After our Halloween show in San Antonio, we have two days to get to Albuquerque for a Monday night show that — you’re not going to believe this — might be canceled. This allows us to lounge a bit in the apartment of Jamie and Traci, who let us stay with them, saving us from a guy who said he wanted to take us home and give us peyote.
We’d been booked into a new place called Sprockets by a guy named Sparky. But Sparky must not have written it down, because when I called back Sparky went “Uh-oh” and told me that there was now a poetry and beer night scheduled. He offered to have us play afterward, or to try to get us a show at a different place. I opted for the latter, and now I’ve spent our time in Texas calling him repeatedly to try to find out if the show is really happening. He keeps assuring me that it absolutely is — uh, probably. We’re in Tucson on Tuesday, so as we head west on I-10 from San Antonio, we have about five hours to decide whether to drive north to Albuquerque or just stay on this highway and go straight to Tucson, saving a couple hundred miles’ worth of gas money.
We decide — what the hell — to head north at Fort Stockton on U.S. 285, toward Albuquerque. Sparky’s assurances aren’t filling us with confidence, but we know that even if our show doesn’t come through, we can go see our friends Luckie Strike, who are playing an all-ages show at Fred’s Breads and Bagels. Luckie Strike is a punk band from Sacramento, and of all the bands we’ve ever played shows with, they’re probably our best friends. (I realize I refer to almost every band we play with as a punk band. This has less to do with any similarities between them and more to do with my not being very good at describing variations in musical styles.)
It’s about 10 p.m. Sunday when we stop at Loving, N.M., for gas. There are two gas station/convenience stores across the road from each other. Big Stick Mick uses the lone pay phone at the Allsup’s, where we’ve gassed up, to call home. His wife, Rachel Harmony, is having a tough time of it alone with their 4-month-old son, Hank, also known as Little Stick. Mick talks to her for about 20 minutes. I go across the street to use the phone at the other place, and a few minutes later Butta Fingers comes across, attracted by the sign that says “pizza.” He walks into and then back out of the store, then asks the two employees, who are outside smoking, how long it takes for pizza.
“Pizza’s closed,” says one. “Kitchen’s closed. They close at 8 and 9.”
Butta shrugs and goes back across the street. Mick finally finishes his call, everyone pees one last time and we hit the highway. We’ve gone about a mile, with Double D driving, when we get pulled over. “I wasn’t speeding!” he says. The officer’s voice crackles over the loudspeaker: “Driver, step out of the vehicle and keep your hands where I can see them.”
This isn’t about speeding.
Double D talks to the officer, who’s now been joined by two others, and then comes back and tells us they want us all out of the van with driver’s licenses ready. We get out and stand in their searchlight for a while as they check for warrants. They quickly determine that we’re not much of a threat (“What kind of music?” “Country”), and the arresting officer tells us that both gas stations had called the police on us for “suspicious behavior.”
“We’re a pretty small community here, and when we get strangers in here, sometimes people get a little nervous,” he says. I want to point out that this small community is a wide spot on a freakin’ U.S. highway, and maybe they should get used to strangers coming by, but I restrain myself. The cops apologize and send us on our way.
Back in the van, Butta, who’d been asleep when we crossed the state line, finally finds out that we’re in New Mexico, not Texas. This is significant because Butta figures there’s a warrant out for his arrest in Texas stemming from a speeding ticket he got and ignored five years ago. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he yells. “Oh my God, the whole time we were out there I was picturing my cellmate.”
For the rest of the trip, “Pizza’s closed, kitchen’s closed” becomes our favorite catch phrase.
We spend the night in Roswell, home of all sorts of goofy alien stuff. In the morning we visit the UFO Museum and several trinket shops, including one that has a crashed model flying saucer with an alien standing in front of it. We convince the store owners to let us take our picture in front of it. We’re supposed to record “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll” for a Sun Records compilation and maybe we can use the photo then.
In Albuquerque Monday, we quickly determine that the club where we’re supposed to play the replacement show is locked up tight. We hook up with Luckie Strike — and their show’s been canceled too! But Fred’s Breads and Bagels has given them a bag of bagels and some hummus, which we help them eat. We go out to dinner at a place called Route 66, since we are in fact on that fabled road, and then the 10 of us — the two quartets and two local friends of Luckie Strike — decide to go to Sprockets, for the poetry and beer. We’re planning to get up and recite our lyrics as poetry: “The devil came down,” I will intone, “and he brought some barbecue …”
Unfortunately, it’s not an open mike poetry night, so we don’t get the chance. Sparky is at Sprockets, which is a pretty nice place on a strip across the street from the University of New Mexico, and he apologizes for the mix-up. The bartender gives us some free beer. We’re again offered a chance to play after the poetry, but that would cost us our place to stay, with the Luckie Strike friends, by making it too late a night for them, so we decline. The free beer doesn’t seem to be an all-night offer, so we head, literally, for the hills, where one of the friends — who’s only 16 — lives with her dad, who doesn’t seem to mind eight strangers crashing on his floor.
