:: tourlog 2002 ::

:: Friday, February 15, 2002 ::

2/14 – Happy Valentines’ Day. I’ll be in the car. All day. Driving 12 hours worth to Aurora, IL. But I’m psyched. I’ve been playing, I’ve been meeting great people, I’ve been signing their CD’s, I’ve got the new one meeting me in Aurora. I’m finally traveling east, and I have a crate of discs that I haven’t even listened to, yet.
Stevie Wonder – almost every disc he’s recorded
Ani DiFranco – Not a Pretty Girl (“Looking at the Million” – I cry every time), Reveling/Reckoning
Slobberbone – that band I opened for in Lawrence. They have a great song called “Lumberlung”, about some delirious man who is being nursed by his girlfriend, knowing that she’s becoming disinterested with him. In a dream, he’s driving, and he sees a child driving a car in the lane next to him. The child smiles, veers off the road, smacks into an overpass, and the car explodes. It’s excellent.
Soul Coughing – Ruby Vroom. This is what the drums on “Pictures of the Big Vacation” were supposed to sound like. They wouldn’t listen to me. Next CD, I will not ask them.
My demo’s for the next CD – just working on how I want to record them.
A whole suitcase full of other discs from everyone you can think of, Duke Ellington to Radiohead to sneaker pimps to Rival Schools to Deftones to Schtum. Sparkelhorse. Erykah Badu. Beck. PJ Harvey. Bjork. D’Angelo. I drove and sang along, digging the scenery, calling friends on the cell. The car is just a moving couch, and I’m hanging out. The world is a TV I can walk into whenever I want.

In Kearney, Missouri, I passed the home of Jesse James, and decided to pull over and take the tour. I love how history whitewashes outlaws. I like looking at little kids dressed as pirates on Halloween. Don’t they know what pirates did? If they did, Halloween would be different. “Trick or treat!” would be a bone-chilling war cry as the kids stormed the front door, raped the babysitter, slaughtered the boy-ghosts and hobos, and made off with the Twizzlers. And the Xbox. Whatever. Back to Jesse. Turns out, the Civil War went on a little longer in Missouri – it was surrounded by northern states and skirmishes continued after the peace accords were signed. Jesse and his brother were beaten by union troops, and converted to an outlaw life soon after. They had no dad, but their mom was huge, and could probably take any of the James boys on, until she lost her arm to a grenade, thrown into the window of her house by a Pinkerton police squad. Those fucking Pinkertons. I remember doing a report on the Pinkertons in high school, about how they foiled an attempt to assassinate Lincoln. Clearly, they failed later on. I didn’t do well on the paper, either, I think because Ms. Roosevelt confused me with the other Italian kid in the class who always used to fail.
Bitch.

There were some weird Jesse/bin laden correlations, especially when they guide explained how authorities couldn’t catch him because of his network of friends in the area who sympathized with his beliefs in the Confederacy. He was a terrorist bent on older ways, targeting banks and the new train system, and people thought of him as a Robin Hood because he didn’t rob women, Confederates, or hard working men, but still, his family owned slaves. I went to the nearby slave quarters and stood alone in there for a long time, just thinking. It was amazingly drafty, barely a house at all, just a wooden structure no bigger than a tool shed, with a stuffed bed, a ragged quilt, some rusty farm equipment, and a small brown doll with cornrows laying on the stained feather pillow. I remembered that it’s Black History month. I couldn’t even access the things I was feeling in that room.

I drove ‘til dinner, and found a TGIFridays outside of Iowa City. What a Valentines meal. The place was totally packed with couples of every age. The guys were taking their ladies out, getting them chicken tenders and a pitcher of light beer. The younger girls wore push-up bras, and packed on the eyeliner according to the rules set forth by Mademoiselle. Their shirts were tight, and showed off the bra straps that cut deep into the fat along their backs. The guys wore clean Dockers, belted, with crisp blue button down shirts and horny smiles. Every man in this room was most likely going to be getting some. Certainly every man was fixing to try, having sprung for the big night out at TGIFridays. Not me.

So what do I do? Try and get myself buzzed on iced tea and hope I make a move on myself while I’m driving? And if so, do I say yes?

And am I in Iowa or Illinois?

Dead deer: 2
Amish: 0
mike has traveled: 3844.80 YAHOO! miles

:: mike 11:15 AM [+] ::

2/13 - Why am I still traveling west? I know it’s only going to mean I have to travel as far going east. And soon.

