Boulder is both not as bad as it used to be and way worse than it seems. The frat boys and untouchable sorority girls in tight yellow CU T-shirts don’t faze me as much as they used to, as I’m no longer a second class citizen in the scene that they rule. I’m now officially well into my in-betweenness: I’m not a college kid, and I’m not some swinging rock club promoter, and I’m not a grown-up with a goddam career, I’m just a hanger-on. Which is bad sometimes, like the time I was parked behind a building in-between a little park and a field somewhere in Illinois (I think it was Illinois, it could have been Missouri) and I woke up, moved my shield of pillows and peered outside because I detected someone close to me and it was a little old lady—a nice little old lady with a bright red coat and white hair glowing under the rising sun—just out walking her dog. She’d already been checking out the van I guess, and her eyes widened when she saw me moving inside of it. She walked away quickly, peering back at me nervously over her shoulder.
Sometimes it’s good, like the time in Urbana, Illinois when I couldn’t find the place where I was supposed to play and I pulled up next to a meek Asian-American college girl who was just getting out of her car to ask her for directions and I swear I could feel her hands tightening on the little canister of pepper spray her father gave her to put on her key chain. Yeah, beware, little darling, I’m a stranger in your town.
But being a stranger in Boulder is worse because I know this place, and I know it well. I even kind of ruled it for a while, albeit disdainfully. Which is to say I had a reputation here, and people were a little uncomfortable around me, but respectfully uncomfortable, not just creeped out like they are elsewhere. [God, I’m so sick of my writing, somewhere along the line I learned how to talk down to people in my writing and now that goddamn middle-class condescending middlebrow has covered my real writing like kudzu. At the very least, this journal has taught me that I have a limitless capability for whining. Boo fucking hoo.] I want to talk to somebody, but not just anybody, I want somebody to want to talk to me. I don’t want to have to go out and look for it. It sucks coming back here and having everything be the fucking same as it was when I was seventeen, living with my mom and my sister in a cold bare apartment, none of us with any friends or any money, my mother’s continued high spirits only wearing us further down, all of us desperately lonely and wanting friends with the same intensity with which we resent all of humanity. I gotta get the fuck out of here and back to Allie’s loving arms.
There’s a kink in my back that I’ve had since, oh, about Alabama and it’s not going away.
Stunning scene on the Pearl Street mall today. After my huge success at Penny Lane the other night (selling three CDs to cute college girls!!!) I decided I had to try my luck at busking because, who knows, I may be great at it. After running a couple of funny covers, I packed all my shit up and headed out. Well, I chickened out, of course, but I justified it by telling myself that my voice was dying (it may be) and that it wasn’t worth doing for twenty minutes. But, man, when I was walking back down from scoping the scene out, I heard this fantastic music, like Calypso but played on vibes instead of steel drums. As I approached, the first thing I could see was just this little blond girl’s pony tail bobbing up and down as she was whacking away on something—I mean big, wood-chopping strokes—with sticks with bright yellow tennis balls on the ends. As I got closer, I could see that it was a whole family (maybe some crackpot right wing Christian church group, but Christ, just imagine it as a damn family, okay) dressed in assorted tie-dyed bright blue outfits with the guys wearing those little hats that dudes always wear with dashikis, and all of ‘em playing sets of vibes of different sizes, maybe four of five different rigs in all, the smallest being normal sized and the biggest one maybe four feet tall and eight feet long with individual boards cut out of what must have been two by sixes. None of the players appeared to be over sixteen, and many of‘em were well under, maybe as young as nine or ten. As I got closer, I noticed a kid in front playing a hand drum as well, and a young girl, maybe fourteen or fifteen, standing slightly in front of the whole troupe in bare feet (though I was cold in my jean jacket) shaking huge maracas made out of coconuts and unselfconsciously swaying her hips and taking in the crowd. She was fucking beautiful, and she had us all. But not beautiful in a generic, safe way, not optimized beautiful, but a fragile beauty. Like at that moment, she was the best fucking thing I’d ever seen, but even then, staring at her because I couldn’t help myself, I knew that in only a few short years, she would become dissatisfied, she would feel that her hips were heavy on her and out of proportion to the rest of her body and that far sooner than that her life would be complicated w/ all the appallingly banal convolutions of teenage life, that her face, though it was clear, was probably bound for the ravages of serious acne and that maybe even that night her boyfriend could pull some bullshit “you would if you loved me” and that cloud would settle over her face, never to leave. But for today, she was perfect.
