LATE FALL TOUR – 2000
September 29th 2000 Driving East
900 miles between Boulder and Malden, Missouri. Corn and cows and cumulous puffing on the horizon.
I’m standing at a counter somewhere in Kansas at a gas station when I notice myself in black & white on the TV security screen overhead. It’s just my back, mine and Kenny’s and the lady behind the counter and some candy and the juice I’m buying.
“Look Kenny,” I say grabbing and maintaining a strong hold on Kenny’s upper arm “We’re on TV!!” and I’m still looking up at the image of mine and Kenny’s backs, my arm squeezing lovingly down on Kenny’s arm when I hear, not Kenny’s voice coming out of the man standing beside me.
The man who I am holding, who is not Kenny at all, says: “At least I’m not doing anything I’m not suppose to be doing.” I release my grip and slowly turn my head to see the man who’s standing next to me, who is not Kenny, and who is, in fact 30 years Kenny’s senior, smile and leave the gas station to laugh about the incident with the rest of the band.
We’re excited about this last strand of shows!
| ON TOUR WITH SALLY AND THE BAND |
 |
| A SALLY TAYLOR FLASHBACK: (9/9/2000) “We met a bunch of really cool cops in McAlester, Oklahoma. Since we almost got arrested there in May, I thought it would be funny to take some pictures in a McAlester, OK T-shirt, with the cops. They said they were game and the next thing we knew, all of us were taking turns putting on the T-shirt and letting the cops direct us in the pictures.” |
September 30th 2000 – The Malden Youth Museum, Malden MO
An hour outside of St Louis we stop for gas and snaky cakes. That’s when I notice it’s missing. My wallet and my keys. We strip-search the van before I conclude that: “it must be back at the motel.”
I’m standing in the Missouri sun at noon, my suitcase spread out, garage sale style, across the gas stained pavement, begging the lady at the St Louis Motel to, please, go search the room. I offer her money in exchange for her help but all she can tell me is that she’s the only person at the front desk and can’t leave it to search for my wallet.
I’d lost my wallet the last East Coast tour and was not about to let this one go so easily. Flashes of me standing on line at the Boulder DMV again for hours on end had me in a frantic and distraught place that made the boys nervous and the lady at the motel finally take pity on me, for she finally paid room #136 a visit.
“Nope. No wallet.” She said.
“But it’s got to be there.” I insistently pleaded until she finally found it. ” It was all rolled up in the sheets.” She said and promised to send it to me on the road.
Malden MO. 5,000 people live there, and there resides the Malden Youth Museum. I’d never been to a youth museum, let alone played one but it turned out to be really great.
There were toys everywhere! Mitch and Patsy our promoters showed us all the exhibits. We ran around like 12 year olds checking out all the cool toys, blowing bubbles and wreaking havoc in wheel chairs the whole time, filming with the video camera. We laughed until our sides ached! And then we played on stage. Come to think of it…we’re playing pretty much all the time. It was a pretty good first night and at set break, I got to hang out in front signing CDs in front of three giant coffins and near the dolphin shaped ice sculpture dripping apologetically onto the tray of chocolate covered strawberries. Not your normal scene I must admit. But again it was great. And then again again…who likes normal anyhow? It’s so boring.
Which reminds me of a time that I brought my boyfriend home from high school and to meet my mom for the first time. He was nervous to begin with and when my mom opened the door she shook his hand, sat him down and said:
“So Sacha, you addicted to anything?”
“Noo..no Ms. Simon.” He stammered
“Nothing Sacha?”
“Nu, no” he said with proud conviction, to which she responded: “How boring.” It wasn’t that she wanted my boyfriend to be an addict or anything, she just wanted to see a little imperfection, something human, something unusual, something not normal. “Normal” has never been considered a very healthy condition in my household. It means somebody is hiding or humiliated by their humanness and that can’t be healthy.
Stephanie, a beautiful blond woman who is somehow affiliated with the museum, jumps up on stage during the second set and starts dancing with Soucy and pouring beer into Kyle’s mouth as he plays the refrain to “Stuck in the Middle.” Weird for a youth museum, right? But again, who thrives on normal? I thought she was flirting with Chris a little so during “Use Me Up,” which we did as an encore, I whispered to The Doc that he didn’t need to do the extendo guitar solo, he already had obviously impressed someone.
“Who?” He wanted to know.
“Stephanie.” I said. My bad. Stephanie was already married turns out, much to The Doc’s chagrin.
“Look for the ring Sal! Look for the ring!!” He scolded me. Oops, sorry Soucy.
October 1, 2000 – Malden MO to Little Rock AK
4:00am and I’m awake. Maybe I’m not used to having my own bedroom on the road. Maybe I’m not used to sleeping next to a landing strip that’s right across the street from the train tracks. Blurry eyes on the way to the mirror, blurry eyes on the way to the magenta curtains pulled aside to look, see – where we are again? Parking lot, chain linked fence, flat dry grass, suburbia barely visible through the dark gauze of 4am morning, Missouri. TV? Book? Yoga? Yoga and then I’m up ‘til 5:30, inverted and contortioned and tired, but not enough to sleep still and I realize that it’ll be light out before it’s dark again in my mind.
Eventually, I do sleep again, and wake with a rush to check out in 10 minutes. I’m groggy, decaffeinated and I can’t find my sunglasses anywhere.
