Tour Notes, part V

I’m living like a monk on this tour. Trying to stay clear and focused and healthy. No coffee, no alcohol, no sugar. Vegan food.

It used to be lollipops and cough drops all the time between meals but these days if I have a bad taste or dryness in my mouth I’ll suck on an almond or a cashew until it softens and melts. I always think of one of Samuel Beckett’s characters sucking on a stone he had in his pocket. (I forget which book, which character—they are all basically versions of the same idea, I think). Someday I want to try that. Sucking on a little round smooth stone. Just because Beckett’s guy did.

Seems like we’re in Nowheresville. My hotel room smells like the last guest had a barbecue party in here. My strong “sugared grapefruit” travel candle—usually able to bore through any lingering room odor—is not cutting it. Fruit and beef are intermingling and it’s not a marriage made in (my) heaven.

After we check in and put our bags in our rooms we meet up at the van to go to soundcheck.

Me: “This hotel’s a little grim.”

Todd: “We’ve been in so much worse.”

Todd again tells the story of once finding a pool of blood (fresh, and wet) in a hotel room bed. “It was a miscarriage or something.”

Me: “Was it under the covers?”

Todd: “Yeah, after I pulled the covers back.”

At night, after the show, back in the hotel room, I turn the AC mini-split on the wall next to the bed to the “OFF” position but it continues to make noises, all night, between heavenly periods of silence. Hissing, gurgling, then quiet, then kicking in again with a loud knock for more whooshing, etc. But it is in the “OFF” position (I checked). Its lights are all off, dormant.

The temperature in the room is just right; the air needs no conditioning.

I am stuck between a rock and a hard place.

I am not in control.

I sleep from 11:30 pm to 2:30 am and not much more.

The next morning: I am SO tired and I look like it. How can I get my face back to normal before the show? so that I look fresh again and not haggard.

In the van I am miserable, like a zombie. So glad Steve offered to drive the first shift. I doze in and out through the whole drive, shifting and squirming in the front passenger seat, never comfortable, awakened seemingly every few minutes by some jostling or some harsh sound like a loud BANG exploding right next to us jerking me awake and my blurting, “What was that?!” thinking someone had side-scraped our van or shot at it. “A motorcycle backfired.” Just as I doze off again someone wants to ask me a question from the back, leaning forward to get my attention: “JULE”, not realizing I was dozing.

I tell the crowd tonight that a good thing about getting older is that you can use your face as a weapon. I was telling them that this tour is “the 30^th-ish” anniversary of our Juliana Hatfield Three “Become What You Are” album, and that “we made it when we were 12 (haha)” and then “Nah, it’s great to be mature”, and the face/weapon comment.

Because people really are sometimes truly scared by women (men, too, actually, to be fair) who used to be young appearing to be not so young anymore. Why not use this to your/our advantage? LEAN IN to wrinkles and witchy grey teeth! I’m trying.

A woman in the front row right in front of me is looking down at the phone in her hands, and texting, through the whole set.

She does the same thing (constant phone) during the first two Soul Asylum songs, after which I leave the venue because I am tired.

I can’t help but wonder, “Why even come to the show at all? Why be here? Why not stay at home and look at your phone in peace? Why pay money for a concert ticket?” Maybe she is a music critic at work, sending back updates to headquarters, or live tweeting, reporting on the show in real time, documenting her thoughts on what is unfolding sonically in front of her, and doesn’t have time to look up (and still get it all down), in which case: Kudos, lady! Bravo, you thorough, diligent worker!

Maybe her significant other dragged her to the show, or bribed her with something she (the texter) wanted in return.

Or maybe she is a very shy, socially anxious person and the only way she can coexist in a space surrounded by other people is to have this other engagement (with her phone) going on all the time whilst in that space. And she really really wanted to be at this concert, so she is suffering through the difficulties. Maybe she is my biggest fan, or Soul Asylum’s biggest fan.

But I don’t think so. Her manner was so blasé; she looked so bored—by everything; by the rock concert, by whatever was happening with her fingers and her screen-- that I felt sorry for her.

It’s nice to play the same set—the album-- every night, because it takes away the pressure of putting together a new list of songs every night. Takes away the uncertainty and open-endedness of choices and we can just settle into the known order and get into the groove and get it done, every night.

The hotel tonight is a much cleaner and more comfy hotel and I sleep much better. I am unconscious as soon as my head hits the pillow at about 12:30 and then I don’t wake up until 6 am. This for me is a screaming success. 5 ½ straight hours is the best I can hope for out here and it is rejuvenating. Probably not enough, not enough sleep, but I can work with it. I am subsisting. I am getting the job sort of done. No one is complaining, out loud.

We do great in L.A. It feels comfortable on stage and we are playing well and grooving together. I wish Rick could be here to see it because for once I am proud and usually when he’s with me on the road I am hating most of my performances and I am really down on myself and I won’t shut up about it and he just absorbs it all unjudgingly like he is my shrink. But on this tour I feel generally a little bit better in the head sometimes. Maybe it’s something about being—playing—with Dean and Todd. They are my old friends. We’ve been through a lot together. I am enjoying being with them again. I appreciate them.