life of a musician

Mt. Shasta… It’s not just a landform….

After a late night at the Weed Brewery we woke up at a reasonable hour so we could attempt to find a pick-up gig. The show we had booked got cancelled because the bar had been sold and was being renovated. So we went to The Vet Club downtown Mt. Shasta just to try our luck. Turns out it was our lucky day. We picked up a show for the night. With that out of the way we had some time to do some hiking and rock climbing.

When you go hiking around Mt. Shasta it’s pretty funny because people don’t really use maps. We got a sheet of paper with directions to a particular trail and climbing wall that basically said find a random parking lot and a random trail and follow it…. Pretty funny. It’s even funnier that we only took one trail that was wrong and ended up actually finding the climbing wall without too much trouble. After the climbing and hiking it was time to head back to town to play our show. The Vet Club was a blast. There was a great crowd that was up to get down and well we couldn’t have asked for a better pick up gig.   We ended up making friends with a percussionist and he sat in on a few songs toward the end of the night.  Nothing like

some auxiliary percussion to aid in the funk.   Between beautiful scenery and the awesome people it couldn’t have been a better day in Mt. Shasta.

San Fran: The joy of seeing old friends

One of my favorite things about touring is catching up with old friends. I have a lot of them scattered about the country (and world at this point), from a few trips abroad and from Rice’s cosmopolitan population. I think it’s such a gift to be able to see people who live thousands and thousands of miles away and usually don’t have plans to come to Texas any time soon.

I plan to see many people, and solicit their couches a few weeks (or days) ahead before we reach a city. This was the case with Andy and Megan, some very close friends from Rice. We stayed with them in San Francisco, as Hooch mentioned in yesterday’s post, and had a great time. They cooked us incredible food, we went to the Farmer’s Market, we traded music and stories, we played frisbee, we talked politics and love and economics and religion and bio-psycho-social developmental theories (you know all the usual stuff). We all had a wonderful time.

I also got to catch up with one of my old roommates and very good friends Brian Chek. Awesome.

Wish I had a pic of what I was talking about, but this happened on Friday night after the show. There was a lot of graffiti already in those practice rooms, so we added to it. We like to leave our mark I guess.

Some of the most exciting times are the ones that are totally unexpected. We show up at the Brainwash two Fridays ago in San Francisco. It’s a sweet place – food, coffee, beer, laundry, and live music all in one. The show was fun, we played with the same band as Wednesday plus another, we jammed afterwards with them and some of their friends at a crazy warehouse practice space with grafitti everwhere. This alone would have been worth a blog post. Everyone we hung out with was incredibly generous with their instruments, booze, and northern Californian specialties.

Back to the show – there was this moment during our first song when I glanced over the counter at Brainwash only to see two friends that I had not seen in three and a half years – since I studied abroad with them in Ghana. I did a double take, and for a few moments, maybe even a few minutes, I had to make sure I was not indeed dreaming. First I saw Rachel with long hair, even though the whole time I knew her she had a buzz cut. Standing right next to her was Kristen, another friend from the same Ghanaian Urban Ethnomusicological drum and dance fest. What! Last I knew one was in St. Louis and the other was in New York. How’d they end up San Francisco? This alone made the night amazing, because I love these girls!

We got a chance to catch up; I got to meet one of their boyfriends whom I had heard about back in the day; we ate burritos. The time was of course way too short (it always is isn’t it?) but it was so sweet. And I love surprises.

Being able to reconnect with people like this always spreads my grin so wide that my mouth muscles hurt. It was almost too much – catching up with Cole on Wednesday and Thursday, Andy and Megan the whole time, Chek, plus Rachel and Kristen. There wasn’t even enough time for it all.

Stripping down and hanging out at Esalen

We had the distinct pleasure of taking a break at Esalen on our way to San Francisco. For those who don’t know, which I guess is most people, Esalen is an alternative learning and spiritual retreat center dedicated exploring the vast frontier of human potential. As a result, all the major thinkers, spiritual leaders, new age gurus, and metaphysical philosophers of the past four or five decades have passed through the place – people like Abraham Maslow, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Buckminster Fuller, Fritz Perls, George Leonard, and even the Beatles and Ravi Shankar have spent time at Esalen.

Marie shows off the natural beauty of Esalen

A great friend of mine name Marie is the reason we were able to hang out there for a night. She was our gracious host and tour guide. We also had a ton of fun with her, her friends, and her mom. For example;

- We attended a group Gestalt psychotherapeutic session called “Open Seat,” (more below)
- We ate incredible food
- All the food at Esalen is DIVINE
- Much of it is grown on-site
- We experienced the hot springs (clothing discouraged, more on that)
- We played Big Talk kings
- I meditated over the joining of three rivers

Plus, on a personal note, I took a transformational class that studied the Human Potential Movement and American Metaphysics through the lens of Esalen. It was in this class that I made my lifelong friend who co-founded the Big Talk Project with me.