Then we’re on our way to a BBQ that last night’s promoters, Patsy and Mitch and his family (beautiful wife Teresa, and cute, jr-highed, sweet, red headed daughter Ashley) are having for us. Their house is directly adjacent to a cotton field where Mitch takes us to pick some cotton, on account of we’ve never picked cotton before. It’s harder than you’d think. Each little cluster is filled with jelly bean sized seeds which, with out a cotton gin, you have to hand abstract. I think cotton picking would be a good Zen practice. I still have the little cotton ball that I de-seeded, in my jean shorts pocket.
The BBQ was great! The band and the fam. sat around watching football and MTV’s claymation “Celebrity DeathMatch” (very disturbing!!), grilling burgers, chicken and sausages, experiencing Sunday’s version of Missouri.
After football, strawberry rhubarb pie and chocolate cheesecake the family took us to the driving range. Beside Delucchi, none of us had really golfed before and as it turns out Kyle is a natural. From the first ball hit, he was spitting those little white nugget suckers out to the 200 marker. We were all really impressed. I however Sucked!!! Big Time!!!! I’d get up to the T and hit a grounder 20 feet to the left of me. And that was on a good hit. Most of the time I was calling “heads up” before the shiny white globe hit someone in the butt. Once I knew I was no natch, I started having fun and laughing a lot. Mostly at myself but every once and a while, at the person I was hitting.
The rest of the day, on the drive to Little Rock, I was in a giddy mood and when I get in a mood like that, it can mean only one thing: trouble for Soucy. I don’t know why I should pick exclusively on Soucy. Maybe because he’s so serious all the time, maybe because he’s fun to beat up on, maybe because, having been a 5th grade teacher, he brings out the little kid in me, but I always seem to find myself picking on him when I get in a silly mood. It started when we were in a gas station still in MO. We were standing around the kid station in the middle of the Texaco store, checking out balloons and plastic light up balls when, unfortunate for Soucy, I found some blueberry air freshener. Without hesitation and with a conniving crackley smile on my face I illegally opened up the bottle and let loose on The Doc. Then ran out of the store laughing hyena style.
Even though he smelled up the whole van like a cheep New York Cab. Even though he had to wash blue stain out of his shirt back at the hotel, he didn’t loose his temper on me. YET. It wasn’t ‘til we were sitting at dinner at a Cracker Barrel, after the spitballs and the tickling at the table that he lost his patience.
I’d ordered a hot tea which came in a little silver pot next to a kreveled** piece of lemon. I was just making a truce with the exasperated Soucy after bombarding him with: “Here comes a double hitter” spit ball in the cheek, when a jumbo glass of ice water was set just beyond my metal tea pot. I reached for it, my under arm touched the top of the steaming tea pot and I spastically pulled my arm back from the metal with a yelp thus knocking, with fury, the glass of ice water into the air, which landed with abandon, on the unlucky Soucy. Everyone looked as the water dripped icily down The Doc’s forehead and shorts, which were full of transparent frozen cubes and the red striped straw I had used against him as a spitball weapon.
“DO SOMETHING! SAL!!! DO SOMETHING!!!” He shouted frantically. But all I could do was laugh. Hunch over, laugh and apologize: “I didn’t mean to. Sorry, Souce. I’ll be good. I promise.”
** VOCABULARY
Krevel: Dirt or grime usually associated with the bottom of one’s shoe.
October 3, 2000 – Red River Revel, Shreveport LA
We wake up early at the Residence Inn. “Welcome Home!!” It says on the refrigerator and somehow I know this’ll be the closest to home I’ll be for the next 6 weeks.
I took the rollaway last night. And because I was too tired, after hanging out after hours at Juanita’s, to make the bed up properly, I woke up, immobilized in a cocoon of my own blankets, sheets and pillows with my back arching like a bow and my eyes slammed shut like a new born baby’s.
Todd, the regional manager of The Waffle House, once again invited us to eat on his tab at any Waffle House “from here to Louisiana.” The obvious question was “Which W.H. are Mary and Melba working at these days?” Breakfast at The Waffle House in Arkansas has now become an STB tradition and the two (the only two) waitresses to have are Melba and Mary.
The Waffle House was full of smoke when we arrived. Skillets were sizzling; eggs and bacon and welcoming laughter hung in the opaque air like a sea of southern comfort. Melba and Mary screamed their unrestricted greeting to us as we entered. Men with baseball hats floating atop their rumpled hair, smiled half-toothed grins and tipped their heads in our direction. They smoked cigarettes while they ate, puffing in between bites, and spoke a southern drawl, which we caught immediately like the flu. How could we not? It’s too easy, too comfortable and too ‘home’ not to pick it up: “Hey, Melba” one of us would say, “cud’I git me sum’more’uh that coffee when you git a secn’ darlin’?” and: “Mary, what you been doin’ wit yer self girl?” Fun.
Grits, OJ, Coffee, bacon and, of course, waffles. On the ride to Shreveport we imitated Eddie Vedder (from Pearl Jam) singing different popular songs (for the books, I really like Eddie Vedder). Kyle does the Eddie Vedder face better than anyone and had us all on the floor in stitches as I filmed and shouted out different songs for him to mimic. Ever since I lost my wallet I’ve been using an empty Pop tarts wrapper to hold my money. The boys are all sure I’ll throw it out by accident at some gas station which is probably the only reason I haven’t lost it yet.
The guys are still bugging me to ditch my favorite shoes. “THEY STINK!!!,” they insist, but I love them! “Then at least get some foot powder,” They beg me but I haven’t come across any yet. So when we finally got to the Red River Revel and situated ourselves in our trailer; they made me leave my shoes outside and wash my feet in the sink. But the trailer water was stinkier than my shoes, as it turned out. It smelled of sulfur. So not only did my poor feet smell like rotten shoe, but like sulfur yuckiness too. The smell was awful but seeing as the trailer was the only air-conditioned place at the Revel, we sucked it up.
