LOS ANGELES AND SAN DIEGO
I was reading an article about Stanley Kubrick last night. A British documentarian struck up a friendship with Kubrick’s chief assistant after the director’s death, and was given access to his huge estate. There, he found one room filled with nothing but books about Napoleon — research for Kubrick’s proposed film on the leader. Volumes of ghost stories lined shelves for The Shining research. Portable sheds littered the grounds, all filled up with boxes of information.
Kubrick designed the boxes themselves. One series of them held fan letters alphabetized by city — 25 orange folders filled with letters in each box or something like that. He had marked each letter P, N and C for Positive, Negative and Crazy. Another held correspondance between Kubrick and the Nabokovs from when he was filming Lolita.
I wish I had at least a little part of this obsessive attention to cataloging. I wish I had an organized collection of song ideas, demos, pages with lyric ideas. Instead, most of them are lost or spread across five different computers. It’s not much of a loss for most of them — they weren’t very good — but I think there’s a pleasure in organizing and cataloging for its own sake. But maybe that’s how hoarders start out.
Anyway, this is all to say that while I have good intentions about updating this place more regularly with some photos and longer bits of writing in an attempt to catalog and organize the experiences of a very little band, which admittedly no one has even been clamoring for, any of this writing, that is — I’ll probably fail.
But let’s stay positive! Here are some photos from my iPhone run through the standard, vaguely-retro filters everyone uses after the break.
It’s S.O.P. when arriving at a venue to first check out the stage and then survey the bathroom facilities. Best, of course, is when there’s a private bathroom by a greenroom. Second best is if there’s a private bathroom tucked back by some office behind the bar or something. Usually it’s much much much worse than that. Usually it’s unusable.
Then, I take stock of my real or imagined illnesses, make some stupid joke about feeling too sick to play, so we’ll have to cancel the show (we’ve never cancelled a show), and set about sitting around for the seven hours or so before we get up on stage for our 45 minutes to an hour or whatever.
The Terror usually creeps into your stomach an hour or so before the show starts. It’s the pointless, stupid terror of Will ANYBODY come to the show tonight? You get this terror even when you’ve pre-sold 75 tickets or whatever. You think, Well, there could be rain, and maybe this is a town where people don’t drive in the rain, so maybe none of them are coming. But then you try to make yourself feel better by running numbers through your head: Well, we’ve sold X number of tickets and the room hold Y number of people, so even if JUST the X show up, it’ll be a really good night. And I know for certain that Z is coming, because she posted it on her Facebook, and she said she’d bring, like, seven friends, so even if she just brings two or three friends, that’d be great. And the room is angled well so that a smaller group of people will really pack it.
And if that doesn’t cure it, you can always go the Fuck it route. As in: Whatever. I can’t control who goes out to see live music anymore. I can only control how well I play the set. Springsteen played THOUSANDS of shows in front of no one except the bartender and his manager — this is probably very untrue, but it doesn’t matter for the purposes of this pep talk — We’ve already come further than 99.89 percent of bands that form and this how you do it. Look up any huge band that you love right now, look at their touring history, they’re playing the exact same shows we’re playing right now when they were where we are. We’re tracking right with them. But would it kill you to make a Facebook event page for the show so that people can RSVP and write comments about how excited they are for the show or whatever?
And then you have a great show and none of that matters. People like it and give you their email address and buy a T-shirt and CD, and it’s great. And you’re really dumb for worrying about it all.
When we got to the hotel we stayed at in L.A., the only place to park was an underground garage. Brian was certain that we had stayed at this hotel before — though Jake and I were doubtful — and had parked in this garage before. It’s got very low ceilings and our van sets off an alarm as we pull down the first ramp, but Brian says that’s what happened last time we were here and it’s fine.
But it’s not fine. Brian was really thinking of another trip of his, when he had stayed in this hotel and parked in this garage, but with a shorter car. We start scraping up against the ceiling on the second or third floor down. There aren’t any parking spots and the ceiling gets lower with each level.
The biggest concern is scraping up against one of the smoke alarm sprinklers. I went on a Jr. High trip to Washington D.C., during which some of my classmates horsed around and set off one of those things in their hotel room. The hotel couldn’t turn them off and the whole floor began filling up with water. There was like $20,000 worth of damage or something. That’s what I was thinking about as Jake gingerly navigated the van between these sprinklers. One red pipe dipped lower than the rest and a sickening noise came from above our heads — the pipe pressing into our roof, kind of groaning.
But the lobby was kind of nice:
And here’s Wayne:
This entry was written by , posted on January 6, 2011 at 9:56 pm