Springing the Blues, part 1: getting there

Glen Allen, Virginia, April 2, 2008
We're dying for a good meal. It's been almost 48 hours since our last bite of Real Food, a roast beef sandwich at the famous Rein's Deli in Conncecticut. I violated one of my cardinal rules of restaurants yesterday by driving 10 miles off our route onto a peninsula in southern Maryland for lunch at Captain John's Seafood. Captain John's is not to be confused with Cap'n Jack's or Captain D's, or its neighbor, Captain Billy's, whose weathered billboard on the highway suggests it has either seen better days or it hasn't, ever. I think I can safely add a "No 'Captains'" rule to our restaurant guide.
We made a more pleasant stop in Orange, Virginia, home of Billy Cooper's Music Store. This is the pedal steel guitar capital of the Eastern Seaboard. They have an amazing assortment of steel guitars for sale, and other instruments as well. My favorite item in the store is the pad of post-it notes with a little picture of a pedal steel on each note. The artwork takes up a lot of space on the tiny square, but it's cute and it provides entertainment for us "steel widows."

The Don'ts of Driving

Getting ready for a drive from Boston to Jacksonville, Florida in a few weeks. Time to check out the car, shake out the spring wardrobe, and remember some of the rules of the road:

When you're driving, DON'T...
- Drink wine
- eat with a knife and fork
- wipe hamburger grease off your hands
- examine your hands and clothes for bread crumbs or melted chocolate
- listen in on passengers' arguments
- fish around for your meds
- fish around for someone else's meds
- think about what would happen if you suddenly JERKED the steering wheel
- stare at limos
- play that song that makes you close your eyes
- play Monopoly
- or Sudoku
- assume that there are any good restaurants on a peninsula
- drive down said peninsula looking for said restaurant
- answer your email
- change your pants
- floss
- take off more than one layer of clothing at a time
- watch the movie playing in the car ahead of you

Those are all the printable ones I could think of. Feel free to add your own!

Oily in the Morning

I got my driver's license when I was 18, but my real driver's education came from using a stick shift. My father had an old 1981 Toyota Celica hatchback that was all falling apart except for the engine. I careened all over Massachusetts at record-breaking speeds, zooming from work to gigs, from home to rehearsals, and giving rides to other musicians when their cars were impounded for overdue parking fines.

The Celica ran hot. The only way to keep it cool was to run the heater full blast, even in summertime. I remember bouncing from pothole to pothole down a simmering, bubbling L Street in South Boston in July to rehearse with my friend Pete, a great guitarist and songwriter who lives in Nashville now. I adjusted the vents to blow all the hot air at my feet, which was not as uncomfortable as it sounds. I'd rather be too hot than too cold anyway. But I did a lot of stupid things like that when I was younger. Not like now, of course.

When I first started driving, I had to be "schooled" at the gas pump. One time I was giving a ride home to my old music partner, the late Butch McClendon. I was running on empty, so I pulled into a filling station and got five dollars worth of regular unleaded. At the time this was about 3 gallons. Butch shook his head and said,"Little girl, you don't know nothing. You can't go around putting five dollars in all the time." He took a ten out of his coat pocket and handed it to me. "Here. Put some more gas in your car." Butch hardly ever paid me for gigs as the band drank up the tab and usually ended up owing the bar money, but he believed in the value of a good education. I think of those days fondly now as we drive from state to state spending 50 bucks a pop at the pumps.

Before Paul and I became music partners, I would drive him out to his Wednesday night gig at the Sit 'n Bull Pub in Maynard, MA, where he opened for Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters. I was always late in picking him up, but felt confident I could make up the time en route. One winter there was a snowstorm every Wednesday night. I took a rural road for most of the 17 miles, navigating the sharp curves and slippery conditions with my left foot hovering over the clutch, my right pressing accelerator and brake simultaneously, as I palpated the horn every few seconds. I had become a topnotch Boston Driver.