The trailer was actually really gooch!** So nice, in fact, that the boys all yelled at me to get them something like it to travel in. It had a dining table, a fridge, a bathroom, two bunk beds and a queen size bed up some green shag carpet stairs. Moby is getting pretty small I’ll admit, but I can’t afford it quite yet, I explain to their pouting but understanding faces.
Kyle, Soucy and I all flopped out on the queen-size mattress. And before we knew it, Kyle was streamrolling all over us and we were wrestling and slapping just as Channel 5 News walked in and wanted to do an interview. Pretty damn funny if you ask me!
I didn’t think I had much of anything to say about yesterday, but two really sweet women approached me before the show and asked that I write about Shreveport on the site. How could I resist? They were just too nice. The gig itself was fun; hot, but very fun and all the people we met and worked with were GREAT!
October 4th, 2000 – The Parish (House of Blues) New Orleans, LA
The sky falls out onto the ground in New Orleans, and I think to myself, that maybe it’s all this cloud caught in my eyes that’s making NOLA** seem like such a dream. People with glowing satin skin and a crazed evangelical glares, dance down the streets to the sound of brass band this and that, or to zydeco which pours out, just like the sky does, onto the street, from novelty stores and po’ boy**, hole-in-the-wall sandwich shops. Some people talk to themselves feverishly as they pass by and mostly everyone has an instrument in hand. Some play with broken hearts and broken down straw hats with which to catch a passing buck or 50 cents with. Other instruments rush by with their owners, on their way to a rehearsal or to an early gig. But everyone here is a musician, have no doubt. Mostly people carry guitars but I saw some trombones, and a drum or two. I even saw a guy walking down the French Quarter surrounded by a swirling tuba, as we were loading in.
Upstairs at the Parish was gothically serene and peaceful like the silence in church. Chandeliers dripped from the ceiling and folk art stared at us through iridescent sequent eyes.
“What up with the weather in here?” asked Soucy. Smoke that smelled suspiciously like jazz and condensed milk hung like an uninvited memory, in the Parish. Brent, the sound guy explained to us that they’d been experimenting with the ambiance in the adjacent House of Blues and gotten kinda carried away.
After sound check, BirdMan** arrived having traveled all the way from Mobile, Alabama. He said he’d written us a 28 minute song which turned out to be an INGENIOUS epic about our last Eastern tour together, on which he’d put in 7 crazy days. He looked incredibly handsome and was wearing a typical BirdMan shirt: a see-through, sparkling, black and blue polyester lycra blend. It was great to see him!
The Chris’s, BirdMan and I drove over to play a radio show (WWOZ) which our friend Benny (from the NOLA band “Sublime Lens”) had invited us to participate in. It was really fun!!
By the time we returned to the club, night had happened to New Orleans and people with feathered boas and drinks staggered noisily down crippled streets with laughter that smelled like rum and red peppermint candy. Upstairs bands were already playing. The room, finally cleared of smoke, was now full of people there for a gun control benefit. Every one danced as the bands kicked the funk out, and we were no exception. After the benefit and the costumes and the Mardi Gras beads and those who had donned them were gone, we played.
It was a very quiet evening. Not very many people at the show but we managed to have fun anyhow, pretending to be the drama and shadows and the fuzzy light that crackles and stretches dark around the tip of a tiny child’s sparkler** that we seemed to be lacking in that night.
The lighting girl, the one with the blue dreads and cool pale innocent eyes, the one with the nose pierce and the translucent tattooed skin brought me her snake to hold.
“This is her first show,” she said handing me the still small rainbow boa constrictor “I want you to name her.” I let the snake curl and tangle around my prayer pointed fingers. It was so beautiful and cold and dangerous and curious and mysterious and breathless that I realized it was what New Orleans had always meant for me to know about her. I named her “Isis.”
We were suppose to meet a bunch of friends out at The Maple Leaf for drinks, but I was all worn out and opted for the hotel.
Holiday Inn.
2:00.
Discovery Channel.
Special on Jack the Ripper.
Words the narrator used to describe the “Mutilated” “Decapitated” “Sliced Up” “Indistinguishable” “Mass’s” Of Jack’s victims “Flesh,” stuck in my head and followed me unsympathetically,
Into my dreams.
Into the disastrous mares** of my night.
**VOCABULARY:
NOLA: New Orleans, LA.
Po’ Boy: A New Orleans version of a sub (really yummy and mostly unhealthy)
BirdMan: Eric Erdman.
Sparkler: Those fire crackers that we had as kids that just crackled and spit static fire off of a stick
Mares: As in “Nightmares”
October 5th 2000 – Newby’s, Memphis TN
OK. So I’m drinking the skunky bud this tour. The tradition, if you don’t know already, is that who ever makes the biggest faux pas during a given tour, must drink a skunky Budweiser beer that’s been sitting in the cooler, heating up and cooling down for the entire trip.
“Where’s my capo?” I yelled out, after Spilt Decisions “I just put it down here.” I said pointing at the stage floor. The boys and I scoured the stage looking under rugs and wires until Kenny finally tapped me on the shoulder pointing at my capo, conveniently situated right on the neck of my guitar positioned perfectly for the next song. But that wasn’t the end of my blundering. I then proceeded to sing the first verse of Happy Now like this:
“There is a house without a phone, and we have locked ourselves in here. It’s broken shlick anotham en found it, asham aglockafondu afair. My friend it is because of you, toganther frolick meair, to what you and I all blabla bla. Blabla bla bla bla bla bla. HE HE HE!!!”
