and other unspeakable horrors, and I make reality collide with Semi-Fiction as we stop to shower at a truck-stop and I eyeball the big burly men sitting there in the Driver's Lounge, eyes glued to the screen, wondering if they too fork over greasy twenties to little boys dressed as girls when the sun goes down over the cemetery of shining Peterbilts outside. I read long after everyone else seems to be asleep, like the good old days with the flashlight under the covers long after I'd been warned a second time. But I still wake up earlier than everybody else. Napping is key.
My birthday came and went under the tacky Vegas sun without much incident. I had been to Vegas twice before, once on a cross-country trip when I was five (my mother let us each gamble a dollar at Circus Circus)
and once in 1999, when I went to visit with Brett and his uncle and tried to make some money on the strip as the Eight Foot Bride, my living statue charater. I set up illegally in front of different casinos until they chased me away. Brett put on his tuxedo and we got married by a mime in the Venetian. Brian had never been, so I took him for a walk on the strip and we indulged in AquaMassages and ten minutes of Oxygen Inhaling at a kiosk next to an outdoor cover band playing Eagles covers. Vegas fascinates me. It is a place, and yet a non-place. A tourist attraction from the ground up, a disneyland for the depraved. But somwehere off the strip must be a real town, i wonder where....maybe The Killers could tell us. But they're mormons. Ah, who cares.
The show with Nine Inch Nails that night went well and the NIN folk sent an Amanda birthday cake over to the bus. All Black, one solitary candle. Very NIN. The band and crew have been wonderfully kind. The NIN keyboard techs went to town on my abused Kurzweil the other night and I watched like a nervous mother watching her child get a appendix out as they spent a solid half-hour trying to get it open to see if they could repair a broken key. You can tell when people are passionate about gear, they get this gleam in their eye that reminds me of little boys pulling the wings off of flies. Mr. Trent Renzor and some of the other guys in the band and crew came out to our non-NIN show in San Francisco and apparently loved it. Trent loved the Brigade and the performers....it was an A+ night in the world of the Brigade, Casey pulled out all the stops and there were painted crazed people everywhere, stilts, puppets, evil, costumes that had to be seen to be believed and the crown jewel of the Vau de Vire Society, a wonderful troupe of vaudelvillian pranksters who did a choreographed stage show to both Missed Me and Girl Anachronism. Little Sunday, one of our youngest fans (i think she's 4) wheeled her toy piano backstage in a red wagon and played me the opening chords of "Coin-Operated Boy" on it for my birthday.
The Coachella festival was a surreal experience and felt like a historic landmark for the band....the desert filled with music and illuminated palmtrees and sound sculptures, made me regret that my hallucinogenic days came to an untimely end long ago. All of the artists (there were at least 40 bands on our day including Bright Eyes, NIN, Gang of Four and New Order) were set up in this wonderful David Lynchian Trailer Park with Picket Fences, so that every band had a little home and a yard set up in a grid about the size of a city block. The Arcade Fire hung out in our yard because it was in the shade and I felt very honored. They were amazing, though we only got to catch about 6 minutes of their set as they went in right before us. I can't wait to see them again. Our set was in a large tent and it was packed to the brim with about 3000 people. We played one of the most intense 45-minute sets of our career and left stage delirious. More unreality set in as Peter Murphy grabbed me back stage and told me that he loved the set (important note: Amanda was a Bauhaus Fanatic for a while in High School). He came back to our
yard and we drank wine while I pinched my proverbial arm every fifteen minutes or so. I went and forraged for cigarettes for all of us.
Brian and I just bought airbrushed T-shirts at the Generic American Truck-stop in Arizona yesterday. His is reddish orange has a big Wolf and mine is blue and purple and has two Dolphins.
l
a
p.s. media lately:
Antony and the Johnson's new CD "I am a bird now" is fucking genius, a cd to cry and die to.
kathleen edwards' new cd - "back to me" is growing on me, still very standard alt-country but brilliant songwriting.
just finished "the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime" by Mark Haddon and highly recommend, it can be a long one-sitting read....
Saturday, April 16, 2005
Nine Inch Nails & Tori Amos
I do not want to live to archive my own life.
I see it everywhere around me, especially with the popularity of web diaries, forums, and cell phones that take pictures. I do not want to fall into the subtle trap of truly believing I Blog Therefore I Am.
