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

II. INTO THE PENUMBRA

Somewhere along the way, we filled up with gas at an unusual side-of-the-road truck stop, which didn't look blankly generic like all of the 7-11s or mini-marts. The proprietor was a friendly, silver-hair, clean-shaven bespectacled gent, who came all the way out to our van to return the $1 in change I'd been too lazy to walk back and get. (By the way, we've seen gas prices in most states as low as 93 cents per gallon, compared to L.A.'s currently inflated by "crisis" $1.60 and higher prices for regular gas -- California IS being punished for something.)

His gas station was actually a rambling rummage sale of weird, anachronistic kitschy memorabilia, like his difficult-to-get-rid-of overstock of "I LOVE MICHAEL JACKSON" air fresheners, sitting in rows of suffocated plastic clipped to a large board, looking very dusty, like they'd been waiting there for more than a decade. There were cheap post cards, and autographed photos of passing-through, midlevel country musicians on the wall, lotsa bumper stickers with cornball redneck witticisms, old cash registers and cowboy boots, plastic children's toys and racks of clothes. But there was something else strange and wonderful about this place, like it was a mystical bazaar, or an artful front for something illegal. Or a crossroads for interplanetary travelers. Every time I'd start to turn away, I'd notice something else out of the corner of my eye, some strange artifact or souvenir wedged in among the more expected silver Route 66 commemorative spoons or superstars of wrestling merchandise. And then we were gone again.

It was fun to be on tour, in no particular hurry, without any shows for the first few days, and it felt so much like a sightseeing trip that we pulled off the road near Springfield, Missouri to check out Fantastic Caverns after getting brainwashed by several hundred miles of spelunking billboards. I figured it would be some dismal crack in the ground after so much hype, but Fantastic Caverns turned out to be several gigantic, interconnected brownish-red, rock-walled rooms that were dripping with water from the ceiling's amputated pillars of stalactites onto the inverted, tall, phallic stalagmites, growing in marble-looking, slippery, smooth, cum-colored mounds from the cave's floor.

In a large, natural antechamber, there was a wooden stage where Buck Owens and Ray Price used to give concerts, and before that the space had been used as a bootleg bar and ballroom during Prohibition, all beneath stratas of limestone and calcite. Deeper in the caverns, there were the remains of a large sinkhole, and in its empty swimming pool-shaped bottom was a crevice that led to a lower chamber, where we could see part of a fast-rushing, loud underground river, running over a shallow bed of stones and pebbles under the artificial light.

We were a little taken aback when we emerged from the comforting gloom of the caverns into the ugly bright blare of reality, where someone had stuck a threatening, you'll-go-to-hell-you-freaks-type religious pamphlet on Valerie's windshield. We noticed that ours was the only windshield in the parking lot with such a pamphlet.

Outside of St. Louis, it started to rain a little, and we saw a giant shape in the clouds that looked like a mercury-colored version of the god Mercury, funny hat and all. Or maybe a gargoyle, as Fred guessed. Then, we saw a wisp of St. Louis' arch to the far south of us, away from the freeway, before the horizon snapped it shut, and we were sad we didn't have a show there this time, especially Miss Koko Puff, who had never been to St. Louis before. Minutes later we crossed the big, muddy brown Mississippi, our visions tangled in the interlocking metal arms of the bridge above it. On the tape deck: Gun Club's "Calling Up Thunder."

The weather was sunny again, and we dallied briefly in a field of yellow wildflowers somewhere in Illinois, but Valerie the van had her own momentum, and soon we were in Indiana, west of Indianapolis (near a place called Diana?), when the weather suddenly changed. We were pummeled with the heaviest hailstorm any of us had ever seen, being rattled from what sounded like all sides by an angry barrage of large hail. I think the deafening, metallic clatter of thousands of hailstones, slamming into the van's roof and sides, would have literally driven us crazy if it had continued much longer. We screamed! It was so thick Koko could barely see to drive, and we kept looking in vain for an overpass to cower under. Somehow Miss Koko Puff managed to control the van and pull over at a rest area, where we tried to hide behind a bigger truck. As the storm was dying down, I finally remembered in the front passenger seat to turn on the video camera, but was so shaken, I mainly filmed the dashboard.