Of course a fumble as severe as that in the Olympics would have cost me the gold. However at Newby’s it won me the audience’s laughter, Delucchi’s dazed and confused expression from behind the sound board, and one awful, discussing, skunky BUD!
Newby’s was great. It was cool to see the whole crew, including an old high school friend, Ellie Beach, and poet IQ, captained by none other than the loving and fearless, Big Hand Todd.
October 6, 2000 – Travel Day from Memphis to York PA.
Doc Soucy and I flew from Memphis to PA on Saturday, getting into Harrisburg a little past 9pm. A six-hour day of travel was hardly easy considering how scared both of us are of flying.
I flipped nervously through the Sky Mall catalog thinking that I might get something for myself, or for one of the Chrises, who’s birthdays are both on this tour. (Soucy’s: the 24th and Delucchi’s, the 28th). Hummm, Hammacher Schlemer? Sharper Image? …. What up with the mail order meat in that catalog anyway? “Hey Soucy,” I say grabbing and clutching at his shirtsleeve from across the isle, “I was thinking of ordering you a nice steak from Sky Mall for your birthday.”
“Dude, don’t you dare.” He says as I bat my eyes and a stewardess walking toward us stops, looks at the two of us and says “Aww, you guys are cute.”
“No we’re not. NO WE ARE NOT!” Soucy calls after the attractive stewardess as she passes us by. “NOT CUTE?!” Insists a discouraged Soucy.
We had a 3-hour layover in North Carolina, which we spent in a toy store playing with kid toys and regressing. I bought a flourescent yellow “nose flute” for a buck and walked around the airport trying to perfect it as Soucy dragged his disaster of a bag around on the treadmill walkways (which he loves riding and will spend all day going back and forth on, given the opportunity).
Let me take a moment to describe the dilapidation of Chris Soucy’s travel luggage. It’s a bag on wheels, like the rest of the bags the band has. Only, somehow, it’s taken 100 times the abuse as the rest of ours. One wheel has come off and so it limps and clumps through hotel halls like a stray puppy tearing up carpet as he tugs it pathetically behind him. The leather handle is broken and so it flaps to one side, covered with an attempt to fix it: duct tape job, and dirt from bathing in puddles. Last but not least, the metal pull up handle frame is all crooked and crippled too. He refuses to get a new bag because they’re so expensive and so he continues to drag the poor thing around, much to his chagrin and the STB’s amusement. In the airport, people turn around to look at him, laugh at him and pity him and his one wheel, no handle having, wanta be leather pull/drag bag.
At the Hotel we threw our stuff in our rooms and went for a nightcap at the hotel bar “Chats.” There, a wedding reception was winding down. Muffled disco music etched through warped mirrored walls. Glittery dresses walked their wearers around with mannequin-like stiffness. Men in tuxedos sauntered through balloon filled halls with plastic glasses of muted Champagne, with cummerbund discomfort, and small talk like: “Where are your kids in college Stan?” and “My wife always cries at these weddings Bill.”
I, personally, was under a considerable amount of stress, mostly from the flight, that and the bad airplane food. So Soucy took me to the hotel arcade at midnight where only the least enthusiastic wedding guests, and the most disobedient kids had assembled. He treated me to a speed racer pinball game which calmed me and then, after I begged him, he lent me the change to play a “western quick draw shoot out” game, where the opponents were actual people on video pretending to shoot you. Shooting people really helped me get out some aggression. Maybe I should be worried. Maybe I should invest in one of those games.
Oct 18th 2000, The Walden School. Media, PA
Rain. Weather which seeps through cracks in brick walls and down the insides of my ribs, down my shoulders into the deepest part of my memory. Rain always does this to me. It takes me back into the laughter filled recesses of my childhood, running through the tall grass all dripping from head to foot with water from low-lying, heavy, dramatically dark clowds; reading my first Nancy Drew novel in the shivery school library, my first kiss in the vacant hall under the blinking, echoing, halogen light, near my narrow, blue locker. How perfect it is, that today we should be entertaining at The Walden School. Those of you who read my “road accounts” often, know that these little excursions to Media PA are what keep me sane in the long, arching backbends we do across the Eastern Coast of USA.
The kids here are the coolest and most loving kids I’ve ever met. They run into my arms like bouquets of flowers as I come, time and time again, into their school singing and remembering and regressing. Marji and her husband Larry feed us downstairs where there happens to be a closet full of games and gym equipment. I grab a plastic red hula-hoop while the boys form teams with yellow and green hockey sticks and slap a wiffle ball yelling: “ooh, here!” and “I’m opened” and “Yeah…Score!” Eating has slipped our minds entirely by this point and I’m doing boomerang tricks with my hula-hoop which is bouncing off walls, crashing in to quiet class rooms and finally knocking into the 3rd grade’s hamster cage which rattles with excitement before I stick my head in, snatch the hoop, and repeat the action with a little more finess. We’re huffing and puffing and laughing as the rain thuds enthusiastically, like a roaring crowd of sports fans kept outside the by the window, when Marji says “OK! now sit down.” And I am reminded that not only am I misbehaving, but I am no longer a child. We sit diligently, hands in lap, as Marji serves us lunch and we become, once again, the adults we assume ourselves to be.
The reason I haven’t been writing is because I broke my computer in Nashville, or was it Charlotte? I can’t remember, and now, without my diary, I can barely remember anything. That’s the problem with keeping a journal. You begin to rely on written word instead of memory.
Let’s see. What I do remember about last week:
At the York PA Women’s expo, I lost my underwear to a roudy bunch of Harley Dudes.