I should mention the Luckie Strike van: They’ve rigged up a TV and VCR. Mick and I ride in it for a while, and we watch part of “Enter the Dragon.” The Big Orange Van doesn’t even have a radio.
After saying our goodbyes to Luckie Strike we drive to Tucson, a slogging trek through the desert that’s reminiscent of the slogging trek through Nebraska and Iowa, only with cactus instead of cornfields. Plus it’s warmer. I play and lose another scratcher ticket. I’d also played and lost one in Texas, so I’m now even on the lottery, having lost four times since my $4 score in Colorado.
We play at a place called 7 Black Cats, which is across the street from the city bus terminal, not far from the University of Arizona. This appears to me to be downtown, but not much is going on aside from this bar, and not much is going on here either. A few folks show up, but most of them leave during the set of Tarot Bandero, who play before us. We decide that there has to be a word for that phenomenon, and if there isn’t we’re going to make one up. It’s pretty annoying when it happens, but Tarot Bandero, on the road from Washington, D.C., seem to be nice enough people who weren’t trying to alienate the audience, and they stay to watch us, so we’re not too mad. We give them some of our door money.
On Wednesday we drive to Los Angeles — we honk the horn and cheer when we cross into California and the Pacific time zone — for a show at Spaceland, an ultrahip club in the supercool neighborhood of Silverlake. The less said about this show the better. It was booked three months in advance, and I spent the entire three months trying to get someone to call me back with details on the show. It ends up being a slapped-together bill with a folk singer, a cabaret/blues band and us. We’re last, which we call being the “sucker band,” because if you’re naive enough the promoter will try to convince you that because you’re playing last, you’re headlining. The blues band before us takes so long to get off stage — 20 minutes, 30, 40 — that everyone leaves before we play.
Welcome to L.A.
We’re staying in Hollywood with my brother, who works for “Entertainment Tonight.” He invites us to come down and watch them tape the show. We drive the Big Orange Van through the main gate at Paramount Studios and we feel like movie stars. We walk through the back lot — Hey! Frasier’s dad! — and find the Mae West building, where the “ET” offices are, and are then escorted to a studio where they’re taping the weekend show. We sit in the control room for a while and watch as they cobble together the pieces into a TV show.
“Kind of like watching paint dry, isn’t it?” my brother says.
Then he takes us out into the actual studio, where we watch the anchors, Julie Moran and Bob Goen, read their scripts. During a break he takes us up onto the little stage and introduces us to the anchors and stagehands, saying we’re on a U.S. tour. Everyone laughs a “yeah, right” kind of laugh. We tell them we’re playing in Santa Ana, down the freeway past Disneyland, tonight, and Goen says, “Shouldn’t you be on your way by now?”
“Well, the helicopter picks us up at 5,” I say, and he nods and says, “Oh, you have a helicopter,” before realizing I’m pulling his leg.
In Santa Ana, we play an all-ages show at Koo’s Arts Cafe, which is in what looks like an old house across a major street from the biggest, brightest 99-cent store you’d ever want to see. The three other bands are all good and the kids seem to really like us. Two girls tell me they’re great admirers of my outfit, which consists of a red shirt, red pants and a red jacket, all of which clash a bit, but not in the dark. Even more exciting than that, our two biggest fans come out: Jamie and Sara, who are mother and daughter, have recently moved here from the Bay Area. Sara, 9, is a veteran Smokejumpers T-shirt seller at all-ages shows, and Jamie’s been to more shows than anyone except our wives and girlfriends. They invite us to stay at their place, and they sleep in the living room so we can have the two bedrooms and they won’t wake us up when they go off to work and school. I tell you, there’s just no believing people sometimes.
In San Diego we’re playing last, after the headliners, at a divey joint near the airport called the Crowbar, which used to be the Velvet, and before that was the original Casbah, back when “they” were saying that San Diego was about to become the next Seattle. Not because of the place, which we like, but because we’re playing after the headliner, Billyclub, and because the show’s lineup has been in flux over the past few weeks, we’re figuring this show’s going to suck. And we think we’re not going to get paid much because the Crowbar is one of those places that asks people who they’re coming to see as they pay the cover, and pays each band accordingly. This sounds OK on paper, but in practice it doesn’t work so well. What if you’ve had several chances to see Billyclub, say, but decide to come see them on this night because they’re playing with, oh, let’s say the Smokejumpers, and that’s a good package? At the door, you’ll say you’re there to see Billyclub, and they’ll get your money.
In spite of this impending long evening, we’re happy to go to San Diego and see our pal Darren, who’s putting us up for the evening. We met Darren when we played a gigantic street fair in Pacific Beach last spring, and last time we were in town he came to our show and offered us a place to stay conditional on our singing “My Baby Thinks She’s Bettie Page” to his 5-year-old son, Brandon, in the morning. We accepted. Darren has the most amazing kitchen you’ve ever seen: It looks like a ’50s diner from one end to the other, and the centerpiece is an old Kelvinator fridge painted black with flames, like a hot rod. This time, Darren and his girlfriend Lisa are hosting a “Tupperware and cocktails” party on the night of our show, and he’s invited us to come over, drop off our stuff, get dressed and enjoy the party for a while before we go to the gig. I’m disabused of the notion that the Tupperware party is an ironic joke when the Tupperware lady shows up! We all get free samples: little toothbrush holders and bendy straws that whistle when you blow through them. We also convince several of the party-goers to come to the show.
