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Tokyo to Omaha
“He was on his third drink before the wheels of the plane left the ground.”
Part I: Japan Japan. That’s where I was headed. How it happened, I’m not sure, but like most unexpected things in my life, I just went with it rather than question it. If I really gave any serious thought to the events that make up my day-to-day, I’d probably become paralyzed with fear and never leave the house. Mom was predictably exasperated by the news. She reacted as she always has ever since I expressed a desire to travel further than the end of the street we lived on when I was growing up: “Oh Bobby, what do you want to go there for!?” Like Louis Armstrong said about jazz: “If I have to explain, you’ll never understand.” In Maine, you’re either from there – or you’re from away. And away is not good. My parents (in spite of Mom’s protestations about my latest trip abroad) are among the more adventurous of our clan. They moved out of state to New Jersey – where I was born and raised – and never moved back. They’ve also done a respectable bit of traveling in the lower forty-eight. Still…Japan. Away. Best not to think about it. But I couldn’t help thinking about it here, on a big plane chasing the sun across the International Date Line. I wasn’t just visiting another country, I was visiting another day! It is of utmost importance to get a respectable buzz on before boarding a long international flight, especially if you’re flying coach. Also, a flight such as this gives one an excellent excuse to drink Scotch at 9:00 in the morning without having to feel guilty about it. There is a very nice bar in the LAX international terminal (everything is nice in the LAX international terminal), so I sat down on a sleek, postmodern barstool and ordered a Talisker single malt scotch. An Englishman, who lived in Dallas but was on his way to Australia, sat down next to me, and we struck up a conversation. It turned out that he was somehow involved in designing and updating currency in various countries. He even worked on the design of the new 100s, 50s, and 20s, 10s and 5s that are now in circulation here in America (the ones with the big heads). He told me about the special inks and watermarks they use, and that they’re printing the new money because Saddam Hussein had bought a bunch of old American currency printing presses and was cranking out millions in counterfeit U.S. dollars. All of this I was learning while getting drunk at the airport at nine in the morning. I was a little worried about all the government secrets he was sharing with me. He’d probably have to kill me after telling me all this stuff. I decided my best recourse was to order another scotch, so maybe I wouldn’t feel anything when he whacked me. I went over to the ATM machine to get some cash to turn into yen before I got on the plane. My barstool-flying co-pilot advised me that the exchange rate is better if I get money out of a machine in Japan. Then he pulled a 1,000-yen note out of his wallet – which was filled with dough from all over the world in every shape, size and color – and gave it to me! I toasted the man’s generosity and then got out of there before he remembered he hadn’t killed me yet. I was flying on Korean Air. The service was great, the flight attendants were babes, the food was excellent, and the drinks were free. I give Korean Air a thumbs up: it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it. I watched a couple of movies, had a couple of drinks, and read most of Blast From The Past, the new Kinky Freidman book, which I knew was going to be particularly good when I read the opening line: “Call me Kinky.” Next thing I knew, it was a different day, and we were touching down at the Tokyo-Narigata International Airport. The first thing I had to do after picking up my luggage was clear customs, which is not easy when you look like me. The Japanese authorities don’t dig us longhaired musicians too much, too many of us have tried to bring drugs through customs. I can’t blame the Japanese for being pissed off about that. I’ve always wondered: do these jag-offs actually think they’re not going to get caught? What, if anything, are they thinking? “Well, sure, I know they have dogs sniffing all the luggage and they cut off your hands and throw you in jail for life if they catch you with so much as a roach…but, like, they probably won’t mind if I have just this little baggie of China-White in my carry-on, will they? Like, I’m a rock star, right??” The promoter here in Japan had faxed me a letter to give to the customs agent. I don’t know what it said – it was in Japanese – but it must have been good ‘cause they sent me right on through. And then, there stood Chiaki Takahachi. It was the first time I’d seen her in five years. We met like this: Seven years ago, I was deep in the throes of what is referred to as one’s “salad days” (what does that mean, anyway? That you’re too poor to get a salad with your dinner, or you’re so poor that you can only have the salad?). I was playing at Hennessey’s Tavern on Pier Avenue in Hermosa Beach, California. Nine to one-fifteen every night. That’s right: one fifteen. Once I stopped at 1:10 on a Tuesday because the place was empty, and the manager nearly ruptured himself yelling at me and threatening to withhold the lousy sixty-five bucks I was supposed to make that night. The cheap son of a bitch that owned the place used to come into the bar and loudly proclaim (after a few Black & Tans) that he could “Put any monkey on that stage and his bar would still make money.” Actually he was right. People did not come to Hennessey’s Tavern to appreciate my fine piano improvisations and intricate vocalese. They came to get drunk, get laid, and sing along to the hits. I either delivered what they wanted or I got eaten alive (or ignored, which somehow was worse). It was the kind of place where people got so drunk they’d request a song while you were playing it. They endlessly requested “Brown Eyed Girl” and “Margaritaville” and “American Pie” and “Piano Man.” These are not bad songs. I once loved them as dearly as the drunks down at Hennessey’s, before I started playing there. But those songs have been played so many times that there’s no reason to ever hear them again. So one night I’m slogging through a typical night at Hennessey’s. It’s 11pm, I’ve just fended off my 47th request for Piano Man, and I’m so drunk I’m about to fall off the piano stool. About this time, a very attractive Asian woman walks into the room. After watching about a half-hour of my set, she sends up a note that says: “You are better than Ray Charles.” Now nobody is better than Brother Ray, but it sure did make me feel good all the same. When I attained the nirvana of my break, I went over to her table to thank her. She said she had gone to a Ray Charles concert that night and he had phoned in a 45-minute set and she had been very disappointed, but my music had cheered her right up. She also told me she was a promoter who booked music into the Japanese clubs all over the South Bay in Los Angeles. After that night, Chiaki would occasionally throw some work my way. The most memorable venue was a club in Torrance patronized only by Japanese people. It was very small, but I always got paid really great money. I could never figure out how such a small joint could afford to shell out such magnanimous scheckles for the entertainment. I found out later that the club, which was attached to a hotel, was running a prostitution ring for Japanese businessmen. That also explained all the great looking Japanese chicks with surgically enlarged breasts that I always saw there with aging guys wearing suits and wedding rings. Then, five years ago, Chiaki moved back home to Japan. I would hear from her about once a year. She would always say that someday, she’d book a tour of Japan for me. I didn’t take her seriously. After eight years of living in Los Angeles, I no longer expected anyone to keep a promise. But Chiaki was from Japan, where honor and keeping ones promises are important virtues (except if you’re a married businessman abroad in America, and you wanna bang a hooker). One day I got a call out of the blue. Chiaki could secure a whole tour of venues in Japan, with me as the headliner. Would I come and play?? After deplaning, I was tired and a little drunk. I couldn’t read any of the signs or understand what anyone was saying. At that moment I became totally dependent on Chiaki…a condition that would continue for the next two weeks. It is a little scary to be one hundred percent dependent on someone you really don’t know. It’s as if you’ve just been born and this person is your mom.
Day Two We took a train from the airport to another train station where we would catch the Bullet Train to Morioka, Chiaki’s hometown. This would take five hours, I was told. “Five hours!?” I said. “Where’s the bar?” We walked over to a newsstand on the railway platform and bought a can of sake. This in itself was amazing (you could also get whiskey and water pre-mixed in a can, and beer), but then she turned the can over and pushed in the bottom and in ten seconds, the can was hot! Hot sake – no flame! Rarely has technology been put to so noble a use. I happily sipped my hot sake until the train came. The bullet train is amazing. It took about three and a half hours to go a distance that would have taken all day in a car. We were averaging two hundred miles an hour in a quiet, comfortable train with beverage and food service. It was like flying first class without leaving the ground. We entered the restaurant through a hanging cloth in the doorway (no door). The room looked like something from a thirties movie set in the Orient: grubby, but in an exotic, agreeable sort of a way. We greeted Cole, who was already well into a bottle of Japanese vodka and had lost what little English he had. Cole was the kind of guy you just feel great to be around. He liked to party, but not in an annoying frat-boy-drunk-Japanese businessman type of way. He just clearly enjoyed life. In the two weeks I was around him, his smile never faltered. I wish Cole was here right now. I’d crack a bottle of Japanese vodka and toast him until it was empty. Without Cole’s dough, this tour never would have happened. Chiaki always had the desire to bring me over to Japan, and she had the connections to book the gigs, but the money from the gigs would never be able to cover the tremendous expense of getting me there and putting me up and feeding me. Enter Cole. Cole had made a fortune as a building contractor, and was a huge music fan. Chiaki had played him a tape I had made some eight years ago now, a cover of Ray Charles’ “Unchain My Heart.” Cole loved it so much that he was willing to put up the thousands it would take to have me come to Japan and play it live for him. At the restaurant, we sat at what looked like a sushi bar, but wasn’t. The owner/cook stood behind the bar and just made food as it pleased him. Many of the dishes he apparently invented on the spot – culinary improvisation. A little of this, a little of that. It was wonderful to watch him, and watch his clear transcendent joy in the act of preparing food. One exquisite thing after another appeared in front of us. It was all delicious. We ate and drank for hours while Elmore James and Muddy Waters (and, after a hushed conversation between Chiaki and the owner – Bob Malone) CDs played on the stereo. It was a fine first night in a far away place. Away. After settling up and saying our goodbyes, we picked up Chiaki’s car at a nearby parking garage where they saved space by putting the cars on little auto-elevators. It reminded me of the little Matchbox car-garage that I had as a kid. We drove to her place on the outskirts of town. There I nearly caused an international incident by not removing my shoes before walking into the living room. I apologized and worked my best boyish charm to smooth things out. A trip to Camp David thus avoided, Chiaki showed me to the guest bedroom, where I fell asleep instantly. The next morning, Chiaki took me out to what she promised would be a “real American style breakfast.” Had I been more alert (or alert at all) I would have told her that the last thing I wanted during my two weeks in Japan was an American-style anything. The best thing about traveling is that you get something different than what you get at home. Otherwise, why endure the inconvenience? I’ve always been baffled by the American tourist who, when he arrives in a foreign land, gets his panties in a bunch because things aren’t just like they are at home. If that’s what you’re looking for, why not just go to Disneyland? At Disneyland, not only can you see homogenized, americanized versions of other cultures, but you can even see a homogenized, sanitized-for-your-protection version of your own culture. My “real American-style breakfast” had about as much to do with an American breakfast as Kenny G has to do with jazz. But it was really good: salmon with some kind of white sauce on it and a side of delicate, hot pastries. I wouldn’t always be this lucky with food on this trip. Towards the end of the tour – feeling a little homesick and dying for something that was going to wake my colon up and make it say “Woh! We must be home now!!” – I abandoned my normally ironclad “when in Rome” policy and ordered a cheeseburger. It was a slab of meatloaf on a piece of bread. The cheese was a kind of creamy substance that hadn’t been able to make it all the way to a solid cheese-like consistency. Ketchup and mustard? Fagedaboudit!! This was not a cheeseburger. A lesson learned. After breakfast, we returned to the house. I had no shows booked for two days… Chiaki wanted to give me time to get over the jet lag, so I could enjoy the gigs. My guarantee was the same either way, so why not? Chiaki had private students coming over to the house (she teaches English), so I took the opportunity to take a stroll around the neighborhood. The streets were narrow and fetching, and it was a beautiful day. I went down to the railroad tracks just as a train was coming. That’s always a thrill for me, I love trains. Beyond the tracks was a rice field being harvested and I finally got to see what rice plants actually look like. It was a wonderful afternoon…no answering machine to check at a buck a minute, no calls to make, no gig to go to, no one to answer to, no traffic to sit in. A perfect day. That night we met Cole for dinner at a swank sushi joint. Chiaki and Cole were concerned that I would have problems with the local cuisine, but I quickly set their minds at ease: “Don’t worry! I’ll eat anything, just bring it on!” I said. It was a wonderful meal. I ate, without question or hesitation, everything put before me, much of which was unlike anything I’d seen before. Six sakes and countless beers into the meal, Chiaki turned to me and said: “You’re sure you’ll eat anything?” “Sure,” I said, “Bring it on!!” This was when they brought out the marinated grasshoppers. Well, let me tell you, friends and neighbors – hard as they tried, they had not gotten me nearly drunk enough to eat fuckin’ insects. With all of the other things there are to eat in this world, there’s just no reason to eat bugs. Sorry. I retracted my previous statement, and ordered another drink. Everyone else went ahead and ate the insects. It made this horrible crunching sound when they bit down. It was worse than that scene from the second Indiana Jones movie where they eat the “chilled monkey brains.” Worse, because it was really happening. The next day I’m having coffee, checking my e-mail, sitting around the house – like I do when I’m home, except I’m in Japan – and Chiaki walks into the room and asks me if I want to go see Van Halen. Van Halen in Japan, of all things. I love Van Halen. Well, I loved Van Halen with David Lee Roth. Sammy Hagar is the kind of boneheaded cock-rocker that I have absolutely no use for. David Lee Roth, on the other hand, may have had a vocal range of about four notes, but he had a sense of humor – something most hard rock bands desperately lack. All those deadly serious metal dudes sporting anti-social scowls and low slung guitars don’t seem to know that they come off as unintentionally hilarious to most people above the age of fourteen. Spinal Tap made real. Memo to metal dudes: just because your A&R guy calls you an “artist” is not license to take the title seriously. He’ll call his dog an artist if his dog’s band is moving enough units to make the quarterly profit projections. But Van Halen was different than the rest. Between Eddie Van Halen being such a skilled and inventive guitarist, and Diamond Dave injecting a little Al Jolson camp and just the tiniest bit of irony into the proceedings, they attained an accidental sort of artistry that put them way above most of their peers. And, dude: they fuckin’ rocked!!