In Nashville TN I discovered that, to get back at me for having sprayed him multiple times with cheesey gas station, imitation-designer-cologne air freshners, Chris Soucy put 12 taxicab, cardboard tree and rainbow air freshners in my clothing bag which then sat in the sun for 3 days. (Now all of my stuff stinks like O’ de NYC cab)
In Charlotte NC we stayed at Camp Stuart (Chris’s friend’s, Mike and LG’s summer camp) where we had a 12 foot bonfire in the yard, lit bottle rockets, and played croquet by moonlight.
In Annapolis MD I got on stage and embarassingly said: “It is SOOO good to be back in Virginia” (never mind that I was in Maryland!!!). And then in Herndon VA, I introduced the headliner, Ellis Paul, as Paul Ellis…..I’m definitely drinking the scunky Budweiser mascot this tour. Bummer!
All is in working order with the band and we’re just about halfway through: “The Cut and Paste Tour 2000.” I should have my computer back by the weekend.
October 21, 2000 – New York to Mass. The Bitter End
October is the Sunday of months. It sleeps-in late, it smiles and laughs and couches. It steeps in orange pekoe tea, and hangs, like Mozart, off the tip of the air. It takes time and hangs it up like linen, like laundry on a loose clothesline. It rests, it rustles, it remembers. It pauses….. Before the intensity, before the heavy exhale; of what is yet to come.
Patchworked miles of quilted autumn ahead of us, blond, and fire, and orange crush. Then there are the leaves that have already browned and crippled and clenched themselves into crumpled paper bags and died, as if selflessly sacrificed for our leaf pile. We laugh as we jump and land in the raked leaves, because unlike when we were five, it hurts to hit the cool ground and land with the weight of 20+ years under our belts, and somehow, in the slanting shadows of afternoon hours, the pain seems funny. Or maybe, that we thought there would be none, is what’s so hysterical. Regardless, before we know it, we’re covered from head to toe in an ocean of autumn.
Tim Buckley is on the radio and somehow, that’s perfect. Hot chocolate with mini marshmallows in the cup holder. Tall sky swallowing up the jagged edges of the earth. Purple cashmere scarf purring comfortably around my neck, while Tim’s acoustic guitar scratches initials into the landscape, promising to leave its indelible mark on the dark, cool, mystery of the universe.
We’re on our way up to Great Barrington Massachusetts for a gig at Club Helsinki and then crash out at my dad’s place. As hectic as this week has been, we’ve still managed to have the best time of our lives.
After The Point, in Bryn Mawr, PA, 1:00 in the friggin morning, Soucy decided he was going to do his laundry, napping in-between loads. This made it entirely impossible to sleep at all, what with his alarm clock going off every 1/2 hour proceeded by the turning on and off of the lights and then the rain, which pounded on the roof, echoing like a thousand construction workers opening their brown paper bag lunches. The morning of the 19th hurt, like chlorine on my smoke dried eyes. Oct 19th Itinerary:
Oxygen Media TV:10:45 am
CD Now interview (at The Bitter End): 5:00
CNN interview (at The Bitter End): 5:45
Sound Check :6:00
Doors 7:00
Show: 8:30
WNEW radio interview: 11-3am
Oxygen Media is located above the Chelsea flower market. We made our way through the crowded market up to the 8th floor. Managerial shouts of shop owners, the scent of fresh flowers, bread, chocolate, and the hum of the undercurrent of New York City, like a sink faucet turned on hot and full throttle, filled my eyes and ears and for some reason I walked more slowly than I would have normally. I felt kind of like a ghost, walking the brick laid halls, blue guitar in hand, as though the noise and the heat and the mean, viperous, smoke might pass right through me, or break around me, the way the ocean does, around a protruding rock.
There was a video camera in the elevator, which we had fun picking our noses and making faces in front of. Upstairs, we were greeted by “Nikki,” and coffee, and bagels, and flowers, and a huge, clean, comfortable, unnecessary but much appreciated dressing room surrounded by windows, looking out on the booming and energized company floor. Kenny parked, spread eagle around the TV, and tuned into The Tella Tubbies. On channel 3, was Oxygen Media. Quentin Tarantino was on getting interviewed in a Hawaiian shirt, flailing his arms around frantically talking about his movies and New York City and 4:00 am, with whom he’s reluctantly acquainted himself, trying to write his new script. After his interview, the director introduced him to me and I persuaded him to come have a cup of coffee with me and the band in our huge, white, unnecessary but much appreciated dressing room. He was hysterical! And had us all laughing hyenically.** You know when you meet someone you feel you’ve already known your entire life? That’s what it was like with Quentin. He ended up at our show later that night, too, at the Bitter End and stood out amongst the hardness of the dark wood, wobbley chairs, the smoke and the stage lights which stain your skin different shades of night if you stay too long. The Bitter End was packed. Intermixed with unfamiliar, shadow steeped faces, were patches of friends from all walks of my life:
Brian Marketti, my boyfriend from Brown, and his crew; Oren Seigel; Jim Hart, my step dad; Gene O’Brian, The Tabor (high school) representatives: Nimi Alisbah, Heidi, Lee, and Michael who’d come all the way from D.C. to see the show; Rob Gordon, Jeff Cohn, J.W. Johnson, Russ Titleman, Chris Blackwell, Todd Rotondi, Steph Chenkin, Tom Sheehan and more. It was like seeing my whole life flash before my eyes to look out from the stage into a crowd of friends whose lives I’ve drifted in and out of, who have all touched my life and my heart for the better.
