I hear the sun is coming. It flirted with our skins briefly while I was loading the car this morning, and then it ducked away again. Now we’re driving through scenic Connecticut (provided your idea of scenery is trees) for an AM show at an unspellable college. Heather’s got a banana and she’s gesturing in questionable fashion, Kristen’s getting up to whatever it is she gets up to on that iPhone of hers, and I’m contemplating the continued need for teleportation in my Life.
I AM wondering how that conversation would go though – you know… with the venue?
Saturday before the show, we went a’wandereing through Putnam. I bought some action figures -at a 2 for 1 sale (last time is was 6 for 2!) and went to visit the mill that the town was built around. Connecticut’s been facing a LOT of flooding from all the rains, a lot of friends have missed shows in favour of vacuuming water out of their basements, and all the rivers were RAGING.
“Hi there! Venue x!” “Hi venue x, I was hoping you could tell me if coordinates blah blah blah point blah by blah…. Are they clear?” “Clear?” “You know, are they clear?” “Clear of WHAT?” “Anything – but most importantly, solid matter. You know, animate or inanimate.” “What?!” I’d hate to arrive at a gig and have to perform a show fused into a table top or something.
A weird antique store in Putnam, CT.
No matter. (ha! No matter could be in my way!) – no matter, what I wanted to talk about is how last night I didn’t get any sleep. Kristen has an enviable trait of generally dropping off pretty swiftly… Heather and I are generally a little more nocturnal, but I’ve been shifted to something semi-sensible, generally pretty dead to the world by 2am. However, out of the two of us, I think I’m the one who generally actually will suffer hardcore insomnia. She just stays up late – I’ll get into that place where I genuinely simply can’t sleep. And so – though Heather had clearly drifted off by 5, I was up till around 6.30am on a morning where I was going to have to be up by 8. I’m hoping to be coherent through our lunchtime gig, but I don’t plan to extend any promises.
Perhaps I was wired from the beauty of the night before – The Space really got a lot of words and sounds flowing through my head. Perhaps it was the tea I had at the venue – the black stuff BEFORE we cam back to the house and switched to herbal. I know for a LONG time at least I was visualizing of my dream guitar, and I eventually fell asleep fantasizing about playing a beautiful GX Composite Acoustic. I think I lost consciousness with my hands twitching.
Still, I managed to wrest myself from my nest after only one smack of the snooze (hair of the dog, luck of the Irish, smack of the snooze…). Got up, blearily nodded at our early-rising host, stumbled into the bathroom and did some face maintenance (I have to shave for college shows… too much grey… too much information? You like it, dear reader, you like it)…. The hot shower did more for me than hot coffee ever could, burning away the cobwebs in my head. A burst of ice cold water right at the end makes sure I’m ready to tackle the day and then it’s time for guitar maintenance.
I rarely break strings on stage now. Between my choice of the BEST STRINGS KNOWN TO MAN (the now discontinued medium Martin SP XP+, how I Loved thee, this morning I think I used my very last pack) and making sure to change my strings pretty regularly – even the metal nails and my aggressive instrumental fingering generally doesn’t result in too much string breakage. Last night’s stage-foul was sheer oversight on my part. And so I pulled the strings off the Alvarez, wiped it down, pulled out the errant bits of CRAP that inevitably collect inside the poor beast’s body, strung it up, tuned it, tested the flex in the body and the tension of the strings… found all things to be good… cased her and started packing the car. Kristen and Heather moving this way and that – even in this unfamiliar trio configuration and pre-10am, we’re functioning as a well-oiled machine.
