Artificial Light

by James Greer

  Hidden in his magic cloak, Siegfried left by the gate that opened onto the shore. There he found a bark, and, boarding it unseen, sculled it swiftly away as though the wind were blowing it. It’s smaller than usual rock band tour buses, more of a glorified van than a proper bus. No bunks, just seats, but the seats are comfortable and the windows large and there’s a TV with VCR. Sammy brought some tapes of a British TV show, too, some apparently very popular comedy that may well be funny but we don’t know, since the accents are so thick you can only catch every third word or so in a sentence, and even that imperfectly. But Sammy keeps trying to indoctrinate us into the club of people who adore British television comedies, with which he’s not having much luck, even with Henry, who’s an Anglophile when it comes to rock music but not much else.

  A band spends a great deal of time on tour in its bus, so the bus assumes a supersized importance in the band’s touring life. Ours is blue and metallic gray, like the sky in Dayton before a thunderstorm, of which there are many, noisy and spectacular. The yellow license plate reads K6 STA, registered in Sheffield, and we spend a lot of time trying to decipher the license number for omens, but find none. Sammy, in addition to tour managing and sound engineering, is also our driver. He’s a good driver, possessing the necessary qualities of abundant stamina and not drinking much. Back in the States, our bass player, Tub, does most of the driving, because we used to use his van until it fell apart and we started renting, and he just got in the habit. Tub’s usually okay on the way to the show, but afterwards, on the way back to the hotel or on to the next primary market, he was almost always catastrophically drunk, and we got usually lost. One time a cop pulled us over and we thought we were done for, especially Tub, who already had somewhere around seven DUIs and didn’t even have a license, but Tub somehow pulled it together, played it cool, asked the cop for directions, and the cop was taken aback by Tub’s totally cool demeanor, didn’t even glance in the back at the rest of us frantically stubbing out joints and pouring our open beers down the rusthole near the rear axle, and gave Tub the directions. With Sammy we don’t have to worry.

  We arrived at the soundcheck: Then the soldier pulled out his pipe and lighted it at the blue-light, and as soon as a few wreaths of smoke had ascended, the mannikin was there with a small cudgel in his hand. But to please the maternal Earth and honor the God of the waters now the city revives: a glorious artifice, firmly founded as galaxies, wrought by genius that readily thus will make himself fetters of love. Love fetters. Love. Check one two. Check.

  Soundcheck is probably the most painfully boring and/or annoying two hours you can imagine. The worst part is the drummer’s part of the soundcheck, which is exactly the same (if you’d like to reproduce this at home) as someone bouncing a heavy rubber hammer off your skull for extended minutes. Slowly. Adding to our aggravation in Münster: severe non-drunkenness at an hour when we should be drinking, but the club manager hasn’t delivered the pre-show beer yet, which is part of our rider, which is what the beer and wine and deli meats and cheese and so forth that you see backstage in movies about rock bands is called. We’re nervous about our first shows overseas, and confused about the rented European equipment, which works on a different voltage system than American stuff and may blow up at any minute (and later, at a show in Köln, does, but thankfully when the opening band has borrowed it for their set). Most importantly, we’re anxious about appearing to worry about any of the above stuff, except maybe the beer, the lack of which incurs in the rock band Whiskey Ships a universal emotion best expressed by the famous pop song “Pain.”

  Playing a show in a foreign country is inevitably more exciting than playing a show back home, partly from the exotic quality of even everyday things, from the brand of beer they give you to more complicated matters like currency conversion. We’re endlessly explaining to Henry how many dollars equals how many marks, and we foresee this happening in every country for the next three weeks, even though we’re only guessing and halfmaking up the conversion amounts. Henry’s obsessed with money, a side effect of his not ever having had any for most of his life, and now that he does he’s convinced everybody is trying to rip him off. Not trying: actually doing it, ripping him off. Once when we were in the office of the president of a very large record label that wanted to sign us, the president—who was an oldschool music-biz type—said, “You should enjoy this time, when everyone’s [crude phrase for oral sex].” It’s not true that Henry then replied, “I’m tired of [crude phrase for oral sex]. I’m ready to get [crude term that can apply both to passive, not necessarily consensual sex, and to active, n.n.c. sex, past tense].” That’s the way we always tell the story, but that’s what Henry afterwards said he should have said. It’s a fine example of staircase wit: what he actually did was laugh. But the point is, the sentiment in the mythical comeback to the president of Ocean Pacific Records remains Henry’s idea of the music business. It’s a notunhealthy attitude.

  Beyond the inherent excitement of the first show by Whiskey Ships on foreign soil, there’s some attendant anxiety on our part, in re first of all, do we have any fans over here? In each EC country, we’re signed to a different label. In Germany it’s Geist, which is one of the larger German independents. We have no way of knowing how well we’re doing, sales-wise, in any particular country, because the representatives of the different companies who come to the shows and give us posters and ask us to sign them are professionally vague about sales figures and moreover don’t always speak very fluent English.