**VOCABULARY: Hyenically: like a hyena.
October 27th – Morning TV, Buffalo NY
8:00 am. Room #111.
Knock Knock Knock.
“S.T. Time to go girl. Time for TV.” Muttered a muffled Soucy from the stale, echoing hall. 9 times out of 10 they don’t provide fitted sheets in these cheap motels and so the beige fuzzy blanket tangled up in my legs as the layered, un-fitted sheets poured out in a syrup-like pattern, revealing the conspicuous, underlying, 70’s, green and yellow mattress. The heating unit went “thump thump thump.” The crack in the polyester curtains bleached a pie-wedge of daylight on the far facing wall. I unlaced my appendages from the snarled bedding and staggered towards the door, opening it just as far as the security chain would allow. Enough to see Soucy, awake, washed and refreshed. He let out a laugh when he saw me, all puffy and crumpled up around the eyes. “I didn’t get my wake up call,” stating the obvious in a garbled morning voice.
“I can see that,” he said, amused. “We got 5 minutes before we have to leave. Wash up, put on some clean clothes, brush your teeth and meet me down stairs.” He said. I washed my face but since I hadn’t bothered getting undressed the night before; I didn’t bother getting re-dressed. I was still wearing the jeans and tank top I’d arrived in at 4:00 after driving straight from the gig in Syracuse….Well, I didn’t actually drive…..I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again “Thank GOD for Chris Delucchi.” I swear that man is my savior. If it weren’t for him I’d lose my mind, not to mention my wallet, my keys, my voice and probably my career. Needless to say, Delucchi did all the AM driving between Syracuse and Buffalo. We stopped for a bathroom break at a Roy Rogers. I got a coffee which I immediately proceeded to spill on my white “Barb’s BBQ” T-shirt. I went back into the bathroom to wash up. The Roy Rogers restroom was pretty quiet at 2 o’clock in the morning so I didn’t much mind stripping down to wash out my shirt. As I entered the bathroom, a halogen light spit and hissed at me and splashed metallically off the dirty orange and brown tile walls. I filled up a sink with luke-warm water, put my shirt underneath the liquid soap dispenser, dashed off two pink squiggles and threw it in the sink. I swirled it this way and that, squeezed out the excess water and threw it back on before dashing out into the bitter New York cold, back onto the night blind highway which leads ever closer toward the dawn.
Not too much of the stain lasted in the morning; not that I could see anyhow. Through squinted eyes, I somehow decided I was presentable enough for TV, besides, I didn’t really have much of a choice.
Soucy and I performed on AM Buffalo, at the local ABC affiliate, at 10am, after some condiment-less coffee and a sadly inadequate session of vocal exercises in the women’s dressing room.
My voice is a bit distressed these days. Last week alone, with radio and TV, we did 12 shows and my voice is usually good for no more than 6. After the House of Blues show in Boston I knew I was in trouble. My throat was so swollen and painful that I got an appointment with my Pop’s throat specialist at Mt Sinai. The doctor sat me in a straight back chair, sprayed a numbing, novocaine, astringent, watermelon-ish spray into the back of my sore throat then stuck a miniature video camera on the end of a metal stick into my throbbing wind pipe. “Oooohhhh,” he said “ahhh, uuuhhh yup. Looks swollen.” He said as my friend Todd looked on in horror at the red puffy vocal chord tissue, which is most often mistaken for the most private of the female anatomy.
“What should I do?” I asked, choking on the cold camera stick.
“You gotta sleep and drink plenty of water. No coffee, no chocolate, no bubbly drinks, no acidic juices, no spicy food, no eating before bedtime, no talking, no singing and try an’ avoid smokey areasn” he said. I almost laughed out loud … good luck, I thought. That was on the 24th, our first day off in 7 days and it just happened to be Doc. Soucy’s birthday. After my throat appointment, I met the boys down at Harvard Square in a toy store where we bought the now infamous: “boxing nun,” “boxing rabbi” and “boxing devil.”" Since then we’ve been having non-stop boxing matches in the van. I don’t know why it should be as fun as it is. I guess it’s mostly the band’s sordid and inappropriate commentary that makes van puppet boxing so funny; that and that we all seem to regress into our earliest action figure days. I must admit, I’m the least sportsmanlike of our brood when it comes to our boxing matches and if puppets could bite, mine would.
“… Usually, before long, Sally resorts to illegal head butting, hair pulling and grabbing the other puppet’s muumuus for which the ref, time and time again has to reprimand her. He will not hesitate to take a point away if such behavior continues Sally,” warns Kyle.
I drove up to Albany with my friend Todd in his navy blue, 80’s Mercedes Benz later that 24th of October. “Do you smell something?”, he asked half an hour into our drive as we cruised out into the blood orange sunset off I-90.
“Kinda” I said
“I think my car is leaking diesel fumes into the main compartment,” he said and I knew he was right, when after another 30 miles or so, we were laughing at the whistling of the wind and weaving all over the road. The rest of the drive we left the windows down and the sunroof opened to the cold, which flooded in like deep water. We tied T-shirts around our mouths to avoid inhaling dangerous amounts of carbon monoxide, listened to the radio, cruised at 90, and wrapped ourselves in comic amounts of layers: scarves and flannels and mittens. I knit my new gray woolly project with a newfound rigor.