Day Three Sunday, my first working day in Japan. I was going to play at a place called That Sounds Good! (don’t laugh, this was one of the better club names on this trip). It was out in the country next to a large lake, two hours away in the town of Tazawako. The place was a kind of musician’s retreat: a ski-lodge-looking building with about a dozen rooms, a place to eat, and all kinds of musical instruments on hand for jamming. There was a hot tub shaped like a piano, with black and white porcelain keys. You can bet I sat in that thing after the gig. An outdoor stage faced a large lawn beside the lake. This was where the gig was to take place. The piano tuner was wrapping it up when we arrived. I did soundcheck and went to my room. I was coming down with some kind of virus and desperately needed to rest. This always happens to me on a tour. I really must start taking better care of myself on the road. Maybe if I had a macrobiotic cook traveling with me, I’d be healthier. But then I’d probably start writing really crappy songs. A cold every now and then may not be such a bad thing. A good-sized crowd gathered on the lawn, and the opening band did their thing. The opening act’s bandleader was a piano player named Yoishi who was also the guy that drove us to the gig. He was really burning. Played jazz a hell of a lot better than I did. During the drive, we bonded mightily even though we couldn’t talk to each other. All it took was listening to a CD by Michel Petrucciani or Chick Corea or some other impossibly gifted, inspiring piano player, and we were brothers in arms, blissfully grinning at each other during all the really cool parts. After fifteen years of making a living as a musician, I’m still a fan. Whether it’s Miles Davis’s solo on “So What,” or Bob Dylan spitting out “Ballad of a Thin Man,” or Horowitz playing the Pathetique Sonata, or even Eddie Van Halen getting down on “Hot For Teacher,” or a million other things, I get all happy and goofy when I hear someone really throw it down. I turn sixteen all over again. Nothing else comes close to making me feel that way. I’ve already learned way more than I ever wanted to know about the music business. I harbor no love for airports, rental cars and hotel rooms. Cynical promoters, club-owners, and label hacks will not be missed by me when I retire. But great music still gets to me like nothing else can. It reminds me why I’m doing this in the first place: to glorify the music. It’s the most important thing in the world to me. The opening band finished and I went on. The Japanese audience was wonderful to play to. I did a long show with a bunch of encores, occasionally bringing Chiaki out to translate my stage patter. After the show, Chiaki sold a lot of my CDs, and I signed every one of them. Japanese fans don’t feel they’ve bought your record until you autograph it. After the piano was put back inside and the crowd dispersed, we feasted. Endless food and drink was produced and we all ate and drank and laughed for hours. I couldn’t understand a word being said, but I didn’t give a damn. I was in the throes of the happy glow that comes from doing a great gig, not to mention the happy glow from four glasses of Japanese whiskey. I sat there with a big-ass smile on my face while everyone chattered on. Later on, the jam session began. We found ourselves drunkenly running through jazz and R&B chestnuts. Two other piano players were there, so I played drums (I have drummer envy) and accordion. Eventually, I got on the piano, jammed with the band, and then did some ballads by myself. It got real quiet and I dug into some reflective-type stuff and took the room to another place. It was even better than the gig. I finally retired to the piano-shaped hot tub, and then to bed. Around four a.m. I dozed off with the jam session still going strong. The next morning, we went back to Chiaki’s hometown of Morioka to play at a place called Club Spain. We had gone there briefly after dinner on my first night in town. Upon arrival that first night, we’d been given the royal treatment. Free drinks and hot towels and a fawning waitress. I was so exhausted that I didn’t get to enjoy it properly, so now it was good to be back. Club Spain was small, intimate, dimly lit, with couches and wooden furniture and a long grand piano dominating the room. There was Blanton’s bourbon on hand. I was impressed and ordered a double. While I waited to go on, a wonderful live recording of the great saxophonist Archie Shepp played over the p.a. system. Chiaki gave the audience a long intro speech, and I went on. I hadn’t understood a word of the intro, but I connected with the crowd as if there were no language barrier. Two sets and three encores later, I stumbled away from the piano, drained but awfully happy. I was still sick, but the entire time onstage I felt just fine. This is a phenomenon that never ceases to amaze me. Once, back in Jersey, when I was sixteen, I was really ill with the flu: puking, fever, etc.. I had tickets to see Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band at Brendan Byrne Arena (now the lamely-monikered “Continental Airlines Arena”) and there was no way I was going to miss the show, no matter what my mom said. My friend Jeff McCarthy (who was one year older and had the car) picked me up and I sat in a miserable, sleepy delirium the whole way there. We surrendered our hard-won tickets and went to our seats in the last row at the very top of the arena – the cheap-seats, where I always sat when I went to rock-shows as a teenager. The performers who played to me way back there in the nosebleeds, as well as to the people in the front-row, are the ones who are my heroes to this day. I always remember the lesson they taught me: you’re only as good as your last show. If someone goes to the trouble and expense to come see you do what you already love to do, you owe it to them to deliver. Whether you’re in the mood or not. From the very first song, I completely forgot that I was sick. I stood and sang along to every note of “Feel Like A Number,” and “Her Strut,” and “Hollywood Nights,” and “Roll Me Away,” and of course “Old Time Rock & Roll.” By the final encore, I was feeling great – cured of my sickness by a Bob Seger concert. The next day, I went to school (with the Seger tee shirt on, of course) as if I hadn’t been delirious with fever and puking hourly the day before. Music can heal me better than any drug I’ve ever had. After my performance at Club Spain, I was very pleased with the evening, but still much under the weather. I ain’t sixteen no more. I signed a bunch of autographs and mustered up an endless supply of domo to offer all these people who were telling me how much they enjoyed the show. Finally, I escaped to the dressing room…where I had the great misfortune to be alone with the sound-guy. This idiot, who was also a guitarist who would open for me on the last gig of the tour and nearly ruin the show, was dangerously obsessed with Chiaki. As I arrived in Japan, he was reaching the stalking stage of his obsession. Just the night before, he had stood outside her house all night while we slept, watching. Chiaki had been up all night, scared to death. Now this guy is telling me in excruciatingly halting English how he’s going to move to America when Chiaki moves back there, so he can be with her…even though she clearly has no interest in him and he’s got a wife and kids back at the house. What is up with guys like this? I see a lot of this sort of thing. Dudes with an unrealistic obsession on a woman are bad enough, but married guys doing this is even more disturbing. These people have got to go. I extracted myself from the situation, and Chiaki and I went back to the house. The next day after breakfast, I did a live interview on a Morioka radio station. Chiaki translated during the interview. We went on the air, and I uttered four-word sentences, mustering as much low-key charm as I was able. The translation would be an excited ten-minute monologue by Chiaki, with the DJ adding encouragement. I sat there hoping that whatever they were talking about had something to do with what I said.
Day Four A couple of rich guys Chiaki knew invited us to the racetrack in Morioka. They were fans of my music. We had lunch in the special private upstairs area where only members were allowed. Jacket and tie required, no riffraff need apply. This was a first for me…usually when I go to see the ponies run, I am the riffraff. I love getting a Racing Forum at the 7-11, and going down to Hollywood Park on a weekday wearing a rumpled suit and a skinny tie. I drink bourbon, smoke cheap cigars and bet $2 box trifectas. Today at the track in Japan we were drinking expensive wine and eating gourmet food on linen tablecloths and watching the races through the window of our ivory tower. It was ok, I guess. But it wasn’t the track.
Day Five Tonight I was playing a club called Faces, your basic dance club: huge DJ booth, lots of lights aimed everywhere, disco ball, black walls, black ceiling. However, there was a 6’5” Yamaha grand piano on the stage, tuned. Our buddy, the sound guy, was already there. He had taken some time off from stalking the promoter to set up the p.a., mike the piano, and set up a vocal mic for me. Big of him, I thought, what with his busy schedule being a mal-adjusted obsessive and all. The place filled up. I did my energetic, over-the-top, big echo-y room set. They loved it. After signing autographs and having my picture taken with countless people I’d never see again, I got to slip my flu-ridden body between the sheets and catch some badly needed Zs. The next morning, I woke up feeling better. Checked my email on the laptop. Since leaving the States, email had been my only contact with the outside world. Today’s batch of electronic missives included some good news. My friend Josh, from the William Morris Agency, informed me that I was being offered the opening slot for seven shows with the Neville Brothers. Was I interested? My response was a calm, measured, professional, “Fuck, yeah!!” The Neville tour was already starting in the Northeast, going across the country as far as Denver, banging a colossal U-turn, and ending in Omaha, Nebraska. I would be picking up the tour in Lawrence, Kansas, and playing all the Midwest dates. This worked out great for me because I’d already booked some East Coast dates starting the day after I left Japan. I could just play my way across the country back home to Los Angeles. That’s how Josh put it. As if it were that easy. In order to do these Neville Brothers dates, I would have to cancel some gigs already booked. I hate that. Canceling a gig is a horrible thing for a musician to do. My philosophy has always been that unless you’re dead, you should be at the gig. Also, once you’ve booked something, no matter what other higher-paying gig comes along, you do the original booking. Unless, of course, you’re dead…in which case it’s ok to send a sub, as long as he can read the charts. This time I was going to have to break my own rules. When something this good comes along, there are only two kinds of people: people who jump at the chance, and people who are bitter and unhappy for the rest of their lives because they didn’t. I started e-mailing people whom I had to bail on due to this tour. To my relief, the responses were all positive, as soon as people heard the magic words: Neville Brothers. How could anyone blame me? The gig I most regretted having to cancel was the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville. It is a feather in one’s cap to play at the Bluebird. And it’s really fun. At the Bluebird, if an audience member talks during the show, they throw them right the fuck out. It is a temple for songwriters. My trepidation about canceling that date was for nothing. Bluebird owner Amy Kurland understood, just like everybody else, and she wished me much luck on my journey. Maybe I worry too much. Or maybe I don’t worry enough. I worry about that. As I sat here in Japan, the Neville Brothers tour was three weeks away. Tonight, I was off to a town called Kitakami, to play a place called Club Bigi, a tiny private club run by a large, entertaining woman named Masako; an authentic character whom everybody called Mama. This club, like others I’d seen in this country, was in a buildingthat housed a dozen or more drinking establishments. In America, a bar usually gets the whole building. Of course, we’ve got more space to work with. In Japan, you can go bar hopping all night without leaving the building. Mama also owned a bar across the street from the one I was playing in, where we drank during my breaks. This other bar was a faux surfer-beach-bar establishment. Having played bars like this in Southern California, I found being there uncomfortable. I’ve never liked those places. And I liked the fake version even less. I wanted to tell the people working there: “No!! Don’t do this! Imitate a bar that Tom Waits would go to, or Charles Bukowski! Not this! Anything but this!” Of course I couldn’t say this. They would just smile and say “Bud or Miller Light?” Oy. Technically, I suppose the gig was a success. I really had to pander to get a response. I opened with my most killer stuff – the ones that always slay ‘em. Nothing but polite applause. I downshifted to hip, non-embarrassing, but generally recognizable cover tunes. Nothing. Finally, as a last-resort, I pulled out the overplayed hack bar-band-R&B chestnuts that never fail to send the lemmings running for the cliff. Finally I got something out of these people. The crowd was mostly affluent, overfed businessmen out on dates with women most assuredly not their wives (could have been their daughters, but I doubt it). I finished off the set to enthusiastic (but pointless, as far as I was concerned) applause. I was offered many free drinks, signed many autographs, and got a bouquet of roses from a stunningyoung woman who was in awe of how well I played “Mustang Sally.” Oy vey. I did photo-ops with the club owner, and we headed back to the faux beach-bar. “Bud or Miller Lite?” asked the barkeep. “Neither” I said. “Do you have any beer?”
Day Six Today was a final day off before the last two days of the Japanese tour (and three nonstop weeks in the States). Cole was very excited. He was taking us to a traditional Japanese hotel, complete with geisha girls. A big honor, I was told, and very expensive. In the late afternoon we drove to the hotel, a big, rambling place on a hill overlooking Hanimaki. Very swank. We were shown to our rooms. Each of us was assigned a demure, berobed woman who would shuffle around behind you and do your bidding. She followed me into my room, awaiting instructions. Would I like tea? A hot towel? A drink? What I’d really like is for you to get the fuck out of here, I thought, so I can get some whiskey from the minibar and watch a little TV before dinner. This hand and foot thing was not my style. I don’t know how people can have servants in their houses. If I had servants, I’d always feel guilty every time one of them tried to do something for me. I’d be like: “Hey, don’t worry about it, I’ll get it! You want a beer or something while I’m up?” I guess if I ever come into the really big shekels, I’ll have to take rich lessons. Not wanting to offend, I said, “Sure, I’ll have some tea; and yes, a hot towel would be very nice, thank you.” Then, just when I think I’m approaching the far side of this cultural divide, she presents me with a robe and slippers. Apparently, I was required to wear this while in the hotel. I was already Full-Cleveland in my best Italian suit (and really, is there any other kind of suit?) and Italian boots, ready for the pleasure of eating a meal I could never afford with my own money. Oh well, when In Rome... My servant gave no sign that she would be leaving while I changed, so I finally made it clear that I would need no further assistance. If I needed her to wipe my ass or something later on, I’d call the front desk. I put on the robe and slippers – feeling like I was dressed to go to the pool and not to dinner – got a couple of mini-bottles of Suntory whiskey out of the bar, and waited for someone to come get me. The room was beautiful, tastefully done up in traditional Japanese style, with delicate woodwork and nice prints on the wall. But there was no bed. They come in while you’re at dinner and put a futon on the floor. With one pillow. Five hundred bucks a night and all you get is a futon. And no mint on the pillow. Oh well, it wasn’t my money. I was summoned for dinner, and led to our private dining room. Cole, Chiaki, Mama (resplendent in a leopard-print pill-box hat), and two professional geisha girls were in attendance. The geishas wore the traditional garb and had the traditional white-faced makeup thing going. Soon we were being waited on hand and foot by the Geishas and sucking up course after course of gourmet Japanese food. Three glasses – one for sake, one for whiskey, and one for beer – were kept filled in front of each of us at all times. I felt like a Roman emperor shortly before the fall. Halfway through the meal, Cole had them bring out a very expensive bottle of wine. This was all I needed, I was already three-sheets and counting. We all were. The wine was great. Eventually, dessert was produced and devoured, and the entertainment commenced. Geisha girls, I learned, are more than just high-class prostitutes. They are also trained in the playing and singing of traditional Japanese music, and a number of other art forms. Our Geishas told jokes (I guess they were funny, everyone else was laughing) and then one of them played koto while the other sang. It was all very charming. This bit of timeless Japanese culture was followed by the all-time worst piece of culture the Japanese have ever produced. I speak of the Karaoke bar. Off we went, down to the hotel bar on the first floor to – yes you guessed it – drink more sake. As this superfluous imbibing took place, we were encouraged to stand on a tiny platform and shamelessly molest our favorite tunes. What is it with Karaoke? There are already enough bad musicians out there crucifying songs in bars all over the world without the audience having to get on stage and join in. After a couple of hours of this, I was invited to go with Cole and the geisha girls to the bathhouse. Although Cole was picking up the tab for my geisha experience as well as everything else, I declined. I had a girl back home, and besides, I wanted to get back to my futon. I was beat.