On the radio: First, we heard a belated emergency multicounty severe-emergency weather warning, intoned by what sounded like a male, Swedish robot. It turned out that we'd been on the fringes of a tornado! Some local DJ had the wit to provide the perfect cloud-clearing soundtrack: Santo & Johnny's instrumental "Sleepwalk."

Suddenly, it was warm again, and the sky become sunny. I assumed that the worst was over, and we continued toward Indianapolis, which wasn't far from the Clarks' home in Anderson, a town northeast of Indy. Before rounding Indianapolis on Hwy. 69, we got caught in traffic for a few hours when a giant, fast-moving, storm approached from the south and swept broodingly over us with heavy rain and an extravagant show of lightning.

We didn't think we were going to die this time, but the stubborn traffic, and length and steadiness of the second storm, made us feel we were in an Orwellian/NO EXIT-type purgatory and that we'd never leave the freeway again. We were properly humbled by the time we reached Anderson, and we were awestruck in a nicer way when we saw how elegant and stylish Allen and Zebra's two-story house was. We had been planning on pleading with the Clarks to give up this Indiana madness and come back to California, but when we realized how glamorous life was in their restored, haunted mansion, we each wanted to move into one of its many rooms.

As we practiced songs later in the Clarks' basement, we had our first band fight, which was about something vague like me not getting enough "respect" or something. Both Miss Koko Puff and Melanie V. love to gossip and make fun of other people's embarrassments, and this is fine as long as they're reading trashy tabloids about talentless celebrities with distant problems. However, like the matching cackling witches limned by yellow moonlight, which they'd gotten tattooed to their ankles a few days before the tour, Miss Koko and "Sweet Potatoes" Vammen have a tendency to feast on whatever person is bleeding near them, lazily, maliciously, like cats, and sometimes their evil powers are even turned on vulnerable innocents like me (o.k., I'm really critical and tense and spiteful all the time, which is probably most of the problem, but let's not let facts interfere with my paranoid interpretation of reality!). I don't remembered what started it, but I was ready to break up the band and turn around and go home, yet the chemical mood swing finally passed, or maybe I was merely under some evil spell they'd cast, because I eventually forgot what I was mad about.

The turning point came when Allen Clark III, Allen & Zebra's six-year-old son, took me aside after the girls went shopping in Anderson. Little AC3 looked me in the eyes and gave me some wise, Zen-insightful advice about how to behave, and what did it all matter, and why be so mean to everybody? I shouldn't have been so shocked that he was so precocious; AC3 had played drums live and even recorded with the Leaving Trains when he was only TWO years old. Once I calmed down, we jammed in the basement on an instrumental version of "Legalize Me," with me on guitar and him playing trumpet (which he'd recently picked up), note for note perfect, flavored with his clever trumpet drawls that mimicked the original version's vocal-melody slurs. AC3 was sad that he wasn't allowed to go on the road with us; I think his father was just happy to get a break from his hard work restoring the old house. It was sad that Zebra Stripes wasn't coming, too, since it had been so much fun when the Trains toured the West Coast with her band Hot Damn in 1994.

By the time we reached Fort Wayne for our first show of this tour, I was in a predictably overheated blur of fannish excitement. I have a tendency to think of cities in relation to the musicians and figure skaters who live in them, which is why I'll always associate walking around New York with the Ramones and the Velvet Underground, or Seattle with Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana, or San Francisco with the Avengers. Well, to me, Fort Wayne, which we'd never previously been to, was like this idealized place because all I knew was that it was the hometown of the Beautys. Now I realize that many of the band names I've been dropping here seem obscure to some of you, but in my correctly balanced/revisionist parallel-universe version of reality, these people are the true mega rock stars, which is why I talk about them here as if their every little facial twitch were already branded into the mainstream consciousness. These musicians will all be famous in 10 years, so let's adore them now while they're still alive.

