You'll find me where you left me, asleep in the bed of my truck in Andy's yard. Dan had asked me, somewhere in the silly blur of the previous night, how many times I'd slept in the bed of my truck and I'd dropped my jaw as if he'd handed me the keys to a goddamn time machine. I knew at that very moment that I had to get my sleeping bag and my pillow and sleep my first night in a truck bed.
I wish I could say it was the first time I've slept in my truck, but I've slept in the cab several times. Once after a catastrophic party involving a limousine in which I nearly got in a fight with a man easily twice my size (who later respected me for standing up to him) and the other time was after the first Drone Valley... I'd been up all night, inhaling PBR, in this damp and haunted hippie basement and there was no way to sleep with the terrible, terrible thump of Jay-Z at 5:30 in the morning. I had no choice but to go certifiably insane and I got in the faces of these hippies, talking mad shit, and then I left. I got some gas station coffee, indistinguishable from the walking dead, before crawling my way home... drive 2 hours... sleep 2 hours curled up painfully in the cab of my truck at some rest area and hope for the best... drive 2 hours... repeat (all the way to Greenville - 5 hours!). This was 2007. I think the party with the limousine and the hot tempers must have been in 2005.
Sleeping in the truck isn't good for you, no matter the year.
People were driving to work and it woke me up so eventually I got up. I went in the house and made some coffee, but it tasted like potting soil and not even light could escape. I think I used enough grounds to power a tugboat. I stepped outside and this nice guy was walking across the yard...
Gotta interject... Pushy Lips borrowed a church van from another band. This is an integral detail to the current story.
Okay, so this nice guy is walking across the yard and there I am with my Wayne Static morning hair and the porch is covered in beer cans and here's Amoretta's not-completely-empty bottle of wine and he says "Excuse me, friend. Would you be able to move that van so we can get a truck in across the street?"
I look across the little street and there's a loading dock and there's a semi idling in the road.
"Hold on, let me find someone who has the keys," and I go back inside & shut the door. It takes a few minutes, but Dallas has the keys and he goes outside and he very elaborately starts the van. There are all kinds of switches you have to hit, some of them under the hood.
"It's like you're starting up the Millenium Falcon!" I joke. I mean the spaceship, not my little red Mazda truck.
I can only wonder what the guy who asked me to move the van was thinking, what kind of debauchery he thought took place and how on earth a church van from Tennessee fit into all this wilderness. Maybe his imagination fell short... or maybe he thought we'd been out sacrificing goats and launching virgins into the sides of buildings with catapults.
Right. Dallas moves the van into the yard and commerce continues.
Pushy Lips rolled to Rosetta's and out of town. We watched "Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride" and then I slept like an absolute baby for another 2 hours. I wouldn't recommend sleeping in the bed of a pickup truck, not when it's a 6' bed and you're a 6'3" gork with a build that can politely be labeled "emaciated."
I kid. Emaciated people are generally considered attractive. I'm not skinny enough for heroin chic. I'd be a lot cooler if this were so.
Goddammit, get to the show.
Ok. So we headed to Johnson City eventually. It had been an easy day for me, lazing around Andy's and generally just taking up space. We loaded the gear into the Millenium Falcon (my truck, not the spaceship) and Andy, Dan and I packed into the cab and were off.
You may want to get comfortable, there's a lot to tell.
We had some good conversation as we made our way through Asheville. I was thrilled fuckless to be well rested. We rolled out of NC with no incident, generally just giggling our asses off, and into Tennessee... it wasn't until we stopped for gas that the freaks found us.
I was pumping gas when the first freak rolled in... he was talking to me before he even stopped. It was so weird that I wrote it down and I'm going to go grab my notes. He rolled up to the pump opposite mine in a faded S-10 that very badly wanted to die, window open, and said "What's up?" before his truck even stopped. I nodded and said "hi." He quickly engaged me in an engrossing conversation, something to the tune of "Oh, the pump's usually on this side." My response of "Yeah, some of them are broken. They have bags over them," fascinated him and if I'd known what I was bringing upon myself I would have probably elected to throw turds at him or climb a billboard, howling like a macaque, rather than risk further conversation.
