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Crawl Across Texas
“ABCDEFG. Plans. Pure delusions. How can you accommodate the imponderables, the variables, the voluptuous teeming of possibilities, the random assertions of chance, the inflexible dictates of fate?” “There he goes - one of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind, never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.” “That’s right – you’re not from Texas”
Day One Stop the mail, pack the gear, pawn the plants off on the neighbors, empty the fridge, carefully pack the clothes that will be totally wrinkled by the first Motel 6, do the sad goodbye with the girlfriend. The road, improbable and inconvenient and unpredictable, beckoned again. The year was 1996…Bill Clinton was still president, the Twin Towers still stood, the internet was still mostly the domain of a few thousand scattered geeks and hackers, and all the hip kids were still digging that Seattle Grunge-rock sound. And taking it seriously. It was an entirely different world. As for me, I had just turned thirty and remember thinking at the time that I was positively ancient. Hard to believe that now. Most of this particular tour had been booked by a singer/songwriter who was a friend of mine at the time. We were going to split the bill, and, if our luck was in, the money. For the remainder of this narrative, and to protect the relatively innocent, we will call him Milo. Milo showed up at my apartment in Redondo Beach, California at 5:00 pm. We were about to embark on a two-week, seven-city tour of Texas, and Milo, a native Texan, would be guiding this New Jersey Yankee through new, uncharted terrain. Milo was remarkably intelligent, a fine writer of songs, and an all around decent guy, but he was unfortunately possessed of an astounding lack of social skills. This had never particularly bothered me – I was not exactly burdened by an excess of couth and tact myself. But there is an invisible line in our society between what is considered sane behavior and what is not. Milo was one of the unfortunates that inhabit that purgatory in between. Not quite nutty enough to be locked away, and not anywhere near ready for prime time either. To most Americans, his abrasive personality, erratic behavior, and questionable grooming habits would be acceptable only if he were famous. Indeed, were he famous, these traits would be admired, and no doubt emulated by millions of young and impressionable school-children. Also, fame would have rendered the never-ending crisis that was his life far more tolerable with a constant stream of ready cash in large quantities. They say money can’t buy happiness, but it sure does come in handy when you need to make bail. That I was about to unwittingly become an active participant in the ceaseless crisis that was Milo’s life never occurred to me until we were somewhere in the wastes of Arizona…too far away to turn back. It took us two hours to wedge all of our stuff into Milo’s 1988 Toyota Tercel. This operation required complex mathematical equations, blueprints and scale diagrams, and a doctorate in physics. Or a drummer. A drummer could have done it in ten minutes. Say what you will about drummers (Q: What did the drummer get on his IQ test? A: Drool), they sure can stow gear. Whenever a band packs up after a gig, the scene is always this: everyone who is not the drummer stands around the vehicle (which, for most bands I’ve been in, is an ‘82 Ford Econoline van with rusty rocker panels and a coat-hanger antenna) staring into the rear door at a hopeless jumble of wires and stands and cases that seem to fill every visible crevice, and scratching their heads because half of their stuff is still left out on the curb. As they are about to send the bass player for rope to tie the leftovers onto the roof, the drummer emerges from the club, beer and cocktail waitress in hand, and, with a withering stare, says, “Everybody away from the truck! Don’t touch that! No, you can’t help!” He then yanks everything out of the van, and repacks the entire load by instinct – including