Emporia State staged the show in their dining hall. A few people came on the recommendation of folks from the Kansas State show, others came from internet chat groups, mostly Rusted Root groups…yes, yes, this is how it grows. I played some newer material, since it was a smallish crowd. It felt great.

I was put up by the school in a killer old tyme Bed and Breakfast with a pearly white Jacuzzi in the bathroom. They asked if I wanted my eggs brought to my room, and served in bed. No puke stained Travelodge mattresses on this night… I was so grateful. I’m grateful for this whole tour, really. I'm just digging it.

I’ve also found out another fantastic Cracker Barrel fact that should sway you, if by now you are still riding on the fence about the genius of this family style art piece/restaurant: if you buy a book on tape from them, and read/listen to it, you can pull in to any other Cracker Barrel in the country and exchange it with any other title for a fee of $2. It’s like a lending library! OK, a library that promotes illiteracy, but still…what a place!

:: mike 11:08 AM [+] ::

2/12 – Mardi Gras only means one thing to me: it means that in one week’s time there will be a new volume of Girls Gone Wild. What are those stupid chicks thinking? Is that really “wild”? And what is it about footage of women lifting their shirts and kissing each other that only illustrates the sexual repression of the country we live in? I doubt those tapes sell well in Europe. In Europe, that video is entitled Going to the Damn Beach With the Wife and Kids. Oh well. Soon it’ll bed time to pull volume 15 out of my VCR and make room for…16, I guess. It’ll be like Christmas morning.

The Kansas State show was the kind of show that has made this tour artistically rewarding for me, although I still haven’t added in enough new songs, like I’d planned. I admit – I’ve been a little chicken about it. I rationalize by saying that I’m out here bringing people up to speed, so I have to play the big ones.

As my mom says, Sinatra sang “My Way” every show of his life.

This is a big school. I played in one of many restaurants in their student union which boasts a 16-lane friggin’ BOWLING ALLEY. You’ve gotta be kidding me. Another super-fan brought a bunch of friends, and told me, “Dude, I heard your song ‘Daylight’ a year and a half ago, and I’ve been looking for it ever since. I love it.” Out here, I’ve learned that in every city there are a couple of people like the guy I met here, and this year I’m going to find them. If they say that the live show was better than the discs, I have the live disc for them.

mike has traveled: 3249.4 YAHOO! miles
Dead Deer sighting: 0
Amish sighting: 2 (on TV)

:: mike 11:06 AM [+] ::

2/11 – “Where you off to, next, mike?”
“Leavenworth.”
”Leavenworth…wow. Have fun over there. Don’t pick up hitchhikers."

I heard a lot of this kind of talk in Kansas City and Lawrence. I was told, over and over again, that Leavenworth has not one, not two, but three major prisons; one state, one federal, and one military. This is where the murderers were hanged in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. So, do you play “When I get out of jail” here, or not? I don’t know. I mean, you don’t play “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” in Chattanooga, and you don’t play “New York, New York” in New York…right? Or do you? The Yankees play that song after every home game. Shit, I don’t know. I’ve confused myself.

I stepped out of my car, and was overwhelmed with the smell of cow. Not cow shit, or burgers, or leather, or any other process or product of cow. Just straight up cow. A raw, live cocktail of cow hair, cow sweat, drool, teat. The weird thing was that I couldn’t see any cows, and hadn’t for a while (“a while” at this point is about 35 minutes). All I could see from the parking lot of the Villager Lodge hotel was the Long John Silver’s next door, with the usual procession of each major fast food place down the main road from there, a K-Mart across the street, a Cingular Wireless outlet, and a pawn shop advertising a sale on “Unclaimed guns.” Cow had seeped into the fabric of this city. It made me think that eating steak is a patriotic act. If vegetarianism really took hold, America would be up for sale. We’d all be Canadians.

The High Noon Saloon was very Bennigan’s-esque, with license plates on the wall, deer heads, neon beer signs, black and white photos of anonymous high school football teams from years past, that high school long burned down for teaching evolution, the players by now reclining nearby in plaid upholstered La-Z-Boy chairs, swimming in an Alzheimer’s haze and dreading their next bowel movement. Some are long dead. Some are soon dead. I hate old pictures of football teams.

