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

IV. SEXY WAR MONUMENTS

Still commiserating with the ghosts of New York City, I had no desire to spend my day off in Washington, D.C., the belly of the beast, like certain guitar players and bassists in this band. Miss Koko Puff and Melanie Vammen are Leos, whereas I'm a Scorpio with Virgo rising. Something had to give. Since nobody wanted to back down, they went ahead to D.C. in Honeyburst's van and apparently had a grand time shopping without us.

But when we all met up on Tuesday at the Metro Café in D.C., it was like that scene near the end of THIS IS SPINAL TAP when Nigel Tufnel rejoins the group in Japan and everything's okay again. We hugged, and no one was mad. It felt great to be back in the same adventure; it had been so lonely without the two Leos, multiplied by the missing miles between us.

Despite all the dumb arguments and my constant threats to go home, we divas were ultimately too vain to sacrifice the chance to perform a concert in front of a captive audience. The show had to go on: Melanie, Koko and I need the attention. And that's nothing compared to drummer Allen "Alien Rock" Clark, whose public compulsions include nudity and fireworks (especially when he's playing guitar in Fearless Leader).

The Leaving Trains and Washington, D.C., have always had a strange, explosive rivalry that perhaps started even before our first tour in 1986, when we were thrown out and permanently banned from the 9:30 club after our then-drummer tried to strangle me midset during a dispute regarding whether or not I was playing and singing with enough musical quality. Then, in the early '90s, Bobby Belltower and Whitey Sims lost most of their clothes and stuff when someone broke into the van, smashing a window, while we were playing at another club. I didn't have anything in the van that night, as I try to keep all of my stuff near me onstage, like a hockey goalie/mama bear making sure she doesn't stray too far from the net/nest. But it sucked for Bobby and Whitey, who had almost nothing to wear for the rest of that tour except for a few of their worn-out, crummy shirts we found scattered on shrubs a few blocks away. It was ironic and annoying that someone had gone to the trouble of stealing such worthless stuff.

In the past, we'd often ended up in D.C. at the most miserably humid war times, and it was hard not to link the place with the weather and obscene brutalities being conducted under Reagan, Bush, Clinton, etc. The granite-smothered swamp was a giant funnel, spitting out all of America's misguided ignorance, selfishness and dumb hate. On many tours we'd avoided D.C. altogether, and often skipped nearby Baltimore out of perverse spite (plus, we're not that popular there). D.C. was a symbol of ongoing oppression, and genocide, and war. And bad speeches. And false hope. Like the idea of a country of immigrants starting a democracy based on the attempted destruction of "Indian" nations already living here.

We Angelenos were considered vulgar, garish, obvious, drug-abusing, perverted, lowlife, trashy, naïve, provincial whores by D.C.'s dignified, closeted, sober, cynical, high-minded, overmedicated, patronizing, patriarchaic, Purityrannical whores. Much of the white capital seemed just as fannishly consumed with the cult of personality as Hollywood, but with the pretense that its particular posture was dignified and historic and meaningful, that things like sex were beneath its august notice, that perhaps sex didn't even happen, and that men couldn't dress like secretaries and women and interns couldn't act as presidents, that Columbus was the first to arrive on this old New World, and that real people didn't die in wars, they just turned to marble statues, like the Washington Monument, pointing a spiky finger at the sky, white and blank and arrogant; and its opposite-reaction counterpart, the Vietnam War memorial, which was toppled over, horizontal, black and mournful, filled with dead names.

Yet the place has its occasional moments. I remember seeing this marble swamp, more than ten years ago, during a blizzard, when the snow rounded off the edges of the giant bank vault buildings and their pompous columns and corners, burying them in sexy, lazy drifts, soft and peaceful, austere, lovely. When the clouds cleared a bit, the sky had been serene and lovingly pink against a shiny, brilliant gray.

Plus, I do love those pink blossoms that come out on the trees in spring.

Just like Spinal Tap, we played a much more inspired show (unlike the debacle in Philly) once our prodigal Nigels, Melanie and Miss Koko, returned, flaunting the domineering black vinyl fetish wear from their remorseless shopping spree.

The Metro Café was pleasantly well-attended, the weather nice, and the club staff were actually friendly. Although I blamed everybody in the room (including me) for the current wars, I didn't think they were such a bad lot of people, not really, deep down inside, and I think at times we played extra spontaneously, with more thought and melody, if only to make up for the Philadelphia unraveling. We punished the well-behaved audience with sadistic versions of our two special, new anti-war rants "I've Made That Mistake Before" and "Use Your Own Weapons Against You," as if playing them in an evil nation's capital would somehow stop the bombing.

