This is absurdly fucking late. Sorry.
A day after the Lit Lounge show and associated near-road rage, Mark was eager to relieve me of the Suburban and test his driving chops with the trip to Asbury Park, NJ due for that evening. In fact he insisted. I felt a little bad about this, partly because I took it as if my psychological fitness as band driver was being implicated, which in light of certain flippings-out was fairly justified. Nevertheless I was pretty apprehensive about dropping Mark cold into the driver's seat, no less to face the unfiltered shitstorm that is commuting in New England. But in the end I worried more about being a dick about it, so I let him drive. All things considered, Mark did a pretty good job, taking us through Newark and navigating the Garden State Parkway through the rain with little to no help from the Suburban's unsurprisingly dysfunctional left windshield wiper or crunched rear-view mirror. That notwithstanding there were a few moments of handle-grabbing terror, that may or may not have been exaggerated by my fundamental unease with letting an unseasoned Kiwi drive on the right side of the road in a car in which I happened to be sitting shotgun (i.e., prime ejection-through-glass territory); these occurred mainly during lane changes and intersection traversals that require you to be used to passers on the right and cross-traffic coming in from a direction appropriate to Western hemisphere motoring.
In Jersey City we picked up a friend of the band's named Maria, a music publicist and manager who spoke Italian and said she was the world's biggest fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation (which is impossible because I know what a bussard collector and a Heisenberg compensator are, and would probably be an instructor for intensive Klingon language courses if I hadn't been forced to attend to college). Then we drove southbound for maybe two hours and wandered around some anonymous coastal suburb of the state of New Jersey, stopping by a gargantuan 99-cent store for directions and a cheap can of regular-flavored Pringles. This put us in Asbury Park around maybe 8PM. The gig was at an extremely cool and yet extremely empty and unpatronized bowling alley called Asbury Lanes, which I remember had extremely weird flushing mechanisms attached to the urinals in the men's bathroom, viz., spring-loaded, twist-action knobs that creeped the hell out of me. While the band wasn't getting paid, the house did comp us free diner-style meals of curly fries, orange pop, and grilled cheese sandwiches, the novelty of which was not lost on any of us, especially after three straight weeks of getting way more drink tickets than our kidneys could handle.
They also let us bowl for free. Bowling for me is like what dancing and singing are for most Americans: a supposedly fun, extroverted activity that is in reality totally terrifying, exactly because you are supposed to be having a good time but you suspect everyone is judging you by your skills, and then, because you're feeling self-conscious, you really are in danger of not having a good time, and worse, looking very obvious to everyone around that you're feeling self-conscious, and in essence seeming like a ninny and/or poor sport. But historically speaking, I am the world's greatest bowling catastrophe, and it takes a great deal of irony and preemptive apologizing for impending gutterballs for me to get over myself. I have a natural tendency to chuck the ball out from my center, as opposed to out from my side, so the ball's trajectory is already bad on release and requires an extremely finessed counter-spin and a good deal of speed to reach any pins at all. What's silly about my concerns, though, is that most of us were varying degrees of awful at bowling. At one point Dan cranked his pre-swing up too far and too fast, and the ball had more inertia than his feet, and so he fell over literally heels over head. We just laughed at him. I'd never seen anything like it. Grayson, however, was some kind of machine at the game, so routinely going for eight or nine pins on his first attempts and then cleaning up the dregs on his seconds that we accused him of practicing (and, I think, demonstrating the world view that one can only be either 1) a shitty bowler or 2) a nerd who prepares his bowling skills to impress and ultimately dominate his friends). I stopped bowling after a point when the first band came on, although somehow I was the only one weirded out by the idea of playing sport like fifteen feet away from a band we were supposed to be performing with; for whatever reason it occurred to me that it was dismissive and nonchalant in a way that hanging out in the green room or at the bar (both typical activities when you are not actually into the bands you're performing with) are not.
