Gigantic.33

The First Tour

To save money, it was three people in a two-person room. Our first night in London at the Queens Park Hotel, I was the one situated on the floor with the band’s two biggest snorers in beds on either side of me. Sleep was not happening.

It’d been almost ten years since I’d lived in London but I still remembered my way around. I walked along Queensway to Westbourne Grove. London’s only 7-11 was still there and open. I got my favorite chocolate bar, a Double Decker, and ate it on the way back, hoping the walk would tire me out.

Three hour van ride next day to Leichester. First leg of the tour we were opening up for Pavement. Nice fellers, they looked like college boys. Everyone in Mercury Rev had been to college, too, but looked like vampires.

Our first show went well. The opening song, Empire State, required me to pound the same chord repeatedly for seven straight minutes without variation. If I could make it through that, the rest was a cakewalk.

Due to hipster gear requirements of the mid-90s, everything had to be vintage and heavy. The Wurlitzer was at the core of my set-up. Resting on top was a Prophet synthesizer which I used for a few built-in sounds but mostly to trigger a Vintage Keys module. I also had a cassette player duct taped to the top of my Fender Twin, it was part of my job to swap out backing tapes for additional effects.

Good thing we’d done a trial run two weeks prior in Buffalo. With no roadies, breaking down my own gear between sets at lightning speed was a whole other skillset I needed to master. Having five different people losing their shit at me in Buffalo had made that abundantly clear.

Gear packed, I made for the public restroom since there wasn’t one backstage that night. This was where I had my first Paul Newman bathroom moment.

“You waved at me!” a very excited young man said to me, standing just inches behind me while I was actually doing my business.

“Uh, I don’t think so,” I said, trying to stay concentrated on what I was doing.

“You did, you waved at me from the stage!”

“I waved at the audience, it was a general sort of thing.”

“But you were looking right at me!”

“Whatever, pal…”

I zipped, scootched past him, and washed my hands as quickly as possible, then returned to the safety of backstage. Note to self: be more cautious when waving from stage.

From Leichester to Norwich to Wolverhampton, each new town took us deeper into reality being defined by movement rather than any one place in particular. I was digging it on that level. Maybe it was in Manchester that I looked behind me and there, on stage right, were Steve and Mark from Pavement cheering me on.

“Was that some kind of modal thing you were doing?” Steve asked me afterwards.

“Yeah, actually.”

I was impressed he’d figured that out. Modes are ways of reinventing whatever scale you’re playing by using a different starting point. I’d been messing with one called the Dorian Mode, it seemed to find its own space within pre-existing song structures without drawing too much attention to itself.

Finding a corresponding space for myself was another matter. I was forging individual friendships which would eventually survive the tour, but there was no obvious mode that would weave my personality gracefully into the band’s rigid social order. Except one.

My susceptibility to the group’s prevailing drug tendencies created as many new problems as it seemed to solve. Less than a week into the tour, I’d probably ingested the same amount of substances it’d taken me three weeks to consume back in Seattle.

The next night was Barrowland in Glasgow, our biggest yet, and the first time I ever played to this many people. Two thousand Scots make a lot of noise. Despite potentially feeling overwhelmed, I had no problem getting through the set. Keeping my head up and holding simple conversations in the dressing room afterwards was another matter.

Our detour into Wales the next day for a little break was well-timed. Charming little inn in Snowdonia. When I asked the innkeeper how late the bar would be open, he replied:

“How long is a piece of string?”

At the edge of town, I propelled myself up the first mountain, trying to see how far I could put my new bandmates behind me. I soon lost the trail, found myself high above the village on rocky terrain, surrounded by goats. Were goats friendly or not? I couldn’t remember.

It could’ve been a grounding moment like that time in Lolo Pass in Montana, but it was not. Sweating, nauseous, more substances in my system than food. I sat on a rock staring at a goat, who stared back at me sympathetically as I tried to sort it out.

It was a proper dilemma. So many perfectly good jobs and opportunities I’d thrown away rather than conform to the parameters of a situation. But touring was a fucking blast, a journey. It seemed worth it to make compromises to see where the road would lead. If I quit, there were secrets that would never be revealed.

But I already knew what would happen if things kept going like this. Sooner or later, this band was going to destroy me.

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