Eventually my father traded me a red Acura for his beloved Celica, and from there I graduated to a Dodge and then a Plymouth minivan, better suited to larger bands and longer hauls. Paul and I had a gig at Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs, New York, followed by a gig the next night in Burlington, Vermont. It turned out to be a longer drive than I had anticipated, and we would need to hurry to get there in time. We examined the map and made the mistake of believing that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The straight line in this case was a road called 9N that branched off from the New York Thruway and angled towards the Hudson River south of Burlington. 9N may have looked perfectly straight from above, but on the ground it was the world's longest, bumpiest Evel Kneivel stunt prop. We dipped in and out of the asphalt waves, surfacing among Adirondack Lake cabins. I can never forget the grinding sound as I gunned the engine to speed over those winding hills. The next day we had to drive over the Green Mountains on the way home. Finally, on Interstate 93 in southern New Hampshire, the car made a final growl and stopped responding. This is when I learned what a transmission was and why I needed a new one.

Of course, I eventually forgot all about it, until we got to Livingston, Montana last July. Livingston is a really cute town outside of Bozeman. We had a gig at the local Elks Lodge. I was worried we wouldn't have any people, as the entire town was plastered with posters for an upcoming show by "Sean Reefer and the Resin Valley Boys" which sounded like some kind of code for something. But we had a wonderful night after all, with a great crowd, and we want to thank John Taillie for putting it together. He and his girlfriend treated us to a delicious dinner and put us up at the best hotel in town, the Murray. The only odd thing about the Murray was that it had a century-old elevator that could only be operated by a member of the desk staff. The desk didn't open until 7:30, so the next morning we had to wait to load out, though we would ordinarily be on the road by 6:30 AM.

The Murray Hotel, Livingston, Montana. Across the street is a restored old railroad depot. You can't see the detail in this photo, but the circular rosette between the depot's second floor windows contains a red and black plaster yin-yang, an feature designed and installed by the original Chinese builders.

I thought that since we would still be in town when the local businesses opened, we might as well get the oil changed and the car looked over. John sent us over to a place called "Special Lube." You laugh, but it's the best damn place to take your car in the entire Mountain Time Zone. It's owned and operated by a group of idealistic, polite young people who aren't out to fleece anybody; they just really like cars. The guy at the desk wore giant tortiseshell glasses that were too big to fit on his nose and had slid down to just above the tip, giving him an owlish, baby-faced look like Al Wilson from Canned Heat. As he wrote up the bill for the oil change he informed us that the transmission fluid was brown and full of little burned-up pieces of the transmission. Apparently this is a bad thing. However, it would take them almost an hour to do a "Tranny flush" - stop laughing, it's auto mechanic's jargon - so we decided to take our chances as we had a long drive over the Rockies to get to Spokane by evening. Paul and I got in the car and had driven about a block and a half when we looked at each other with the same thought: "Take our chances? In the ROCKY MOUNTAINS?" What's an hour in Livingston, I realized, compared with the time we'd spend waiting for a tow truck to find us at the Continental Divide, or the incredible hassle of renting a car or looking for a new one for the remaining 6,000 miles of our tour?

Neither of us had said anything. I just turned the car around and drove it right back into the bay at Special Lube. We took our instruments out and sat at a picnic table across the street, playing for a couple of foraging prairie dogs as the freight trains rolled by behind us. I should have taken a picture. It was our only non-ludicrous "Americana Moment" on the tour. I'll get to the ludicrous ones eventually.

The Special Lube guy wrote up the final bill ($122 well spent!) and, with an air of sincere interest in the subject and no trace of sarcasm, gave me a few pointers about gear shifting in a car with automatic transmission. I really noticed the difference in the feel of the engine after the transmission flush. And I suddenly felt guilty about those hundred-mile-an-hour joyrides through the trooperless High Plains. I paid much closer attention to the tachometer after that and patted the dashboard with apologies and comforting words for the next several thousand miles.

Looking back on the trip now, I wish we had taken as good care of ourselves as we took of that car. But that's another story.

Paul in downtown Livingston





Inside the Elks Lodge with two of Livingston's finest. Everybody we met there was great, but these two made it happen.

