Airbus A340

REM Tour '99

Twenty-five years ago this week, we opened up for REM at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. How weird is that, both that I was in a band that toured with REM, and that it’s been 25 years. Jeez. It’s prompting recollections…

I was addicted to Skymap and it wasn’t working. Our tour manager, Caron, suggested we try visiting the flight deck to see where we were. Was this even possible?

We were flying directly from London to LA on Virgin, owned by Richard Branson, who also owned us. Well, he owned our label, anyway. Caron cheekily told one of the flight attendants:

“The boys were hanging out with Richard just last week, he said they could bop up to the flight deck anytime.”

It’s true we were “hanging out” with Richard i.e. he’d ducked into our dressing room in Paris, said Hello with his winning smile and drank most of our beer. It was not true he’d said we could bop up to the flight deck anytime, but maybe I’d missed that part.

At any rate, the flight attendant was soon escorting me, Caron, and another curious bandmate up to the flight deck (this was two years before 9-11, life was different.)

Entering the cabin, I found both pilot and co-pilot with feet up on the console eating sandwiches, reading magazines. I think one of them might’ve had mayonnaise on his face.

“You’re opening for REM?” the pilot said, almost in disbelief, putting his sandwich and magazine down.

“You’re flying a plane,” I said, clarifying which was more impressive at the moment.

“No, really, you’re opening for REM,” he repeated.

“No, really, you’re flying a plane,” I persisted.

At this point, the truly awesome panorama beyond the pilot outside the windscreen began to register deeply.

“Is that Hudson Bay?” I asked in a state of wonderment, looking down at this gigantic horseshoe of water we were about to fly over.

The pilot was still looking at me instead of out the windshield, I almost had to coerce him to turn his head. When he finally glanced over his shoulder to look down at the planet, he said something like:

“Uh, I don’t know.”

“How can you not know, don’t you have, like, a map or something?”

I was a little confused. Having never looked out upon the continent with such a commanding view from the heavens, my brain was on the threshold of radical awe, but the almost comical exchange with the man responsible for keeping hundreds of souls aloft was competing mightily for my attention.

I can’t remember exactly where the conversation went from there, but it must have gone well. The pilots were really friendly, autopilot continued to work flawlessly, and I was invited to return a few hours later for the landing. By then, my bandmate had disappeared within the folds of his travel pillow and sleep mask (a uniform several bandmates had taken to wearing even when not airborne) so it was all me.

There was now a different person in the pilot seat. This, it turns out, was the captain, who’d been having a nap in a hidden compartment because it was such a long flight. The other two were both copilots. One of them offered me what they called the “jump seat” and showed me how to strap myself in, Chuck-Yeager-style, with a belt that attached in five places, shoulders, hips, and between your legs.

Near as I could tell, we were high over Vegas. The desert beyond seemed to pass quickly, then there was one more set of mountains, I’m guessing now these were the San Bernadinos. The captain adjusted the autopilot from 35,000 down to 18,000, which made me feel like we were barely clearing them.

To early settlers, each of these final landscapes would have been major challenges. In an Airbus A340, you just leapfrog everything, then begin your descent. You find yourself suddenly above a grid system of roadways as far as the eye can see.

Los Angeles was an alien landscape to me at that time. I’d only been there four or five times prior. It was a smoggy day. I think I recognized downtown and the Hollywood Hills. LA didn’t exactly conform to my notion of “city” like New York or London, but the vastness of it was staggering. If you had told me that ten years later I’d be living here, I wouldn’t have believed it.

“The captain is flying the plane now,” one of the co-pilots whispered to me.

He was steering with something resembling a joystick with his left hand. You could feel the difference. Minor adjustments were being made, corresponding directly with whatever the captain was doing. Nobody had their feet up at this point.

As big as Los Angeles is, at this speed, LAX comes up pretty quickly, last stop before the Pacific.

We seemed to have a choice of runways before us. The captain, communicating with the control tower, selected one and lined us up.

I’d actually flown in a Cessna before. When you’re looking at a runway head-on, there’s a moment of disbelief that you’re about to reconnect with the planet without crashing. I had always imagined that in a big passenger jet this would be magnified, that the land would come at you screamingly fast, there’d be a last-minute scramble to keep the thing righted and on course.

Actually, it was remarkably calm. You know how the dotted lines on the highway seem to pass at a manageable speed? The painted lines on the runway are so BIG that they actually seem to be passing incredibly slowly. You’d never guess the plane was still going over 150 miles an hour, it’s very measured. Like, if you absolutely had to land this thing yourself like in the movies, maybe you could.

It’s once on the ground that things get scary.

They had given me a pair of headphones, and I was listening not only to our captain talking to the control tower, but a whole mess of other conversations in the background. The tarmac seemed like an absolutely INSANE place. This plane rolling here, that plane trying to sneak in there, crossing paths.

This is why they tell you to keep your seatbelts fastened. Being on the ground is more dangerous than being in the air! But we made it to the gate without incident, and I was soon unbuckling and thanking the crew sincerely. They thanked me too. Turns out Caron had given them REM tickets, which better explains how I got up here in the first place.

They’d let me leave my carry-on in first class, so it was easy for me to de-board without having to fight my way back to my seat. I rejoined the band at baggage claim. You don’t get to skip baggage when you’re on tour, because there’s a lot of it. Then there’d be customs to deal with since we were coming from overseas.

Here’s a fun detail: You know when your driver is waiting for you at the airport with that little handwritten sign? When you’re really famous, they don’t put your real name on the sign, they use a previously-agreed-upon fake name and you look for it. We weren’t really famous, but we used a fake name. I can’t now remember what it was.

We’d be playing two nights at the Greek Theatre so we wouldn’t be getting on a tour bus for a few days. Our driver took us to Le Parc, the hotel we’d stayed at previously in West Hollywood.

Things began to get very LA very quickly at this point, which was not all bad. Our suites all had click-on fireplaces, plush robes, and our manager had left each of us lovely gift baskets. Things you could get used to.

We had cocktails at the rooftop bar, then they took us to the Little Door, a restaurant I would return to fondly over the years. There was a famous producer at the bar who I wouldn’t recognize if I tripped over him, but a couple of my bandmates did, so they went over to chat him up.

I’d had enough adventures for one day and was literally falling asleep over my plate of monkfish. It’d been a pretty auspicious way to kick off the tour, but we’d been knocking around Europe awhile already, and I was looking forward to climbing between some freshly pressed sheets.

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