When SSM went on stage there were exactly the following people listening: me, Maria, the guy who made us grilled-cheese sandwiches, some people way across the bowling alley in the bar, the sound guy, and the other band plus what appeared to be their girlfriends (some of whom were bowling, although despite what I said above I didn't take it personally or anything). It was a strange show and I suppose a little disappointing in spite of the general coolness of the venue, and the band wrote the gig off as free dinner and rehearsal time.
On the way out the door there was a bit of controversy when it became clear the Mark intended to drive us back to New York. There was this pretty uncomfortable exchange in which Dan told Mark that while it had indeed been very "fun" (Dan's own term) when Mark drove down, it would be "even more fun" if I were to drive everyone back instead. It was extremely well-meaning and conciliatory but also detectably insincere, and so Mark stuck to his guns. Then Maria said flat-out that she didn't feel safe with Mark behind the wheel (something to the effect of "I insist on living!", an ouch-class rejoinder to my prior "I'm not gonna insist on driving..."), which I guess was honest but made me wince, in part because of the directness of it, and also because I felt that as the favored driver I was kind of involuntarily complicit in hurting Mark's feelings. At that point, Mark got pissed off and said he was just trying to spare me some trouble and felt like nobody was helping him out. I insisted that it really was all OK and took an oath of good behavior and no profanity for the drive back up, which after all of that was predictably weird and awkward. Yet again we took a series of wrong turns in south Manhattan and ended up in the wrong part of Brooklyn, and then when we got to the right part of Brooklyn we spent at least thirty excruciating minutes looking for an unadorned stretch of kerb long enough to fit the Suburban. On the way out of the car, Grayson dropped the band phone into a melted-snow puddle of impressive scale and grossness, and then somehow I managed to drop the car keys into the exact same spot, and so we spent a little while fishing around in the puddle with our bare hands.
That night we had no way of getting into Tash's apartment, where we'd been storing the gear, which meant that we'd have to leave all of the band's equipment in the car and furthermore that somebody would have to spend the night in the car as a human theft deterrent. Mark immediately volunteered for the job. After going back to Chelsea's place briefly to get Mark's stuff, Grayson and I walked Mark back to the car. It was a cold night, and when we left Mark at the Suburban and turned back, I was feeling tired and guilty. Actually I think that was rock-bottom for the tour for me.
The next day I got up at the brutally early hour of 9AM to return a borrowed amp. The morning traffic consisted of school buses and loading trucks and taxis and about 10 consecutive blocks of Hasidic Jews darting into the street and standing outside of brick warehouses. Along the way we passed by what was purported to be the childhood residence of deceased rapper Biggie Smalls. After this I left alone to eat with Chelsea in Manhattan, and then I scurried back into Brooklyn in the evening for a loft show that the band had somehow contrived an invitation to play. Really this was the pattern of the rest of the half-week I had in NYC, despite all of our vast and varied ambitions to visit art museums and see the musical rendering of Raimi's Evil Dead and eat loads of pizza (of which I ultimately ate only a single mouthful that I stole from Dan). We'd more or less locked ourselves into a routine of waking up way too late, going our separate ways for what was left of daylight, and reconvening in a rushed fashion to get the gear and car ready for a show.
The loft of said loft show was apparently someone's actual residence and very hip indeed but none of us were particularly impressed, and after So So Modern played we ended up trickling in one by one into the room where all of the bands' equipment was being stored. For a while we shared that room with this one bizarre guy who said nothing to us but didn't quite ignore us either, and so this was awkward and perhaps even a bit creepy. After him was a guy called Matt who was the drummer for a band called The Fugue, and it later came out that he was also no less than the latest drummer for Asobi Seksu, which thus made him the highest-profile musician I met on tour. While conversing with him I specifically avoided mentioning that I thought AS's music was kind of boring and a Category-3 let-down given the amount of indie-media hype over them, and that I thought such hype was almost certainly a result of the lead singer being very ostentatiously a Japanese Female and very obviously aware of what advantage that brought her vis-a-vis an audience all too willing to pass off exoticist fetishism as some kind of aesthetic sophistication (which just stop me right now), although not bringing any of this up was very difficult, because Matt was actually very matter-of-fact and cool about his lot in life and seemed like he saw things for what they were.