Day Seven After a fine traditional Japanese breakfast at the hotel the next morning, Chiaki took me back to her place. Later that day we would drive to the city of Hanimaki, where I would play at a place called Club Doll. Chiaki was looking and feeling much better than she had for most of the trip. She had finally gotten a decent night’s sleep because the stalker couldn’t find us at the hotel. I felt so bad for her. Nobody should have to go through that. We checked into the hotel in Hanimaki at five o’clock, and went over to the club. The stalker had the p.a. all set up and ready to go (he may have been a nut-ball, but he was a professional nut-ball). This place was the smallest club I’d ever played in my life. And it turned out to be one of the best. There was a stage the size of the baby grand piano that was on it, and seating for fifty max, sardine style. The owner was a very nice, petite woman who did a cabaret-style act there at her own club. I wish I could have seen it. The place started to fill up, and soon they were packed in shoulder-to-shoulder, cheek-to-cheek, smoking and laughing and eating and having a great time. If Americans that close together in a room, there would be violence for sure. It was even making me antsy. I can’t deal with having my three feet of personal space invaded. Many an unlucky obnoxious drunk has gotten too close while I was playing in a bar and suddenly found himself on the floor. The Japanese, however, have adjusted to living in close quarters. Chiaki introduced me and I went on. Nights like this one are the reason I do this for a living. Whenever a musician (who doesn’t suck) plays, he’ll try to put on a good show, the people will respond accordingly, and hopefully it’s a satisfying experience for all involved. But every so often, something extra happens between performer and audience. It’s hard to explain, but you connect in a deeper way. It’s almost as if you are making love to the crowd. It stops being about any specific thing you’re doing. It is instead pure animal passion between you and the people on the other side of the footlights. I can’t remember what I played or said that night. I only remember the feeling that passed between me and the people in that room. It was magical. We did not speak the same language or come from the same world…but we understood each other perfectly. After a string of encores, I made my way back to the kitchen (which, as in many clubs, was the dressing-room), to get some space around me. I shot the shit in broken-English with the cook and a waitress, while decompressing from the show. I felt drained, but in a good way: emptied of stress, worry, insecurity, bad juju, and accumulated pain and disappointment. A happy, empty shell of a man. Later I emerged and signed many autographs. One exuberant fan gave me a beautiful painting that he had done for me. It was the text of a poem in ancient Japanese script. It’s hanging in a place of honor in my living room as I write this. I wish I knew what it said... After the crowd dispersed, I sat down with Cole, Chiaki, the club owner, and the club staff for a sushi feast with much sake and beer flowing. I’ll probably never play that little club again (and if I did, it wouldn’t be the same, ‘cause lightning like that never strikes twice), or see those people again…but I’ll never forget that night as long as I live.
Day Eight At the hotel in Hanimaki, I awoke to an overcast day. Over the last few days I had begun feeling homesick. Japan was wonderful, and I was having a great time, but being there was like being on Mars. It was so different, in such an intense way, that it was wearing me out. I longed to have a real conversation with someone who shared the same reference points with me. I wanted to drive a big American car on a big American interstate. I wanted to make love to my girlfriend. I was dying for a damn cheeseburger. I met Cole and Chiaki in the lobby and we had breakfast in the hotel restaurant. I was out of clean clothes, so we went to a dry-cleaner where Cole pulled strings and had my stuff done in two hours. While we waited, we went to the Kenji Mayazawa Museum. Kenji Mayazawa was a musician/writer/poet/painter and all-around Renaissance man who is revered nearly as a deity by the Japanese. It is a refreshing contrast to the type of person Americans generally worship: someone who is either rich, has killed a lot of people in a war, or can throw a ball really good. Among other things, Kenji Mayazawa almost single-handedly brought western classical music to Japan. He was a virtuoso cellist who gave string quartet concerts to audiences who had previously heard only koto music. Chiaki bought me a book of his poems and the sheet music to a song he had written that was an anthem of sorts to the Japanese. She said everyone in Japan learns this tune as a child and it would mean a lot to the audience if I played it at my show. Tonight’s gig, the last one of the tour, was at the Hanimaki Performing Arts Center, by far the biggest venue on this trip. It was a classical music hall, the place to play if you were coming to this region. There was a nine-foot grand onstage, with piano tuner standing by. Chiaki’s band would be opening for me. The stalker/soundman was also the guitar player in Chiaki’s band. He skulked around all day making everyone uncomfortable, especially Chiaki…who made me promise not to confront him. Showtime rolled around, and Chiaki’s band went out. They did their thing and everything seemed to be going fine. The crowd was large and responsive. Then, towards the end, Mr. Stalker Dude steps up to the mike and starts ranting about something in Japanese. Then he leaves the stage, mid-song. The band stopped shortly after, and the set ended with a kind of confused barely audible applause from the audience, who clearly were disturbed by whatever had been said. I asked someone backstage who spoke English what had just happened and she told me he had said he was quitting playing music forever and the band sucked and the audience sucked and everybody sucked. Blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada, feel my pain, I’m a fuckin’ artist. Chiaki was supposed to introduce me and bring me onstage, but she was nowhere to be found. Twenty minutes later, the audience was getting restless, and still no Chiaki. Finally I found her in a corner behind a door being yelled at by Mr. Wonderful. She told him to take a hike, and she went on and introduced me. The crowd was a little slow to respond at first – what with the floor-show and all – but eventually they loosened up and things went great. To close the set, I brought the band out (sans guitar) to play “Unchain My Heart” with me. That was fun, and Cole was thrilled. Then I went out for an encore and did a pretty, reflective version of the Kenji Miyazawa tune. They stood and applauded to raise the roof. People were crying. It was quite a moment. I’m so glad I did the tune, it felt like I had given the audience something back for all they had given me. Backstage, things had calmed down, the stalker had taken off, and everyone was having fun. I went out to the lobby where they were lined up to buy CDs and signed autographs for most of an hour. When it was over, we all drove over to a restaurant that had been opened up especially for us, and had a big end-of-tour farewell throwdown. Lots of sukiyaki warming on hot plates at the table, and beer and laughter and picture taking. I was going to miss these people. They were warm and generous and wonderful. I only hope I was able to get across to them how special I thought they were. Early the next morning we went over to a TV station to tape an interview that would be used in conjunction with the airing of the Club Spain show. I was tired and hungover and probably looked hideously puffy and disheveled on camera. I didn’t care. I just wanted to go home. After the TV thing we went to the train station and caught the Bullet Train to Tokyo and the Naragata International Airport. At the airport, Chiaki changed my yen into dollars, and we said our goodbyes. I was off across the globe, playing tag with the sun and moon on what would turn out to be the longest day of my life.
Part II: America “Omaha, on the west bank of the Missouri, is a plain little town, so unassuming that it still calls its airport an airfield. It seems strange that there should be a man here, Warren Buffett, who is worth some $50 billion; it’s difficult to associate plain, unornate Omaha with such riches.” “Oh well, oh well, I’m feelin so good today
After nearly 14 hours in the air, I arrived in L.A. at almost exactly the same time I left Chiaki’s house in Morioka, according to the clock. There was a three-hour layover in L.A., and then I would be flying to New York to begin the next leg of the tour, which would begin the following day in Watertown, Connecticut, opening for Average White Band. Karen picked me up at the airport and we drove the ten-minutes to my apartment. I had just enough time to look at the mail, pack some more CDs into the bag full of dirty clothes, and water the plants. In addition to CDs and dirty laundry, I would also be bringing my keyboard, which weighs a hundred pounds. I was going from the world of headlining overseas – deli-plate and grand piano at every gig – to the world of being an opening act in America. There would be no grand pianos now. On every commercial airline flight, the In Flight Peanut-Distribution Technician comes on the airplane intercom at the end of the flight and says: “We know you have a choice when it comes to air travel, and we want to thank you for choosing fill-in-the-blank Air.” Who the fuck do they think they’re fooling? Most of us choose the cheapest flight we can get, and we don’t give a damn what airline it is. And that’s how, on this endless day, I came to be flying on Tower Air, the worst airline in the world. The fare was low, but in the end, I paid plenty. I arrived at the Tower Air check-in (no skycaps on this carrier, bubbee), where, after standing in line forty-five minutes, I was told to get on another line to pay extra for my oversize/overweight keyboard. “Because you have to get in the other line.” “Next.” So, having now been up for 24 hours, I got in another line, just to pay more money. I wished I’d spent the extra hundred bucks and taken Delta. After another half-hour wait, I got to the counter, credit card in hand, ready to pay whatever they wanted without question. Instead of doing the transaction, they took my ticket and told me to go sit down and wait my turn to pay. I was now in serious danger of missing my flight. “Next.” One pound of flesh later, I found myself in a dilapidated airline terminal that might have been new around the time Eisenhower was president. No food, no bar, no restroom. Just one door where a loud, unfriendly, swarthy guy was harassing all of us cattle lined up to go into the chute. “Have your tickets ready!! Stay in line!! Move it, we don’t have all day!! Children must go in the overhead bins!! Get down and give me fifty!! Stand up straight, maggot!!” Tickets were snatched from our hands, and we walked down a long hallway to a door that went outside. There was no plane. Instead, an ominous looking, mutant, seatless doublewide bus-like thing squatted on the tarmac, belching foul diesel fumes into the clear blue Southern California sky. They called this vehicle a “people carrier.” It looked like a leftover prop from Blade Runner. Three hundred of us were loaded onto this thing. We stood there, hot and sweaty and close for about 20 minutes, until it finally got moving. We were driven at least two miles at about ten miles an hour, to the very outer edge of the airport tarmac, where our plane was waiting. I had finished the Kinky Friedman book and was now about halfway through James Ellroy’s L.A. Noir. I just hoped to God I didn’t finish it before the flight was over. For the rest of the trip, I read while the guy next to me thought up new and exciting ways to cough up phlegm. At 11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time we finally arrived in New York. Three hundred of us were herded into a small, sweltering windowless area to wait for our bags. An hour went by. No bags. An hour and a half went by. I could feel how mob mentality takes hold and riots happen. There was an electric feeling in the air, a harbinger of violence. Still no bags. An unsympathetic, droning voice over the intercom said our bags would be out in ten minutes. They announced this every ten minutes. Two hours later, the bags started trickling out. I retrieved my first two bags in the melee, but there was no sign of the keyboard. Two and a half hours after my flight arrived, I was standing in the baggage area waiting for my final bag…alone. Just as I began to feel like a lone Armageddon survivor settling in for an eternity in a stone bunker, my battered keyboard case emerged. Out in the lobby, my parents were patiently waiting for me. If I were Catholic, I would advise the Pope to process their sainthood papers right away. Dad had gotten a great deal on a new minivan, and he offered it to me to drive cross-country on this trip. Mom and Dad would be leaving New Jersey in their RV on the same day, heading into the sun towards a tanned, peaceful, and well-earned desert retirement (and an orgy of golfing) in Palm Springs. Once we were all in California, Dad would sell me the van and I would take over the payments. It was an offer I could not refuse. My current van, approaching the 300,000-mile mark, had nearly obliterated half of my last tour. A digression from my 1998 tour diary:
Okay, back to the East Coast. Mom and Dad and I put my luggage in the new van, and we headed for the swamps of Jersey. The house had already been sold, so my parents were staying in their RV on the campground at Mahlon-Dickerson Reservation State Park, just up the road from my old high school. I crawled into my bunk in the camper and slept for the first time in two days.