At the Crowbar, I try to wiggle out of playing last. Billyclub is a band of punk veterans (ex-members of U.K. Subs and the Exploited) who live in Dallas. I ask the drummer if they’d mind if we played before them. He’s nice, but he says no. They’ve just driven straight from Dallas and they want to go to bed. We ask them to mention us a lot while they’re playing, which they do, and to get offstage quickly so we can jump on and start playing before everybody leaves, which they also do. As we’re rushing our gear onto the stage, Tony, the club owner, hands me a pretty decent stack of money. A surprising number of people (I try not to look surprised) have come just to see us. And a surprising number who didn’t come to see us are sticking around, including the tired lads of Billyclub. We’re so hyped up from hurrying onto the stage, from watching Billyclub and two other good punk bands that played before them, D.S.F.N. and the U.K. Wongs — who aren’t from the U.K. — and from having a crowd to play to that we play as loud, fast and crazy as we ever have, and the audience seems to love it. And so do we.
We’re invited to an “afterparty” at a warehouse somewhere, but instead take the offer of Dani and Sunny, two girls we met at Darren’s party, to take us out to dinner, or breakfast, or whatever you want to call it at 3 a.m. We go to Denny’s and I order “Moons Over My Hammy,” which I don’t even particularly like; I just like saying “Moons Over My Hammy.” The girls pay for dinner/breakfast, and Dani gets into a heavy-duty parking lot conversation with — you won’t believe this — Double D.
In the morning we revive what is clearly becoming a San Diego tradition: the acoustic concert for Brandon. After some lounging we pack up, say our goodbyes to Darren, Lisa, Brandon and Salty Dog, their demure pooch, and head for the last show of the tour, in Bakersfield. We can’t wait to get home. The Queen Teen, back home for a week now, is saying things to me like “Don’t go away anymore.” If this tour were going on for another four weeks, I’d be good to go, but since it’s one day from ending, I’m itchy to go home. So is everybody else. We’re going to play the show and then drive to San Francisco overnight, about 300 miles. We can sleep when we get there.
It’s drizzling as we pull up to Narducci’s Cafe, a family-style restaurant and bar where we’re headlining the show in a room that during the day is a dining room. We’re offered free food — everything but an entree, meaning we get soup, salad, bread and pasta. But things turn weird: A waitress is explaining the situation to us when the owner of the place calls her away and chews her out for wasting time on nonpaying customers. Our reactions range from annoyed to pissed off at this rudeness. No food comes for a while, so all of us except Butta Fingers abandon the table to get dressed, set up the merchandise, etc. The club is filling up nicely when we hear what is clearly karaoke singing. I go into the main bar and see, standing on a little stage, holding a saxophone and singing “Footloose” or something — the owner! He sings and plays sax on several songs, then several more, mostly hits from the ’80s. The first band, Johnny Retsched and the Fabulous Martini Brothers, is setting up. People keep asking me when we, or somebody, anybody, is going to play and end the karaoke. It’s out of my hands, friends.
The Martini Brothers play their rockabilly-swing set, and when they finish, the promoter, Skip, climbs onstage and says to them and us, “Not to put too fine a point on it, but the faster you guys change over, the less likely Jimmy will play his saxophone.” But we’re not successful. He starts in again before we can get ready. I’m not sure, but I think Skip introduces us and we start playing while he’s in the middle of a song. Sorry, Jimmy: If somebody says, “The Smokejumpers,” we start playing.
We’ve played Bakersfield before, and there’s a pretty good crowd to see us. We play two sets and sell lots of CDs, more than at any other show on the trip. This last show, in fact, is by far the best on the tour, a fine way to end up. Lots of happy people and lots of money. We’re offered an opening slot in two weeks for the Paladins, who would be the biggest band we’ve ever played with. We pack up and spend some time outside in the drizzle talking to friends, while inside Jimmy and a few pals have drunkenly started up the karaoke again.
A guy comes bursting out the front door and running down the street. “He’s doing Hootie! Run for your lives!”
I’m lying down on the front bench seat as we head west from Bakersfield on state highways for about 50 miles before hooking up with Interstate 5, which will rocket us north toward home. Double D is driving, and he hits a ramp a little too fast on the slick pavement. First I hear “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.” I sit up and look — out the front window — at a taxicab that’s next to us, on the road we’re merging onto. The driver is looking at us with this “fer-cryin’-out-loud” stare that only a cabby could give you in that situation. Now I’m looking behind us — still out the front window. We’re in a full spin. “Oh my God.” I see the cab again out a different window. I wait for the side of the van to smack into something hard and unforgiving, or worse yet, for us to flip over. I can already picture us standing miserably in the rain, petals on a wet, black bough, waiting hours for a tow in the growing morning light.
And then everything stops. We’re facing the right way. We haven’t hit anything. While it was happening, it was too surreal for us to be scared. Now we’re just freaked. We go over it again and again. “I just heard ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’” someone says.
