For our very last show of this leg we're doing a benefit for a new copyright initiative called Creative Commons. We share the bill with Gilberto Gil, the Brazilian composer, singer, and now minister of culture.
Over the last few weeks I've been e-mailing Gil's people regarding the possibility of doing a song or 2 together. We've exchanged ideas and MP3s via Email, as we only have the afternoon soundcheck to rehearse together. It's been kind of crazy, but it works.
I did an English translation of "Asa Branca," the Luiz Gonzaga classic that Gil covers; at the end of his set, we alternate verses in Portuguese and English. Then, for our encore, Gil joins us for a "Brazilian" version of "Don't Fence Me In," which I recorded for Red, Hot, and Blue. Jamie worked up an arrangement for the Toscas, so we're all on board and are joined by Susano and Gustavo, Gil's percussionists. It is a mighty groove, to be somewhat immodest.
Gil's English is excellent, partly due to his years in exile in UK during the early 70s. Just before the show, fellow exile Caetano calls Gil (from Rio, I guess) to wish him well and say hello. I happen to be in Gil's dressing room discussing lyrics and say hello. I'm impressed that these 2 have remained so close. Their careers stretch back into the 60s — not too many musicians have bonds that far back.
The show goes very well. The folks at Wired magazine, who sponsored the benefit, throw a party at a nearby hotel and Malu joins us. I think she has a great time, though it's pretty late for a school night.
I ride my bicycle home. It might be around 3AM.
Recent discussions have often revolved around our upcoming leg in South American, a place I love but can't tour as often as I would like. I'm not a hugely popular act there (though I am known), so the expense of bringing a band of this size is considerable.
I bike along the Delaware/Raritan canal, which runs close to the hotel. There are heron, deer, ducks, and turtles. It's a beautiful, sunny day, but I don't know what to do here. I have to pack up all the stuff collected during the North American tour before we pull into Manhattan at 2AM and get dumped out of our bus home for good. I've got boxes of CDs, books, and DVDs that were handed to me over the last month or so. So I head back to the bus and hotel and try and begin to get organized.
Our show is at the Carolina Theater, a nice theater on the Duke campus that's quite a bit larger than the previous clubs I've played here. The Fort Worth venue was also quite a bit nicer. I've stepped up, but why?
James B. Duke gave this university its name. It was originally called Trinity College, but, with what must have been a sizable endowment, he "offered" his name as part of the deal.
From a website:
I might be over-simplifying matters, but James B. Duke was the sort of man only the U.S. can produce. He started with nothing and clawed his way to the top, becoming the most ruthless of tycoons. His forte was the 1880s tobacco industry. In 1890, he created the American Tobacco Company by merging the five largest tobacco companies in America at that time.
The years 1900-1902 are now known as the "Tobacco Wars." But, in fact, the battle was between James B. Duke and the rest of the world. The end of 1901 saw the birth of the Imperial Tobacco Company (ITC), formed by Wills and twelve other companies. During this period, many smaller tobacco companies were carried from the field because big companies were selling cigarettes below cost.
In 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of the tobacco trust as a combination in restraint of trade.
Duke's older brother, Benjamin Newton, had launched the family into the textile business as early as 1892. As their textile interests developed, the need for economical water power led the Dukes into the hydroelectric-generating business. In 1905, they founded the Southern Power Company, now known as Duke Power, one of the companies making up Duke Energy, Inc. Within two decades, this company was supplying electricity to more than 300 cotton mills and other factories, electric lines, and towns primarily in the Piedmont region of North and South Carolina.
Hurricane Ivan preceded us, but the washed-out roads and bad weather are minimal by the time we pass through. We've been incredibly lucky with the weather on this tour.
Tracy and I bike over to the local state park, which runs along the Eno River. I expected a bike trail along the river, but there isn't one; there is, however, a well-marked hiking trail along the banks of the swollen, muddy river.
Two kayakers pass by. There are some rapids downstream, and one of the kayakers seems to get caught in the undertow for a few minutes.
It's a day off. At night, a group of us goes over to Carrboro to visit Tricia Mesigian, who did merch on a previous tour and now owns the Orange County Social Club, a bar close to the Cat's Cradle (a popular local venue for touring bands).
I've biked around here before, so I've already seen the Country Music Hall Of Fame (lots of great outfits) and music row (a neighborhood where every home is a music publisher). I go for a run along a river path that quickly peters out and leaves me in an industrial zone.
I look for pants in the western wear stores to replace the ones that have gone missing. They don’t have them but I get distracted and end up buying a retro western shirt instead.
The show at the Ryman, the original Grand Ole Opry, is may be the most well-received of the whole tour. The audience goes nuts almost from the beginning. Although it doesn’t seem to be completely sold out, it’s pretty close, and the whole balcony is up and dancing. They're stomping their feet and slamming their hands on the stage. We were here on our last tour. At the time, they’d just begun to book shows in here again — it had been shut down for a while. Now the Ryman has sort of become the medium-sized alt. venue or choice.
Last time I was excited just to be playing here — on the same stage as Hank Williams, etc. It went pretty well, as I remember, but this reception was on a whole other level.