Day Ten Mom woke me up the next morning, made me breakfast, ironed my clothes, and sent me off with the kind of love that only a mom can provide. So whenever I’m in my hometown, I always try to stop by the music room to say hi, and let my old mentors know that I’m doing okay, and still making a living playing music. Just like they hoped I would. After leaving my old school, I began the four-hour drive to Watertown, Connecticut. Tonight I was opening for Average White Band at a club called Fat Daddy’s Tavern. AWB was one of my all-time fave bands during my youth, and this would be my fourth time opening for them. Fat Daddy’s was significantly smaller than the venues AWB normally played, but it was close to their homes, and the promoter had come across with the required guarantee. A gig is a gig. By now, I had gotten to know the guys pretty well, and they really liked having me as the support act. I was looking forward to the show. The only problem would be getting there. Jet lag was beginning to get the best of me. It was one in the afternoon but my body was positive that it was three in the morning and time to go to bed. I was in danger of falling asleep at the wheel on I-84 in the middle of the afternoon. There was also the cigar problem. I had not been able to find so much as a stale, mass-produced, cellophane-wrapped, gas-station stogie in Japan…let alone a humidor fresh Montecristo. Determined to find a few good sticks to ease me along the hard road ahead, I pulled off the highway near the New York/Connecticut line, and drove into a little podunk burg in search of a decent smoke. My luck was in. On the main drag, I found an honest-to-God, should have been torn down by now but wasn’t, small-town corner drugstore, complete with soda fountain. A place like this would have made me happy with or without cigars. But inside there was a big ol’ humidor with a sliding glass door, filled with cigars. I opened up the door, took a deep breath to savor the wonderful odor of a couple-hundred fat stogies all moist and ready to be smoked, and began to stock up. I got a couple of Partigas, some short Fonsecas, a few cheap, who-cares-what-the-brand-is maintenance-sticks, and one fat, twelve-dollar, Churchill-style Montecristo. This last one I would save for a special occasion…like, for instance: right now. I hadn’t had a cigar in two weeks. I was exhausted to the point of hallucination, on my way to the exciting, exotic land of Connecticut. If this moment didn’t call for self-indulgence, I don’t know what moment would. I paid a fat guy with suspenders at the worn, grooved wooden counter, walked back to the van, got into my seat, and broke out the cigar-cutter and wooden matches to begin the pre-ignition ritual. My new van, being a product of the oh-so-health conscious nineties, didn’t have an ashtray, it just had this empty area between two cup-holders that insinuated the concept of an ashtray, but with a big red circle with a line through a smoking cig painted in the middle of it. Well, that pissed me right off. Who are these people, telling me not to smoke in my own van? I’ll jump in the front seat, do a couple bumps on the dashboard, get a blowjob from a twenty-dollar whore, and shoot up smack with the seatbelt wrapped around my arm if I want to! And, for good measure, I might spill some Jim Beam from the glovebox pint on the steering-column while chasing it with an ice-cold beer from the cooler in the back seat, after I roll a big fat joint! Kee-rist! I sat there and smoked until a nice long white ash was hanging from the tip of the Montie. I dropped that ash right in the middle of the red no-smoking circle. Back out on I-84, I still had a couple hours to go before Waterville, where I would hang a left and drive ten miles to Watertown, where the gig was. It was strange to be back east. This is where I’m from, my roots, my stomping grounds. Pretty much everything between North Jersey and Northern Maine was familiar territory. But at the same time, after living ten years in California, it felt strange and alien. Of course, California feels strange and alien, too. Now, it seems, no place feels like home. In the time it took to smoke the Montecristo and one of the cheap throwaway cigars, I finally made it to the club. I angled my way into a parking spot out front, tires crunching on the snow along the sidewalk. It was early November, but winter had already begun to register its bone-chilling presence. I’d never done a gig at Fat Daddy’s before, but as I hauled my keyboard in, I recognized it as the kind of joint I’d played hundreds of times. The comforting odor of flat beer, spilled whiskey, and stale cigarette smoke wafted outward as I opened the door. Inside, aging pinball machines flanked the wall. The cheap wood paneling, way older than my first piano lesson was bruised with the punctures of a million staples that had affixed a million posters advertising a million forgotten bands that didn’t even get the chance to become has-beens. Those band members were now scattered, married, working day jobs, trying to bury their long-ago dream of rock and roll stardom. A long bar dominated the room. A large cash register dominated the bar. Like it or not, we all lived and died by that cash register. One of the beer taps had a plastic cup over it, signifying that it was broken or they’d run out of that brand. And there, calling to me like a dark pagan god, was the black stage at the end of the room. If you were not a performer, that stage would be nothing more than a battered, duct-tape marked, cigarette-burn-scarred platform with a couple of battle-scarred monitor speakers at the front edge. If you were me, strung out on the miles and always homesick for the one place where you could feel totally competent and totally at ease, it was the crucible, the Holy Grail. It was the place where everything I’d given up a normal life for would be either embraced or rejected. I climbed up on a barstool, ordered a shot of Jameson and a Guinness, and watched Average White Band finish their soundcheck. Alan Gorrie and Onnie McEntyre took a break from what was turning out to be a troublesome soundcheck, and came over to say hi. They were glad to see me, because one of the indignities being visited upon them of late, besides the occasional gig at a place like Fat Daddy’s Tavern, has been a plague of godawful opening acts. I had seen it first hand when I was third act on a couple of shows with them. Concert promoters had, for reasons known only to themselves, determined that the best opener for an AWB show would be a really mediocre R&B cover band – the kind that plays tired, un-funky, lame-ass versions of overplayed, threadbare tunes like “Play That Funky Music White Boy,” or “Brick House,” or “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.” Tonight, the guys in Average White Band at least had the comfort of knowing that Murph & The Magic Tones were not going to be opening their show. “Ay, he’s got that look in his eyes…looks like a fuckin’ zombie, don’t ‘e?? Bit of jet-lag, eh??” “Oh yeah, he looks like shite!” Agreed Onnie. “Fuck you!” I said. After that, I went to find Dave Brunetto, the AWB merch guy. He’s the dude who makes sure all those AWB CDs, tee shirts, bumper stickers, posters, keychains, etc., get sold throughout the night. Because he was a cool guy, he’d make sure the Bob Malone product got sold as well. It was now just ninety minutes before showtime. The band was just finishing their soundcheck. It wasn’t their fault. They were trying to hear themselves through monitors that would have been considered inferior by your average garage band. Phil Pagano, the AWB sound guy, was tired, hungry and burned out from being yelled at by unhappy musicians for three hours. But he stayed to do my soundcheck. It’s a good thing he did. Nothing. I plugged into another outlet. Nothing. Phil, now looking concerned, came out from behind his mixing sanctuary and inquired what was wrong, all the while doing his saintly best to suppress a low-blood-sugar, twenty-hour-day, really-need-to-eat-now kind of urge to bite my head off and pull out my fuckin’ lungs. I told him that the keyboard would not turn on. I had tried all the available outlets. “I’m gettin’ a beer,” he said. The place was really starting to fill up. I hate to soundcheck in front of an audience. I don’t like the crowd seeing the me that slouches on the couch in my underwear with the remote in one hand and a beer in the other, scratching my balls. I want the crowd to see the me that is cleaned up nice, observing good posture, and knows which wine to order with dinner. That is the me they paid to see. But tonight I was beyond caring about anything but the fact that if I couldn’t get this keyboard to work, I couldn’t play. In fifteen years of making music for a living, I have never missed a show. I sure as hell wasn’t going to miss this one. I ran out to the van and grabbed my toolbox. It’s the kind of toolbox that guys who don’t really know how to use tools generally have. After much slipping and sliding on the sidewalk ice-patches, I got back inside and opened the keyboard up, and peered helplessly into the tangle of wires, transistors, capacitors, and sticky beer-stains within. Phil ambled back over from the bar, looking much happier, and produced a flashlight. He shined his light into the morass and within seconds discovered a lone wire that had ripped loose from its moorings. “Let me get my soldering iron,” he said. So right there, in front of a packed club, while I stood by helpless with world-class jet-lag and a complete inability to understand anything that lay within the bowels of my own keyboard, Phil Pagano saved my ass. With a flashlight in one hand and a smoking soldering iron in the other, he re-soldered the wire, got me some levels through the p.a., and went backstage for Scottish whisky, Mexican beer, and Italian chow. Not bad. We’d all seen worse. A Mexican jail-cell has better amenities than many of the dressing rooms I’ve been in over the years. If your average con had to be backstage at your average club for more than five minutes, he’d have his lawyers screaming cruel and unusual quicker than you could say “frivolous lawsuit.”
I rode AWB’s coattails to the buffet table. The band invited me to take part in the spoils, and I dug in gratefully. I got a shot of Dewar’s in a plastic cup, chased home with a Greenie from the cooler, and a steaming plate of Fettucinni Alfredo. It was almost showtime. I could hear through the wall that it was starting to get noisy next door at the club and I knew it was almost time to make my way to the stage. The boys wished me luck. I walked out into the freezing night, past the doorman, and through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd of about four hundred people, to the stage. The soundman introduced me and I went on. The show went fine, from what I can remember. I was beyond jet-lag, running on alcohol and desperation. Still, it was fun to play, and the keyboard worked great all the way through the show. I could’ve kissed that soundman. After the set, I hung around the CD selling area, signed a few autographs and helped perspective customers find their wallets. Then I went backstage. The band told me that, whether I knew it or not, I sounded great. This was definitely a night when I sure did appreciate some outside perspective. Plus, it’s wonderful to receive a compliment on your music from your adolescent musical heroes. One of the club staff came down and led the AWB members on a circuitous route from the abandoned-deli down the block, through an alley, around the back of the club, and up a long stairway that led directly to the stage. They couldn’t exactly walk unnoticed through the crowd like I did, after all. The lights went down, the band was introduced, and the show began. As I heard the opening notes of “Person To Person” from my seat on a subwoofer at the side of the stage, I was transported back fifteen years to my sophomore year of high school, listening to the AWB live album from ‘77 with Mike Bayliff, the guitar player in my first garage band. We would listen to that record repeatedly and wonder if someday we’d ever be that good. Tonight at Fat Daddy’s was no mere nostalgia show, however. The goods were being delivered in full. And it clearly didn’t matter to these guys that they were playing Fat Daddy’s Tavern instead of playing a theatre or a festival, or even the hockey-arenas of their 1970s peak. The important thing was the music. It’s how they got there in the first place, and they still love to play more than anything else. This is how it should be. By the end of the show, my ass was dragging so far behind me that I needed a compass to find it, so I said goodbye to the backstage crowd and went off in search of a hotel room. Not only was there no Motel 6…there wasn’t anything. When a rare exit indicated the presence of a motel, it was ten miles off the interstate down some unlit two-lane road. That’s how you know you're in New England: when you get off the highway for gas, the gas station is so far from the highway that you run out of gas trying to get to it. Travel tip: When traveling in New England, always stop for gas when you’re down to three-quarters of a tank. Three times I turned off, and when I got to the purported hotel/motel, I was greeted by a “No Vacancy” sign. One hotel had rooms, but there was nobody at the desk. I rang the bell. I banged on the counter. I yelled “Fire!” Nothing. Nobody came. Here’s a little known fact that you can consider while pondering the downfall of Western Civilization: it costs one hundred fucking dollars a night to stay at the Holiday Inn in Fishkill, New York. I tossed my credit card at the surly, calcified, overly-rouged woman manning the desk, and dragged my sorry ass up to my overpriced room. It was nothing more than a Motel 6 room with a mint on the pillow. I had five hours to sleep.
Day Eleven At dawn I dressed in the clothes from the day before, and hauled ass out of Fishkill. I had to drive two and a half hours to Chester, New York, where I was doing a 10 a.m. radio interview with the guy who books the club I was playing that night. The one highlight of this bleary morning was the rare pleasure of being up early enough to get breakfast at McDonalds. I just love breakfast at Micky D’s. A couple of those pre-fab corrugated hash browns and a Sausage McMuffin with the Processed American Egg-Food Product and those perfectly round sausage patties with the suspicious-looking little red things in them always perk me right up. Also, don’t forget that really hot Mc D’s coffee (as in: so hot that hopefully you’ll be too preoccupied with your burnt tongue to notice how bad the coffee tastes). There’s always the chance you could spill it on yourself and get a couple mil out of Ronald McD, Inc. I made it to the radio station, which was in Florida, New York (there’s an oxymoron for ya), one town over from Chester. I slouched in. Considering I’m a guy you’ve probably never heard on the radio, I’ve been played on a lot of radio stations. Hundreds of them. I get airplay by going to the stations and playing live on the air. Radio people like that. They get to know you, so they’ll likely give your records a spin or two in the future. This is how it works when you’re not on a major record-label with millions of dollars to spend on promo. If you are on a major label, it works like this: the radio promoter gets the program directors at all the key stations a few grams of Peruvian marching-powder, a couple of underage hookers, a new wing on the house, and about forty large in nonsequential unmarked bills, and viola: you have a hit! Actually, that’s the way it used to be, back in the good old days when humans ran the music business. Now it’s even worse. The big commercial radio stations send prospective singles to these consultants, who play the tunes for a big mainframe computer somewhere in a bunker in Colorado, and the computer determines whether the record will appeal to the absolute stone-brain-dead-lowest-common-denominator pool of listeners. If the computer thinks people who live in trailers and watch rasslin’ on TV will like your tune, you get spins. Yet, in spite of the Orwellian state of radio these days, there are deejay holdouts who still do it for the music – mostly leftovers from the late ‘60s, early ‘70s glory days of eclectic free-form FM. There’s a surprising number of them out there, nationwide, and they play records by people like me. I’ve even gotten royalty checks for airplay. Of course, these checks have fewer commas in them than, say, the checks Posh Spice gets (but only this week…her 15 minutes are almost up). Still, it beats working. I hauled the keyboard in, said hi to Jon Stein, the DJ/club booker, and we did the usual interview with some live tunes and a couple of things from the CD. After that, I went off in search of a hotel room. I was exhausted. I located a cheap motel and checked into a filthy, ill-heated room that smelled like an ashtray and had water stains on the walls and ceiling. I didn’t give a shit. I’d flown Tower Air. I threw my bag on the floor, went immediately to bed, and stayed there for the rest of the day. I awoke feeling more disoriented and confused than before the nap. I laid in bed a full ten minutes, trying to figure out where I was, and why I was there. Then it came to me: Chester, New York; Bodle’s Opera House. I laid in bed another full ten minutes, trying to figure out where I was, and why I was there. This time, the nature of the question had gone from practical to spiritual. I decided the Middletown Motel (“The End Of Highway Robbery!”) was not a good place to dwell upon the spiritual, so I got up, hit the shower, and drove over to the club. Bodle’s Opera House was half cabaret, half bar, half restaurant, half re-converted barn. A good place to play. When I walked in, the headliner was onstage soundchecking. Somebody & the Something-or-Others. They didn’t suck, exactly, but they weren’t really worth turning on the microphones for, either. They were just more soldiers in the Army of the Instantly Forgettable, who eventually will be found dead on the battlefield of art vs. commerce. I did soundcheck, hit the bar, did the set. It was one of those excellent shows that can happen only when one is punchy enough to be having an out-of-body experience. I could have played all night.
