darling, it's tour

This may be bad for our image, but musicians really do get homesick. We're just discreet about it. Not once throughout the whole tour did I hear someone say, "I want to go home." (besides Jordan, who was really rather nonchalant about it, seeing as how we all knew that he didn't want to come in the first place.) But near the end of both tours it was implied. You could see it in our growing frustration with each other, on our weary weighted shoulders, or when we would wake up on the bus in the morning, stretch our aching bodies and exclaim,
" I cannot wait to sleep in a real bed again!" Our joints would crack, hinge by hinge, and the subject would drop. Back to the road, back to the next show.
This longing is present in contemporary and older music. Personally, Carole King says it best in the bridge of her song, "So Far Away,"
"One more song about moving a long the highway, can't seem to say anything that's new. I sure hope the road don't come to own me, there are so many dreams I've yet to find, but you're so far away."

I was never really sure how to handle my relationship with Tony. I didn't want to seem needy, or overwhelm him with phone calls, so I usually called every other day or so, to give him an update, or to see how his french classes were going. He would ask me eager questions. I would anticipate our reunion silently.
In Tahlequah Oklahoma, a few nights before we came back he addressed my infrequent calls.
"You know Laura, you can call me more often."
He was right. I could have.
But by not talking to him more often, I could more efficiently deny the fact that I had missed him the whole time.

Joey would lay fetal style, facing the metal interior wall of the bus with his cell phone cradled to his ear. He would talk to Stevi until his battery drained.
“Stevi I love you so much.”
“Baby I miss you so bad.”
The rest of us would pretend not to hear his conversations, hiding behind our headphones or our books, but every once in while we would catch eachother’s glances, look over at Joey’s back and roll our eyes.

At rest stops we would disperse out to various worn picnic tables and call our families or friends. Phone conversations were difficult, as our experiences were hard to summarize. How do you tell your mother that you slept on a stranger's floor or that you brushed your teeth at a gas station? My best tactic was to keep conversation about home, daily tasks that were taking place, how my little sister was doing, the above ground pool that was being installed in our back yard. I would close my eyes while my mom was talking and imagine the sunlight cutting through the curtains of the bay window in the kitchen.
Slowly we would pile back on the bus and hit the road again, headed to the next venue for another night of nameless faces. Jordan would turn the key in the ignition and we would rumble down the highway. There were times when I would put my book down, and look out the blurred landscape of America, like a painting doused in paint thinner, and miss the solid look of land that stands still.


To be continued...

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/16-01/ff_byrne?currentPage=all

here's a link to the article that Fred Johnson referred me to. Really good stuff.

I read quite a bit this weekend. I read the bus section of H. Stith Bennett's work. That was pretty interesting. If I had to paraphrase it, I would tell you that he thinks that the bus is not only transportation, it is a physical manifestation of the band's image, as well as a private place to smoke pot. By far my favorite account is when he quotes a band member who says that the van is a great place to smoke, and is really nice because it gives his wife a place to nurse their newborn baby.
?! And my H. Stith quote of the week is, "Surprisingly not all Rock Musicians take part in habitual drug use."
He did have some interesting things to say about the bus, and it will give me a lot of material to use on my short flash non-fiction on the bus. It's going to take a lot of will power not to come off as mocking.
The homesick portion is coming a long slowly but surely. There's not a lot of analytical material on homesickness, so it is turning out to be a lot more memoir based, which takes me longer.
The Econ Book that I am reading Noise: the Political Economy of Music is completely fascinating, and very foreshadowing. That article by David Byrne was also really interesting. I'm doing a lot of more contemporary research on the music industry, since the Econ book was published in 1980 and could be considered out dated.
The homesickness piece is coming along rather slowly. I'll post a draft of that next.

I think that these should be in the over all project.

