THE GET LUCKY TOUR DIARY
(May 1999, North America)

I. OUT OF THE UMBRA

When a rock band isn't on tour, it's like when Winston Churchill or Bob Hope don't have a war to keep them busy. Civilian life turns us strange, so strange that we're almost human, like real people, with dogs (cats, actually) and jobs and other banal problems. We become dull and fat; our secret identities revealed as moth-eaten sequined costumes hanging in the closet while our delicate magic powers wither, radiated away by television and the arbitrary humiliations of bosses.

So when our good friend Michael Kastelic, former front man with garage-rock legends the Cynics, called in late winter from Pittsburgh, inviting the Leaving Trains to go on tour with his new band, Honeyburst, we felt like we'd escaped the orphanage, that we were the last puppies in the pound to be rescued from the gas chambers.

Touring is the greatest escape. You can act out in all sorts of extravagant fashions in front of strangers you'll never see again -- or so you think -- and the next day, you'll be hundreds of miles away and no one in the new town will know about the previous night's embarrassments. There's always another city just over the horizon, a new chance at redemption, a fresh start.

Leaving Trains tours are riddled with endless distracting possibilities; we never know where or when the van is going to break down; or who will quit the band midtour and what stranger will jump in the van and join us; which nights we'll party so much in one city that we miss a show in the next; who will end up in jail; or whether multiple encores will inspire the crowd in D.C. to follow us out of the club and into the streets as we raze the White House and take over the TV stations; or whether we'll be physically fending off bouncers, sound people and the police as we try to escape the club with all of our equipment intact. No matter how cautiously or smoothly our booking agent, Eric Stone of Stone Alone agency, plans a schedule, we realize that once we get into the van (no different than astronauts committing to their mutual claustrophobia inside a similarly sized hurtling cylinder), we have no control over the tour or even its direction. Instead the tour will direct us. And change us. Few musicians travel that many miles unscathed. There's always the possibility that we'll fall in love. Or fall apart. Or never come back.

In the past, all Leaving Trains tours have been chaotic and dangerous, but the predictable threat of violence and dismemberment was at least balanced this time by knowing that if we could somehow make it to the shows, we'd get to see the high-spirited Michael Kastelic perform every night, which is such a rarity for us, since the Cynics only performed in L.A. once or twice before breaking up a few years ago. Now, you have to understand. I consider most garage-rock revivalists to be part a cowardly, whimpering clique of 'fraidy cats reliving the '60s (minus the napalm) from the safe distance of several decades. But the Cynics were one of those rare '80s garage bands whose original songs exceeded their influences, thanks especially to Michael's mournfully whimsical, rabid vocal delivery. The Cynics were one of the all-time great rock & roll combos, which automatically made seeing Mr. Kastelic's new group, Honeyburst, a necessity.

Plus, spring, with its attendant carpeting of flowers across the continent, was always a lovely time to tour, not to mention that the USA was currently bombing Yugoslavia and Iraq and the Sudan (among other countries), and the chance to scream protests about bloody murder into a microphone at hundreds of hostage, war-pig American killers-by-proxy in the collective audience was just too tempting to pass up.

Leaving Trains tours are usually signaled by natural disasters, such as the moderate earthquake that rattled the outside stairs to my apartment building as we loaded equipment into the van just as we were leaving on our previous tour, with the Humpers two years ago. And then there was that time that a big quake struck L.A. a few days after we left L.A., or the night another sharp quake hit hours after ex-Trains guitarist Bobby Belltower took a train to move back to New York. Or the Rodney King rebellion, which happened when we were back east in 1992. Or when we drove through Oklahoma City a few days after its federal-building bombing.

And now we were going to be driving through O.K. City again, just a week after the area had been leveled by killer tornados, the largest in its history.

We escaped L.A. by late afternoon, Friday, May 14, after a lazy start and detour to Astro Burger on Gower and Melrose Ave. in Hollywood, a vegetarian fast-food place, where we stocked up at the drive-thru window. Then we wrestled our way through L.A. traffic for an hour or two until we were past Pomona and Claremont, on the 10 freeway, where cars finally became scarce. The desert east of Lost Angeles was dark, with a particularly foreboding, large smoky cloud looming over an anvil-shaped San Gabriel mountain to the north, lit up with a dull red, furnace-ember glow.

We headed quickly toward Arizona after the late start, the van moving really easily and smoothly, almost driving itself, happy perhaps to not be turning in concentrated circles, digging ruts in the freeway in the same devil's triangulated noose/loop 'round Silver Lake and Hollywood, from work, back home, from work, back home, repeat a thousand times yearly. The 1987 Dodge van, which we'd named Valerie Malone after Tiffany Amber-Thiessen's deliciously fucked-up character on BEVERLY HILLS 90210, seemed to push against its harness willfully, impatient to get east.

