(This dispatch written from the Days Inn in Portland, Oregon. We all just got off a plane from San Francisco. I gotta go buy some boots.)
"Love is Law. Disco is Real."
We arrived in Austin just after seven. Gus/Roy parked the van with unusual speediness, and bolted into the club, Emo's, before we had the van unloaded. It was approaching the full moon.
I found Gus in the back bar of the joint, a room filled with paintings of women with syringes as arms. He was standing on a picnic table, staring at a suspended television on which Claire Danes was smiling the semi-smile that Gus loves her for. He was chortling softly.
"Ohhhhh-ho-ho-ho," said Gus.
Every once in a while he would leap up for the volume knob, in a vain attempt to hear Claire Danes' voice. Then he would go back to staring at her in awe, his mouth open.
"Yo, man," said some kid wandering past the picnic table, gazing up. "Jordan Catalano ain't s@#t." In the background, Jeremy, the born-again-Christian lead singer of Sunny Day Real Estate, was playing videogames elatedly.
Yuval sprained his ankle that night, leaping offstage. "Yo, G," he said, "no 'Mr. Bitterness' for a few of them days."
The next day, we played a little college town called Bryan, on a very movie-set-of-a-small-town-in-Texas street on which everything was closed but the Opera House we were playing and small loan shops, most of which also sold jewelry, most of which were watches shaped like the state of Texas. There were more than a few cowboy hats in the house that night. So we played a calculatedly offensive show--we opened with this new song "Paint", a move more or less designed to confuse people. Happily, no one was confused, and the house was quite into it. "What about Mexicans?" yelled a booty-shaking girl in the front row, after we finished playing "White Girl."
And after that, desert and desert and desert. Insanely long drives. Beautiful though--particularly when we got to watch the rain coming on. Texas is unfathomably huge. We stopped in El Paso to sleep, and Larry the Soundman and I went down to Bobby Q's to eat mediocre barbeque and ask waitresses where amusing activity could be found.
"Well, uh," said the waitress. "What is this, Saturday? There's, uh, alternative rock night at the Cadillac Bar, down the way at the mall..."
Instead, Larry amused me with tales of his days touring with Kix, and everybody went to sleep.
Tuscon was next. We got to the club and no one was there; the doors were locked. We had been driving for eleven hours. We were miserable. Funnily enough, when they did open the doors and we played, it turned out to be, for me, the best show of the tour so far. I think everybody was into it. It was crazy fierce. William from Sunny Day's entire family flew down to Tuscon to see him; the best part of the show was when I asked the crowd if anyone in the room was related to him; there was a huge, joyful roar.
The Downtown Performance Center, where we played, is some sorta DIY co-op venture. Very cool. There was this strange sign posted by the entrance stating that, since the co-owners of the club couldn't afford some ridiculously expensive insurance policy, dancing was prohibited by Arizona law. Very 'Footloose'. The sign respectfully asked the crowd to quote passively enjoy, unquote, the quote entertainment, unquote.
We said goodbye to Sunny Day, who, of course, cannot enter the state of California, and then got in the van for a long drive overnight to Los Angeles. We stopped at a messed-up Flying J just over the California border. They had utterly no beef jerky. Mark and I spent ten minutes gawking at the empty beef jerky racks.
"This place isn't fit to wear the Flying J name," said Gus/Roy, master of all things Flying J, disgustedly. "I'm gonna complain."
You've already heard everything I got to say about L.A. However, we did have a Pajama party at our friend Randy's house; it was booming, as Pajama parties always are. We played two sets, mostly new stuff, and a version of "Down To This" with none of the real words in it, just the "industrial penetrating oil" chant that we do live, and the "See The Ball To Gee That Bootyack" chant lifted from the jive-talking guy in Airplane by DJ Mark the 45 King in his fine song "Cold Got 2 Be."
Our pal Dale, who works at Slash, our fine fine record label, claimed to be able to get Claire Danes down to the gig. I wrote her a note inviting her, and he faxed it off to some production company or other. Gus/Roy looked incredibly freaked-out the entire time. But, alas, Claire did not show. Claire, Claire, where are you? Gus' life is in your hands.
More free poetry:
FROM A GAS STATION OUTSIDE PROVIDENCE
This kiss, unfinished; lips to receiver in the parking lot, a pucker shot through a fiber optic wire to an answering machine, toward switchboards and stations transmitting in blips to satellites, this kiss thrown earthward and shooting down coils, around pipeline and electric power lumbering underground, up threads and transistors and transference points. This kiss is zeroes and ones jumbled and tossed into the pneumatic system, unscrambled at the end and scrawled onto a tape recorder slowly rolling at the side of your bed, then slapping back, reverbed off the ringer, a tinny phantom of the smooch like a smack on an aluminum can, up the same veins through the belly of the same satellite and softly to the side of my head; this kiss is home before the next exhalation leaves.
I'm stooped in the booth, pounding quarters into the slot; yellow light droops over the asphalt, and your ghost, too cool and elusive with those hands and mouth sings around me in the smell of gasoline, Whose mouth is this, scratched in static; some droplet of a sigh, atomized, and sputtering digitized into my room?
San Francisco was ultrachill; my girlfriend Maggie flew in from New York, and we did nothing but lay around and bathe for two days. Sebastian disappeared completely; I only saw him at the gig, and then after we got off the plane in Portland. San Francisco is Mark's hometown, so the joint was chock full of De Gli Antonies--their responses to my local-boy-done-good onstage announcements rivalled those of William's relatives in Tuscon.
And now, Portland. Cold and wet. What else can I say?
--Doughty, November 25th, 1994
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