Come on, Big Boy, Ten Cents a Mile

photo by Annie Raines

On Sunday we drove west from Cleveland to Janesville, Wisconsin, 450 miles down the road.
We faced an important decision in Janesville: whether to stay on I-90 West through southern Minnesota and South Dakota, traveling through the Badlands and part of Wyoming, then north to Billings, or to follow I-94 northwest into Minneapolis and across North Dakota before cutting southwest to Billings. The northern route was 30 miles shorter, and perhaps flatter, but took us through Minneapolis and St. Paul, which would mean heavier traffic. The southern route avoided any big cities in Minnesota, but we would need to drive 473 miles to Sioux Falls in order to stay at a major chain hotel and find good food. I was also concerned about the view from the driver's seat. The southern route, I imagined, would be more interesting, with scenic mountains and historical sites, though we wouldn't have time to tour Mt. Rushmore. On the other hand, we would have to go through Sturgis, SD, which was under two weeks away from its annual Harley Davidson Rally and possibly already crowded with motorcycles. The northern route was by most accounts flat and featureless, and I pictured myself being bored and depressed as we drove across a stark plain. I took the Greyhound cross-country when I was a kid visiting the Grand Canyon with my parents, and I will never forget the soul-killing ride through central Nebraska, which bore a striking resemblance to eastern Nebraska and western Nebraska. I would lean against the window with the air conditioning blowing against my head, my nostrils dilating from the disinfectant aroma wafting out of the bus toilet a few rows behind me, and fall asleep staring out at browned fields so vast and unbroken I thought we had stopped moving altogether. There wasn’t a tree, shrub, cow or calf to jut out from the land and provide the merest sense of scale. I would fall asleep staring at this leathery landscape and awaken hours later to the same view. How would we ever make it to the Rockies this way?
My fear of encountering a grayer, northern version of the same thing in North Dakota was pushing me more to the southern route. I tried to find advice on the internet, typing in search terms like “cross country drive” “fastest route” “I-90” or “is better.” I found a very funny travel blog on eopinions.com about both routes that had us howling with laughter even as our worst fears were confirmed.
But in the end it came down to where there were still hotel rooms available. Like most northeasterners, I labor under the misapprehension that the farther west you go, the fewer people there are in any given place. However, this isn't true in the cities. There are lots of people in Sioux Falls, Bismarck, Butte and Billings, because there's nowhere else to go for hundreds of miles.
I was too tired to contemplate it further and slept on it until the next morning, delaying the decision until the car was packed and ready to go. One blind panic and a flurry of phone calls later, we were headed to Minneapolis and what we thought was the bleak landscape of North Dakota. We were surprised to see gold and green rolling hills, cows, horses, cornfields and hay bales, natural beauty that was at once both domesticated and far ranging. West of Bismarck, the farms gave way to grassy canyons and wind-worn pyramids of colorfully striped sandstone. It was one of the most beautiful drives we’ve ever taken, because there were no billboards, no mile-high signs for gas stations, no factories, no Bob's Big Boy, no tacky industrial buildings plunked down on the highwayside; just the harmony of the landscape as we whizzed through at over 90 miles per hour. (I shouldn’t have mentioned this as I know my mother will be reading it). We did burn a lot of gas at that speed, though, so I’ll probably take it slower for the rest of the drive.

3500 miles into our trip, we stopped in Medora, North Dakota. It sits an hour east of the Montana Line, nestled into the northern Badlands and Theodore Roosevelt State Park. It is also the home of the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame. Whatever the town’s original purpose, it had been refurbished into a cute Old West tourist attraction at the State Park entrance. We found a fantastic bookstore there, full of history books about settlement and strife in the American West, framed prints by local artists and country music CDs by regional stars like the Larsen Brothers. We bought some books and postcards, then went around the corner to buy some stamps at the local post office. Across the street from the post office was a table flanked by two benches, and we sat there under a lovely old tree and wrote out several postcards. We hated to leave Medora.

The ride through eastern Montana was, admittedly, a little less breathtaking. Even though we were going fast enough to become airborne, the wait for the next mile marker seemed to go on forever. We finally made it to Billings, land of civilization and commerce, land of scary fast drivers, and The Only Game in Town.