Finally the fumes were so strong that we decided to stop over at my pops house. My dad jumped, like a well-oiled mechanic, under Todd’s car and after some careful analysis decided he could remedy the problem with some dental floss. I made soup and veggie burgers with Kim, dad’s fiancée, for the burly mechanics who came in from the night covered in oil, blackening their faces and necks and a chunk of messy tubing in their hand that they’d surgically removed from the bowels of the car and somehow repaired with mint, un-waxed, dental hygienic equipment. Needless to say I was more nervous about their repair job than about the carbon monoxide poisoning we risked on the rest of the ride. It was a beautiful, yet strenuous couple of days in up state New York leading up to Buffalo on the 27th.
AM Buffalo went well I thought, but then again, it felt like part of the funny little dream I was having just before Chris woke me up (but without the talking monk fish) and when I got beck to the motel the only comments the band had were about how tired I’d looked and that I should take a nap. But I’m too excited about playing The Tralf tonight to bother with my other dreamings.
October 31, 2000, The Thirsty Ear, Columbus OH
Across the street from Bob Evan’s. The train goes by. The train goes by again and then once more at 3:30. Knock knock at the door….”Who is it?” No answer. I look through the peephole to see part of Delucchi’s green “Fly me to the Moon” T-shirt and some of his long, soft, Pantene commercial like, flowing hair. I open the door, but the chain on the door stops me and I laugh as he laughs and I unlatch the door and let him in. I never bolt the door unless I’m staying alone and tonight the club has been generous enough to rent me my own room.
“I got a 1:00 check out time.” He says, holding 3 Anchor Steam beers in his right hand.
“I better have one of those.” I say referring to the beers and too my pathetic ineptness at opening the door.
“See you in the afternoon.” He says in his upbeat Delucchi way, hands me a beer and walks down the open hall way to room #215A.
I’m in #217A at the Cross-Country Inn in Columbus, OH. It is 2 in the morning. It’s pretty still outside except for the loud, red, neon “Bob Evan’s” sign, under which they’re advertising their “Famous Fudge Brounies.” Delucchi points out the misspelling as we drive out the drive-through check-in counter. I’ve never seen a drive-in check-in before and so we film the new and unique experience. The blond squinting woman, with the dark, drooling mascara at the drive through window says she can’t find our reservations and she doesn’t look too thrilled about being Memorexed. But we’re used to this type of thing so we don’t get upset and, of course, the reservation’s there eventually. It’s just under some club owner’s wife’s maiden name or his daughter’s pet hamster’s name or something else silly and impossible to imagine at 2 in the morning. The rest of the boys are in #221A. Quiet drifts over the monotonous, blurried sound of the mini refrigerator humming along to the bathroom fan’s wrath and then…Knock Knock…”It’s Kenny…beer police.” He mutters through the door. I open it. “You can keep the beer actually,” he says “just give me a hug.”
Then it’s quiet again. Like wasabi. Like ginger. Like the rice paper that comes from Japan but can be found at selected Walmarts around the country in the 12th aisle next to the imitation porcelain plates. America, what a weird place it is at midnight and beyond. The secret obsessions seep from cracks in the pavement. From the black and white of back page beat rags. In the steam which creeps from the sidewalk grills and chimneys like an old man smoking in his armchair. My dad used to tell me that Peter Pan lived underneath the street and the smoke from manholes were really just Peter smoking on his peace pipe, but now I know that Peter Pan doesn’t exist and that it must be some other little man down there smoking a pipe.
I feel legitimately alone and yet I’m somehow filled with company. Maybe that’s why I can’t sleep. The party’s not over under my skin. I can still feel the laughter, the applause and the exhales between cigarette puffs from tonight’s show, and the show before that and the one last Friday when Heidi and Brandon came.
The show at the Thirsty Ear was busy for a Monday. Nearly sold out Busy! And the two Chef’s (Vince and Jim) catered us a feast after the show. I got to sign CD’s after the gig and talk to some really cool folks. I just want to know how many people my father’s picked up in his life time ‘cus everywhere I go somebody’s got this fantastic story about how: “I was hitchhiking on Martha’s Vineyard this one summer when this tall, handsome, skinny guy picked me up and that guy turned out to be James Taylor and he was really nice and shy and maybe if you tell him this story he’ll remember me…I was wearing this long red scarf that day…” Don’t get me wrong; I’m glad my dad picks up hitchhikers on occasion, but I’ll tell ya, after hearing that story every night from someone else who expects me to be surprised that the guy who picked them up was my dad is almost all I can do to not spoil the punch line before they get there.
We had the day off yesterday but had to drive to Akron OH in order to position ourselves closer to the Columbus show. We ‘d gotten into Akron at 5:00pm, and Soucy and I grabbed dinner at a local brewery: The Thirsty Dog. “Can you seat us somewhere in non-smoking, and far away from TV?”
“In the kitchen,” the Hostess suggested and sat us underneath adjacent widescreen TVs amidst a cloud of other peoples’ smoky exhales. When we got back to the hometel, Soucy begged me to shave racing stripes into his head. OK he didn’t beg and I did sort of offer but after he’d lathered and covered his shoulders with a starched white towel I could sense he was hesitant to let me actually do it.
“Have you ever shaved a head before?” he grilled me.
“Yes” I replied, appalled by his lack of trust.
“Whose?” he asked reluctantly
“Kipp’s, my brothers” I listed.
“Ever cut either one of um?”
“No” I said reassuringly but truthfully I couldn’t exactly recall.
“Cus you know that scalp bleeds..”
“Hurt, right, I know,” I said cutting him off
“No, they don’t really hurt. But they sure do bleed a lot.” I assured him I wouldn’t cut him, sat him down and swiveled the TV around so I could watch Sex in the City on HBO.
“You’re not going to watch TV while you cut my hair” he said
“Can you just trust me?” I asked impatiently.