Afterwards, I said hi to Adrian Belew, who produces records here, and the folks from Lambchop, whose song we did as part of the set. I also did a couple of old country songs with Jamie, Graham, Paul, and Mauro as an encore, sort of pretending we are country of another era: "There Stands The Glass" and "Give Me The Flowers." Jamie was a top fiddler in Calgary, so he pulled out some perfect licks that don’t get much play with the Toscas.
Everyone in the rhythm section is wearing overalls — sort of our Homer and Jethro look, which inspires one of the venue folks to give us Hee-Haw t-shirts afterwards; they own the rights to that TV show.
Our hotel is in the middle of a hospital complex. It seems to be a hotel for grieving relatives and families huddled together to watch grandma die.
Another Tadao Ando building is next to the venue; it’s a Pulitzer Foundation and contemporary art museum, sort of bundled together. More beautiful bunkers. Those buildings are seen as lynchpins in a renewal effort for this uptown neighborhood, which encompasses St. Louis University and a massive Masonic lodge.
The Uptown Theater. Johnny Reno tipped us that this is a good town for thrift stores. Deanne reportedly got a whole box load of stuff that only she could pull off. I just picked up a shirt and baby blue jacket, which is useful, as most of my clothes are dirty at this point. It's less than a week before we hit NYC and I can dump laundry.
The show is at Bass Hall, a lovely traditional concert hall build by one of the Bass family fairly recently to mimic the style of an older concert hall. From the inside, it sort of works. In the amber light, as people filter in, it truly evokes a beautiful old theater. But, occasionally, there's a giveaway that it's a brand new building.
I am somewhat amazed that we're playing here. Last tour, we played the Red Jacket club in Dallas. It was a bit too small for us, but a long way from being a 2000-plus-seat concert hall. And Dallas is the larger of the 2 cities — Fort Worth proudly stands by its "Cowtown" moniker, despite the sheen of new museums and business headquarters.
What happened? Did I suddenly get more popular? It sometimes seems that way, but why? I haven't had a hit record here in ages. ("Lazy" was a hit in Europe and Australia, but not here.) Maybe word of mouth has filtered out that our touring show is good? That, combined with the fact that it appeals to a multiple generations, some of whom would prefer to go out to a nice concert hall than squeeze into an overstuffed club. I'm playing a lot more theaters on this tour, which allows that audience to be comfortable. Or maybe the pendulum just swung my way for a while, as it sometimes does.
After the show, some of the band hops on the crew bus and heads out to visit friends in Kansas City. The rest of us of us stay here and, the next morning, I connect with Christina and Johnny Reno, who I've known since we worked together on True Stories. We drive over to Dallas and catch Bale Allen’s gallery show of bronze tumbleweeds and photos. It's a great show; he’s really hit his stride, and most of the pieces are already sold.
We check out a show of peculiar images by an Argentine photographer at Photos Do Not Bend Gallery, where I had a show some years ago. This guy, equal part photographer and tinkerer, used a camera modified to take panoramic photos out a car window; each shot uses a whole roll of 120 film.
Another series was taken via a camera attached to a kite; the resulting pictures make the landscape look like model train sets. A third group uses an archaic printing method to fix B&W images of a series of futuristic, Deco-style buildings — mostly slaughterhouses, crematoriums, and some public works. They are incredible, slightly fascist structures that are now decaying in the countryside.
We pop back to Cowtown to visit the new museum of modern art, and then the Kimble next door. Tadao Ando did the new one, in a sort of homage to the Kahn/Kimble structure next door. If buildings had love affairs, this would be one. Both buildings are like beautiful, massive bunkers — concrete temples to art. If earlier art museums echoed Greek and Roman temples, these echo space, science.
That evening, the Renos stop by artist Vernon Fisher’s studio on the way to dinner. He’s finishing a giant diptych in the shape of Texas. One side has roads and the other, the earlier trails on which the roads were built. I35 follows the Chisholm trail pretty much exactly.
We meet a lot of the band and crew at Byblos, a Lebanese restaurant opened by the son of the restaurateur; he has another Lebanese restaurant in town, Hadari, where I'd been before.
After a huge meal, we all lean back and share some hookahs in a high-ceiling room filled with cushions.
Sunday afternoon, a group of older guys arrive a couple at a time at Artz Rib House, where they form a circle out back in the shade. They begin playing old country, bluegrass, and Texas swing songs. There are a couple of dobro players, a few guitarists, a fiddle, and 2 mandolins.
We're at Hogg Auditorium, named after the philanthropist daughter of a wealthy Texas Governor, who named his two daughters Ima and Ura. True.
I bring Stephen Barber up on stage during the introductions and the end of the show; he did so many of our arrangements, both live and on record.
Naturally, the Toscas have lots of friends in Austin. After the show, we rendezvous at the Continental, where Heybale is playing. I've heard them quite a few times on previous visits, but I don't get tired of them. Some ex-players from various classic country bands, their choice of material is wonderful; their audience runs from Goths to grandmas — all dancing or at least swaying with beers in hand.
