|
The Austin Chronicle - June 26, 1992 |
|
|
|
|
|
We all had about two days notice that Poi Dog Pondering had invited us to support them on the final leg of their U.S. tour. Our manager, Gretchen, called at lunchtime on Monday with the news that Poi Dog's management had offered us the opening slots of the coming weekend's shows in Dallas and Oklahoma City, adding that they had also mentioned Lawrence, KA as a possibility for the following Monday. Since just going to Oklahoma meant missing work days, Kansas seemed out of the question, until Gretchen called back 15 minutes later. Poi Dog had proposed 12 more shows, culminating in Amherst, MA (where the Duckhills, inexplicably, have a few fans). This was beginning to sound like a dare, and when she called the next day to report that the tour now included 25 shows all through the Midwest, Northeast and New England, along with far more money than we deserved, we clearly couldn't afford to decline.
We asked ourselves then, as we were asked many times later, how we managed to land such an opportunity to gain invaluable experience and exposure; we knew it sure as hell wasn't because we deserved it. As the Duckhills, we had barely been in existence for 18 months at the time, and had our share of local popularity and media attention. We started by imposing ourselves on co-op parties, then moved on to local shows at Cannibal Club, the Texas Tavern, Liberty Lunch and SXSW, as well as nervous forays into Dallas and Houston, etc. Our self-consciousness at performing publicly led us to adopt an image of amiable obliviousness and naiveté, which was fun until we discovered that the hipper critics and concertgoers didn't get the joke; our first tape went over well enough, however, to encourage us to make another, and we invited and then begged Dave Crawford, who we knew from the bar at Cannibal, to record some accordion and brass parts on the follow-up. Our connection with Dave brought our name up in Poi Dog's camp enough for them to invite us to open for them on seven dates in California, Arizona and Texas in November. At the time, I don't think any of us had ever actually seen or heard Poi Dog Pondering play. C'est la Biz.
When we caught up with them in College Station with our U-Haul trailer and newly appointed "Guitar Tech/Stage Manger" Paul English (who we tricked into quitting his day job like the rest of us with the tempting offer of ten bucks a day and a new MiniMag flashlight on a lanyard), we were mindful that, given what we knew of typical band/management relationships, it was entirely possible that the actual band members of Poi Dog had no idea that their legal arm had compromised the next 40 days of their careers with our presence. They took the news well, luckily, and the weirdness began.
Tuesday, April 7: Stafford
Opera House, Bryan, TX
Friday, April 10: Deep Ellum Live, Dallas, TX We are astonished to discover that the club has fulfilled to the letter every single provision on our contract rider, even the Twelve Assorted Pieces of Fruit (which we had included on a whim, not realizing that this would become our sole source of vitamins B and C for the next six weeks of touring). There is a guy here whose only duty appears to be guarding our truck and being courteous to us. The show is extremely encouraging; the crowd responds enthusiastically, especially for a Dallas audience. At earlier shows in Deep Ellum, we had become accustomed to being able to hear the umbrellas in their drinks in between songs.
Saturday, April 11: Pandaemonium, Oklahoma City, OK None of us had ever been to Oklahoma before, willingly or otherwise. The second official greeting (after the "Welcome to Beautiful Oklahoma" sign) is a drab yellow notice emblazoned with a silhouette of a police helicopter, and the slogan "Watch your speed -We are," quickly followed by the cryptic warning "Do Not Drive into Smoke" - presumably billowing from formerly speeding vehicles set ablaze by airborne police flamethrowers and left to bum as a warning to out-of-towners and other scofflaws. The venue is an old church that looks a lot larger on the outside. The show is early, because Pandaemonium turns into a mirrored-ball and smoke-machine disco promptly at midnight; the audience is hiding, observing the local protocol that regulates the amount of attention that can be paid to opening acts, especially those that make fun of their disco ball and are billed as Tiny Lights but aren't... The local sound company is unhappy too, both with our existence and with the Poi Dog sound engineer's failure to comply with the Rock'n'Roll Code of Honor, which requires that she be male. She, Deanne, ends up running sound for us in the absence of their cooperation, and we promptly fall in love with her. The entire situation strikes us as so funny that we end up playing a great show.