the stuff on the curb – with quick, fluid grace. He’ll be done before his beer gets warm and the waitress gets cold, and everything fits together at perfect right angles, every last cubic inch of space used to its fullest potential. The finished work of art is such a masterpiece that you’d swear each item was custom-built to fit in the very place he put it. It is this way with all drummers. I do not know why. Milo and I had none of this going for us. We executed a slow and sloppy job of packing the car and immediately set off for my favorite local bar, Rebo’s (that’s sober spelled backwards), for an inaugural belt. Then we hit the highway. Right around the Arizona state line, as we were marveling at the beauty of the stars and the 75-mile-per-hour speed limit signs, we noticed that we were about to become a couple of those poor bastards that you see from time to time on the side of the road with the hood up and a miniature Mt. Vesuvius erupting from their engine. This was mostly because we were not riding in just any ‘88 Toyota Tercel. We were riding in a musician’s ‘88 Toyota Tercel, which means it was in about the same shape as a ‘71 Dodge Dart that hadn’t had a tune-up or an oil change since mood rings were fashionable. Five minutes later we were sitting on a dark desert highway with a sinking feeling in our hearts and steam rising from our engine. We let it cool, refilled the radiator, and limped into Phoenix around four in the morning. We spotted an Econo-Lodge advertising LOW LOW RATES! CONT. BRKFST! VACANCY! This looked like an E-ticket to us. We pulled in. At the front desk we encountered a yellowed-strappy-tee-shirt-and-trifocal-glasses-wearing 800-year-old Methuselah who probably hadn’t had a coherent thought since the Eisenhower administration. “Hi! We need a room for the night. How mu– ” “Ain’t got no rooms!” Translation: ain’t got no rooms for a couple of long-haired, pinko-commie, drug-takin, non-Jesus-fearin, possible humasexshul freaks like you. “But the sign says vacan– ” “AIN’T got no rooms!!” Defeated, and too weary to fight, we headed to the local Motel 6 (where they leave the light on for you) and crashed. Our first gig was in Dallas, Texas, in two days. I hoped we’d make it. I fell asleep and tossed through restless, repetitive dreams about a giant temperature gauge needle hovering just below a giant red H.
Day Two We departed at the crack of noon after eating a well-rounded, nutritious meal at the local Burger King and gathering essential supplies for the 100-degree day ahead: water, ice, cooler, antifreeze, beer, ibuprofen. Upon hitting the proverbial dusty, the car immediately started overheating – not quite all the way, but closing in fast. We drove at a sedate 55 miles an hour across the 110-degree desert with the heater on full blast to cool the engine, silently staring at the temperature gauge. As our version of luck would have it, near Tucson the radiator ceased to be a problem because we lost the transmission. We called Triple A and waited for the tow truck. An hour later we were picked up by a very articulate, toothless man who wanted to know: “Where the fuck do ya want me to take this fuckin’ thing!?” He also informed us: “I don’t know why I live in this fuckin’ hot town! I want to go back home to fuckin’ Rhode Island but they’ll make me give up my fuckin’ guns! I'm not givin’ up my fuckin’ guns! You boys like guns?!” Lacking the two days and $1,500 required to fix the car, Milo whipped out his Visa and rented a big, honkin ‘96 Chevy Lumina. We threw our stuff in the back, and blew Tucson as the sun was setting. On the outskirts of town we pit-stopped at a little Mexican restaurant for a couple of shots of tequila. Sufficiently lubricated, we cranked the AC and the stereo, set the cruise control for 85 miles an hour, and set off toward New Mexico in the last golden light of the day. Eight hours later, when we pulled into the Fort Hancock Motel (REASONABLE RATES! TAXIDERMY IN EVERY ROOM!) in extreme west Texas, the gig was still 700 miles away. I slept a restless three hours. My friend slept not at all.