I see this happening at our shows, as an alien army of fans in the front row hold their phones up to my face as if probing me for signs of life in some twisted Outer Limits martian ritual. But I understand this feeling all too well. The picture that you will take home, connect to the interweb, mail to your friends and offer proof positive that you had an experience is almost worth more than the experience itself. And as I realize that more and more people out there read this diary, it haunts me in my life. Each good deed, struggle, mishap and geuinely weird experience I have gets simultaneously logged into an unhealthy mental card catalog of Good for Web Diary.
My friend who knows me best has the perspective and advantage of being older than I am, he saw me grow through my teens. We used to talk about a moment that never happened, but was a perfect metaphor for my self-consious narcissism.
It is summer. People are outside. I am lounging alone under a shady tree, in a beautiful sundress, reading a book. As people pass, I am more aware of this picturesque vision of myself than I am of the book I am reading. I am sixteen, and I know I am the Poster Girl of Youth and Beauty and Freedom, and that the middle-aged men passing by me in their polyester jogging suits take a long hard look as I focus on the page, pretending to be unaware that they are staring at me, the icon of girl.
We could talk on and on about The Male Gaze, post-feminism, narcissistic personality disorders and so forth, but the truth remains simple. For some people, life is lived to be shown more than lived. I pray every day that I don't fall victim to this in perpetuity, it would completely suck. Fuck it.
The two dates in London with Nine Inch Nails (www.nin.com) were a relief. We were bracing ourselves for an onslaught of hatred just in case, but the audience was incredibly receptive. Nothing was thrown at the stage.
The band and crew of NIN were all very friendly, though you could feel that tension at first, before they all saw us play. I had imagined the whole aggro black-clad NIN crew sitting on their bus over whisky drinks saying
"So what about this gay mime band?"
"Dunno, Trent picked 'em so they might be good."
"We'll wait and see if they suck."
"Yeah."
In reality they were these amazingly kind and funny people. At any rate, they seemed to approve and decided to like us.
The band and Mr. Reznor Himself were busy as hell and cordonned off in some secret dressing room the way Famous Bands are, but on the second day we were granted an audeince, and we thanked Mr. Reznor for bringing us out on the road. He told us that he had been sent the CD by a friend, loved it, and that was that. Here we were. I had never seen them play until these shows, and these people fucking throw down. He's one intense motherfucker. From what I read in a recent interview, he's straight and into taking care of himself and his body lately, so when I get up the courage I will invite him to do some power yoga with me. Namaste, Trent.
And now, I must now delve into the uncomfortable subject of Tori Amos.
She's been haunting me for years and it's time the story was told.
My earliest memories of Tori Amos were of not really liking her, in that teenage-fuck-everything way, before I'd really heard much of her music. A friend of my sister, Rich Collins, was way into her and gave me a copy of her "crucify" EP. I didn't really dig it, and I didn't bother to dig any deeper. As I grew older and starting getting the comparisons, I just shrugged my shoudlers and said, "Not really familiar with it, not really into it." When I was working at Toscanini's, I think I was around 20, Mike Penta insisted that I dig. "You'll love her. I'll make you a mix." And so he did, and I listened. And I still didn't like it. This time, I more than didn't like it, I REALLY didn't like it. There was something about the vocal that irked me. But some of her lyrics and melodies were brilliant. Some I couldn't stand. This was really bugging me. There was one song on the disc "Winter", that I absolutely loved, but I wanted to go into the song with my bare hands and strangle some of the precious-sounding lyrics. I realized back then that the reason this was such a frustrating expereince is that the similarites - between my songs and hers - were enough that the differences were painful. The way human beings are terrified of likenesses of human beings that are "slightly off". Hearing the piano was like listening to someone speak in my voice, it felt like a violation. I would hear this word choice, this chord choice, this line or phrase and my blodd would just boil....wrong! wrong! wrong! No mittens and snowflakes! Evil! No butterflies, no goddesses, this is wrong wrong wrong! But the songs that were good rooted and stuck. They were few, but I was fucked. I had to admit that I liked them. After that I sort of forgot about her.