“Who was saying that?” Double D asks.
“You were.”
When you get home from tour you can’t just go home. First you have to stop off at the rehearsal space to drop off the gear. One last bit of torture: delayed gratification.
I walk in the door of our apartment around 10 a.m. The Queen Teen’s pretending to sleep. I climb in bed and hold her and it feels like I’ll never want to leave again, though I know I will want to eventually, because if I didn’t do this, who would I be?
Later she takes me up the street for pancakes. We stop at the gas station and I buy one last lottery scratcher. I borrow a quarter from her to scratch it.
This time I’m a winner: I win a free lottery ticket.
In the darkest of the dark hours Sunday night, as we struggled unsuccessfully in a Brighton, Colo., truck stop parking lot to fix the Big Orange Van in time not to have to miss a second consecutive show, I thought it would be a prudent move to play the lottery, on the off chance that our luck was overdue to change. And maybe it was: I won $5 on a scratcher, bringing my lifetime lottery winnings to $5, which is to say $4 because I paid a buck for the ticket. I took it as a sign that things were going to start happening in our favor after two days of minor mechanical problems cost us as much as $600 in lost earnings, repair bills, parts and unanticipated hotel stops, not to mention the attendant frustration, anger and tension.
You take your signs where you can get them.
Now we’re on a 24-hour, 1,220-mile drive through five states to get from the Denver outskirts to Muncie, Ind., for a Tuesday night all-ages show at a record store called Stevie Ray’s House of Wax. We plow through eastern Colorado, Nebraska and Iowa on Interstate 80, then head southeast on I-74 through Illinois and on into Indianapolis. From there it’s less than an hour up the road to Muncie. I play one scratcher ticket each in Nebraska and Iowa, losing both times. At Council Bluffs, Iowa, just across the river from Omaha, we buy gas for 92 cents a gallon — the first two-digit price we’ve seen on the trip, or in years. Gas is $1.20 or more back home. We take pictures of the sign. Starting in Iowa and for the rest of the time we’re in the Midwest and South, store clerks bid us adieu by saying, “Come back.”
I begin to measure the quality of truck stops by their willingness to give me a cup of hot water for free. (Flying J keeps wanting to charge me 16 cents for the cup, but I always manage to talk them out of it. On the plus side for Flying J: great bathrooms.) I’m guzzling lemon tea to soothe a sore throat that hit me the day before we left and hasn’t been helped by my singing every night. (Come to think of it, nothing is ever helped by my singing.) By the end of Saturday night’s show in Denver, I was in pretty serious pain and worrying about my future as a singer. A former musical partner injured his vocal chords six years ago and is still struggling with the effects. Now, thanks to the tea and not having to sing for two nights, my throat is feeling better. Perhaps the problems with the Big Orange Van have been a blessing in disguise, though I have to say it’s a hell of a disguise.
One thing brightening my spirits as we head to Muncie is that my wife will be there. A Hoosier gal, the Queen Teen is taking a trip to her home state to visit friends and catch our show. When we’d been sitting in 40-degree Denver weather waiting for a tow, or when I’d been up to my elbows in grease, helping Double D, guitar player and resident mechanic, try to force some unwilling engine part into place, I’d spent a lot of time thinking about how nice it would be to be at home, curled up on the couch or clean and warm in bed. She has a way of reassuring me in bad times without being a Pollyanna, and after less than a week on the road, I can already use a dose of that.
What kind of town is Muncie? The Indiana Visitors Bureau booth on the highway has no information on it. Not even a map. Stevie Ray’s is in “The Village,” a downtown section of restaurants and shops near Ball State University. We get to town in the early afternoon and check into a Valu-Lodge motel. “It’s going to be expensive because of that word ‘lodge,’” says Big Stick Mick. “No,” I say, “Valu with no ‘e’ cancels it out.” The rooms smell like chemicals, the shower is broken and there are shady characters hanging around, but we have all afternoon to eat pizza, do laundry and, in my case, luxuriate in the presence of my favorite person.
We’re playing with the Parasites, friends of ours from Berkeley who are racing east to hook up with the Queers and the Mr. T Experience for a tour. A local band of teenagers called the H-Men opens the show, then us, then the Parasites. We form a mutual admiration society with the Parasites. They tell us they jumped at the chance to play this show with us and we thoroughly enjoy their melodic punk show, with the Queen Teen dancing all night front and center. The Parasites want to adopt her. The kids buy up some CDs. Who ever said anything bad about Muncie?
Here’s where the story should get really wild, because we were originally
scheduled to play a wet T-shirt night in Nashville. Alas, that show fell
through and we ended up with a gig at a pizza parlor in Montevallo, Ala., a
college town down the road from Birmingham. When we arrive, the place is
empty and we decide not to play, though the staff gives us free pizza and
beer anyway. Eventually, some people show up and talk us into playing. I’d
already changed into my spiffy stage outfit, but the other guys hadn’t even
bothered — so this is the first Smokejumpers show in civilian
clothes. It seems that Barnstormers Pizza is the one place in town where
the freaks go, and some of them come just in case something is happening.