Day Three West Texas is dull. It is so dull that taking time to write something about it would do it way too much justice. We set the cruise control on 100, and it felt like walking down the up escalator. I’d been driving the whole trip, and I couldn’t take another minute of it. With great trepidation I asked Milo – the worst driver ever issued a license – to take over the wheel. Ten minutes later we were clocked doing 96 in a 70. The Texas state trooper told Milo: “Step out of the car, son.” A $200 fine was due on the spot, or so we were told. We didn’t have two dollars on us, let alone two hundred. After asking me to get out of the car and show my license, the officer went back to his cruiser. There was an inexplicably long wait, during which Milo and I exchanged silent, nervous glances. Then the narcotics and K-9 units showed up. The narcotics guy pulled us aside while the convinced-he’s-soon-to-be-arresting-officer searched the car for the copious amounts of drugs we didn’t have. “Whatever drugs y’all got, you should tell me now before I get the dogs ‘cause I’m willing to work with y’all if you cooperate,” he said. “We don’t have any drugs, we’re just late getting to our gig and we were…” “Musicians!” He said. “Hell, son, I used to book country bands down in San Angelo. What kind of music y’all play?” At this point, the car-searching guy got to my cartons of CDs and cassettes in the trunk. He looked at my CD, looked at my license, and said with that I-might-be-tellin’-the-boys-down-at-the-bar-I-met-a-celebrity face: “Hey, that’s yew!” Milo commenced to furiously sir and y’all the officers (he was from this state, he was qualified). Soon they told us in a slightly embarrassed tone that there would be no speeding ticket, and all six officers left with brand new copies of the latest Bob Malone CD. Four hours later, traveling at exactly the posted speed limit, we arrived in Dallas “Just in time to stand in line, freeway lookin’ like a parking lot” to crib unapologetically from James Taylor. We made the gig five minutes before downbeat. There were six people in the audience. This show, like the four that would follow, was at a Borders Books & Music store. I’d played several of these places. The gigs always seemed to go well, but I’d never been able to get used to playing under fluorescent lights in a…bookstore. Where were the drunks? Where was the surly, money-grubbing club owner? Where was the goddamn bar? I got up on stage after driving ten hours straight, with a throat infection and three hours sleep, and did one of the worst sets I’ve ever done. I’ve played better coming off a two-day bender. Luckily, I only had to play half an hour. After Milo did his set, we got the dough and hit the nearest drinking establishment.
Day Four I woke up feeling like utter shit. I needed a doctor. Milo took me to a health clinic where they told me I had strep throat, gave me a shot in the ass, and took one hundred dollars of my money. I drove three days to make that fucking one hundred dollars. I gotta change careers. The gig that night, at the Borders in Plano – an aptly named suburb of Dallas – went pretty well. The shot started taking effect around the third song, and I ended up having a good set even though the room felt like a junior high library. We spent that night at the house of an old friend of Milo’s. I went inside to write a letter to my girlfriend Megan and crash while Milo stayed out on the curb to smoke a cigarette – thus planting the seeds for Law Enforcement Encounter #2. Five minutes after I left, the cops cruised by and tried to arrest Milo for being a long-haired, pinko-commie, Keith-Richards-lookin, earring-wearin freak in our nice, quiet, God-fearin community. The owner of the house came out just in time to explain that, yes, that freak sitting on the curb really did belong here. Milo was once again saved from a night in the joint.
Day Five Today’s gig was an afternoon thing at the Fort Worth Borders. We found out we were double-booked with a high school puppet show (“If I told them once I told them a million times – Spinal Tap first, then the puppet show!”). We had the contract, so the gloves got bumped to four o’clock. As we approached the stage area I saw…a grand piano. With trepidation and hopefulness I touched the keys to see if it was in tune. It was! A miracle! Today would be good, I could feel it. This turned out to be the best gig so far. I sold quite a few CDs and tapes – some even to the puppet show people – and I never had to take my 100-pound electronic piano out of the car. We packed up, hit the nearest bar for lunch, then headed out. We made Houston by midnight, and crashed for the night.
Day six For the next three days, we would be staying at Milo’s parents’ house on the outskirts of Houston. This provided some comforts-of-home perks: free food, rooms, and laundry. We had a blissfully uneventful first day in town – no encounters with law enforcement representatives. The Borders gig we were going to do that night would be our last bookstore show for a while. I would be greatly relieved to get back into my customary barroom environment. The crowd was good for a Monday at a bookstore. My set was going okay until the P.A. started cutting in and out. The glitch got worse and worse until finally I stopped in mid-song, took a deep breath, and went on an unamplified 10-minute comic diatribe about all the misfortunes we’d encountered on this jaunt. This was greeted with resounding laughter and applause, and the good vibes seemed to affect the P.A. – it made it through the rest of the set. Months later, when Milo tried to get another Borders gig, we found out that the woman who booked this place – a humorless corporate animatron with a brain programmed from birth to automatically self-destruct if she ever thought for herself – was incensed that I had publicly criticized her piece-of-shit P.A., and she had sent a memo to corporate HQ insisting that they ban Milo and me from ever again playing any Borders Books & Music stores. Since I’d already resolved by then not to do any more Borders gigs, I didn’t care. Also, my fans and musician friends were impressed that I was badass enough to get banned from the place (when told of the incident a few years later, my friend Dan Reed – who at the time was music director at WFPK in Louisville, KY – said, misty with admiration: “That is so punk!”). The whole thing turned out to be quite good for business.
