THE CURTAIL OF THE TRAIL : PART 1
we leave tucson on the day of the dead.
november has its restrictive focus. . . a string of days that harbor a long list of dearly departed … rainer amongst them.
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the band meets in london and a fine show is had at the queen elizabeth hall. mike brewer is there recalling t-rex playing and david bowie miming there back in the late 60s.
scott garber comes on stage for a few songs from the 1st album that we recorded together . this show begins the pause of celebrating the 25 years since then.
next night is me lost in the rain. temperature dropped. should have brought a coat. the morning arrives with fever.
heading for a solo gig the following night at café otto.
no taxi can be found. its colder then yesterday. the show is rough but the crowd is rapt. they warm up the proceedings and am hoping the stage lights will sweat out the fever. it has before. but no. too small. lonna is the only band member still left in town and she helps me out of the set medicinally, closing the night with her lullaby beautifully.
afterwards, ran out for soup in the intense freeze. another bad idea. found no soup and the cough set in. next morning death is my alarm clock.
they take me to the bbc but I can’t even imagine walking and breathing. the short skip from taxi to building is enough to grab hold of my lungs in an icy grip and fiercely shake the death rattle forming.
the host revives me by adjusting the room particles with her smile. she must be the nurse of death, that last smile to help one let go. there’s candles in her eyes and her speaking voice has melody. her name is ceris and she yanks a couple songs out of my empty shell. my songs sound like they’re abandoning ship.
flotsam.
jetsam.
then she has to run. her kid’s birthday. she wraps up in a whirl and swirls out of there. now that the morphine of her proximity is gone, i am left to realize the pain that defines me now.
i drip into the elevator.
waiting for a taxi is too much work.
crawling into it is a choreography of crumble.
everyone is gone now.
the band and lonna. the record company dudes. no hotel. nothing. where is the elephant bone yard ?
take me there.
no way i can fly today as planned.
no rehearsals on planet gypsy now.
got dropped off at a home that rents rooms for travelers.
the house is rambling. the fever has me rambling too.
that night the ghosts of regrets i didn’t know i had come to taunt.
the fever does that particular thing it does; it repeats all the visions in small loops. over and over. i see the same disturbing scene like its trapped in digital skip. its relentless. its amplified.
my only chance is to skype the family back home. their voices shake the loops out of the room. when that’s over, the fevered dreams return to scrape my skull out. i am plagued by a train of dark ponder and limitless mistakes and wrongful choices.
when morning comes, the bed is soaked. hot bath then.
the day passes and i wait, but where am i supposed to be ?
night returns and the fever comes to play me some more.
this time it delivers the horrors of the world. the cruelty. the unfeeling evil. the infinite persecutions. the murder of families. the holocaust. the current trend of suicide killers. every war.
and the repeating loop has returned to set the images deep.
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can’t imagine this tour now. gotta call it off and bail.
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morning comes and the bed is drenched in sweat again.
i figure what must be happening is a depression amplified by the fever. the house is probably haunted too.
there’s a friendly promoter in switzerland who is also a doctor, and an offer of antibiotics during her festival of all canadian bands if i can get there. i ponder escape.
reckon its best to leave this house. have to change something so the outcome wont remain the same again and looped.
packing up is slow. brain is not working. then out the door and the raging storm seems so cliché but has me wishing i had a coat. crab a cab. it’s a vicious storm out there, but my cabbie is the perfect captian to weather it and get me outa here. “winter’s returning with a vengeance, mate.” he blasts the heat in the back seat. the slanted rain keeps changing direction. the snarl of traffic is blurred by the foggy windscreen. it feels great plunging through it with him at the helm.
get to the train. train to the plane. plane to the train. train to the cab. at the hotel the doc hands me a fistful of antibiotics.
it was about as difficult as walking down a long hallway of a rambling house.
bad dreams are gone. night sweats continue. the hotel is the 3 crowns of vevey. if you’ve never been, it’s a pill in itself, ancient and warm, an old palace that forbids bad dreams to plunkulate.
on the 3rd day its time to head up to the rolling stone festival in germany, which means that i’ve decided to attempt this tour. though this has never happened in the last 25 years, it appeared that the travel expenses already paid out for band and crew would be crippling without the balance sheet in play. bottom line was that going home sick was not an option. that was a funny feeling. fever be damned, full speed ahead, no matter the wobble.
so its out into the bracing swiss wind and miss a train or two getting to the plane. brain not fully engaged. lonna shows up at zurich airport. she was gigging in german switzerland and now helps move me along. we arrive in hamburg and fetched by sir steve left; tour manager extraordinaire. it feels good to be amongst the sonic troops again and bolstered by their cluster.
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isobel campbell and marie frank both have new releases at the same time as us. it meant sharing configurations of giant sand band members at various tour times. the puzzle of this was pure stankle fling flunk to detangle.
this german rolling stone festival gig was going to be a 3 piece giant sand with nikolaj sitting in on drums. (peter and anders were off playing with marie.) never played with nik on drums before, but now the odds were bent a bit more since i’d been so sick. but at least the sweats have finally stopped after 7 days and we got me a warm coat too.
apparently i’m also behind enemy lines.
word has it that some rolling stone editor hates me since the 90s. this might explain some dark write ups in it over the years, but not explain what the cause was.
my informant explained that at one interview i’d attempted to answer their questions with a prerecorded cassette tape of the answers without hearing their questions first. i would just play a random answer after each of their questions. (which still sounds like a good idea to me.) this same technique went over very well when i was on a panel at SXSW that year. sometimes it’s important to entertain when you are an entertainer.
then was informed that another editor there thinks i was too “moldy” during his interview. no idea what that means except that the interviewing editor admitted he was moldy too.
and then i hear another editor was upset because i berated one of their favorite artists back in the 90s; nell young.
who are these german stoned rolling editors ?
back stage at the dining area i had the feeling someone was looking at me from behind. when i turned to look, there was a table of graying bespectacled gentlemen with long coats and long faces quickly diverting their gaze. i think the crumble of the major label world has made them funkled here in festival land.
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as we were about to take the stage i was hoping to figure out how to survive the set tonight.
the best remedy was having steve shelley (sonic youth) sit in with us and pound the set home. it allowed nikolaj to fill in on guitar and bolster the sound. steve’s drumming goes back a long way with me, but only this year have we finally played together.
back when we were mixing our first records, the engineers tried to save us from ourselves by giving us a sound they thought was state of the art, but not the art of our state. the drums were always way too 80s loud, and gated, and just plain insulting to the guitar distortion that was mixed quieter behind them. what i heard when i played my guitar was what i wanted to deliver on record. a full thrust of crackled sizzle mixed way up to represent. like where an orchestra would come in, startling loud and overtaking the song for a moment.
that’s what distortion pedals meant to me; an affordable blast of instantaneous orchestra. a thunderous resounding. and it was with a sonic youth record i was able to show the engineers what a proper mix of drums should sound like, as well as pointing out various records from 1972, like “sticky fingers”. but they never heard of sonic youth or would care until the 90s, and so the struggle continued, often times physically wrestling the faders down while the tapes were twirling and the mix happening.
after that i remember reading an article on sonic youth where steve moaned that the band mixed his drums down way too much.
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this was the first night without the night sweats.
2 hours of sleep later, thøger and i had to fly down to spain to play with the gypsies. no idea where we were going. someone would fetch us upon arrival. probably.
once the gypsies showed up, it was exactly the opposite of the fevered nightmares.
honey bunny (from “pulp fiction”) sat in and sang a clash tune with us .. “should i stay or should i go now?”
exactly what i was thinking 7 days ago.
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