Road Journal 10/16/2021: Inside / Out
We have spanned a lot of the country in a short time this week. From Idaho to Utah… Colorado, Missouri/Kansas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Cleveland, Indianapolis…we’ve set up the circus all but one night in the course of 10 days.
If someone were to ask me what I had for breakfast yesterday, I could shoot back ’oatmeal, spinach, black coffee’, because it’s what I have most mornings now. Boring, effective, cholesterol free.
But if someone asks where we played last night, I hang my head, close my eyes and focus on the answer for a micro-second. It’s not a slight on where we just were, it’s that the senses constantly in motion mix together and can really blur some state lines.
Sometimes during soundcheck just after a night drive, the band can feel the sea legs adjusting to solid ground, like being on the water for some time, the body sways inside…motion of the ocean.
We’ve been full-bore for 6 weeks now, and fatigue has set in. Everyone now conserves their energies for the 2-hour show. The guys with families get a little melancholy after Facetime and are missing their kids. My personal low was last Sunday, after emptying the tank onstage in Denver the night before. The ‘Mile High City’ at 5,280’ elevation (a mile) always humbles when it’s time to bounce around and sing. With reduced oxygen and no time to acclimate, the spots during songs you are used to breathing get thrown out the window. You really have to plan when to breathe, remember to breathe, and decide how much you are going to move around while trying use your words and long vowels on pitch in between breathing. This, and a few nights of waking up earlier than planned, and I’m on fumes as we ride out of town towards Kansas City.
With a week+ more of shows before our next travel day, I took a CBD oil / Tylenol PM cocktail and went down hard for 11 hours. That hasn’t happened since college. Proper rest on tour is rare and you stock up where you can, but I don’t recommend that RX combo…I was a wasteoid the next day and wasn’t back to full capacity until Tuesday.
Rewinding to the band’s day off ahead of our Colorado shows, we pulled up under the ‘No Overnight RV Parking’ signs in the Ft Collins Walmart parking lot and set up camp for the evening. It was fix-it piddle time and a Double Feature movie night aboard the White Whale.
For a year now, Jesse has been incredulous that none of the band has seen MacGruber, an SNL tv sketch-turned-full blown movie, this one riffing on the ‘80s TV show, MacGuyver. It is a crude, low brow, juvenile action-comedy. I laughed most of the time.
For counter programming, next up was Bo Burnham’s ‘Inside’.
‘Inside’ is a master stroke of creativity from a young, bright satirical comedian caught ‘inside’, literally and metaphorically, as he films himself ruminating on pandemic isolation and the toll it takes on our human need to connect, socialize, relate, and feel normal and loved in the age of digital dependance, addiction, distraction narcissism and dystopia. It’s funny, sad, candid, surreal, disorienting, vulnerable, inventive, inspired and entertaining. It resonates and I recommend you make some time for it.
In Chicago on Wednesday, a young girl in her late teens or early 20s was on the corner against the wall of the venue we were loading in to. It had started to drizzle and she was with her powder blue bike with white tires and a cute handlebar basket. She was young, pretty, black, and was wearing clean, new fashionable clothes and sneakers and had nothing else but a ‘Hello Kitty’-type umbrella that she was using as a lean-to to keep from getting wet. It started to rain hard now and her shoes were sticking out. Surely she’s waiting for the bus, or to be picked up by a family member, or doesn’t want to bike home in the rain.
It’s now pouring, and we pull a blue tarp from the trailer and offered it, which she readily accepted and thanked us enthusiastically for, allowing us to cover her up, bike and all. “Yes yes!! Thank you!!!”
Bright, polite, alert, aware, normal.
“Just leave the tarp by our trailer when you leave!” we said.
8 hours later, midnight, and we’re loading out after the show and she’s still there, completely covered as we left her. It hit me that this is a brand new homeless person, clearly in her first day or two of having no shelter. (A homeless person who’s not a… ‘homeless person’ …ever been caught off guard by that prejudice?)
The production manager said there is a sharp increase of homeless - a ‘new wave’, as he put it - emerging across the city.
We left a stored pillow and blanket next to the tarp and as we left town I was thinking….this is how it starts. You walk out the last door that’s yours, and each night forward, you find your layers. Tarp…blanket…pillow…the homeless starter kit begins.
The Hunting Ground tour continues this weekend into the midwest and down to TX, MO, TN. Ya’ll come.
- Barry