Day Seven One week on the road. It felt like three. Tonight began a two-night stand at our first real club, a place called Fitzgerald’s. Local rags touted it as a rock and roll mecca. What it really was was a shithole. I didn’t mind. It wouldn’t be the first, or the last. There was a small crowd, including a couple of people from my very limited Texas mailing list. The gig was fun: it was great to be able to drink and cuss onstage again. I sold some CDs. Our total take for the night (we got a percentage of the bar) was eight bucks apiece.
Day Eight Night two at Fitzgerald’s. The club turned out to be a two-story venue. The previous night I hadn’t even noticed there was an upstairs, as it had been closed. Tonight I could not help but notice: the stage directly above ours was featuring a full compliment of alterna-trash bands that all sounded like they were playing two songs at the same time at roughly the volume of a 747 achieving full liftoff velocity. Along with this was a packed house of the kind of kids who are just brimming with angst and unfocused rage because, like, it’s just so boring to have to hang out at the mall all the time, and like, having to pay for everything with dad’s credit card is so unfair. I’d never seen so many goatees and ill-fitting clothes – It was as if they were in uniform. Such rebels! The club had taken away the great-sounding speakers I’d had the night before – the alleged bands upstairs were using them as extra monitors so they could hear themselves over themselves – and now I had the worst sounding speakers I’d ever had the misfortune to play through. An air hockey game was in full swing next to the bandstand, and the kids playing were banging that plastic disc as if their lives depended on it. The band upstairs was shaking the whole room. The jukebox on the back of our stage wasn’t being used, but every so often during my set it would suddenly light up and start blasting “Crazy Train” by Ozzy Osbourne at full volume. I’d stop playing, run back and hit the kill switch on the back of the juke, and go back and continue my song wherever I had left off. Finally I unplugged the sumbitch. I nicknamed the jukebox “Christine.” I banged out a loud, extremely unmusical set. The crowd seemed to like what they could hear of it. I sold some stuff. Then Milo went on and did the best set I’d seen him do so far. Apparently, he thrived on this sort of misery. I got drunk. My second set was played to a small crowd of gen-xers whose reaction ranged from indifferent to hostile. I wrapped it up early, said “Fuck you and goodnight” just to see if anyone was paying attention (no one was), picked up my $20 pay, and bugged out. I’d never felt so old in all my life.
