2/19/10 Main Room of Earth House Collective, Indianapolis, Indiana
play list: If Not for You – Bob Dylan, Lust for Life – Girls, Let it Be – Ike and Tina Turner, My Heart – Neil Young, Downtown – Petula Clark, Strawberry Letter 23- Shuggie Otis
Brad is playing jazz and cleaning the kitchen. Tim is on his computer watching Saturday Night Lights, my hands are cracking, I’m wearing the same thing I’ve worn for three days, stripe shirt, red had, black jeans, and blue jean vest, flannel jacket. It’s my new favorite outfit so I don’t mind, but I smell like a carton of Camel Lights and I could use a shower. Am just woke up and came downstairs.
Three days ago, three days ago I think, ya, we pull up to The Earth House Collective, an old church converted into a non-profit organic art space. We had a long drive from Nashville and are tired already. We have to stop at a Guitar Center in a strip mall on 31 North to get drumsticks for Matt and to try to fix Am’s pedals. I am anxious and ready to go and somehow get the good idea to put on the least wintered shoes I own. We pull up to the church late but it’s laid back and doesn’t matter. We park the van in the back, turn it off, decide to pull it up front, turn it off, turn it on again. Nothing. We can’t get it on so we go play. It’s a beautiful church space, and sounds great, but there aren’t many folks there to hear it.
We get done, I’m cranky and Tim goes down to the van to try to start it up again. He stands out there for a good while, inside, a drunk knocks over a $600 dollar sculpture, and then offers to give the van a jump. But nothing really works and so we leave it alone and Doug says we can stay at his house. I feel a bad about crashing there. A man named Rudy who work’s at Marsh’s down the block has been staying on Doug’s couch and I don’t want the four of us cramping his space. Doug and Brad and their friends say they’re making Taco’s if we want in, no Burritos they say, and we say yes but I head to the store anyway for my own stuff. I run into Am halfway there and he walks with me the rest of the day. Rudy checks us out at the help center because it’s late and the other isles are closed. It’s around one and he gets off in an hour but we don’t introduce ourselves. We head back and the guys are cooking meat. We talk in the kitchen for a while about bands that have been through Indie before they were who they are now. I stay pretty quiet and prepare a taco for my band mates. They ask if we want to watch a movie in the sanctuary, we say yes, they choose Clue and we pull all the biggest pillows off the couches in the main room and head upstairs. I fall asleep early, we’re not really supposed to sleep in here but Doug says if we fall asleep there’s not much he can do, wink, ya know.
We wake up at 9 when the place opens, I make some toast in the kitchen in the basement, the guy opening gives me a free latte and I call AAA. Tim comes with me to the mechanic shop. He hangs out with the mechanic during dialysis. The guy is apparently in his sixties, looks 42 and served in Vietnam. So we have a busted fuel pump, and its gonna cost me, and I have to come back in the afternoon. A lady at the shop gives us a ride in her white Navigator and I come back feeling defeated and still tired. I mess around on the piano a little bit, half learn one of my songs, and walk to get Cajun food for lunch with Am and Tim. It’s freezing out and these small black sneakers do nothing for me against the snow. The mechanic calls and tells me there’s even more wrong with the van and that we need parts from the dealer, which won’t get here until tomorrow. We have a day off today, thank god, but we were headed to Chicago to hang out with David and drop Matt off at the airport and pick up Nate who is replacing him for two days. Ain’t gonna happen. We’re stranded at this point, Matt’s changing his flight and I decide to go to the store, make some dinner, make some cookies and make the best of it. The guys meet me in there and we head back, eat, Matt sleeps on the sofa and we decide he is called the Scoranocle, a combination between an oracle and Scarano, and we ask his advice which always ends in him telling us to leave it alone or bring him food. Its just more dumb inside jokes, which we’re learning we may have too many of, but people humor us. Matt heads out and I bring my cookies upstairs to an event happening in the sanctuary.
We hang out with Doug, who looks like our friend and East is East drummer Pete Angevine, and he asks us what we want to do for the night. He offers that we go to a show being put on my Dodge at My Old Kentucky Blog, who I know and like a lot, and we say ok. Why don’t you play the show, Doug asks, but Matt has to leave at 4 in the morning, so we decline. He calls Dodge who says I should just pay a solo set. Around this time Amy, who is lovely, and tired from protesting all day in front of a health insurance office shows up. Brad is here, and now we’re a proper crew. I say yes to playing, practice my songs in the women’s room and Doug tries to get us a ride. Ok, we can use the cook’s car. A white Dodge 15 passenger from the seventies called the Torpedo. So I get my guitar and we get in the Torpedo, whose doors I don’t even know how to work, its freezing in there, it has two false starts and Doug isn’t sure how to turn on the dashboard lights. Give it a little gas, Brad says, and he does and we’re off. We’re bouncing over every bump, rolling down streets I don’t know, past gingerbread looking houses, long flat streets, perfect rows of lamps and trees, in fog stained windows, through a cracked windshield, past car dealerships and porn shops, fast food joints, a Mexican restaurant. We’re talking about sexuality and then debating what’d it’d be like having lunch with a member of the KKK, while Tim talks on the phone in the back seat and Brad’s laughing in his row. We get there and the place is for real, called Locals Only, there’s still smoking in bars in the Midwest, there’s a girl in ripped tights and a white fur hat, there’s dudes playing pool, a sound guy with long hair running around and Amy orders a burger. I play my set, some of the more somber ones I’ve got, under the stage’s Christmas lights while the bar tender pours $2 beers and male figure skaters compete on the small TV for Olympic Gold. We hang around for a while, Brad tells us some good jokes and eventually we head home.
In the morning I do some dishes in the side kitchen, make toast for me and Brad while he turns on his music and makes us all coffee. If ever I was cynical, if every I was skeptical, if ever I was jaded, it seems to have been erased by our stay here. The generosity of strangers is something of a panacea for ills of the heart. Its not about what they’re telling you about. Not really. I love New York, really, God Bless, but there’s something to be said for the kindness of these strangers. I mean really something. If it’s about anything, it’s about this.
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