Author Archives: Dave

Tour Diary 10/15/05

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Back in Philadelphia. Trying to elevate the game here by raising these blog postings to new levels of literacy and relevance. Failing.

Four dates in with the Routes now, and somehow we’ve always been about 45 minutes behind schedule. Circumstance then seems to tear us apart after shows, night after night, and I feel like the new chimp who has yet to be fully accepted by the tribe, still waiting for my chance to beat one of the other juveniles to death with a bone or piece of wood in front of the others, to get that bite on the back of the neck that I just made up but could, in some ape communities, signify acceptance.

We played in Manayunk tonight, a suburb of Philadelphia that was described to us as “sort of an open-air halfway house for recent college graduates who aren’t quite ready for the real world.” We estimated that Grape Street had at least three and a quarter metric tonnes of door security, in the form of countless 1/8 to 1/4 tonne bouncers scattered throughout the club, as well as a bathroom attendant who gave several of us stage fright and is probably indirectly responsible for the persistent urine smell we experienced on our way to and from the parking lot.

But what of the men, you ask? The Speechwriters themselves, how are they holding up? The answer is: fine, for the most part. Nitzan got his phone stolen in New York and is not a happy camper. Jack got a bunch of new clothes and is quietly but firmly elevating our fashion profile in ways we can only begin to understand. Misha’s been getting his mind blown left and right by the writings of Ray Kurzweil and the curveballs life seems to be throwing us all as we approach week six of the tour.

My story is the least exciting by far. I’ve become addicted to a video game from 1987. Jack got a Nintendo emulator for his PSP, and woe unto him that walks willingly into that great, dark wood. I’m not going to say which game it is, but I will say that it involves ogres and gauntlets and I’m just as horrified as you are that I can’t seem to put the damned thing down. The less said about this portion of my life, the better…I can only hope that I find the remaining three power orbs in the next couple of days, so I can stop viewing my world in terms of vitality and experience points and be done with this forever.

This is all so uncool. I’m probably going to get fired for this.

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I am in a band that is at least 50% zombies.

photo by danielle fox 2005

We’re currently two shows in with the Routes, and I couldn’t be happier, but this picture still scares the living hell out of me. I pray for short sets, so I don’t have to turn my back on these two for more than a few minutes per day.

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SWLLC vs. The World
LLC 1 ; World 0

And let’s fucking hope this holds, yes? Two nights ago, I was pursued by one of Maine’s finest and, my apologies to any family members who wind up reading this, was able to duck down a back alley, kill the lights, slink real low in my seat, and wait until they roared by in a glittering blaze of red and blue after some other speeder and pursue unmolested for the next 35 miles down route 302.

Last night, as Misha mentioned, we were pulled over again by the border patrol. Similar situation: late night, little bit of fog, some small town squad car pulls out of its speed trap and starts following me. I have technology on my side – I set the cruise control for one mile over the speed limit and divide my time between monitoring road signs and checking the status of Officer Friendly in my rearview. We finally get pulled over, but I’ve got that weird confidence you get from not having done anything wrong, and we go from there.

Miraculously, we are allowed to go on our way, despite having a van with tinted windows, California plates, one brown-skinned naturalized Briton, one vaguely “ethnic-looking” Israeli, one Irish guy with tattoos and a knife, and a bleary-eyed Jew with a bad haircut behind the wheel.

Tonight, my daily beatdown from the world of men came in the form of a broken power adapter for my one and only effects pedal. It’s not the kind of thing I’d brandish on the pages of Guitar Player magazine, but it’s an iron horse of a multi-FX processor that has gotten me through more tours of duty than I know how to count, and its power cord died somewhere between Boston and New York. Since it’s an effects pedal, it (of course) has some weird combination of voltages and impedences that means you have to go to Guitar Center and throw down $30+ for a replacement when it inevitably starts acting skittish, but here I was, in Potsdam NY, and I wasn’t about to make some side trip to the nearest major city just to replace my damned power cord. We’d been staying with our best friends in Potsdam, the inimitable Mark Zagarelli and Eric Arzberger, who possessed, among other things, the entire first season of “McGuyver” on DVD. This inspired me to rip an embedded staple from the wall of the Cheel Center, bend in painstakingly into a 180mm ox-bow, then jam it into the power supply as a means of bridging the severed wire in the power supply.

My father went to MIT back in the 60’s, and I feel like he would have been proud. He taught me at an early age that it was really fun to take electrical things apart, and then at a later age that, statistically, the things that you’ve taken apart probably won’t work as well once you put them back together as they did just before you took them apart, both of which were pretty valuable lessons. Because on the one hand, taking electronic shit apart, when you know what you’re doing, is an incredibly worthwhile experience. On the other hand, though, there comes a point in your life when you have to say to yourself, “You know, it isn’t 1964 anymore. Your hi-fi system wasn’t hand-assmebled from some mail-order Damark kit – you bought it from Sony, and if something goes weird with it, God help you if you don’t go into an authorized service center and get it taken care of by a paid professional.”

My new best friend in all of Philadelphia, Matt @ the World Cafe Live, helped me take apart my guitar amp and reassemble it for fun and profit, and it was a legitimately pleasant experience: two well-meaning people assembling a piece of precision crafted Japanese machinery, talking shop and presumably filling superficial voids in each other’s lives with words like “quarterphone” and “transducer,” securing power sources with Phillips heads and becoming closer as men.

I wrote a great end-piece to this, but the laptop I was using lashed out and erased it. I don’t know if this is a sign of things to come or merely a fluke of technology. The bottom line is, we’re happy to be here, we consistently get fucked with by machinery, and we’re ultimately children of the 21st century who are able to either triumph or pretend like we’re triumphing in light of these circumstances, especially when we’ve been drinking, which is presently the case, so goodnight.

Cheers,
Dave