Youngstown OH, despite having a Springsteen song about it, appears to be a town with little to recommend it. Obviously, I don't get a chance to learn a great deal about any town I go to, so I'm almost certainly being unfair, but Yo-Town (as some locals apparently call it) is the one place so far which I have no interest in returning to. Jenn Gooch and I (and her dog) drove in to town and had a walk around the desserted downtown area in the bitterly cold wind without seeing anything of interest, then had something to eat before heading over to the Lemon Grove. The guy who booked the show (politically conscious hip hop artist MC Homeless) had left town and I arrived at around 8 to discover that the show was supposed to start at 7 as an 'R&B party night' was starting at 9. There were a few people in the bar, but nobody interested in watching any music, so Jenn and I each did a short set, singing to each other, before taking our $50 and running away. In our haste to leave Youngstown behind forever, we ended up getting repeatedly lost and at one point feared we were doomed to spend all eternity in Yo-Town as penance for some monumental sins we must have commited, but eventually we escaped back to Pittsburgh. Although the show was pretty pointless it was a lot of fun to hang out with Jenn and hear stories from her fascinating life which involved using a violin scholarship to escape from a Texan trailer park and some extreme evangelical Christian parents!
The next morning began with a mad rush to fix my suitcase and get to the station in time for my bus to Toledo. This is a race I won, but not comfortably. My first ride on a Greyhound bus was unpleasant enough to make the prospect of all the coming hours I will be spending on them rather daunting. It was rancid. But it got me to Toledo. I walked through another desserted downtown and made my way to The Revolution Collective, a house-venue run by some radical kids and one US military veteran. They were all very friendly and welcoming. Most excitingly of all, this is where the leg of the tour I was to spend with my friend Dustin Kcrcatovich began. He is a friend whom I met on my first trip over here and I was excited to see him again. He is currently playing under the name Mall Mutants and makes a kind of psychedelic noise music constructed out of looped guitar and vocal parts and tape samples put through an array of pedals. It's great. We each played our sets to a small-ish but fairly enthusiastic crowd, then hung out to watch the other bands. Jerry Fels & The Jerry Fels was goofy and fun and slightly reminiscent of his fellow Massachusetian, the wonderful Don Lennon. Here he is in action:
One of the kids from the next band ('Marky Strange') had told Dustin's lovely girlfriend Monika that she should get ready to watch "the best band in the world". Apparently he had failed to notice that his band plays a particularly turgid and graceless variant of unconvincingly 'groovy' classic rock. The band members that I spoke to were nice, but we felt it necessary to make our excuses and leave two songs into their set and we drove back to Dustin's place in Ypsilanti MI.
The next show was in Ann Arbor, which is a cool little college town a little south of Detroit. I spend the day walking around town and trying to set up some more shows for later in the tour while Dustin was at work, then we met up for some good Lebanese food before heading to the venue, Name Brand Tattoo. This was my first trip to a tattoo parlour and was probably a lot more pleasant that I imagine they usually are. Dustin introduced his stage outfit (a sharp but seedy suit and tie, worn with biker boots and gelled hair) which made his show a lot of fun. Some hilariously hip looking dude called HLEP performed a fun noise set using cassettes and reverb heavy vocals, and my friend Robert Doherty played a fine set of his intriguing guitar songs. I met Robert a few months back in Cardiff, before he moved to Michigan, and it was really great to see him again and to meet his wife, Courtney. Here's Robert playing in front of some tattoo designs:
The next day we picked up a hire car and drove over to Kalamazoo. Cruising down the highway listening to Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers is a pretty big thrill to a kid from the Midlands! The show in Kalamazoo was at a shop called "i heart ipanema" and was set up by my friends Ben and Nicole Angelo who I also met last time I was over here. It was wonderful to see them and I was really touched by their kindness and generosity, just as I had been 7 years ago. The show was a lot of fun and my set went pretty smoothly apart from one point where I was startled by a picture of Bill Cosby's face and forgot what I was doing. I tried to get a 'Graduate' vibe in this photo of Mall Mutants doing his thing:
We didn't have a show the next day, but drove up to Chicago anyway based on a promise of some dinner and a place to stay from Ally, a girl I had met over the summer at a London music festival. This turned out to be an excellent choice because we were looked after quite sensationally and it was great to hang out with Ally some more. Our stay involved eating a lot of rich food, buying some great and very cheap records, playing 'Youtube DJ', getting lost in Chicago and generally having a great time.
