by Jon Niccum
“They wanted him onstage now—and he wasn’t coming. Didn’t show up. Twenty minutes went by, half an hour went by, forty-five minutes. Same deal. We were playing our songs, and they wanted nothing to do with that. They were booing us off the stage. Finally, the promoter had to come on and say, ‘Rakim won’t be making it tonight because he’s stuck in traffic’—which is total bullshit. We all knew Rakim had taken the opportunity the night before to hang at his house in New York and left with not enough time to get to Baltimore.
“They started rioting. [The promoters] locked us backstage in the green room until the cops could show up and clear it out. We couldn’t come out to see what was going on, but we heard everything. That was kind of surreal…I think it was full-blown rioting outside. The security couldn’t handle it. There were people throwing bottles. The cops finally had to come and break it up. But they are like, ‘You are not to leave this room until the situation is under control.’
“It was a good couple hours before we could leave there.”
—James King, Fitz and the Tantrums
George Winston
George Winston is dubbed the “father of new-age music.” And he’s been proving his musical virility since the early 1970s, first arriving in the public eye through the iconic Windham Hill label and later with his own Dancing Cat Records. He is the rare musician who can claim to have three Platinum and four Gold records of instrumental piano music. His material ranges from his own atmospheric pieces based on seasonal cycles to records covering The Doors and Vince Guaraldi’s jazz compositions for the Peanuts cartoons.
• • •
“The first time I went to Denver, with the altitude thing I kept forgetting the name of the radio station I was supposed to thank. I would say, ‘I’d like to thank—what is it?’ Then somebody would yell it to me. Then I’d say, ‘I want to thank…’ Then I’d forget it again. I forgot it four times. I was like, ‘What is going on here?’ I’d never had a drink in my life or a drug. I hadn’t even taken aspirin. Then somebody afterward asked, ‘Are you a little bit woozy?’ I said I was and wasn’t feeling great, either. They said, ‘That’s your first time with the altitude.’ Good thing I didn’t go to Crested Butte.”
—George Winston
Tower of Power
Credit: Brian Rachlin
Despite a career spanning six decades, Tower of Power is still better known for its mind-boggling amount of appearances on other artists’ records. The Oakland-based combo was hatched in 1968 by tenor saxophonist–vocalist Emilio Castillo and baritone saxophonist Stephen “Doc” Kupka, who continue to be the driving force behind the ten-piece ensemble. Its unmistakable horn section has backed a catalog of performers that include Elton John, Aerosmith, Little Feat, Heart, Ray Charles, The B-52’s and Neil Diamond.
• • •
“We played the Chesterfield Café, which was this really small bar in downtown Paris. It was extremely hot that day, like heatstroke hot. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Paris in the summer, but it’s incredibly humid. So everybody is walking around looking like a Rorschach test. They’re sweating unbelievably. And that’s what it’s like outside, but in the Chesterfield Café it was packed to the rafters. The stage was the size of a postage stamp. We’re ten pieces with all these horns. So there’s no dancing this time. We’re playing, and the people are literally right in our face. There might have been some chairs in the peripheral; I couldn’t see them. It was people standing shoulder to shoulder, right up to the stage. They’re loving it, but it was so incredibly hot. Suffocating, you know.
“We all went on wearing shorts. We played the gig, and after there were these pools of sweat underneath everybody. When we came offstage, we all took our clothes off. I was wearing these shorts, and I wrung them out. It wasn’t like a few drops came out; it was pouring. It was like I soaked them in a shower. I remember I walked across the street with a couple of the guys—by now it’s nighttime and it’s cooled off. But we just collapsed. We were on the ground, leaning against a building, completely drained.
“Even to this day, after all these gigs, we’ll say, ‘Remember the Chesterfield Café? Now that was hot!’”