Grayson's manager Emily lived in town and had him booked for a couple of solo sets during the stint in NYC,. These shows were ultimately attended by little more than myself and one or more members of SSM and what turned out to be a rather decent-sized (relatively speaking), all-female contingent of SSM and/or Grayson Gilmour friends-cum-groupies (primarily the former, but very arguably the latter as well), and then also a paltry smattering of unrelated hipster riffraff--all in all a weird dynamic. Grayson had a tendency to blow through his sets with a witticism inserted here and there between songs ("You might have heard this one before" was his introduction to his cover of Weezer's "Buddy Holly"), and often ended his songs by smashing his left hand against like ten or so of the low-octave keys--either he'd sorta picked up that he didn't have anyone in the crowd that he really needed to impress, or he's fundamentally self-conscious about all the false drama and gravitas that seems automatically to go along with performing solo piano ballads.
At one point the scheduling of these solo sets happened to conflict with a certain potential SSM gig in Philadelphia. Philly was a geographical long shot, but I could tell Grayson was pretty resistant to the idea of canceling his set regardless. That was understandable, but in any case it made me wonder about the nature of his relationship to the band, given that at present his solo work appears to be both more lucrative and more widely-received than what SSM has thus far been able to achieve. I asked him about it once, and it seemed to not be a big issue to him. The rest of the band barely talks about it, and there isn't quite a 500-pound gorilla vibe that you would expect to see in a situation like that, so I'm not sure what to think.
Among those previously-mentioned NYC friends of the band were Karin (who not incidentally is Chelsea's roommate and whose bed I slept in twice, although not with her but rather once with Dan and Wolf The Affectionately Allergenic Cat, and Mark another time) and Rachel, both of whom worked shifts at the Knitting Factory and had colluded to score SSM a set on a Sunday night. That show ended up being my last for the tour, and it conformed to the pattern of US metro shows played alongside anonymously emo-ish local bands who were, in as kindly objective terms as I can muster, nowhere near as good as SSM. What was neat for me was watching Rachel work the mixing console, from which she would occasionally glower and shake her head at guitar players who'd turned their amps up too loud.
I was running the merch table after the show when I was approached by a blonde girl who I at first believed was very friendly but soon realized was quite drunk. I sold her a CD for ten bucks, and then she kept trying to sell it back to me for five bucks and a copy of SSM's press sampler, and this after she'd removed the liner from her CD and gotten a couple SSM guys to sign it and successfully mangled it with her drunken fingers. It took me maybe a full minute to figure out what she was trying to say to me, and the entire time Karin (herself a true tour-support pro) was giving me that knife-cutting-throat gesture, but what was I supposed to do? At one point the blonde girl said, "Here, this is what I want you to do," and she took a pen out of my hands and drew upon my tally sheet a picture of what I think was a flower with more equally-size flowers growing fractally from its petals. Finally Dan came over and let her take a sampler, and she staggered away. She left a half-full bottle of beer at the merch table. Anyway I found it all pretty scary.
I spent three weeks with these guys:
Aidan Leong is half-Chinese and half something else I didn't bother asking about. One of the prime subplots of the tour was sneaking Aidan into various 21-and-over establishments because until literally days before I left NYC he was not yet 21. As it turns out our tactic was to give him Mark's NZ driver's license (Mark himself could use his passport) and this somehow worked every time; I'll give the door guys in question the benefit of doubt and say that instead of being unable to discern people of fully- and mixed-Asian lineage, they simply did not give a fuck about rigorous enforcement of the US legal drinking age.
Aidan very articulately explains that he is concerned about the incompatibility and potential irreconcilability of his musical concerns and his university degree, which was earned through a semi-vocational program in radiation therapy. He worries that if he pursues music for the next X years of his life, he'll be left behind by the rapidly-changing field of medical technology and thereby rendered unemployable. Apparently this is something the others in the band worry about as well, as if Aidan's Career and So So Modern are mutually exclusive objects, a concern which strikes a third party as both completely understandable and also way overstated, since after all we should not be so narrow as to have our lives dictated by our respective undergraduate degrees.