Day Twelve I awoke to a gray, drizzly, suicide-inducing (or creativity-inspiring, depending on your mood and if you’ve had your medication) kind of day. I heaved my suitcase and laptop into the truck, and set about locating a diner. Being from New Jersey, where the best diners are, I am very particular about what makes a good diner. Out in California, they have these awful fifties theme diners. Let’s face it, the fifties weren’t that great. Okay, I wasn’t there, but I’ve done a lot of research. I believe the unfortunate downward spiral of bad taste that we continue to live with today can all be traced back to the fifties. You ever notice how clothing and architecture and music and movies from, say, the thirties, is still timeless and classy today…and how the majority of things from the fifties on seem to have dated with illusion-crushing rapidity? Around 1955 or so, we lost touch with that which is timeless. I don’t know how it happened. Polyester. Suburban tract housing. Fast food. Pat Boone. It can all be traced to the fifties. And all these fifties theme diners always display the same three tired photos of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Elvis. There’s nothing wrong with those three dead icons of Caucasian-ness, but if you’re going to celebrate the fifties, why not be more imaginative? How about Miles Davis’ cool period. The beat poets. Fats Domino. What I think these fifties theme places are really about is bland, country-club WASPs mourning the passing of the entrenched stranglehold they had on American society before JFK, the civil rights movement, and the sexual revolution. All cleverly disguised as nostalgia for a simpler time. A fifties theme diner is not acceptable. But a diner that has been in operation since the fifties certainly is. Preferably with all the grime, grooved-pre-Formica countertops, and atmosphere that comes with it. Also essential is an old battleaxe waitress who talks loud, gets to the point, can juggle twenty orders from memory, and remembers the name and favorite dish of every regular who’s been coming there since 1962. Most of the really good Jersey diners are owned and operated by Greeks. The menu is six pages of every kind of artery-blocking American-style food imaginable, plus a Xeroxed sheet clipped to the inside with four-hundred specials on it in eight-point type, plus a small section of Greek food near the bottom of the last page, right before the drinks. If there’s an aging, grossly overweight Greek woman with a mustache and a hairy mole on her cheek manning the cash-register and mint-bowl, you are guaranteed a decent patty melt. One never actually orders the Greek food at a diner. You’d go to a Greek restaurant for that. But its presence seems to raise the quality of the other food items. Just outside of Middletown, on NY Route 17, I located a good place, ordered the #2 breakfast, and got the intravenous going for my morning infusion of coffee. Today I would be driving to Albany. Not a thought that fills one with shivers of excitement, but that’s where the gig was. I took route 17 to the Thruway north, got my toll-ticket, and settled in for the two-hour ride. Before getting all the way to Albany, I would actually be stopping in Middleburgh, New York, so named because it’s a Burgh in the Middle of nowhere. That’s where Sonny Ochs lives. I’d met Sonny Ochs six years ago while playing the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. She has been awfully kind to me ever since. Sonny is the sister of famed folk-protest singer Phil Ochs. Since his suicide in the ‘70s, Sonny has done her best to keep his flame alive. A few times a year she holds a concert event known as Phil Ochs Song Night. It’s a more-organized-than-usual hootenanny where famous, infamous and totally obscure folkies get up on stage and do one Phil Ochs song apiece and one of their own. This was the gig I was going to do tonight. I didn’t know much about Phil Ochs, but I had picked out one of his songs – “Miranda.” It wasn’t overtly political, and I could do a cool stride-piano thing on it. I’ve never been much of a fan of political songs (“Masters Of War” notwithstanding); they don’t date well. Of course, we all hope for the day that even the finest protest song loses its relevance. Then we’ll know that the job is finished. In any case, I was on my way to Albany to participate in Phil Ochs Song Night, which was a prestigious, well attended, well-intentioned gig that got good ink in the local rags. Sonny Ochs lives on a dirt road on a mountain next to a waterfall. Very idyllic, if you can find the place. The road to her house has no name. You drive about an hour up New York State Route 145, then turn left at a barn with a rotting cow-head on it. Somebody, in a fit of rural brilliance, cut the head off a steer and nailed it to the barn; the dead cow’s face gradually slid off of its skull and now just hangs there, nailed to the barn. You look for Sonny’s mailbox, and head up the dirt road. The length of Route 145 through Preston Hollow had little shamrocks painted on the road, in case you wondered what the ethnic extraction of the townsfolk was. They didn’t need the Shamrocks. The bars more than gave it away. These towns had more bars per capita than all the other towns in New York State. I think this is a good thing, better than having a larger than average amount of strip-malls or discount department stores or parking lots. Or Starbucks. The bars all had names like Paddy O’Something’s Pub and Grub, or McFill-in-the-blank’s Rest, or the Rose and The Shamrock. After twenty miles of driving through the rain past all these inviting-looking country taverns, I couldn’t take it anymore, and stopped at one. On a chilly, gray day like this, a shot of Jameson’s couldn’t hurt. I walked into the empty bar, pulled up a stool, and ordered a double Jameson with a Guinness back. Of course, Guinness qualifies as something far more than a mere “back.” Just the correct pouring of a Guinness is an art form. It should require between ten and fifteen minutes, using the spoon. I couldn’t help remembering that at Hennessey’s Tavern – back in Redondo Beach – bartenders who knew how to draw a Guinness properly were re-programmed to pour as quickly as possible, for better turnover. All those idiot frat boys were drinking Guinness without ever getting to know what it really tasted like. Oh well, when Steve Miller’s Greatest Hits is your favorite record, you get what you deserve. The bartender at this bar in Preston Hollow poured my Guinness like we had all day. And like any good bartender, he was talkative. He wanted to talk about football. That would only be natural, there was a football game on the tube. He figured that I, like 99.9% of American males, would be a football fan. But I don’t give a ripe shit about football. I’m not even completely sure what they’re doing out there. I think it’s the one where they throw the puck through the hoop and get a Touchoff. By college, when other guys were watching the big game, I was getting laid…usually by the girlfriend of a guy engrossed in the playoffs. So I never developed a taste for the sport. I do, however, have an affinity for baseball. Baseball evokes an earlier time, and I’m always a sucker for that sort of thing. Besides, I owe it to my Dad to show an interest in baseball. My father, a hardcore Red Sox fan and former star baseball-player and coach, made the ultimate sacrifice for me once when I was a kid. He took me to Yankee Stadium. Right into the heart of enemy territory. It took me years to realize how hard that must have been for him. See, after I graduated high school, I moved to Boston to go to the Berklee College Of Music. I got a degree in jazz piano, which, along with a quarter, will most assuredly not buy you a cup of coffee. My first apartment, a dismal, roach infested little shit-hole on Louie Prang Street (which at the time my best friend and roommate Buzz Burrowes and I thought was giving the Taj Mahal a run for its money), was a short walk from Fenway Park. I used to lie in bed on summer weekend afternoons and listen to the organ music from the ballpark wafting through the open bedroom window. However, I rarely went to Fenway…unless the Yankees were in town. During these momentous contests, I never missed a game. I would sit in that little section of Ex-pat New Yorkers with my Yankees cap on, cheering the Anti-Christ. This commitment came with the risk of death. But I did what I had to do. Dad has never forgiven me for being a Yankees Fan – but he did take me to the house that Ruth built. After a while, the bartender gave up the conversation attempt when I didn’t react to any of the technical football jargon he was tossing around (what is a down supposed to be, anyway?), and he went back to polishing his glasses, like he was doing before I came in. I ordered a second round, drank it, and left. A few miles later I turned left at the cowhead, navigated the minivan up the treacherous dirt track, and pulled up in front of Sonny Ochs’ little patch of peacefulness in the woods. I grabbed my bag of CDs and walked up to and through the big, red, wood-slat, brass-handled, rounded-at-the-top church doors. I was greeted on all sides by traveling musician friends of mine that I never see much of, except on the road. We’re all too busy to keep in touch with each other. That’s the best thing about a gig like this, not only do we musicians get to connect with an audience, but we get to connect with each other. The alter, which was tonight’s stage, was set up with a couple of direct inputs for guitars to plug into, four mics for singing, and one big, expensive omnidirectional microphone for the bluegrass-purists who considered close-miking a blasphemy. The church grand piano was reasonably in tune and appropriately miked up for the gig. Backstage there was an enormous buffet set up with big, steaming, Sterno-heated aluminum containers of lasagna, salad, chicken fill-in-the-blank, etc.. I loaded up a Chinet plate with an adult-size sampling of all the goodies, and grabbed a fistful of plastic utensils and a cup of mystery-punch. Free food: the musician’s revenge. As a working musician (not as an artist, that would come later with a whole new set of abuses), I learned years ago that, whether you’re hungry or not: if there’s free food, you eat it. You are probably being grossly underpaid for a craft that few have mastered and that you have spent a lifetime honing to diamond-like precision, only to squander that talent playing the latest simpleminded fluff at somebody’s wedding or bar-mitzvah or anniversary party so you can make rent on your shitty, vermin-ridden one-bedroom. You will be treated with the indifference and contempt usually saved for busboys. While everyone else in the room dines sumptuously, you will be forced to eat your Bandwich* in an 8X12 paint closet, sitting on a cardboard box with your plate on your lap and no utensils…in exactly 15 minutes or you’ll get docked for taking too long of a break. Also, you gotta wear a tux. Your only recourse is to take it out on them at the buffet table whenever possible. So, even though tonight my check would be coming from wonderful, musician-loving folk-angels, I couldn’t help but load up on the lasagna. Old habits die hard. A crowd of over three hundred filled the church. The show began with introductions from Sonny Ochs and Wanda Fischer (of the local NPR station WAMC). I settled in for the long wait to do my two songs. That’s another weird thing that happens when you go from working-stiff musician to “artist”: you find yourself spending a lot more time sitting around waiting to play instead of actually playing. Tonight I would get paid far more to hang out and play two songs than I ever used to make playing cover tunes for four long hours at some joint. When I got on to do my two songs, I was still in that cool out-of-body state that accompanies severe mental and physical fatigue. The crowd loved me. The next day, the critic in the Albany Times-Union said, “The fantastic Bob Malone stole the show with a rollicking John Hiatt-like ‘Miranda,’despite the fact that he was suffering from serious jet lag.” I only wish I could have remembered doing it... Before and after my own performance, I heard wonderful interpretations of truly moving Phil Ochs songs, including some protest songs that really had stood the test of time. I was proud to be part of it all. CDs were sold, autographs scrawled, cabbage harvested, and Sonny and I headed back to the hinterlands. On the way, I asked Sonny if she knew the infamous Ratso. I had just finished reading Blast From The Past by Kinky Friedman, and, like all the other books by the Kinkster that I had read, his friend Ratso played a major role in a minor sort of way. Blast From The Past chronicled the early days with Ratso, and revealed that not only had Kinky and Michael Bloomfield each spent many a night crashing out on Ratso’s couch (“the one with the skid marks on it”) in Ratso’s West Village apartment, but Phil Ochs also had spent a bit of time making that couch his bed-away-from-home. Sonny had an instant, violent reaction to my utterance of the word “Ratso.” “My God! Of course I remember Ratso. He lived in that awful basement apartment down on Prince Street! My brother used to crash there!” Further tales ensued, of Ratso and his amazing collection of books about nothing but Jesus, Hitler, and Bob Dylan. All of this stuff about Ratso and Kinky Friedman was interesting, but in the space of three days, I had gone from Hanimaki, Japan to Middleburgh, New York without a moment’s rest to absorb the depth and/or stupidity of the experience. As a result, the last thing I remember thinking, as I fell asleep under the cat-hair-encrusted comforter in Sonny’s guest room, was: Where exactly the fuck am I?
Day Thirteen Three days off: a miracle. For a full seventy-two hours, I didn’t do a single thing worth writing about. I awoke at the crack of noon each day, threw on whatever clothes I happened to have left lying on the floor the night before, and let my high-tech ultra-sensitive java-radar lead me to the kitchen. Chipped, steaming coffee-mug in hand, I would commence with a few hours of sitting in the living room with a volume from Sonny’s extensive book collection in my hands, and a cat from Sonny’s extensive feline collection in my lap. I would take showers in the evening with a cold beer resting in the soap dish. Sonny was mostly out on call with the local rescue-squad, so I didn’t see much of her. This was the week I was supposed to do the Bluebird Café gig in Nashville that got cancelled because of the Neville Brothers tour. While down there, I was supposed to be crashing at the home of Mike Williams…the same Mike Williams who wrote the introduction to this book. Mike is a wonderful big old bear of a guy, with an infectious laugh and a million stories to tell. He used to be an even more demented road-doggie than me, but he gave it all up twenty years ago when, as he put it: “Reagan got elected and the college kids just weren’t getting the hippie wild-man act anymore.” John Denver cut one of his songs, and Mike played as a duo with Emmylou Harris in the 60s. He’s played nearly every college in the country. Now he lives in a house on a hill in Nashville with a view of the surrounding mountains and a short stretch of I-40 way in the distance. One day we were standing by the window watching the cars and semis drone by down on the highway and he told me he loved this view the best, “because I can watch the cars go by down there and thank God I’m not in one of them.” I hadn’t yet called Mike to break the news that I wasn’t coming this time, so I picked up the phone and rang Nashville. I told Mike my sordid tale and his response was: “Well, you could always come to tomorrow night’s pickin’ party instead! We got some great songwriters coming! You just gotta play! I’ll open up an extra chair for you…see you there!!” Next thing I knew, I had committed to a trip to Nashville – an 1,800 mile u-turn to play 5 songs at Mike Williams’ house, and get up the next day and drive back to Pennsylvania. If I was going to make it from New York to Nashville by downbeat the next day, I needed to get my ass in gear and head on down the highway. Early the next morning I commenced a nonstop kamikaze run down I-81 through the rolling hills of Virginia to Tennessee, I-40 west, and finally Nashville. I walked into Mike’s house at 6 p.m. with my keyboard and suitcase, set up the keyboard, threw the suitcase into the guest-room, said hi, had a mighty tug on the bottle of Makers Mark in the liquor-closet, and hit the shower. One hour later, the party started. I was in a circle of very talented people, including Steve Seskin, who has written a number of monster country hits. When I hear the writers of these country-radio hit songs sing the songs themselves, I am suddenly reminded of what is so great about their writing. All the rough edges, hard-won pain, and pathological dysfunction that make for a great country and western song are usually on full display when the writer wraps his wizened voice around the thing. When I hear these same songs sung by the too-young-to-possibly-know-what-he’s-talking-about hat-model with the cookie-cutter, safe for radio voice, my reaction is always “shut the fuck up!” followed by a quick lunge for the radio dial. Unfortunately, when I do that in the South, the next station is more of the same. When it’s done right, I love country music. I love George Jones and Willie Nelson and Robbie Fulks and Patsy Cline and Steve Earle and Hank Williams. But it’s no secret that country radio these days doesn’t play any country music. Mostly they play over-long jingles sung by models. Then there’s Shania Twain, the ultimate triumph of style over content. Sure, she looks great – but look up vacuous in the dictionary, and there’s a picture of her right next to the lyrics to “Man, I Feel Like A Woman.” As a country singer, Shania Twain makes an excellent aerobics instructor. The gig at Mike William’s pad was as invigorating and inspiring as ever. I was exhausted, but awfully glad to be there. After everyone left, and Mike and Kathy had gone to bed, I grabbed the bottle of Maker’s, lit a Partigas, and went out to Mike’s deck for a soak in the hot tub. I took in the view down between the trees, where I could just barely see the never-ending parade of cars and trucks on I-40, and tried to block out the thought that tomorrow morning, I’d once again be among them.
Day Fourteen Next stop was Split Rock, Pennsylvania, deep in the heart of the Poconos, at the annual Northeast Folk Alliance Conference. I had been chosen to showcase my act for all the festival and venue talent buyers, critics, gatekeepers and tastemakers of the folk music world. A tough slot to get, and I knew I’d also be playing for a few hundred other folksingers, who would be plenty bitter because I got the showcase and they didn’t. This bitterness is often warranted. I know, I’ve been there. I’ve had to watch helplessly plenty of times when some barefooted dink with a guitar, a stool and a list of complaints warbled about his pain and took twenty minutes between songs to move the capo, retune the guitar so it would be out of tune in a different way than it was during the previous song, and then cross my eyes with insufferably pretentious between-song blather. I’m not kidding, I actually once heard this folk-chick do a twenty minute spoken intro to a song about living on a dirt farm. Then she prattered on and on about how she had gone there to “get back in touch with the land.” I was thinking: This is bullshit: I gotta get back in touch with the bartender! In fact, the best thing about this whole event is the bar, which is centrally located in the midst of all the schmoozing action. What most of the hardworking folkies at the Northeast Folk Alliance Conference don’t realize is that you do not need to wear yourself out schlepping around the convention hall with your convention smile and your twenty- pound bag of CDs, flyers and assorted swag, sucking up to every booking agent, magazine rep, and guitar string manufacturer in the joint. All you have to do is plant yourself at the bar around 11 a.m. and stay there for the rest of the day. Eventually, you will see every person you really came to see. And all the people you really don’t want to see won’t be coming anywhere near the bar, so you can conveniently weed them out. And the schmoozing is so much more effective ‘cause you’re at the bar. I have gotten all of my best bookings while getting loaded at Folk Alliance. I left Nashville in the morning and made another sixteen-hour kamikaze run back up to Pennsylvania. I ended the day by checking into the Harrisburg Red Roof Inn, where I had stayed on the way south two days before. Same guy was at the desk. He recognized me. I didn’t even try to explain. It was snowy, icy and gray when I skidded and slid into the Split Rock Inn parking lot the next morning. Even at that early hour, vast time-zones away from Musician Standard Time, the lobby was abuzz with eager folkies, flyers in hand, desperately working their way to the top of the folk heap. I checked in, dropped my stuff off in the room, and headed downstairs for a breakfast beer. It was the beginning of a fruitful day. The first person I saw was George Wurzbach, an incredibly gifted pianist, songwriter, and legendary malcontent from Brooklyn. I love this guy. He gave me a copy of his new CD, and we bonded for a while. It’s always great to see George. I hope he gets rich and famous someday. The rest of the day, while consuming a steady stream of Jameson's Irish whiskey chased with the local brew, I picked up airplay on six radio stations, got three festival bookings, and got reviews in two high profile music magazines. A solid day’s work. Evening was approaching. The convention hall shut down in preparation for the showcases that night. I headed up to my room, showered, changed into my stage clothes, and struck out in search of the backstage area. The hall was cavernous, with seating for around a thousand, and set up with a stage, lights, and a good p.a.. The stage manager showed me to the “piano” they had rented. I had said in my contract that I wanted eighty-eight weighted keys, a piano sound, blah, blah, blah. What I should have said was “get me a seven-foot grand piano, tuned and miked properly, or I’m not doing the gig,” but of course, I was in no position to make such demands. The keyboard they had rented was a dinky little three-octave synthesizer thingie with lots of fancy buttons and lights and wheels which I had absolutely no use for, and no sustain pedal, which I absolutely could not do without. They might as well have brought me a fucking banjo. “That’s it?” I said. “Somebody else rented the one you wanted.” I trudged out into the dark snowy night to my truck to get my own keyboard. As I removed it from the back of the van, I hit the taillight with the corner of the keyboard case, and broke the light. I hadn’t even made the first payment, and this thing was already on its way to looking like a musician-van. There was no place to load in, so I spent the next twenty minutes dragging the keyboard through a confusing tangle of corridors clogged with conventioneers. The showcase went great. It was one of those priceless moments of validation from your peers when you’re weary, burnt to a crisp, and generally unsure of yourself. After the set, I made nice to countless folk-folks, packed up my keyboard, and went up to the room to crash. There was cable TV and a remote control that worked – this meant more to me at that moment than you could possibly know.