Day Nine In the morning we left for Austin. I love Austin, it’s one of the hippest cities anywhere – a small miracle in the big state of Texas. Milo made a call to Another Cup, the place we were supposed to play on Friday, to say hi and get details. They told him we were double-booked. “Y’all can play on Sunday!” said the club booker. “We’re on the road! We’re going to be 300 miles away on Sunday!” “Sorry.” What would any tour be without at least one cancelled gig? With desperate resourcefulness, we called the Borders in Austin and booked a new gig five minutes after losing the first one. Apparently that Borders hadn’t gotten the memo yet. The drive from Houston to Austin was two and a half hours through podunk backwaters and dry counties. Baptist churches, lots of pickup trucks, and cows in peoples’ front yards. I’m from New Jersey – this stuff frightens me. In Waller County, I got pulled over for going 74 in a 70. This clearly was not about exceeding the posted speed limit; it was about exceeding the unposted hair limit. The cop glanced at the guitar case and keyboard in the back seat and asked: “Y'all ain’t in one a them alternative bands, are ya?” No, but I just got drowned out by one, I thought. Milo and I told him that we actually played both kinds of music: Country and Western. After going through all the preliminary this-is-just-a-warning-for-speeding, blah, blah, blah, we got down to the real business at hand: searching the car for drugs. With all the smug assuredness that only a dumb hick Texas backwater cop could muster when he’s sure he’ll be taking a couplea longhairs down to the station, he asked me to please sit in the back of the cruiser. “For your safety, son.” About this time a backup unit arrived and they put Milo in the other car so us dangerous drug runners couldn’t sit together and hatch plots against the good hard-workin, God-fearin honest citizens of this great country. It must have been at least ninety degrees in that back of that cop-car, and there were no window-cranks and no door-handles. After rummaging through our car for an hour, they found nothing and reluctantly let us go. The first time this had happened, we had been relieved and happy to get away. This time we were just pissed off. I could only imagine what it must be like to be black around here. We arrived in Austin in a bleak mood. The gig wasn’t until 10, so we hung for a while at the house of an old high school chum of Milo’s. We sat on the front lawn with this guy and his baby and wife, drinking beer and talking and watching the sprinklers go around while the sun went down. It was the best ninety minutes of the trip so far. It lifted the black cloud somewhat – at least until we showed up at the gig. The gig was at the Voodoo Lounge, in a warehouse district around the corner from 6th Street in Austin, where all the action was. We went in, and my first impression was that the place couldn’t be open yet. It was all hanging wires and exposed sheetrock. Boards were lying all over the place. There was no bar. The owner approached. “Sorry, we’re a little behind on construction, but we’re open. ‘Course, we don’t have our liquor license yet, but we do have a 9,000 watt sound system.” Great. Right then, I would have happily traded that for a couple of shots of Jack Daniels and a Shure Vocalmaster*. We found out that we wouldn’t be going on until 11:30 because Danny and the Hurricanes had to do a set for the two people in the place beforehand. We walked around the corner to the 311 Club on 6th for cocktails. Barely one drink into the proceedings, Milo was offered a parking-lot blowjob by a drunk, five-month-pregnant bar hag. We bugged out quickly with Milo backing away muttering tissue paper-thin excuses about why he had to leave. Back at the gig, the band was just wrapping it up, and there was now one person left in the audient. I played. Milo played. We packed up quietly so as not to disturb the soundman, who had fallen asleep on the tattered couch which served as seating for the entire club. He was snoring loudly. I went to the bathroom and found a hole where the toilet was supposed to be. In honor of that great road sage Loudon Wainwright III (“The club is a toilet when you gotta take a piss in the sink – when you’re out on the road”) I took a piss in the sink. Total take for the evening: $0.
Day Ten Borders again. I felt like I was in that story about the man who has to live the same day over and over again until he gets it right. At least we had a gig. And an audience. I set up my digital piano only to find out that the sustain pedal, which had been acting funny the whole trip, had finally hung up its cleats and retired its number. While Milo played the first hour, I drove around the neighborhood, fruitlessly searching for an open music store. I got back just in time to play and did the set without the pedal. It was like playing a guitar with two strings missing. It was like driving a car without brakes. It was like eating soup with a fork. Still, the little crowd liked the music. At least they had a good time. After the gig, we went out to a cool club called Stubb’s Bar-B-Q, where an excellent band called 8½ Souvenirs was playing. They did a kind of acoustic-jazz-blues-cabaret music that really made me want to hang out in a club. I was beginning to feel dangerously hopeful. Tomorrow we’d be heading for the Kerrville Folk Festival, where I would play on Sunday, and my girlfriend Megan was flying in to spend the rest of the tour with me. Things had to get better.
