Gigantic.47
Moveable Feast
Sweden
In Stockholm someone hipped me to Jan Johnansson, a Swedish jazz pianist from the 1960s. I went to a record store and picked up Jazz på svenska (literally, Jazz in Swedish.) It came out in 1964 and sounds like A Charlie Brown Christmas directed by Ingmar Bergman. Just fantastic.
I gave it to our sound man Squid to play as our walk-on music that night. I thought it set the tone quite nicely, but the audience seemed mystified. Later someone asked,
“Why did you open your show with the theme from the news?”
Whoever told me about Jazz på svenska neglected to add that the Swedish Walter Cronkite had been opening up his nightly broadcast with it for decades. Well, it still sounded pretty cool to me.
Another highlight of Scandinavia was Howe Gelb from Giant Sand, he was opening for us and riding along on our bus (a trick I’d soon be borrowing.)
Howe had about ten years on me. He was graying slightly and possessed a poetic reserve that kept me sitting up all hours on the bus to ask him questions. Not about music even, but life in general. He just seemed to know stuff.
Howe usually played solo, the night we played Gothenborg, he asked me to join him on stage to play keyboard. Happily. I’d been paying pretty close attention, usually I can jump in fairly easily. Howe was a whole other story. He’d stop, he’d start, speed up, slow down, add chords and phrases I didn’t recall hearing previously.
“That was a bucking bronco ride,” he said after the show, “you’re hard to shake.”
Apparently, he’d spent a portion of his focus, just for fun, trying to throw me off, in front of a live audience. Both counterintuitive and a little bit amazing. I don’t know how Giant Sand does it. I’m a major fan.
—
Italy
Wherever you play, the venue is supposed to provide supper. In Italy, promoter Andrea and his crew actually made a point of eating with us each night.
This was not dine-and-dash, these were full course meals. Tortellini, then eggplant, then stuffed peppers, then… We’d start looking woozily at the clock at some point, like, Don’t we have to get to the club?
“Maybe you play at 11… maybe you play at 12…”
Italy. You drink your wine. You eat your dinner slowly. The club will be there.
I started to make sure to sit next to Andrea at dinner time. He gave good pointers, he knew which places had the best house wine. Our last night was Caron’s birthday and it was the best. A violin player even came to our table to serenade us.
Toward the end of the meal most of my bandmates ordered cappuccinos. Andrea rolled his eyes in disgust.
“What?” I asked him.
“Cappuccino… maybe for breakfast, maybe… but after dinner, never.”
“So what should I order?”
He looked at me in disbelief.
“Espresso,” he said, like, how could I even ask such a question?
It wasn’t like I’d never had espresso before, but what came next was new. After I’d drank it, while the little cup was still hot, Andrea swiftly filled it with grappa.
He looked at me very seriously while he lifted his own little cup to demonstrate.
“First sniff, then drink, first sniff then drink…sniff then drink.”
He literally repeated it three times. I did exactly what he said.
It’s simple physics. The warm cup heats the grappa ever so slightly, it releases some sort of heady aroma. As I breathed it in, the front of my skull seemed to open up.
Drinking the grappa immediately afterwards, the warm distillation travels down your throat into your stomach, and does for the rest of your body what the aroma just did for your head.
Incredibly satisfying, it resets everything. Andrea smiled to see his lesson had the desired effect.
“I love to cook, I love the table,” he pronounced. “I am Italian.”
We’d been at the table for over two hours, wine with every course, but I was tuned like a fiddle and ready to play.
At 11, or 12, or whenever…
—
France
Somewhere in Europe we were having a band meeting along with reps from the record company. They still didn’t know who’d be opening for us in France.
I looked from face to face, I couldn’t understand why there was any question.
“Superflu,” I said.
“Who?”
“The band who played with us at Divan du Monde in Paris?”
Maybe no one remembered because that was the night Richard Branson came to see us. He had to be whisked out of our dressing room due to some lapse in judgement lost to history, but I distinctly remembered being in the audience for Superflu and thought they were about the most perfect band I could imagine.
When I went to their dressing room afterwards to compliment them, I think they thought I was bullshitting them. But when we converged on Toulouse a short time later, they said, “I guess you really do like us.”
Their name doesn’t translate. In English it sounds like a really bad respiratory infection. But in French, Superflu means superfluous, which they certainly are not.
A brief description does no justice. Nicolas, Sonia, Sébastien, Gauthier, and Gilles intermingled like chamber musicians but playing pared-down indie with violin and a hint of French traditional. They’d sometimes swap instruments depending on the song, which appeals to me. And, of course, the French lyrics add mystery, though Nicolas and Sonia sung succinctly enough that I could almost understand.
We had several lively dinners together, including a memorable one in Strasbourg, the city in France that’s more beer than wine because it’s on the German border. Four out of five band members were charitable enough to speak English, and Gauthier spoke marijuana fluently, so we communicated perfectly on that level.
As a parting gift, Sonia gave me a laminated map of the Paris Metro. It would prove handy, I’d be visiting soon, and one day recording with them…
—
Greece
I’ve loved hats ever since my grandparents travelled in the 60s and brought hats for me from all over Europe.
In a gift shop in Athens, I saw this hat with a three-foot tassel dangling to one side. What was this amazing thing? The woman told me it was a féssi and explained it was very traditional.
“What would people think if I wore a hat like this on stage?”
“They would think that you are a friend of Greece.”
Okay, two things.
One: I refused to wear black onstage like everyone else, but did take pleasure in wearing somewhat outlandish things on occasion (at one festival, I wore a galabeya on stage that Dawn got me in Egypt, something between a very long shirt and a man dress.)
Two: Since I was the one hustling to learn the basics in each country, I’d been elected to greet the audience every night in whatever language.
So, in Athens, wearing my new féssi, I stepped up to the mic:
“Yasas, efharistoume pou írthate…”
Hello, we thank you for coming. I waved with the back of my hand, having been instructed that waving with the front of your hand in Greece is sort of like flipping someone off.
The crowd responded very well. I got a lot of double-cheek kisses after the show.
I guess I was a friend of Greece.
—
Garth UK
Garth Hudson and his band made it to London to play with us. A wizard-like performance, it’s like he was conjuring at the keyboard.
I found out that Garth liked hats too, so the last day we were together, I gave him my Greek féssi. Somewhere there’s a picture of the two of us, him wearing it, smiling broadly.
We all road to Heathrow together. They were going back to New York, we were heading off to Japan. I’d never been, but drummer Randy had been there. He told me Tokyo was a really trippy city to let yourself get lost in.
And that’s just what I was about to do.
—
Click below for…
Branson and “lapse in judgement lost to history” - now I’m super curious. Cool chapter in toto.