—Emilio Castillo, Tower of Power
Siblings Sherri Dupree-Bemis, Chauntelle Dupree D’Agostino, Weston Dupree, Stacy Dupree and cousin Garron Dupree seemed to possess an obvious moniker for their band. But instead of Dupree, they went with the name Eisley—a condensed nod to Mos Eisley, the “wretched hive of scum and villainy” from Star Wars. All of the members hadn’t yet graduated high school when they inked their first record deal, subsequently showcasing their dreamy, punchy pop rock as openers on Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood to the Head tour. Dupree-Bemis—who recently married Say Anything singer Max Bemis—penned this story during a break from touring in her much-warmer hometown of Tyler, Texas.
Eisley Braves the Snowpocalypse
By Sherri DuPree-Bemis
“You guys should really leave tonight, they say a huge snowstorm is going to hit.”
I waved off my mom’s words as one of those “overly concerned” warnings mothers give in excess and opened my new books from Amazon.com that had arrived at her house (when you travel a lot, it’s handy to have parents who live nearby).
As I scampered back out to my car with my arms full of crisp new comics, science fiction and fantasy novels, I never would have guessed how handy they would really be during the next few days that we would be stranded because of “snowpocalypse.”
Credit: Boyd Dupree
Our tour was slated to start in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is about a twelve-hour drive from Tyler, Texas, where we all live, so we gave ourselves a two-day head start. Plenty of time, right? Nope. An ice storm had struck Texas and laid waste to the countryside during the night as we slept. It was a Texan’s nightmare. Especially when you’re a solid summer lover, like me.
I’ve lived in Texas my whole life, and until that day I could count on one hand how many times I’d seen it snow in the state. It just doesn’t happen here. When it did snow, it was rarely “real” snow (the beautiful fluffy kind that falls wistfully across Christmas cards and makes snowball fights so much fun); it was ice. Slick, cruel and rock hard—the kind you ball up into a makeshift snowball as a kid, thinking you are going to have a “fun” snowball fight with your older sister, only to chunk it playfully at her face and give her a black eye—yes, that was me.
A few miles out of our hometown we hit the ice, and what should have been a two-hour drive to Dallas turned into a slipping, sliding, hazardous, anxiety attack-laden seven-hour drive of hell. Since it ices over so rarely in this part of the country, our state doesn’t know the meaning of the words snow and plow. We nearly jackknifed our van and trailer and careened off the road numerous times. At one of the many points that we became stuck, a man in a camouflage jumpsuit and a Magnum, PI, mustache dashed out of his giant truck and began jumping on our trailer hitch with all his might trying to get us free from a snowdrift.
We were all afraid he’d slip and we’d be responsible for his death…but I’m not sure how probable “death by jumping on trailer hitch” is, so in all likelihood he was not in any real danger. Plus, with a mustache like that, you doubtless have the power to defy death.
After Magnum helped us break free, we slid on for another hour or so before we finally gave up on the journey and pulled into a hotel. We realized we would never be able to make it to the Albuquerque show at the rate we were going (your grandmother with both of her hip replacements could have outrun our tour van), so we contacted the other bands to let them know we wouldn’t be there. Turns out they barely made it to the show themselves.
The following show was going to be in Tulsa, Oklahoma, two days later—just four hours from where we were camped. In hopes of the ice thawing a bit, we sat safely for the next day and a half at the hotel surviving off ramen noodle soup and oatmeal cream pies, watching Zomb
ieland and House Hunters—all the time a mere three hours from home, unable to get safely back and unable to move safely forward.
After what seemed a very long two days, the morning of the Tulsa show finally arrived. We packed up our remaining oatmeal cream pies and piled into the van (my two sisters, my two brothers, my cousin and I, who make up the band; my sister’s husband, who tour manages; our sound man; and a partridge in a pear tree), but none of the ice had even thought about melting.
We managed to skate into Oklahoma safely, though the highways were littered with twisted semitrucks and numerous other cars belly up or simply abandoned in the snow. Apparently, Oklahoma had been hit just as badly as Texas, and likewise the words snow and plow were just as foreign to them as they were to us! But all went relatively well until we met a dead end about three tiny miles from the venue and had to take a shortcut through a snow-sunken neighborhood.