We make some friends, including some college girls who take us home to the
messiest house I’ve ever seen that has no men living in it, which I say
without meaning it as a criticism.
By Thursday morning, we’ve decided that we can’t ignore our exhaust leak
any longer, lest one of us go to sleep in the back and wake up dead, so on
the way to New Orleans — where our gig has been canceled, surprise,
surprise — we stop at a Midas shop in Montgomery for repairs. We take
turns walking up the block to the Burger King to get drinks or use the
bathroom. There’s a picture on the wall of Elvis Presley shaking hands with
George Wallace. We’re later assured that this is pretty much it for
Montgomery. We haven’t missed anything.
We’d found out our show at the Dixie Tavern in New Orleans had been pulled
when we called Tuesday for directions. Seems the promoter and the club
owner had a disagreement. I make calls to everyone I know in New Orleans,
which isn’t very many calls, in a desperate attempt to hook onto a show.
The promoter, who isn’t being very helpful, mentions that the Hi-Fives are
playing a place called the Hi-Ho Lounge. The Hi-Fives are friends of ours
from the Bay Area. They’re a “suit band” — they dress up in black or gray
suits and play early Kinks-influenced three-chord rock. They’re the cutest
band I know.
Information has no listing for the Hi-Ho, so I call WTUL, the Tulane
University radio station, hoping someone there knows who’s putting on the
show and, amazingly, someone does. I’m put in touch with Anthony, who, even
more amazingly, says, “If it’s OK with the Hi-Fives, the more bands, the
more fun.” We ask the Midas mechanic how long it takes to get to New
Orleans, since it’s already 4 by the time the BOV’s fixed. “Ah, New
Orleans,” he says. “Party capital of the South, man! Take you about five
and a half, six hours, maybe seven or eight.” Uh, thanks for the help. We
race to New Orleans, figuring the Hi-Fives won’t say no if we’re already
there, and they don’t, so we get to play. The crowd is decent-sized, and I don’t
get the idea they like us very much, but we feel like we’ve accomplished
something just by getting to play.
After our set we jump in the back of a pickup for the short ride to the
French Quarter with my friend Derek, who’s come to the show with his
brother and two friends. We wander around for a while, but it’s pretty
quiet, and we want to get back to see the Hi-Fives. Butta Fingers, the
stand-up bass player, and I each buy a beer to drink in the street, because
we can, and then we scurry back. The Hi-Fives are their usual fine selves,
and they give us some of their door money at the end of the night. We go
back to Derek’s to sleep. He and his wife, Kera, who’s under the weather, have the nicest house we’ve ever seen that doesn’t have guided tours.
In the morning we’re at a gas station on I-10 west of town when a couple of
guys sitting in a pickup call me over. “Hey, Green Wave!” shouts the
driver, referring to my Tulane baseball cap, which I’ve just bought at a
big grocery store at the foot of Napoleon Street, “c’mere.” I go over and
as he’s asking me if I’m a Tulane boy I notice the two of them are drinking
beers and they have a shotgun between them. Living in the Bay Area, I
don’t see many shotguns, so as I tell them I’m a musician from
California, I’m thinking that they either just got back from hunting or I’m
in big trouble.
“Y’all are a band? You should set up right here and play!” says the driver.
“Well, I would, but we’ve gotta get to Dallas tonight.”
“Dallas, damn! What kind of music y’all play?”
“Country.”
I always say this on the road, especially to the police. With the stand-up
bass in the van, it’s a sustainable half-truth (we do play some country
numbers), and it just seems to lend itself to fewer potential problems than
our standard at-home answer, punk-rockabilly.
“Really? You don’t look country.”
I’m wearing a Texas Longhorns T-shirt, green Army shorts and red Chuck
Taylors. “We mix some other stuff in.”
They get out of the pickup and the driver waves me to the back to look at
their dogs and a rabbit they’ve just shot.
“Nice,” I say, unsure of the etiquette when looking at a freshly dead
bunny. I mean, what am I supposed to say? “Cute little feller” doesn’t seem
appropriate. I head back to the van, always happy to make new friends.
The hippest part of Dallas, the only really swinging part of town as far as
I know, is Deep Ellum, a hipster quarter three blocks wide and a quarter
mile or so long, about a mile from downtown. We’re opening for Kim Lenz and
Her Jaguars, a local traditional rockabilly band we opened for earlier this
year in San Jose. Kim is a talented singer and songwriter, and she and her
husband, Charlie, couldn’t be any nicer and kinder to us, offering us
advice on the Texas music scene and encouragement on our music. The place
we’re playing tonight, the Velvet Hammer, is a swanky joint that’s been
open for a couple of months, catering to the swing-dance crowd. Tonight’s
crowd is fair to middling, thanks in part to a show down the street by one of my favorite bands, the Derailers, and we find out just before we go on that after
tomorrow’s show the place is closing. We count this as good luck for us, in
a way: The way things were going earlier in the week, we’re just glad it
didn’t close the night before we were to play. During our set,
Jimbo, the bass player for Reverend Horton Heat, comes in with his
girlfriend. They’re dressed as survivors of the Titanic. He heckles me
about how you can’t smoke in bars in California and they leave.