We're on a mostly elevated highway leading out of the center of Houston. Below us on the left and right are car dealerships, Chinese restaurants, and jewelry warehouses. We're on our way to Mission Control on the invitation of Mike Fincke, who is on the space station. If we hurry, we can talk to him via video link up.
Mike and I have been in sporadic Email contact thanks to Steve, his medical officer. Recently, Mike sent a photo of hurricane Ivan he took.
Email from space. I was pretty excited, but now I've also got pictures from space, and even a PowerPoint presentation!!
This morning in my bus bunk I dreamed of an alien invasion. It was pretty scary — one of those, "they're here, they're deadly and they will destroy us any minute!!" It was a cross between Independence Day (the aliens were in very small spaceships — like large, sleek, black, strangely shaped surfboards) and Invaders From Mars, the old 60s(?) film, in which a boy watches aliens land in a sand lot across from his house and then witnesses his neighbors and family being "taken over." The spaceships in my dream were in a warehouse silo-like building and were inactivated; I could touch the sleek, curved surfaces with my hand, but I could tell that once the power got switched on, look out!
On Saturday afternoon, Downtown Houston is pretty much deserted. Four young filmmakers are in an empty lot making a movie, with a paunchy man playing a homeless person. Otherwise, there's almost no one around. Zip. Nada. Just a phalanx of nearly identical glass buildings that reflect one another. Sort of self-referential, self-reflective, business style... which seems to be what this town is about — oil business.
There are great art museums here (the Menil and the Museum of Fine Arts) and some lovely theaters, but these all seem like the beautiful baubles that decorate the main life here, which is oil.
As we approach the freeway, I can see some black men trimming potted trees and some homeless stoners. One is a man with two dreads sticking out of his forehead. Tracy says they look like the ears of his dog.
There is a parade a block away. Today is 9/11. Some onlookers lean against fences that border parking lots and watch as a marching band, some flag bearers, and a fire truck pass by. I wonder what’s the point. No one lives down here, and the workers, the "important" ones, won’t be leaving their offices and computers to observe this little display.
Now we're on a smaller road with U.S. flags planted along the median strip. There's a Super 8, a shoe repair, a mini mall, Jack in the Box, a cash-advance store and a bank. We're in Nassau Bay, a satellite town in a city that is pretty much all satellite towns.
Mike Fincke is live on a monitor when we arrive in a little nondescript conference room. We gather around facing a video camera and we begin our chat. It will be limited to about 4 minutes of audio and video, due to the alignment of the various satellite daisy chain communication links that are used to make this work. (Actually, we get more almost 10 minutes.)
After a bit of chat, I borrow Steve Hart, the mission doctor's guitar, and I sing Mike an acoustic version of "Heaven." He does a floating flip in response and mouths the words as I sing. Due to the satellite system, there is a couple of seconds' delay, so it looks pretty weird. We're all pretty tongue-tied and stunned that we're doing this, so the conversation from our end is a little stilted.
The medical officer (Steve), mission director (Matt), and another astronaut in training (Megan) take us on a tour of the various control rooms. The building is full of giant simulators.
As a prank, the astronauts will sometimes surreptitiously unbuckle a sleeping fellow astronaut and allow them to float free in the middle of the module. The astronauts usually fasten themselves to wall spots for sleeping, so, if they wake up unfastened, they have no way of moving because they are beyond reach of the walls or hand holds. They flail around for a bit attempting to gain some kind of purchase, which I guess is hilarious — to the others on board, at least.
Graham opens a drawer in the abandoned Apollo Mission Control room and someone's stuff is still in there: rubber stamps, stationary supplies, and paper punchers.
In this control room they used pneumatic tubes to carry hard copies of documents back to the occupants, as there were no printers close by. But the pneumatic capsules not only carried paper; they had burritos, donuts, and, once, a frog.
Upon leaving the modules for a space walk, the astronauts open a hatch and it appears to them as if they are bailing out of an impossibly high plane. The hatch is located on the underside of the airlock, so their view is of the earth below, not the space station. We were told that it’s pretty terrifiying, even though there’s no chance of "falling." But instinct takes over and often the astronaut's first impulse is to grab the nearest hand-hold in a kind of "death grip" (as the program director described it). It takes a good several minutes before the fear passes and they can begin their space walks.
The Russians will neither confirm nor deny that the clear liquid in IV packs kept with the medical supplies is actually vodka.
We were told that the Cosmonauts are trained for a hard landing on the steppes of Kazakhstan, which is their desired landing spot. But they are also trained for a possible water landing in the Black Sea, and even in a remote forest, which is why they carry a gun on board — in case of bears.
There are Canadian, Italian, Russian, and Japanese modules existing or planned for the space station. Probably more nations are involved than this, but this gives the general idea. It's a pretty open international vibe around here — more directed towards science than military secrecy (as it must have been during the Ccold War). The feeling of cooperation and curiosity is refreshing. It might be illusory, but that's the impression one gets.
The simulator room is massive; it sort of looks like a kids' playtime on a giant scale. Here's a pic of a full-scale model of a node, one of the can-like modules that make up the space station, only this one is like a giant Japanese lantern. Hollow, lightweight, and accurate in scale, it was made for the "Canadian" mechanical arm to practice lifting, moving, grasping.
