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right now……i am fucking tired. i am in santa fe.
we’ve done san fran, LA, san diego, tempe arizona and albequerque.i took this picture today. on my telephone.
i love the future.
i’m in the middle of nowhere in santa fe, re-couping at my step-sisters and soaking in the homemade-bread and baby vibe.
ronan, my wee nephew, is 10 months old. i’m beginning to relate to him more….he’s banging on shit constantly to see what sounds he can make.
babies are weird and wonderful. i love how engrossed he can get in something….he recently spent about 15 minutes opening and closing a book.
here are some pictures from tour.
all these photos (expcet where noted) are by beth, my new assistant of life, who is kicking ass all over the place.
she is busy all day doing crazy shit and i wonder already how i’d be coping without her help. i love life. we’ve been doing yoga together.
ok so
this is me, backstage with a lemon. the people in catering made the face on it and left the knife in his head.
and i was trying to explain why little fucking things like this make my life suddenly worthwhile.
this was the night morrissey came to the show.
please understand.
i worshipped at the altar of the smiths and the songwriting of The Moz for a long time.
second only to robert smith.
i knew he was there. my tour manager shook his hand. i missed him.
i was nervous.
not in the usual nervous way.
i don’t get nervous like that anymore.
it was more…..
i hit stage and couldn’t stop judging myself.
i just kept listening to my lyrics ricocheting around in my own head and my terrible judgement setting in (“amateur. stupid. trite. dumb. why did you write this shit?”)
i was only happy during mrs. o (“ok. this isn’t trite”) and astronaut (“ok. this is also good”). what a mindfuck.
i feel like i wouldn’t be so judgemental if robert smith showed up.
but morrissey has been so vocal about his total hatred of certain things. i totally pictured him leaving the venue four songs in with a thought bubble above his head reading “talentless twats. waste of my evening.”
brian picked up on my nervousness and to top it all off the place was air-conditioned to shit (cold = bad gig) so LA was ok. but not great. morrissey left right before the end of the show.
i am sort of glad i didn’t meet him.
i had the chance to, about two years ago, at a german festival. i declined. i was just too afraid he would be a dick and then the music would be marred (no pun intended).
i hate that about music. when the magic is ruined. its only happened to me once or twice, but it’s devastating.
if you love music, and then you meet the source, and the source disappoints you, you can never hear those songs the same way again. i’ve tried to avoid that now. on purpose.
some music is just too good.
HOWEVER.
san francisco was AMAZING.
zoe keating played with us (on astronaut and half jack) and so did meredith yaynos (on boston)
……and so did east bay ray from the dead kennedys.
i couldn’t find a full clip of it on youtube, but here’s us playing the tail end of “moon over marin” by the dead kenndys, with ray….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G74DkvMprno
then we took some time off in LA
brian cut my hair one morning…..
….then brian pulled out his wicked italian recipes and cooked the whole crew dinner while we stayed at my aunt & uncles’ house in palos verdes…..
(check out jaron with his PLATE)
katie kay and her beau, patrick, awaiting food….
the best surprise of tour has been our opening act SMOOSH, who have been kicking ass and taking names.
they are three sisters from seattle, age 11, 14 and 16. and they are ROAD WARRIORS. they;ve been touring forever and play like pros.
you’d think they were in their thirties. it’s crazy. they’ve been tearing it up every night and we love watching them.
we got their youngest member, maya, to play bass with us on “fight for your right”.
and then we decided that we needed to do a song with the whole band, so we threw together “karma police” during soundcheck and debuted it in arizona. they killed it.
(here’s brian teaching maya the chords….)
here is an awesome clip of karma police with the girls….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6klcWi0M1Y
me and beth, dorking out backstage…..
(photo by brian)
eric, our beloved new tour manager:
the couch fort that we built in the dressing room in new mexico (we had 4 couchs to work with, it was awesome).
FORT BEER!…..
maia (from smoosh – sadly, quite a ways under 21), eric (our tour manager), yours truly, captain brian viglione, brian spett (our lighting guy) and jon lammi (our sound guy….)
one big happy beery family.
….so
tour has been bearable.
the new album came out this week.
reviews have been mostly great. the new york times reviewed us for the first time and were sort of back-handed dicks, but at least they put us in the critics choice section (leave it up to the NY times to choose you but also rip you apart by starting a review by saying: “obscurity suits the dresden dolls…..”——-aaaah). but mostly awesome.
i have been cranking in the moonlighting hours on the artwork for the solo record. it’s going to be incredible. i just have to …. do it. finishing up the cover artwork. feeling slow and cranky.
random dept: the infamous blog tshirt on beth’s friend sarah in pennsylvania.
people keep asking for them, we might just have to make a large batch for post-war trade.
(let me know if you want one.)
…………
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four days later……………
we played in kansas city last night. i got atypically drunk over the course of the show, under the guise of self-medicating a very thrown-out neck.
i often drink during our shows but i usually cap it at two drinks or i start getting too sloppy and forgetting lyrics.
yesterdays adventures saw me drinking wine BEFORE the show, which i never do, forgetting to eat dinner, taking aspirin, walking by the bartender and grabbing a shot of jagermeister during my crowd-wander “the gardener”, then stupidly opening my gullet when my well-meaning monitor tech jaron came to pour a shot of whiskey down my throat during “fight for your right to party”.
it was a DAMN FUN show, for sure. i can remember very little from the encore, but i have gathered that the night involved me lying down on stage for the encore and some very birthday-party era nick cave muscial shenanigans during the half jack solo which everyone said sounded very “interesting”. drinking and playing, not good combo. but i suppose i am allowed one behind-the-music night every year or so for all the other sober yoga days.
in a way the night was a weird over-reaction to teh night before. we were filming the show, in denver. and i decided not to drink. and it threw me. i’d gotten so used to hitting a certain level of looseness halfway through the set, with my one beer down, that i got disoriented. the altitude didn’t help. i snowballed, stone-cold sober. there’s something to be said for moderation in moderation as well. i’ll figure it out.
i do hope some photos surface of the night so i can see what happened.
three more days of tour from here, all in texas, which should be good fun. we haven’t headlined here in years and years.
us, somewhere, being sweaty:
rock
love
A