Changing our set list to keep the carnies' attention (CARBON 14 writer Steve Halperin had now made it to three Trains shows in a row, and Honeyburst earlier that night had mixed in a bunch of different songs), we played "Temporal Slut," "Ice Cream Truck" and "Sugarcaning" for the first time on the trip.

"I finally get a mike!" joked Miss Koko, making her lead-vocal debut of the tour on "Ice Cream Truck," switching to guitar while I played her bass. She spat out the lyrics with the brattiness of her Sluts for Hire version (though she sang "thinking about a girl who can just jump rope" instead of her usual twist "thinking about a girl who can just suck cock"), and the audience loved her. "Sugarcaning" was more sparse, but I think it was our musical highlight of the trip: a hovering interlude with its spidery arpeggios spiraling in building waves of fuzzy open-string drone above Allen's solemnly rolling toms, unfolding slower than our usual punk tempos.

Here's the Leaving Trains' D.C. set list, saved with help from Michael K.:

TERMINAL ISLAND
CREEPING COASTLINE OF LIGHTS
BIG BABY
BIG STAR
I WANNA BE YOU
USE YOUR OWN WEAPONS AGAINST YOU
I'VE MADE THAT MISTAKE BEFORE
LEGALIZE ME
TEMPORAL SLUT
ICE CREAM TRUCK
FUCK YOU, GOD!
CAPRICIOUS (I DON'T CARE)
SUGARCANING
NOW I'M MAD

That night at the Metro, Honeyburst received a much anticipated shipment of their "100% Lover" debut 7-inch singles, with "Arthur Lee," "Why Should I Fall?" and "Paint," on the mysterious Get Bent label. The singles also contained four different trading cards, with a picture of each musician's favorite drinks:

Smith Hutchings (bass): double shot of Myers dark rum and Coke
Jon Couch (drums, backing vocals): 12-ounce long-neck bottle of Budweiser beer
Mike Michalski (guitar, backing vocals): double shot of bourbon and ginger ale on the rocks
Michael Kastelic (vocals, harmonica): shot of Cuervo tequila and a 12-ounce bottle of Sol beer

Anyway, Honeyburst had a really fun and rocking audience-interactive show. They played all three songs from the single, as well as Cynics standards "Cry, Cry, Cry" and "Baby, What's Wrong?" (which typically started each set), and a Sonics cover, "Shot Down," which Michael tonight dedicated to Melanie Vammen, since she's in Strychnine Witch, Johnny Angel's all-star Sonics-tribute band.

Honeyburst also whipped out a couple of cool new originals for the first time on the tour, like the jangly, poppy "Justify," which Michael K. called "a beautiful song of unrequited love and hate." Then he peered at individuals in the crowd like he was looking through an imaginary looking glass, and asked, "Does anybody remember ROMPER ROOM?" before "Magick Mirror," another rocking ditty about romantic survival. "Can't see your face anymore . . .," Kastelic trailed off, as Michalski strummed the last, pensive chords.

My fave Honeyburst songs included "The Tone," a fast and snappy garage rocker they played most nights, with Mr. K. yowling about love and unrequited technology (as in lonely phones that keep ringing). I was especially fond of Smith Hutching's "Window," with Smith's inexorable, descending bass bumps, Jon Couch's resolute drumming, and Mike Michalski's hypnotizing beacon of single-note lead-guitar high-string octave chiming. "I could make you understand . . . "

And let's not forget "Glen or Glenda?," as in the Ed Wood film. The tune starts off with a buzzing caveman riff, then soars into a more daydreamy guitar cloudiness, and gets weird, before sliding back into the garage. "So do you kiss," Michael wonders, "your mother with those lips?"

Here's Honeyburst's set list from the Metro Café:

BABY, WHAT'S WRONG?
ARTHUR LEE
WHY SHOULD I FALL?
YEAH
JUSTIFY
MAGICK MIRROR
THE TONE
SHOT DOWN
WINDOW
GLEN OR GLENDA?
PAINT
WASTE MY TIME
GET MY WAY
CRY, CRY, CRY

It took me a moment to comprehend why something seemed different when I went across the street afterward to move the van closer to pack up our equipment. The long side window was smashed (Why? There are so many easier ways to get in!), and Miss Koko's best stage clothes were gone, along with, improbably, my drab and faded raincoat, full of holes. The broken glass was scattered everywhere inside the van like a thousand diamond pebbles, which took a long time to get rid of completely, not just in the van, but even months later in my apartment, where the pieces were scattered by the comings and goings of my luggage. Somehow that glass got into everything and sprouted everywhere and wouldn't go away. It was the window that kept on breaking.

