Portland, Oregon 2/22/10
I’m sleeping in the Tube Bar while the guys eat happy hour snacks and watch Zombieland. I’m walking down Couch street to find a coffee and an apple. I’m trying to put on make-up in a graffti-stained bathroom. I’m at the back of Backspace in Portland, having just come from Pete and Frank’s house on Bellevue Court East in Seattle. We got in to Seattle at around 9, got a car and drove to Franks house. The highways wind and the Space Needle helps to illuminate the city on the bay, the hills and the lights on ridge. Ferns line the roads and I feel far away. I have a home made lemonade with Vodka when I walk into Frank’s. Pete is blasting some serious soul in his music room lined with records. It’s Little Royal yelpin away, and it’s great. The Pepper Rabbit guys are there and they’re sweet as hell and I’m excited for our week together. We get up late the next morning, though I have so much on my mind these days I can’t sleep well, and it’s starting to show in my face and my pants are loose and I guess it’s just part of it.
We walk to the sound garden in a park that looks out over the water and the houses on the other side and in the far distance, the dormant volcano of Mount Renier. Its beautiful here, the light is golden and though the sound towers are closed off we still get a good hike in up the hill. We hit up a music shop and then home for a while as Pete shows me some amazing music; Bobby Gentry, James Carr, Sammi Smith’s Saunder’s Ferry Lane.
After the show we head back for some more lemonade drinks, Frank picks up some baking ingredients and I make cookies. Pete finds me in the yellow kitchen and he’s really supportive of us too and it means a lot. I get so tired I crawl onto the floor of Frank and Pete’s room and in the morning Am finds me there and lets me get in the bed with him and Matt. I get another hour scrunched up on my piece of the mattress, and then go up the street to get some coffee. It’s rare to get a minute alone. I call my mom. I’m starting to feel that slight homesick feeling and it’s heightened when I find a picture of my old apartment in my phone. I can’t go back there, its gone. The next picture on the phone is of a plant a friend gave me. It started as one of three, then number two died, but the last one stuck around a whole two years in it’s tiny plastic pot with the barcode sticker on the back.
We get ready to go Portland and I call Brian to check in about the Dr. Dog dates and get the happy reply that everyone is down and we’re doing the west coast leg of their tour with them, which falls right around our Morning Becomes Eclectic performance. It means I get to go out west with the band and I’m so happy and I’m so happy to wander around strange new places with them and hang out with Scott and the Dr Dog crew and my new friend Chris in Deer Tick who got a record at our show in Providence the other week. Frank joined us on this tour and he’s a doll and an amazing tour mamma and I’m blessed to be here with everyone. I know it’s corny to ramble on in this way but at a certain point how could I not.
4/2, 2010 – 35,000ft in the air, heading home from LA
Listening to a couple of demos and all of Bobbie Gentry
We start driving after Portland, spend a few very comfortable hours in a Comfort Inn outside Eugene and get back on the road. We see the state of Oregon in the crystal blush of day and its breathtaking as the light skips through the clouds and falls in and around the pockets of hills, casting itself over old cars, sheep and roadside homes. We get in to SF and drive over the Bay Bridge, into the city past the familiar Coca Cola neon sign and the lights of the houses on the hill ahead. We play an alright show in SF and Kyle comes and Matt and Jerimiah and we go home after the show and I pass out pretty much right away. I’m exhausted and feel worn thin and wonder how I’ll recover.
We have a day off the next day, and though I’m moody, I decide that I can have a bad mood day, I’ve been surprisingly upbeat most of the time, and we hang out in the morning, walk to whole foods with J and then pick up Tim and his friend and head to Muir Woods. Though I had been there once about 4 years ago with Tracy I am still overwhelmed and restored by it’s beauty and magic. Its funny to think when I was there with Tracy, in my senior year of school, I was just learning the guitar, just putting together songs. I was writing about Death Valley, going to a show at the Great American Music Hall where I’ll play in April and meeting friends on the street, and probably listening to Little Wings, Kyle’s amazing band.
Driving home out of Muir woods in the dusk we pass daring bikers, flying around steep curves down into the green hills we leave behind for the city. As we take a sharp corner I look back and see white dove sitting in bush. As we cross the bridge back into the city it’s still light enough to see the ink white ship in the port, with its red cross, turn blue in the evening light. We go back to Jerimiah and Matt’s house and make a pretty sad dinner; the cookies fall into the oven, we use string cheese for nachos, but the broccoli and rice are good. I have a long helpful talk with Matt about relationships and love, which I’m starting to think may actually easier than everyone has scared us into believing. I think about how easy it can be if you live it day to day, just choose that, like a friendship, like life on the road. I think I can do that. I wake up in the morning and Am is up early and Matt goes to work and I think how sometimes I want to rise early and go to a regular job and see the people in the morning hours and the light and smells of a new day I used to know so well.
We mess up and drive the long way, missing the scenic route from San Francisco to LA. We stop at the Jack Rabbit Café off 41, right where James Dean died. We go in to use the bathrooms and there are big juicy hamburgers coming out of the kitchen and homemade berry crisp in a blue metal tin and I wish we had stopped here to eat instead of eating another water lettuce pickle banana pepper salad from Subway. A storm looks like its coming as we drive up and through steep sprawling green California hills. We pass miles and miles of what I think are orange groves, with pink white petals that fall to the dirt floor below and look like snow. As we pass one grove I see a single black crow sitting on a tree, staring out over the highway, the counterpart to my dove.