That is where we spent the next four hours trapped: in a shimmery, shining, completely unsplendid snowdrift the size of an Oompa-Loompa (that’s all it takes, by the way).
Thank God for my books at this point.
The boys all jumped out into the sixteen-degree weather and began clawing, scraping, shoveling, kicking and swearing at the snow, trying with all their might to set us free. But with the heaviest of my brothers and cousin weighing in at about 150 (and he’s six foot two), you can imagine the success we had. I suppose we could have called a tow truck, but when you’re a band of starving artists (literally at this point) a $300 tow-truck bill might as well be $3,000.
At one point a couple of completely stoned but superkind young men overseeing the fiasco danced over (yes, danced) to try and help us out. Now I’m a big “jump in there and do what you can” kind of girl, but weighing in under 115 pounds, I would have lasted about thirty seconds before my spiderlike fingers turned into icicles and cracked off into the snow, and there would be no more playing guitar—thus no more shows. Then again, if there were no more shows, I guess there would be no more being stranded in the snow because I would be at home next to my fireplace so—hmm—something to think about!
Joking. But even between seven skinny guys, two shovels, a two-by-four board and one small bag of sand that a passerby bestowed on us, the rig wasn’t going to budge.
We had already missed our soundcheck at this point and were in danger of not making it the last three miles to the venue at all, so we finally threw a couple of acoustic guitars and our Fender Rhodes into the back of the van and abandoned our trailer in the wicked drift (as well as our drummer and bassist to guard it), so that us girls could get to the venue and at least play an acoustic set.
Before driving off, the kind, stoned young men handed over the gift of a “jingle stick.” Now I know that sounds really wrong, and I’m still not quite unsure that it isn’t. But all I know is, one of them thrust some sort of stick device through the window with feathers and about a hundred beer caps strung from it. I believe it was meant to be a “musical” device. We were informed we could use it onstage at our show that night.
Sadly, I confess the jingle stick did not find its way into any of the songs that evening, but it was nonetheless very thoughtful of them.
After we arrived and thawed out in the venue, the boys, back in Snowzilla’s neighborhood, were finally able to flag down a passerby with four-wheel drive who helped haul the trailer out. They showed up half an hour before the first band was to start. Not in enough time for us to lug all of our gear out, set up and play a full-band set, but at this point we were just glad they were safe and out of the cold—and not musiciancicles.
I can’t say it was one of the best shows we played that night. After such a chaotic day your brain kind of goes into autopilot, and I used whatever brain waves I had left over to get through the set and try my hardest to make sure the kids singing along in the front row didn’t know how distracted and worn out I felt after four days of battling Snowkenstein. Ultimately, we did have fun, and getting to meet the people afterward who had braved the storm themselves—who thanked us for coming or who had walked a mile in the blizzard because they couldn’t find parking nearby—really warmed our frozen little hearts and made it all feel worth it.
So the moral of this story? Mother always knows best.
Chapter
-6-
Oops!
All forms of injury, illness and general clumsiness that have been known to stop a gig dead in its tracks.
Jane’s Addiction
Credit: Curt Doughty
Jane’s Addiction helped pave the way for alt rock’s eventual mainstream acceptance. The Los Angeles act’s first two records—Nothing’s Shocking and Ritual de lo habitual—are considered among the best and most influential of the genre. Singer Perry Farrell originally disbanded his group in 1991 at the height of its popularity, but not before organizing a suitable tour as a send-off. That event became Lollapalooza, the notorious traveling music festival that was hailed as the MTV generation’s Woodstock. Since then, the quartet has reformed numerous times for various albums and tours.
• • •
“One time in Chicago I was kicking [heroin] really hard. So as opposed to just giving up, I faked a heart attack. I faked a heart attack, and then I faked that it was a fake. The truth of the matter is that I couldn’t really stand up that well. So it might have been dramatic, but it couldn’t have sounded very good. Honestly, in the day, you could get away with a lot of the drama thing.”
