What… the… fuck? I’m so glad we didn’t see any accidents with THIS truck…
Heather and I are slightly more road warrior this evening than usual. Though we’re completely “nomadic”, very rarely do we do a lot of car-Living, which is fortunate. I hate sleeping in cars, and endeavour to avoid it at all times. However, tonight, in Columbus, Ohio we’re not quite sure where we’re spending the night. We’ll try asking from the open mic. We’re sort of in the middle of nowhere – kind of a non-happening strip mall in North Columbus – and aren’t quite sure what to do with ourselves for the next hour waiting for the open mic. We’re not QUITE ready to go sit in the dark Billiard Club and strain our eyeballs over games of Sin City rummy, and so we sit outside.
Eating beef jerky, Heather knits while I shave, creating vast drifts of my salt and pepper beard hairs on the faded and chipped white parking lot lines. My face has been getting exceptionally shaggy – mostly because I’d managed to lose my electric shavers temporarily. I do that. They sort of lead semi-mobile Lives of their own, wandering off and coming back again like somewhat independant little battery-powered dogs. I scold them slightly upon their return, but it’s not a big deal. The longer they stay away the bigger job they have to return to, so it’s not like they ever run off for TOO long.
At the Billard Club and Pub in Columbus, OH we see a couple of really cool groups including the Meantones (not pictured) who play a sort of acoustic incarrnation of Type O Negative, and Varian (also not pictured) who just have a damned good time. Above is a band I didn’t catch the name of. Sigh. But it gives you an impression of the nice stage we got. The sound guy seemed non-plussed by our existance, miking Heather’s djembe with a grumbling of “we usully just get acoustic guitars, this is like a damned rock show”. I sort of felt like he deserved the above band covering Dave Matthew’s cover of Jimi Hendrix’s cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”..
In any case, Heather says we look particularly hard-core at the moment – I like the term “road warrior”, which I’ve heard applied to nomadic musicians more and more frequently – we have specific tools. Hugh McGowan and I were talking about the best road warrior phones – his Treo vs my Audiovox. Laptops, mobile burners, power inverters, the tools of the trade for those who want to be completely mobile and leave none of their toys at home. It certainly satisfies the geek in me.
And so the road warriors have trimmed and smoothed. Heather has re-made up her make up and I’ve tightened my knee brace. We search for wireless networks and she knits a… a something. A patch at the moment. Perhaps someday it will grow into a sleeve. We look forward to the night and I plan my rummy strategy to the passing sounds of Mexican radio.
June 14th, 2006.
A very, very good night. We played the Billiard Club in Columbus, Ohio tonight and rocked it soundly. For all our almost non-existant experiences with Columbus in the past, this one sort of made up for it. Really friendly crowd, really ENTHUSIASTIC crowd – extremely responsive.
Going into a night unsure of what you’re getting into – it’s always a little dicey when you don’t know where you’re going to sleep. Bars are not my chosen environment, but we couldn’t have asked for kinder people. The host of the night, Nate, was even amazed
that during our second song a bunch of the crowd came up to him and asked him to take their money up to us. A spontaneous whip around netted us enough cash in ones and fives to get us to Indianapolis, and people just couldn’t stop telling us how much they Loved our set – trying to see if they could get us up again later in the night, etc.
To my experience, though we’re often appreciated, the spontaneous pass-the-hat thing doesn’t happen and I was just so flattered by all the offers and contacts we made. Of course, always the problem with late nights in bars – as the night progresses people become a little less reliable, and the guys that offer crash space become less reliable, or forget, or pick up women…
I ran into a whole lot of embarassment as 1am rolled around and I realized I didn’t remember what our potential host for the evening looked like. I go back to Heather and she’s like “remember? They’re friends of Zac’s and that’s him over there”. So I wander over to the table in to the middle of a conversation about covering one’s breasts forever and taking away a national treasure. That was odd. I start talking and tell the guy that yeah,
we’ve decided that he’s our best bet, and we’d Love to go home with him… begin the confusion. HE has no idea what I’m talking about. I turn to Zac and I realize he’s not wearing the right shirt and this is NOT Zac and I retreat embarassed and realizing that these guys must think I’m SO very drunk or spectacularly stoned.
Not that they have any problem with that, I’d forgotten how very prevalent pot and everything is in the bars in the midwest. One guy offered to tip us in a… sigh… I’m so unknowledgable… a twig of pot? A lot of foliage. I appreciate the gesture, I really do – and that’s a cold way of saying it – it’s one of the most flattering things ever. It’s like someone sharing their favourite food or wanting to share a book or a movie or their favourite band or something. It’s just not our thing.
In any case, I eventually did track Zac down, who pointed out James, who had offered to let us crash at his place (though in all honesty, I’d sort of gotten the impression he was a little weird about it), as the guy with the black backwards baseball cap on. I wander over to that corner just as another two guys with black baseball caps appear…
I feel really bad that I don’t remember names and faces. I don’t think I’m usually this bad about it – but man, for the Life of me I couldn’t keep anyone straight last night. A lot of names, a lot of faces. Thank God for distinctive t-shirts, distinctive hair, distinctive tattoos, but after a while, EVERYONE had one thing or another and I kept getting them mixed up.
Ah, our beautiful home away from home, the 40 Motel. Of COURSE they don’t have wireless!
And so a night that had started awkward flowed into a spectacular night of being the highlight of the night. A lot of good music throughout the night, and hopefully a lot of good connections for coming around again in the future. We even made friends with one of the DJs from the local alternative station – Ronni from WBZX “the Blitz”.
But then the awesomeness of the night slowly faded into the burning embarassment of being the outsiders who are just trying to keep up with names, faces, business cards, band names…
Eventually, Heather and I decided we’d been doing alright enough ad that just this once we’d stay at a hotel for the night. The beauty of all of our Road Warrior training means that 15 minutes later we’ve tracked down a Motel on the edge of town with a decent price tag. We roll tiredly towards the flickering red neon of the 40 Motel on the West edge of town, wake up the desk guy who offers “smoking or non-smoking? Well, we don’t have any non-smoking”, get our key and stumble upstairs.
Though the temperature of the room is perfect (how many times have you entered a hotel room and NOT had your first action be punching the button on the AC?) the bathroom door didn’t close and there was a dismantled kitchen sink in the middle of the floor. Heather and I became a little closer last night with statments like “you can turn around now” and “could you like… hum a little” and “please stop singing the pee song”.
Anywho, verything is put to bed, everything is charging. Heather’s breathing has changed and I’m hoping sleep doesn’t prove elusive.
Quotes of the night came out of the soundguy – “Hit that jam bay or whatever you call that hippie shit! Man, if she beats you like she beats that drum…”
Hippie shit my ass.