We get going and make it in to LA just in time for load in. Frank is there and the Pepper Rabbits, and Xander looks real nice in his blazer and khaki plants. The show does really well, a bunch of people are there, and are happy and I see Shawna and Audrey and Jesse and Sohrab and I feel good to be here. We go back to Xander’s who has a party at his place in Silver Lake and then back to Shawna’s. The next day we go to San Diego, its raining and I’m spent but somehow we have one of the best shows of tour and the band who plays with us offers to set up a show for us on or day off in LA during our tour in April. We get back to Xander’s late and I wake up early. I call Shawna to come get me and spend the hour reading the news and Edgar Cayce’s predictions for our future, which feel prescient and terrifying as the world crumbles under the stress of cracking fault lines from Chile to Japan. I like Los Angeles, I like the weather, but somehow this trip, I look out over its neon culture, its youth as a city, its augmented breasts, its cars, fixations with both health and extreme thinness, with antiquated ideas of Rock and Roll, with slick backed hair, with aruyvedic cures, with its fixed summer; I don’t understand the city’s multifarious and complex contradictions. I get a little worn wrapping my mind around the $8 raw dried seaweed crackers, the $8,000 purse and the desire for a holistic life led in your new Mercedes.
But aside from this, I do enjoy myself here, and I enjoy my friends and I appreciate the ease of living here, even if I can’t understand it. After Shawna comes to get me I go back to her place, Audrey picks me up and Galen takes the bus and meets us on the corner of Melrose and La Brea. He comes walking toward us and I hardly recognize him. He looks tanned, healthy, he speaks swiftly and clearly, and he is not the friend I first met a year ago in a series of misadventures as we house hopped all over the county.
We get in the car and drive to a thrift store. Am calls to say he and Tim are coming to meet us, and Audrey is on her way with Jesse. Digging through the jean racks I finally feel deep emotion, deep happiness about my friend who has become healthy again, deep privilege for my situation, the healed friendships I have been fortunate enough to hold on to. Being away like this, in a new place everyday, its so much stimulus, so much new information that I turn on autopilot. I can observe the beauty of the world around me like a voyeur in another’s life. But if I dare to take it in, I think I would perhaps lose my mind. When things slow down, and I stop for a moment to take in the scope of the experience, it moves me like man pushing against a boulder, and I don’t know whether I’m the boulder or the man.
We all head to Cantors deli and sit in the old cavernous restaurant with its deep beige benches and long white table. Piles of deserts stack up in display cases in the front and smells of borscht, smoked fish and thick cut fries waft over our table as the waiter brings pickles and saltines. We buy some wine after dinner and all sit by candle light in Shawna’s new apartment. Galen sleeps over, a hulking 6’5 he wears 5’2” Shawna’s sweatpants and as Shawna says, looks like a man who went to sleep a dwarf and woke up a giant. Shawna goes to work early in the morning and Galen and I wander to get coffee, berries and an orange before he heads back to South Central and the guys pick me up for our radio show. Walking home I ask Galen about his life there. He says he doesn’t have words for it yet, but maybe he will when he leaves. I asked him what it looks like and he says it used to be the Olympic village in 60’s but it’s turned to shit now and its just concrete, high metal fenced parking lots, and barbed wire everywhere.
He says there’ve been 70,000 deaths from gang violence in the last few years. He says if this were any other place armed forces would have been sent it. It’s an epidemic without a voice. He says for the people who live there, most are on welfare and not many people in his neighborhood work, and that so many people there are so used to such a low standard of living, and have no example of bettering their situation that stay more or less how they are. No one helps anyone, no one who can help anyway, the city leave this ghetto a ghetto, and he says how insane he thinks it is that people think they can be heroes by going to Haiti to bring relief to earthquake victims but won’t travel 5 miles to do good work of a similar magnitude. Its infuriating to see that there is a problem that no one sees and I ask if he knows what will happen or what will change. He says unfortunately with the economic downturn its just getting worse. He thinks eventually there will be riots again, as people forced to live in such extremes with no help will eventually rise up.
We walk on and laugh about the incredible circumstances under which we met and I have a feeling that we may know each other for a while to come. After the radio show we head back to Xanders, absolutely wiped and later I get a very good Tarot card reading from my favorite guy Michael, in his Canadian hockey jersey at the Bhodi Tree. In the morning I wake up past my alarm, its 5:30 am and I rush over to pick up the guys. Somehow, and it always seems miraculous, but we manage to get on our plane on time, which leaves me here, listening to my favorite new songs sung by Bobbie Gentry: ‘I Wouldn’t Be Surprised’ ‘Courtyard’ and one I don’t know the name of that goes like this:
Rain on my Sunday shoes, pick up the daily news looks like tomorrow’s blues but its better than not, call on the telephone, knowing that he’s not home, I put on the Rolling Stones, I can have me some fun, start up the flight of stairs, stand up and comb my hair, try not to change things more than you can withstand, get into something new, stay for a year or two, pick up the pieces where you think they might land, every day goes another day’s gone, hate to say so but I’m getting older day by day, take off all your clothes, stand up and wipe your nose, cry for your dad lost so long ago, jump on another plane, today its all the same, you can catch me in Boston cause that’s how it goes, I’m in apt 21, somebody have some fun, say how ya doin you old son of a gun, look at a photograph, it could make you laugh, all those changes, what have we done, la la la la la la . . . . Sit down and write a song, wait till the days grow long, wait for the hour when to blow me away , la la la la . . .