  We will say about Germans that they are comically blunt in their opinions. We first encountered this during the morning interviews, when we were asked at one point, “Your new album is not very good. The songs we think are terrible compared to the last record. Why is this?” Our response was wild, inappropriate laughter, which we think is the only response possible under the circumstances. But Germans, we’re beginning to understand, don’t see their invective as in any way an insult. It’s just a statement of their opinion, to be refuted by a statement of your opinion, in a spiraling dialectic that leads nowhere since it’s a discussion of aesthetics as regards rock music; if there was ever a dead end or wrong turn on the way to the land of relevance, follow us here. Germans can’t help taking everything seriously, even stuff we would never have thought of taking seriously, because they have no other way to take things. We know it’s a received notion, this lack of a sense of German humor, but it is wholly borne out by our experience so far in Münster. Unless, again, it’s just a language thing, which leads to additional anxiety with regard to the shows here, as to how that might affect the reaction to certain lyric-dependent songs or Henry’s stage patter, which is always drunken and funny and spontaneous; but will anyone understand what he’s rambling about over here?

  His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him that there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world. So that once on stage, you understand, no other place exists; he performs his ritual dance around a center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed. He’s not aware of the audience; he barely recognizes his own band; so in the brief pauses between songs when Henry stops to acknowledge that which is External to his Being, he will spout one of two things: brilliant nonsense; rote nonsense. The crowd, which naturally understands his speech as directed toward them, also understands and responds on a different level, or perhaps two different levels: the one at which they have been trained or otherwise learned to mimic the rituals of rock show participation; the one at which Henry’s music has elevated their senses, thus understanding, in whatever country, to whatever degree of incoherence he’s been reduced by drunkenness, whatever he says. As for us, unless he addresses one of the band members specifically, which is rare—we have received a number of high-spirited kicks to various parts of our bodies caused by unwise proximity to his flailing presence, and one time he unwittingly smashed our guitar’s pickup to bits—we don’t listen. The experience of pl
aying in Whiskey Ships is wholly other than the experience of watching and listening to the band; because we have done both, we can attest to this truth. Playing, we are focused on necessarily mundane matters—not losing place in the song, staying on tempo, tuning, tone, volume—and it’s the exception rather than the rule that the song’s supernatural qualities sweep these matters from our mind and we can participate in a wholly engaged way in the spiritual uplift that Henry creates. As an audience member, on the other hand, engagement is normative, in a way denied even Henry, who exists on a private plane, connected to the audience only in the sense that he’s connected to every soul in the universe, or more properly to the universal soul. As a player, you can see only parts; as a listener, you see the whole. You are also afforded the luxury of bathroom breaks whenever you choose, a thing not to be discounted.

  Geist, who despite assurances apparently have little faith in our ability to headline clubs on our own, have paired us up with a popular German rock group called Kokotek. These guys speak very little English, which we think may be an ideological statement, because the Geist guy at the club in Münster tells us that Kokotek belong to something called the Hamburg School, which from what we can tell means they come from Hamburg and espouse a rigorous rock dogma the tenets of which are obscure but the main one seems to be a refusal to sing songs in English like any other rock band that wants to become internationally famous. You have to admire their determined nationalism, but at the same time it’s a little scary when any group of Germans, even just a rock group, expresses determined nationalism. Other than that, though, the Kokotek guys seem friendly and nonthreatening, and whenever they catch us sneaking into their dressing room to steal beers because we drank all of ours already, they’re pretty cool about it, which may be a trick to guilt us into not doing it anymore, but if so, nice try.

  Our one special request upon joining Whiskey Ships was that two bottles of red wine be put on the rider for our own personal consumption. We picked wine over whiskey because we’re a more pleasant person at the bottom of a bottle of wine, and because it was generally cheaper, which appealed to Henry’s frugal nature. We start on the first bottle on arriving at the club, and most times it will be gone before we play. We open the second bottle, take it on stage, drink about half while playing, then finish the rest after the show. Often we finish the second bottle before we go offstage, or at least by the second encore, which means we have to switch to beer, or try to find some whiskey. Our worst nights are probably when we manage to find some whiskey. Luckily, in Germany a bottle of whiskey seems to be as rare and precious as a sense of humor, so we mostly stick to the wine and beer. There’s a number of shows we don’t remember clearly, or at all, which goes for the rest of the band as well, maybe even more so in the case of Henry, who often has to be reminded that we played at all the night before, and where, though never why, because he was born to rock, end of sentence.

