October 2007 Archives

I’m not a gadget type of guy. I’m rarely allowed to drive, have an alarm on my watch that I’ve owned for three years and can’t figure out how to turn off, and have occasional struggles with things like light switches, elevator buttons and elevators. So, when it comes to recording songs on the fly I like to keep things decidedly one-button simple.

What follows are a couple recordings done backstage by myself or with friends from the tour. They’re rough, but it’s a lot of fun.

Jess Harper is the lead singer of Old School Freight Train and, like Zack and I, is a big Randy Newman fan. After the show at the 9:30 Club in Washington D.C. we went over to our friend Ed Romanoff’s apartment and recorded a few Newman tunes.

Here are Jesse, Zack, Ed and I singing “Louisiana 1927” and “Lonely at the Top.”

It’s nine thirty in the morning and we are zooming through Nebraska after an all-night ride from Minneapolis.  The ground here is so flat that it’s hard to tell whether the standing water that we pass on either side is river, creek or lake.  Old bales of hay seem to have been left to melt in rolls in the fields, and much of the ground is still green.  We’ve been passing old Pony Express stations and countless naked cottonwood trees, and oak trees with branches are the color of bone.

Don Spitler, our bus driver, is trying to get us past North Platte before the massive thunderstorm being predicted hits.  We’ll see if he makes it!

The last week has passed so quickly that looking at the tour book it seems as if the time is melting away in the same way as the hay bales.  There hasn’t been a moment to sit down and write about everything that’s been happening.

In the last week we’ve played Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Lewisburg, Charleston, Chicago and Minneapolis.  My days have started fairly early with a combination of radio shows, press interviews over the phone and in-stores followed by soundcheck and shows.  I also try and keep up my running as much as possible, as 14 hours in a bus gets you a bit jumpy and it helps to work off the extra energy.  After the show I meet with folks and then get back on the bus sometime between midnight and one.  After a show it takes a while to calm down so we all usually stay up and watch a movie.  It’s not incredibly rock, but then neither are we.

Outside the wind is blowing almost directly across the bus and we just passed a camel - the world’s most confused, unlucky camel.  We get out at the Flying J travel plaza and the temperature is 40 degrees.  The wind is one long whip and it spreads out the birds in their flocks into long sentences.  They are moving across the sky so fast that mid-air collisions would be a hazard, so I guess that’s why they spread out.  They look like bb’s.

Our day off this week was in Cleveland, Ohio and that meant a trip to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.

It is odd being a band in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame museum and not being in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  None of the stuff looks real and it’s hard to equate this crystalline and Windex-ed environment with the actual lifestyle of three p.m. gear load ins, the stale smell of beer, sticky floors and sweat, and the happy-tired feeling at the end of the show. 

The whole place felt like a tribute to a tribute to the musical revue based on the t.v. miniseries about rock ‘n’ roll.  When you take away the music, all you have is costumes, instruments and the few examples of rebellion deemed vestigial enough to show to an all-ages audience.  The effect is disconcerting.  As you walk through the striations of rock history, past the display cases with records, the video wall with the obligatory “rock is really about free expression” and into the shrine dedicated to the usual suspects of the ‘60s and ‘70s, you start to get the distinct feeling that you’re being encouraged to believe that the great music has all been made in the past, that the ‘60s were about funny, gentle looking people who were all geniuses, that drugs did not exist and that the real credentials by which to judge artistic achievement is having Tipper Gore dislike your music.  Talk about giving the finger to The Man!  In fact, the museum really felt less like any kind of tribute to music than a self-congratulatory slap on the back to the baby boom generation.

What was I expecting?  Not much more than I got.  It was fun seeing some of the outfits and Janis Joplin’s car. I enjoyed the photos and the angry letters from Rolling Stone editors to a perpetually behind the deadline Hunter Thompson, the exhibit on sound systems and some of the gear was pretty cool.  But in the end I felt like I do when I come out of a mall - wondering what all the trappings are supposed to add up to.

The real rock halls of fame are the venues that hundreds of bands pass through each year.  These places, from community halls to old vaudeville theaters to tetanus traps in big and small towns across the world are where the real histories are made.  These are the places where the house sound guy is cranky, the bartenders come in early and manage to work through hundreds of soundchecks, where guest lists and attendance numbers are haggled over, where posters are hung and taken down and hung again and where people - strangers - come and hang out with each other to listen to music played in the moment by other people.  I think these kinds of halls are great enough.