Monday, April 13: Liberty Hall, Lawrence, KA Much to our chagrin, nobody here knows where William S. Burroughs' house is. It costs close to ten bucks in tolls to get to Lawrence, which is surprising considering that everything else seems to sport Fifties-era prices. The cafe by the hotel - called The Cafe - offers $1 hamburgers and 50-cent Cokes. The small town atmosphere takes an unnerving, David Lynch twist when we discover that, while we are at sound check, someone has taken a machete to the plastic duck that we had affixed to the back of our trailer to ward off evil spirits and police; the duck is gone, sheared off at the ankles.
Tuesday, April 14: The Blue Note, Columbia, MO We are starting to realize that without Poi Dog's unflagging help, encouragement and generally superhuman neighborliness, opening on tour would be the living hell that it's supposed to be. Trying to finagle with each club over contract riders, guestlists, merchandising, or parking - much less payment - is a tad nerve-wracking, because the clubs know as well as we do that they are under no obligation to cooperate with us. If we don't like something, we're free to leave. Luckily, most aren't inordinately hostile, and I find I'm able to convince someone at each venue who doesn't know better or have time to ask that we have a contract, by gum and we need our twelve pieces of fruit.
Wednesday, April 15: Mississippi Nights, St. Louis, MO Deafening applause. Encores. Black Gold. Texas Tea. I don't know exactly what we did right, but the crowd lets us play them like a cheap ukulele; they hail us like Mussolinis. Expressing your artistic soul to the universe is great and all, but it's positively rapturous to express it to loudly enthusiastic multitudes who later buy up your recorded outpourings faster than you can send them out to the vending booth. It's creepy; later, in the early hours of the morning, we take pictures of each other at the hotel, buried in money.
Saturday, April 18: Cabaret Metro and Lounge Ax, Chicago, IL I like to think that our rented trailer would earn me the respect of my Fellow Truckers, who would regard me as their Little Brother and treat me as One of Their Own. If anyone chooses to ruin their life by joining a band, renting a trailer and dragging it - laden with the most expensive objects they will ever own - into Chicago, New Yolk and Philadelphia, heed these words:
1) Try not to think of the size and weight of your vehicle as a liability, but as an asset.
2) When backing up, turn the wheel in the opposite direction that you want the trailer to go.
We had sternly warned ourselves not to be lulled into a false sense of security due to the St. Louis show, but to no avail; the Chicago crowd is as disorientingly appreciative as the one in St. Louis was, and the shows and tape sales go swimmingly. This is getting pretty cool.
Monday, April 20: Peabody's Down Under, Cleveland. OH; Tuesday, April 21: Lee's Blind Pig, Ann Arbor, MI We are starting to enjoy the dashing, decadent feeling of sincerely forgetting what city we're in or what month it is.
Thursday, April 23: Driving into New York City We had heard a lot about killer bums, volcano-sized potholes, etc., but although dire predictions of immediate carnage proved exaggerated, it was on the turnpike - straddling the median between two exits, one leading to the George Washington Bridge and the other to Brooklyn - that I truly thought we were all about to die.
Friday, April 24: The Marquee,
NY, NY
Yet another thing we've learned is that, generally, if you say onstage, "Hi, we're__________, from Austin, Texas," people cheer and yell as if you invented the place. New York is a great show and a great audience, a fact made more remarkable when one considers that having to drink $4 cans of Rolling Rock tend to put most sane persons in an ugly mindset.
Saturday, April 25: The Paradise, Boston, MA Before there was an L.A. versus N.Y., yin-yang axis, I think there was a N.Y. - Boston one (I might have to check with my grandmother on this) [or just ask a Yankee or Red Sox fan- Ed]. Fittingly so. For us, at least, the Boston audience is the anti-New York experience in every respect. I guess lethargy shouldn't be surprising from a populace who has to deal with street signs that are set at angles that would seem to make them readable, and presumably applicable to, both of two intersecting streets. This isn't necessarily the result of poor planning because, in Boston, it is not uncommon for two intersecting streets to have the same name. (Sample directions to the venue: Take Harvard Street across bridge, take a left on Cambridge, then two immediate successive rights at Harvard and Harvard, take a left on Cambridge, get back on bridge and exit right onto Harvard, go six blocks past the light at Cambridge to Harvard, take a right, back up 50 yards to Harvard, take a left and get on Cambridge. Club is on right, between Harvard and Harvard.)
Sunday, April 26 Due to World Class Communication Failures, we are every bit convinced that we're not playing the Amherst show as Poi Dog is convinced that we are. We hear later that they waited an hour later to play in hopes that we would show, but we were in New Hampshire playing Nintendo with Jeff's girlfriend's four-year-old brother.