Then, recently, I got to the point where I could really afford to get CDs that I might not like. So I bought a bunch of her stuff. I considered this part of my job, research. I would even defend myself at the local record store, embarassed as if I were a guy buying tampons. "Heh heh. These are for my Wife." "Heh heh. This is research for my band. Really." I knew she was coming to town, I got tickets. I decided to delve headfirst and figure this out, and put it to bed if possible. Brian and I had gotten a DVD of hers and watched it several months ago and shut it off halfway through, bored. I had heard that she was a real fireball of a performer, and I was really disappointed by the blandness of it. I also cound't tell if I wanted to like it or wanted to hate it. I couldn't tell if I was jealous or looking for a role model. Some strange combo of all of these things, I think.
We left for tour and I brought a few of her CDs, including her new one, "The Beekeeper", and her new book. It was my project. Brian laughed at my face while he watched me reading. I would grimace, breathe through my teeth and put the book down while making a deep agoinized sound.
"What?"
"AARARRRGGHGGHGg. She's talking about the goddesses and butterflies again and refferring to a song as 'she'. Am I evil for hating this so much?"
But I was fucked again. Buried in all of the Corn-Mother, Butterfly-worshipping New Age LaLa there was a woman living my lifestyle. Getting in a bus with a bunch of people, writing songs, performing them, learning to cope with the crap-ridden, backstabbing music industry. Learning to cope with assholes like me hating her butterfly-worshipping side. I couldn't put the book down. So much of she was writing about, between the lines, was directly applicable to my life. I loved it and I couldn't stand it, just like the music. I listened to her first two records and found songs that I thought were genuinely brilliant. Meanwhile, I listened to the new CD. And I kept wondering...do you want to hate this? Do you want to like it? The answer kept being both (but with the new CD I had no choice, I couldn't like it even if I'd wanted to. Couldn't stand it.)
So we went to see her here in Boston the night before last, my band and I, and there I sat. And as I watched her I thought: This performer does not need to care about whether I like her music or not. She has a huge following, people who love her music and stick with her, she's forty, a mother and she's touring. Terrible album or not, Amanda, you've got to repsect this woman. Coming home, I finished the last few pages of her book and thought about what had struck me, stuck with me. One thing that she expressly said a few times was how sad she thought it was that female musicians and singers felt the need to compete so fiercly with each other, as if there were only room for so many - and it was kill or be killed. I wonder if that's true among those women at the top. I've never felt it. But maybe I have, without realizing it. Maybe my younger distaste for the Toris and the Anis of the world was borne of jealousy more than taste. As I've gotten older, I find that it all doesn't matter so much. I can allow myself to love this or that song, this or that album, and leave it at that. Soemtimes it's easier to love Avril than Tori. Sometimes I wonder what Liz Phair was thinking. Then I think about Bjork and all conflict disappears and I think that the rest of us should just give up and flip burgers.
So as Oprah would say, You Go Tori. I will always continue to buy your records, hoping to find a song I love. And your book made me think, and learn, and consider, and for that, I thank you. There are few of us, and indeed, we best stick together.
I see it everywhere around me, especially with the popularity of web diaries, forums, and cell phones that take pictures. I do not want to fall into the subtle trap of truly believing I Blog Therefore I Am.
I see this happening at our shows, as an alien army of fans in the front row hold their phones up to my face as if probing me for signs of life in some twisted Outer Limits martian ritual. But I understand this feeling all too well. The picture that you will take home, connect to the interweb, mail to your friends and offer proof positive that you had an experience is almost worth more than the experience itself. And as I realize that more and more people out there read this diary, it haunts me in my life. Each good deed, struggle, mishap and geuinely weird experience I have gets simultaneously logged into an unhealthy mental card catalog of Good for Web Diary.
My friend who knows me best has the perspective and advantage of being older than I am, he saw me grow through my teens. We used to talk about a moment that never happened, but was a perfect metaphor for my self-consious narcissism.
It is summer. People are outside. I am lounging alone under a shady tree, in a beautiful sundress, reading a book. As people pass, I am more aware of this picturesque vision of myself than I am of the book I am reading. I am sixteen, and I know I am the Poster Girl of Youth and Beauty and Freedom, and that the middle-aged men passing by me in their polyester jogging suits take a long hard look as I focus on the page, pretending to be unaware that they are staring at me, the icon of girl.