We’re staying with Chris, one of my best friends, who lives in a converted loft right in Deep Ellum. Chris is generous almost to a fault, and he simply showers us with kindness. “You’re the Beatles for a day,” he says as he gives us the royal treatment, showing us around the neighborhood, where he knows everyone, cooking gigantic burgers at 3 a.m. and loading us down with Shiner Bok and Lone Star Beer. This is how it should be everywhere.
On the way out of Dallas on Halloween morning we drive down Elm Street and through Dealey Plaza. I point out the School Book Depository and the Grassy Knoll to the boys, and at the appropriate spot, we all snap our heads.
On the way to San Antonio we learn what a Texas stop sign looks like: It
says “Dairy Queen” on it. We’re playing a Halloween block party at a place
called the Reverb. There are nine bands playing inside the club and out on
the street. As we start to unload, a guy comes up and says he’s seen our
picture and a positive review in the newspaper. “You’re from Houston,
right?”
No, we’re from San Francisco.”
“No, no, man, I saw the newspaper. It said you’re from Houston.”
I offer to show him my driver’s license, but he loses interest and offers
to give us his copy of the paper. When we finally read it, it says we’re
from San Francisco — and that our record’s good. San Antonio: great town.
Things start disappearing in San Antonio. First, Butta discovers his
stage tuner and one of his cords are missing. The dolly he uses to move his
amp around also vanishes, and we spend a fair amount of time chasing it
down. Seems it’s been borrowed by others with things to move around. And
one last casualty is Mr. Bones — a foot-tall rubber skeleton that’s sort
of our mascot. It lives on Mick’s snare drum. It has squeezable, squeaky
viscera — until San Antonio, when the viscera is suddenly gone. We never
find it.
There’s a pretty good crowd, inside and out, and they’re almost all in
costume. So are we. I’ve revived an old Zorro outfit, Big Stick Mick is
dressed as a nun, Butta Fingers has on some false teeth and glasses to look
like Jerry Lewis in, uh, one of those old Jerry Lewis movies and Double D
has on an enormous foam top hat and tie, both purple with orange
polka-dots, plus a Charlie Chaplin mask he won in one of those machines where you try to grab a prize with a claw. It looks unfortunately like a Hitler mask. Mick and Butta had worked out a routine where Mick, in his nun
outfit, falls down on the stage and gives birth to a Teletubby doll he’s
got with him, but I guess they decide not to do it. We do bust out our new
cover: a rockabilly version of the Beastie Boys’ “Fight for Your Right to
Party” (a song I despise, although it was my idea to cover it after we heard
it in the pizza parlor in Alabama). During our set, we get a sign that
perhaps there is a God — it starts raining, so a great costumed hoard
crowds into the club. Many eventually drift out again, but a fair number
stick around and seem to like what we’re doing. Later, I ask Kim, a local
woman, what kind of music really goes over here and she says, “Hard rock.”
“I would have thought our stuff would go over big here.”
“Everywhere in Texas,” she says, “except San Antonio.”
Tomorrow we get our first scheduled day off. We have two days to drive to
Albuquerque. We want to stop in Roswell to see some aliens. Our nose is pointed toward the barn now — pretty soon we’ll only be one time zone from home.
“Hey, we’re the Smokejumpers from San Francisco, California. Thanks for coming, thanks for sticking around, we need a place to stay. Here’s our first song …”
That’s as good a way as any to begin the Smokejumpers’ 16-day, 15-show, 7,000-mile tour, at an all-ages coffeehouse in Reno called Planet Nine. We’re headed east from San Francisco as far as Muncie, Ind., then south to Montevallo, Ala., near Birmingham, then back home through the Southwest and Southern California. By the time we’re through, the four of us will possibly hate each other, probably hate our Big Orange Van and almost certainly hate some things and people we can’t even imagine just yet. We’ll get home, swear we’ll never do this again, then do it again.
We’re a punk-rockabilly band. When we say that to people, they generally say, “You mean like Reverend Horton Heat?” and we say, sure, yes, like that, even though we don’t sound like the Rev. We don’t sound like anyone, really, although we also manage to be pretty unoriginal. But it’s boring to describe yourself. We play loud and fast. We jump around. We make a lot of bad jokes. We’re snappy dressers. OK?
We’re on tour to promote our debut album, “Flat Tear It Up!” Thanks to some delays and screw ups, including a big communication failure between us and our label, Walking Records, a small, start-up indie in San Luis Obispo, Calif., promotion for the first few shows has been pretty weak. The crowd at this opening show is on the small side, but they’ve spread themselves out nicely to make the place look reasonably full. The other band is called the Atomics. They own this place. Literally. We’re told they opened it because they were having trouble getting shows at the other two all-ages places in town. They wear busboy outfits and I like them, even before they give us the whole door take.
And my opening ploy works. Two college girls, freshmen at Nevada-Reno, offer to let us stay in their apartment — which they share with three other students, including two football players.