Monday, April 27: Toad's Place, New Haven, CT Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones have made surprise visits here from time to time, but not tonight. ABC tapes Poi Dog's show for a prime time In Concert program, which we miss later, although we hear that Frank ends the show with a hearty "Thanks from us and the Duckhills!" God bless 'im.
Tuesday, April 28: The Trocadero, Philadelphia, PA Here we have a Time-Life Amazing Experience. The manager of the Korman Suites Hotel, mistaking us for guys that know what the hell is going on, gives us the $250-a-night suite, complete with full kitchen, two bedrooms, living room, two bathrooms with showers, washer-dryer, two TVs and more floor space than our houses, for 65 bucks.
The Troc is another ornate old theatre. The show goes well, we sell gobs of tapes and get a nice review from the Philadelphia Inquirer that unfortunately refers to us as the Duckbills.
Wednesday, April 29: Nightclub 9:30, Washington, D.C. Fear played here. That's all we needed to know. The venue is around the comer from Ford's Theater; you face the bricked-up windows of the back of it from the alley behind the club, if the sumo-sized rats don't distract you. The situation is already eerie enough before we receive the news backstage that the verdict in the LAPD/Rodney King trial had been reached, and LA. was already on fire. The hotel is a twisty and dark 15 blocks away, through downtown D.C.
Friday, May 1: The Metropol,
Pittsburgh, PA;
Saturday, May 2: Newport Music Hall, Columbus, OH; Monday, May 4:
Bogart's, Cincinnati, OH; Tuesday, May 5: Jake's, Bloomington, IN
We get asked a lot about groupies. We answer that they are large, thick, ocean-going fish that can be eaten, and are excellent with a lemon sauce, because we are such good-natured kidders. I guess bands like Poi Dog and us attract a gentler breed of groupie than, say, Warrant. I don't think "groupie" is the generous term, but there is a contingent of people, male and female, to whom meeting and getting to know the bands that they like is an integral part of the musical experience. Whatever it is that they get from us, the relationship is symbiotic. Meeting and talking to someone, getting an address, and getting a phone number all takes on a desperate and goofily sentimental edge, as some instinct tells you that you're not supposed to go from place to place so fitfully.
Wednesday, May 6: Shank Hall, Milwaukee, WI We are crushed to discover that nobody here knows where Lavene DeFazio lives. Milwaukee is only 90 minutes from Chicago, and .a lot of the crowd is from there and familiar with us. We get such a rousing reception that we don't notice that the only people who can hear the show are us, the P.A. system being fucked up.
Thursday, May 7: Mabel's, Champaign, IL Adam says he'll play guitar with us for a couple of songs if we promise not to make too big a deal of it. We don't, although we do sort of break into "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" as he walks out, and Ben kind-of says, "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, PLEASE GIVE A BRANDY-WARM ROUND OF APPLAUSE FOR THE INIMITABLE GUITAR STYLING OF MISTER ADAM 'THE MAN' SULTAN FROM POI DOG PONDERING!" in a low-key manner as the lights sort-of focus on Adam in a subtle kind of way.
Friday, May 8: Wrocklage, Lexington, KY Adam tells us that this place is known in Music Guy Lingo as "Sexington, KenFucky," but we never get a chance to ask him why.
Saturday, May 9: The Omni New Daisy Theatre, Memphis, TN Due to some booking agency chicanery, we are bumped off the show in New Orleans, which makes this one the last show of the tour. We play our goofiest set in recent memory to a sparse but appreciative crowd. They're kind of self-conscious about there not being more of them, we're kind of self-conscious about them kind of sitting there, so we're all in it together and everything turns out fine. Poi Dog's own latent sentimentality rises to the surface as Frank invites us out onstage to do "The Israelite" by Desmond Decker, one of our collective favorites. Then he really tests the crowd's resolve to get their money back by playing one of our songs, "Playsexy," which goes over pretty well, actually. Afterwards, I use the rest of the film in my camera taking bleary "pals-for-life" snapshots of myself and everyone in Poi, the crew, the venue, the audience, Poi's Reba McIntire bus, etc.
It took us a week to get home, since we had two more shows in Baton Rouge and Houston to play on our own. We got back home on Saturday evening, May l6, in the middle of a horrible rainstorm and flood, bought some tequila and drank like vermin before sleeping in our own beds again.
As this diary was going to press, the Duckhills were headed back out on the road, this time westward for another 15 shows with Poi Dog. They'll be back in town on July 24 to play Liberty Lunch. |
|
|
Photo by Paul English |
|
|
|
|
