I haven’t played a huge amount of shows but I’ve played enough of them. I did two complete U.S. Tours, a few regional mini-tours and lived in towns where I played and set up shows a lot – I know that for somebody like a member of longest-running-rock-band Golden Earring that would just be a drop in the proverbial bucket but what I’m trying to say is I’m not exactly green.
Playing shows in DIY spaces is like any other thing that involves repetition and variation in that a lot of it has a sameness but the more a particular experience sticks out the more you’ll remember. You remember the really good shows, you remember the dismally awful shows, you may or may not remember a first or last show.
You remember the shows that didn’t end up happening at all.
In the very beginning of 2010 it was still winter and I was playing a few Bleak End shows around the North Eastern United States. It hadn’t been planned out like an actual tour tour although I would be doing one of those a few months later in the Summer of that same year. I think that I was on that side of the country for family stuff – my father had just died and my mother had decided that it would be a good idea to go see her mother one last time before her mother died or her multiple sclerosis worsened to the point that she couldn’t travel or she died herself.
I was out there helping with that and probably would have played at least a couple shows two birds with one stone style but something had just happened on the West Coast that led to me deciding to play a whole lot of them. If you haven’t read the two 9/11 chapters this is a head’s up that a more detailed explanation of the phenomenon I’m about to describe can be found there. At certain points in my life I’ve met people and immediately experienced a powerful sense of mutual gravity.
You could call it attraction but only with the caveat that the word is being used in it’s most fundamental and elementary sense: a force that brings things together. This time around it happened with not one person but with a pair of very small women who were both acoustic guitar centered singer songwriters. We had first crossed paths in Oakland, in the 2009 chapter An Intimate Haunting, but it wasn’t until we reconnected in Portland that the hands of fate chose to roughly and irresistibly combine us.
They had been moving through the world as a unit for some time and now a new object took form with me on one side of it and them on the other. All of that is a very big story that I will be addressing in much more detail in other chapters but here is what happened: we lived together, we travelled together and because we all played music when we travelled we played music together. We did this on the West Coast and now that we were all on the East Coast we were doing it on the East Coast.
So many things were strange: they sang quiet pretty music and I screamed over a drum machine. They were two different people and I was a single person. The Universe had manifested itself into an unambiguous voice to explain certain rules to me and I proceeded to break those rules. It was all going to play out like a fairy tale and none of it was going to work but for this chapter it is all mostly background information. It was the reason that I found myself on a longer mini-tour playing more shows around the North Eastern United States.
They weren’t with me for this particular show. I was just reminded that the three of us had played with Driphouse in Baltimore on January 2nd but for reasons that will become apparent I know that this Providence show was significantly later in the trip. It may well have been the last scheduled show of the trip before I would return to the West Coast.
I had never actually gotten to see Raccoo-oo-oon while they were still a band but I ended up with some of their releases by being really into the Not Not Fun label. I believe I have seen and even played with all the former members since the band dissolved though. In 2010 Daren Ho had a couple distinctive features he has most likely dispensed with: he only wore the color white, his front teeth were still messed up and he had the really drastic Velvet Underground type bangs. We hadn’t planned this show together but because we were both in New York we decided to take a Chinatown Bus to Providence together.
I’ve thought a bit about the similarities of this night’s walk over Federal Hill and the one I had made to Fort Thunder ten years earlier. In 2000 I was alone but dragging a heavy suitcase with a blanket over my shoulders. In 2010 I was with Daren: I was dragging a rolling suitcase and he had an unwieldy keyboard under his arm. In both situations it started to rain ever so lightly the moment I stepped off the bus and into Providence, Rhode Island.
In 2000 I was returning to Fort Thunder after showing up in the middle of the night whacked out on drugs and waking everybody up by loudly washing the dishes. I was walking there to find out if I would be permitted to stay for the next few weeks. Surprisingly enough the answer was yes. In 2010 Daren and I were walking to a show that we had every reason to believe had been booked for us at a warehouse called Mars Gas Chamber.
We were also in for a surprise.
