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The APT 6S Tour

May 9th, 2000 - day off, PA

The last 4 days have been tour. (my) Definition:

"Tour,n.: An extremely fun and disorienting ride. A place where children's memories reside. Where dreams and laughter and reality collide. A journey that steals but does take up no time."

So, I am glad to be on the road because the road is like a vacation compared to the last 6 months of my life and I am glad to be on vocal rest because here, in my silence, I am forced into a meditation of sorts. And from my meditation I can start to write again.

It is officially our first day off and I am on vocal rest.

I haven't felt inspired to write lately. I think it's probably due to the heat. That combined with the amount of work I've set up for myself, not to mention the marathon of gigs that we have on the horizon which are both a curse and a blessing. My body and soul are excited for the dates but my voice is yelling: "When was the last time I said I'd work for you 7 days in a row?"

It is decidedly heat wave material outside. There was no chance of me getting in a little post sleep jog without acquiring heat stroke. So when I got out of my feather light, crunchy, floral, red and gold covers, I droggely slugged my way down the cement gray stairwell from the top floor in my navy blue shorts, towel in hand, sleep still staining my eyes glassy, to "The hotel gym." Pathetic!!! A broken upright bike, a stair stepper thinggy, and a rowing machine that I made myself sit on all of 20 minutes before deciding to do some yoga instead.

The History Channel was on. And snippets of useful information leaked like a faucet into my brain to mingle with the remnants of my dreams.

I awoke to the sound of loud spanish from the halls followed by a huge woman’s version of tittering laughter.

Hoboken, I remembered where we were almost immediately, as I reached my eyes toward a 50’s style white head board lined in gold. The bed screeched reluctantly as I reached upward to stretch my arms. The bottom (non-fitted) sheet mimicked my every move revealing a semi deflated and floral matrices below.

I heard Delucchi walking into the bathroom, flick the florescent blue light and begin to roar with laughter.

"What?" I inquired.

"Come here," he suggested. Delucchi was pointing up when I walked in. On the ceiling of the dark and dirty bathroom was a huge mirror lined in blue which, upon catching our eyes, immediately reflected us with contempt, making our skin look yellow-y and our eyes look swollen and dimly lined by dark shadows.

"Why?" I asked Delucchi as we laughed until our bellies ached.

In the bedroom the lampshades were pink and the comforters, with the small bright jungle print, matched the opaque drapes and I thought about how much my mother would HATE this place.

"I’m going to get some coffee. Want anything?" I said unchaining the door and walking out into a hallway lined with faded mirrors and tarnished brass lamps. I couldn’t help but be reminded of The Love Boat. Spanish women in cleaning frocks flung dirty sheets and words, I barely recognized, back and forth from room to room laughing and hanging on each other’s loud and obviously comedic replies.

As I passed by Kenny and Kyle's room, the snoring room, I could hear Kenny on the phone frantically inquiring about weather or not someone could fix his bass rig at their store. At the show last night, and near the end of the set thank God, Kenny’s bass power amp died on him and no amount of kicking or Delucchi-ing would bring it back. Kenny was freaking out and we were all searching our brains for names and #'s of people we knew in the area who might know how to fix an amp. But the truth was that we weren’t coming up with much.

Last night was thunderstorms and drenched woolen cloths and black walls and rock club with a folk edge. People sat cross-legged in-groups around the floor. From the stage they looked like tiny children roasting marshmallows around campfires. Things seemed pretty surreal to me all night. The audience was sparse but attentive with the majority of people being somehow related to Chris Soucy, who happens to be from Jersey.

The greenroom, in the cellar was narrow and tall and cement and covered, as all green rooms are, in artist’s ink and band stickers. Somehow the rain had found its way down there too and left the blues all over the place in jazz tones, and sax solos. I sat down there for a while before the show alone, bouncing my voice off the walls the way a tennis player might warm up before a game, and thinking: how lucky I am to be doing what I love.

