Atlanta - The Great Escape

You can call me Houdini.

Last night I was getting ready for the show in Atlanta at the Roxy Theatre. About fifteen minutes before my set I walked out to go to the bus to get changed for the show.

As I’m changing, I hear Donnie Mortimer, who’s playing with Griffin House on the middle slot on these shows (and who, I’d like to add, showed up with an industrial-strengthed rubber band powered pogo stick that he’s carrying with him on the bus - love that Donnie), leave and lock the door to the bus behind him. It takes me another couple of minutes to get myself ready, and then I’m out the door to make the 50 foot walk back to the backstage area to grab my guitar and hit the stage.

Except I get stopped at that whole “out the door” part.

When I had heard Donnie hit the lock, I guess I thought that the door would unlock and open from the inside when I turned the handle. My, in retrospect, rather fuzzy logic on this one was:

* That’s how my front door works at home, and

* While I’m doing this tour, the bus is my home.

I used to be a panicy guy. Before shows, if I broke a string or couldn’t get a pedal to work, I’d be a wreck. But now I’m cool, baby - - hell, I’ve still got 7 minutes or so. No problem.

From this calm, Zen-like state, I was able to keep my wits about me and realize that I had Phil Sullivan’s (our intrepid tour manager) phone number. Sure, I’m going to be the butt of some jokes on the bus, but I’ll give him a call and he’ll come get me out.

Flipping open my phone I’m provided with another interesting turn of events: my phone is dead.

See, I’m one of those people who got burned in the past by re-charging my phone too frequently, which wound up shortening the battery life (there’s physics involved in why this is and this isn’t math class, so just go with me on this one). So I decided with my new phone, I wasn’t gonna be played for a chump. Now I let my phone battery go all the way down before re-charging. It’s smart. Really.

Or maybe not. Did I mention I used to be panicy? This is the point in the story where you’d expect me to revert back to my ways of old and lose it. But you’d be wrong.

Clear-headedly, I immediately thought “no problem, there’s power on the bus, I’ll get my charger and plug in the phone and then call Phil.”

There’s still about 4 minutes to showtime. It’s tight, but everything is going to be fine.

Then I remembered something.

I had brought my charger into the Roxy when we first got there. It’s in there and I’m in here. Locked in here.

So now I’m panicy.

I’m wondering now how long it will take people to first figure out that I’m late (probably not that long), then look around a bit in the dressing room to try to find me (maybe another couple of minutes), then start looking around for someone on the tour with my phone number before finding Phil, who is the only one who has it (this is starting to take some time), then to have Phil try calling me and get put directly to voice mail because my phone is dead (this is getting bad) and finally to start looking in other places and finding me locked in the tour bus (and I’m off the tour).

And as I’m thinking this, something clicks inside my head: “locked in the tour bus”. It just doesn’t sound right, I mean, c’mon, you can’t really get locked in a tour bus, can you?

I go to the door again and at this point of the story I just want to add that it was dark on the bus, okay? So cut me a bit of a break. But, that having been said . . . remember how I said I thought the door would unlock from the inside when I turned the handle? Well, after it didn’t I guess I jumped right to that whole step about the phone call and sort of overllooked something obvious.

There’s a switch underneath the handle which lets you lock or - and this is important - UN-lock the door from the inside.

Luckily, my cunning escape occured at about 2 minutes to 8, so I was able to hit just in time and play to a really amazing Atlanta crowd. They were so into the show and supportive from the first note that I can’t wait to come back and play in Atlanta again.

But next time, I’ll change in the club.

On Tour with Duncan Sheik

Greetings from I-20 West,

I'm watching the hills roll by through the window of the bus as I simultaneously surf the internet - okay, the internet is r e a l l y s l o w but, c'mon, we're going 65 miles an hour on a highway. The fact that this can be happening at all proves that we are truly living in an age of miracles (a beaming shaft of sunlight illuminates me as I type that - actually not, I'm fictionalizing my memoirs in a shameless attempt to get on Oprah. If you have no idea what that means, consider yourself lucky to have escaped the 24 media machine that is our culture).

This is Day 3 of the 5 week saga out on the road playing shows opening for Duncan Sheik and it's been nothing but enjoyable so far.

We've played two shows (26 to go). The first night was in Boone, NC, a place so far up in the mountains away from anything else that there's no doubt in any of our minds that this is where the phrase "the Boonies" gets its name.
And yet, this is the second time I've played there (the first being in September on the Jump, Little Children tour).

And that wasn't even the first time I was in Boone - - I was there just after high school when two friends got married. The bride came from Boone and I remember the night before the wedding there being a jam session with a bunch of her, well let's face it, you'd have to call them "kinfolk", who played bluegrass and kicked the hell out of our young, Michiganian rock and roll asses.

Boone is, being way up in the mountains and all, postcard beautiful. It was also (due to our ignorant northerner preconceptions) surprisingly - which is to say wickedly, bitterly, bitingly - cold. I'll try to put up the photo of the frozen water-wheel outside of the hotel where we had a day room ("day room" is tour-speak for "hotel room that you have (to share) for an hour in the middle of the afternoon to take a quick shower before going on to the venue").

The show went well. I'm doing this tour as the first of three acts on the bill (the second act switches every week or so), so there's definitely a concern about playing to nothing more than the staff, but about 2/3rds of all the people who came were there for my set, it was received well and I had a line of folks coming up to get merch and say hello after the set.

Okay, it felt icky to type that last sentence, but it's a reality of my life at this point - putting up decent numbers in terms of cd sales and the dreaded names on the mailing list is the de facto standard for how "successful" this tour will be judged by those folks in positions that allow them to judge things like how well my tour is going. It's not even really about the dollars that come in from cd sales (which for me on this album are much less than on my previous album because I have to buy them from the ditributor at a much higher cost than when I call Discmakers to press 'Fidelity' myself), its just an indicator of whether anybody out there is connecting with what you're doing. This is another reason why having a generation of people growing up thinking music is free (i.e. downloading) is troubling for musicians like myself who are trying to eke out a living doing it.

Last night we were in Nashvillle at the Belcourt Theatre. People come in and sit in comfy seats - this is a place where there’s concerts, not a band playing in a bar.

Which brings me to one of the happy realities of bus tours - the fact that someone is taking on the expense of renting a tour bus means, by simple fact of economic reality, that you play in nicer places - places which have earned the right to be referred to as “venues”. Places with real backstage areas, Places where they fill at least part of your rider. Places that might even have showers. Places, it goes without saying, that I’m not very accoustomed to playing.

Anyway, what can I tell you? Nashville. Music City, USA. Playing in a town where people value music and people who play it makes you realize that you don’t often play in towns where people value music and the people who play it. Not a lot of places where you’re talking to people after the show and they ask you about finger positioning on the fretboard.

More to come.