We’re passing over into Colorado.  Tonight, Jesse Sykes will be joining me for a show at the Fox Theater in Boulder. 

After that we head to Salt Lake City for a day off (and time to do some serious, serious laundry!) and then make our way to my home state for a show at the Egyptian theater in Boise.

I wish I could convey properly how exciting and gratifying these shows are.  It’s just such a great time to be playing music and I want you to know how lucky the band and I feel to be playing it!

Be Well,
Josh

October 18, 2007
(Just over the border with Colorado)

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Annapolis, Maryland and catching my breath.  I’ve got Dawn Landes’ record Fireproof on, and I’m sitting on the bed with various cameras, iPods and mics around me.  It looks like I’ve come back from a circuit safari.

The first five days have been fairly strenuous and very exciting.  It’s Zack, Sam, Austin, Liam and I, accompanied by tour manager Tim and our guitar/merch man, Brian.  Don Spitler is our bus driver, and the bus, as yet unnamed, brings the total traveling party to nine.  Also along for the trip is “Bone Shaker,” Zack’s fold up bicycle, which fits neatly in the trailer.  We loaded up the bus in Somerville, Massachusetts and headed north on Interstate 95, past Portsmouth and the lands of the New Hampsherites, past foliage turning relentlessly orange and golden despite the unexpected heat wave, and finally down along the drowned coastline of Portland, Maine. 

I hadn’t played in Portland since I played at the Bull Moose Music record store when I released Golden Age of Radio.  I’ve never played a full show there, but seeing as I’d recorded the album not too far from the Capitol of Vacationland, it seemed fitting that this was our first show of the tour. 

It couldn’t have begun on a better note.  Around four hundred people crammed the Space Gallery and the night was sweaty and fun.  Special thanks to Aura for the truly mind blowing apples she picked from her orchard.  They were gone in a snap.

Excited to give the whole sleeping on a bus thing a try, we piled in and stayed up late trying out the refrigerator and the bottle opener.  The fridge does indeed keep the beers cold and the bottle opener does indeed open bottles.  This settled, we settled in.

The next morning we awoke in Northampton, Massachusetts, and I went into the center of town and did a bunch of phone interviews and then played a radio show before heading over to Pearl Street for my concert that night.  Under nearly constant renovation, Pearl Street is a big place with a lot of history, and it’s one of those spots you hear about all the time, so it was good to put a name to the face.  For those of you in the UK, it’s a bit like Manchester Academy 2. 

I sat backstage and did a few more interviews then began to examine the copious amount of backstage grafitti.  My report on that is right here.

The show was good, the crowd was happy and although the sound was pretty rough, we had a good time and I went to bed that night in my bunk feeling like we slayed it and that we were beginning to stretch our legs as a band.  I went to bed around 2 a.m. and woke up about five hours later wondering why my sleep was so short.  You’d think that screaming down the road in a coffin would be fairly relaxing, but in fact it takes a little getting used to.

The Somerville Theater is a 900 seat turn of the century venue in Davis Square, just down Massachusetts Avenue from Harvard.  We were all pretty sacked out from the drive and Sam and Zack and Austin all went home for a bit of a clean up while I went to a radio station for an interview.  That done, we met back up in time for sound check and the show that night.

Horns.  A musician singing songs with horns to back him up is a bit like a convicted murderer with a puppy; everyone thinks just a little bit better of the guy with the puppy regardless of the crimes, sonic or otherwise, he commits.  Such is the beauty of horns, and I have to say it was a supreme pleasure playing with the fine horn section that Zack put together for the two shows at the Somerville. 

We really hit our stride these two nights and each one felt like a bit of a celebration.  We had a lot of friends and family there and the sound was crystal.  I loved it.  Furthermore, you can now buy beer at the Somerville theater, making the shows just a little more festive.

Festivity was in full effect for the encore when Old School Freight Train came out to join me and the boys for “Next to the Last True Romantic.”

After all the hullabaloo and boy-howdy of the Boston shows, it was great to get back on the bus and head to less familiar territory.  Dawn Landes and I played Westport, CT this past February when I was on my solo tour. I remember we played in a church and did a song together in the pulpit.