We could talk on and on about The Male Gaze, post-feminism, narcissistic personality disorders and so forth, but the truth remains simple. For some people, life is lived to be shown more than lived. I pray every day that I don't fall victim to this in perpetuity, it would completely suck. Fuck it.
The two dates in London with Nine Inch Nails (www.nin.com) were a relief. We were bracing ourselves for an onslaught of hatred just in case, but the audience was incredibly receptive. Nothing was thrown at the stage.
The band and crew of NIN were all very friendly, though you could feel that tension at first, before they all saw us play. I had imagined the whole aggro black-clad NIN crew sitting on their bus over whisky drinks saying
"So what about this gay mime band?"
"Dunno, Trent picked 'em so they might be good."
"We'll wait and see if they suck."
"Yeah."
In reality they were these amazingly kind and funny people. At any rate, they seemed to approve and decided to like us.
The band and Mr. Reznor Himself were busy as hell and cordonned off in some secret dressing room the way Famous Bands are, but on the second day we were granted an audeince, and we thanked Mr. Reznor for bringing us out on the road. He told us that he had been sent the CD by a friend, loved it, and that was that. Here we were. I had never seen them play until these shows, and these people fucking throw down. He's one intense motherfucker. From what I read in a recent interview, he's straight and into taking care of himself and his body lately, so when I get up the courage I will invite him to do some power yoga with me. Namaste, Trent.
And now, I must now delve into the uncomfortable subject of Tori Amos.
She's been haunting me for years and it's time the story was told.
My earliest memories of Tori Amos were of not really liking her, in that teenage-fuck-everything way, before I'd really heard much of her music. A friend of my sister, Rich Collins, was way into her and gave me a copy of her "crucify" EP. I didn't really dig it, and I didn't bother to dig any deeper. As I grew older and starting getting the comparisons, I just shrugged my shoudlers and said, "Not really familiar with it, not really into it." When I was working at Toscanini's, I think I was around 20, Mike Penta insisted that I dig. "You'll love her. I'll make you a mix." And so he did, and I listened. And I still didn't like it. This time, I more than didn't like it, I REALLY didn't like it. There was something about the vocal that irked me. But some of her lyrics and melodies were brilliant. Some I couldn't stand. This was really bugging me. There was one song on the disc "Winter", that I absolutely loved, but I wanted to go into the song with my bare hands and strangle some of the precious-sounding lyrics. I realized back then that the reason this was such a frustrating expereince is that the similarites - between my songs and hers - were enough that the differences were painful. The way human beings are terrified of likenesses of human beings that are "slightly off". Hearing the piano was like listening to someone speak in my voice, it felt like a violation. I would hear this word choice, this chord choice, this line or phrase and my blodd would just boil....wrong! wrong! wrong! No mittens and snowflakes! Evil! No butterflies, no goddesses, this is wrong wrong wrong! But the songs that were good rooted and stuck. They were few, but I was fucked. I had to admit that I liked them. After that I sort of forgot about her.
Then, recently, I got to the point where I could really afford to get CDs that I might not like. So I bought a bunch of her stuff. I considered this part of my job, research. I would even defend myself at the local record store, embarassed as if I were a guy buying tampons. "Heh heh. These are for my Wife." "Heh heh. This is research for my band. Really." I knew she was coming to town, I got tickets. I decided to delve headfirst and figure this out, and put it to bed if possible. Brian and I had gotten a DVD of hers and watched it several months ago and shut it off halfway through, bored. I had heard that she was a real fireball of a performer, and I was really disappointed by the blandness of it. I also cound't tell if I wanted to like it or wanted to hate it. I couldn't tell if I was jealous or looking for a role model. Some strange combo of all of these things, I think.
We left for tour and I brought a few of her CDs, including her new one, "The Beekeeper", and her new book. It was my project. Brian laughed at my face while he watched me reading. I would grimace, breathe through my teeth and put the book down while making a deep agoinized sound.
"What?"
"AARARRRGGHGGHGg. She's talking about the goddesses and butterflies again and refferring to a song as 'she'. Am I evil for hating this so much?"