We skirt like dresses along this spring time, into blue and then along a weather front of white. Mist settles atop these green trees the way lint gathers at the end of a broom. In the median of wildly waving grass, daisies grow and a shocking red flower pops up every now and then to distract my eye from the white. It’s a beautiful drive to Saratoga Springs.

"Where is this place?" asks a semi-frustrated Delucchi pulling into parking lot just off of Phila Street. The sign above the parking spot across from us reads: "Parking Only For Café Lena Customers" and the rest of the band points and laughs behind mouth clasped hands as an increasingly frustrated Delucchi curses at a tiny sheet of directions. Upon looking up he begins to laugh too. He laughs his sweet little Delucchi laugh where he squints up his eyes into upside-down crescent moons and holds his cup shaped hand to his stomach: "Look no further I guess!" He exclaims and thus we commence load in.

Café Lena looks like someone’s country house apartment. The floors bend and slouch here and there and the paint flecked walls lean in as if to tell us their secrets. And man, those walls must have some stories to tell. The whole place reeks of ghosts. Not the ghosts of people but of the songs that have been born there. I guess Bob Dylan use to play there a lot, along with a bunch of other folk founding fathers/mothers. It was an honor to be playing Café Lena.

Handsome Dave and his green apron came out and brought us some hot lemon zinger as we set up and sound checked. Spring poured eagerly through white curtained crooked windows. And before we were done soundchecking, our audience had already arrived. They sat patiently sipping cappuccino and mochas around old, wooden, round, wobbly tables the way Europeans sit at cafes in their oil paintings.

The whole night, as we played, I got the feeling that people were not waiting so much for the songs to begin as they were waiting to clap at the songs end.

It was like they were worried they were going to miss their cue for applause. That part was kind of weird but the night in general was really nice.

Every once and a while out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw something move but turning, I saw it was nothing. Well maybe not nothing, maybe a ghost. Maybe a ghost of a song that longed to be stroked, to be strummed, to be played and played with, to be born again into this room, into this spring, into the arms of a young and passionate Lena.

Thank you and goodnight

May 16th 2000 - The House Of Blues, Boston MA

The alarm went off at 6:30 and my eyes opened into a house full of hanging plants and a honey warm, early morning sunshine, I rolled over to find Heidi, a friend of mine from Martha’s Vineyard, gently nudging me to wake up. "Get up Sal, you’ve got to go do Good Morning America with your mom in New York." I rubbed my eyes and slid my hand along the wall towards the bathroom.

Scattered bodies, packed away in colorful sleeping bags, littered the floor. Everywhere you stepped there was another sleeping body and I wondered how I had been lucky enough to score the futon.

Delucchi too, had lucked out on bedding. When I found him he was curled up under a red blanket, looking much like a puddle partially immersed in a slowly deflating blow up matrice. "D. I gotta go to the airport." I whispered. Delucchi wasn’t moving. But Joel, a friend of mine from my Brown rowing days, woke up and generously volunteered to take me to Logan to catch the Delta shuttle to New York City. What a great guy.

Rachael and Billy, a couple of Heidi’s friends, put us up last night, along with the assemblage of people who had come from far and wide to see us play. Rachael & Billy have a 27-pound cat whom, this morning spread himself out like peanut butter across a sunny spot on the floor. The house was quiet. Last night was great. Beside the House of Blues much appreciated hospitality (thank you Tali) my dad showed up and played a song with me. We had a packed house of people who really grooved on our music and my voice seemed to hold out pretty well despite a pollen influenced spring tickle in my throat which wouldn’t go away.

After the show a bunch of us shared a glass of wine upstairs in the green room, filled with New Orleans’s flare. The green room danced with color and laughter and singing and sighing and then we loaded out into a cool night filled with the music of Al Green singing: "Let’s…Let’s stay together….." out of a car window. When we got back to Rachael and Billy’s, we ate knickknacks in their kitchen, talked about the state of our world, and stayed up way past "when." It’s so nice to hang out in someone else life and to share their time with them that even sleep deprivation seems an ok price to pay.