This time through, the theater was a sit down auditorium in a very, very nice elementary school.  The band and I had the music room as our green room and we busied ourselves playing marimbas, xylophones and gongs until it was time to go on.  We played a quieter set as my voice was pretty ragged from the last several shows.  “California” and “In The Dark” both made appearances, but we still brought home the rock.

The night trip from Westport to Annapolis, Maryland takes place mostly on 95.  During daylight hours this is an imposing piece of road.  At night in a screaming coffin, it is easy to imagine that we are trapped in the belly of a yak sauntering down a jungle path. 

Lying in my bunk, chewing the last Maine apple in the barrel and imagining how far into the tour it would be before the scurvey took hold and my teeth started falling out, I began to think about how much this bus felt like a boat.  As a matter of fact, it is estimated that from stem to stern the Santa Maria, Columbus’ flag ship, was seventy feet long.  At 65 feet, our bus and trailer are pretty much the same size.

It’s just gone 8 am and I’m sitting backstage at the Ram’s Head in Annapolis.  I have syrupy black coffee on my left and right now it’s powering up the engines.

My voice is not what one could ever accuse of being “pure,” or “crystalline,” still even mine needs a rest on occasion.  So we got up yesterday and headed into D.C. to see what we could see.  My drummer Liam Hurley pulled out his first ace of the tour by introducing us to his uncle, Jack.  Jack Hurley, a whirring Irish dynamo is partly responsible for the building of the Newseum in Washington D.C. , a project funded by the Freedom Forum with the expressed purpose of reminding Americans how important a right is the freedom of the press.

“At a time when 52% of Americans believe that the press has too much freedom,” Jack said, “you can imagine why we believe this project is very important.  If they come after the press, they’ll come after religion and the arts next.” The museum, which is slated to open in the first half of 2008, is still virtually empty of displays, but those exhibits already installed are fairly breath taking.  A mind blowing 3-D movie with all kinds of bells and whistles is designed to take people on a whirlwind trip through the history of the press in America.  In another hall, a long row of studios allows the museum visitor to tape and edit their own newscast and a beautiful view of the capitol building is the backdrop for the first HD studio in the city. The displays are designed so as to allow the entire building to respond to - and function around - the ever changing events of a particular day’s news so that each visit to the Newseum will be different.

Later we went out for dinner with Tom and Mary Kay Ricks.  Tom is a friend of mine I met last year when he took me on a tour of The Washington Post.  His book, Fiasco, which can be found everywhere right now, is an incredibly important piece of work on the military mission in Iraq and shows just how necessary a completely free press is.  After dinner, Mary Kay took us on a nighttime walking tour of Georgetown.  I couldn’t believe how much she knew about these tiny streets and the houses that stood on them.  For a couple of hours we walked around as she pointed out everything from the steps that Father Damien Karras throws himself down at the end of The Exoricist (we raced each other to the bottom and back up again.  Beat that, Karras!), to the house that once belonged to the plenipotentiary of the Czar of Russia and now belongs to the Kerrys.

We got back to the bus and had a drink and passed out.  It’s good to get out of tour mode on a day off.  It’s so easy to vegetate, and this is necessary sometimes, but a whole day off in the D.C. area is a pretty remarkable thing, and we ate it up.

So! That is an accounting of my first week on the road.  Zack’s mustache is a little longer, we’re all a little thinner for wear and tear, but tomorrow is my first headline show at the 9:30 Club in D.C. and I’m looking forward to it.  After that we head west, and I hope you’ll come along!

A Scrawled Note on Graffiti

I’m sitting backstage at Pearl Street in Northampton, Massachusetts and thinking that along with my normal entries I’d like to send in some of my favorite pieces of backstage graffiti from the places we visit on this tour.  Pearl Street, which no one could accuse of being anything other than a rock room, has a great collection and while not the Sistine Chapel of backstage graffiti, it probably comes close to an Uffizi. 

Now, we live in a multimedia, terabyte, full throttle digital world, where the real and the concrete don’t always mean the same thing, so it’s not surprising that a rock band would want to leave its mark on the world in some way just to prove they were here and they RAWKED.  Occasionally these bands and performers manage to make their mark on society and culture through music.  Sitting backstage at Pearl Street however, it’s plain that far more often, we use sharpies.

I’ve never been one to leave stickers or names or anything like that on the walls but like almost everyone I’m still a big fan of this type of literature.  The backstage of a place like this is the modern equivalent of a cave wall, and in general these cave walls belie the fact that despite the many achievements of Homo Erectus, the development of a written language being a particularly big feather in our large headed hats, we are still our father’s sons in the evolutionary sense. 