  We’re infamous for our drinking, at least among the certain small group of music enthusiasts who number our fans. Before every show, Magnetic Tom carries a large cooler of beers (in the States, always Light Beer, never Heavy Beer, as you can drink more and not get incapacitated) onstage and sets it down lovingly in front of the drum riser, within equidistant grasp of everyone except Stanley, who doesn’t drink. There’s usually about a case in the cooler, and Henry goes through most of that himself. He doesn’t play an instrument, just sings, so he’s got a free hand to swig beers while the other swings the microphone or grasps it tightly while he sings. Many people, watching Henry down almost an entire case of beer almost single-handed (remember, we’re drinking red wine and playing guitar, Stanley doesn’t drink, and most of the time Trinket and Tub have their hands full of stringed instrument), are moved to express concern at his selfabuse, but there are two things these people don’t know: 1) [expletive], and 2) there’s a secret to Henry’s rapid-fire consumption, which we will now divulge. He uses a technique of his own device wherein the beer bottle is tipped completely upside down and held against the drinker’s lips, the lips forming the usual seal around the rim of the bottle’s mouth, which gives the impression of shotgun drinking, where actually there is none because his tongue blocks the flow of the beer down his throat. The beer foams up and most of it pours harmlessly down his chest, and the whole thing is a very convincing simulacrum of chuggery, but like the rest of our show, is mostly a performance.

  Which means what, exactly: that Henry’s a phony, that his apparently prodigious capacity for alcohol is an elaborately staged sham? Not hardly. Henry, when he comes onstage, is already severely drunk, with very rare exceptions. He could not function otherwise, because he suffers from a nervous condition called “stage fright” that can only be remedied by application of what he sometimes calls “Liquid Backbone,” and other times “Uncle Henry’s Nerve Tonic.”

  Let us put this in mathematical terms: Our rider includes five cases of beer total. Two to be delivered before the set, one for the stage, and two to be delivered after the set. There has never been a beer left over from our rider at the end of any show; in fact, usually we run out early and have to steal beers from the other band(s) on the bill, or somehow wrangle another case out of the club, which sometimes when the club’s in a good mood is not a problem. Thus, granting that there are three other drinking members of Whiskey Ships, plus Magnetic Tom, who despite a pre-ulcerous stomach puts away his share, minus us because we’re drinking our rotwein, means that on any given show night Henry puts away somewhere near two cases of beer, which is forty-eight beers, which we think is probably enough. Even if he only dumps half of those down his clothes, or spills them on the stage making a dangerously slick pool of beer scum, the cause of many disastrous-looking but rarely harmful falls and extended balletic slides, that still leaves a case of beer each night personally consumed, which is twentyfour, which now, in Germany, is equivalent to much more than that on account of the superior strength and quality of the German beer. We have been lectured at great length on this superiority, both by friends of ours who have traveled, prior to our departure, and by new acquaintances, here, like Sammy the tour manager and Ute, the concierge back at the Münster Inn. “You’re in for a treat,” Sammy and Ute and our Bund-friendly U.S. friends assure us. “German beer is unlike anything you’ve ever had.” We are collectively unimpressed, however. German beer is viscous and massy, like drinking a loaf of bread, italics ours, and worst of all, you cannot do with German beer the thing we call pound. You cannot pound German beer, you cannot nail a six- or twelvepack like you would on the playing fields of North Dayton without thinking twice. We reject German beer wholeheartedly, settling for a brand of Czech-brewed lager, which is a heavier version of our favorite watery domestic, but acceptable.

  We ambled onstage at 10 p.m., or thereabouts. The gallant Minstrel stood there fully armed. His battledress was of a magnificent hue; he laced his helmet on and affixed a red pennant to his lance. Later he was to come to dire straits, along with his men. How could warriors ever test each other more keenly? From a powerful joust by Gelpfrat, bold Hagen flew over the cruppers and took a seat on the ground—his horse’s poitrel had broken, and the woes of the battle were brought home to him! We played almost fifty songs, as usual, including encores, of which there were three. We were done by midnight. We couldn’t hear anything but the squall of our own badly tuned guitar for the first half of the set, as the monitor in front of us wasn’t working until we kicked it enough times. The crowd was enthusiastic and attentive, as the crowd almost always is for us, because we don’t tour that often and we put on a good show, jumping around like idiots and smoking and drinking to excess. We don’t smoke except onstage, except Tub and Stanley, who now smoke for real after fake-smoking only onstage for years. The club was packed and overheated; we almost passed out twice from the heat and the smoke and the jet lag and the rotwein. The first time we almost passed out was onstage right in the middle of a song called “Nectarine Machine.” The second time was backstage after the
show, when everyone crowded around Henry like he’s the savior of rock, which may be true, but we need our space.

  After the show we take the short bus back to the Münster Inn. We had to leave the next morning early for Köln, which used to be called Cologne if you’re keeping track of our movements on an old-fashioned map. Our purposeful plan to go straight up to our room is easily derailed by the unavoidable fact of the stillopen hotel bar.

  The bar is cool and quiet. Only Ute, a near-six-foot statuesque woman with dark hair and brick-red lipstick wearing a dark blue dress, remains to serve customers, of which there are none until we get there. The Münster Inn is a frequent rock band waystation, so Ute knows to keep the bar open later than usual. We’re not sure there’s anything on earth we love more than a cool, quiet bar late at night, preferably in a foreign country. Henry, Trinket, and we sit at the bar while Ute pours whiskey drinks. It’s safe to drink whiskey now, because it’s very late and we’re all long past exhausted, so the effect of the liquor is mellow, like the soft lemony light from lamps with fake Tiffany shades.