2.20.05: Perth, Australia

The last Australian show was at a rock festival in Perth. In the afternoon, after a morning sound check, I got my surfer wish and Kristin, Ames, Jennifer, Graham, Mauro, Paul and I went to Scarborough beach just outside the city. The guys were hooked on trying to get it right, as if guys won't. I managed to eventually catch quite few waves, but never got up above a kneeling position. But I was thrilled, as it was my first time and the water was perfect, brisk and blue and clear, and no sharks either. Mauro, however, ruled — almost immediately he managed to stand up and soon he was catching wave after wave even though a lot of them were deemed too small for any of the other local surfers to bother with — but Mauro managed to wangle a decent if short ride out of these.

Later, at the festival backstage we met Ray Manzerak of The Doors who is touring with Ian Astbury "doing" Jim Morrison. He recently moved to Napa valley and says he is growing fresh gourmet vegetables. He’s holding a Budweiser, so one of our group goes and fetches him a decent local beer.

I don't really like doing outdoor festivals much. Except the Italian ones that are spread out over a week and which allot an evening to each act. I feel like the audience is primarily there to party, to dance, drink, whatever... and the music is simultaneously the focus and the background. That's all O.K., but some artists are better at providing that than others. Most festival audiences naturally therefore have short attention spans — it’s a natural result of being outdoors, daylight, etc — so our normal show, which "takes you on a journey" as the cliché goes, has to be edited in this context, and the unexpected detours on that journey — often the stuff that makes it really interesting and in my opinion special — have to be curtailed and we just hit the high points. It's the Classic Comics version of our show.

These festivals have evolved into money-makers for the local promoters — staging one big gig or a weekend festival is way easier than doing a string of dates for each act in town — and the acts get paid well, so they show up. The booking agents use them as cash points between less well-paying gigs.

As we're playing I wonder to myself how these things got started. Maybe they began innocently enough with festivals like the Newport Jazz and Folk festivals and semi-spontaneous celebrations in the parks and town squares of various cities. These then moved to stadiums and became more formalized. Occasionally some transcend the efforts to make them a big machine — the early Lollapaloozas, the New Orleans Jazz Festival.

Festivals are also used in the old argument given to bands:"it will expose you to a new audience." Which is true, but so would a lot of things that don't necessarily help one's career. My counter argument is that if the audience isn’t paying attention and you've edited your show then it doesn't really aid your career or attract new fans.

Again, this isn't always true — as much of a mud fest as they can be, I remember playing Bumbershoot (Seattle) and Bonnaroo (Tennessee) and weeks afterwards in other cities folks would come up and say how much they enjoyed those sets.

Blondie is on after us — their set is perfectly tailored for this event — they play hit after hit (at least they're all memorable songs to me) and they play them without pause, as if a DJ were doing a Blondie set.

Australian expressions:

Hooley freaking dooley
Scrouch
Footie

Besides vegemite there is Spearmint-flavoured milk!:

After we do the three Fillmore shows this is more or less the end of this tour cycle. There will be a week of dates in North America in the summer, but those are an afterward. My feeling at the moment is that this tour was in a way a continuation and refining of the last one. An amplification of what that one was hinting at. These shows use the strings more fully and the music ranges more widely. I think overall it went over well — actually I know it did — and in some areas it made money. (This last leg is break-even at best.)

I suspect I'll want to radically change things after this. Two tours and records over 4+ years with more or less the same format might be enough. I can return to this format, but I suspect in the upcoming months I'll want to challenge myself with something that I will feel more intrigued and less confident about.