Schlepping Across America

Brooklyn, Ohio, an airport suburb west of Cleveland, shares a name with the brassy borough in New York, but the similarity ends there. We're staying at a hotel at a flat, open highway crossroads with every kind of shopping mall restaurant clustered at the corners. Two weeks into our road trip, we've already left pieces of ourselves and our possessions scattered across the midatlantic states. We left our schlepper (pet name for a wheeled cart) in Virginia, when a well-meaning fan brought it to the stage to help with our amps, which we instead hand carried to the car. We were so intent on getting through the mountains before dark, we drove off, leaving the lonesome schlepper (the cart, not the guy) by the stage, still waiting to serve us.
The handtruck has special significance in the jumble of non-musical equipment carried by the traveling musician. We have to do most of our own booking, managing, driving, loading and unloading - usually four times a day, sometimes more, setting up, playing, booking hotels, and finding restaurants on the road, so a cart with wheels is like a little helper who travels with us and doesn't ask for its own room or to turn on the air conditioning in the car.
It seemed to us that we were destined to leave the schlep (for short) behind. It wasn't our usual schlepper. Paul got the original schlepper over 10 years ago, as a Christmas gift from his wife, and he has rolled it in and out of hotels and clubs all over the U.S. and Canada since then, stacking the amps on it and giving it an affectionate pat now and then. But he wanted something different for our big road trip, something wider, perhaps lighter, something more manageable. We ran through Staples on our last-minute errand run before leaving, and found the new, sleek black schlepper. Paul was pretty happy with it, but he had no time to bond. So it was no surprise that we forgot to account for it only a few gigs later. We hadn't registered the imprint. We didn't mourn for long, though, as it had been a very short relationship without memorable moments.
Today in Brooklyn we drove by a Staples on our way to the gig at the Winchester Tavern in Lakewood. On the way back from the sound check, I swung the car into the parking lot and went in to find a new schlepper. Success! This one is even better than the last. The last one consisted of open gridwork, which is lighter, but you worry about catching your fingers in the overlapping grids, a thought that makes me queasy. The new one has a solid base and tubular construction. It's heavy, but it has personality. This is a schlepper whose praises you can sing, a schlepper you could maybe even - dare I say? - Love.
However, my heart still belongs to the old, silvery, experienced one resting up at home this summer. You never forget your first schlepper.

Getting Ready, part 2

Before we left on Paul and Annie's Excellent Cross-Country Tour, we measured the car and all of our boxes and bags. Paul had the idea to use some of those ubiquitous purple plastic bins for our clothes, food, and other supplies. It solves the problem of fitting oddly-shaped pieces of luggage into the car, and we can easily cart them into our hotel room because we'll be staying in places with carts and elevators (see the previous entry for my mini-tirade about motels). In the meantime, our pared-down to-do list magically doubled in size, to include "haircut," "shower caddy," and "buy plastic bins."
Our cargo can be broken down into three categories:
1) Things that Make Noise (Musical Equipment)
2) Things That Stack (clothing bins, food bin, wine bin, other supplies)
3) Things That Hang (garment bags, shower caddies, Bag O'Pillows)

If it does anything else, we don't need it.

Getting Ready

The official countdown clock tells us that our summer cross-country tour will begin in exactly two weeks and 24 hours. I started counting down about 6 weeks ago, making lists of all kinds of issues and errands that needed to be resolved or completed by the time we leave. I've had to pare down the list a few times, letting go of some of our grander plans, such as "end world hunger" and "clean garage." Yet some of the items that remain, while simple and attainable, seem trivial, such as "flea med for cats" and "$100 - Boris/VCR rpr." Others seem simply impossible; just thinking about a visit to the Verizon store for a replacement phone fills me with angst - on a cellular level, if you will.
Paul and I learned so much on our tours in 2006, and we hope to apply our hard-won knowledge on this 8,000 mile thrill ride. Here are a few nuggets any traveler might be able to use:
1) Bring wine (we knew this before but it bears repeating)
2) Put everything in plastic bags. Soap, shampoo, food, clothes, everything.
3) Reserve your own hotel room if you can. Anyone who books a room for you is thinking of their convenience first and yours second. That doesn't mean they'll put you in a crappy motel, but it doesn't mean they won't either. We look for "value" hotels (not motels) that have a central lobby, luggage carts, automatic front doors and an elevator, and no visible indoor/outdoor carpeting. Believe it or not, it's also good to ask if the hotel is undergoing or about to undergo renovations. We stayed in a hotel in Michigan that was under construction, and we had to move three times to get away from the noises and smells, but still got no relief. When I heard a few weeks later that Bobby Hatfield of the Righteous Brothers had died on the road in Michigan, I knew immediately what city and what hotel. And I was right. True story!
4) The four most evil words in any musician's lexicon are "Oh, by the way." Run, don't walk, if you hear these words. They're often followed by "my nephew plays the didgeridoo and he's bringing it to the show tonight," or "we couldn't find a soundman or a P.A, but we think the acoustics are great in here, don't you?" "the opening band broke all their equipment playing too loud - can they use yours?" "There's no hot water," you get the idea. "Oh, by the way" is supposed to soften you up for the killing blow that follows.
5) Try not to become addicted to the TV in your hotel room. (I'm saying this more for my own benefit. We gave up our television last year when we moved and now we're extra vulnerable to the pretty lights and colors and "Seinfeld" re-runs when we're on the road.)
6) Bring your own pillows. Also bring your own Kleenex, soap, shampoo, Italian seasonings, plates, forks, spoons, Q-tips, tea, salami, and corkscrew, among other things. I may post a complete list later just for amusement.
7) To paraphrase the Duchess of Windsor, you can never have too much underwear.
8) Pay bills in advance and have someone check your mail in case the US government comes a-callin'.
9) Don't forget to schedule a day off now and then - oops! Well, maybe next time...

