Two Big Stars have fallen from (towards?) the firmament this year. Last week original bassist Andy Hummel was brought down by cancer that was discovered to have viciously metastasized when he came to have hip replacement surgery. Jody had known Andy since they were teenagers. I had only met him on a couple of occasions, both at SXSW. I didn’t get a chance to know him well, I’m afraid…but still, the loss is palpable. Like Alex, he was 59.
This week was a race to the finish line and I have to admit this blog post will be similarly scrunched. I have an alarm set at 5am to get me up and ready to be out the door to catch my 7.15 train to La Rochelle to begin a much needed vacation.
I have not had a day off–a day off being one in which I
a) don’t work. Not in my studio, not editing, not mixing, not retouching mixes, not doing backing vocals, nothing nada.
b) don’t travel. Don’t land that morning at 7am at Charles de Gaulle so I end up spending the day completely zombified and drooling on the couch cushions, and nodding “yes” slowly and feebly to every question directed at me.
c) aren’t on a day off somewhere else away from home. If it’s on tour, it’s working. OK, you can dick me around on the days I spent in Moalboal in January.
– since Dec. 18. Dec. 19 I left to go to THE DiSCiPLiNES recording sessions in Tromsø and it’s been balls out since then. Seven and half months of solid work, no weekends, no ‘veg days’, no watching Seinfeld in syndication, no getting up and wondering what to do…maybe going here, maybe going there, maybe seeing what’s on cable, maybe going for an aimless drive. Forget it. Basically I stuff a bit of sliced lo-fat turkey in the machinery to keep it functional and lean over a hot computer all day, every day. Or play a show, and/or go thru a security line at an airport near you (or on the way to you).
The life I live is a gift. No doubt. And for all the hours I’ve been putting in, I feel pretty vigorous, all told. The only downside to this month is that Aden has been at our summer place since school got out July 2, at which point I was in Canada. it’s been over a month since I’ve seen her. Too long. We chat on the phone daily when I’m in France but that’s not the same. So this was a bit of a slog to get thru the time when I was away from her.
Not to say the work this week was unpleasant. I spent two days mixing two songs for Perth Australia’s The Stanleys, who apparently aren’t tools after all. Hahah. No, it’s classic sunshine guitar pop at its finest, with contributions from Michael Carpenter, formerly of the from-Australia-popular-in-Spain the Pyramidiacs, and Tomas Dahl, contributing ‘member’ of Turbonegro. The band is based around the DiRenzo brothers, who also have a band called Gigantic. Mark came to Paris for the adventure, and we had a nice, but super concentrated and busy, time working. Then he was out the door and Liisa was back in, we spent the last two days of this year’s session working on finishing up recording and then mixing a song called “Julian’s World” that turned into quite a production, totally crashing my laptop every few minutes but sounding pretty dynamite…considering just a couple of weeks ago the same session was a click track, a scratch vocal, and a Midi piano. Soup to nuts. Her man Trav came to town too, a gentle and bright fellow, we all got along famously and played loud music and thus Dom chose to….work late when possible!
I had interviews this week with NME, for an upcoming book on the Replacements, for an upcoming book on the grunge (again).
OLMEN, 7/30
I spent the morning listening to the “Julian’s World” mix and doing some adjustments with fresh ears, and Liisa and Trav came by to say bye, pick up the backup drive for the sessions with the latest mixes installed in various formats, and give a couple of prezzies (Liisa claims her only non-musical skill is that she can expertly gift wrap a book, having done that as a job during uni) which was very sweet. Being a vegan, she also left behind quite a chunk of tofu in my fridge, and I…made it into lunch! Muah ahah.
Heading down the stairs on my way to the metro, the handle on the top of suitcase, the one I would use most for getting it up and down the stairs so it’s upright not lengthwise, broke. Hmmm. This suitcase was really showing its age, it was a cheapy that Dom gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago and has been on duty non stop ever since, it’s the size for all the short hops I do. Long haul stuff is done with a big blue suitcase which also has a broken handle but I think will get me thru the next year or so yet.
I took my nearby metro–normally I would go to Bastille and hop line 5 for direct conveyance to Gare du Nord but Bastille station is all blocked off, the open exits are way on the other side from where I approach and I’m not even sure how to get to line 5 there at all. It’ll be done by the time I’m back in town, so this time I changed at Republique and got to Gare du Nord. You have to up several levels from the line 5 metro platform, and at the top of the first escalator (which usually doesn’t work) there’s a blind turn and then you look down a corridor at more escalators…and in this case…a MASSIVE PILE OF DOG SHIT. Who brings a great Dane or whatever it was into the station to SHIT and then NOT PICK IT UP. There are felonies, and there are capital offenses. Off with his head. The shit was well trod upon so sort of spread out like a bricklayer spreads out mortar…or a pizza chef spreads a ball of dough into an ever larger flat circle…if you get my drift.