He looks at me and says "you look like a musician." I nodded cautiously and said "I am." I would ordinarily be pretty jazzed to have someone out and say that, but this guy exuded creepy desperation and I couldn't put a finger on his motivations. Police station t-shirt, intense mannerisms, piglet eyes... I asked him directions to Next Door (more on that later) since we'd been too nitwitted to google map it. Got directions, committed them to memory, and he was still talking.
"So, what kind of a band are you?"
"Oh, I don't know..." it generally takes me a minute to construct an answer but he was already talking.
"Are you metal?"
"No, we're..." at this point I wanted to get away. He was interrupting at a fantastic rate.
"Are you an indie band?"
"Well, we're..."
"Indie is like Red Hot Chili Peppers or Blue October."
"Oh. Not really like..."
"Or Breaking Benjamin."
"No, I don't really know them. We're kind of like... kind of psychedelic?"
Blank stares. It's a shitty description anyway, so it doesn't matter. I think I may have even said we're like Beck, but this kid had the IQ of a broken toaster oven and my words were obviously bouncing off his forehead, never even making it to his ears.
"Could you guys get me a show? I have an acoustic act. I play solo."
"This is our first time playing Johnson City. We have no influence there at all. You should probably just email the Acoustic Coffeehouse."
"Can't you just write my name down on the list?"
"Just email them. Our word doesn't count for anything yet."
"I only have two shows coming up and they're in the spring. One at the apple festival and one at the Food Lion."
Dan and Andy were out and the Falcon was fueled.
"Ok, man... we're actually running pretty late and need to roll into town. Thanks for those directions."
"Put my number in your phone, man," is what he said.
"Here," I handed him an open notebook, the page that ended up being my observations on Johnson City. "Write it on this."
We piled into the Millenium Falcon and were on the interstate quickly, but somehow not quickly enough. Andy was laughing.
"Man, he asked you to put his number in your phone and you were not having it!"
Lost as fuck in the armpit of buttholes.
We followed this guy's directions, blindly taking an exit on the far side of town and proceeding to drive through the outskirts of Johnson City and away towards (?). We stopped at an Ingles and asked a guy who worked there, this literal-minded young caveman, how to get to downtown and he told us Johnson City had no downtown. We stared at him as he stared at us. Someone had come down from orbit with three eyes and purple skin and politely asked "Glerp forx?" and I was starting to think it was us. He points us back in the direction we came and gave directions, which we faithfully followed until we realized that we were just as lost as before... drifting past every chain store imaginable except for the good ones.
We pulled into a Blockbuster and asked a man with a fantastic mullet, permed to perfection, how to get to the part of town where venues were. He didn't know but he told us his son would, so we went inside and met him. They looked alike, only twenty years difference, and were both nice people, good-natured and genuinely sympathetic to our plight. His son aimed us in the direction of Next Door and we made tracks. I had a good feeling about this guy, he seemed like a very good person stuck in a very bad town, and he came through nicely. We made it to the venue in under five minutes.
Thanks, dude. Never caught your name.
Next door to what?
We got out of the truck and were immediately welcomed by Curt of Next Door. We were not so welcomed by the Acoustic Coffeehouse. We loaded our stuff in and it was still an hour and a half before go time, so we followed the rumor of free food to the Acoustic Coffeehouse. The people at the counter were nice enough, asked us if there was a cover. We thought there was, so we said yes and they said they didn't feed us if there was a cover. They told us they would feed us and give us two free drinks apiece if there wasn't one, these things were very explicitly stated.