Day Fifteen I awoke in an excited frame of mind. The Neville Brothers portion of the trip began today. In 48 hours, I would be doing my first gig with them in Lawrence, Kansas. That meant I’d be spending the rest of today shagging my ass as far out into the Midwest as I possibly could get it. I stopped at the local Denny’s (Coffee-chicken-fried-steak-and-eggs-eggs-over-easy-hashbrowns-well-done-white-toast-could-I-get-some-Tabasco-with-that-please), topped off the tank, and got down to it. There isn’t much to say about the rest of the day except that I spent a frighteningly large number of my days like this. I drove and drove. Unchanging miles of interstate rolled by, until I began to hallucinate and deemed that it was either death or the next exit. I chose the exit. This time. I was in St. Louis, Missouri, a city that is really no longer a city at all, but rather an endless rambling series of white-flight suburbs with a tiny, rotting downtown buried at the center like a malignant, cancerous tumor. That this malignant tumor will eventually poison and kill the rest of the body if it is not nursed back to health is something that never seems to occur to the city-planners. Or the members of the local country club. I checked into yet another Red Roof Inn. I hope someday to move up to the La Quinta Inn chain. La Quinta, as Rev. Billy C. Wirtz once told me, is Spanish for “next to Denny’s.” I called Karen, checked e-mail on the laptop, and watched the Weather Channel to get the odds on whether I was going to die or get paid the next day. Went to bed. The next day was four hours across Missouri to Kansas City, than a short half hour into Kansas and the college town of Lawrence. Because this tour had come together so quickly, I hadn’t even gotten directions to any of the gigs from William Morris. After I crossed the Kansas state line, I stopped at a pay phone to call Josh at the office. The machine picked up. Then I remembered – it was Saturday afternoon. All the William Morris agents were out playing golf; or at home, sleeping in with their wives, if they had wives. Josh would be out shooting hoops with his friends. I was on my own. At the first Lawrence exit off the Kansas Turnpike, a kindly old lady at the tollbooth told me where Liberty Hall was. I found the venue downtown, right where she said it was, and parked around the corner. The front doors were locked and I didn’t see anyone around, so I went around back into the alley. Worn and weathered nineteenth-century brick buildings loomed around me. Broken glass lined the edges of the alley. I passed a couple of foul-smelling dumpsters and found a battered metal door hanging open in an otherwise featureless wall. I figured this must be the place, so I stepped into the doorway…right onto the stage. The Nevilles’ gear was all set up on stage but there was no one in sight. I looked around a bit and finally found this guy eating a sandwich in the wings. I asked if he knew where the stage manager was. He mumbled something nondescript which amounted basically to: “fuck off.” I continued to wander. Eventually, I bumped into Rocky, the Nevilles’ road manger, who got me plugged in and soundchecked. Later, I crowded around with everyone else in the band and crew backstage and got my all-access laminate. It always feels cool to have an all-access laminate. Three hours to kill before showtime. I went out to wander the town. Downtown Lawrence is a classic college-town, nice leafy main-street lined with historic buildings. Lots of bars, coffeehouses, and bookstores. Very pretty. I really like college towns – except, of course, for the college students. Across the street from Liberty Hall was a great old hotel with a fully preserved 19th century bar. I stepped up to the rail, ordered a single-malt scotch, and drank it in style. “Hi. Aaron.” No shit. I thought. I continued on to my bunker deep in the bowels of the building. There was food and water and beer – a nice setup for an opening act. The promoters were young – barely out of college I would have guessed – and very accommodating. I inquired about a room, and found out they had a deal going with one of the local hotels. A call was made, and I had a room right next to the on-ramp of the Kansas Turnpike. Ahh, if only it were always like this. Showtime rolled around, and I went out and did it. I was not able to bring a piano stool along for the trip because I had flown, and so for this gig, I ended up sitting on two plastic milk crates I had found backstage. A regular chair is too low for playing piano, but the crates were the perfect height for maximum leverage whilst banging on the piano and shouting into the microphone. The show was going really well, with excellent reaction from the nearly sold-out crowd. Then, as I fired up the fast boogie-woogie vamp that began my closing song, the milk crates fell right out from under me and suddenly I was flat on my ass in front of 1,500 spectators. Without pause, I jumped back on my feet and continued the vamp in a standing position. Massive cheer from the crowd – they thought the falling on the floor thing was part of my act. I finished the song and left the stage to a resounding ovation. My ass was killing me. Backstage, I ran into a couple of the guys from the band, who told me how much they enjoyed the show. Art, the keyboard playing Neville, was standing there listening to his backup band wax lyrical about my piano playing. He bummed a smoke off one of the guys, turned to me smiling, and said: “Somebody else likes what you do, too.” Goddamn. A compliment from Art Neville. I could now die a happy man. I was all flustered and trying to tell him how much I admired his playing and how he’d influenced me and he says: “Man, I can’t play any of that complicated shit you play!” It was just great. About that time Cyril, my favorite Neville, burst through the back stage door, said a brisk hello, and headed for the dressing room. Five minutes later, the Neville Brothers went on. It was then that I experienced the single greatest thing about having gotten this gig: for the next week and a half, I’d get to watch the Neville Brothers play, from the wings, for free! Like I said before: I’m a fan. Backstage, Rocky, aghast about the milk-crate incident, pulled an extra drum throne out of a road case and said it was mine for the remainder of the tour. He also said: “Have I told you to go fuck yourself yet today?” That meant he really liked me. But I had already kinda figured that. And thus, a guy from New Jersey found out that he had more in common with a guy from New Orleans than he thought. In New Jersey, saying something like “Fuck you, ya fuckin’ hump!!” to someone is a sign of endearment and deep, loyal friendship. It’s when someone starts getting all polite that you know he’s pissed at you. I have this sort of relationship with my drummer, Jake Jacobs, who is also from New Jersey. Somewhere around the middle of the second song of the set, if things are going well, we’ll give each other the finger (subtly, so the crowd can’t see). If things are strained, or not grooving, or if we’re pissed at each other – nobody gets flipped off. I’ve come to learn that if I don’t get The Finger from Jake by the second song of the set, it’s probably going to be a bad show. Day Sixteen Today’s gig was in Columbia, a college-town halfway between Kansas City and St. Louis in the dead center of the state of Missouri. A two and a half hour drive got me there. This place, like Liberty Hall, was a former thirties era art-deco movie-theatre that had been converted into a music venue. It held around 2,000 people. I walked in the front door and saw a guy mopping up the spilled beer and broken glass from the show the night before. I asked him where I might find the guy who ran the place and he directed me up the balcony and then up a ladder to the office, which apparently used to be the projection booth. I found the Promoter there. “What do you want?!” He barked. “I’m here to see about dinner.” I said. “What dinner? I’m not buying your dinner!” He spat. “It’s in my contract.” I said with utmost deference. “How many in the band?” He seethed. “Just me.” A long pause. “Well,” he said, in a tone that conveyed overwhelming pain, as if he was about to pass a large object through his clenched colon, “if it’s really just you, I guess you can go eat with the crew.” After soundcheck, I followed a crew member down a suspicious set of creaky wooden stairs to what they were calling the “dressing room.” It made the abandoned-deli dressing room back in Connecticut look absolutely luxurious in comparison. A single unshaded forty-watt bulb hung over a dank room with walls constructed of rotting, warped lumber, a damp concrete floor that would forever be a little too far below the water table, and a small, putrid bathroom off to the side. Given a choice between sitting on the toilet in that john and taking a crap in my Jockeys, I’d have to think long and hard about it. Graffiti from previous bands adorned the walls and ceiling, as is traditional in dressing rooms of this ilk. A couple of bemused looking crew members sat around munching chips from the buffet and trading war stories. Everyone said hi and invited me to partake of the spoils. At least there was beer down here. The Neville brothers, of course, were nowhere to be seen. They were back at the Doubletree, as it should be. Those guys didn’t deserve this dressing room (although you can bet they’ve seen plenty worse). The Neville Brothers and band don’t do soundcheck. Their crew has it down to a science: they get it all set up and sounding great. The band shows up right before showtime, goes out there and does the gig. It’s a wonderful thing. I followed the crew to the restaurant across the street where we would be eating. I fell into conversation with the woman who was selling merch on this tour. It turned out that she was close with the members of Counting Crows. “Oh, Canceling Crows, you mean!” I said. These guys had cancelled three shows in a row in L.A. because Adam Duritz had a sore throat, poor baby. She took offence to that. “Adam realized that he’s an artist, not a roadie.” She said. Adam Duritz is an extremely lucky guy who sings in a rock band. I thought. He’s also a fuckin’ whiner. Duke Ellington was an artist – and he never missed a show. And what does that make The Neville Brothers, who have probably never missed a show in three decades of performing? Roadies? What does it make me, for that matter, whom I can say for sure has never missed a show? I changed the subject. If I didn’t get some serious miles in tonight, I was never going to make it. So as soon as I finished my set at 9:30, I waved to the crowd, unplugged my keyboard, picked it up off the stand, and walked directly out the backstage door. I threw the keyboard in the back of the truck, lit a cigar, and drove until I started seeing double. Checked into a Stupid-8 Motel at the edge of a fallow cornfield in Topeka, Kansas. Five hundred miles to go. I wasn’t worried. I knew I’d make it. I always make it.
Day Seventeen As far as excruciatingly dull experiences go, driving across Kansas is most definitely in the top 1%. It is rivaled, perhaps, only by a drive across West Texas or having to wait on line at the DMV. Or watching grass grow. The worst thing is, after hundreds of miles of nothing but flat, featureless tundra, you finally reach the Colorado border, where you think something is finally going to happen – geographically, at least. “The Rockies!!” you think, as a modicum of hope leaps into your shriveled soul. Forget it – it’s another three hours of flat, featureless tundra before the Rocky Mountains finally, reluctantly, show themselves. By then, you’re so delirious, you’re convinced it’s all a mirage. The mountains don’t even look real. They can’t be real. You’re at 6,000 feet before you realize the nightmare is over. It was in this rather hallucinatory state of mind that I approached the suburbs east of Denver, Colorado. At the club, which was called The Casino, I walked in on a very agitated Neville Brothers crew. Every piece of gear that night – the instruments, the p.a. system – was rented. The truck with the regular gear was back at the airport parking lot in Kansas City. It seems the Denver sound-company hadn’t sent anything that was actually specified in the contract. Either it was the wrong stuff because they didn’t have the right stuff on hand, or it was the wrong stuff because they simply had fucked up. Either way, it had sent the crew into a frenzy of trying to make apple pie out of horseshit. I knew to stay out of the way. If I got a soundcheck at all tonight, it would be at the very last minute. I went looking for the club owner. Upon finding her, I discovered that she was an even more unpleasant creature than the guy in Columbia. I ventured a polite question regarding my dressing room and dinner, and got a look that could have stopped a bus in broad daylight on Santa Monica Boulevard. “The dressing room is up there!!” She barked, pointing to a door at the right of the stage on the balcony level. “What about dinner?” I said. “I just drove nine hours, and anything you could throw together would be great, it doesn’t have to be any...” “I’m not feeding you!!” She said. Smoke was practically coming out of her ears, so incensed was she by my unreasonable demands. “It’s in my contract.” I said. “Well, I’ll just have to go look at your contract!!” She said, and stomped off. Jesus. What next? Perhaps I wouldn’t be allowed to use the stage for my performance tonight. I slouched toward the dressing room door, which was locked. I found the manager, who had the key, and discovered that my dressing room was actually a storage room filled top to bottom with chairs and old neon beer-signs. Well, at least with all these chairs, I wouldn’t have trouble finding somewhere to sit. Like the old saying goes: when life hands you lemons – you’re fucked! Forlorn, dog-tired, yet still somehow vaguely amused by the whole thing, I took one of the chairs down (being careful not to be seen doing it – I’m sure the club owner would have pitched a major fit if she’d seen me actually sitting in one of her chairs) and sat for a while reading James Crumley’s Bordersnakes by the light of the single forty-watt bulb. I wondered what Milo or Shugrue – the two hard-drinking, ass kicking anti-heroes of the book – would have done in this situation. What they would have done was go off in search of a drink. So I did the same. ‘Course, they would have done that only after kicking the shit out of the club owner…but I needed to get paid, so I skipped that part. I was too hungry to canvass the town foraging for a meal, so I wandered over to the Neville’s dressing room, and was encouraged by the crew to help myself to the lavish buffet spread and free beer. I dug in with the unbridled enthusiasm one can only have after a nine-hour drive across Western Kansas. About five minutes before the doors were to open, I was told to get my shit on stage for soundcheck. There weren’t enough channels left in the mixing-board for me to use, so I had to use two that were already set up and equalized for completely different things. Only the volume could be adjusted. I told them that if it was going to sound like shit, then at least make it really loud. It sounded terrible in the monitors, but I wasn’t about to complain. The Neville’s crew are genuine good guys, and they were doing the best they could under the circumstances. I was made to wait until the last possible minute to get paid. The fact that I had done a good show seemed to make the club-owner even more incensed. I am simply paralyzed with awe when faced with such utterly fucked-up behavior. How are you supposed to react to someone like that? I thanked her extra graciously, which had the desired effect of making her really steamed (she was dying to rumble, but I wasn’t about to take the bait), and headed for the nearest Motel 6. Tomorrow was a day off, and boy did I ever need one.
