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Eminent Hipsters (9781101638095)

Page 14

by Fagen, Donald


  AUGUST 22

  After the Milwaukee show we took a day off in Chicago. After sleeping for a thousand years, never leaving the room, I’m now on the bus heading toward a gig in nearby Highland Park for the Ravinia Festival. Three more gigs and I fly home. My spider bite is beginning to heal.

  All that sleep and yet I feel strangely unrefreshed, still tired and kind of jumpy, perhaps indicating the beginning of Post Tour Disorder. It’s probably going to take several more millennia of sleep before I feel better. It always does.

  • • •

  The show at Ravinia, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, was, I don’t know, tight and polite. It’s that kind of place. In a desperate attempt to deal with my agitated mood, I asked Pasqual if I could have a tiny toke on one of his thin, neatly rolled joints a half hour before the show. This was a very unusual move on my part. I hadn’t smoked any pot for, literally, years. The experience was immediately both familiar and sad. Time stretched out, elongating the spaces between the beats. This gave me more time to think about what I was going to play, and more time to execute. On the other hand, I felt dissociated from the event as it was unfolding. Each song seemed to take forever to wind through the arrangement, and I even lost my place a couple of times. On the upside, I felt a little less wired. But, ultimately, it was a classic bummer.

  On the way to Indianapolis, an alarm went off indicating some problem with the bus, forcing Geoff to pull over onto the narrow shoulder. Incredibly, the point at which the system shut down left us without lights, including emergency lights. The traffic couldn’t see us until they caught us in their headlights. Each time a huge truck hurtled by, the bus would shake and seem to lift off the ground. For a few minutes, we sat there like idiots on the side of the dark highway, and then scuffled off the dead bus to stand in the weeds while Geoff pointed a blinking flashlight at the oncoming traffic.

  Just about the time Geoff figured out how to get the emergency lights working, Vince and I were picked up by the Horn/Nerd Bus. We took off, leaving Geoff to try to deglitch the system. Everyone had conked out except Jay Collins, who was watching a DVD of The Constant Gardener. Then he turned in as well.

  As I sat there, wide awake, thinking about the bus breakdown, two literary references came to mind. The British sci-fi author J. G. Ballard was fascinated by the way in which technology has dehumanized the world, particularly with highways, parking garages and traffic. In Concrete Island, a driver crashes through a barrier and ends up on a traffic island below a network of highways. Unable to crawl up the embankment, he has to live on the island à la Robinson Crusoe, scavenging material from his totaled Jaguar (this was long before cell phones).

  The other reference was to the last, lovely lines of Moby-Dick. After the white whale sinks the Pequod, Ishmael is in the sea, clinging to Queequeg’s unused coffin:

  On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

  How cool is that?

  AUGUST 23

  I was woken up in the Indianapolis Omni by a band outside somewhere, playing a medley of Eagles tunes. A food festival or something. Then we bused to the Fraze Pavilion in Dayton, Ohio.

  When my family moved to Ohio, Dayton was the first place they settled. I asked some of the ladies in catering if they remembered the Burger Chef franchise. Nope.

  AUGUST 24

  Last show, in Indianapolis, outdoors. Super crowd: old stoners, fortysomethings, college types. Afterwards, there was a band dinner at the Omni. Like all last-night get-togethers, there was apprehension and sadness beneath the surface, people worried about the transition into other gigs, other lives. McDonald was already on the bus back to Nashville, Boz up to Maine somewhere. We’d reconvene in October for the trip to Japan.

  AUGUST 25

  Vince rode with me to the airport, where he was getting a later flight to LA. After all the vexation and euphoria of the tour, I was feeling strangely placid, or, perhaps, feeling nothing. The greeter person, a young black guy, seemed to think I was a sports agent and asked me how to get into the business, but just then we arrived at security and I didn’t have to answer. Bye-bye, Indiana, I’ve become airborne.