We went outside and sat with Pushy Lips, who were enjoying their free food and beer, to discover that there actually wasn't a cover. Thrilling news, so we returned to the counter but by now the story had changed again and they were resistant to giving us food even though, not five minutes prior, they'd said they'd feed us if there wasn't a cover. One of them went to get the manager for some reason, they were exchanging nervous glances. The evening got really weird really fast. The manager swooped into our little huddle, Dan and Andy and me. He darted from face to face with a hyena's eyes, as if to say "which one of you criminal fucks is the ringleader?" Andy spoke.
"Hey. We're playing next door and I just wanted some clarification on the food deal for bands. We were told we could get free food and two drinks per person if there was no cover."
At this point our attempt at clarification was met with a stream of antagonistic insults. The owner of the Acoustic Coffeehouse got really red in the face and was facing off with Andy as if he wanted a fight. We weren't about to return the body language, the naked hostility was too fucking weird.
"How many of you are there? Huh?"
"Well, two bands... seven of us total."
"I can't afford to feed all of you."
"The other band already got fed, they're the ones who told us."
"Well, that was a mistake," he said with jack-bastard smugness. We would have walked away but he wasn't done ranting.
"What kind of a draw do you have?"
"We'll see."
"See, I feed people who play here," by 'here' he means the Acoustic Coffeehouse. Obviously he thinks we don't know that the Acoustic Coffeehouse owns Next Door. "You told me you didn't want to play here, so I can't help you."
Andy puts up his hands defensively.
"I never said that."
It's true, we've never even communicated with the place. We no longer had any idea what we were being accused of. Especially confusing, again, is the fact that the Acoustic Coffeehouse fucking OWNS Next Door! He's pissed off because some person out there, and it may as well have been Andy, decided to play one place he owns rather than the other? I don't think simple anger management is going to work on this guy, he needs some kind of happy pill or even an animal sedative capable of calming a thresher shark.
I didn't hear any more because I turned around and walked out. I had heard enough and life's too short for me to just stand there and take verbal abuse. Maybe this hawaiian-shirted fucker is the king of Johnson City, good for him. He can have it. I'd rather be a nobody in Chapel Hill than the king of Johnson City.
odd times in the land of maybe music, but probably not...
Kids from whatever college is in Johnson City were milling around, drunk and shouting before it was even midnight. Somewhere in the middle of the set an older gentlemen with a cane shouted in mountain gibberish. He either wanted to hear "Amazing Grace" or Macy Gray, we never could settle on which one he wanted. He was loud and complimentary but, as we would discover later, he was thoroughly out of his mind.
Pushy Lips played to a few more people than us and their audience was more receptive (in that not just the loony old man said nice things). This guy with a pony tail and goatee who had been to the house show came out to Johnson City as well and proceeded to casually insult me several times. Awesome.
Dude - if someone is being humble and says "I'm not much of a singer" you're not supposed to quickly agree with them. That's a real jackass move.
Getting to know Pushy Lips' set over the course of three shows was a lot of fun. I maintain that Kristen is the anchor of this band. Around her do the others orbit. She's a really good drummer who doesn't have to prove it. She has excellent time and applies phrasing generally reserved for fills to her beats. She also has a great ear for dynamics, leading the others in the rise and fall of their fierce epics.
I said after my first encounter with this band that it was evolved '90s music, but I don't think so any more. Now that I know them better, I'd say it's prog-based but without the meandering selfishness generally associated with the genre. Yeah, there's prog in there, but it's been finely honed. Dallas can cut a serious groove, digging deep into the bedrock. Rivers change their courses, cliffs gently slope into rolling plains. Will and Dallas follow the same sonic landscape, establishing a neo-funk parallel structure. Much like funk, this creates a hypnotic groove and it is so sweet when one of them deviates from the groove for a brief, early 20th century jazz proto-solo. It's riff based but these are riffs for the patient. The elements of the riffs, the individual phrases, become almost as important as the overarching riffs themselves.
