Saint Louis has been very, very good to us this time around. The tour in general has been a lot of fun with only a couple of really stupid nights – 10 nights with one night off and two nights that were kind of “eh”… it’s still 70% positive and the POSITIVE has been so overwhelming that it easily tips that percentage higher.
I have no real way of quantifying a good tour vs a bad one. We’re making good money, we’re meeting new people and getting lots of names on the mailing list. The two eh nights had some pretty extenuating circumstances. I’ve eaten great food and only had one bout of intestinal distress, and for me and my delicate, flower-like constitution, that’s pretty fucking good.
At the moment we’re hurtling on I-64 through Indianapolis which is flat and boring and naught but farmland interrupted by billboards and road signs. Last night’s show at the Stagger Inn was the best we’ve ever had there, but I’m left with stinging fingers that sort of wish the keyboard on my laptop was softer.
A bunch of pickup images… including the Saint Charles Coffeehouse… 
And more from the City Museum…. 
The Stagger Inn is a bar gig – mostly played because the money’s decent and the staff really likes us. It has a decent stage, but it’s a pretty hard-drinking place that’s slowly shifting from the older crowd of music Lovers to a young college crowd of party-goers. We’ve seen the shift in the years that we’ve been playing there – and the Stagger had become a grueling show, four hours of struggling for attention, always trying to decide whether you want to turn up so you can be heard over the shouted conversations, or turn down in the hopes that the conversations wouldn’t be shouted.
Well – this show was very, very different. This tour has been one of the first to see a break with venue loyalty. People have come to see us in different places than they normally have, and have come out for multiple shows. It was great to see familiar faces, and even better to see them more than once. It let us sit and actually have conversations with a couple of people, getting to know them better than we have in the past – and at Stagger it gave us a critical core of attention that we could play to and expand. We were in top form, with an audience to play for we passionately gave 125%, without that 125% being the frightening over-expenditure that giving 75% to an audience that doesn’t give a fuck can be. Jeff Wheeler joined us on djembe and that just helped the energy spiral up through the roof.
On the other side of that, the Stagger Inn… Again was in rare form. The first set was played to a very excitable Halloween party and a very drunken bridal party. The third set was relatively quiet and given over to us really being able to communicate to the chosen survivors… but the second set was like nothing we’d ever played before. A blonde girl in a tight, scanty zebra-patterned dress decided she needed to come up and dance with the lead guitarist for Peter Gabriel’s “Your Eyes”. She sort of wiggled and wriggled on the floor in front of me for a couple of moments, and then, with the whooping encouragement of the audience she climbed on to the stage. At first I thought she was headed for the microphone, which I blocked off from her. Then she just sort of moved in and started to get her grind on. The important thing is I only missed ONE chord.
With the guitar in hand, I could pretty much deflect most of her gyrations, but eventually she decided to play the guitar WITH me… and was trying to strum along.
That didn’t work very well… plus her boobs kept hitting the fretboard…. So she decided she’d have better luck getting around behind me and fretting. I found that as long as I could sort of solo under where she was trying to put her hands, she didn’t actually end up screwing anything up. It became quite the game and an exercise in my knowing my neck.
The song came to an end, I gave her a hand down off the stage at which she turned around to our two friends at the front of the table and screamed “FUCK YOU!!!!”
They responded with an injured chorus of “what did WE do?”s and she replied “NO! I mean I’ll fuck you! Both of you! Right now!!” Then she was helped into the bathroom by some friends who, according to the disgusted and angered reports of later bathroom-users and employees, didn’t actually help her to the toilet.
At least she didn’t throw up on me.
Other members of the audience were then kicked out of the men’s room where they had been enthusiastically having sex. I can’t think of many less-sanitary places, but at least if one or the other parties involved wasn’t good, the reading material on the walls is much more interesting than that found in most bathroom stalls.
We got home at around 4am and I slept through to noon and have still slept half the drive away from Belleville to Louisville. Ville to ville to ville to ville to ville…
I imagine Zebra Girl’s probably still throwing up.
Listening to Ani Difranco as the surrounding land translates from plains and farmland to multi-coloured forests and hills. The sun is setting behind us, highlighting the golds and reds and flaming glory of East Indiana Autumn and even the gridlike high powered electrical towers are picked out in oranges against the still-cloudless blue sky.
That’s the grin of a man who’s PARTNER’S loading the car! 
We’re just north of Santa Claus, IN – a tiny town that’s home to “Holiday World and Splashin’ Safari” where the names of the streets south of Christmas Boulevard are all named things like “Tinsel Drive”, “Evergreen Plaza” and “Madonna Circle”. The map shows them to have one street for each of Santas reindeer (except for Rudolph, but I’m eyeing “Randolph Lane” suspiciously) as well as a number of the creepier-named angels. North of Christmas Boulevard we appear to have holidays: Easter Day, Valentine’s Day, there’s both a New Years Day and a New Year’s Eve, a Good Friday, Inauguration Day and North Pro Super Bowl.
And as I look at the map and see that tonight’s venue is just off from yet ANOTHER “Broadway” I do declare – there’s NO excuse for having another 10 towns with identical street names people!!!