But I was fucked again. Buried in all of the Corn-Mother, Butterfly-worshipping New Age LaLa there was a woman living my lifestyle. Getting in a bus with a bunch of people, writing songs, performing them, learning to cope with the crap-ridden, backstabbing music industry. Learning to cope with assholes like me hating her butterfly-worshipping side. I couldn't put the book down. So much of she was writing about, between the lines, was directly applicable to my life. I loved it and I couldn't stand it, just like the music. I listened to her first two records and found songs that I thought were genuinely brilliant. Meanwhile, I listened to the new CD. And I kept wondering...do you want to hate this? Do you want to like it? The answer kept being both (but with the new CD I had no choice, I couldn't like it even if I'd wanted to. Couldn't stand it.)
So we went to see her here in Boston the night before last, my band and I, and there I sat. And as I watched her I thought: This performer does not need to care about whether I like her music or not. She has a huge following, people who love her music and stick with her, she's forty, a mother and she's touring. Terrible album or not, Amanda, you've got to repsect this woman. Coming home, I finished the last few pages of her book and thought about what had struck me, stuck with me. One thing that she expressly said a few times was how sad she thought it was that female musicians and singers felt the need to compete so fiercly with each other, as if there were only room for so many - and it was kill or be killed. I wonder if that's true among those women at the top. I've never felt it. But maybe I have, without realizing it. Maybe my younger distaste for the Toris and the Anis of the world was borne of jealousy more than taste. As I've gotten older, I find that it all doesn't matter so much. I can allow myself to love this or that song, this or that album, and leave it at that. Soemtimes it's easier to love Avril than Tori. Sometimes I wonder what Liz Phair was thinking. Then I think about Bjork and all conflict disappears and I think that the rest of us should just give up and flip burgers.
So as Oprah would say, You Go Tori. I will always continue to buy your records, hoping to find a song I love. And your book made me think, and learn, and consider, and for that, I thank you. There are few of us, and indeed, we best stick together.
Monday, March 14, 2005
3/14/05 - Why We Are Not Rock and Roll
March 14, 2005. Bordeaux, FR
It's been a blurry week, shows starting to merge, towns starting to merge, life starting to merge, starting to feel repetitive...is it us getting used to this or have things honestly just been that routine for the past week? Both, I know.
The remainder of the german tour was incredible. We got to munich to find our newfound friends from "...and you will know us by the trail of dead" waiting in our dressing room as a surprise. Many fun was had, there was more dancing....this time the dj at the club was playing gun club and gang of four and human league....ah. We also did something very rock and roll, which was to throw a pair of hardboiled eggs against the wall. Granted, I cleaned up the mess, because I can't stand vandalizing the clubs we work in, but still it felt kind of rock and roll. A little. This brings me to an important point. We are not Rock and Roll. We do not smoke (well, much), drink (well, much), we do not trash dressing rooms, we do not stay up late into the night snorting coke of off groupies tits, in fact we do not do drugs to any Rock and Roll extant at all (does ambien count? We've been eating those like candy to fight jetlag and bus snoring), we do not get into fistfights with other bands, I do have a pair of leather pants that I used to wear religiously in germany but now that I'm actually in a rock band I'm almost too embarrassed to touch them, so we don't wear leather pants, we don't have shaggy hair, we don't wear sunglasses indoors, we don't wear pointy shoes, we are not Rock and Roll. On the contrary. An average day in the land of the dresden dolls is like group therapy at a geriatric nudist commune in the bay area. We drink juice, we do yoga, we get sufficient sleep, we stretch and warm up our voices, we give each other backrubs, we sleep with stuffed animals, we read books, we eat chocolate when we want to feel dangerous....I mean, it's fucking embarrassing bringing people on the tour bus. Instead of “this is the room where we have orgies and this smashed hole in the wall is from when brian....” we say “and this is amanda's tea collection and here's where we keep all our multivitimins.....”