Day Eleven I was up at seven in the morning. Due to poor planning (I have a degree in poor planning) I was going to have to drive a hundred miles along the hilly, winding roads to Kerrville, pitch a tent at the festival, then drive back to Austin in the afternoon to pick up Megan at the airport. Milo and I inhaled breakfast and hit the road. I don’t camp. I’ve never had any interest in going back to the land or roughing it. Why go back to the land when you can go back to the room instead? There’s a reason why humans have evolved into a species with electricity and running water and indoor toilets and beds and rooms with walls. To me, roughing it means running out of soap in the middle of a shower. Last year when I played Kerrville, I’d stayed in a hotel room and had a great time. This year, in a non-lucid, hallucinatory moment, I had declared, “Camping will be fun! lets camp this year!” The first indication that my head had been firmly implanted in my ass when I’d said that was when Milo and I attempted to pitch the tent. We were two right-brain-impaired guys doing a job meant for a car-fixin-handy-around-the-house-tablesaw-owning kind of guy. The kind of guy Dave Barry has pointed out is usually named Steve, and makes you feel vaguely uncomfortable when he’s around your wife, who can’t help but notice how much more of a virile man Steve is than you are. As tent pitchers, we made excellent songwriters. It took us two and a half hours to turn six metal poles and a big piece of nylon cloth into something somewhat resembling a tent. And we did it in a dust storm. Dirty, disheveled, tired, and experiencing severe culture shock, I made it to the airport an hour and a half late. During that hour and a half, Megan had gone from elated to see me, to slightly concerned that I was late, to wanting to kill me for forgetting to pick her up, to hysterical about being stranded alone in a strange town. When I got there, she mustered all her restraint so as not to kick my ass all the way across the Austin Airport short-term parking lot. We made it back to Kerrville in time to catch Ellis Paul’s set. I’d opened for Ellis when I’d been on tour in New England the previous year, and really loved his stuff. Megan and I were both big fans, so we didn’t want to miss his set. Ellis did a fine show, which thawed things tremendously between Megan and me. The Kerrville Folk Festival is a big musician-hippie-commune-camping-singing-around-the-fire-after-the-show kind of experience. After the show on the mainstage, people sing around campfires all night. Traveling musicians from all over the country hang out and play together. One large camp, called Camp Cuisine, run by a guy from Nashville named Mike Williams, draws a big crowd from all around the festival grounds. The mainstage performers usually show up to play there after midnight. I’d done a songwriter showcase in Nashville that Mike had hosted, so he invited me to play at Camp Cuisine. There was a battery-powered piano there, which was essential for me because I play guitar like Milo drives. We played music well into the small hours. Megan and I got back to our tent at 4:30 in the morning and attempted to get some sleep in spite of the 40-mile-an-hour winds, the hard ground, and the Deadheads banging on bongos and singing the two-hour extended version of “Uncle John's Band” three feet from our tent. God I hate camping.
Day Twelve Today was going to be the big day of the tour. My set on the mainstage was at 1:30 in the afternoon. I paced nervously all morning. Backstage I ran into friends from Boston, Nashville, New York and L.A. This would probably be the biggest crowd I’d play to this year and many of my peers were here. I wanted to shine. I was introduced, and bounded out onto the stage. Two bars into the first song’s intro, the crowd started yelling, “Can’t hear the piano!” The piano mike wasn’t working. As the sound guys ran out with a new mike, I immediately launched into the same diatribe about the “Plagued By Locusts Tour ‘96” that had worked so well at the Borders gig. The audience loved it. When the piano mike came on, I careened into an extremely well received set, and left the stage to a standing ovation. The whole trip suddenly felt worth every misadventure we’d been through. Afterwards I went out into the crowd to find Megan and Milo. I hadn’t seen Milo since the day before when he went off with some of our L.A. friends who were at the festival. When we finally located him, he had a big bloody scar on his forehead from when the wind had blown him out of his hammock the night before. Milo hated camping. We all went back to my tent to drink Shiner Bocks. After sundown we went back to the mainstage to catch some of the acts. I stopped at the CD sales booth and found that all Malone product was sold out. Cool! I walked the 8,000 miles back to the car and fetched another box of discs. Around ten o’clock that night, the heat and lack of sleep took their toll, and Megan and I left early to go crash back at the tent.