My classification are subject to change as the tour goes on, but in general the stuff falls into six categories:

1.Band Self Reference/Extollation (“The Suburban Legends are Dance Machines!”, “Cobra: Bites Once, Strikes Twice!”)
2.Band to Band Messages (“X and the Y’s LOOOOVES/HAAAAATES A and the B’s”)
3.Anatomically Fantastical Pictorial Scenarios.  These are often pretty basic, but occasionally can be raised to the realm of actual art by the cleverness of the artist. When I find one, we can test Paste’s legal department.
4.Stickers/Posters (“In Dreams We Die”: Appearing Live!)
5.Actual Artwork (Occasionally you do see something really beautiful on the walls)
6.Pithy Sayings (“I Heart Jeethuth”, “Cargo pants are not pants”, and the old war horse, “I’m Here Because I did Drugs in High School”)

So, over the course of this trip I’ll be sending in some photos of my favorite backstage wall art.  My thanks to the artists, Cro Magnon or otherwise…

Again, somehow we bypassed Seattle completely and have landed in the “college” town of Bellingham, Wash. It’s about 60 miles from the Canadian border. The only problem with playing here was that it seemed classes hadn’t even started yet!  The club, Nightlife, was really nice.  I think as a band, we’ve been getting swankier every night and this was a place where we could “dig in” a bit.  Well, “dig in” we did for 75 disco dancing fans!!!  So far it’s been an uphill battle as far as attendance is concerned but things tell me from Vancouver on we will become U2.

Sept. 20 - Day off in Boise, Idaho. We drove through beautiful Oregon.  Watched a documentary on song poems called Off the Carts. I highly recommend it.  Attempted to eat at an Outback Steakhouse, but there was a 45 minute wait.  Woke up in Bothell, Washington right next to an Outback Steakhouse.  It’s like it’s playing with us.

Sept. 21- For some reason, I thought this was Seattle.  We were actually 40 min. north playing in a brand new performing arts theater next to a high school.  This was their first concert of the season and the staff was nice and accommodating, but slightly uptight.  No booze, no big deal. My cousin, Jeremy Rouse, and his girlfriend drove four hours to see us.  I told him to bring his guitar and play on “Love Vibration.” He did, and was very good.  Jason Collett sounded great in this space.  Unfortunately, there weren’t very many people.  It’s one of those “member supported” events and the tickets were 30 dollars.  Half the audience were senior citizens.

Salt Lake City has its own set of rules.  Beautiful day and the shower in the bus works!  We were informed that due to noise restrictions we couldn’t soundcheck until 8 p.m. This wasn’t good.  It was suggested by the guy handling tonight’s show that if we weren’t happy with the late start, we could go open for Guster who was playing a mile away. Joe Pisapia (CMCH mixer and player, and Marc’s brother) plays with Guster. We said we’d be up for it but finally it came down to the promoter raising a stink about not selling booze.  So we negotiated an earlier soundcheck, and I set up the merch next to the pinball machines. This was a smoking club, so I eased back on the amount of shirts I put out.  A little over 100 grateful people showed up, and I was pleased with that.  They were actually lined up outside for an hour, and we started at 11:30 on a weeknight.  Salt Lake City has its own set of rules.

I used to live in a suburb of Salt Lake called Murray.  I went to an elementary school called Liberty where they were smoking pot in the 4th grade, if that tells you anything.  I asked from the stage if anyone went to Liberty, and a girl from the back got really excited and started waiving her arms madly. Turns out it was the same girl that served us coffee during the day, and her boyfriend became pissed off, dragging her out halfway through the set.  We were convinced this club was a crystal meth front.  It was my first time playing (as an adult) in Salt Lake City.

Hey Everyone!

It’s 10 p.m., we’re ensconced in a hotel in Medford, Massachusetts and we’ve just gotten back from kicking these songs around a final time before we head out on the road tomorrow, and the Rittorical conquests begin.  I’ve got Alfred Deller on and he’s singing a beautiful song called “Peg-a-Ramsay.” The guy’s voice could break your heart.  Right now it’s about as quiet as it’s going to be for the next five weeks and I am fast falling asleep.

