The Post-Road Diary:
Flashbacks in Jax

In an attempt to recount a recent tour of upstate New York, and realizing she hadn't yet written about a prior trip to the Canadian Maritimes, Annie was compelled to reach back to the beginning of her traveling career. Here's another installment from the first band tour in 1994.

Fresh from our heady first gig in Atlanta, we headed south to Jacksonville, certain to reach the finish line in our race to the Big Time. Another cheap motel awaited us on the outskirts of town. In the room were two twin beds outfitted with plastic skirts around the box springs. One of the bed skirts had been spattered with a reddish-brown liquid, now dried, on one side. Paul noticed it first and said to me, “Oh, look at that awful stain on YOUR bed. It’s a shame about YOUR bed.” Thus began the saga of Paul teasing me mercilessly from one side of this country to the other, for years and years and years. He got a lot of material out of that one stain. There was certainly no way of getting the stain out of the material.

The other funny thing that happened was we went for a walk, but before we left, Paul stashed his guitar, in its case, in the shower. He figured if someone broke into the room they would be less likely to look in there. When we returned from our walk, our room door was open and a large woman was standing outside, shaking as she talked and gesturing excitedly to a man next to a cart filled with cleaning supplies. It seems she had gone into the room to check for towels, and mistook the silhouette of the guitar for an inanimate body in the shower. She let out a whoop and hightailed it out of the room. When we showed up, she was soliciting the janitor to accompany her back in the room to investigate.

That night in Jacksonville we played a club called “Yesterdays.” It was the kind of place where you were 90% likely to hear “Whiter Shade of Pale” on the jukebox at least twice an evening. Yesterdays was divided into two sections, with a poolroom in front and a performance room in the back. Our drummer Tuffy checked out the pool tables and made plans for later in the evening. Then he entered the band room and was stopped in his tracks by the sight of a beautiful drum set, fully assembled and sparkling in the back corner of the stage. “Whose are those?” he asked with wonderment. Someone from the club replied, “Those belong to Artimus Pyle. He likes to come down and play all the time, so he just leaves them set up.” Being young and ignorant, I had to have it explained to me that Artimus Pyle was the drummer from Lynyrd Skynyrd, that their hit song was “Sweet Home Alabama,” that there had been a plane crash that killed several band members and road crew, and Pyle, sitting in the rear of the plane, had survived. That night, Mr. Pyle showed up and played with us on several songs, dueling with Tuffy as each man veered his drum kit towards the other in a game of musical bumper cars. The pleasure they felt in each others’ musicianship was evident in their smiles and their sympathetic parrying.

But Tuffy wasn't through making his mark on Jacksonville. On the break, he patrolled the poolroom, casing the regulars, finally picking one out and saying, “I bet you I could beat you at pool with one hand behind my back.” Deal, the man said. Tuffy proceeded to chase every ball off the table and this poor man out of his week’s wages with alarming speed. We had to move almost as quickly to pack up and get out of there before a mob formed. We were relieved to make it back to our sleazy hotel, intact and ready to drive to Tampa the following day.

Next stop: Tampa