I told the hostess that I was here to play for a group that was dining here, and she dimly gestured to her left. I turned the corner, interpreting her directions (I’m good at that, by now), and walked straight into a private dining room with about 25 much older people, seated quietly at a long dining room table. Their grey heads turned slowly and faced me. There was an odd number of eyes in this room, and some of the ones I saw were purely ornamental. “Hi, I’m here…to play…for you?”
An old woman, dressed severely in royal blue with chunky gold earrings spoke up. “Oh, I think you have the wrong room. This is a church group meeting.” She paused, deliberately. “We were just saying grace just now when you...walked in.”



The St. Mary’s folks had organized a small group for a benefit in the “Great Western” conference room in the back, with bowls of snack foods, “pop” and such. They’d found a PA system, and I figured out how to make it sound pretty good. I managed to find a way to turn off the fluorescent lights, and adorn the stage with two moonshine jugs that had been converted into lamps. The lighting was warm, and the mood was not bad, considering. This was a far cry from the Bottleneck, no doubt. Again, a couple of super-fans were on hand, and requested some old-skool “Stacy” and “7 Bottles of Bristol Cream.” I obliged on the first. 7 Bottles is ridiculous on a single acoustic. It’s like “We Will Rock You” on a ukulele.

In the morning, at Homer’s, the only neighborhood diner that hasn’t been squeezed out by Long John Silver’s and the rest of the multi-nationals, I had breakfast next to people wearing flak jackets and security guard badges. The parking lot was a hive of patrol cars. The prison must be nearby, and must employ most of this town. I was the only guy there without a badge or a gun. Why does an intense amount of security make me feel less secure? What must the Leavenworth Greyhound Bus Depot look like? I mean, when the folks get out of jail, that’s got to be their first stop. I can see a guy in 70s style street clothes dumping a handful of tarnished change on the counter. “Where will this take me?”

That much’ll get ya to Manhattan, Kansas, my friend.
:: mike 3:47 PM [+] ::

2/10 – Morning radio show at KJHK with Bari Koral. Radio stations always sound to me like they emanate from a big place, with a big radio tower, a big DJ, a giant CD collection. In truth, most of the radio stations I’ve visited are cramped closets littered with band stickers (God, so many stickers in this world!), a broken coffee machine, a microphone taped onto a mic stand, and foam-core insulation coming unglued from the ceiling. Most of the music is pre-programmed via computer after “focus grouping” and various “favors” by record labels sort out who you get to hear. The DJ is basically there to make sure the computer doesn’t get unplugged by a stray vaccum cleaner.

There are, of course, exceptions, and KJHK is one. It’s one of the best stations I’ve heard, and you can hear it on the Web, too. Evan, the DJ, came in with a giant raspberry slushie, and suitcases full of cds to play. I could tell he loved his job (his show is called “Route 66”), and was psyched to turn people on to new stuff they might not have heard otherwise. I can’t even imagine what it would be like if radio stations were all so open-minded and not so in the pockets of record labels. You never would have heard of O-town. You never would have heard of, oh, NICKELBACK. Not to slight other bands – it’s just how the system works.

Evan asked about September 11th and its effect on the music scene, and requested “God” which I thought was really cool. That song has deepened unbelievably since the WTC disaster. I also played “Strawberry Song” which was written after September. I’m always happy to play requests – it makes me feel closer with whoever’s listening. I hope to have a copy of the show by the time I get back.

Night: The Bottleneck with Bari Koral, Slobberbone. Once again, there were a couple of super-fans, this far away from home. It’s pretty cool. I found that a lot of them are coming from Rusted Root’s Rust Tribe. God bless them. Someone requested “Halloween”, which is funny, because that’s not the title and because it hasn’t been released yet. It’s called “Underwater” and it’s going to be on the live CD. I'm glad, now, because even though the bottleneck is a cool, fairly large club with flames painted on the riser to create the effect that the artists are “on fire,” (or, on a bad night, “in hell”), the sound system was kinda screwy, and crapping out really badly on stage. The soundman kept saying the crowd wasn’t hearing the popping and crapping and farting, but it was really distracting. At one point I decided I’d just try and blow one of his damn speakers for the hell of it, but that’s real hard to do on an acoustic. The pictures they had on their walls were of Deftones, Radiohead, Rev. Horton Heat. They could blow speakers. Mr. Acoustic Boy could try, I suppose. I did try, actually. It was a good show for me. I needed to rip, a little. Kansas City was tough. Maybe I shouldn’t play cities that have a football team. Like, oh, New York. Which has two.

When I got off stage, a woman asked about my chipped tooth. A Tallboy5 reader, it turned out, and good friend of the infamous Levi Feeney, pimpin’ mack-boy tour manager of several of my previous tours. I thanked him on Tonight I Drink You All and for good reason – he’s clocked many a mile with me. Only Jake comes close. She’s from Kansas, and studying here at KU. I slid into the booth she and her friend were at, and opened wide, exposing the damage. She burst out laughing.
“You did that…HOW?”
“On a fork at the Cracker Barrel.” I need to come up with something better than that.
“What the hell were you eating?”
“Chicken.”
It’s kinda small, I guess, but still ridiculous, I think. After some humiliation, she admitted, “Oh, don’t worry about it. I chipped my tooth once. On my overalls. The strap kept falling off the button, and they would come undone. It was annoying. So I bit down on the latch part that hooks onto the button, and chipped my front tooth.”
“Let’s see it.”
She opened her mouth. I didn’t see anything.
“It’s not there anymore,” she said.
“You got it bonded at the dentist’s?”
“Um, no. I filed them both down to match each other.”
“OW.” The thought of that. The sound of low-grade sandpaper wheezing over exposed bone. The vibrations searing through my head. “Um...good thinking.”
“Kansas dentistry, babe.”
I guess so. Kansas Overall alteration, too, I guess.

I went out til about 4:30 with another friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend who tends bar at the Eldridge Hotel, and drank PBRs while listening to crazy banjo-punk – I have to find out what it was. Some local band. In a stupor, we decided Styx is cooler than Boston, any day, and if you just take the singing off Styx, it’s actually cool. No one would admit that, because Styx was seen as a ‘chick band,’ so boys only liked it in secret. He refused to tell me the story behind the cover art of the first Boston CD, with the flying guitars disappearing through space, even though I am sure I understood the message. He just said, “They gave money to some trippy artist, and guitars are cool, and that’s it.” I didn’t want to say anything, but I believe that it’s an apocalyptic vision, upon which the mythology of the band is based. The scenario, I believe, goes as follows: Planet Earth has died, and is seen exploding at the lower section of the canvas. The great cities of the planet (Boston among them) have developed guitar-shaped intergalactic pods (guitar shaped pods are the most aerodynamic and structurally sound for space travel – just ask around), and have all blasted off to discover, colonize, and ROCK other galaxies. I knew all this, but I decided not to get into it. Sometimes I go off on tangents, and when people don’t know me, they get kind of annoyed, even though the logic is unassailable. It’s just something they didn’t want to talk about. OK. Fine. On a voyage of self discovery such as this, some lessons are private.

Dead deer sighting: 1
Amish sighting: 0
mike has traveled: 3048.58 YAHOO! miles. And still traveling westward.
:: mike 1:33 PM [+] ::

2/10 - Rolled into the Travelodge on Iowa St., Lawrence, KS. There’s a mousetrap in the corner of the room. It’s baited with peanut butter. I wonder if I could lick it without the trap snapping on my face. I decide not to, because I wouldn’t want to have to report it here. Admit it – you’d think less of me. It’s cold in the room, but if I turn the heat on, the smoke detector starts firing warning shots, like piercing little digital blips. I decide I can live with them. I hope smoke’s not actually coming out.

Last night was the Hurricane with Bari Koral and Longwave, both from NYC, strangely enough. Smallish club, but a brilliant sound system. Still, Kansas City was rough. No one lives in town, and everyone seems more likely to shop at a Gap outlet and drink at Starbucks than they are to see live music that isn't "Original Kansas City Blues." Quick, let's see the blues guy play his little blues, buy the t-shirt to prove that we were here, and let's get a jump on traffic home. The Hurricane was an oasis in a very sleepy city. The buzz-cut doorman was propped up again the wall reading Noam Chomsky's latest book, "9-11." Three hot women were walking through the crowd in red shorts and tight white shirts, handing out mini bottles of Smirnoff Ice. Those multi national corporations think of everything. I wanted them to flank me and get a picture. They refused. Smirnoff Ice tastes like crap. I suggest you never drink it. It's Zima with a headache trapped inside.



:: mike 1:25 PM [+] ::

2/08 – Day off, piled into K.C. Played guitar in my room. Like I’m 12 years old, again.

:: mike 1:11 PM [+] ::