SATURDAY 5.15.2010
ARTS AT THE ARMORY – BOSTON, MA

Rider and I woke up around 10:30AM in what I think was some sort of closet.  The sun was blazing in and porcelain dolls were definitely watching us.  Grandma, or as Joe calls her, Mim, was making breakfast downstairs and we all figured a good breakfast would fix us after the horrendous day we’d had yesterday.  Scrambled eggs, bacon, orange juice and delicious fried rolls brought us right back where we needed to be.  And after we all took our turns in the shower we decided to explore the horse ranch a bit.

Almost directly outside the house, people were taking riding lessons and we made our way into one of the three stables to pet a few horses.  Now, I’m not much of a fan of horses but I did enjoy seeing them up close and observing ranch operations.  It was very sunny and windy, making for a pleasant day and it was good to be out in the “country” when almost all of the tour consists of highways and cities.  Apparently, the horses really enjoy candy and we fed them those round, after-dinner peppermints out of the palms of our hands.  Joe was feeding them hay, but some other guy was bitten so I wasn’t really in the mood to lose a finger.  Now, back in the house, Mim was determined to feed us a ham dinner before we needed to leave at 3PM.  The thing was full on, featuring green bean casserole, rolls and mashed potatoes and gravy.  We probably ate more at this horse ranch than we had in the last three days and it was absolutely delicious.  But the time had come to part ways for Boston and she sent us off with a case of water, ham AND turkey sandwiches in a cooler and a bag of chips to boot.

During the nearly 4-hour drive to Boston, I had a sort of epiphany of what my life is actually like, and what we do is actually pretty crazy and complex.  Yesterday we woke up in Detroit at 4AM and drove to Cleveland to play music and sing my thoughts on the radio.  Then we just skipped town and drove to upstate New York to do the same thing in person.  Although we walked around the city, giving away music and just meeting new people, I find the show to be the weirdest part.  Performing things that we’ve created, hoping people enjoy it enough to want to hear it again.  Or telling people about personal things or ideas and assuming they would want to know.  It’s different than doing it in your hometown or once in a while for fun.  I think it’s a very hard and special thing to do without covering it up with guitar solos, effects pedals or attitude.  I think people recognize this when they hear or see us even though they might not know how or why – or even like the music.  But then after this interaction we have to jet right out of there and drive another 3+ hours to Rexford where we stay on a ranch, wake up the next day and feed horses, walking around in the sunshiny country.  Its completely nuts to squeeze that much into 24 hours and wake up somewhere completely strange, halfway across the nation, doing something you could have never guessed.  I think that’s how we like life, in a band or not.  It’s all these things, these opportunities we’re getting or are allowed for providing music across the country.  I hope, and I know we try, to give as much back.

Well, along with the good comes the bad and the last three shows had gone really well.  But we arrived at Boston’s Arts at the Armory, owned by the Middle East Club, to find the Belt Sander Racing Association having a blowout in the large performance room (see what I mean about running into things you can never expect?).  And this is fine, so our show is in a smaller room they like to call the Café; only they’ve changed their policy about noise levels since we booked the show months ago.  Somehow we had not been informed there are to be no drums or even amplifiers in this room, which would be fine for just us.  However, we invited our long-time friends The Waylons from Brooklyn to play the show and they just don’t strip down like we do.  So now we have a big issue on the verge of cancellation with a band that drove from New York to play a show we’ve vouched for.  Well, things like this have happened before and so we start calling around to local bars asking if they would like some live music for the night.  Two things are wrong with this.  The first is that we aren’t traveling with our P.A. because we weren’t expecting to use it.  The other is that any bar in Boston having a P.A. in house will already have acts booked on a Saturday night.  After about an hour of scrambling Debra, who is in charge of the situation, called the guys who run a recording studio in the basement of this place.  They were kind enough to open up their doors and host the show on their tiny, but ample stage.  It turns to be Hi-n-Dry studios, belonging to the two remaining members of Morphine and we met the saxophone player, Dana Colley, who unlocked the doors for us.  Later on, the bass player for Twinemen, Andrew Mazzone, came down to run sound for the show.

The Waylons went on first for what I’ll admit was a small crowd.  Audrey Ryan, our local support, had dropped off the show, we had texted people about possibly moving the whole thing to another bar and now we were in the basement of the Armory.  It was just a very messy situation we were making the best of and the Waylons were very understanding, looking at it as tour experience and practice for tomorrow’s show at Union Pool where we’d share the stage again.  It was nice to hear a lot of their new material in a “listening environment” and the vibe was obviously laid back without banter or a drunken bar crowd.  It was kind of like sitting in on an exclusive band practice and we had that feeling in mind when we took the stage, playing mostly new songs “Oh, To Know,” “Oh My God! This Weekend” and “Why I’m Not Great.”  Eric’s bass amp cut out and my harmonica holder fell off at one point, but it was better here than at Union Pool the next night.  In all reality, the sound was good and both of us got video of us performing in the room full of a ridiculous amount of vintage equipment including a Wurlitzer electric piano, Hammond B3, Gibson J-45, and everything else everyone seeks to find.  And it had all been sucked into one central location we stumbled upon due to an otherwise canceled show in Boston.  Its funny how these things end up working out and Andrew assured us it was better than playing Tommy Doyle’s where we’d landed a last minute gig just in case.  We were glad to have met him and he gave us a few Morphine CD’s, strongly suggesting we play at P.A.’s Lounge next time we were in town.  We sold one copy of Power Lines, gave one to Andrew, passed the money from the door to the Waylons and we were on our way with the tour.

I think the Waylons were staying in town for the night and wanted to eat at Red Bones Barbeque, for which Somerville was apparently famous.  So we made our way over there to enjoy a much-needed beer after the stressful situation we’d just resolved.  Rider even said it was more frustrating than the day before where we’d done all the driving, etcetera.  Kehoe and Joe tried the local brew, Rider got hand-cut french fries and I ordered catfingers (deep fried catfish nuggets).  All of it was delicious and Joe declared he was going to “poop a flame” after trying the atomic corn salsa Sean from the Waylons had ordered.  Finally, after texting some old school macro wieners from all of our phones to Sean, we decided it was time to head to Barrington, RI where we’d be staying with my aunt and uncle.

The drive was short relative to the last few treks and it was still fairly early, arriving before 2AM.  There was chicken casserole waiting for us along with a fresh batch of chocolate chip cookies, which we plowed through before calling it a night.  We made all our Internet stops and found The Narrative was listening to our disc on the rest of their tour.  We’d left it in their windshield along with a banana.  Kehoe and Joe head down into the basement while Rider and I fell asleep upstairs while watching Napoleon Dynamite on Comedy Central.