Being on tour gave me a new found appreciation for showers. Every bathroom was different. There was the suburban family household bathroom of Lombard, with dryer-sheet scented towels, and floral wallpaper curled over itself on the walls, then there was the dim-lit and dirty bathroom of Millwaukee, the bathroom that belonged to four hipster dudes, with organic mint-scented shampoo, and hair in the drain. There was the shower on the farm, after which I actually felt clean, because there was a breeze coming throw the lace-curtained window when I stepped out from under the hot water. I washed my hair twice that morning.
Sure, I had brought my own shampoo, Garnier Fruictis 2-in-1 that I kept in a large plastic bag in my suitcase. I would carry it in with me to the bathroom along with my toothbrush and face wash with every intention of using it. There was no reason to take from strangers, bath products are expensive. Curiosity got the better of me every single time, starting with Milwaukee. Mint-scented organic shampoo? What does that feel like? It ended up not lathering very well, the soap seeped through the spaces between my fingers and circled down the drain. It didn’t feel any thicker than the water running down my back. I didn’t feel clean at all after that. On the bus later the shampoo came up in conversation.
“Man, my hair smells so good!” Gavin exclaimed as his coif whipped him in the face as we sped down the highway.
“Did you use the Garnier?”
“No I used that mint stuff they had. Actually I used every shampoo they had, and it was awesome. I love showering at other people’s houses. They always have such cool stuff.”
“No wonder you take twenty minute showers.” Ian said. Gavin’s showers were marathons, and rarely left the person who followed with any warm water.
“I like to take my time man.”
“Yeah we noticed.” Justin said over his copy of Love in the Time of Cholera.
“You should try it.”

Out of all of us, Justin was the most particular about showering. He wouldn’t go a day without one, and he was usually first in the bathroom if he woke up in time. It’s not that he took an especially long time, like Gavin, or left the bathroom billowing with steam, like Joey, he just refused to leave a house until he had showered. He sweated a lot when we played and hated to feel dirty. The rest of the guys would rough it sometimes, waiting a day or two between cleaning, but Justin always insisted on lathering up before we left. In Minneapolis he had to go without a shower (We got kicked out for sleeping in too late. Famous line, “I don’t mean to be an asshole, but you guys need to get the fuck out.”) Justin was the first of us to wash his hair in a bathroom sink.

Ian only showered every three days. With most people this would be disgusting on th even the tidiest of people would smell after a day or two. Ian’s sweat just didn’t seem to smell very bad, so none of us minded. He just smelled especially nice on the days where he did clean up.
Here’s my theory on Ian’s sweat. I have this untested theory about his lack of body odor.
Ian drank a solid gallon of Arizona tea every two days, or about a liter of tea every day. On the bus the gallon was constantly by his side, he would take a swig, put it back down, wait a few minutes, and then drink some more. When he ran out of his first two gallons on the first four days of tour he started buying multiple cans at every gas station that we stopped at. As far as I can see there are no studies on the effect of sweet green tea and sweat production, but Ian stayed SO hydrated through his almost ridiculous intake of the liquid that it might have actually changed the way that his sweat smelled.
In any case, the rest of us just showered as normal, in other people’s bathrooms, using their shampoo whenever we could. We were fortunate enough on the Western leg of tour to never be out of a place to stay.

The Eastern leg was different.

Some of the other books that I found were about the politics of the music industry, making it, etc.
A professor in class said something that piqued my interest. "Record company execs are looking towards the new generation to figure out where the music industry is going, because they are clueless right now. If any of you guys have ideas you should get your voices out there."
That seems to be the voyage that I am embarking on in my writing. It's tough because it is such a multifaceted issue. There is a lot of resistance in the larger musical community (i.e. major record labels, successful rock stars, etc.) against change. Those of us who are on the bottom of the musical totem pole find ourselves standing and gawking up at them... there's no good way to get up there. Obviously there are those salmon swimming against the current, as there are still successful musicians out there, but there are quite a few more pitfalls than there were before.
There has been a shift in the exchange of information, starting with platforms such as Napster, which have mutated and evolved into things like Limewire or even Itunes.
I started this portion of my literary journalism stuff by just writing out a bit of my own experiences in the music scene, so I could get a grasp of my own opinions from inside experience. This brought me to things like burning cds:

After shows on tour I was our "merch bitch," as I was the cutest and most approachable of the six of us. Gavin would announce from the stage before the last song of the set, "if you like what you hear, talk to this little lady in the back after the show. We have cd's and tshirts and stuff. We would really appreciate your support." We would unload our gear from the stage and I would hustle to the back of the venue and set up camp. One night in Springfield Missouri an enthusiastic group of girls bought a cd from me.
"You have a great voice, the show was really awesome. Really good." The girl who was in the middle of the few of them held our cd close to her chest and smiled. The other girls nodded in agreement.
"Yeah! We're gonna make copies when we get back to my house."
What a verbal slap in the face. I felt like robbing their designer-brand purses, but suppressed my instinct into a wince/smile. I had assumed that the other girls would burn the cd at home, but to tell me that felt like robbery, and essentially it was.
Scene folk may not understand this but venues don't pay bands much at all. Next time you're at a show, take a tally of the heads in the audience. Multiply that number by the amount of money you payed at the door, usually about $5. Subtract about 15-20% of that for the venue (usually about a dollar) then divide the remainder by the number of performers that night. Sometimes the local act will be charitable and ask the doorman to give the traveling act a bigger cut, but most of the time that doesn't happen. The night of my birthday in Minneapolis there were six acts, and a five dollar charge at the door. The place may have looked packed, but there were five people per act...at least thirty of the people there were performing that night. All and all we made about sixteen dollars that night, to get our bus to Iowa on over $3 a gallon. It was impossible.
Merchandise really is what gets us show to show. With people burning and illegally exchanging, cd sales are down, making it very hard for musicians to thrive.

I’m also exploring the economic realities of the music business. My main source on this is the novel Noise: The Political Economy of Music by Jacques Attali, who believes that “if it is true that the political organization of the twentieth century is rooted in the political thought of the nineteenth then the latter is almost entirely present in embryonic form of the music of the eighteenth century.” He also believes that the way that music is exchanged is ominous of a change in social relations, which leads one to think of online social networking such as myspace and facebook, and the way those avenues have effected the music scene. Attali is very dense reading for me, as my economic education is very limited, and I find myself having to do a lot of back up reading to completely understand what he is talking about, but so far what I have read I agree with. He goes as far back to Bach to explain his point of view, but his theory still applies to our current situation.
He actually has changed some hypotheses of what the economy of music will evolve into. Part of me felt as if the industry was devolving, a slow adjustment back to bardism. The earliest musicians were simply entertainers who played for both the peasants and the courts, playing and performing wherever and whenever possible. That isn’t too different from the way that we lived this summer, especially when we had a few shows cancel on us out west this past summer. The night of my birthday we ended up doing an acoustic set at a coffee shop in Des Moines, and not making any money, just so that we could play a show. Justin, Gavin, and I sat on stools with Sierra Nevada’s in hand, staring out at an audience of five, along with Jordan, Joey, and Ian. We were stripped down to a banjo, an acoustic guitar, and two voices…as sparse as we could get, but it was better.than not playing a show at all. Surely that situation wasn’t too different from our bearded bard brethren from centuries ago. No, we didn’t walk there on foot, we weren’t carrying our instruments on our backs, and we didn’t have to juggle while we performed, but we were playing for whoever we could whenever we could.
What stands between us and the past is the technology. If it weren’t for social networks such as myspace, the tour never would have happened. These days the music business is completely networking, its who your booking agent is, or which out of town bands you have hosted when they came to your town, which venues you can get into. In “How To Become A Rock Musician” H. Stith Bennett distinguishes the difference between a local band and a touring band, “In economic terms, the traveling group’s bookings constitute a salary whereas the local group’s piecemeal bookings constitute wages.” This very well may have been valid when the book was first published in 1980, but now a days local groups have taken their ‘piecemeal bookings’ to the road.



....to be continued

In an effort to make my work more literary journalism-ish, I've absorbed alot of my reading to Rock n' Roll Culture. Last night I spent most of the evening in the basement of Bracken Library, looking at their music literature, old rolling stones, that kind of thing.
The most fortunate book that I came across was "On Becoming A Rock Musicia" by H. Stith Bennett. It's a How-to guide essentially, but its very proper and old-fashioned. He has notes on different gigs, how to pack a bus or transportation, developing an image for the band, doing covers, and how to have a good live performance. It's given me a good idea of how I want to structure things.
I've started several drafts of those quips, right now most of my energy is going towards "Washing Your Hair in a Truckstop Sink" which is a guide on hygiene upkeep on the road. I know that sounds weird, but showering was a stable thing for all of us, and there's something unique about having to wash up at a truck stop, in a public place. I want to write about the things that people don't tell you about on the road. People think about gigs, and boozing, and the glamour that is associated with rock and roll, but I want to debunk some of the mystique.
Another piece that I'm making progress is on homesickness and melancholy on the road, which is more memoir-ish, talking about the different ways that we handled being away from loved ones, specifically the contrast between the way Joey handled himself and the way that I did. I am researching the psychological effects of homesickness and melancholy, so that I can give it a more informative angle with memoir-ish quips. If that makes sense. In any case I am happy with the way that it is developing.
I also started developing my "Manifesto for a Touring Band" which looks like this so far:


Manifesto of a Band on Tour
We will complain about our self-inflicted poverty
We will sleep in parking lots, at truck stops, on couches, on floors of strangers
We will wash our hair, teeth, and faces in gas station sinks
We will always charge our ipods
We will not always charge our cell phones
We will overdraw our bank accounts for gas money
We will miss our loves the entire time
We will still flirt with members of the other bands
We will never see you again
We will break strings in the middle of a performance
We will play for audiences of no one
We will play for packed houses
We will pathetically ask for a place to stay from the stage
We will never see you again
We will shoot fireworks in your streets at three a.m.
We will eat your food
We will use your toothpaste, your shampoo, your face products
We will never see you again
We will get bruises from tambourines
We will take food from grocery stores
We will never see you again
We will abuse your free drink policy at the bar
We will not tip the bar tender
We will never see you again
We will barely eat by the end of this
We will spend the rest of our lives wishing to return to this
We will lose ourselves somewhere in between.



I'd like to have this closer to the beginning of the entire work, as kind of a preface, because it establishes the tone of what I'm doing pretty well. I feel it needs some editing, but it's a start.

I am a firm believer that every touring band should have Triple A.
Say for instance the band’s Chevy Vandura is stranded ten miles outside of Oklahoma on the humid afternoon of June 24th. That morning we all ate together at Waffle House, at the encouragement of frontman Gavin, who was eager to be able to eat and smoke at the same time.
Something felt awry, a sneaking suspicion that was not aided by our waitress at the restaurant. Her nametag and its two letters: TC.
“What does the TC stand for?” Gavin asked. I noticed the letters were also tattooed on the aged and veined skin of her right hand, as she wrote down everyone’s breakfast orders in a code not even the Rosetta Stone could decipher. She smiled at us. She was missing many teeth.
“Trouble Comin’.”
Her face came to mind later, when Ian’s bass head flew at me from the rear of the bus. I (along with my cherished copy of The Fountainhead and blankets) slid forward over the bus bench straight into Justin, who then catapulted into the back of Jordan’s chair. The rest of the band jerked around in confusion, gripping the edge of their seats, hard. Jordan was the one-man brass section of our band, but he was also our bus driver. He calmly took control of the wheel and pulled the short bus to the side of the highway while the rest of us looked at one another in complete desperation.
Had she cursed us? Did Gavin doom us when he exhaled smoke a little to closely to her face? Or did she hear us hypothesizing about her past and become insulted?
Our first idea was that she was the rejected lover of a Hell’s Angel who had been abandoned on the side of a Western-Missouri highway.
“No, wait. Those are obviously prison tattoos.” That was Justin’s theory. He was eating so quickly that remnants of his neon-yellow eggs and soggy buttered-toast got caught in his beard. She did look like the kind of person who could hold her own behind bars.
“Yeah! I bet she did time!” Joey, as always, spoke a little too loud.
“Joey!” I hit him in the diaphragm.
“What? Look at her!” He pointed at her with his fully-loaded fork.
“She could hear you…”
“Who cares?” He stuffed his eggs in his mouth and smiled. Trouble Comin’ looked up at us, eyeing our half-empty cups of coffee. She put on another pot to brew.
The woman sitting behind us suppressed a laugh and looked out the window. Her brilliantly airbrushed red nails clinked on her ceramic coffee cup.
Waffle House isn’t anyone’s idea of paradise. Except maybe Gavin, who was on to his third Pal Mal and only halfway through his meal. I asked the guys why they thought that TC would ever choose to be in this place.
“I bet she’s a member of the witness protection program.”
Dejected and feisty as ever, Trouble Comin’ had turned in her Hells Angel to the FED’s. Somewhere the rest of the gang was after her, eager engines revving. She had to lay low, and this Waffle House was her best option.
It was then that Trouble Comin’ came to refill our coffee cups. Her face was a series of canyons as old and parched as the terrain she lived in. Her skin hung as loosely as her uniform did, her apron paled with flour and bleach. She had filled our coffee cups assiduously, asking if we needed cream and sugar. Joey, the drummer, said yes.
“Oh! You like your coffee like I like my men.” Joey jerked his seventeen year-old head back in surprise, a nervous smile tensed on his face. “White, hot, sweet, and ready!” She had dropped that line before, on other customers. That didn’t mean it took us any less by surprise.
The looks we exchanged in reaction were comparable to those we made as the bus jerked on the shoulder of highway 44. Joey’s forearms braced on the edge of his bench, his veins and muscles clinging to support him. I realized that we had passed the last exit at least ten minutes ago. My teeth were clenched.
Justin, who had peeled himself off of the back of Jordan’s seat, is the kind of guy who carries a full tool set in his trunk, accompanied with blankets, and a flashlight. In that instant he was unprepared. He stared at his frayed corduroy slippers.
Jordan looked to the edge of the highway and got out of the bus to investigate the damage. He brought with him the set of warning reflectors, which he placed one-hundred, then two-hundred feet away. The rest of us remained silent on the bus, heads in hands, eyes large, mouths tensed. Jordan paused at the back of the bus when he returned. The dingy tint of Western Missouri dust gave him an aura of rust.
It dawned on us then that there was a solution to our problem.
“Gavin.”
He looked up, a Pal Mal hung between his lips. His right hand gripped his black Bic lighter, his left braced its oncoming flame from the humid summer wind.
“Don’t you have Triple A?”
He stuffed his lighter into his pocket and his cigarette behind his ear. The tension between his brows eased.
Jordan climbed on the bus, slamming the door behind him.
“The inner left tire in the back is completely shredded. I have no idea what the hell happened, but it looks terrible.”
“It’s okay man.” Gavin says, “I got Triple A.”

An hour later we were sitting in the burnt-orange booth of an Ice Cream store drinking a strawberry-chocolate shakes. The chain of events that evolved in the hour between the phone call and the shake solidified our faith in man and common decency.
It took three phone calls on three uncharged phones to get the tow truck ten miles north of mile-marker 135 on the interstate. There was little hope in the tow truck, which would only sit two. The remainder of us would have to wait on the edge of the highway. Many cigarettes were smoked. The sun glared and I winced for so long I could feel crows’ feet forming. I wondered how many times TC got stuck in this kind of situation.
It was then that a camper pulled over on the highway in front of us. We recognized it from the way the shiny white paint had contrasted the corroded exterior of the waffle house earlier that morning. The six of us exchanged tentative glances as the door to the camper opened. Secretly, I expected more of the worst, many a horror film began with a flat tire on an obscure highway.
Out stepped a middle-aged African American woman with a bleach-blonde side ponytail and a faded grey polo shirt. She lit a Virginia Slim menthol as she approached the Vandura. I recognized her as her scarlet fake nails stuffed her lighter into her jeans pocket. She had been sitting in the booth behind us at Waffle House.
“ I knew I recognized that bus.” She said. Her name was Lynn. She spent her time driving around the United States getting rich people their campers. It was a good way of life. She stopped to offer her assistance, and was willing to give the rest of the band a ride when the tow truck arrived.
“I figure this kind of thing will come back in my favor someday,” she exhaled menthol smoke, “lord knows someday a camper will break down and I’ll need some help too.” She gazed down the highway and we all waited for the tow truck to arrive.
The tow truck’s driver’s name was Roy, and he arrived ten minutes after Lynn pulled over. Gavin rode with him back to Joplin, a twenty-mile tow that was covered by his gold and black card. Roy lent Gavin a cigarette as he explained it would be hard to locate a tire for our bus. Not many people kept short bus tires in stock, but he knew of a good tire place in town that might be able to help.
The rest of us rode with Lynn on her air-conditioned camper, which she was delivering to Oklahoma later that day. Heading back to Joplin was out of her way, but her gas was paid for by the company, and she was running ahead of schedule. We passed the Waffle House on the way back into town. Trouble Comin’ was inside somewhere, giving people their breakfasts. I wondered if somehow she had known what would happen that morning. But Lynn kept driving, and the thought blurred as we passed.
The story ends at the ice-cream shop next door to the tire center, where Lynn dropped us off. Roy’s friend came in handy, and just happened to have the tire that we needed, as rare as they are. Dizzied by ice-cream headaches and the day’s events, the band sat silent in our booth. I’m not sure if we all felt dumbfounded, or blessed, but the feeling left us speechless. Trying to articulate the day’s events to friends and family later was nearly impossible. Trouble Comin’ was already becoming an urban legend, we promised to write a song in her honor. We made it to your show in Tahlequah on time that night, and the rest of this leg of tour ran smoothly. Of course none of this would have happened without Triple A.