Crazy
We're all a little crazy in this group. In my experience, anyone who has been on the road for more than a tour or two is at least a little crazy. I'm not sure if this life makes people crazy or if crazy people are just naturally drawn to it. It might just be that all the normal people eventually go home, leaving an ever higher concentration of crazy on the bus. But I do think there is something about life on the road that teases up the crazy, drawing into to view what "normal" people hide in the basement or bury in the back yard.
It comes and goes. I often look around and feel like the Marilyn Munster character in this particular show. But no doubt everyone takes their turn in that role.
Maybe it's the shadow of our creative and artistic sides, articulated by exhaustion, overexposure to strangers and each other, booze, and what I call "no-nest-syndrome".
No-nest-sydrome is the result of living on the road, where you never really have a chance to get comfortable anywhere. Most touring acts 'go out on tour' for a week or two, whereas we 'come off the road' for a week or two, now and then. But even when we come off the road, we don't have a nest that is our comfort zone, at least not one that is our own.
Fred is the only one who has his own place to go home to, but even that is just a big hall with a kitchen, downstairs from his studio.
Another big factor is that we don't get to maintain our close relationships in a face-to-face manner. Even with modern technology, I can't get a phone plan that allows me to call my Mom (in Illinois) from Canada without paying around a dollar a minute.
The flip side of that is that living three or four in a bus, spending most of our time rolling down the road and sleeping, it's really hard to find an opportunity to be alone. So we get a little claustrophobic as well.
Then there is all the free booze.
Ten years ago I was on the road with Slaid Cleaves. I had been driving around the country in my pickup truck, playing bars and coffeehouses all over the US for a few years. I was happy to get a chance to open for Slaid on a run up through the Midwest. It meant playing for a hundred or more attentive listeners every night, which was a fairly new experience for me.
I got the job by making myself useful. Slaid was riding the wave of his very successful "Broke Down" CD and was invited to play at Robert Earl Keen's Texas Uprising in Houston on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. The invitation had come in late and Slaid already had gigs booked in Oklahoma City on Friday and near Rolla, MO on Sun. So my job was to drive Slaid and the band to the airport on Sat. morning for their flight to Houston, then drive Slaid's van to St. Louis and pick them up on Sunday morning. But I had to have my truck for my solo tour home and that complicated matters for me.
My plan was to drive from Austin to Rolla, catch a bus from Rolla to OKC, then the rest would make logistical sense. It's a long drive up to Rolla and I thought I might look for an opportunity to make a few dollars along the way. I was rolling through W. Missouri late in the day when I passed an old-school road house and decided that was my mark. I walked in with my guitar and was saddened to find that karaoke had taken over the stage for the night. But the karaoke had pretty much run its course and the bartender started asking me about my guitar. Turned out the bartender was the owner and he asked me to play a few songs on the mic, which I did. The karaoke crowd wasn't very impressed, but the owner fed me and bought me a few drinks. He also invited me to stay in his deer cabin, just a few hundred yards behind his house.
He showed me around his bar as I drank his beer. Turns out he had spent a decade driving a tour bus for his wife's country band. There were photos all over the bar of the band on stage, in the bus, and pictures of the bus as well. He bought the bar with the proceeds from selling the tour coach. I asked him why they came off the road and he told me that everyone had lost their minds.
It was late when we got the bar closed down and we arrived at the deer lodge for a night cap. He was a pretty 'country' fellow, but it seemed odd to me that he had a deer lodge within shouting distance of his actual house. I never met his wife but there were pictures of her all over the lodge, mostly "on-stage" photos. She was beautiful and appeared to be a real pro. She had released a record but it didn't sell well and the label lost interest.
I drifted off to sleep on the couch while he was still talking. I knew it was rude, but I was starting to feel more like a hostage than a guest and I had nowhere to go, so I just let it happen. When I awoke it was quiet but there was smoke in the air. He was standing in the middle of the room with a cup in his hand and a straw in his mouth.
It must have three or four a.m. by this point and I tried to just close my eyes and go back to sleep. But it occurred to me that he wasn't smoking. Still, I figured if there was danger, he would have said something by now. But I was pretty sure he'd seen me open my eyes, so I sat up and took a closer look. It turns out we was smoking after all. But not like I'd ever seen it done. He was smoking crystal meth.
I didn't want to be too nosy, but I figured that if he didn't want me to know he was smoking meth, he would have done it somewhere else. And it became clear that he wanted me to know. He wanted me to be his confessor.
Wow...now that is an amazing story. Hope there is a "rest of the story" to that!
ReplyDelete