Of course, as a diehard fan who gets weak in the knees watching the Beautys and who'd traveled two thousand miles just to see them in their native habitat, I felt that they played too short of a set at Columbia Street West (I always feel that way when I see 'em!), but they did debut several new songs, including my favorite hit of the year, a really catchy, sing-along fuzzpop song called "Coverband." It was the first time I'd seen them with new, hard-driving bassist Erick (ex-Queers), and it was nice that their original bassist, "Poopy Pants," also showed up and remembered us. Amazing drummer "Salsa" Dave Trevino (a.k.a. "Cheeto Finger") effortlessly powered the night's versions of "Shut Your Piehole," "Happy in Ft. Wayne," "Sweetheart," "Goldslobber," "Thursday Nights at the Rail" and "Gas City Cops," although the Bee-utes didn't essay "Re: Tard," "We Are the Beautys" and "Sleepyhead."

They have so many great funny, angry, melodic punk songs, like "Jocks on Junk" (which advises that taking drugs can't be considered bohemian if even jocks are now getting high), or the revenge-of-the-nerds scenario "We Are the Beautys" ("we are the geeks/we are the weirdoes/we are the kind of people you call dorks!"), or the revenge-of-the-teacher scenario ("You Get an 'F'"), or the giddy, exuberant "Some Things Never Change," which soars with Chica's yearning, nostalgic high-speed melody, a true pop classic. If you like the Muffs or Ramones, or singer Chica Baby's previous group the Smears, you'd probably enjoy the Beauty's deft, sizzling surf-guitar instrumentals and caustic, hilarious anti-cop punk rock anthems, all paced with Chica's spontaneous between-song wisecracks. She's sorta like a hipper Carol Burnett. Our own set was a little scattered, thanks probably to my rambling anti-war pontificating, though Miss Koko Puff claims that it was an especially solid performance. I always think I'm preaching to the converted, but it turned out there were a half dozen military guys in the audience who wanted to debate with me afterward about my anti-NATO comments; one of whom cheerfully admitted that he was fighting (where I'm not sure, since he was in Indiana) so that people like me could have the "right" to say seditious things. Having said those things and been assaulted, etc., so many times, I'm still waiting for clear proof of those rights, but at least these guys were generally peaceful and non-threatening and just wanted to talk.

We stayed overnight at Chica Baby and bassist Erick the Red's apartment, where we were treated to a delicious, spicy homemade vegetarian stew, and where I discovered that Chica was also a brilliantly funny cartoonist and sardonically evocative painter. I hadn't realized until then that she'd painted the cover to the Beautys' LIQUOR PIG CD (one of the Top 10 Punk-Rawk releases last year, in my parallel universe). The painting's subject, a beautiful, bored bartender, has this really perfect, bemused, resigned, swaggering/repulsed, sexy, life-beyond-this-scummy-bar expression. It's a '90s-defining image.

The next day, Chica led us to Fort Wayne's finest thrift stores and health-food emporiums, and boasted about her city's synergistic dork-rock/wrestling role-playing scene, and sagely pointed out examples of the mystical connection between our different towns, the top two American cities with highest amount of drivers per capita.

Then I had this kinda separation anxiety after we dropped off Chica at Erick's work and left town. Sometimes you forget that you're in a band, too, because you're such a fan, and you get so clingy, like when one of your favorite groups has been touring in your city for a week of shows, and you've seen 'em so much you think of them as new friends, but now they're moving on like the carnival to some shinier, prettier town further down the road. And you become jealous because some other city is going to get to see the Rolling Stones or the Real McKenzies or the Beautys, or the Chicken Hawks, Tijuana No, Short Fuses, Tammy Faye Starlite, the Real Kids, etc., and you've gotta stay behind.

Or it's like when we Trains go on tour and play consecutive shows with cool bands who are fun to see every night (as were were lucky to do at times with the Humpers, Mekons, Naked Prey, Green on Red, old Soul Asylum, etc.) and also fun to hang out with, but then the tours would end, or groups would split off into separate directions, and we'd be back to opening for Red Hot Chili Pepper cover bands in Calgary and feeling abandoned, like the real party was elsewhere.

