The Saturnine Project: Tour Diaries 1995

October 15, 1995: We stayed in St. Louis for two days at Mike's friend's apartment, since she had gone out of town. Friday night Jennifer came running back from down the street where Cicero's is located and told us that Shiner was playing. So we went down there and got in for free because we're playing there on Monday. Mike H___ was playing bass for Shiner, which is a loud band on the Jawbox label. We spent a lot of time promoting our show -- Mike talked to a few people who said they would come, except none of them did. We put up flyers and went to a record store, where they bought 10 singles from us. I went running all three days in St. Louis -- the neighborhood was located next to Washington University -- old houses, winding streets fighting off the bad neighborhoods with iron gates. We went for a drive one day and crossed Skinker and then the railroad tracks and the whole city fell apart. Store fronts were boarded up and people walked down the middle of the street. The best part of my runs was going down the alleyways in the nice neighborhood, where there were ivy-covered carriage houses lining both sides; I felt like I was running messages in the Civil War. Saturday night we went to see Yo La Tengo at the university, which was OK. This woman at the university said she would book us, and we met a DJ who wanted to interview us on Monday. Sunday we drove to Columbia and arrived at the radio station where we met Veronica. We hung out at the station and looked at the CMJ issue where we were 'most added.' The band we were playing with, unCrush, was playing its first show outside of Kansas City. They were very young and their lead singer, Kelly, had a really strong slacker/southern accent and none of us could really understand him at first. He worked as a dishwasher in some town. The played to about 10 people, and it sounded OK except all the midrange was cut out of the PA so I couldn't hear any vocals. I noticed that people in the midwest use the term 'white trash' a lot. We played to about 20-30 people, which was nice. A real teenage kid bought our disk, and we got paid $5 in change. Veronica, who put the show together, took us all back to her house, where she made spaghetti. She was the ultimate scenester in a good sense because she has promoted shows with every good indie band in the last five years and she had a hall-of-fame wall of posters. We left that night and drove back to St. Louis. Jennifer forgot her backpack, so they had to FedEx it to Pittsburgh.

October 16/St. Louis: Cicero's is a great club. We almost fell over when they sent us a postcard saying they wanted to book a show with us. We played with this band called the Highway Matrons, which featured Freddy Friction, this skinny, wiry guy in a muscle t-shirt and pearl necklace who played the spoons and the drums. In the middle of their set, these two buskers came in and played guitar and washboard (with Freddy on spoons) and played the theme from Gilligan's Island and 'These Boots Are Made for Walkin'). Then the band came on and played forever. At one point, Mike turned to me and said, 'If they play another song, I'm going to cry.' Before the band went on, the band members all went up to each other and burped into each others' ears. We left at 1:30am for Pittsburgh. Mike was driving.

October 17/Pittsburgh: We arrived in Pittsburgh 10 hours later. I made a bunch of phone calls including one to this idiot promoter in Canada who told me that he couldn't book any of the shows that he had promised to book. That night, we played at Graffiti, which was probably the biggest venue we've played. We also had the biggest crowd, which was nice, except there weren't too many scenesters. We had to pay the club 10 percent of our merch, which amounted to $6.90. My sister Jan told the soundman to turn us down, and then she told me to turn down our amps. She said afterward that she felt like I barely recognized her. Actually, I did turn down a bit. Jan brought a delegation of Russians with her, including Sergei and Igor who had eaten over at [my brother]'s with us the week before. A couple of the others gave me some promotional literature and postcards and pins from their city in Siberia about two minutes before we played. I wore the pins, though.

October 18/Cincinnati: Zig-zagging across Route 70 through Ohio. Arrived at the club and met Gerald and his band who were playing with us. We ate at this Mexican place and Mike and Jennifer ordered vegetable burritos, which came out looking like a taco. Then Jimmy D found us and we went back to the club with him. Our show was OK -- not that crowded, but actually just as crowded as the Barbara Manning/Chris Knox show down the street at Sudsy Malone's. Gerald played with about 20 pedals -- it was a little too guitar player for my tastes. We spent the night at his house, which was in an old suburb of Cincinnati. Gerald told us that he thought Nectarine was a real indie-rock band because they recorded all on analog and recommended that they be listened to only on vinyl, etc. He looked great in his new short haircut, but I also had to laugh to myself when he said he liked Cincinnati because he was getting calls from major labels. Oh well. We got up in the morning and said hello to Gerald's father, who didn't seem that happy to see us. Me and Mike went out running in a rather big park and went trailblazing along the mountains. We got lost and almost ran onto the freeway. When we got back we hung around for a while and then packed and left because we didn't want to stay another night at Gerald's. We went out to breakfast and then went to Jimmy D's. After Gerald left, we went to a drum store to get Jim some stuff, and then we went to a really good thrift store -- rows and rows of shirts arranged by color, nothing more than $2. Mike said he was going to withdraw all of his money to buy shirts to bring back and sell in New York. Later, we went to Ultrasuede, where the Afghan Whigs record. We met John the bass player who runs the studio, and hung out with the Ass Ponys who were in the middle of recording their new album. They didn't seem that happy, although the songs they played for us sounded pretty good. It's amazing what bands do when they have a lot of time. The night before they had dragged out all of these speakers into the street so they could mix feedback in with the sound of the train yard. It seemed kind of Rock Star. Then the guy in Throneberry was telling us how when they recorded they would do about 12 takes of every song and then piece together the 'best' part of each rhythm track, so that it took them one day for each track. Then we went out to dinner downtown at this place called Marlene's and Jennifer went in first and then came running back to tell us that Michael Stipe was in the restaurant. This was all the more remarkable because she had met him about six weeks earlier at the Mercury Lounge and had given him our promo tape, because Angela had given one to Spike, who had it at the bar. Jimmy D bought us a great dinner and we hung out with the waiter and the chef because Jimmy D was friends with them. After we walked out, we convinced Jennifer (Mike went with her) to go say hello to Michael Stipe, which she did. She went up to him and interrupted: 'I'm very sorry, but I met you last month in New York at the Pell Mell show and I gave you a copy of our tape and I wanted to give you a copy of our record.' And he said, 'cool -- yeah, that Pell Mell show, thanks, this is cool,' and that was it. Then we went and had a radio interview at midnight with this freaky guy named Sonny. He bought like $20 worth of merch at the show, but then he accused us of stealing a Velvet Underground record from the radio station (which we didn't).

Comments

"The night before they had dragged out all of these speakers into the street so they could mix feedback in with the sound of the train yard. It seemed kind of Rock Star."

!!!

Posted by: jh | 12/04/2009 at 03:04 PM