Now I’m on a plane on my way to New York, on 2 hours of sleep, still in the same outfit that I sang in last night, that I went to sleep in (sneakers included) to be filmed for Good Morning America with my Mom and my brother. Funny how dream like everything becomes on 2 hours of sleep.

May 18th 2000, The Bottom Line New York City

I was so exhausted going to bed last night that I almost slept through the fight that the couple in the hallway had at 3 am. I was so tired that when the cleaning lady came in at 8:00 I almost let her make the bed with me still in it, and when the drilling and hammering started at 9am next door, the ear plugs and the pillow over the head trick almost worked…..but it didn’t and I have, once again succeeded in not getting a restful night’s sleep.

New York’s famous Bottom Line, I’ve always wanted to play there. When we arrived in NYC Soucy had to pick up a package from Cuba that had been sent to some obscure Post Office in Chelsea which took him forever to get, and turned out to be nothing more than a letter from a friend he’d met down there, saying "we hope you didn’t have to go through too much trouble to get our letter."

While we were waiting in the van, in the heat, in the horn honking traffic of New York for Soucy, I needed to find a bathroom. I walked up to 16th and then headed down town. I didn’t find a restroom but I did find a shoe store (one of my 2 or 3 weaknesses). Within 10 minutes I was back in the van with a brand new pair of lizard skin shoes and had all the boys laughing and laughing and laughing at me.

The Bottom Line was just as I imagined it, very dramatic in an egoless way. Mom said, when she arrived, that the dressing rooms hadn’t changed a bit since she’d played there in the 70’s. Linoleum filled with blue and black marble like squiggles circled around the room. A fan rotated forth and to with jolting, ungraceful, arthritic movements. We were the 3rd of 4 bands playing last night and the 5 of us were sharing a green room the size of Moby (the van) with another 5 piece band headed by Christine Ohlman who donned a white disheveled Beehive and a pair of capri leopard skin pants. It was Nightbirds night at The Bottom Line, hosted by Meg Griffin, and all the bands were lead by female vocalists.

The rain didn’t start until 7:00 and even then it wasn’t torrential, nor had they started announcing the "tornado warnings" which my made my mother so very nervous. Until then I was wandering around Bleeker’s streets in the muggy but breezy New York air. People strolled with their hips leaning forward, holding hands and sipping cool drinks from red straws. Kids sat out on the church stairs and smoked the chronic. Storeowners stood, with squinted eyes, outside their stores at pierced teens with baggy jeans who threw slang at each other like fists. When the rain came down it came down like a Broadway curtain on closing night: heavy, determined, devastating.

When it rains like it did last night, no body goes out. But somehow we managed to pull in a decent sized crowd, mostly friends or diehard fans who’d flown in to see us from out of town and hadn’t predicted the tempest. While the front of house wasn’t so packed, the back stage was a mad house. Four bands, 16 guitars, hundreds of little, get lost easy bags, all jammed into a tiny tiny area trying to change and sit and stay cool and entertain friends and prepare for their 25 minute set. It was lunacy.

That’s the way they do it at the Bottom Line, each band has 25 minutes on stage after which they run their gear off stage and the next band is introduced. Then that band waits around for three hours until they start the line up again. That way each band has two sets in-between 3 other acts. It’s quite hectic but I’m sure the audience enjoys the constant activity. All the bands were GREAT: Denice Franke, Christine and especially Cecilia, a band from DC who rocked.

Mom came up during the first show and sang back ups on Split Decisions, which was really cool. I idolize her. She is the coolest mom on the face of this earth. After the show she helped me sell CDs in the back room and I helped her promote her new CD "The Bed Room Tapes" which is phenomenal.

We had a great night and after our second show and the stroke of midnight, and the rain ended and the back line had been packed away and driven off and the fan had died and the last note had been sung and the last CD sold, Allan Pepper, the owner who at one time had booked my mother to play, pulled me aside and asked me to come back. "I’d be honored" I said, "I would be honored.

May 19th 2000 - The Iron Horse, Northampton MA

I woke up in Troy New York feeling awful….never mind what kind of awful, just awful. Awful enough to want to go to a hospital and sit in an emergency waiting room to be looked at by a doctor. However, Delucchi was gone with the van. He’d driven back to Mass., back to The Iron Horse, where we’d played last night, to pick up a mailing list which was left by mistake so I was left carless.

I hailed a cab and a young scraggly kid with sunglasses and pail, scaleing skin drove me in his ashtray of a back seat, to St. Mary’s hospital.

Now we wait. People who are angry wait. People who are older wait. People who are sicker than I wait. People wait in these uncomfortable blue chairs uncomfortably. They sit as though their pain cannot. A baby slaps her ear and cries. A women in a wheelchair rolls on by. An overweight man slanting to the right holds his eye. The Learning Channel is on, a special on Death and I wonder if any of the people who stare at the screen so intently recognize the irony of the program. I go to the vending machine and get a Pepsi and some trail mix. I can’t help but feel even worse here under these yellow lights, surrounded by this company while outside it’s raining.

It’s raining, just like it rained yesterday and the day before that and the day before that and I’m feeling soggy all the way through.

When we got to The Iron Horse, and after we raced to get our gear in and out of the rain, Soucy drove me over to Amherst College to do a radio interview and then back through thick, graduation weekend traffic to try to sneak in a quick sound check before doors opened to the public at 5:30.

It was hectic arriving back 5:00, with my overalls stuck to my legs like a wet suit and my green woolen button down shirt making me hot and uncomfortable. Delucchi was yelling at me to get on stage while a women near the door was telling me she was there to take pictures of me for the front page of a magazine and that we had to shoot it before 5:30. As we sound checked, she shot her camera and Delucchi got annoyed and I got more frazzled.

Downstairs in the green room I found my peace. We ate dinner and played with our food a little throwing salad goods around. Kenny made up a character named "leafy Johnston" who was just a piece of salad with a smiley face painted on him but we loved leafy Johnston and referred to him for the rest of the night as our mascot.

The show was great. Short but great. Little lights flickered from the tops of vanilla scented candles, which had been placed on each table. Women lounged back in their chairs onto their lovers laps who stroked their hair and listened with opened hearts and closed eyes.

It was such an early show that we drove to get sushi and then Kyle navigated us to Albany. The scent of flowers and of soy sauce and raw fish and sneakers crowded the van. I could see Chris S. in the back seat, his face illuminated by the glow of the computer screen. He worked the entire drive to Troy on returning e-mails. I love my boys. I love this journey that we’re on. What a wild life this is.

Looks like I can see the doctor now.

May 20, 2000 - Valentine’s, Albany, NY

New York Route 7, headed west in the van, Chris Soucy reporting

From the Best Western Rensselaer Inn in Troy, New York it’s only a fifteen-minute drive to Valentine’s in Albany. But Troy is an historic city. Perhaps not experiencing its glory days right now, but once upon a time...

Sally and I had breakfast with her stepfather, Jim Hart, and his son, Amen, at a greasy spoon called Duncan’s, where everything seems to be served with a side of bacon whether you order it or not. Eggs over-medium are served over-easy and runny just because and the coffee is the color of a goldfish tank in need of a good cleaning. That’s just the way it is. That’s just the way it needs to be, too.

Jim spent some college days here a while back. He actually painted the polyurethane finish behind the bar at Holmes and Watson, where Sal and Kyle had lunch yesterday, which also happened to be Kyle’s wedding anniversary. (Sorry to keep your hubby away from you, Traci, but his services are required on the road here with us for a while longer.)

Jim told us a little of the Albany/Troy area history over breakfast. Once a thriving industrial area, its iron ore and textiles traveled to other cities via the Erie Canal in horse and ox drawn barges. It’s the birthplace of "Uncle Sam." Uncle Sam was the name of a meat packing company that shipped food supplies south to Union soldiers during the Civil War, and the name Uncle Sam has been synonymous with patriotism ever since. Troy is also called the Collar City because back in the day when shirt collars were produced separately from the shirts onto which they were clipped, they were made here in numbers great enough for the city to build its reputation on them. Beautiful old brownstones and big granite libraries and courthouses line the streets, but most of the industry is now gone and empty storefronts seem be the order of the day. That’s what we learned over breakfast this morning.

Last night’s show at Valentine’s once again proved the old saying that you can’t judge a book by its cover. It seems to be a phenomenon we encounter over and over again on the road this year. We walk into a club at five o’clock to set up our gear, look around and say, "Yikes, another dreary black box of a bar." Then of course it turns out to be a great gig.

Apparently there’s a little bit of construction going on at Valentine’s. A large corner of the room just next to the stage is blocked off by raw plywood. Maybe it has always been that way, but it has that "Men Working, Please Wear Your Hardhat" look about it. I imagine that most nights there’s a pretty heavy rock band taking the stage at Valentine’s and thrashing at an earsplitting volume while young rockers, dressed like vampires, tattooed and pierced in urban tribal fashion drink, cruise, pose, scam, deal and fall down the stairs. But last night they set up chairs for a somewhat tamer, older crowd and a triple bill of acts fronted by acoustic guitar playing songwriters.

The opening acts were terrific. Two guys named Tao and Johnny played first. They’re from the Northampton, Massachusetts area and they played a blend of old time roots country, blues and bluegrass with some modern touches. Our new favorite guy is Stephen Kellogg, who played in the middle spot. Stephen is also from Northampton. He’s a terrific singer, a great songwriter and we all became instant friends with him and his girlfriend, Kirsten, who bravely ran the merchandise table all night. Stephen and I chatted over the relative merits of different types of pickup systems for acoustic guitars all night. Sally invited him to join us on stage to sing a verse on our cover of the Stealer’s Wheel tune, "Stuck in the Middle with You" and on Sally’s "Happy Now." Stephen happens to be a terrific kazoo player and he and I joked about having him whip it out for a solo without telling Sally about it before hand, but we felt it was best for him to maybe leave the kazoo in his pocket after all. I’ll bet a kazoo solo would sound GREAT on "Happy Now," but these kinds of intricate complicated parts played on such sophisticated instruments need to be carefully rehearsed, you know. Next time.

The loudest and rowdiest contingent in the crowd last night was a bunch of folks from the Hatch family. Once upon a time, years ago, I worked as an elementary school teacher with a fiery, crazy woman named Gigi, who happens to be from a huge clan of brothers, sisters and in-laws spread out over the continent. Gigi and her family members Nanette, Natalie, Joseph, others whose names I can’t recall, their assorted boyfriends, girlfriends, spouses and drinking buddies have now come to many of our shows: Hoboken, Saratoga Springs, a few different shows in New York City and again last night in Albany. Gigi came to gigs of mine in New Mexico back in the day. I even did a recording session with her husband, Jon, once. These folks have been great fans of the band. The fact that they are a whole family of gorgeous blondes and redheads (except maybe for Joseph) doesn’t seem to bother any of the boys in the group either. Thanks for all of your support. I think we’ll just set up and play in your living room next time, as long as you promise to take it easy on the martinis and stop shouting for guitar solos before the show even begins, OK?

We’ve been taking lots of photos these days ­ pictures of the musicians, fans and staff we meet at various venues, snapshots of 28 pound kitty cats named Jerky that live in Boston, pictures of other kitties that live in bars, more and more photos of Kenny sleeping in the van with a book on his chest. We’ll try to post some of this craziness on the website soon. It may help you begin to understand just exactly why we are the way we are and why we behave the way we do. [From the road, Chris Soucy, Guitarist/elf/resident smart ass]

May 23rd 2000 - Trumansburg High school, Ithaca NY

Delucchi and I have to wake up at 7:00 to make it on time to the Trumansburg High School. It is a gray and drizzly morning and I’m not use to getting up before 10 so I have to follow my hand down the long dark corridor in my pajamas to the lobby for some complementary coffee. When I get there, I am greeted by men and women in suits with disapproving eyes looking me up and down. Frankly, I’m too tired to be embarrassed.

When we arrive at school, a twinge of panic overwhelms me. The memory of high school, the first day, exams, SAT’s, insecurity, self-doubt, fill my senses and I remember how much I disliked that time in my life. High school, How can anyone concentrate on studying with all those hormones, that self doubt, that drama? Needless to say I’m glad I’m out of there. But there I am again, this time I’m teaching.

Debbie, who’s set up the whole event here, greets me. She seems a little nervous and it’s making me nervous. Thank God I’m too tired to care. She gives us bagels and OJ and then escorts me through a sea of adolescent faces, past blue, narrow lockers to the music room where I am to teach my first class. 10 or so sophomores sit in a semi circle around me, some of who, probably know a lot more about music than me. They sit silently before me, not knowing if their questions are important enough or smart enough to ask. I tell them what I know about writing music. I tell them what I know about performance and getting a band out on the road. I tell them about how difficult and yet rewarding it is to be a musician. I tell them that life is an interpretation, that no one else on earth is going to have the same experience as they are and that music is an interpretation of life, the life that is specific to them and then I tell them about the dangers of the "Big League."

Still, after class some one wants to know: "How can I become famous?" and I look into her insecure little eyes and don’t know how to tell her that the only reason I think she wants to be famous is because she doesn’t love herself yet. So I say:

"First sit down with a pencil and a pad and write out exactly WHY you want to be famous. Then write down what you think will make your life SUCCESSFUL. Then make sure they are in sync with each other. And keep that piece of paper OK?"

She seemed to be content with my response though I never really answered her question.

I taught an English class after then hung out with some kids in the hall who were hacking away at a Taylor guitar and singing. The student-studded cement loneliness of the corridors resonated with their intriguing voices. Colorful graffiti flooded the walls with "I love so and so" and "Fuck" and "So and so blew me here 5/99." I was reminded all day just how much I hated high school.

We set up and performed at 1:30. 300+ students filed in for an-hour-and-a-half-performance.

It was difficult. I knew it would be. It’s hard to perform for a bunch of people who HAVE to be there, let alone a bunch of kids, most of them insecure and looking around to see how their friends were reacting to the music before they, themselves, could enjoy it. But we made it. In the echo-y Trumansburg auditorium we made it, and by the end of the set a bunch of students had stood up to clap and cheer us on.

I’m glad I’m not in high school any more. Oh, did I say that already? But truly, those kids were great. I could see through their anxiety into their shinning souls, and what I saw is that all they want, just like the rest of us, is to be loved. To be truly, truly, loved.

May 27th 2000 Outside of Detroit Morning

It’s drizzling. Detroit is broken. It is broken down, broken into and broken hearted. I can see it pass by out the window through the drizzle stained glass and it makes me feel bruised in my lungs, the way it feels to second hand smoke other people’s worries.

We’re on our way to Indiana, to the sound of Victor Wooton. On our way we’ll stop and have lunch with a friend, Jason, in the southern tip of Michigan.

Little translucent bugs flit around near the window. We picked them up accidentally a couple of nights ago, in Cleveland after the mostly empty Peabody’s show with a rave going on above us. It wasn’t a bad show. It was actually a really cool club. It was just that we were really really tired. And somehow between Buffalo and Cleveland I’d managed to break my own heart. I was pretty emotional all day, which I mostly attributed to staying out until 4am the night before, dancing at the transvestite bar that was directly below The Tralf. We’d finished up playing at around 12:30.

The show at The Tralf had gone really well. The stage sounded GREAT and Buffalo really showed up for us, even on a Wednesday, even though we’d never been to the area before. When we’d packed up all our equipment and loaded it out, Craig, the soundman, escorted us down to the dance club.

The men were beautifully dressed up in pumps and pink boas and gloss. They danced and lip sank with painted on faces. They strutted their womanliness down the red carpeted catwalk, stopping only to bite a dollar bill, here and there, out of someone’s teeth bearing mouth. Kyle filmed the whole thing. I just danced and cheered them on. Men were in the women’s room dressing in slips and stockings, Someone in the men’s bathroom looked at Soucy, he said, at the urinal and asked him:
"What’s your flavor honey?"

Kenny and Delucchi danced with me and as night wore on and grew day on it’s dark we ventured out of the club and back on the road toward home. Well, not toward home, but toward some place that would suffice until home and we drifted though dreams which seemed more real than reality, and on into the morning.

We went back to The Tralf the next morning to pick up a tank top for Kenny’s wife and Craig suggested we take a walk down the street to Righteous Babe Records which is Ani Difranco’s label. It was pretty exciting to go there I must admit. And through a dazed fog I met Mary who is the manager there and gave us a little tour. It was so cool to see what Ani had done. She’s grown that record company up from scratch. She is an inspiration. She has managed to be what I aspire to be: an artist and a record company. Righteous Babe is a RIGHTEOUS place! It’s full of people with smiles and purple flare and charisma and self-confidence and world consciousness. It’s full of posters and paintings and power. It was inspiring to see. Really inspiring. And so even though the rest of my day and the ride to OH and the early evening was spent doing business and tying up loose ends with lawyers, art directors, record companies, and web site distributors, I did so with a smile because I know that I’m doing what I love and I’m working, not only to benefit my own career, but to empower all artists. The way Ani has.

May 31 2000, Cicero’s, St Louis MO

Missouri is hot. 95 degrees. I shave my legs in the sink and dress in what I imagine to be appropriate attire for the heat but when we get to the club the air conditioner is working over time and we have to traverse through two opposite climates to load in our gear. I think I’m getting a cold from all these wacky conditioners.

I remember once when I was a kid and my dad took us out on the road my brother and I had to sleep on the floor of the bus. It wasn’t like he forced us to sleep on the floor, there just weren’t enough bunk beds and we were the kids so we opted for the floor. However, the AC was on full blast and my brother was sleeping right in front of it. In the morning we discovered that he’d contracted Bell’s palsy which temporarily froze the left side of his face for upward of a month. He couldn’t eat or drink anything because it would just dribble right out the left side and he had to wear a pirate patch to sleep because his little 10-year-old eye wouldn’t close. It was really wild. Now, of course as a result, I’m a little scared of air conditioners and where should I have to sleep last night? On the roll away directly in front of the AC. This morning my throat feels kind of tight.

The show went all right. Cicero’s seems more like a jamband gig. Every other poster on the walls announces the coming of a band called: "The Kind," "Shwag," "Grateful dead cover band," etc. I don’t mean to stereotype the place. It was really clean and air conditioned and had a cool mural on the wall of music and every one who worked there was extra ultra friendly and it was a pretty good crowd for a Wednesday, I guess I’m just tired. Before the show, the band all hung out in the green room, which is a bathroom with a hand written note on the door…."Not a public rest room." Inside, the walls are black and the lighting is halogen like the intestines of impatience. All of our gear cases are crowded in there with us hanging around like extra players waiting to perform. Kyle warms up against a box "Thrum thrum thrum." and beside the toilet, there are a few chairs to sit on which the boys do as I wash my face and then wash my face again. The air here is like thick dirty water, which seems to cling to all of us like the ghosts of memories and our faces look weighed down, red and Christmas ball-y.

The show was pretty fun and we had a good opener: Kim Hudgins. As much fun as I’m having… I must admit that after 5 weeks I’m ready for a little break. Back to Boulder on Sunday.

June 2 2000, The Ice House, McAlester OK

"What's this we 'ave 'ere?" Said a cop with a southern drawl, which oozed of punishment. Kenny and I stood outside the passenger side seat of Moby in air the texture of romance gone array. The over weight officer stepped out of his patrol car in slow motion, 100 pound steps. I could tell he wanted to enjoy every second of this.

Two minutes before, I'd been in the club, backstage changing out of a black skirt and green T-shirt with red sparkles on it, into overalls and tied back hair. I rushed to pick up any last straggling items that we'd inevitably have to come back and get the next day, if left. I rushed out of the back stage door with an arm full of cloths, my computer, my "pretty bag" slung over my shoulder and the bottom of the last sip of a plastic cup once containing Chardonnay. As I explained before, the night wore a jacket of mist. The night was the part of a smoker’s breath that never gets fully exhaled, just recycled and tumbled and heated up again and again in the lungs until it turns in to exhaustion.

Delucchi, seeing a cop car drive by yelled out "cop….You guys be careful….we don’t know what the laws are here." Hearing him, it still didn’t register that I had a glass of wine in my hand and I headed toward Moby to put down all my stuff which was draping and falling off of me. Kenny walked that way too. He had a 6 pack of Anchorsteam beer that the club had given us and he was going to put it in the cooler. I had just set my computer in the van and put the last of the wine down on the stair well when from behind us we heard:

"What’s this we ‘ave ‘ere?"
"What’s this we ‘ave ‘ere?"
"What’s this we ‘ave ‘ere?"

The boys, every one besides Kenny, rushed back into the club to find the owner, Chris. The officer strolled toward the van, his cheeks the size of hamburger buns and his skin the texture of anger in danger, red and callused like deli meat. He picked my cup off the stair well.

"Looks like we got ourselves an open container here boys." He shouted over his shoulder not taking his eyes off of us, and while three other cops were stepping out of the patrol car, he called for back up.

"I’m sorry officer," I said, "I wasn’t thinking. I—"

"Didn’t you have a drink in your hand too?" he said at Kenny and shone his flash light in the front cabin lighting up a few straggling water bottles and some dirty towels.

"Nnnno," sputtered Kenny.

"License and registration." He said which suddenly made me feel like I was being told I had a terminal disease. I scrambled through my wallet and produced my license. He looked at it and said:
"Y’er from Colorado?…… McAlester, hell of a place to come to get arrested in."

Not another word was said as the mist came down like beetles, flying all around our faces, in and out of the headlights and the cop’s flashlights. I was nervous. Kenny had his eyes closed, his head resting against the white of the van.

Just a minute before, as I was putting the computer in the van, Kenny was seeing the cop car out of the corner of his eye and struggling to put the 6 pack of beer into the cooler. By accident he knocked Soucy’s CD player into the icy cooler water. We didn’t notice it until we got back to the hotel and by that time it had been fully emersed for over a 1/2 an hour. Soucy spent an hour shaking out all the water and blowing it dry with the hair dryer provided to us by the Day’s Inn. Miraculously, it worked again this morning.

When Chris, the owner appeared, he walked toward us like a super-hero, all strong and confident and silhouetted by the cop cars that had come for back up. The officer gripped my license and bent it back and forth in the palm of his hand, nervous, like a villain when the super hero arrives on the scene to say: "Unhand them you fiend." Well Chris didn’t say it that way exactly but he was undoubtedly our hero! And somehow we managed to drive away unscathed. Fshooowww!!!! That was close.

The rest of the night paled in comparison to that adventure (Thank God). We drove from Tulsa, where we’d spent the night before and loaded in at 5:00. Casey Wilson, a photographer from Kansas met up with us at load in. He wanted to do "A Day in the Life of the Sally Taylor Band." He was a handsome young man with blond hair and southern accented charm. He followed us around snapping pictures of the silly stuff we do in black and white. It was really fun but I’m glad that he left before the whole cop incident though because then we would have surely been thrown in jail.

The show itself was great. The IceHouse is HUGE and it has a big American flag hanging in back of the stage which sounds GREAT. The people there are just as sweet as you can imagine (Chris, Danny, Gail, Shannon, Tracy, Joe, Jay and all the rest). There was also another band that was playing after our show; a really tight cover band called "Push" from OK City who we got to hang out and wrap with in the green room.

We dig OK.

An extra grateful thanks and praises to Chris Clark for your hospitality (from Chris and Kyle especially).

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