But on the drive from Fort Wayne to Chicago, I consoled myself about already missing the Beautys when I remembered that I was just as geeky of a fan when it came to the Cynics, so I refocused my slavering adoration in the direction of Honeyburst, who turned out to be an amazing rock 'n' roll band once we caught up with them. Melanie V. and I already knew that singer Michael Kastelic was a dynamic, lustful, serpentine, quintessential garage-rock showman/shaman from his days in the Cynics, and indeed he was in a thrilling, playful, attention-grabbing mood every night of the tour. Michael would often saunter far into the audience, making everybody laugh by getting right into their faces, singing merrily all the while, thanks to his extra-long mike cord. Later on the tour, I think my political ramblings influenced him to alter his midsong comic/defiant pro-kids-rights rap about the Littleton school violence, which often segued into a snippet of "School's Out" during Honeyburst's climactic "Cry, Cry, Cry." It was a rare kick to hear versions of old Cynics classics like "Baby, What's Wrong With Me?" and yet it was even more thrilling to hear brand-new Honeyburst songs like "Arthur Lee," the abstract tribute to the imprisoned lead singer of Love ("A shoestring life breaking at the middle"), and other originals, including "Paint" and "Why Should I Fall" from their debut single, that seemed just as energetic and driving as the Cynics, but less retro, hammered out by an ambidexterous band with maybe wider influences, a group capable of casually, spontaneously pulling off perfect, stylishly distinct remakes of songs by Led Zeppelin ("Good Times") and Alex Chilton.

Michael wasn't a surprise to anyone who'd already heard the Cynics, but his new band was a revelation: bassist Smith Hutchings (who became a simpatico drinking/gossiping partner to Melanie Vammen and Miss Koko Puff, a.k.a. the Cackling Witches), flashy rock-god guitarist and ex-latter-day-Cynic Mike Michalski, and poor drummer Jon Couch, who, because he was so sincere and amiably gullible, often became the target of the Cackling Witches' merciless teasing and pranks. The gals were like cats or killer whales who cruelly toss and torment their prey for a long time before eating, and while it was a relief that Melanie and Koko had found someone besides me to torture, I could see it was only a matter of time before young Jon would crack.

Chicago had never been an especially friendly city to us Leaving Trains, nor had we been kind to the Windy City in return, but we thought our set at Lounge Ax on Wednesday in front of an unusually helpful crowd was our best ever in the area. For some reason, the speeches and new, political songs like "Use Your Own Weapons Against You" came off more succinct and hard-hitting, and we were properly and arrogantly sexy, like we didn't care.

Afterward, the Honeyburst and Leaving Train vans whirled around Chicago's remaining night, driving toward wherever we saw the most light, and we ended up floating along the glittering lakefront before leaving for sleep in another state.

The next day, I was intoxicated by the coffee-brown nylon slink of the Sandusky River in Ohio in the lazy afternoon burning sunshine, and distracted later when we entered Cleveland under dusk's perfect closure of light, with the sharp spikes of downtown buildings set off against the sky's burnished, suffused purple glow.

The concert in Cleveland at Pat's in the Flats must have been Rock Critic Night, as everyone who showed up seemed to be a writer, like Jane Scott, a legendary reporter who used to interview Lou Reed, and Laura Demarco, who'd just written a feature story about the Trains in the CLEVELAND WEEKLY. We felt important, almost famous, like our opinions mattered! We were asked questions, and I stared at the ground and pondered/pouted cheerfully like a beauty-pageant contestant, not sure of the correct answers but hoping I still looked good.

I was also happy to reconnect with the ever-sarcastic John Petkovic, the brains behind two of my fave Cleveburg bands, Cobra Verde and Death of Samantha, and Jim Lanza, who surprised us by giving us shiny, colorful Leaving Trains stickers he'd specially designed. Just about the only Cleveland celebrity who wasn't there: Tonia Kwiatkowski, one of my many favorite figure skaters. What can you do? Ice skaters and real rock & rollers are fated never to meet. Trapped in parallel worlds that we never made. There was no stage at Pat's on the Flats, which made it easier for Michael Kastelic's frequent forays into the crowd, and it was a good, fun night, although I was annoyed during our set when a drunk threw a chair, apparently not maliciously, at us, and almost hit Melanie. I've seen so many not necessarily soft objects come arcing upstage over the years that I'm ready to go to war whenever I see a paper airplane sail in my direction; luckily no one was hurt.

We would have stayed longer to properly teach our friends in Cleveland how to behave, but we had an all-night drive ahead of us so we could make the next show in New York City.