God, I’m a hack.
Last night blew. Maybe the emptiest I’ve ever seen the Lion’s Lair. More than a little humiliating—this is my triumphant homecoming, my van drawn into town by a team of six gleaming white horses? Calamity Jean was surprisingly good, compelling songs, great voice, strong guitar playing. And she also plays accordion, sax, piano and saw! A touching and slightly melancholy character, broad Midwestern face, thick Midwestern body, big, pretty eyes.
(Okay, I meant to write about last night, but as I am writing, I’m witnessing a spectacle too compelling to ignore. Sitting in Penny Lane, a coffeehouse on Pearl Street (read as: hippie heaven) in Boulder, CO. A couple of hippie dudes jamming onstage, one w/ a beard, clogs, and a classical guitar, the other, a bass player, only wearing one of his flip-flops. A dreaded (in both senses of the word) hippie girl walks out of the bathroom and starts doing her funky hippie shuffle, self-consciously un-selfconscious. Is that a dress and jeans she’s wearing? Indeed it do. A plague on this town.)
I follow the funk onstage, play three songs, a rather lackluster performance if I do say so myself. My voice appears to be fading. As soon as I sit down, the three college girls behind me who all approach cuteness without really attaining it lean over and say “hey, can we buy a CD?” Great, fabulous, one CD sold. But they’re holding out fifteen bucks, they each want one. I fucking rule.
The Lion’s Lair, Denver. A female mannequin head hangs over the bar with a Mohawk of syringes, its eyeballs drooling out of their sockets. The bartender talking about her daughter’s ringworm. Gee, it’s great to be back home.
Elliot Smith killed himself yesterday. I’m outlasting all my idols on this tour. Without wanting to.
I’m still fucked up from my visit today with ‘The Oracle,’ as she shall henceforth be known. [On my mom’s recommendation, I went to go and see a psychic who made some pretty accurate predictions for her seven years ago. This same woman predicted that I was going to be very wealthy when I was 27. Well, I’m 26, so I’m assuming it’s not going to be a slow build to my eventual fortune.] It’s baffling, every word out of her mouth blew my mind and I’m still exhausted from hanging on her every word for half an hour. It’s super encouraging to hear from her that this year ! is going to go well for my music, but she said several times, in clear language, that I can fuck it up by “letting my energy go down” a.k.a liquor. It seems like that’s what I’ve been trying to do forever, just to exert my own will over what she said when I was nineteen. Pretty fucking stupid. Worst thing is, I said “Alcohol?” and she said “Yes… but that’s not it.”
Hoo ha! Redemptive show last night in Denver, nothing better than walking into a getting-it-over-with show and playing a fucking encore. Paid $40 and sold five CDs. The best part was after a really cool set by the PW3, their bass player (John Lennon sunglasses, long gray hair, long gray beard and droopy mustache, New York Fucking City T-shirt, sitting on a stool thumbing a pink P-bass w/ a paisley leather pickguard) said he had to tell me a story. “I went to see Frank Zappa in ’74 [I knew then that I had been waiting to hear this story from this guy all night] and he came out while the house lights were still on and said ‘Alright, everybody’s got to sit down and shut the fuck up and listen to this guy.’ This guy came out and mumbled some jokes and played some songs on the piano. That guy was Tom Waits. I’m going to be telling my grandkids about you.”
Sitting in the “Hall of Fame,” a.k.a. “Hall of Shame” a.k.a. “Loser’s Lounge” located inside the Best Western in Nashville. We can only go up from here. (Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s the first time I’ve said that).
