Dispatch #4 - Feb, 1995



Currently in Chicago, and jetlagged as all hell. Maggie flew out here. I am overjoyed.

We said goodbye to Gus after a little tour of a few East Coast cities--Boston, D.C., New York, Philadelphia. Great little tour; suddenly everyone knows the words, everyone's jumping up and down, there's this whole frenzy thing going on. Now we know where the sweet spots are in the songs--the jazz section at the end of "Bus," the switch from the freestyle section into the fadeout in "True Dreams," the bass breaks in "Blueeyed". We hit these points and it's like we've jiggled some kind of switch; everyone suddenly howls. At each show, four songs in, I kept thinking something screwy was happening with my monitor. Like there was a high, hissy echo on the vocal sound. It took me that long to figure out that that sound was the audience, singing.

Gus is going to Australia with Belly--"All I have to do is tune guitars inconspicuously and pick up the money at the end of the night," he says. We're sad about this, but Gus has always wanted to go to Australia, and we're happy for him.

So we went to Denmark.

Denmark is cool if you like fish. Personally, I can't stand fish. I am totally unable to eat it. I've always been this way; I've never known why.

I'm partially Scandinavian, so all through the Denmark shows I kept saying "That's my people, man." This could be prompted by a particularly fine deli tray, or, as in Arhus, at which there were very few people, the crazed youths jumping on and off the stage and shouting for "Janine." We never play "Janine". To do so, we'd have to bring an answering machine on the road with us, and we hadn't the foresight to do that. That's my people, man.

Handy Danish phrase; "Har de Dukker, kan der go og tale?" = "Do you have any dolls that can walk or talk?"

Europe--or Yurp, as our dear departed Gus spells it--is Hell for two reasons. Firstly, there's nothing Yuval can eat. For Yuval, Europe means learning to ask "Yo, G, is dere lard in dis?" in four or five different languages. Secondly, Europeans relate to American culture much the same way white Americans have related to black culture; they love it and consume it with much gluttony, but hate the people. Invariably after the shows, I'd end up talking to some local about a) How brilliant they think we are and b) How awful Americans in general are. It gets pretty disconcerting.

In Sonderborg, a small town a few hours outside of Copenhagen, a place so remote and conservative it confounded even the citizens of Arhus that we would be playing there, nobody showed up at the gig. The joint was two-thirds empty. These are always the best shows, the fuck-it shows. We barely stuck to the set list, went off on peculiar tangents, tore shit up to shreds.

Afterwards, I ended up accepting the invitation of a 17 year old girl prone to spouting L7 and Cypress Hill lyrics in a thick Danish accent and her mom, and went to a Danish karaoke bar. The Danes were crazy drunk, yelping the lyrics to "Born to Be Wild." From there, we went to a bar where an awful German blues band played "Sweet Home Alabama" to fierce applause. The whole time we were pursued by the 17 year old girl's drunken boyfriend, who apparently was incensed at the prospect of his girlfriend and her mom hanging out with some American guitar player. He trailed us at twenty feet, screaming the whole time, weeping and moaning. At one point, on some deserted residential street, the cops drove up. "I'm an American musician returning to my hotel," I said. "Everything is fine here." They eyed the moaning boy and then drove off.

Onward to Berlin, where we sold out a club called the Loft, a relatively large place. Still, the bass sound onstage was awful and the crowd was sedate until after we finished playing. This is sort of the pattern in Europe--you get offstage thinking they hated it, and then they all file up to you and ask why you only played for an hour and fifteen minutes.

Various names of condoms sold in vending machines in Germany--Billy Boy, Action Box, Safe Surfer, Tropicana, Black Nero.

New songs on the setlist--"Lemon Lime," "I Got Lost In the Parking Lot." Other ones we've played for awhile but aren't on the record--"Blow My Only," "Laff On, Fatboy," "Collapse, Unload It," "Woolly Imbibe," and the ever-popular "White Girl."

From there, Amsterdam and Antwerp, and then onward to Paris, home of our favorite European record company, Barclay. They're quite cool over there. Stephane Verite, the honcho, has a dapper little French goatee and dresses like the pinnacle of French indie rock couture. Last time we were in France, he got very drunk and kept apologizing for being very drunk, and then explaining in great detail his affection for women that looked like twelve year old boys. This time, he took us to a bar in Paris where a woman in a cowboy hat and holsters holding tequila bottles and shotglasses would, for a few francs, whip out a shot, slam it on the table, and yelp "AIYIYIYI--TEQUILA!" in a faux-cowboy howl.

I don't drink at all, so this was all particularly amusing for me.

For some absurd reason, we are regarded as Important in France. Journalists ask us very serious questions. It's difficult for me to pull my usual Oh, the lyrics mean nothing lie. They won't have it. They know the words, they question references. They ask about our obvious connections to Frank Zappa and Morphine, an idea which totally confounds me. I've never listened to Zappa, personally.

We have been listening to a tremendous amount of Portishead, which we played no fewer than three times daily in the van, getting all stoned and weepy to it. It's an incredibly sad, beautiful record. If you know the song "Glory Box," I think the section near the end, where the singer screams "Forever and ever" and the lumbering ugly beat slams in, is the closest musical description of the horror of Getting Dumped that I've ever heard.

On through Switzerland, unnotable other than that we did Laundry there and we had a gig that was sort of a snottier version of Sonderborg in Zurich. Then to Italy, lovely Italy. The border guard got out the hash-sniffing dog in our honor, but only found our soundman Larry's pornography.

In Cesena, a tiny town redolent of fascism and the forties, in the front row, there was a kid lip-synching to "Blow My Only." He's probably heard it--as we've never been to Italy--on a bootleg of a radio session we did in Amsterdam a couple months back. If you've been to our AOL folder, you probably know that this is a pretty widely circulated bootleg. We love bootlegs. But, uh, they're against the law, so, uh, don't do it, okay, officially? We, the members of Soul Coughing, surely wouldn't endorse anything illegal. Of course not.

After Milan, in which we all fell in love with all things Italian, the insanely beautiful language, the food, we flew to Minneapolis.

Time to wake up, Soul Coughing kids.

Actually, the show was great, even though it was an over-21 show, which we all despise. Suddenly, we were back in the land of the crazed audience, shaking and pushing and yelling. I felt like Ian MacKaye--I started out with a diatribe against non-all-ages shows, and we kept having to tell the audience to stop crushing the women in the front row. They didn't listen. Whenever I had two seconds in which I wasn't playing guitar, I would pull some woman out of the audience that was getting smooshed against the lip of the stage. The crowd kept flipping over the monitors and accidentally pushing Mark's keyboard out from under him. It was truly insane.

Sadly, my friend Sam, whom I met on AOL and was the absolute first person to buy the record in Minneapolis, couldn't make it in, as she's underage. This over-21 thing is a real, real drag.

Now we're in Chicago, where we're all in a haze of jetlag. Our girlfriends have all flown out, we're all restful and happy. Maggie is here, and I'm happier than I can tell you.

The first thing Maggie ever said to me was, "Hey, aren't you Soul Coughing guy?"

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