At their place, something happens that amazes three-fourths (and maybe all) of the Smokejumpers: Tom “Double D” Thumb, guitar player and heartthrob of the band, the only one of us who isn’t married or living with someone, whose sex life we live vicariously through on the road even though he never gets laid despite the fact that women are constantly flinging themselves at him, gets lucky with one of our hosts. (Not one of the football players.)
“I’m doubting everything I know!” Big Stick Mick, the drummer, is reeling. His world’s been rocked, his assumptions destroyed by Double D’s semireluctant admission in the van Friday morning that he had been co-responsible for the rhythmic noises coming from upstairs Thursday night.
Our hero.
The Big Orange Van is new to us. It used to belong to the city of Orange, hence the paint job, though everyone thinks it looks like a Cal-Trans vehicle. We honk and wave at highway workers whenever we pass them, and they look at us like they’d like to hunt us down and kill us.
It’s a one-ton GMC Vandura, the BOV is, and it’s a beast, much more powerful than the 3/4-ton GMC van that died on us north of Eugene, Ore., in the dead of night five months and three road trips ago. Saying that your van, with all your musical gear in it, died in the dead of night 500 miles from home and 35 miles from anywhere — bad as that sounds — does not begin to get at how bad it is to go through it. But that long dark night of the Carrows Restaurant (waiting for a mechanic to open up) is behind us now, and we’re happy in our Big Orange Van, powering up mountains at 65 mph, leaving hapless musicians in 3/4-ton vans in our dust. If it had a radio, the BOV would be perfect. Also, if the rearview mirrors stayed where you placed them and the floor didn’t get so hot, that would be nice. And the seats could be more comfortable. And if the windows didn’t all whistle, we could maybe get more sleep.
We beg for floor space to sleep on each night, but we live in this van. A West Coast band that wants to travel is in for some heavy driving. Bands east of the Mississippi can travel from town to town to town in a matter of hours, but out West in the wide open spaces there’s a whole lot of endless gray ribbon, baby, long black highways and thin white lines yeah yeah. They don’t write road songs about Maryland or Connecticut, you know. After our friendly little first-day drive of 230 miles from San Francisco to Reno, the next eight days promise hauls of 560 miles to Ogden, 533 to Denver, 556 to Lawrence, Kan., 347 to Iowa City, 430 to Muncie, 540 to Montevallo, 380 to New Orleans and 507 to Dallas. Almost everyone I’ve showed this schedule to over the last few weeks has had the same reaction: “Are you crazy!? How can you stand so much driving?” My answer: 10 or 12 hours a day in a van, driving, sleeping, watching the scenery go by, beats spending that same time on the job, grinding away at someone else’s life’s work. Plus, we get to play music at the end of the day. How could I go to work all day without this to look forward to?
We have two bench seats, so at any given time on the highway, half of the band is asleep, preferably not including the driver. The addition of the second bench before this trip has cut down on the endless games of Boggle and 20 questions, which might better be called X questions, with X representing the number of questions it takes to guess the person or character one of us is thinking of. Through this game we’ve learned that various Smokejumpers have never heard of James Joyce, “Beowulf,” Che Guevara and “The Greatest American Hero.”
“What’s Ogden like?” I ask two local guys as I change my guitar strings before Friday night’s show at the O-Town Tavern, weirdly located in the basement of a state office building.
“A little Salt Lake City,” they say, and clearly it’s not a compliment. There’s a Quiet Riot/Warrant/Slaughter show in town tonight, but it’s probably our publicity woes more than some loss of potential fans to ’80s fluff metal nostalgia that again keeps the crowd on the small side. Ah, but they’re enthusiastic again, and you’d be amazed how much that helps this thought not go through your mind as you sing: “What am I doing up here? I’m wasting my life!”
My opening plea for a place to stay works again. This time a woman in her mid-20s offers us floor space in her one-bedroom condo nearby and we quickly accept. Kathy had been an eager stage-front supporter during our set, and now it’s clear to me she’s in her cups. She’s slurring her words as she tells me about her condo and that she lives alone there. Part of me — not the part that’s glad to have a place to sleep, of course — is appalled at her lack of judgment. We’re four men she knows nothing about other than that we play music and live in another state, and she’s not operating at full mental speed. She’s really putting herself in a terribly dangerous situation. We should watch out for our fan, tell her not to invite strange groups of strange men into her home. That’s it, we’re going to refuse.
So, over at Kathy’s place, we claim our spots on the living room floor as she puts on various CDs. Louise, a friend who had been with Kathy at the show, turns up. Seems she lives next door. I’m a bit uncomfortable about this because I’d pressured Louise to buy a T-shirt at the show, taking a bit of advantage of her own beer-lubricated generosity. Hey, we’re on the road. You gotta be aggressive. But now she doesn’t seem to have any objections to the deal, though she can’t seem to remember our band’s name for any length of time. We all talk some more about Ogden. Kathy insists it’s a pretty tolerant place, once you get past the fact that the Mormons really want you to join their religion. Louise disagrees. Her mother is Vietnamese and her father Puerto Rican. “I got shit all the time growing up here.”