Spent last night spanking myself half to death watching Skinemax on the floor of Carl’s apartment. Turned the sound down at one point because I suddenly got concerned and didn’t want him to hear me, and heard the exact same lame soft-porn rock and faked moans coming from his room. Ah, human closeness, alienated together.
Van’s running great again, the control panel cleared of warning lights. It feels like a fresh start, which is good in terms of the van and bad in terms of me, in that the resilience/momentum I got from muscling my way through all the sucky shows/open mics feels gone. I’m nervous about the open mic tonight. Urbana looks like a decent place to play despite the slightly menacing name. The Mon/Tues/Wed nights actually have been easier for me, as I can jump on an open mic; Fridays and Saturdays it’s clear that I don’t belong; the hopelessness of my venture becomes transparent.
Heard the new Strokes single on the radio tonight as I was pulling in to Urbana. I’m underwhelmed, but it does seem a little more hard-bitten than the last stuff. I wish I could write more knowingly about hotels.
There’s a cute girl in a wheelchair here. She’s wearing a cotton top w/ little flares around the shoulders and could it be a bow in her hair? The wheels of her wheelchair have big gaudy stars and stripes inserts, but it can’t be a joke, not here, not in Urbana, IL. I don’t want to stare; it carries different weight when the object of your attentions is in a wheelchair. I’d love to go home with her. Why must it always be the sordidly hot or the aberrant depressing? Dear Sweet Allison, your eyes grow bigger as I recede into the distance.
I’m consumed with the same string of anxious thoughts as I drive. I’m not writing/ I’m not writing songs/ I’m running out of money/ I can’t see a time in the future when this’ll get easier/ I should have made more out of my time in NY/ I don’t have any friends that I’ve had for a long time, etc., etc. I could go on, and I will, tomorrow in the van, driving to Nashville.
***
Curious show tonight. An open mic at a huge venue, like 400+. I got into town early, blew my chance to play at an open mic at the coffee shop next door where I may have actually made some fans and sold some CDs, then played on this mammoth stage to a mostly empty room. The few people who were there shot pool as I played, and there was always a long pause after I finished a song where people realized “Oh, he’s finished a song, we should generate some polite applause.” But somehow, I turned it out, had a great time playing and sang my guts out, totally hoarse after five or six songs. Then I sold no CDs, got no names on the guest list, couldn’t even bring myself to give a CD to the guy who ran the night. As I was loading out, the next band was rocking out, a huge ska band w/ sloppy horns, lame keys sound and distorted guitar with some nineteen year old dude rapping his way through that Cake song that was on MTV, what, six years ago?
Another down day today, this one spent lounging on my brother-in-law’s brother Carl’s couch in Quincy, Illinois, catching up on e-mail, spending forty five minutes on the phone with MSN customer service trying to get my damn e-mail account sorted out. I’m porking out already from the crap I’ve been eating, spending more money than I’d planned on, the van’s running like garbage, my motivation for booking shows is dwindling… so everything according to plan.
Yesterday was a bust show wise, but a decent day. I rolled out of St. Louis as soon as I woke up. The street I parked on stayed pretty busy all night, but somehow I didn’t have too hard of a time sleeping in. I gotta get the rear curtain hooked up, but other than that, the bunk fucking rocks. I made it in to Quincy around one, took the historic Highway 61 in. It’s a nice drive, but it really made me realize that I’m not living in the world that I imagine myself to be. Like Anna said, everyone is just concerned about shopping and eating and downloading and getting gas and going to Blockbuster. These days feel distinctly unhistoric.