I must say, though, having now been moderately exposed to bands who stay up drinking endlessly and snorting coke before shows: I Don't Know How They Do It. I swear to god I don't. If I eat too much sugar and have one cup of coffee and a couple cigarettes, I practically fuck myself for the next show. How do these people do it? I basically, through trial and error, had to stop drinking on tour. I don't have more than one drink - and rarely that - before going onstage. The early experiments with this, at the lizard lounge in boston when we were in our residency there, resulted in braincramps of the first order. I have a hard enough time remembering the lyrics and chords to all these damn songs that the minute I've got a couple drinks in me they sort of drift away like a childs lost balloon....goodbye, goodbye, there's no way in hell I'm going to remember you. Funny enough, last night (in the throes of complete sobriety, I might add) I decided to play perfect fit for the first time this tour and completely blanked on how the last verse started. I knew it had something to do with cards. Brian was miming insanely over his drumkit....shuffling and dealing like there was no tomorrow but I just didn't get it. We played a nice little instrumental for a good minute until he finally yelled “shuffle cut and deal!!” over my way and the song resumed. You've got to love a drummer who knows the lyrics better than you do. There are certain songs that just don't ever stick, and that's one of them. If I've ever re-written the lyrics, even once ten years ago, the song doesn't stick. I wonder why. I'm sure oliver sacks could tell me.
But I digress, back to being Not Rock and Roll.
I now limit my alcohol intake to two drinks tops on show days and a little more on off days. No coffee on show days. No cigarettes on show days. One on off days. Maybe two if I'm feeling indulgent. Every week I try to do a one-or-two day fast with no alcohol or caffeine or sugar. This helps. There is chocolate everywhere. In vending machines in the subway. Everywhere.
I've also been exercising more on this tour than any other, because I know I'll shrivel and die if I don't. My mood is so seriously effected by the amount of exercise I get that I'm starting to wonder if all that high school depression came on only because I quit the lacrosse team and joined the drama club. I carve out a little land for myself in the backstage area, lay down my yoga mat, and drishdi my little heart out for an hour every few days. I always feel a weird combination of pride (fuck yes! I'm exercising! I'm actively taking care of myself! This Is Unheard Of!) and shame (this is so not Rock and Roll). Granted, it's 98% pride to 2% shame, but the shame is still there. the ame ratio is there every time I turn down a drink, every time I decline an invitation to go painting the town red after a show, every time I toast with mineral water. But I know my body would fucking mutiny if I didn't do this. And our shows would start to suck, and my voice would disappear. So in order to rock and roll, one must not be Rock and Roll. It is the Rock and Roll Paradox. I look at all these aging rockers like keith richards and metallica and iggy pop and aerosmith and on and on and they've all had to become straight, yoga-fixated, juice-obsessed dorks like me over the years to sustain the touring life. I feel like I've just skipped the step where I OD and end up in recovery for six months.
It's been a blurry week, shows starting to merge, towns starting to merge, life starting to merge, starting to feel repetitive...is it us getting used to this or have things honestly just been that routine for the past week? Both, I know.
The remainder of the german tour was incredible. We got to munich to find our newfound friends from "...and you will know us by the trail of dead" waiting in our dressing room as a surprise. Many fun was had, there was more dancing....this time the dj at the club was playing gun club and gang of four and human league....ah. We also did something very rock and roll, which was to throw a pair of hardboiled eggs against the wall. Granted, I cleaned up the mess, because I can't stand vandalizing the clubs we work in, but still it felt kind of rock and roll. A little. This brings me to an important point. We are not Rock and Roll. We do not smoke (well, much), drink (well, much), we do not trash dressing rooms, we do not stay up late into the night snorting coke of off groupies tits, in fact we do not do drugs to any Rock and Roll extant at all (does ambien count? We've been eating those like candy to fight jetlag and bus snoring), we do not get into fistfights with other bands, I do have a pair of leather pants that I used to wear religiously in germany but now that I'm actually in a rock band I'm almost too embarrassed to touch them, so we don't wear leather pants, we don't have shaggy hair, we don't wear sunglasses indoors, we don't wear pointy shoes, we are not Rock and Roll. On the contrary. An average day in the land of the dresden dolls is like group therapy at a geriatric nudist commune in the bay area. We drink juice, we do yoga, we get sufficient sleep, we stretch and warm up our voices, we give each other backrubs, we sleep with stuffed animals, we read books, we eat chocolate when we want to feel dangerous....I mean, it's fucking embarrassing bringing people on the tour bus. Instead of “this is the room where we have orgies and this smashed hole in the wall is from when brian....” we say “and this is amanda's tea collection and here's where we keep all our multivitimins.....”