From what I gather, Aidan thanks people a lot. He is always thanking the crowd between songs and is always thanking everyone who gives him the slightest provocation to thank them. Outwardly he is quiet and sweet. I think he must be the most aggressively considerate of the guys in SSM. Maybe that's a function of him being so goddamn young, although that's probably a little too convenient an explanation. That notwithstanding, Aidan's method of demonstrating platonic intimacy is through dudely uncouthness: the way you know you're in with him is when asks you in post-ironic fashion if you're some kind of fag or homosexual or something, and gives you this extremely harsh and intense look. Apparently it's his habit to disappear for long periods of time wandering on his own, and also to be suspiciously evasive about any potential romantic entanglements of his, and these are traits that were described directly to me by other members of the band and more or less confirmed through my own observations during the tour. When Aidan told me he was going back to Germany after the US Midwest tour, I immediately asked him if it was about a girl, and he only replied, "How is it that everyone seems to know that?"
Daniel Nagles never has a quiet moment; either he is in the middle of cracking a theatrically elaborate joke (often necessitating grotesque full-body gestures) or expounding lengthily on something that he finds deeply profound. Out of his fellow band members he's the only one I'd describe as truly extroverted. He has a particular combination of stubbornness and recklessness and genuine curiosity and raw energy that for all intents and purposes makes him jinxed. That's to say that he is always slightly screwed, either running late or losing his wallet or missing the bus or doing something crazy and possibly illegal in front of bored cops or something.
Despite that Dan's both extremely funny and extremely fun to be around, there are times I think the guys in the band are laughing at him rather than with him. Dan's too-dead-to-be-deadpan soliloquies on history and culture and DNA helices and how it would be cool if There Was A Movie About A Subway Train That Was Actually Some Satanic Species Of Gigantic Snake are semi-coherent and wandering and extremely verbose and often just plain nonsensical to everyone but him, and are thus frequently dismissed and mocked, which Dan himself takes with such superb equanimity that I wonder if he's even aware he's being dismissed or mocked. It might be simpler to say that he just doesn't care either way. But there is something a little sad about not being taken seriously when you are so obviously saying something that you take very seriously, or at least when you are trying very hard to express to others what you have in mind.
And yet I still don't really worry about Dan, because he's easily the most gifted person in the band, viz., as far as I can tell, he is always basically happy. Once I was carrying someone's guitar case or synth case or whatever, to the car or something, when Dan came up to me and said, "Well Jeff, you gotta meet my girl back home." And I said, "Why?" "Because she's great," was Dan's reply. That was the sum of the conversation.
A weird thing about Grayson Gilmour is how he's generally the one kicking people's asses about paying attention and staying on schedule, and how he's fastidious and even skinflinty about the band's finances, but then outside of the practical realm he's the generally least focused on the moment in any given situation. Grayson is distinctly haunted by two things: A) music and B) the prospect of living somewhere where he doesn't speak the language. When we went to museums he would discuss not art but the new delay pedal that he bought; when we passed by all the various sights of New York City, he had his nose in a German language survival guide. And then he has the classic introvert's habit of saying extremely little among his non-familiars, and then being the loudest when he's among his close friends, and also the classic smart-ass's tendency of using humor to express what is in fact his genuine disapproval, as well as to reveal, inadvertently, his own insecurities. Really I felt like I had a lot in common with him.
One night after one of the NYC shows, we headed out to a party where we were meeting Tash, who was supposed to give us a key so we could again stash the band gear at her place. Aidan had already left to meet a friend in Manhattan. When we got to the building where the party was, Mark and Dan immediately took off to check out the party, while Grayson and I elected to wait in the Suburban. We spent like five or ten minutes watching the entrance to the building. After a while we started making up cruel dialogue for the people coming or going or lingering outside. Me, nerd voice: "Look at this fucking tool, he's like 'I'm a graphic designer, I really think New York's a great place to step up my career.'" Grayson, watching a guy walk away from the party, Americanesque grumbling: "Fuck this party, it fucking sucks." And so on and so forth. I guess we were mostly kidding, but if we were laughing, then I have to think it was also a little painful, as with a kind of punk's contempt and punk's envy built into the experience of watching something in which we'd explicitly chosen not to participate and yet found impossible to ignore.
