River Whyless: Band on the Run

All Things Must Pass

It was the last night of a 46-show tour and we were in Richmond, Virginia, at a venue called The Yerb, which wasn’t a venue at all but a dilapidated house in whose living room somebody had built a stage where the fireplace should have been. The PA system was old and half-broken, farting out the low notes and missing the highs altogether. Nobody seemed to mind. People pressed against the rim of the stage. They stood in couches and crowded the kitchen and spilled into the hallway and made stadium seating of the staircase and the house grew hot and sweat-fogged and at the end of every song came an eruption of applause so that by mid-set I had slipped into that state of blurred and furious bliss we all so covet and pursue to every corner of the country.

Little Tybee played next. We’d alternated every night and tonight it was Tybee’s turn to “headline,” though it really didn’t matter because we split any money made. I stood watching from the back of the room. Their energy was intense, even after all those shows, and my bliss continued, absorbing the worry that usually accompanies the end of a tour. The concern about money and the future and the questions of what have we accomplished and where do we go from here was forgotten. The unceasing passing and passing and passing was suspended by the shear force and holiness of the moment.

But then the show was over and we began to pack our equipment. We’d done it so many times that it had become a completely thoughtless process. The same late-night, half-buzzed weariness. Slow fade of the onstage high that leaves you feeling scooped-out and lost. We moved around one another like ants in a nest, putting instruments in cases and hefting them down the staircase into the street where Ryan, as always, had climbed up into the back of the van to direct the last of the nightly routines. When all was loaded we piled in and rolled out, our van leading and the Little Tybee rig following. It was three in the morning and six hours to Asheville, North Carolina.

Ryan drove first shift. Dan lay out on the bench seat and Halli and I shared the homemade bunk in the back. We unrolled our sleeping bags head to foot and I was asleep before we hit the interstate. I woke somewhere near Chapel Hill. A faint navy glow seeping out of the east. My turn to drive. I shambled into the gas station and bought a coke, passing on my way in a group of truckers at a picnic table sipping coffee and eating doughnuts and smoking cigarettes while their rigs stood huge against the glowing rim of the horizon.

Soon it was full light. My mirrors consumed by a molten sun exploding behind me to the east. The van chasing its own shadow westward toward the mountains. Ryan was the first to part. He was catching a flight that very morning to California, where he would be staying with his girlfriend (a woman he met on a previous tour) for the duration of our three-week break. He was flying out from Charlotte. The Tybee guys were going to drop him at the airport on their way home to Atlanta. We stopped at a gas station in Statesville to make the switch. Ryan standing among the pumps in nothing but his underwear, rummaging through his suitcase for something halfway clean. People gawking at this ragged partially naked figure dousing himself in deodorant and brushing his teeth with a jug of water. This was also goodbye to Tybee. We hugged, said our farewells.

Now three: Halli, Dan, and I. Dan drove the last leg. I dozed in the back seat. Woke to the sight of mountains filling the window. Pulling into the driveway of Molly’s house (Dan’s girlfriend). She came skip-running out the door. They embraced in the walkway. Halli and I watched from the van, squinting into the bright sun.

Now it was just Halli and me.

“I feel strange,” she said, having climbed up from the back and into the passenger seat. “Almost sick” she said. “But not really. Not physically.”

I nodded. “Me too.”