  APPENDIX: ACUTE TOUR DISORDER

  Definition

  Acute Tour Disorder (ATD) is characterized by a cluster of anxiety and dissociative symptoms that develop in response to traumatic events that occur while a person is employed as a member of a rock concert touring band. Symptoms usually arise sometime during the first month of the tour and continue until its conclusion, at which time the onset of Post Tour Disorder (PTD) almost certainly follows. ATD is related to other disorders brought on as a result of severe vocational stress, such as Combat Stress Reaction (aka shell shock).

  Causes and Symptoms

  Acute Tour Disorder is caused by exposure to traumatic events that occur during a tour. Curiously, the majority of these events are regarded by the participants as being consistent with occupational norms. These include:

  Confinement in vehicles, hotels, dressing rooms, and so on, with the same group of people over long periods of time

  Daily relocation to a new venue (sports arena, “rock palace,” casino theater, “summer shed”)

  Nightly performances in front of large, rowdy, often intoxicated crowds as well as exposure to amplified percussion and electric instruments at decibel levels that frequently cause irreversible physical and psychological damage

  These are all, in fact, stressors that can produce a broad range of symptoms, including:

  Anxiety Symptoms

  Mania

  Panic attacks

  Inability to focus

  Paranoia

  Anger problems (“stage rage”)

  Bizarre ideations

  Replay of traumatic events (flashbacks)

  Physical restlessness

  Insomnia

  Muscle pain and twitching

  Headaches

  Diarrhea

  Dissociative Symptoms

  Depersonalization

  Derealization

  Emotional numbness

  Severe depression

  Memory loss

  Other Symptoms

  Inability to carry out and prioritize tasks

  Morbid fixations on minor problems

  Physical and mental exhaustion

  Sexual dysfunction

  In addition, high levels of psychic pain and physical discomfort often lead to secondary problems, such as substance abuse, television trance and compulsive, sometimes deviant, sexual behavior.

  Diagnosis

  Because the patient suffering from Acute Tour Disorder rarely seeks help until the condition has resolved itself into Post Tour Disorder (i.e., until after the tour is over), the diagnostic history is brief. Opportunities for diagnosis usually present themselves after a severe functional breakdown or when some overt behavioral aberration is brought to the attention of law enforcement and/or medical professionals. After an examination of the patient’s history has ruled out diseases that can cause similar symptoms, diagnostic criteria can be set as follows:

  The patient presents six of the above symptoms

  Onset of the symptoms was in the first six weeks of the tour and symptoms show no signs of reduction

  Treatment

  Treatment for ATD usually includes a combination of antidepressant medications and short-term psychotherapy.

  Prognosis

  The prognosis for recovery is contingent on the intensity and duration of the tour and the patient’s previous level of functioning. Prompt treatment and appropriate social support are major factors in recovery. If the patient’s symptoms are severe enough to interfere with normal functioning and last longer than one month, the diagnosis may be changed to PTD. Patien
ts who do not receive treatment for ATD are at increased risk for additional symptoms characteristic of PTD: narcolepsy, major anxiety/depressive disorders and concomitant behavioral aberrations.

  Prevention

  Of course, the best way to avoid ATD is a real-world transformation such as a change of vocation. With this choice, however, unknown factors come into play, often linked to the withdrawal of the hyperattention that is normally bestowed on the patient by audiences, members of the road crew and industry flacks, that is, a steep and sudden reduction of narcissistic supply. In theory, prompt professional intervention might reduce the likelihood or severity of ATD.

  Acknowledgments

  Folks who’ve encouraged me over the years or read through the stuff and let me know if I’ve said anything really dumb include Peter Battis, John Becker, Walter Becker, Virginia Cannon, Marcelle Clements, Deborah Eisenberg, Brooke Gladstone, Karenna Gore-Schiff, Tony Hendra, Hendrik Hertzberg, Gerry Howard, Fred Kaplan, Dick LaPalm, Rita Meed, Peter Mezan, Susan Lyne, Scott Moyers, Richard Ransohoff, Paul Slovak, Wallace Shawn, John Swansburg, Scott Sutton, Rusty Unger, Dorothy White, Andrew Wylie, Hassan Yalcinkaya and some other guys and gals I’m sure I’m leaving out. Sorry, y’all.

  * Not unlike the complex relationship of bop to the jazz that preceded it.

 

 

 


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