Day Eighteen My sole responsibility today was to complete at least half of the thousand-mile drive back to Chicago. Omaha, Nebraska, was about halfway. I drove to Omaha, checked in, ate dinner, did some laundry at the motel, called Karen, went to sleep. Not the most exciting day – but at least I didn’t have to take shit from any dysfunctional promoters or club owners, so it was a day well spent.
Day Nineteen I began the long trek from Omaha to Chicago, across Iowa and on into Northern Illinois, past endless miles of fallow winter fields slumbering under a despondent, threadbare mantle of snow. I made the outskirts of Chicago at rush hour, and crawled for hours through the ‘burbs west of town on route 88, the East-West Tollway. I passed through Aurora, Downers Grove, Oak Brook – only a few miles from Chicago, but spiritually light-years away. Chicago is not really Illinois, any more than New York City is New York. House Of Blues Chicago, where tonight’s gig would be, was downtown in a frustrating atmosphere of urban congestion, one-way streets, and short-tempered cab drivers. An exciting place if you’re on foot. A living hell if you’re in a car. I negotiated a complicated maze of one-way streets and alleys, finally making it to the unmarked alley that took me to the underground loading area at the back of the club. I got near where I was supposed to load in, and discovered a big truck blocking the way. The driver was nowhere to be found. Shit. I thought. I’ve driven all day, and now I’m 200 yards from the backstage entrance and can’t get in. Well: that’s rock and roll! I walked to the backstage door, and rang the bell for the elevator. An ancient freight elevator, left over from this building’s former days as a factory, was the only way to get up to the stage, two stories up. A member of the HOB stage crew came down and took me up in the lift, to the rear of the stage. The Neville’s gear was all set up, of course. I walked out to the front of the stage and faced a large room that wasn’t very deep, but went up and up with three balconies. Kind of a funky, down-home opera house. It was a beautiful venue, and I anticipated a great gig…if I could only get my keyboard into the club. I told the stage manager about the truck blocking the alley. He said he’d take care of it. We took the elevator – a black iron cage with wire walls and a wooden floor scarred and grooved from years of use – back down to the steaming, dark subterranean loading area. The driver was now in the truck: a swarthy man reading an Arabic-language newspaper, slouched in the cab with the motor off. He didn’t look like he was planning on going anywhere anytime soon. The stage manager told him he had to move. “No move!!” the driver snarled, and continued his slouch. The stage manager explained that he was blocking our way, there was a show tonight, etc. The driver seemed not to understand English and informed us once again that he would “no move,” as he continued to read the Kill All Pig-Imperialist Zionist-American Swine in the Name Of Jihad Times. The stage manager finally said something about the police, and possibly a tow-truck, and the driver suddenly regained a grasp on his English skills and fired up the engine. We got my stuff up to the stage, did soundcheck, and then I was shown to my dressing room, which was, as it always is at a House Of Blues gig, very nice. It also had a fridge full of beer. Like Ira Gershwin said: who could ask for anything more? I ordered dinner off the backstage menu, and went off to check in my merch with the merch-chick. She seemed to be in a much better mood tonight. Everyone on the tour was in a better mood. This was a much larger and better appointed venue than any of the others we’d played so far, but also, House Of Blues is just a really nice gig to work. I’ve played their venues in Hollywood, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Boston, and now here in Shy-town, and I’ve always been treated well. My only negative House Of Blues experiences have had to do with the occasional troublesome headliner – someone on their way up or on their way down. Nothing turns some people into an asshole quicker than when they find out they’re either having their 15 minutes, or that their 15-minutes is over. I remember when House Of Blues in L.A. first opened. All the music writers in all the free printed-with-smudgy-soy-based-ink papers were up in arms about HOB’s “faux Mississippi roadhouse look” and that the sound and lights were too good, which meant you couldn’t have an “authentic” blues experience. It’s a chain, it’s Disney, etc… What a bunch of dingleberrys. For one thing – the club is in L.A., which means you’re already not having an authentic blues experience. For another thing, you’re certainly never going to hear any authentic blues musicians complain ‘cause the sound and lights are too good! Do these idiot critics think that all those first and second generation blues men and women played in shitty little dives in a corner under a forty watt bulb with their microphone plugged into their guitar amp for a p.a. because they wanted to?? They did it because they had no choice. John Lee Hooker deserves a 200-can light show, a 10,000-watt p.a., and a nice dressing room. Not to mention a big fat check with a comma in it after the show. Two commas, if possible. Authentic, my ass. Anyway, I luxuriated in the surroundings of my wonderfully appointed non-authentic dressing room, had some free beer, ordered food off the menu, splashed my face in the shower, and relaxed on a couch free of suspicious stains and odors. If this is Disney, I thought, then bring on the mouse! A faint rumble came through the wall as the crowd of 3,000 gathered out in the club. Finally it was showtime. The crowd was enthusiastic, if somewhat drunk. It was Chicago – and they love their blues. We all had a great time. I gave them all the energy I could muster, and they gave the same right back to me. Which is how it should be. The performer only puts on half the concert. The crowd takes care of the other half. We need each other. I wrapped it up with my usual closing bit, which is “Goodbye L.A.” followed by a stride-ragtime piano solo which segues into “Solfeggetto” by Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach (just to show them I’m edjumacated). Then I played a little perverted boogie-woogie and wrapped it up with “Don’t Tell Me Where You’ve Been (Just Show Me What You Know),” a tour de force of tastelessness that gets ‘em every time. After hammering out the closing chord on my knees in front of the piano, I stumbled out to the edge of the stage and basked in the applause for a minute before heading backstage. I was met by the stage manager, who had my check in hand (House Of Blues never messes around with the money, another reason why it’s not an authentic blues experience). All hands backstage complimented me on my show, including Art Neville, who’d been watching from stage left. The Nevilles went on shortly after, and to say they were great would be redundant. The Neville Brothers are always great. After the show, I went in search of a bar. Chicago is an excellent bar town. The bars are open until four in the morning, and many feature excellent live music. There’s a deep talent pool in this town. I emerged onto the sidewalk and the wind slapped me in the face as if it had just found out I’d had sex with its sister. It was colder than Hillary’s tit after she saw the Blue Dress on Geraldo. I pulled my scarf around my neck and made a beeline for the nearest watering hole. It turned out to be a dark, candle-lit piano bar, where a decent jazz pianist was elegantly working his way through the songbooks of Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, Cole Porter, The Gershwins, et al. Perfect. I was three martinis into it when a horde of actors, who were getting off from their nightly performances of the revival runs of A Chorus Line and Oklahomastarted coming in. I knew from bitter experience that what was about to follow would be an endless parade of SAG-AFTRA members getting up on stage to sing overwrought versions of songs from Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. I signaled for the waitress, paid my tab, and got the hell out. No sense letting Andrew Lloyd Webber ruin a perfectly wonderful evening.
Day Twenty Today’s mission, should I choose to accept it, was to drive to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Not a particularly long drive…but I was going to Iowa. There are lots of perfectly wonderful people in Iowa, but the place makes me nervous. All I can think about is Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper. As soon as I cross the border, I start to wonder when I’m gonna die. The club was on the second floor of the building, and I had to walk the keyboard up a long metal staircase out back. I went out to the front of the stage and surveyed the room. Nothing fancy, but pretty big. It would get the job done. I went up to the front and met one of the club owners, who was a very nice man. He thanked me for coming out to do the show. “Any time.” I said. The other club owner was out in the parking lot, directing traffic. These were hands-on type guys. I went out into the freezing Iowa night and introduced myself to the other club owner. He was also a hell of a guy. Said he liked my CDs very much, gave me some drink tickets, and pointed me in the direction of the buffet table. Now how hard was that? I thought. Other club owners should meet these guys and see how easy it is to be a civilized human being. I got a beer and went to the buffet, where I found the Nevilles’ tired and bewildered road manager nursing a beer and listlessly eating a Midwestern attempt at Jambalaya. He was pretty burnt out, as was I. We had a few laughs about that. To keep laughing is the most important thing, especially when to start crying is the only thing left. I asked if he knew where my dressing room was, and he gave me a pitying smile and told me how to get there. I went backstage, past the bathroom, through an unmarked door, up a flight of stairs…and there it was. The room was bare except for a single rickety chair with paint splatters on it. It was so cold in there that I could see my breath. There was what appeared to be a bullet hole in one of the windows, and the piece of black electrical tape over the hole was not doing a very effective job of keeping the arctic wind out. Still – it was better than Denver. It is important to always keep one’s sense of perspective. I got paid, loaded up the truck, and found the nearest cheap motel. Amen.
Day Twenty-One Minneapolis. The Twin Cities. Home of A Prairie Home Companion, Prince, and that accent like the one you hear in Fargo. That’s where I was headed today. The venue, called The Cabooze, was your basic rock and roll club. By far the smallest place we would play on this trip. There was no need to ask how to get to the stage; I was well acquainted with the routine in a joint like this: I followed the smell from the dumpsters until it led me to the backstage door. The woman who ran the place informed me that food and drinks were on the house. She had no idea how happy she was making me. I got a shot and beer at the bar, and was led to my dressing room, which was the smaller of the two that were available. It was clean, there was a deli-plate and beer, and I didn't have to beg to get in. I was really beginning to like this place. The food serving part of the establishment was next door, so I went over there and ordered a cheeseburger and fries. I assumed a fly-on-the-wall position and tuned in to the local conversation. This is the best way to get the feel for a new town. Forget the guidebooks: the conversation at the local bar or pizza joint is where it’s really at. After having my daily quota of grease and finding out how the local sports franchises were doing, I headed back over to the dressing room to wait. The dressing rooms weren’t anywhere near the stage. When the time came, I had to plough through a completely packed club to get up on the stage. Once up there, I saw before me a veritable sea of humanity. Every last inch of available space was occupied by a human being. They were pressed up against the stage and the bar. I let ‘em have it. Both barrels. At first, this being strictly a band joint, they were clearly puzzled by the sight of a guy playing piano up there all by himself. But by the middle of the first song, they were mine. There was no backstage area to speak of, so after the set, I waded into the crowd to watch the show. And I gotta say, after hearing many a Neville Brothers show, before and after this tour, this was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen them do. Their thing in a club this small was just magic. They have got to be the best bar band in the world. At some point I found myself dancing with this hippie-chick who had really dug my set. After it was all over, she invited me over to crash at her pad, which she shared with another deadhead-type friend of hers. I painstakingly followed directions drunkenly scrawled on a cocktail-napkin, and finally located the hippie crash pad. I met the roommate, declined a hit off the bong, and fell asleep fully clothed in the guest bedroom.