Our road manager turned out to be Fred Manchento (singer with synth duo EMA-3 and stubborn rockists THE HELPFUL NUNS), who decided at the last minute to join us after our usual roadie, Ames Evil, had to commit to a simultaneous Betty Blowtorch/Vanilla Ice (?!!) tour. Fred ended up doing a heroic job by helping us with everything from fixing the van after its frequent bouts with entropy to psychically anticipating problems, like replacing guitars onstage before we'd even broken strings, and most importantly, keeping us entertained and cheerful during the long drives with tales about his ancestors' complex and sordid history as pirates and dictators over the past 600 years in Europe and South America.

I was optimistic that Get Lucky would be the first smooth and happy Leaving Trains tour, especially since everyone in this lineup, guitarist Melanie Vammen (Pandoras, Muffs), bassist Miss Koko Puff (Pointy Kitty, Sluts for Hire), Allen Clark II (Hot Damn, AC3, Fearless Leader, ex-Lazy Cowgirls) and your narrator, enjoys traveling. On previous Trains tour over the past two decades, there's always been at least one person with us who actively hated traveling, and that often led to furious sightseeing debates-turned-into-brawls and band breakups.

The tragedy was that we had to leave our regular drummer, the legendary Maddog Karla (Controllers/Legal Weapon), back in L.A. since the tour was originally planned with our previous batteriste, Allen Clark II, who played on the Leaving Trains CD SMOKE FOLLOWS BEAUTY. Allen had moved back to his native Indiana habitat (where he first came to attention as the original Lazy Cowgirls drummer) with wife/Hot Damn singer Zebra Stripes and 6-year-old son (and AC3's wunderkind singing drummer) Allen Clark III not long after the release of SMOKE FOLLOWS, but we all stayed in touch and agreed to time our vacations to go on tour with Honeyburst.

The plan was simple: Super-roadie Fred Manchento and the three L.A.-based Trains were to drive Valerie the van straight from California to Indiana, rescue Allen the Second from his job, stay with the Clark family for a few days to practice our songs, and then drive to the first show, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on a bill with hometown heroes the Beautys. Our pal/tennis superstar Eric Stone of Stone Alone agency booked us the next night in Chicago, where we'd meet Honeyburst, who'd end up playing with us on all of the other nights of the Get Lucky Tour.

(Miss Koko Puff named the tour, when I'd idly told her beforehand, "I hope I get lucky.")

After reaching rusty, sunburned and eternal Mojave Desert outposts like Barstow and Needles, we drove through Arid-zona along the old Route 66, with quick stops at night-shrouded oasis of unnatural light brimming from the same one-story square grids of bunched-together gas stations called towns in the middle of the desert. At night in Arizona, the whorls of sagebrush looked like ghostly white elephant ears, luminescent and sentient in the austere, deceptively blank rocky wilderness around us. Plugged-in tumbleweeds.

By early Saturday afternoon, we were already in Albuquerque, and New Mexico did seem a little enchanted, in a rushing-past-us-through-the-windshield kind of way. Our only driving problem so far was that my van's tape deck had broken right before leaving L.A., and this was a desperate situation for a ditz like me, since I can't trust the radio and am unable to drive efficiently without good music. We pulled off the highway in Albuquerque, drove along the main drag past the entrance to the university (where we saw a lone, shirtless, thin old man wearing cut-off shorts and waving a two-sided sign: "NATO -- World's Worst Terrorist Gang" and "Jesus Wouldn't Bomb"). I caught a furtive glimpse of Bow Wow Wow Records on the university drag, a magickal record store where the Trains had once played live many years ago under an especially thick, silver-ringed full moon that came in through the skylight. It made me think of the late, always sweet Rob Graves, the quiet, mysterious bassist in Gun Club and 45 Grave, who'd been standing shyly among the record bins at Bow Wow that night. Driving quickly past, it was nice to see a living, friendly haunted house of wax even now in such bright, sustaining sunshine.

We eventually purchased an overly expensive tape deck at a gigantic barn-a-torium emporium, where we found the deck in the nether reaches of the hangar-sized sporting goods department, on the wall next to the guns. Playing on the sample deck: "Sweet Emotion" by Aerosmith, and then a lot of country music while we waited in line.

After eating Mexican food in town, we drove east through striated slabs of several distinct rock layers, revealed by the teeth marks of the interstate cutting through hills and the crumbling, exposed faces of mesas. Sometimes the soil gleamed ashy black, under a lighter, reddish-brown mantle of sand and loose earth. Eventually, the desert subsided, giving way to lush, green, leafy trees in eastern New Mexico.