An Ogden police officer knocks on the door with a complaint about the noise of our “party.” Considering there are only three occupied units in the building and the occupants of two of them are here, there’s little doubt who called. Local dispute. None of our business. We turn in. It’s the smallest, quietest party I’ve ever been to that’s been broken up by the cops. I hadn’t even known it was a party.
Saturday in Wyoming, on the way to Denver, we climb above 7,000 feet. The altitude is wreaking havoc on our gas mileage, driving it down from about 10 miles a gallon to maybe seven. This is costing us money! And that’s in short supply. All of us have managed to get time off of our jobs, but it’s not paid time for any of us. We have some money from the record label, plus what we make on the road. We probably won’t lose money out here unless the BOV lets us down in a big way, but if we don’t make some decent coin at some of these shows we could come home not having earned much for two weeks. We discuss CD sales. We’ve had them for about eight days, and at our current sales pace, we’ll go platinum in 5,000 years.
We got the Saturday night show in Denver through the Hillbilly Hellcats,
whom we’d opened for in Los Angeles. Local heroes here, they were going to
headline, but they had to pull out, and instead we’re playing the 15th
Street Tavern with a hard-core punk band called Electric Summer, consisting
of four Japanese guys who barely speak English. Again, attendance is on the
light side, but Big Stick Mick and I have friends here, and it’s kind of a fun night.
Until the van won’t start after we’ve loaded the gear back into it.
It’s 2, then 3 in the morning as Double D works on it desperately with
Mick’s friend Sean and a good Samaritan passerby. Double D is from Detroit,
so he has some sort of inborn knowledge of cars. At least that’s how it
seems to me, to whom starting a car engine is something like a magic trick.
And now it’s 4. Teeth are chattering, tempers are flaring and hangovers are
starting as we and our friends wait in the cold for a tow truck. Sean’s
cousin Jenny and her boyfriend, David, must certainly be regretting by now
their decision to let us stay on their living room floor. But they wait it
out with the rest of us, starting their car for heat every few minutes
until the tow finally shows up.
We always ask and usually succeed in
getting someone to let us stay with them. We’ve only had to resort to a
motel a few times. Even a cheap one puts a big dent in our traveling
budget. Still, we’re always amazed that anyone would let a bunch of smelly
musicians they don’t know invade their home. It’s an act of astonishing
generosity.
But it’s nothing compared to what this couple will do over the
next 12 hours as we try to fix the Big Orange Van. They’ll put up with us
lounging in and around their house all day, making phone calls, ordering
pizzas, swearing at our luck, getting underfoot during the Broncos game.
They’ll lend us their car for too many trips to count to auto parts stores,
hardware stores, home supply stores, even Wal-Mart as we try to find the
parts and tools we need to fix the problem, or rather the problems, because
each problem fixed reveals a new one: Once the spark plugs are replaced, we
find we need a new fuel filter, which reveals that we need a new fuel pump,
and somewhere in this process we break the fuel line.
And they’ll put up
with the stress and tension that are fairly radiating off of us, because
we’re trying desperately to get this thing fixed in time to make the
11-hour drive to Lawrence for what figures to be the most lucrative show on
the tour, a weekly swing-dance night with a built-in crowd, and then the
depression that sets in when we realize we won’t make it. And through it
all, they’ll remain cheerful and welcoming. Don’t worry about it, they’ll
keep saying. No problem.
Finally, as darkness crowds us early on the first day of standard time, we
say our copious thank yous and leave, the van finally working. We’re headed
to Iowa City for Monday night’s show, and we get as far as Brighton before
we break down again, which if you know your Colorado geography is a funny
one: To find a mechanic in Brighton, you look in the Denver phone book.
We coast into a Texaco truck stop, which will be our home for the next six
hours. Our jury-rigged fuel line has given way, so we have to try to redo
it, this time with a proper metal pipe. Double D catches a ride about five
miles to an auto parts store with a family that has room for one.
Not wanting to leave him out there alone, I try to catch one too to join
him, but I quickly find out that I don’t have the kind of face that makes
people say, “Sure, hop in.” If you ever want to feel like a scam artist or
a serial killer, try walking up to tourists in a highway truck stop fuel
area and saying, “Excuse me, are you driving toward town?”
Double D returns with the part, which we spend five hours trying to bend
and twist into place, without anything resembling success. There are temper
tantrums, sulks, damn-near nervous breakdowns as three of us (I, feeling
particularly useless, stay out of the way) try to get this damn $5 part
into place. We finally surrender, freezing, utterly defeated and saturated
in grease, and get a tow to a Super 8 Motel that’s next to a garage.
In the
morning, the mechanic says he can put in a rubber fuel line. No way to get
a metal line in there, he laughs. They put that part in first, then build
the engine around it. We feel like idiots. But we’re getting our van back.
We have no chance to make Iowa City. We call and cancel. We’ve missed two
shows in a row now, and playing music is beginning to feel like a distant
memory. But all we have to do to make Tuesday’s show in Muncie is drive
straight through from Denver. The trip, 1,220 miles through five states,
shouldn’t take more than 23 hours. Then we can feel like musicians again.
*Some names have been changed.