Back at UC Berkeley's I-House, Mark Leong and I turned out to be pretty good roommates, tolerant (at the very least) of one another's music, both fans of comic books and guitars, and similarly prone to laughably uninformed armchair cultural criticism and rampant idealism and self-righteousness (although he in a relentlessly positive manner and me in a depressed cynical manner). I find it strange how he and I are never quite dudes in each other's company; our conversations tend to be dourly epic, always about morals and choices and society and the essence of things, and are generally at least 75% Bullshit, but I think while they're happening we genuinely dig it. If we're joking around, it's never so much silly or relaxed as it is a mutual attempt to be witty. In any moment we're interacting, one of us is either existentially or romantically mid-crisis and clearly eager for the attention of someone who's willing to sit through an over-articulated and self-conscious account of said crisis. Truth be told I sometimes worry that we take ourselves too seriously among one another, since in other contexts we are each shown to be much more crass and dude-like. Does that mean we secretly fear the other's judgment? Or is it just that we are both game to nerd it up at the first sign that a second party wouldn't mind, and we just smell it in each other? Either way, I think it's probably best that in the future we take every opportunity to do stuff like dance together to bad techno--those moments seem to be the ones when we're most uninhibited with respect to one another. I've kept him touch with him for four years, which, in context, is rare and counts as a really close friendship, one of very high mutual esteem, but we seriously need to chill the fuck out.
One semi-intentional consequence of this notion is that I've recently gotten into the habit of affectionately laughing at Mark behind his back with the other SSM guys. So having an identifiable crew of mutual friends definitely helps. In any case it comes from the awareness of the things about a person that both impress us and disappoint us, and also the recognition that those things are pretty much always inseparable, or perhaps facets of the same basic trait. Mark's always been philosophically unified, at least by all outward appearances: he finds moral significance and intellectual connectedness in everything that he reads and the things that he does. Occasionally this rings highfalutin and/or self-contradictory, but it's also exactly what makes me respect and envy him. Despite my best efforts I'll always harbor fears that the path to enlightenment or self-realization or whatever the fuck is jagged and awful and full of disappointment. And it's not that Mark's without his doubts, but it seems to me that he's convinced, deep down, that there's a right way to run one's life, and that he'll find it eventually, and that he'll have a really good time looking for it. I don't nearly have that kind of confidence.
As recently as maybe eighteen months ago I was still deeply uncomfortable with the idea that I wasn't meant to be a rock star other such musician of note. That sounds pretty silly, but that was really much more of an unwillingness to accept the idea that there were generic limits to what I could accomplish with my life, i.e., up until I was 25 or so I basically saw no line between fantasy and true conceivability. Nowadays I thrash slightly less when I entertain the possibility that I won't ever attain certain chimeras such as widespread musical renown and credibility. Partly that's the necrosis of youthful optimism expressing itself, and that's really not a point any young person should ever be eager to reach--I tend to think growing up is an accumulation equally of fear and apathy as it is of reason and knowledge. But the other thing I've come to accept is that vocation and/or avocation don't necessarily equate to a clear identity, and furthermore that clarity of identity doesn't equate to happiness. That's to say that I think it's an unambiguously good thing to realize that A) what you do as a job/hobby doesn't come nearly close to defining who you are, and that B) being able to claim definitively and unselfconsciously that you're a musician or a writer or a doctor or whatever does not, in and of itself, represent satisfaction, self-knowledge, or the passing of other such spiritual milestones.
The SSM tour was then useful for assuaging a kind of guilt I felt about my waning musical ambitions. For one thing, much of the gruntwork of touring is exceptionally tedious and occasionally nerve-wracking, and even when it is stressful, it is still the same shit you had to deal with before, time and time again. The human aspect can also be numbing, with so much audience enthusiasm amounting to so little in the way of real relationships. Having logged three and a half weeks on a rock tour, I feel fairly convinced that my life could be complete without a brutal regimen of performing here and there with a half-ton of musical gear on my back.