On the cassette deck: The Rutles, Creedence and Koko Taylor. I felt much more relaxed, driving again with favorite music, and we seemed to sail just above the highway, which uncurled in black before us like a whip. I was ecstatic to be away from my job, my streets, the collapsed, claustrophobic Silver Lake Blvd. horizon. Every new tree, every cloudscape and simmering river, was a revelation, and an absolution. Maybe I could disappear. Maybe I was alive. Fred M. just seemed happy about the surprise of it all, to suddenly be a thousand miles from home when only a day or so earlier he thought he'd had mundane chores to do in L.A. Each of us was playing geographic hooky, for one reason or another. (Did L.A. even notice we were gone?). Koko and Melanie passed the long drives by reading aloud malicious gossip about unfortunate celebrities from tabloids they picked up at road stores along the way. After we crossed the Pecos River, Fred said, "There'll be no good Mexican food east of the Pecos." And he was mostly right (with the exception of Chicago and parts of Indiana); los restaurantes Mexicanos started appearing with hopelessly gringo names like "Taco John" and "Taco Mayo."

Near the border to Texas, we stopped at a gas station and almost gave a ride to a young drifter, but he started talking so crazy about breaking up with his girlfriend, and being AWOL from the military, and something about how the police were after him by mistake, that we finally changed our minds, and drove the short distance into Texas without him, where we were immediately greeted by a Texas-sized traffic jam and police roadblock, probably looking for the drifter. But we weren't in Texas long, sailing through Amarillo and Shamrock and up into the heavenly green, rolling hills of Oklahoma.

Sunday morning, the sky was grayer than the previous two blandly sunny days. And the winds were picking up. Not that we were terrified about the disastrous, record-setting tornados that had just passed through or anything (though Miss Koko Puff kept reminding us of the terrible one she'd lived through when she was living in Georgia), but every time we heard a soda can rattle in the sketchy breeze, we'd think: twister?

We stayed overnight in El Reno, slightly west and outside of Oklahoma City proper, at a motel where the American flag was at half-mast to honor the storm's victims. The TV news showed rescuers saving a kitten, which they'd just found a week later in the chaos of rubble and tangled, disorganized flotsam.

It wasn't until we'd gone a little north of Oklahoma City the next morning, on the way to Tulsa on Interstate 44, that we saw our first tornado damage. In a rural, low-hilled area, I began noticing road signs and billboards that were lying flipped backward. Then we marveled at trees that had been splintered and pulled apart midtrunk, and that these calamities followed a twisting path that often paralleled and crossed the interstate, for several miles. Occasional farm houses and barns and clots of suburban neighborhood homes had their roofs ripped off, sometimes leaving the twisted skeletal frames underneath. On the tape deck: Jimi Hendrix's "1983."

By the western, left side of the highway, we spied an outdoor mini-mall, laid out like an inverted, toppled "U" around a square parking lot, and many of the stores in the gigantic lot had had part or all of their roofs sucked off, culminating at a Levi's outlet that was a complete shambles, with collapsed walls piled around a heap of other wreckage. We turned around and returned south to look at the crushed mall, which took forever before we found an offramp on the pesky toll road, and exited at the mall, where the driveway was blocked off by army soldiers.

We'd caught some of this destruction, driving by, on the video camera that Koko Puff and Melanie's boss had kindly loaned us, but the batteries ran out as we approached the soldiers. We were having trouble keeping the one working battery constantly charged during the tour, and thus missed out on taping even more footage, especially since the probably bored army guys then gave us a ride in a humvee and took us closer to the shopping center's wreckage, where we at least snapped a few bad still photos.

According to local newspapers, and people we talked to along the way, the major tornado had started north of Oklahoma City, then skipped up and down south, getting stronger and weaker at different times. The destruction we'd seen was from the same tornado that later demolished much of the south side of Oklahoma City.

That tornado (there had been several other big ones, up through Kansas), one paper said, was strong enough to rip asphalt out of the ground. A local TV-news program reported that a woman had been pulled out of an underpass and carried in the air for more than a half hour, before landing a couple dozen miles away, indicating that she'd probably been alive during the entire maddening flight.

Some people survived by taking cover in basements (though it turned out that many folks we talked to didn't have 'em in their homes) or bathtubs; if caught outside, in ditches, low-lying areas and freeway underpasses. I'd thought that if you were hiding at a lower level than nearby hilltops, you'd probably be safe, but near the ruined shopping center, I could see that the path of the tornado had at one point gone straight downhill, uprooting and twisting trees and metal roof tops in a useless jumble at the bottom of a moderate gully.

Nowhere was really safe of course. People got trapped and crushed in their cellars when their houses fell in on them; you could be huddling in a bathtub and the whole house might be picked up, then set right back down again. The houses hardest hit by the tornado were utterly, more pervasively destroyed than buildings crushed by earthquakes. Here, every plank of wood or piece of wall was splintered and shredded into thousands of widely flung parts, some trash landing nearby, other pieces strewn randomly miles away in the branches of trees like ugly decorations.