I first toured around the country in 2003 when my album, Hello Starling, was released.  My band and I toured in the Green Machine, a sixteen passenger van half filled with gear and half filled with guys.  We slept six to a room.  Seriously.  We slept six to a room, and before this little autobiography drifts into the “Back in the day, we were so poor we couldn’t even afford a last name” territory, I’ll just say that I have been around the country many times and I’m excited to be documenting this trip for Paste because there are a lot of places I want people to see.

I remember reading Johnny Cash saying that he could pinpoint where he was in the country within 10 miles just by looking out the window of his tour bus at any given moment.  I didn’t used to believe him, but after just four years on the interstates, state highways and occasional back roads I’ve learned how to pick out a few places myself.  The muggy pull of air thick with oxygen that is cornfields in Nebraska in summer, the steep and curvy roads that mix with the smell of cloud and pine that is Snoqualmie Pass headed down into Seattle.  There is a stretch of Indiana road that is so straight even your hair loses its curl until it’s snarled up again in the traffic of Gary, Indiana at the gates of Chicago.

I know Bozeman, Montana and Dallas, Texas by their respective skylines.  The sky scrapers of Dallas seem like those laboratory-grown crystals that you can buy on late night shopping programs; smoked and ambitious and fragile.  Bozeman, which I have only ever seen in the early morning twilight, is built low to the ground and owns what I consider to be the nation’s most beautiful collection of small town movie marquees.  The town, which we always stop in for breakfast on the long dead-head drive from Minnesota to Seattle, is permanently wrapped up in the smell of bacon for me, though we once bought perfume on the street here from a British girl trying to get gas money for the trip to Taos, New Mexico at 7:30 in the morning.

I think it’s a fairly universal experience finding the familiar rendered new again by witnessing through someone else’s eyes.  A friend of mine from Ireland once visited me in my hometown of Moscow, Idaho.  She couldn’t believe the gun selection at Tri-State (“Idaho’s Most Interesting Store”), the number of Christian denominational coffeehouses, and our strange reliance on the huckleberry.  Seeing it through her eyes made me appreciate my town in a deeper way.

This tour is a big one for me.  It’s my first time having a tour bus in the States, the shows are the biggest of my career, and I have a kick-ass new record to play with my band and friends.  The country is huge and it’s sewn together by roads that we’ll be traveling by night and day over the next month and a half, playing radio shows, eating breakfast, running, reading, carousing all hours and most of all playing music late into the night.  In his essay “Walking,” which accompanies me on the road this trip, Thoreau dissects one of the possible meanings for the word “saunter” as, “sans terre, without land or home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere.”

For the next five weeks my band and I will have no particular home and yet try our best to be at home everywhere.  It’s an experience well worth the having, and folks, I hope you can share in it as we go sauntering along.

9/17/07 - After spending a few hours attempting to load the big blue Prevost bus Sunday night, we realized we’d have to sacrifice a few things. The thing is, we have a shower on the bus and it takes up all our room in the “equipment” area under the bus. Carl, the bus driver from Nashville, drove all night to Kansas City.  We were happy because everything thing seemed to be working as far as the cable and internet access. I can remember when I started touring in ‘98, I didn’t even have a cell phone. We woke up and went swimming at some odd hotel for a few hours and Carl picked us back up around 5pm.

9/18/07 - Denver, one mile high..... and one less side mirror on the bus. I woke up to a slight knock on the bus. I thought it was was just someone closing the door.  We were parked in front of the Bluebird Theater (ex-porn movie house) and some city worker in his truck plowed into us. Carl went to Auto-Zone and managed to rig something that resembled a mirror. Very nice and honest, that Carl.  Out of all the bus drivers we’ve had, he’s got the gold so far!

Some of my family drove three hours from Nebraska to see the show.  I had a radio visit at 2pm, so I dragged my mom and aunt along so they could see what the day to day is like “on the road.” Luckily, the station was new and they were treating me as if I were James Blunt. My mom and aunt loved it.  I pretended like that was a normal radio visit for the sake of being legit.

It was my stepfather, Marc (drummer), and Ryan’s (soundman) birthday today!!  Despite some weird bass feedback over the first four or five songs, I thought the first show went well.  There were about 200 people there which isn’t bad for a Tuesday night.  I was hoping for a bit more but what can you do?  The fans that were there were really excited, dancing, and wearing homemade 1972 t-shirts!!!  My folks, in all their excitement, forgot to eat and got a little Coors light buzz.