I don’t have any memory of actually going to the door of the building or talking to a person named Weird Mike and I think I’ve figured out the reason why. The other two artists who’d been scheduled to perform, Isa Christ and Kyle Clyde, were waiting nervously in their van on the corner and stopped me and Daren before we even got to the door. Apparently when they had arrived a little earlier the aforementioned Weird Mike had acted extremely cagey upon learning that they were there to play a show and denied that shows of any kind happened anywhere in the vicinity ever.
Live music in unlicensed spaces in Providence, Rhode Island had been in a kind of “don’t ask don’t tell” place since the Great White fire of 2003. A lot of cities were having issues with Vice busts, there’s a San Diego story up here called “Think of it as One of the Rivers” on the topic, but this city in particular brought the ethos of “ask a punk” to another level. Normally this wouldn’t have been a problem because we were punks, and punks who had been booked to play a show at that, if not for one glaring error.
Our good friend Alley of SHV had decided to leave town without telling anybody that there was supposed to be a show for us. 2010 was very different from 2000 in that everybody had a cell phone and everything more or less happened through internet messages often on social media platforms but none of us were managing to get ahold of Alley. Of course none of us were 100% sure of the statement in the first sentence of this paragraph either.
As far as the traditional “five stages of grief” goes all of us were still on the very first step: denial. We told ourselves that we had simply committed a faux pas that every one of us frets about almost every time we go out – arriving too early. We told ourselves that if we simply went and killed time somewhere we would return to a show where all misunderstandings had been ironed out and perform for a particularly receptive and appreciative crowd – it was the least the Universe could do for us after the uncertainty and anxiety we’d been made to suffer.
We went to a nearby record store called Armageddon Shop just up the hill on Broadway. Dylan from Isa Christ was scanning over the flyers for upcoming shows when he suddenly became animated with renewed hope:
“Wait! There’s a flyer here for our show! It has to be happening!”
I mentioned earlier that certain details would indicate that this event happened near the end of my East Coast trip. The reason that I know that is this: I had already passed through Providence to visit the RISD Nature Lab and view the collection of small animals and animal remains with one of the aforementioned acoustic guitar girls who happened to be a RISD alumnus. While in town I had quickly printed up flyers for this future show using an image from the Takarazuka Review – a famous Japanese Theater where all the male roles are performed by women.
I had learned about the Review while spending time researching the obscure and outmoded theatrical genre known as Masque several weeks earlier at New York’s Kennedy Center Performing Arts Library. These details are irrelevant to the larger story but I’ve included them to remind myself of how different my life used to be. I used to constantly travel, spend time researching the performing arts and constantly produce flyers for my own performances and the ones I’d set up for other people.
The picture I’ve included here is not the one from the actual flyer. I’ve lost that image – if any of my readers might be in possession of the flyer from this 2010 Providence show that never actually happened then by all means please send it along. This might be the least reasonable of the various image and document requests I’ve put out there but I did make ten to twenty of the things and left them in a major record store hub of a regional music scene.
I explained all of the above details concerning the provenance of the flyer to my would-be show mates and the group’s morale sunk perceptibly. Still there was a possibility that we might return to the Mars Gas Chamber to find Alley, a show, laughs and apologies. We had to at least check. I can’t remember if I walked to the door to read the small notice in person but I remember exactly what it said:
“show” cancelled
That innocuous pair of quotation marks was the final insult to injury. As performing artists we must constantly reconcile the artistic ideals with which we dream up our onstage actions and the cold reality we then read upon the faces and actions of our spectators. It’s always better in your head – we remember the highs but live with the lows every time the thing we imagined as grandiose is proven merely mundane and even forgettable by our ever fickle audience.
What I’m trying to say is that that little pair of quotation marks was the cruelest cut of all. I’ve been to SXSW where unless you are cresting a powerful wave of hype the act of wanting to play live music for an audience is one step below begging for change on the street but still I remember those quotation marks and they haunt me. In a strange coincidence my wife has played a show inside of Mars Gas Chamber but I never actually did. Alley promised she’d make it up to me the next time around and she did: on the Summer Tour with Generation I played a memorable basement show with a surprisingly great band from New Hampshire called Brown Drown.
But all of that was in the future. In the early Winter of 2010 me, Daren, Dylan and Kyle had no recourse but to go to Whole Foods and after buying the comforting but overpriced hot foods of our individual choosing continue onto the Expressway and back to New York.
In total and utter defeat…
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 