We drove up to Lake Villa IL to play at a bizarre 'hookah lounge' called Swing State. Our payment for the night was a free hookah of pumpkin flavoured tobacco and all the coffee we could drink. Here's me 'enjoying' some hookah:
And here's Dustin performing in front of a 'psychedelic light show' which could have been tailored for his act:
The band we were supposed to be playing with (The Cryptics of Devon, New Hampshire) turned up, took one look at the venue and drove off in their van, which meant that Dustin and I were the only people playing. The most notable event of the day was probably the creation of a new alter-ego for Dustin, 'Teddy Fabz'. The product of two slightly cracked, sleep-deprived minds on a series of long, boring drives through uninspiring countryside, the Teddy Fabz concept developed over the following days into an unstoppable monster and a ridiculous private joke of limited external interest, but of massive hilarity to the two of us. I couldn't begin to detail the finer points here, but look out for his forthcoming album on the FM dust label next year.
We stayed with Liz, whom I had contacted through the couchsurfing web-site and she also looked after us very well and was fun to hang out with. We sat around listening to Terry Riley's 'A Rainbow in Curved Air' and chatting until tour fatigue overcame us. We were up early the next morning for the drive down to Urbana IL. The weather had become beautifully summery by this point and the combination of the heat, lack of sleep, and the apparent lack of fun, free things to do in Urbana left us feeling pretty lethargic, so it was nice to be able to go the venue/house (Transporter Room 3) early and relax before the show. Sitting on the porch with my feet up and drinking some sub-par American beer, it was good to spend some time reflecting on the last few days. The show was kind of quiet, but everyone was really friendly. I played a pretty crap set I thought, but nobody seemed to minded. We went out for a quick drink in Urbana which was full of college girls who'd drunk too much, then headed back to the house where I slept in a skanky room on a bed which looked a little bit like it might give me scabies. This is what being on tour is supposed to be like and I had really been spoiled by the previous few days!
And that brings me up to yesterday which was the last show I got to play with Dustin. We drove over to St Louis MO, which seemed like a slightly more exciting town, where we had a blast talking to each other in bad southern accents ("Can you bejewel this gun for me, son? It's for my wife...") and trying to see the funny side of some horrendously right-wing talk radio we stumbled across. We ate mediocre curry then sat in the beautiful sunshine in a beautiful park for a little while before going over to Pancake Productions where we were to play. Again, the people setting up and attending the show were wonderfully friendly and the show was a blast. The evening began with a sublime performance from Dustin/Mall Mutants/Teddy Fabz, carried off in spite of the fact that his performance suit had reached the point where it may have been considered an environmental risk. Rob, who set up the show performed an amusing and very high-energy set as Googleplexia. This is what it looked like:
We stayed with Dustin's friends Cara and Travis, who were great fun to hang out with and treated us very kindly, offering a black bean burrito, a few more cans of that classy American beer and some fun conversation right through to 4:30 AM or so. This morning's package included a wonderful breakfast sandwich and a guided tour of St Louis from Cara. I said my emotional goodbyes to Dustin and boarded the last megabus of the tour to Columbia MO, where I am currently sitting on the porch while my host Andrew makes me some dinner. Not bad.
It's been a great past few days and I've had so much fun hanging out with Dustin. Going from being chauffeured around and having somebody to be silly with back to my solitary bus-rides seems like kind of a shame, but this way also has it's charms and I'm still totally excited just to be out here doing the thing that I like to do best.
I will try to update this sooner in order that the next entry does not go on so long! And in the mean-time I'd love to hear more news from the people I know. Keep in touch.
Hugh
x
No comments:
Post a Comment