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

The Post-Road Diary: New York

In an attempt to recount a recent tour of upstate New York, and realizing she hadn't started to write about a prior trip to Canada, Annie was compelled to reach back to the beginning of her traveling career. Here's an installment from the first band tour in 1994.
But wait, I never got a chance to tell you about our tour of the Canadian Maritimes!
Flash forward: I only realized afterwards that it was our first band tour (“tour” in this case means at least three consecutive out-of-town dates) in thirteen years.
OK, flash back: Our first band tour together was in February of 1994. We drove all over (where else?) Florida and Georgia with our bass player Damian Purro and our great drummer Tuffy Kimble. I had been playing with Paul for a little over a year. We had done a few gigs outside of New England, but I had never really gone out on the road before. Paul and I flew down to Orlando and rented a car, while Tuffy and Damian drove down with all the equipment to meet us at the first gig at Blind Willie’s in Atlanta. We got to Atlanta the day before the gig and checked into the club’s affiliated motel, a sleazy family-friendly place called the Cheshire Bridge Motor Inn.
In those days I was working out regularly at a gym, so, having brought my sneakers and sweats with me, I set out in the morning to find a place where I could crunch those quads, or whatever it was I used to do. As it happened, there was a gym right next to the hotel. I decided to walk a little first, warm up and see the neighborhood. Just past the gym was a bakery. The smell of freshly made bread filled the air. I walked a block, turned around, walked back to the bakery, purchased a loaf and brought it back to the hotel. I could always work out tomorrow. It’s amazing how quickly the lifestyle of a touring musician cured me of any notion of physical fitness. I know they have “fitness centers” in most hotels now, complete with treadmills and stairmasters, but wouldn’t you rather play, eat, drink or smoke too much than miss out on the chance to do any of those things because you were “working out?” Also, if you’re staying in a hotel and you don’t have to a)take Junior to school; b)pick Junior up from school; c)call Junior’s teacher about that grade; d)drive to the mall; e)clean up cat puke; - why not take a well-deserved nap and save the exertion for when you’re home and need to vent your angst about the unbearably tedious turn your life has taken?
Flashing back to Florida: Tuffy and Damian arrived that afternoon. We all drove around until we found Blind Willie’s. We all bought T-shirts that said “It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Sleazy” – not true, by the way – and had our picture taken together outside the club. The show went reasonably well, though I can’t remember any of it. We were preceded by a robust singer named Sandra Hall. She sang in the tradition of “big mamas” and did a fine job.


Next: Jacksonville

Cherokee to the Highway

Let me start off by saying that we had a great time touring in Arizona and New Mexico last week. We'd been traveling under a cloud for 5 months, carrying the bad weather with us, but that is nearly impossible to do in the American southwest. It boasts a superabundance of sunshine and hot, dry air, as well as a scorching wind, probably the result of all of the beans in the local diet. Paul theorizes that the settlers of California didn’t cross the Rockies by choice, but were propelled there by a strong tailwind. Bostonians are known for their own bean cuisine, of course, but the cooler climate helps them keep it under wraps, so to speak.