Amoretta is her own vocalist and the more I hear her sing the harder the style is to explain. There are Corin Tucker gospel howls and tremelos leading into Zach de la Rocha territory, words fired from a machine gun. Their lyrics are simple and are repeated, chant-like; building, evolving, a story told not by details but through raw emotion. Pushy Lips are agents of psychedelic hypnosis and Amoretta is their assassin. Her behavior on stage (and in real life, I discovered) is that of a predatory wildcat that's come out of the trees to hunt and to play and it's hard to tell which is which. I don't think she's much heavier than your average bobcat...About midway through their set the crazy man shouted to Amoretta that he'd see her naked someday. During their next song he asked us to take his picture. He got up on the stage and stood there, so we got his picture.
What a strange place.
Journey to the lost heart of downtown
The show was over and the streets were getting drunker. The Acoustic Coffeehouse patio was a mess of shouting, falling-over-each-other people and there had been scattered talk of a show a block away we could play if we were up for it. A new metal bar had lost two bands on the bill and we could pull double duty if we wanted. We were waiting for Curt to finish our CD first, the recording of our show, so we decided we would walk downtown to see this row of bars Andy had been saying were really cool. I didn't want to drink but I definitely wanted to walk.
We got directions from a drunk stumbling the other way. "Hang a loosie, you can't miss it."
Got a picture by the Buffalo St. sign and made it to the strip, a brightly lit, antiseptic place permeated by pop country and stilleto heels. This was what 5th St. in Greenville would look if it were populated by the offspring of married cousins.
I don't expect - or want - to play Johnson City again. Right now I'm just having fun.
WtBR vs. Twang Bangers vs. nightclubs vs. sidewalks
The bars and clubs on the strip were overcrowded and spilled their wasted contents into the street. Outside of one particularly soul-sucking bar this country blond drunkenly encouraged us to come here the "Swang Bangers," who are (apparently) the best band in Johnson City.
I've found them. Turns out they're the Twang Bangers. Shitting evil hell, they're exactly as bad as I thought they were.
Andy replied (I wasn't talking, I was furiously taking notes) that we'd already played Next Door that night. The girl turned to her friend and asked "Who played Next Door tonight?" She casually assured us that we were nowhere near as good as Twang Bangers (she was still saying "Swang Bangers").
We abandoned the great debauch and went back to Next Door to wait for our CD. Members of WtBR and Pushy Lips went on a mission to the metal venue to see if it was worth playing and it definitely wasn't. Brand new place and this was their first night with beer. Some metal band was playing to five of their friends who would obviously be leaving with them. Our CD was under the Millenium Falcon's wiper blades so I took it, put it in the CD player, and we rolled through the dark East Tennessee night to Asheville. This time around we took the right way out of town. It turns out there's an interstate exit maybe a mile from the venue and the directions the gas station weirdo (remember him?) had given were unimaginably bad. No surprises at this point.
If I give you $30 will you kick me in the gut?
The weirdest thing was the recording. Curt was the nicest guy we met, we really liked him, I still like him, but the recording of our set is one of the worst things I've ever heard. It sounds like he only had the vocal mic live (and it's way up front) and an area mic barely on... then he applied this 4 second delay with high feedback to everything. It's the oddest thing I've ever heard, our songs transformed into nightmare cacophany. It's what schizophrenics hear when you talk to them... it's a lot like the fever dreams that hit when you're down with the flu.
The big waste of it all is that we (both bands combined) had to pay to play this show. We had rationalized it by the end of the night as "Well, if we get a decent recording out of this then it's not a wasted $15."
This is why I don't do pay to play. It's never a good idea.
Back to Asheville, laughing our asses off... what would you have done?
Doomed, doomed, doomed.
I'm not an idiot. I know Johnson City has good people - it would be completely illogical for it not to - it's just that we only met a handful of them and they were so overshadowed by the Bad Ones that it's hard to focus on them. Thanks Curt, thanks Blockbuster dude who finally gave us good directions, and thanks to the girl working at the Acoustic Coffeehouse who empathized with our plight moments before her boss treated us like a bunch of rowdy teenagers with spraypaint cans.
(concluded and resolved in act III)
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