I must say, though, having now been moderately exposed to bands who stay up drinking endlessly and snorting coke before shows: I Don't Know How They Do It. I swear to god I don't. If I eat too much sugar and have one cup of coffee and a couple cigarettes, I practically fuck myself for the next show. How do these people do it? I basically, through trial and error, had to stop drinking on tour. I don't have more than one drink - and rarely that - before going onstage. The early experiments with this, at the lizard lounge in boston when we were in our residency there, resulted in braincramps of the first order. I have a hard enough time remembering the lyrics and chords to all these damn songs that the minute I've got a couple drinks in me they sort of drift away like a childs lost balloon....goodbye, goodbye, there's no way in hell I'm going to remember you. Funny enough, last night (in the throes of complete sobriety, I might add) I decided to play perfect fit for the first time this tour and completely blanked on how the last verse started. I knew it had something to do with cards. Brian was miming insanely over his drumkit....shuffling and dealing like there was no tomorrow but I just didn't get it. We played a nice little instrumental for a good minute until he finally yelled “shuffle cut and deal!!” over my way and the song resumed. You've got to love a drummer who knows the lyrics better than you do. There are certain songs that just don't ever stick, and that's one of them. If I've ever re-written the lyrics, even once ten years ago, the song doesn't stick. I wonder why. I'm sure oliver sacks could tell me.
But I digress, back to being Not Rock and Roll.
I now limit my alcohol intake to two drinks tops on show days and a little more on off days. No coffee on show days. No cigarettes on show days. One on off days. Maybe two if I'm feeling indulgent. Every week I try to do a one-or-two day fast with no alcohol or caffeine or sugar. This helps. There is chocolate everywhere. In vending machines in the subway. Everywhere.
I've also been exercising more on this tour than any other, because I know I'll shrivel and die if I don't. My mood is so seriously effected by the amount of exercise I get that I'm starting to wonder if all that high school depression came on only because I quit the lacrosse team and joined the drama club. I carve out a little land for myself in the backstage area, lay down my yoga mat, and drishdi my little heart out for an hour every few days. I always feel a weird combination of pride (fuck yes! I'm exercising! I'm actively taking care of myself! This Is Unheard Of!) and shame (this is so not Rock and Roll). Granted, it's 98% pride to 2% shame, but the shame is still there. the ame ratio is there every time I turn down a drink, every time I decline an invitation to go painting the town red after a show, every time I toast with mineral water. But I know my body would fucking mutiny if I didn't do this. And our shows would start to suck, and my voice would disappear. So in order to rock and roll, one must not be Rock and Roll. It is the Rock and Roll Paradox. I look at all these aging rockers like keith richards and metallica and iggy pop and aerosmith and on and on and they've all had to become straight, yoga-fixated, juice-obsessed dorks like me over the years to sustain the touring life. I feel like I've just skipped the step where I OD and end up in recovery for six months.
Sunday, March 06, 2005
03/06/05 - the dresden dolls in dresden
Dresden was a wildcard...an off-the-usual-touring-route for most bands, deep in eastern germany where the orange and brown polyester furniture echoes the commie era and the vibe is still very different from west german cities. It's poorer, it's bleaker and it also happened to get, oh, flattened in the war. Headed into the old town (I'd been once, back in 96 when I was living in regensburg) and walked around in the blistering cold, marveling at the beauty and visiting the newly restored fraunkirche. This huge, gorgeous church was pummeled in the bombing and the ruins were left standing by the DDR as a reminder of western evil. When the wall came down, they worked on the restoration which was just completed for the 60th anniversary of the firebombing.
We had no idea if people would show up for the concert, but in the end about 600+ folks showed up and it was one of the best concerts of the tour so far. Whatever it was in the air that was caused by the band name was palpable and we felt more embraced than in any other city....highlights included a big black banner in the crowd that read “welcome home in dresden” and a few dresdeners after the show coming to us and saying how genuinely proud they felt that we had named the band after their town, that we honored them. Holy shit. Weeping-worthy stuff.
The show in Cologne last night took a turn south as Brian and I bickered about bullshit up til showtime and I found myself completely distracted by the petty arguments echoing in my head during the show (about the same old bullshit....control issues, who's in charge of what, who has rights to stay and leave and call the shots for whom and on and on and god it's tiresome) and not fully able to concentrate on what I was doing until halfway through the set, which is rare and having PMS made it even harder to let the shit drop and just focus. One of the worst, and rare, parts of our otherwise mostly wonderful bandship is that we fucking love to argue and we can never let an argument end. When we get into let's-address-the-issue mode, we're both “....and another thing!...” types and this causes endless late soundchecks and bus departures while we go on and on at each other. It's very spinal tap, it's very typical for people in bands in general, and it's always been like this, but granted: it's getting way better than it used to be and our love for each other and the band grows ever deeper. There seems to be a two-three week point on every tour where the happy bubble bursts and everyone starts getting whinier and pissier.