I must admit, I did a FANTASTIC job! He’s too much of a baby to say thank you, but I know he likes his new do. “I’m sure my mom wouldn’t really enjoy reading about this in the road tales,” he said.
“Oh, there’s no way I’m not writing about this Souce. Sorry, I did too good of a job not to gloat.” And thus he let go of his mother finding out (Sorry you had to find out like this Mrs. Soucy).
I had a radio interview I had to wake up for at 8:00, so I got a wakeup call for 7:55 and strolled down to the lobby for some complimentary coffee, into which I mixed a carnation hot cocoa packet. I strolled faster, now becoming recaffinated, back to the room. A billboard sign across from the hotel read: “What part of ‘Thou shalt not’ didn’t you understand?”-GOD
The room was blacker then I had left it and I tripped and stumbled noisily over partially opened bags and scattered shoes to Soucy’s bedside. “I wanted to apologize in advance for the phone call I’m about to make.” “’Salrite” he mumbled and turned over.
Radio went well. The one thing that drives me nuts about doing radio shows is that the DJ’s never say goodbye on the phone they just say “thanks for being with us this morning.” and then Click. They hang up. I hate it when people don’t say goodbye. It’s so ‘industry’. Like you’re so busy you don’t even have time to say goodbye? Sorry to get so cynical about it, but it annoys me. So now it’s 3:33am in Columbus and the third train has hushed in into a deadening, Doppler trademarked, silence and I am off, back into my jammies.
November 2, 2000 – The 20th Century Theater, Cincinnati OH
1:00 PM. A bowl of soft, blond, shredded mozzarella cheese covers a layer of french fries which are lumped atop 5 huge, steaming, buttery slabs of chicken which is all on a wilting bed of iceburg lettuce on the splintered and spilt on bar before me… I guess that’s the grilled chicken salad I ordered? … But wait … really? Kyle, who is sitting beside me, has to try to hold back his laughter but it pokes through his lips with little lawnmowing sputters and a few apologetic tears. The butch waitress glares at him with indignation, her manish side burns hanging below her backward facing base ball cap. I’m on the hands-free cell phone with my mom and she wants to know what’s so funny.
“Cheese Bowl.” I say and Kyle lets out another uncontrollable roar through his tightly clenched fingers. The Country Music Station is on in wide screen above the bar and we all eat in dumb whited silence, spacing out at the tube and the attractive, dancing, country stars in cowboy hats and boots on dusty roads near cow fields and horse stables and hay stacks. Everyone is smoking in Vinnie’s Italian Kitchen/Bar while they eat, puffing between bites. While outside it’s muggy, inside it’s cancerous. It’s hard enough to taste anything through all the country music and smoke and cheese. But finally I begin to suspect, with nausea, that this cheese-lathered meat might not really be chicken at all. I stop eating and stand up to imitate the girl from that 80’s video: “I know what boys like, I know what guys want, I know what boys like, boys like, boys like me…..” I’m overdramatizing in an under-dramatized place and I feel like glitter at a funeral … really inappropriate. But the guys are laughing. Everyone else is wondering ‘what the hell is that girl in the blue aviator glasses and green felt hippie shoes doing acting all lipsticky, here in the middle of an undone downtown Cincinnati. Frankly, I’m wondering the same thing myself. I’m wondering where all that time went in-between New York and today, and this mild mid-afternoon bar and this disgusting bowl of cheese.
The wakeup call came five hours after we’d said goodnight last night. Since the bedside phone didn’t work, Soucy had to get out of bed to pick it up. Then he woke me up with tenderly violent thrusts; pulling me, with whiplash, out of the dreams I’d so messily glued myself into and lost my time to.
“Sal. TV babe.” I was ready in 15 minutes and we were at Fox in 30. I guess it might seem pretty banal doing a TV show in a city we played the night before and which we’re about to leave .. but hey, any press is good press right?
The day before, in OH, was been spent mostly resting, but some people (not me) made it out into the world of Cincinnati and found a gorgeous new red guitar, which they bought. I watched Soap Operas (which I’ve never done before, but I just had to see my friend Todd Rotondi on “As the World Turns”. he was great). And then we played at the 20th Century Theater.
The 20th Century Theater is a really beautiful vintage theater and Mark, the promoter, is a really sweet guy. The upstairs greenroom is very film noir, with dark, dramatic red walls, an old classic bar, and a pool table, on which I whooped Soucy’s Butt at pool. I shot some TV footage before the show with a great journalist named Doug High who’d previously interviewed me for a show we did in Toledo. I think we freaked him and his film crew out a bit. The band’s been together for so many weeks now, all cooked up in an ever increasingly cluttered van, with very little sleep or little outside interaction to remind us of what is “normal,” that we’re all a little (lot) loopy. It’s as though we all went into our separate sleeps but somehow ended up all together in the same dream and that’s where we’re living now. Just like a dream ain’t it? To jump up and tangle yourself in a mess of your own time.
I don’t know whether it’s the sleep deprivation, the miles and miles of tarmac we’ve traveled (up to 80,000+ miles on Moby now), or that we are, in fact, getting funnier and funnier by the second, but we’ve been laughing non-stop. Someone will shout out “Gherkin” and we’ll be in stitches for hours. Then, when we finally stop laughing, we’ll start laughing at the ridiculousness of having just laughed at whatever it was we were laughing at … But “what was it any way?” And “I can’t remember.”
I guess this is what it means to have best friends … No modesty, no beating around the bush, no holds barred, no judgement; no way I thought I’d ever be lucky enough to have people like this in my life. I must be the luckiest woman alive.
© 2013 Sally Taylor