Day Thirteen A tremendous downpour awoke us at six in the morning. Thunder, lightning – the whole show. The tent was starting to leak badly. We had to get ourselves and our stuff out before the whole thing came crashing down. We ran 765,000 miles back to the car and drove back into the camping area, drenched, tired and pissed off. After salvaging our belongings from the tent, we drove into town to eat breakfast at Denny’s and change in their bathroom. After all, you don’t go to Denny’s: you end up there. By now, the rain had stopped and it was turning into a nice day. We got back to the tent, rolled it up, scraped off the mud, and found Milo, who was sporting another bloody welt on his forehead from when a metal overhang had fallen on him in the dark during the rainstorm. As we left the festival grounds, we stopped at the CD booth to pick up my earnings, which turned out to be more than I’d made on the whole rest of the trip so far. Our plan was to not stop until Texas was behind us and New Orleans was in our sights. That night we made Lake Charles, Louisiana, and checked into a Motel 6. Beds! Showers! There was a riverboat casino five minutes from the motel. We headed for that floating palace of sin, and spent the rest of the night losing money and sucking up free booze.
Day Fourteen Driving on I-10 through the heart of Cajun country, bound for New Orleans, we saw a sign that said: CAMPING, NEXT RIGHT. “Get in the left lane and drive like hell!” Milo moaned from the back seat. We stopped at a little joint for lunch: gumbo, oyster po-boys, red beans & rice, and boudin sausage. It kicked ass. We made the Crescent City by three o’clock. Most people who have seen my show or have heard my CDs think I’m from New Orleans because of the way I play and sing. I have been profoundly influenced by the music of New Orleans, but before this tour, I’d never been there. As we approached the city, I was nervous because I’d never wanted to go to a place so badly in my life and I was afraid of being disappointed. But as soon as we got there, I realized there was nothing to fear. I loved this place. The architecture, the music, the food, the vibes…everything was as I’d hoped it would be. My gig was to start at 6:00 at a place called The Gazebo on Decatur Street in the French Quarter. Milo was sitting this one out, along with all the other NOLA gigs. It was a regular four-set bar gig, the kind of show where I could try to blend in and pass for a local musician. Two hours before downbeat we found a parking lot eight blocks from the club (it was cheaper) and ankled it down to the gig. The playing area was outdoors, with the bar right on the sidewalk and a funky old upright piano. Looked like fun. The great thing about people in New Orleans is that they’re so laid-back and relaxed. The bad thing about people in New Orleans is that they’re so laid-back and relaxed. I walked up to the bar and found the owner and introduced myself. Free drinks started flowing immediately. Everyone was very friendly (“y’all want some dinner, too?”). Then I asked George, the owner, if he had gotten the P.A. system I’d specified in my contract. “The gig is only an hour from now.” I said. “Don’t worry, we’ll get a P.A. Looks like you and your friends could use another round!” The guy disappeared. Downbeat rolled around – no P.A. of course. No one seemed to be able to help me with this situation. I had no problem getting another drink, however. Finally I took it upon myself to go looking for anything that a microphone might plug into. In the kitchen I found a tiny, decrepit mixing board and a pair of speakers, sticky with spilled beer, which apparently had been left behind by a band that had gotten fired and never bothered to come back and pick up their gear. I appropriated it, guilt free. No cords though. So I started playing the piano (no singing) while my girlfriend ran the eight blocks back to the car and grabbed every guitar cord she could find. By the time she got back, I’d done most of a set. Three hours later, the club owner showed up. “Everything okay?” he asked. “Oh yeah, just great. I sure could use another drink, though.” “No problem! Everything sounds great!” Even with the P.A. problem, the gig was fun. I felt right at home. This is the only town in America where they’d rather hear a piano player than a guitar player. Afterwards, we went looking for a hotel room, and failed resoundingly. There were three conventions in town, and every room was booked. Milo said, “There’s a Motel 6 in Slidell. It’s only ten minutes out of town. Let’s go there.” “It looks a lot further on the map. Shouldn’t we—“ “I’m from the South, I know how far it is!” He said – his considerable pride wounded. An hour later, we pulled into the Slidell Motel 6 parking lot. I was too tired to even say “I told you so.”
