Gigantic.56
Ground Zero
Australia is literally as far as you can go from New York without leaving the planet, so it’s fitting that’s where our tour finally ended. We just couldn’t go any further.
If I was really going to break out on my own and do this solo thing, it was time to get started.
In London, I took a meeting with someone at a major label. There was a lot of energy in the room, a lot of enthusiastic talk.
I was reading The Art of War at the time. Maybe not such a random choice. “Be cautious,” Sun Tzu advises, “when a deal is discussed but no papers are on the table.” Sun Tzu must’ve been in the record business. That deal went nowhere.
Back in New York, I was sitting in a diner with my friend Susan, who was our sales rep at V2.
“So, what does a sales rep actually do?” I asked her.
“I promote the records to chain stores and distributors,” she said, “otherwise they won’t carry them.”
“Really?”
When she saw the look of confusion on my face, she continued her tutorial, going through the nuts and bolts of how records actually made their way from the studio to the general public.
Amazingly, I’d been in the music business for almost five years and had little-to-no idea about how it actually worked. To some extent, I really was starting from ground zero.
I finished the demo I recorded with Jacques Cohen in Poughkeepsie, took it down to the city, and plunked down 800 bucks for 300 cds. That was a good deal in 1999.
I kept some for myself, sent some over to Katie, who was hustling in the UK. This is where I imagined this thing was going to take off, if we could make it happen.
If Kingston were on the map in those days, it was at the edge where the map read: Here Be Monsters. Not much happening, just a good place for pirates to hang out.
A few people were trying to get things going. Friends from grade school, Valerie and Cam, had renovated the dilapidated old synagogue downtown, turned it into a nightclub.
Valerie came over one night.
“We’d like you open up for someone,” she said.
I figured she was talking about some blues jam or jazz brunch, I was already strategizing how to politely decline.
“I’m kind of busy,” I apologized, “anyone in particular?”
“Have you ever heard of The The?”
Holy fuck. I mean, firstly, why was The The playing in a bar in downtown Kingston? And, secondly, what kind of divine intervention would put me on the bill?
I said yes immediately, of course, but as the show approached, I looked at the venue with a critical eye. The upstairs was glorious, but the performance space was a concrete bunker in the basement. Low ceiling. Hard, reflective surfaces.
The biggest issue was there was no backstage. You had to load out off the front of the stage and make your way through the crowd to some sort of green room which might as well have been in Port Ewen.
In my mom’s basement I found my old wooden Radio Flyer from when I was a kid. I screwed wooden poles vertically onto each corner, draped it with Christmas lights and dubbed it my Gypsy Wagon. My Fender Deluxe Reverb and other gear actually fit perfectly. If it worked, I’d be able to get all my gear off the stage all by myself in one shot.
Soundcheck was brief and not promising. When it came time for the show, there was so much low end rumbling about on stage I literally could not hear my own amp, much less my vocals.
Half the crowd were local drunkards who’d come to see anyone, but the other half were die-hard The The fans, some (I later found out) had driven hours to be here. When I performed a deep cut off the Soul Mining LP, there were people singing along.
The Gypsy Wagon worked. I was able to get my gear off the stage and through the densely-packed crowd.
Back in Syracuse, I’d sat with headphones at Bird Library every day, listening to Soul Mining while scribbling out my earliest attempts at fiction writing. Would I tell Matt Johnson how his music had been the soundtrack to my tortured 18-year-old soul?
When I finally got to talk with him in the green room, what I said to Matt Johnson was this:
“The sound sucks.”
“I know,” he said.
We did get to talk a little bit beyond that. Nice guy. Their show was more of a four-piece rock band sound than the early-80s drum-machine-heavy production that had mesmerized me back in the day. But it was a great night, and I really appreciated that Valerie had asked me to do it. Even if the sound sucked.
Most of The The’s show dates around the northeast in late 1999 were in small venues on purpose. He was about to release a new album, this was a below-the-radar way to get the band ready.
A week later I’d be heading back to the UK and Ireland to play more consecutive solo shows than I’d ever done. Whether they’d be below-the-radar or not was yet to be revealed.
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