Day Twenty-Two In the morning, I showered off a lingering odor of incense and patchouli and bid adieu to the hippie-chicks. I love hippie chicks. I don’t know why. I eat meat, I drink whiskey, I wouldn’t wear Birkenstocks if you put a gun to my head, and I loathe all that is psychedelic. The Vanilla Fudge, Iron Butterfly and Jefferson Airplane (Grace Slick in particular) can most sincerely kiss my cracked, hairy ass. Given a choice between sucking crystals with a guru at a commune in Taos and two slices with pepperoni at Famous Ray’s in the Village, I would choose the pizza (with sausage and anchovies, please). But still, I dig hippie chicks. I don’t wear the rose colored glasses of the counterculture and its decedents, but I somehow share their vision. Maybe that’s why Karen Nash has such a hold over me. She is a perfectly balanced combination of a liberal left-wing-free-love-save-the-world-throwback-flower-child, and a martini-sipping-meat eating-market-savvy-save-your-own-ass-first realist. Kind of like me. We are neither vegetarians nor republicans. Today was the final gig of the tour. Much as I had enjoyed this trip, I was really ready for it to be over. I was longing for a full week of doing nothing in particular at my one-bedroom by the sea in Redondo Beach. Awake at the crack of noon. Make coffee, naked. Maybe put on a bathrobe, maybe not. Maybe make a couple of calls, maybe not. Cook up a late breakfast of chorizo and eggs on my little stove, play some classical music on the piano. Spend a slow afternoon reading a good hardboiled noir detective novel. A little past lunch and a little before dinner, when the sun is low and warm, go to the cheap Mexican place around the corner for a shot of Herradura, a Bohemia beer, and a couple of beef chimichangas with rice and beans and extra guacamole. After that, convince Karen to leave her eminently more swank digs in West Hollywood to come over and join me in front of the TV for a Clint Eastwood spaghetti-western or perhaps a Woody Allen flick. Go for a late-night beer run at the 7-11 up the street. Go to bed. Engage in some nasty sex…or snuggle, depending on the moment. Maybe both. Sleep till noon the next day. Repeat. Yeah, baby. Right now, however, I had to drive to Omaha, Nebraska. In the fullness of time, Omaha would turn out to be very good to me – but right now it was not a place I wanted to go. The good news was that Karen was flying out to see me do the show and drive the rest of the way home with me, so I did get a certain lift as I departed. It was another gray day as I set out west across the prairies of southern Minnesota. Later, for about fifteen minutes, as I swung south towards Nebraska, I would find myself in South Dakota, which I found mildly disturbing – the Dakotas seemed like they should be so much further away. Yet here they were: big as life and twice as ugly. Many a strategically placed billboard told me I was heading directly towards the notorious Wall Drug, made infamous in America by a battalion of bumper stickers. Much as I longed for my own Wall Drug bumper sticker, I would not be traveling that far into the South Dakota interior. A strangely exhilarating left turn in Sioux Falls took me once again back in Iowa, where I knew for sure that nothing exciting would happen. Whether it was fatigue, hangover, or a burning desire for the trip to be over, I’m not sure – but I seriously underestimated how long it would take to get from Minneapolis to Omaha. Less than an hour before showtime, I pulled off at the downtown Omaha exit. I didn’t know where the venue was. It was Saturday night, so I couldn’t call William Morris and get hip. The sum total of my information was that the gig was at the “Music Hall.” I asked around at various bars and restaurants downtown – no one had heard of the place. Desperate, I bought copies of all the local paper. All had full-page ads for the show with the address as simply “The Music Hall” and a phone number for a box office long since closed for the day. Finally, I stepped into a pizza joint, shivering with tension, and the guy behind the counter knew where the show was: the Civic Center Music Hall, two blocks away. This was Omaha’s big downtown center for the arts, home of the local symphony, ballet, and opera. As I drove up, I saw an electronic sign, its message circling the building in scaled-down Times Square fashion: TONIGHT – NEVILLE BROTHERS & BOB MALONE. At least they knew where I was supposed to be. I frantically whipped my van into the backstage loading dock. A very relieved Karen – looking very good, I might add – and an even more relieved Neville Brothers crew greeted me at the door. Karen had bonded elaborately with the crew and band, she was already part of the family. The stage manager guided me through the backstage labyrinth. This venue was far and away the biggest we’d played on this tour. The crew was very happy, explaining that the Nevilles had just done a year-long package tour with B.B. King, and this was the size venue they were used to. I rushed my keyboard out to center of the vast stage, and plugged it into the direct box. Nothing. Not a sound. I was due to play in fifteen minutes. In a cold sweat, I dragged my keyboard backstage, plugged it in, glommed a screwdriver from a stagehand, and opened it up. I didn’t know in the slightest what I was looking for, but I hoped I’d know it when I saw it. I started randomly prodding various transistors and wires and other possible suspects until the instrument grudgingly decided to function again. Relieved to the point of tears, I returned to the stage, plugged in, and quickly sound-checked in front of nearly full house of 3,000-plus people. In a couple of minutes I was called to the stage, where someone from a local radio station was introducing the band. She gave a fumbling, uncertain kind of introduction – she knew there was an opening act, so she couldn’t just simply announce, “Ladies & Gentlemen: The Neville Brothers.” But she was determined not to acknowledge my presence. Being small of mind, she was a proponent of the “If I ain’t heard of you, you must not be any good” school of thought. After finishing her pitch for the station, she announced no one, and wandered off confused, without having elicited any kind of applause. I walked into a terrifying void of 3,000 completely silent people, across an endless expanse of hardwood floor, to the center of the stage. I leaned into the microphone and said: “I’d like to introduce…myself!” This generated a good amount of laughter, and I launched into “I Know He’s Your Husband (But He Don’t Know That I’m Your Man)” on a wave of applause. It was one of the best shows of my life. This was exactly the setting where my show seems to go over best: a real concert environment. I can rock a barroom, but a place where people are really listening is where I’m at my finest. From the moment I walked out, I could do no wrong. It was a perfect show. After the set was over, I joined Karen, who was selling my CDs out in the lobby (the merch-chick couldn’t make this gig). The table was mobbed. I waded in and started collecting greenbacks. Five minutes before the Neville’s went on, we sold the very last CD. Its case was cracked and I hadn’t expected to sell it at all, but there was three people fighting over who would get it. It was like the Day-After-Christmas sale at Macy’s. There was still a line of people hoping to get records; they had to settle for order forms. In fifteen minutes, I’d sold more CDs than at every other venue on the tour combined. Later, backstage, I met Rick Galusha, who ran Homer’s, a record store chain with shops all over Nebraska and western Iowa. Over the last year and a half since this night, Rick has become a good friend of mine and has been instrumental in bringing me back to the Midwest for many excellent shows. And Homer’s has sold hell of a lot of my CDs. The backstage hang was cool, but we were missing the excellent acoustics of the hall, so we went out into the auditorium to hear Aaron Neville’s angelic voice float on all that nice natural reverb. While out there, I was approached by a number of autograph seekers. The perfect way to end a tour. At the end of the show, there were fond goodbyes all around. Everybody was in a good mood, ready to get back home for a few days of well-deserved R&R. I threw my keyboard and empty CD road-case into the back of the van and, feeling on top of the world, headed out for the very same Motel 6 that I’d stayed in just a few days earlier, when I was feeling ready to quit the music business after the Denver gig. What a difference one really good show can make. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Day Twenty-Three Morning came, and I realized that I hadn’t gotten paid for the gig. I had such a good time that I had forgotten to track down the promoter and get the check. Now that is a great gig. I called the William Morris Agency first thing, and they assured me the money would be waiting when I got back to L.A.. All that was left now was to drive 1,500 miles home. We planned to make the best of it. Karen had long been smitten with the town of Estes Park, Colorado, from back in her days on the road as a traveling folk singer. We decided that that would be our first destination. We packed quickly, fortified ourselves with Breakfast at Denny’s, and headed west on I-80. The trip between Omaha and Denver is best summed-up by a comment Karen made as we were crawling through western Nebraska: “There’s no place to take a shit around here!” We made Estes Park at 8:30 p.m., starving. The town, covered in a light dusting of snow, was quite fetching, but a hard Rocky Mountain wind was blowing across the road, rocking the van on its springs. It was Sunday night, and the place was a ghost town. Just as we were sliding out of town and giving up hope on our dream of a trout dinner, a couple of martinis, and a nice warm cabin by a babbling brook, we came upon an open hotel: Nicky’s. Just from the name, I knew it was going to be perfect. The place was all the way old school. Did they have rooms? Of course! Would you like one with a fireplace right by the babbling brook? Was the dining room open? You bet your ass! Right this way. We were shown to a dining room done up in a red velvet motif, straight out of the ‘50s. We were the only customers in the place. We ordered trout dinners, martinis, and a nice white wine to go with the fish. The service was excellent, the food and drink superb, the price reasonable. It was everything we had so feverishly hoped for as we crossed the lonely prairie. After dinner, and a round of twenty-five-year-old single malt scotch, we repaired to our room. There was the promise fine sex in the air, but first I wanted to build a fire in the fireplace. I come from a mostly working class kind of family. My cousins and uncles and grandparents were the kind of people that couldn’t discuss the difference between Kant and Camous, but they could fix things and build things. They have practical skills that I have always envied. They’re the kind of people who can fix a distributor cap. Pitch a tent. Tie a fly. Build furniture. Stuck in the woods with no shelter? Well, just hand me that pocketknife, and I’ll whip up a lean-to, a roaring fire, and a spit so you can roast this deer I just tracked, killed, and dressed. I’ve always felt hopelessly egg-headed around all of this. I can barely change a light bulb, let alone change my oil. I’m the kind of guy that can discuss for hours the relative merits of the late romantic composers and the neo-modernists – but give me a flat tire, and I’ll probably die by the side of the road. With these deep, longstanding feelings of inadequacy hanging over me, I was determined once and for all to prove that I was not just a pseudo-intellectual wimp, but a real man! I was going to make love to my woman by a roaring fire that I built with my own bare hands. An hour and a half, twenty pounds of kindling, and four Sunday papers later, I had managed nothing more than an insipid, smoky blaze. By this time, Karen was sound asleep. I was left to admire my manly, capable handiwork all by myself. As I slid into bed, Karen half awoke to tell me that the fire was wonderful and that she loved me. I didn’t get laid, but I still felt pretty manly.
Day Twenty-Four Our mission today was simple: spend as little time as possible in Utah, and as much time as possible in Las Vegas. The only thing in our way was 850 miles of interstate highway. We left Nicky’s and drove about fifty miles of wonderfully scenic twisty-turny Rocky Mountain switchback two-lane, south to I-70. Then it was 250 miles out of the Rockies down into the town of Grand Junction, Colorado, a few scant miles from the Utah border. There we ate steak sandwiches, filled the tank, and stocked up on bottled water before plunging headlong into the abyss. Grand Junction is the last chance, the final outpost of civilization before you leave America and enter the theocracy of Utah. I am always surprised that there are no border guards when you cross into Utah. You would think that they’d want to shake you down for illegal items such as Coca Cola, colored underpants, and unmarried non-virgins. I was obsessed to get out of Utah as quickly as possible. “We will stop in this state only once, for gas!” I said. I had no desire to contribute money to the local economy. It would only encourage the proliferation of trailer parks, 2.3 beer, and illiterate religious zealots. After about 400 miles of nonstop driving – running on high-octane terror – we were forced to stop in Beaver, Utah, to replenish the gasoline rations. While in the gas-station restroom, I heard, coming from a speaker above me, the voice of Aaron Neville singing “Everybody Plays The Fool.” Truly surreal. From Beaver (uh, huh, huh – shut up, Beavis!), we could make Vegas in five hours. We were beginning to get punchy and out of sorts, but we pointed that energy in the right direction. That’s the great thing about the relationship Karen and I have: when we get stressed and tired, we usually end up making each other laugh instead of snapping at each other. The true test of any relationship is how you manage when things suck. Anybody can get along when everything is great. At some point in the dark desert night, after crossing from Utah into the northwest corner of Arizona, and then into Nevada, we saw the sprawling lights of Vegas below us. There is no rational explanation for Las Vegas. It is a brazen affront to every shred of decency, taste, and civilization that humans have painstakingly built back up since the fall of the Roman Empire. That must be why I love it so much. I have a theory about Las Vegas. Vegas is there so L.A. won’t explode. Los Angeles is like a grenade with the shaking hand of a crazed Libyan terrorist on the pin. Vegas is the plane back to the fatherland and the seven American hostages that keep the threat of Jihad at bay. Twenty-four hours a day people explode out into the desert wasteland towards the shining lights of Lost Wages to get a faux, everyman version of what Hollywood continuously promises but never delivers. Vegas allows Hollywood to maintain its normal level of functional insanity. It keeps freeway shootings to a tolerable minimum. After thirteen hours of bleak Utah desert, the lights of the Strip shone like sweet relief. It was 2:30 in the morning when we rolled in. I should have been exhausted, but I had been denied sensory input for so long that I was primed for a full dose of excess. “I am going to get drunk and eat a steak twice the size of my head!!” I proclaimed blearily (yet enthusiastically) as we careened down the Tropicana Boulevard exit ramp. The Tropicana Hotel & Casino would be our base for Operation Debauch tonight. The husband of a co-worker of Karen’s spends a lot of dough gambling in Vegas, and he loses – I mean wagers – most of that cash at the Trop. Therefore he and anyone claiming to be a close personal friend of his (that would be us tonight) gets everything comped with just a quick phone call from either the wife or the big guy himself. I was ready to make this hotel sorry they ever let me past the city limits. I love spending other people’s money. Especially here. Karen, as any sane, reasonable person would be after having just driven eight hundred miles across Utah – was tired, cranky, and not at all in the mood to begin an evening of fun and inebriation at 2:30 on a Tuesday morning. But one thing I know about Ms. Nash is that she adapts to new surroundings quickly. Karen, despite having grown up affluent in Los Angeles, is a survivor. She’ll sit there and whine, but when it comes down to it – she’ll be the first one to declare: “Fuck it!” and jump out of the plane. I figured if I gave her about a half-hour to depressurize, she’d be right there at the bar with me – drinking shots and beers. We valet-parked the van, and the bell-dude bring our bags up. After 15 nights in a row of Super8Motel6RedRoofInn-we’ll-leave-the-goddamn-light-on-for-you, I was more than ready for a little we’ll-carry-your-bags-and-park-your-fucking-car-for-you action. We went up to the tenth floor to our room. After checking out the bedsprings a little bit, and spending a little quality time with herself in the bathroom, Princess Nash was suddenly ready to do the town in style. There is a scotch whiskey that Karen and I both discovered and fell in love with one summer while on Martha’s Vineyard, doing a gig at the Wintertide Cafe. It’s a peaty, smoky, dark, ten-year-old lowlands single malt called Talisker, from the Isle Of Skye. Many bars don’t have it. But I’ve gotten to the point where I can stand outside a bar and tell if it’s the kind of place that does. I knew in my heart of hearts that this was that sort of place. After a quick perusal of the spirits and cigar menu, I found that my little voice had not failed me. I ordered up two double Taliskers for myself and the lady, plus a grossly overpriced Montecristo cigar. Three rounds later, we were no longer aware that it was four in the morning and we had just driven thirteen hours from Estes Park, Colorado. Well, maybe we were aware, but it sure wasn’t bothering us anymore. We paid the tab and wandered downstairs to the slot machines. High rollers that we are, we each got twenty dollars worth of quarters and got down to it. Meanwhile, the free drinks just kept on coming. Karen favored the electronic poker machines while I – a purist – played the standard slots. As I steadily pumped quarters into the machine and shots of Jack chased with Heineken into my brain, I found that I was actually winning. I was about $60 up. And while that wasn’t going to get me comped here under my own name, it still felt pretty good. Every once in a while, Karen would cut loose with a joyous sound from over by the poker slots, so I knew she was kicking some ass as well. The cigarette girl came around and I bought a ninety-nine cent cigar for five dollars (oh, but that first drag was more than worth the price). “A guy in a relationship is like an ant standing on a truck tire. He knows he’s on top of something big, but doesn’t really know what it is until it rolls around and squashes him into a little black dot on the pavement.” The moment was right. The moon was full. The planets were properly aligned. And I was utterly shitfaced. I proposed. Right there in the casino at four in the morning. “Karen, let’s get married!” I said. (Actually, what I really said was: “Karen! Lesht get maaaaaarried! By an Elvish im-persh-inator!! Do you have any more quartersh?”) “You’re drunk.” She said. She also said, “No.” Karen Nash is a sensible girl. We cashed in our chips and went off in search of obscenely large portions of extremely unhealthy food. We found a large restaurant in the casino with an “American” theme to it. There was a big map of the United States Of Advertising hanging from the ceiling. Both the map and the menu reduced each state of the Union to its most common stereotype. For instance, you could order the “Chicken Fried Minority with White Supremacist Sauce and KKK Kola” from the Mississippi section of the menu, or the “Grilled Radicchio pineapple pizza with sprouts, sun dried tomatoes and a complimentary high colonic” from the California section. After a feast of shrimp cocktail and steaks bigger than our heads, we decided we’d had enough, and retired to our room at the Trop. It was 5:30 am. **** Morning arrived well after noon, on gossamer wings of room service. Bagels, cream cheese, lox, Bloody Marys. We ate, drank, showered, put our bags in the van, and blew town. Four hours later we were back in Los Angeles. © 1999 by Bob Malone * band·wich\band-wich\ n: a term used by musicians to describe that which is generally offered to them as dinner when playing a wedding, bar mitzvah, or aunt Edna’s seventy-fifty birthday party at a catering house or hotel. While the guests enjoy shrimp-cocktail, lobster-tails, and filet mignon wrapped in bacon, accompanied by a nice California chardonnay, the band is whisked off to a paint-closet or coatroom to eat bandwiches during their break. Said food item generally consists of a single dry-around-the-edges slice of baloney, a single slice of processed American cheese-food, and a brown piece of lettuce, between two soggy slices of white bread; usually accompanied by a piece of fruit of some sort (also brown), a bag of generic-brand potato chips, and a plastic cup of lukewarm tap-water. These items are given to the musicians by the hotel or catering-house’s pompous food and beverage manager, who makes it eminently clear that he is conferring upon them a great favor, for which they should perhaps get down on their knees and thank him. Usually at such events, seven or eight leftover servings of shrimp-cocktail, lobster-tails, and filet mignon wrapped in bacon will be thrown away, but not, under any circumstances, be given to the band.
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