—Perry Farrell, Jane’s Addiction
Blue Man Group
The bald-headed, indigo-skinned Blue Man Group has always mixed music into its wordless, performance-art pieces since emerging in 1987. The revolving theater troop employs freakish percussive devices that have become a visual and audio trademark. Among these are instruments made from PVC (polyvinyl chloride) pipes, “backpack tubulums,” “air poles” and a “piano smasher,” which is a grand piano turned on its side to expose strings that are hit with an oversized mallet.
• • •
“I threw up, so that was pretty bad. It was very early on toward the beginning of the tour. I was so thirsty I had chugged a pint of Gatorade when I got a chance to go behind the instruments. I came out with my fiberglass boat antenna and swished it around. At the end of the show we jump up and down to the beat for about a minute. So I’m jumping and I feel the Gatorade. I turn around and motion to the band to acknowledge them, then my stomach twisted and all this Gatorade just flew out of my mouth. The band just sort of looked at me. They didn’t know if I was holding it in my mouth and just playing a joke. I was like, that’s pretty rock and roll. It was some ridiculous flavor like kiwi-watermelon something—so that’s off my list now. That was a very panicky thing. I started sweating and thinking, ‘I’m just gonna lose it in front of all these thousands of people.’”
—Tom Galassi, Blue Man Group
Laurie Anderson
Renowned experimental musician-artist Laurie Anderson has been exploring her conceptual pieces since the late 1960s while an undergrad at Barnard College and a graduate student at Columbia University. She became something of a cult figure thanks to her piece Duets on Ice, in which she played a violin fitted with a tape head and a bow strung with audiotape—all while wearing ice skates with blades encased in a block of ice. The piece ended when it melted. She eventually moved into the world of recordings, leading to her minimalist 1981 single “O Superman,” which hit number two on the UK charts.
• • •
“I was trying to stop smoking and I had the Nicoderm patch, which is basically speed. You wake up in the morning and you think, ‘I’ll rearrange all the furniture in the house!’ So I was doing that and I had this show in Spain in a couple days, and I thought, ‘I’m going to have it translated and do it in Spanish—a language I don’t speak.’ So it was a show with lots of words, but it also had a lot of images [projected]. I slowly read the Spanish, and by the end of
the show I thought it went really well. But I looked out and every single person had gone. There was no one left in the theater. Then I walked offstage and all the production people were looking at the floor. I’m saying, ‘Wasn’t that great?’ They were like, ‘I’m working for a crazy person.’ The show—which was normally about an hour—took four hours. My timing was—well, you couldn’t even say it was off. It took four times longer than it normally would. It was ridiculous. Nicoderm is a powerful mood enhancer, I guess.”
—Laurie Anderson
John Mayer
John Mayer built his initial success through a devoted grassroots following that embraced his breathy voice, complex compositions, stellar guitar chops and boyish good looks. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, Mayer was selling out shows before anybody had ever heard of him. Now armed with seven Grammy wins, the tabloid heartthrob is respected for stepping outside the sensitive songwriting of his early career to explore various genres that include blues and hip-hop.
• • •
“St. Patrick’s Day, 2001. It was the absolute worst show I ever played in my life. It was at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. It was the worst show for a bunch of reasons: Number one, I hadn’t been sleeping because I’d been recording my record. Number two, because I’d been recording my record, my sense of the lineage of my songs from beginning to end was so messed up. Everything in the studio was punched or overdubbed or edited or moved, and I’d actually forgotten how to play straight through them. Third of all, I was getting really sick. Together it made the absolute worst experience I’ve ever had onstage in my life. Hopefully, that will last for the rest of my life as the worst show…Yet everyone had a memory of loving it. Then again, that was so early in my playing career, I don’t think there was anything to really contrast against—except for silence.”