Day Fifteen We awoke to an overcast day in a nondescript suburb an hour away from where we wanted to be. The strain was starting to show on Megan. She was unaccustomed to the vagabond musician lifestyle. There had been too much crisis, not enough fun. We drove back to New Orleans in the pouring rain and headed for the Columns Hotel, where I would be playing the following night. The idea was to get the owner to let us stay there free because I’d be playing there and we couldn’t get a room anywhere else. Like most of our plans, this one was deeply flawed, but we didn’t give a rip, we were desperate. The hotel manager didn’t go for the free angle, but he did give us two $100 rooms for thirty bucks each. He shoots – he scores! This hotel was a beautiful 150-year-old historic monument in the Garden District. It was our first taste of ambiance and amenities on the whole trip. Megan was very pleased. We spent the rest of the day in the room. Later on I did my second night at the Gazebo. The gig was slow because of the rain, so I wrapped up early and we hit the town. We cruised around the Quarter, but the rain and our lack of funds was putting a damper on the evening. We were at that point you get to sooner or later on the road where you just want to go home.
Day Sixteen We got up and had breakfast while reading the complimentary Times-Picayune that had been left at our door. I needed to stay in more places like this. For the first time on the trip I felt almost…human. We went on an afternoon tour of the Garden District, during which Milo spent most of the time bonding with a drug dealer on the trolley. Then we headed back to my gig at the hotel. The bar at the Columns was old, wooden and small. There was no P.A., and I’d be playing on an ancient upright piano in the corner. I got up there and started shouting out songs as loud as I could. It was like traveling back in time: there was no sign of any technology that had evolved in the last 50 years. As the night progressed to an increasingly louder and rowdier level of drunkenness, I rolled the piano closer to the bar so I could be heard better, solicit tips easier, and get my whiskey faster. The crowd was mostly locals, they were layin the bucks on me and requesting real New Orleans music: “Truro Infirmary,” “Tipitina,” “High Blood Pressure,” “Goin’ to the Mardi Gras.” I knew ‘em all. Six hours later my voice was completely gone and my hands were wrecked from banging on the piano. I went up to the room and passed out.
Day seventeen, eighteen We drove to Austin and dropped Megan off at the airport. Milo and I were scheduled to play two more gigs on the way home to L.A., but we found out that both were canceled. Not that I really needed to play El Paso or Tucson. I’d had enough. ENOUGH ALREADY! Next morning at six o’clock we guzzled java and pulled out of Austin. I drove 1,000 miles that day, all the way to Tucson. Would have kept going if we hadn’t had to pick up Milo’s car from the shop. The following morning we discovered that the morons at the garage hadn’t even started working on the car. “I will be in L.A. tonight with you or without you.” I said. He got the picture, and we kept the rental car another day. When we got back to Redondo Beach, I got out of the car and kissed the ground.
Epilogue >Milo ended up declaring his car a total loss after going back to Tucson, picking it up, and losing the tranny again ten miles out of town. Megan left me less than a month after we got back. She just couldn’t take it anymore. Who could blame her? And me? Well, as Bobby Dylan once said, I’m still on the road, headin’ for another joint. The gigs and the pay have improved significantly, and I am now a sober man, but in spite of all that…it’s still the same old road it has always been. Only survivors need apply. Honey I got to get back to you - TEXAS *Shure Vocalmaster: The original prototype P.A. system designed specifically for use by musicians. These dinosaurs are rarely seen today, and with good reason: they sound like shit. The Vocalmaster disappeared from the scene around the mid-seventies, along with tye-dye, VW Microbuses, and the Vanilla Fudge. Still, you will occasionally encounter an aging hippie musician (usually a guy who plays bass with a pick through a really tall sixties-vintage bass amp that also sounds like shit) who will swear up and down that those modern P.A. systems can’t compare to his good old Vocalmaster. This sort of delusion is generally the result of having ingested too much acid, or having attended too many Grateful Dead concerts. © 1996 by Bob Malone
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