Red Rocks
REM Tour ’99
Shows back east are a day’s drive apart, if that. You play every night, one city after another.
The West is a different animal. Two-day drives to the next show are typical. Even if there are small markets and college towns in between, booking agents tend to skip them.
Today we wake somewhere in Nevada. Dominic pulls off at a truck stop. Tour buses are big and have to park where the 18-wheelers do. If you want to go into the truck stop, you have to walk through acres of idling big rigs and assorted characters. I’ve done this many times. At night it can be downright scary, during the day it’s not so bad.
Both truckers and tour bus drivers have mandatory sleep requirements. This isn’t one of those ten-hour breaks, but a truck stop is a commitment, you tend to stay a while. Long haul truckers and touring musicians are second cousins, of a sort, this is the crossroads where we brush past each other.
I need some air before I enter the truck stop. I go to where the lot turns into open field, covered in scrubby vegetation. The soil is light-colored and compacted, but it breaks down into fine sand when you pinch a clump of it between your fingers.
Inside the truck stop are slot machines. Nevada. My first two quarters yield nothing. On my third try I win $1.25. I quit while I’m ahead and buy a couple of cheap postcards with my winnings.
Back on the bus, some of us watch a movie to pass the time. By early afternoon we’re in Salt Lake City, where we take a proper break. We won’t be staying the night, but we have day rooms so we can wash up. A recent tornado demolished the hotel that Caron had booked initially, so instead we’re at the same Econo Lodge we crammed into in 95, in much different circumstances.
Back then I had friends here who introduced me to Bill and Nada’s, an all-night cafe that hasn’t changed since it first opened in the 40s. I call a cab to bring me over there, Jeff and James come for the ride. We grab some French toast. The cafe still has paper placemats with pictures of all the presidents, I saved one from last time.
After lunch, Jeff and James go their own way. I decide to check out the Tabernacle. Seems like the thing to do when in Salt Lake City.
At the visitors center, I find myself alone in a darkened screening room. There’s a video of the Tabernacle Choir, I figure I’ll watch one song. Then I watch a second song. Before I know it, I’ve stayed for the whole thing.
Oddest thing. It puts me into a deep meditative state. I emerge from the visitors center feeling calmer than I’ve felt in months. I wander the grounds with a good feeling in my chest, a sense of clarity as I look around.
You can’t actually go into the temple, but you can view it from the outside. It does really look like a sort of heavenly castle in the sky. I’ve been to many cathedrals. In its way, it ranks favorably.
I bump into Caron and Paddy who are also having a look around. They’re speaking with a young woman who’s working as a missionary, if that’s the word. She’s very friendly, and ridiculously cute. Genius PR move by the LDS. If Caron and Paddy weren’t tugging on my sleeve, she would’ve talked me into that Book of Mormon, no problem.
Paddy goes off with his film camera to document tornado damage, Caron and I grab an iced coffee at a nearby bookstore cafe, then spend the rest of the day poking around town.
I know this is the west as opposed to the mid-west where I’d lived for a few years, but it’s bringing up summer memories. It’s August, so yes, it’s summer. But summer isn’t just an average temperature reading. It’s a sensation of being rooted in one place while the season washes over you in all its lazy glory.
There’s a moment just past sunset, sitting on the steps outside the motel, having a smoke in the early evening breeze. I get a taste of it, that beautiful, languid, summer essence, when you’ve got nowhere to go, and that’s a.o.k. with you.
Then we get back on the tour bus.
# # #
James, our sound man, lives in Colorado, and has said the drive through the Rockies will be beautiful. I climb from my bunk several times but it’s still too dark to see anything.
Finally, I pull on clothes, head to the front of the bus and commit. We are in a tunnel, in the middle of a mountain. When we emerge, a revelation. You don’t need to be on the flight deck of a jumbo airplane to look out over the land as if from the sky.
A passage from my journal at the time:
“Here in the lips of God, this miles high winding pass carved into this rock serpentine by a high mountain river which the road hugs and parallels. From here, a two-hour decent at breakneck speed, mountains, sky, a blur of trees, until we reach the edge of the Prairie Ocean, still a mile high, and we have arrived in Denver.”
# # #
It is worth mentioning that Neal Cassady was from Denver*. Any American road mythology that doesn’t at least mention our patron saint would be lacking if not cursed.
Unlike NC, we’re not in a 1940s downtown boarding house but another clean hotel dayroom, taking care of business. Caron is discussing particulars of our upcoming Australian tour, a month away and eagerly anticipated, my first trip south of the equator.
I shave, iron a shirt. Then it’s off to Red Rocks. Which are really red.
The bus parks at the bottom of the hill. A van drives us the rest of the way up to the venue.
“You’ll walk this hill once,” the van driver says, knowingly.
He means once will be enough to convince you a van ride is better, but a few of us take it as a personal challenge. We walk down to the trading post that predates the venue, then walk back up. The air is thinner here and the hill is steep, but there are steep hills in downtown Kingston too.
Red Rocks amphitheater was created by the WPA in the 40s, which makes it impressively historic and gives it its classic style. But the rocks themselves have been in this formation for at least 35 million years. Just to put things in perspective.
Something about the government-engineering combined with the larger-than-life rock formation is giving me a Devils Tower, Close Encounters vibe. Like the event we’re waiting for is not another REM concert but a coordinated communion with a fleet of alien spacecraft.
After a three-minute soundcheck, we have dinner and linger afterwards chatting with Ken and Scott. By this point in the tour our bands have been commingling more effortlessly.
Red Rocks is the first show on the tour without assigned seating, this means people arrive early to make sure they get a good seat. For the first time we’re playing to a full house.
During our show, I cannot stop looking at those giant rocks. This place holds 10,000 people, but the audience is dwarfed in both size and sense of importance by these massive rocks. The sky between them takes on a golden blue hue. Later someone who was in the audience will tell me they saw a rainbow over the stage.
I always play a little piano solo at the end of Goddess on a Highway. Tonight I play an REM tribute, working in Mike Mills’ opening bass lines to Cuyahoga, tailored to a D to A chord progression. I wonder if any of them hear it?
Watching REM’s show tonight, I’m psyched when they finally play Driver 8, featuring one of those Peter Buck guitar riffs I’ve tried a thousand times, and here he is, playing it almost right in front of me.
Despite the massive rocks calling out to eternity and the universe, there is no alien visitation culminating the evening, just an afterparty.
When I was younger and would sneak into an afterparty, it seemed like the coolest thing in the world. When you’re on tour, theoretically at the center of the action but exhausted, it’s more like, “I’m really tired, why am I here?”
The whole band seems to come to this same conclusion. We head back to the bus.
While the rest of the crew packs the equipment, Caron always makes sure our rider [snacks/drinks] makes it onto the bus. With the largesse they’ve been piling into our dressing rooms, the bus is stocked. We’ve got a full bar and enough munchies for ten people to eat for a week.
Changing into sweats, talking shit, and falling asleep on each others’ shoulders with drinks in our hands, this is the only afterparty any of us desires at this point.
Our six-date tour with REM is winding down, tonight was our second to last.
Dominic starts her up and points us toward Texas.
This has been the sixth installment in this series.
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*Neal Cassady, aka Dean Moriarty, hero of Kerouac’s On the Road.