We rarely left anything important in the van, but we were still out of our normal rhythm from splitting up in Philly, and I think poor Koko was so resentful of my constant, condescending warnings about previous tours and our capital city's collective bad karma that she subconsciously blocked out my advice, forgot to bring in a few bags for once, and I probably unintentionally caused the whole thing by worrying too much, Except for the shiny new black dress she was wearing that night onstage (and the other threads she'd just picked up in D.C.), most of Miss Koko's all-time-best stage clothes were stolen, and we didn't find any of them lying around afterward as we trolled the nearby alleys and streets.

The video camera was also taken, so our little tour-movie experiment ends halfway through the actual tour with the last stuff we filmed in Philly. Luckily, the first two-hour videocassette, with the tornado damage and the Beautys and NYC, had just been filled up and Koko had packed it somewhere else, and that tape wasn't stolen. There was only a little bit of footage on the new videotape in the camera, including my psychodrama outside Upstairs at Nick's, which is no loss, but the break-in overshadowed our exuberance about the show. We gave up looking for our stuff eventually, and limped away from the neighborhood in the van, its gaping maw raining new chips of glass like hail, clacking to the street and into the back seats whenever we'd hit a bump. We ended up downtown in a ritzy diplomat-type area. Koko Puff splurged on a really expensive hotel room, and we straggled upstairs, where it was nice to relax and say "so what!" with a few D.C. friends who'd been at the show. Usually, I'm against spending more than $25 on a motel, or staying in hotels in general, but Koko convinced us that since we were on our vacations, we deserved to spoil ourselves. We all stayed up talking until dawn, when I went down to the hotel's garage with one of the locals, who had to leave to return the car she'd borrowed from a friend.

She was an enigmatic, lost artist I'd met a few years earlier through mutual acquaintances, though I'd only hung out with her on a couple occasions. While waiting for the elevator in a mirrored hallway, our arms somehow became entwined, and we suddenly started kissing and hugging madly as if we should have been doing it for years, making up for the distance that was about to expand between us, and we pushed ourselves furtively into the elevator, sinking for a last few desperate embraces until the lobby, before she drove away, leaving me dizzy and beguiled by this unexpected flash storm of passion. Maybe we wouldn't see each other again for years or always stay in touch that well, but the interlude made me stop hating the world and myself quite so absolutely. All it took was a kiss. Or two.

The next afternoon, Wednesday, May 26, we slunk slowly through the streets of Washington, District of Columbia, past the white mausoleums of government, and the Washington Monument, which was still under repair, covered with scaffolding and sheets of plastic. It looked like it was wrapped in a giant condom, bursting angrily from the ground.

The lawns of the grassy knolls in the park areas between the monuments were filled with thousands of government women taking their lunch breaks, reveling in the new spring sun. They were everywhere. They were secretaries and lawyers and businesswomen, wearing Washington's restrained white, tan, grey and pale-blue colors, in business suits, skirts and blouses, with white or brown pantyhose, hardly anyone in pants. And there were no men anywhere! Perhaps the men were still inside the buildings, hidden, watching. It was very surreal and dreamlike, and also mundane. Like PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK. Most of the office girls were prettier than models, larger than life, their eyes looking up telepathically as we passed, like deer, with stockinged calves that glistened with extra radiance in the daylight, and curtly layered hair catching that light and framing embellished faces in the glimmer of halos.

The makeup was just a little too glamorous, the hair piled too perfectly in intricate up-dos, clothes tailored so smartly, so mercilessly, to best show off alluring demarcations of thighs, of arms and necks. It didn't seem job-related. The city simmered with undeclared sex. It's no wonder that Monica Lewinsky so easily brought the place to its knees.

I was just driving through, I wasn't the intended target, but I felt guilty that I was so easily caught in the same visual snares these women were setting to snag the attentions of the ugly men they worked for, the ones currently bombing Yugoslavia, and putting up fences and killing people at the Mexican border, those dashing politicians and business representatives and lobbyists and lawmakers.

While the women frolicked on the lawns and in the paneled, dignified chambers of their mostly white, mostly male bosses, who were apparently stressed out from the burden of oppressing the rest of the world, the city's larger, poorer black population seethed, trapped in rotting neighborhoods just blocks away from the White House and Congress, but far from power or opportunity. Among the whites we met, there didn't appear to be any token resistance to the mainstream culture or the war in Yugoslavia or the 400-year occupation of the Americas or the economic oppression of women by men; even the liberals at the club looked and dressed extra conservatively, afraid to stand out. Such invisible protesters! Fighting from the inside, I suppose.

We drove all over D.C., looking for a glass place that could repair the broken window, but ultimately nobody could do it in time, since we had to get to Columbus, Ohio that night. Fred patched up the cracked window panel with duct tape and cardboard, which worked out okay for a while, though we'd often hear the muffled, behind-cardboard scratchings of bits of glass that would break free from the remaining piece of window.