But on the flip side, touring also has its oases of acute and very intense thrills (especially if you are the performer as opposed to the roadie), and it is above all other concerns a terrific adventure, so long as you are lucky enough to have the company of people who are your friends. Here's what I've always said, and what I think I can only now say with any kind of true sympathy: it would be good to be a rock star for a year. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be cut out for it past that point.
I have neglected to mention these things:
- Once near the end of the LA leg of the tour, me and Dan and Aidan and Mark went to a music store in San Fernando to pick up some DIs and a snare skin. The place was full of imitation gear, e.g. Fernandez's instead of Fenders, and all these savvy little signs comparing the store's prices to those of online discounters. Just as we were turning to leave, the guy behind the register stopped us deliberately to inform us that his store had indeed been used as a set for the guitar store scene in Wayne's World. He then took us into a back chamber in which he'd erected a small shrine of Wayne's World paraphernalia; in addition to the actual "NO STAIRWAY" sign and the actual "May I Help You?"-riff guitar, he also had numerous Wayne and Garth bobble heads and photos of Mike Meyers that I am quite certain had nothing to do with the actual filming of the movie.
- Grayson's sleeping bag had a large hole at the bottom, enabling him to walk around while wearing his sleeping bag like a full-body nylon condom. This is how he spent his most of his mornings on tour.
- Apparently the Suburban broke down immediately after I left New York, setting in motion an episode of high drama involving parking tickets, tow trucks, and nervous politics with Brit, the owner of the Suburban. As it was related to me, Brit turned out to be unbelievably nice about the whole thing and paid for the repairs himself, and even took the guys to the airport on their last day in NYC. It was further related to me that 30 minutes into that trip to the airport, somebody in the band suddenly realized that they were headed to the wrong airport, which precipitated a frantic re-routing and I guess a ton of profanity.
- The Kinko's on 5th St. (or was it 4th?) in Austin, like other Kinko's around the nation, sucks profoundly. It cost me a full dollar and like nearly half an hour just to print out the PDF plane ticket I had on Dan's USB key.
- Despite the whole myth of rock n' roll being a sexually-charged affair, the tour as a whole was only as debauched as any mundane gathering of friends, and for a fully-fledged Rock Tour and international jaunt it was disappointingly puritan. We gave Mark and Aidan loads of shit for talking to the occasional girl post-show, but I think we were just trying to create some drama. I did have a semi-platonic and low-intensity crush on exactly one of the army of female characters we encountered on tour. I am being discrete and coy about it because if I weren't, it would be so boring as to not even merit my mentioning it; in other words, I am just trying to create some drama in saying so.
- On a side trip I went to up to Harlem to eat at Silvia's, purportedly the most famous soul food restaurant in NYC. As one might expect from the most famous soul food restaurant in NYC, Sylvia's is blatantly self-promoting and basically soulless, despite that it facilitates such near-surreal experiences as my sitting with a tableful of church-going Asian kids expatriated from the suburbs of Los Angeles and Dallas and being serenaded by a MIDI-accompanied chanteuse who patrolled the restaurant singing "Amazing Grace" and asking where each group of customers was from; when we told her we were from California and Texas she said into the mic, "California and Texas IN THE HOUSE!!!", and when some other table told her they were from Norway, she said into the mic, "Norway's IN THE HOUSE!!!", and so and so forth. I noticed with geeky displeasure that she used the same melismatic descending phrase when she sang the names of certain birthday-celebrating patrons during her extended table-to-table run of "Happy Birthday", i.e., she would sing "Dear Daaaaaaaave" with the same basic rhtyhm and melodic content as "Dear Melissaaaaaaa", and FYI that's not very soulful when that happens like half a dozen time in a row.
- I think this is the only group photo I took with the band. Before the shot, I said, "Okay everyone, let's do the humorless rock star look!" which apparently nobody heard or understood:
