(In the van. Just past Katy, Texas. Thursday. Doughty here, with the weekly Soul C's dispatch. Mark, honorable keyboard sampler man, will be providing a weekly sample to go with these dispatches, one that you can download. We're heading to Austin, currently, with Tucson and Los Angeles and San Francisco off in the up ahead. We're out with Sunny Day Real Estate and Shudder to Think, curling through the South, then up towards Seattle.)
"Where's Fredrickburg?" I ask our tour manager Gus, who we've taken to calling Roy for some mysterious reason.
"You're soaking in it," says Gus.
Ah, the van life. The basic mental haze of it settles in quickly. And we've been out here just over a week. This sort of general bleariness sets in; sort of like being somewhat drunk all the time. A kinda of crazy restlessness. I kinda like it; I kinda bliss out on the general lack of a destination. Why use drugs when sleep deprivation can conjure equally stimulating side effects?
Play. Drive. Sleep. Rinse, repeat.
The shows have been cool; we've lately settled into this sort of lowdown pimp-suit groove. Everything is laid back and full of space. I think it has something to do with being in the South; something to do with the fragrance, the humidity. I love it down here; I have an Uncle Junior that lives in Tullos, Louisiana. We schemed to stop off in Tullos and chill with Junior, but, I fear, we ended up taking a quicker route to Houston and missed out on Tullos entirely.
Anyway, we've been throwing weird things into the set--"Woolly Imbibe," "I Got Lost In The Parking Lot," which is a new one. We did this thing called "Henry Rollins Has A Very Large Neck Indeed" on a closed-circuit University cable station in Atlanta. We've been playing this other new joint, "White Girl" pretty much at every show; it's vaguely about my recent ex-girlfriend, so it's a decent crutch for me. The bassline is this way slippery, creepy thing that Sebastian came up with during this ridiculous video shoot a couple months back. We come up with stuff in the oddest moments--at the time he improvised it, I think somebody was powdering his face.
Sebastian likes me to draw pictures of bears on his set list, after we've all written it. The more notable recent bears--Champagne Glass-Shaped Weeping Bear, Aerosol Bear, Shriner Fez Bear, Digital Bear, El Oso con Queso y Jamon, Taco-Shaped Bear. People keep stealing his set lists from him after the shows, and it really bums him out. He likes the Bears as a souvenir.
Yuval's taken to speaking in a Texas accent; given his unique relationship to the American dialect, it comes out sounding like Boris Badenov with a strange, whistling lisp. We used to want Yuval to pretend he's not from Israel, and tell everyone he's from Pittsburgh. "Where you from, Yuval?" "I'm from Peetsburgh."
Finest Yuval quotes of the week:
"Go, G, with that hundred of thousand of watts you got there."
"Yo, Larry, if this is the South, where is it?"
"This looks a lot like Italy."
We admire Yuval for the way he has with a non-sequitur.
Our soundman Larry is the King of the Eighties. We don't know why. He's just got this thing around him that suggests the getting-ready-for-the-big-dance sequence in Footloose. "You're so eighties," says Gus/Roy, in amazement. "That's so hot." Subsequently, Gus/Roy and I have taken to dueling non-sequitur eighties-references; I won the last round with a sudden-death mention of Hardbodies.
For similarly little reason, everone is calling Mark the Horsey.
At a Flying J truckstop now. Gus/Roy has a peculiar affection for Flying J. While we're in Europe, he has to drive the van from Seattle to Iowa; he's plotted his journey so that he hits the maximum number of Flying J's possible. Yuval and Sebastian have vanished to the payphones; they're always vanishing to the payphones. Who are they calling, we always wonder. Nobody knows. Every time we stop, one or both of them are on payphones, making their mysterious payphone calls.
Dan, the lanky, bearded guitar fellow from Sunny Day, won't go to California, and no one knows why. He completely refuses to enter the state, and won't tell anyone the particulars.
"Yeah," says Sunny Day's fresh-faced and affable drummer, William. "He won't tell us. We've heard some pretty weird rumours, though."
"That's so hot," says Gus/Roy. "I hate California."
Gus/Roy is madly in love with Claire Danes, star of TV's "My So-Called Life." All one has to do is say "Claire Danes" and he'll let out this sort of anguished, fevered "Ohhhhh ho ho ho." He sent her e-mail last week and now checks his twice daily to see if she's written him back. He invariably returns crestfallen. She's on the guest list plus one for every show we do, lest Claire show up looking for this legendary Gus fellow and end up stuck outside. Hopefully, if she shows up, she'll either show up at an all ages show or they won't card her, being that she's a big TeeVee star and all. Claire, if you're reading this, there's a special place on the Soul Coughing guest list for you. You might not wanna take advantage of the plus-one, though; I think Gus would be a little hurt if you showed up with a date.
This is a poem I wrote in the van somewhere between Fredricksburg and Chapel Hill;
BUTTER/LOST
Against hands, a smooth is smoothed around and skin rushes up to it, cooing sweat like a whistle defecting a steampipe.
Oiled, the machine chuffs and the brain is dry, and the nerves scurry off with messages to no one in charge, while this equals this: two arms locked into each other are without a mind to differentiate between limbs and hips, therefore, I have come here to get lost.
Currently on the Soul C's van-stereo hit parade; Cibo Matto, a duo of Japanese women we know from New York, one of whom lays down the funk loops on sampler, while Miho, the vocalist, yelps groovily; "Extra Sugar! Extra Salt! Extra Oil and MSG! Shut up, I want to eat!" It's insanely funky. Also George Jones' Golden Hits, and the Latin Playboys, naturally. We had a deep listening-drive through Alabama with Exile on Main Street. Prince's Come is a big favourite. On a truly special day, Mark is planning on whipping out his tape of the Hi-Lo's.
We're soaking, as Gus/Roy would say, in Austin now. Thousands of miles and four days from now, we're playing a pajama party in Los Angeles. If only we can locate some pajamas.
--Doughty, November 17, 1994