The Naked Hot Tubs

Esalen is infamous for the natural hot springs hot tubs that hang on cliffs over the ocean. Besides being incredibly relaxing and beautiful (the whole of the Californian coast between LA and SF boasts awe-inspiring vistas of mountains, cliffs, waterfalls, ocean, flora, and fauna), the baths are well known for the “clothing optional” rule, which is better put “clothing highly discouraged.”

I thought that I would be right as rain, given my dubious history on a bike, but I must admit I was a bit shy at first. I think it was comfort as well as the nighttime. When it’s dark outside, there’s a sense that you can still hide your anatomy from the rest of the people in the area. When it’s bright daylight, there’s no protection camouflaging anything. By my third trip to the baths, in the middle of our second day at Esalen, I felt much more comfortable sunning the areas of my body which normally remain obscured.

The Naked Mind

Open Seat was a good introduction to a group psychotherapeutic process, and it reminded me of something Martin Atkins said when I interviewed him a few months ago. Bands should get therapy. I whole-heartedly agree with this philosophy, and plan on it when we have more of the basics (three meals a day instead of one, for example) taken care of. We spend a massive amount of time together in very tight quarters, with little personal time or space. Why is this not a normal thing bands talk about and do? Certainly for the cost, but what about famous bands? Have the Red Hot Chili Peppers ever mentioned it? What about 311? When Martin said it, I thought, “of course!” Our experience at Esalen was not directed towards band dynamics at all, but if nothing else it helps us better understand each other and the different way we experience what we’re all going through at the same moment. Pretty cool. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I think the other guys did as well.

As I said in the twitter message, “Esalen, we’ll be back.”

Ramona, and more

New city, new stage, new show. Video coming soon.

The day’s events:

- had a long and in-depth discussion with Nora, the owner of Packard’s Coffee Shop

- The coffee there is awesome. If you’re in Ramona, I recommend it. Also Kona coffee is amazing. Until then I had only tried the beer made with Kona coffee (the Pipeline Porter).

- Three local bands played with us, but they all filled in last minute for bands that cancelled so the crowd was mostly other bands and their significant others. Nevertheless they were good people and we got a lot of email sign-ups

- The guys from Privatized Air invited us to an after party. At first we thought we were screwed because we drove for fifteen minutes way out in the country (“the sticks” as they call it here) on tiny, winding, even dirt roads. Turns out it was on the way back to San Diego where we were staying. Good times, as usual.

THE SUPERBOWL:

Way to go Saints!!! That was a sweet game. I’m glad they won.

- We watched the game at a little sports bar. It’s amazing how quickly you can feel camaraderie with total strangers

- Indeed it’s equally interesting how quickly we divide ourselves into artificial categories and judge each other and gloat and so forth based on these

Day 2: Becoming electricians + Joy in New Orleans

messing with fuses

Today we got up, ate breakfast and went straight to O’Reilly’s Autoparts. I worked on fixing our portable veggie oil filtration pump, while Michael and Ryan jimmy-rigged a system to get power on the bus (The cigarette lighter doesn’t work, of course). 

Before this morning if you’d of shown me a flat fuse versus a round one, and told me to wire it in to something, I’d have stared at you with consternation and asked for more directions. Now I can be the one directing. The pump works. 

Michael and Ryan devised a clever system for accessing the battery – necessary for the inverter- using jumper cables and duct tape. It just reminds me that musicians, at least the kind trying to get famous the way we are, cannot just be musicians. You can’t just play your instrument and walk off stage. You have to don gloves, grab a screwdriver, and start splitting some wires. You’ve got to get a copy of Photoshop and Illustrator, download new fonts and watch videos about how to make the old T-shirt effect. You don’t just see a flyer; you see layers, you see opacity, you see hours at Kinko’s, you start calculating costs, you wonder if you could utilize the same color scheme, you critique the size and readability of fonts and laud simplicity.

I keep forgetting to take pictures, so here's a stock photo

Yeah so the show was great. The other two bands, Fallen Trees and Dirty Bourbon River Show, were all nice guys and great musicians. I’m sure we’ll be playing with them again. The show went crazy late – and no one cared cause that’s how it goes in New Orleans apparently. When we were setting up at 10 (the time the show was supposed to start) the sound guy complained that he shouldn’t have taken that bong hit right before work. He also told us about how he had to bail to Mexico because some people tried to kidnap him to get to his landlord a couple of years ago. 

 Anyway . . . Julie, my girlfriend’s older sister, brought a posse to the HI HO ready to party. They felt the groove and started the dance party before we even finished “I Feel Fine.” They catch on quick and were singing along as we played. Eventually the whole crew ended up crammed together in this cage right by the stage. Ryan’s buddies seemed pretty impressed too. It was awesome meeting them, meeting Julie’s friends, catching up with my old friend and meeting her girlfriend. I love that about playing – I love the people. I love seeing my friends in a such a positive space, meeting their friends, and sharing my feelings and passion with them.

Another positive side note – the booking agent who made this show far and away the most difficult and time consuming one to nail down wasn’t there to sour the mood. He should be happy because I guarantee you they made money at the bar. Hell I even paid for a couple whiskey cokes.

Also – got to see another sunrise.