March 9th, 2008.

Would you LIKE the story that begins with playing “It Ain’t Unusual” by Tom Jones and ends with slaying the black widow in Daryl Hannah’s El Camino’s engine block? Enticing, no?

Let us begin on Friday night then. We’d driven many an hour, abandoning our comforting Cary, NC home for the uncertainty of Tryon, half-an-hour South of Asheville. In Asheville the hippies have gone to create a beautiful mountain town that may be on it’s way up or may be on it’s way out. It’s got art and beauty and music and Lovely food. It’s got abandoned buildings and the homeless in force. However, the people who’ve decided they want a little less city in their mountain and a little less college kid on their street, have moved out to Tryon. It reminds me of a mountain town in the Rockies of Colorado with art galleries and sushi bars and theatres and train tracks running right through the middle. We’ve frequently played the Main Street Gallery Coffeehouse and this time around, though we don’t have a gig, we figure we’ll drop in on their open mic.

We don’t have a place to stay for the night, but in a friendly town you usually get great results from playing a couple of songs and asking from the stage – and so we enter this tiny coffeeshop with its velvet Elvis and it’s window to the sky, it’s huge PA and Lovely cookies without fear. But… it’s not the open mic. It’s the Pickin’ Parlor. The place swiftly fills with a circle of older players that make me think of the mothers of women from Heather’s mom’s knit shop. A song circle springs into Life with Sue the obvious head – she scolds people when they try to skip their turn and reminds them of positions of hands and calls out finger positions of scales and in general really amazes me with her encyclopaedic knowledge of the guitar. I’ve sat in with a couple of song circles where they trade folk songs and old traditionals and everyone usually turns to page x of Sing Out! and follow the G chords to C chords to E majors – and this was definitely what I was expecting.

I certainly wasn’t expecting one woman to say “I sold my Taylor and bought this Takamine. I needed the cutaway.” A lot of older country tunes – a total gap between their knowledge and my own. We managed to come together for a bit with Patsy Cline but they didn’t know Simon and Garfunkel or Joni Mitchell and we didn’t know… their stuff…. we played some original tunes and we got along well, but all in all it was a little bizarre. And yes, we eventually came together on “It’s Not Unusual” by Tom Jones.

Needless to say, there’s a certain comfort level required to actually ask someone if you can come home with them. Needless to say, though we dropped a couple of hints, that was about as far as we got and they fell with the softness of baby owlets onto the forest floor. Unheeded except for by creepy predators.

After a dinner of gas station hot dog, we ended up using our yearly hotel quota (once per) and Friday night found us checking in pretty early at some travel lodge or another. We watched some TV and went to bed and proceeded to totally fail to sleep. Apparently, someone seemed to be trying out their diesel V-8 in the room above us and there was just a lot of … activity. Between that and the impertinent .activity of the aforementioned gas station hot dog, sleep just didn’t happen.

(It’s hard to focus – I’m in Nashville, TN with my friend Whitney who is a master of such sentences as “Katy barfed up a bird once. It was red feathery barf.” Distracting to say the least).

We had to get up early to check out and decided to pass the day in Asheville. What with an hour and a half drive to Morristown and nothing to do when we got there but load-in at the Downtown at 8, we figured we could kill the 7 hours or so in the coffeehouses and streets and bookstores of Asheville. We could certainly use the coffee.

This isn’t usually a daunting task – Asheville is a beautiful town to walk around in and there are lots of wireless cafes and whatnot. Great art galleries… but it was COLD outside and we had to keep feeding the meters and coffeehouses lose their appeal after your millionth cup of cappuccino and your billionth lemon bar. I mean, we were exhausted but maybe you don’t EVER really need THAT much coffee.

I also decided to give the hot dog genre another go and we returned to Cats and Dawgs (specialties include cat fish and hot dogs) where I had an exquisite German sausage with sauerkraut and red peppers and spicy brown mustard. Eventually we managed to ship out for Morristown where we met up with our friend Dave (the old drummer from Nefrit El-Or’s band) and his girlfriend. we played a great show, met some wonderful people and settled in to enjoy the act we’d opened for, Will Bradford of the Seepeoples. We were going to stick out the night and stay in the crash space above the Downtown – we’d been warned that it was a cold night and the place had no heat, but – hey, it was better than nothing. And Hell, THIS place has the BEST hot dogs ever – “Coney island style” brings  me my first chili and onion dog ever.

Unfortunately, shortly into Will’s set, Dave comes back in and explains that his girlfriend’s car won’t start. There’s a couple of attempts to jigger it back into motion, to jumpstart it, all sorts of things – but eventually we fall back on a beautiful thing: AAA. My mother purchased me a membership when I got my VW bus 12 years ago and has renewed it every year for my birthday. It’s a godsend. A momsend. Whatever. We get through and the tow truck says it’ll be there by 1am and now there’s nothing left but to wait.

And wait.

At 12.45am we get a call that says “Sorry, that company doesn’t want to drive all that way so I’ve called another that will, they’ll be there by 2am”.

All what way you ask? Yes – I’d forgotten to mention that part of my tale. We’re going to be in Nashville, TN the next day. Dave is driving to MD tonight, but the woman’s car and the woman are going back home to Chattanooga. 150 miles away.

Ugh – it’s at around this time that we’re exposed to our unheated crash space.

Unchaining the gate and looking up the dark, dark stairs I realize that we don’t mean “unheated”. we mean “open air”. It’s 21 degrees in Morristown tonight, the tow truck’s not hear, see above about the people that are willing to take us in. and we come to the ugly decision. we’re driving to Nashville tonight. It’s only 3.5 hours. it’s only 2.30am.

Chaos.

The tow truck comes at 2am. It takes a long time to get us all going in our separate directions. Dave’s ETA is 10am – by comparison our ETA in Nashville at 6am should seem manageable, but for SOME reason I’d thought I’d drunk enough coffee already.

The road treats us kindly and I’m convinced that Heather actually fell asleep for a while though she claims this is impossible. By 6.03am I call Whitney to the door of her beautiful Nashvillian home and we load the car out and we stumble upstairs, half-heartedly play with the kitten and then fall unconscious till we’re woken by. excitement!

Enter Daryl Hannah’s El Camino. – well – guess who won the bid? Freddie and Whitney. They’ve just received it from California and taken their first look under the hood only to find a giant black widow perched, ready to destroy us all. It’s slowly coaxed out of the vehicle through the cunning use of paper and glass where it’s examined, studied and contemplated. After much deliberation as to WHERE exactly you let go a spider that can kill a man – the beestie settles the matter by escaping to the ground next to my bare (stupid) feet. She is quickly assaulted by other people’s boots and ground into the gravel.

So yeah. that was MY day.