The other night I was out with Nathan here in Portland and he bought me a few drinks. (By the way, I’ve given up on my campaign to legitimize the drink I call the High Roller, which—if you’ll recall—is vodka and coke with a lemon. It was modified slightly on this tour to great effect in Fort Worth, Texas when a bartender suggested ditching the lemon and using vanilla vodka, which made it taste just like a Vanilla Coke. But still, it’s a drink that grosses people out whenever I order it, so I generally don’t. Instead I’ve been relying on the Madras, which is vodka, cranberry and orange juice. I still get harassed for drinking this drink, mostly by men who think the beverage looks a little too “girly.” However, the drink is the exact same color as a greyhound, which is generally considered to be a manly drink. I don’t understand it, and I’ve stopped trying to figure out the logic of drink ordering. The Madras is harmless enough, and I’m going to stay there for a while.)

Nathan and I talked for a while about the tour, which has now been over for three weeks, and then Nathan just got some momentum and started talking about the world. I’ve said before that he’s a good friend for a writer to have, because you can just paraphrase large swaths of his monologues and put them in your tour diary and it generally looks pretty legitimate. This time he was talking about the ownership culture of the modern world, and what came before it. I’ll do my best to remember what he said.

“Most Native American languages have no verb for ‘to be,’” he said, approximately. “If you want to say that you’re good at soccer you don’t say, ‘I’m good at soccer,’ because there is no ‘I AM.” You would say something like, “Soccer rattles around in my legs.’ Or if you were a musician you’d say, ‘Music likes to find its home in my fingers,’ or something like that. The result is that things like Music and Sport are empowered to the point that they have a will and desires, and they are in charge. When you think of Music as something with its own spirit, something that can act on you instead of the other way around, you suddenly have more respect for it, because it has all the power and you’re just receiving it.”

Not to steal yet one more thing from the Native Americans, but that would be a nice attitude to adapt as a musician. This whole process of creating songs in your room and then getting together some people to play the songs for the public is just naturally going to be one big tug-of-war on your ego. When everything comes together and the mood in the room is appropriate for your music and your voice is in good shape and you hit all your marks, it’s just an amazing feeling. It makes you never want to stop playing. When everything goes the other way, it seems like nothing you do is right. Like there are a million notes in a scale and they’re all wrong, like your instrument will just never get in tune, like there’s a narrow little strip you can walk on where things are okay, and all this flowing lava around you that is so wrong. But maybe it has very little to do with the person that is making the music. Maybe it’s actually more like a flag blowing in the wind. If there was a windy day and a flag was billowing and you heard the flag say, “Hell YEAH, dude! I’m the SHIT! I’m the best flag in the world! Look at me!” you would think that the flag was kind of a jerk. And it would be equally ridiculous if you saw the same flag on a wind-less day and it was all depressed and saying things like, “Man, I suck. I think I’m going to just retire from being a flag.” It would be stupid of that talking flag to think that way, you know? What a dumb flag. But that’s exactly the range of emotions that I, for example, go through from good show to bad show. It doesn’t matter if the night before was magical and perfect, if the next night is dead and dreary I start to think that I need to write better songs, or better yet, get a different career. But it’s really not about me, it’s just a matter of the wind blowing or not.

Well. Just to wrap up the tour. I think I mentioned last time that there was a lot of rain? And that the economy was bad? And that it was always raining? If you’ll remember, my band’s official motto is, “When life gives you lemons, you milk those lemons for all they’re worth and drink their delicious lemon-milk.” We parted ways with Leonard Cohen and cut through the rainy midwest, played a house show on the second story of a greystone mansion on the South Side of Chicago, and made it to Madison for the second-to-last show of the tour. Finally, after four weeks, it was sunny. Not warm—in fact unseasonably cold—but still sunny. We tried busking on the street there and it went pretty poorly. It was graduation day in town (it’s always something!) and either people with mortarboards were walking briskly past with their parents and grandparents, or homeless people were mocking us. As soon as homeless people start mocking you, that’s when you close up the suitcase and move on. But before we could do that, some old man kicked over Scott’s clarinet while it was on its stand on the sidewalk, rendering several of the keys bent and unplayable. This further depressed the band. We went to our gig, which was at a tiny art space. We were a little early, and no one was there. In fact it looked like NO ONE was going to be there EVER, so I fell asleep in the back of the van an hour before show time and figured that if no one ever woke me up it would be just fine. I could just sleep all the way back to Portland, sleep through the show and all the moving of equipment and all that. But I awoke to the sounds of kids drinking beers out of paper bags. People had indeed come to see us play, and when we played our set all the young people danced. We got called back for an encore, and we played “James”, a song that normally Scott would play on clarinet, but because it was broken I asked him to just sing his parts. Everyone was completely quiet while he stood up front and sang tenderly “ooooh” instead of playing his instrument. The first verse of that song goes like this:

James wrote
in the Bible
there is profit
in your trials
it’s worth waiting
for a man you’ve
never met

The next day we crashed a block party in Madison. It was sunny again, and warmer this time. Soul-healingly warm. There was one giant stage at the end of the block where bands were playing, and a schedule with the start times on it. We set up on the opposite side of the block and waited for one band to finish, and then we’d play a frantic fifteen minute set to the confused block party-goers before the next band started. Almost everyone was overjoyed at the impromptu nature of the performance. Another one of those beautiful moments that you just want to hang out in forever, like a particularly good scene in a play that has some difficult acts in it, and you’re the actor and you just pretend to forget your lines so you can stand there in the sun with everyone dancing. We were originally only going to do two sets and then drive to Minneapolis, but it was going so well that we sat through another band’s hour-long set just so we could play for another fifteen minutes. We played again in the middle of the party, next to an African man who was selling percussion. Scott bought two different shell-laden gourds and shook them during our clarinet-less set.

And it was a long, long drive home. After Minneapolis, we tore across the continent in two days. We stopped and had dinner with William’s parents in Bismarck, North Dakota, taking the extra brownies with us in a paper bag. We plowed right through Montana lengthwise, and rolled into Portland at the bleary one a.m. hour the next day. All the while, in the back of the van there was an endless game of poker, shouts of amazement at the surprise straight flush, at the rookie player who was taking everyone’s money, at the push and pull of chance on the cards.

I’m mostly leaving out a lot of the good parts of the tour, you know? There were many shows where we were listened to, respected, well taken care of. Many times where the music resided in us. We are blessed to even have the opportunity to drive around the country for four weeks, find people that want to hear our music, laugh and drink with new friends. There’s just an arc of a story to be told, and sometimes rain makes for a better narrative than a well-played show where we sell a bunch of cds. I just don’t want you to get the impression that my band is a total disaster.

At one point, somewhere in Montana, I broke up the poker game and took the back seat of the van to lie down for awhile. I put on my headphones and listened to an old Tom Waits song, a song for the upside-down places in the world, the places that look the same, have the same currency, have the same cars and buildings, but where people just don’t get you. But if you find yourself treated differently there, don’t worry. It’s not about you.

I know a place
where a royal flush
Can never beat a pair
And even Thomas Jefferson
Is on the nickel
over there

Links:
Nick JainaSpace
The new-and-improved nickjaina.com !
People discussing Tom Waits’ “On the Nickel”

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