On a brighter note, I'm slowly and painfully sifting through the 1000+ photos I've taken on my new digital camera since september and working on a fully captioned (sights! sounds! smells!) tour diary of the past six months. I'm trying to figure out whether to start at the beginning or the end....
I have resolved to cut coffee, sugar, beer and cigarettes out of my diet for the next three days, til we hit france. What was once (two short weeks ago) a very mild and harmless chocolate habit has grown into an ugly, wild-eyed addiction and I've been drinking not tons, but enough to leave me feeling crusty in the morning. Basta. Having quit smoking about two years ago, I'm still one of those annoying people who will ask you for a drag of your cigarette and then hold it there, worshipping it's smoking papery holiness like it's a bar of gold (“handrolled by god and licked shut by the claudia schiffer's pussylips” in the words of our hero bill hicks) before inhaling and sorrowfully returning it. Nasty habit, that, got to stop.
Every few days Brian or I will look at each other and one of us will say “we're opening up for nine inch nails this spring”. Then we'll observe a moment of stunned silence, then we'll pretend-faint and then we'll hop up and down a little. It should be an excellent tour, we're waiting on the word from herr reznor to see whether living statues in the theater lobbies will jive with the NIN aesthetic.
We had no idea if people would show up for the concert, but in the end about 600+ folks showed up and it was one of the best concerts of the tour so far. Whatever it was in the air that was caused by the band name was palpable and we felt more embraced than in any other city....highlights included a big black banner in the crowd that read “welcome home in dresden” and a few dresdeners after the show coming to us and saying how genuinely proud they felt that we had named the band after their town, that we honored them. Holy shit. Weeping-worthy stuff.
The show in Cologne last night took a turn south as Brian and I bickered about bullshit up til showtime and I found myself completely distracted by the petty arguments echoing in my head during the show (about the same old bullshit....control issues, who's in charge of what, who has rights to stay and leave and call the shots for whom and on and on and god it's tiresome) and not fully able to concentrate on what I was doing until halfway through the set, which is rare and having PMS made it even harder to let the shit drop and just focus. One of the worst, and rare, parts of our otherwise mostly wonderful bandship is that we fucking love to argue and we can never let an argument end. When we get into let's-address-the-issue mode, we're both “....and another thing!...” types and this causes endless late soundchecks and bus departures while we go on and on at each other. It's very spinal tap, it's very typical for people in bands in general, and it's always been like this, but granted: it's getting way better than it used to be and our love for each other and the band grows ever deeper. There seems to be a two-three week point on every tour where the happy bubble bursts and everyone starts getting whinier and pissier.
On a brighter note, I'm slowly and painfully sifting through the 1000+ photos I've taken on my new digital camera since september and working on a fully captioned (sights! sounds! smells!) tour diary of the past six months. I'm trying to figure out whether to start at the beginning or the end....
I have resolved to cut coffee, sugar, beer and cigarettes out of my diet for the next three days, til we hit france. What was once (two short weeks ago) a very mild and harmless chocolate habit has grown into an ugly, wild-eyed addiction and I've been drinking not tons, but enough to leave me feeling crusty in the morning. Basta. Having quit smoking about two years ago, I'm still one of those annoying people who will ask you for a drag of your cigarette and then hold it there, worshipping it's smoking papery holiness like it's a bar of gold (“handrolled by god and licked shut by the claudia schiffer's pussylips” in the words of our hero bill hicks) before inhaling and sorrowfully returning it. Nasty habit, that, got to stop.
Every few days Brian or I will look at each other and one of us will say “we're opening up for nine inch nails this spring”. Then we'll observe a moment of stunned silence, then we'll pretend-faint and then we'll hop up and down a little. It should be an excellent tour, we're waiting on the word from herr reznor to see whether living statues in the theater lobbies will jive with the NIN aesthetic.
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