I had printed my tix at home (I have a printer now! Incredible). so I had a little down time to sit on my ass and wait for them to announce our track, and then went to the train and only got a little ripped off when I had already paid my internet time on board when we had to switch trains unexpectedly in Brussels–’technical problem’ (like, technically, Thalys owes me 20 more minutes of net access), train waiting on the other side of the platform, NOBODY able to FUCKING READ A FUCKING SIGN and get on the right car. I was, by the way.
Then we got to Antwerp and two guys from the festival were waiting for me on the platform, and we drove to Olmen, it took some bad traffic in and around Antwerp to get thru but then smooth sailing. Olmen is a village, surrounded by farms–lots of turkeys, lots of sheep. There’s a canal, of course. And a massive zoo for some reason–evidently started by a local guy who worked on some big ship, and….stole animals from all over the world??
The guys were sleeping off their early morning departure from Oslo when I pulled up to the hotel, which was an incredibly stylish B&B, all grey and futuristic, but charming at the same time…homey, but mod homey. I dropped a few things and then we all went over to the festival and descended upon the victuals like we were freshly escaped zoo residents. It was a spread of Chinese stuff, and it was oddly perfect.
The festival site was a little space between a school, a church that’s no longer a church, and the residence of the priest who’s no longer there…they build a big stage outside, put vendors all around, have some bands in the church, too evidently. It gets about 1,000 people, which is surely several Olmen’s worth of peeps, paying €10-€15 to get in, so the bands aren’t massive, and we were, like…highly anticipated (by some). We sat around looking not busy, drinking crummy Aussie cheap wine, the endless free beers (not me), chatting about next year and signing a few tax docs, as one does when one has a band.
Finally we get to it. We had a great backline, lots of help, no problems. we set up, the people distracted by the band on the other stage (the bands were staggered all day, and prob. staggering by night). It got dark. I talked the backstage bar out of a little vodka shot, and we went on in a blaze of gore, since I crushed my lip like in the 2nd bar of the first song. There were a LOT of rowdy teens in the audience who kept chanting some slogan, for some little gang they had. Well I played along, and they liked it so much, that they formed a MOSH PIT. Many of the Olmen and Olwomen were terrified and stayed WAY back but you know, Flemish are pretty big & tough bastards, so also, people just sort of worked with it. At one point I was walking thru the moshers with my mic, and they kept missing me, I felt like Robert Duvall’s character in Apocalypse Now.
I think they liked us, it was hard to tell, it was the whole town’s nite to get hammered, and they did a great job. But people dug it…it was too dark for me to bother going out in the crowd with the merch, but when I went back in the catering many of the staff bought shirts and CDs, so it worked out. I parked the merch at the pathetic merch area….pathetic cuz NOBODY cared…it was in the BEER tent and like who is going to spend extra money on something they have to carry around and then have like, 5 less beers? No way.
When I went to pack up that night, having had as I imagined no further sales, I closed up the suitcase and extended the handle for rolling away and it spectacularly shattered. OK, that suitcase is done…except now it only had the side handle, and I couldn’t roll it anymore, and I had to get home.
We had friends at the show–from Brussels, from London, from Finland, from Breda–and I drank my scuzzy Aussie Chard (uh, last time I checked Belgium is next door to a massive WINEMAKING COUNTRY–where cheap wine is €2/bottle…what, exactly, is the point of importing the dregs of Aussie scuzz?) and got my buzz on, so I was totally fried by the time I got to the Inn, and crashed.
Up the next morning for breakfast, I felt like a chardonnay-flavored kangaroo had just kickboxed by medulla oblongata when I wasn’t looking, but the nice breakfast spread sorted me out. We did ‘the receipt thing’ and then a big van taxi took us to Antwerp station, and I literally ran saying my goodbyes as I humped that useless valise along with me to the lower platform, so I could jump that 13.03 and have a little more time to change in Brussels than the 13.38 B-rail recommended I take. I settled in with some badass looking dudes, a guy with long hair and rings on every finger nervously counting 50 Euro notes…that makes ME nervous. If you’re such a badass you don’t need to hide your money, but you’re also, like, shaky, jittery (is the safety on or off?)…yikes.
I got settled on my train to Paris after gobbling some quiche in the station, and became, like, the train’s IT guy. First the woman next to me needed me to compose and send a text message on her phone to her son to meet her at the station, she wasn’t dexterous enough to do it, the poor dear. That was sweet. Then the woman behind me asked if she could check her Facebook on my computer (yes, for whatever increment of €6.50 you care to chip in, dahlink) but it seems like I got the hour for free cuz it said the transaction did not complete, no email came with a receipt, and I got online for longer than the hour it would have been…hmmm.
I got home and unpacked and packed and packed a few things for Dom and some for Aden, and retired the broken suitcase, tweaked the Stanleys mix a bit, listened to some records including the album “Wild Aim” from Picture Day, which has a song called “Little Bigger” that was written by the band’s Eric Lichter (also of Green Pajamas), but performed almost entirely by me, recorded here in Paris a year or two ago (I don’t remember how long ago in fact). I play piano, acoustic guitar and sing. They added a vocal or two in Seattle and it sounds really really wicked, quite haunting and dark.
On those notes, I have a train to catch. Bye.
Love
KS
Paris