But when I pulled in, Carl was standing out front waving me down. It literally took us about five minutes to make friends. We hit Wendy’s for food, and Carl talked about Bill (my brother-in-law) the entire time. The conversation may have stayed on the topic of Bill partially because he’s one of the only things that Carl and I have in common, but it’s also clear that Carl really loves and looks up to Bill, without really having any hope of catching up to him. It’s an odd blessing/curse to have someone to look up to and inspire you, and also someone whose accomplishments will always diminish yours. We killed A LOT of time in front of the TV, neither of us having the energy to turn it off and go out and do anything. Til happy hour that is. We drink Bud Light at a bar called Flatliners (kind of a grim name for the purveyors of poison) with a couple of fat Midwestern girls in the house, Eminem on the jukebox. These lives will not be lacking anything without the Strokes or the YYYs or The French Kicks, to say nothing of me.
After a couple of pitchers, we stuffed ourselves at the local pizza/Mexican place, which was pretty great, then stumbled off to bed. It’s funny, when you’re young, it’s all about getting fucked up, the highest peak of pleasure and fuck the consequences, but as you get longer in tooth, it’s only about comfort and avoidance of pain. Curse my lazy soul.
The nature of life in a car is that you’re at the whim of the road. You get all of the ups and down, and you’re subject to incredible reversals of fortune.
I’m sitting on the couch in my friend Anna’s house outside of Fayetteville, AR. I’ve been on the road since Sunday the 29th and due to computer problems and a certain indolence on my part, this is the first time I’ve had a chance to sit down and write. The last few days have been a mixture of anxiety and anticipation.
As I was writing that last sentence about eight hours ago, I heard a noise coming from my friend Anna’s bedroom. I hadn’t seen Anna for about a year and a half. In that time, she became addicted to heroin and has been in and out of detoxes and rehabs, gotten pregnant, gotten engaged, lost the baby, broken off the engagement, had six car accidents, and so on, ad nauseum. When I heard noises coming from her room today, I went and knocked on her door and asked her if she was alright. When I got no coherent response, I walked in and saw her cleaning up bright pink vomit. I asked her what was going on and she said that instead of going to her AA meeting today, she had gone to W! algreens and bought a bottle of cough syrup and drank it. I found the bottle, and it was an eight ounce bottle of maximum strength, the same shit that sent me into convulsions when I was sixteen. I couldn’t tell how much of it she’d thrown up, but I knew I was in for an unpleasant day. I was right. She was barely coherent and getting worse, staggering around, tearful, gripped with sudden tears. She’s a small person, always naturally thin, but now almost bony from being strung out. For the first time, I felt like I understood all the drug analogies, i.e. ‘monkey on his back,’ etc. It was like she was fucking possessed, like there was a huge, powerful supernatural being writhing inside her tiny frame. I was continually concerned for her welfare as she kept walking into walls and almost falling into windows, onto end tables covered with pictures, etc., but more than once I was just creeped out by how depraved she had gotten and I just wanted to run the fuck out of there.
It’s incredibly hard to watch a friend strung out because you’re riddled with all these conflicting feelings. I wanted to draw her to me and just hold her and let her cry and tell her it was going to be alright, and I was deeply disappointed in her not just for letting herself get so fucked up, but for fucking romanticizing it, and I was scared of her, I guess because I saw a little of myself in her, and I just wanted to get as high as she was and sit with her and talk about space ships and capsules and escape hatches, too.
Of course, along with all the babble, she did say a couple of brilliant things. In a long riff about how people are actively disinterested in the meaningful things in life, she said “people don’t want art to change their lives! They want to talk on the phone! They want to download! They want to go to Blockbuster!” Which, for the record, is true, but it’s no excuse for becoming a junkie. Listening to Sigur Ros (all fucking day, might I mention, which I don’t think is conducive to getting someone off the goddamn drugs, even after I gave her a copy of my new record, Christ) she pricked up her ears for a second, then looked at me and said “People have got to stop making music that sounds like cell phones.” Amen to that, sister.
After a long fucking day with her, both she and her parents opted to not let her go to the bar to watch me play. I feel like I’m always writing “today was a new low” but let me say it: today was a new low. I feel as bad as I’ve ever felt, and for once it’s not just out of pity and concern for myself.