A California OXBOW in King Arthur's Colony
"Is it a riot if it's just the four of us?" The OXBOW "tour" of America rides again.
America is unbeatable. Red Dawn not withstanding, it’s a country that crushes all and sundry who believe it’s possible to embrace it easily, or at the very least, without difficulty. Any band not from America doesn’t believe this. Until they are crushed by America. Any band from America believes, or at least senses this, in their bones.
And an American band that’s tried to tame America, doesn’t anymore. Which is why OXBOW’s American “tour” is a “tour” and not a tour. By which I mean if Nebraska was meant to have a “scene”, after 42 years of making music I think we would have heard of it. Not to say Nebraska is not wonderful. If you’re a wrestler, or a fan of Johnny Carson and corn, it’s great. If you’re in a van and trying to get a quorum for a show? Not so great.
Which is why and how we’ve decided to carve up the country and play it in discreet bursts instead of creeping through Nebraska, the Dakotas and g-d knows, everywhere else, for weeks on end hoping to hit folks who hate the Internet enough to actually leave their homes and hear some live music.
[D]oing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu before you play is almost as unbelievably stupid as getting a tattoo before you play. Both of which I have done. Repeatedly. I’ve also placed my penis in a vacuum cleaner.
So after a triumphant exit from Europe here OXBOW is again. First stop? The city of brotherly love, a sobriquet that always makes me laugh…
PHILADELPHIA: “Hey! We’re coming to your show….to FUCK you UP!” I’m not sure if that’s what he said but that’s the way I heard it. The speaker was David Grossman from the band Rosetta. He and his bud are BJJ blackbelts and when he offered me a chance to roll before the show in Philly that’s how I read it, love him though I do.
And, of course, I couldn’t refuse it. So I agreed. Even if doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu before you play is almost as unbelievably stupid as getting a tattoo before you play. Both of which I have done. Repeatedly. I’ve also placed my penis in a vacuum cleaner. More than once. But that’s not about that. This is about me getting my ass kicked by two black belts who got their white belts after I had already been training for a decade and their black belts before I got mine. You know…phenoms!
There were other problems. Logistical ones. We flew into Newark, also known as the Land of Lost Luggage, and had to figure out how to get to the hotel sans a van. Which means negotiating with a bleary bevy of drivers and the altogether chaotic cabbing action curbside at Newark. The good part? The luggage all showed.
The bad part? The cavalcade of screaming West Indians needed to figure out how to get five of us, the band and our intrepid merch guy and see-er of over 100 OXBOW shows Fozzy, in to a cabs with two guitars, merch and snare drums. Ten minutes of operatic screaming, hand waving and eye rolls later, we’re on the four minute trip to Heritage Inn Suites. Which always begs the question for me: what heritage, what makes it an Inn and suites? Is that what they call a dirty bed in a room with Brady Bunch paneling?
Beggars, not choosers, we bed down for the only reasonable night of sleep available given the American drives of length and death. Good thing I am rooming with Niko who, as luck would have it, decides to re-string all of his guitars. While talking to his kids. Being three hours away from California tells me those kids are up way past their bed time but neither rain, sleet, snow nor chattering kids can stop the Morpheus express and I am asleep in 11 minutes.
And good thing in the unexpected chill of a Jersey night I also decided to turn the room heater up to 80 before going to sleep. Which means waking up in Hades.
Next stop? The van, the equipment and then two hours to Philly. To the old mortuary that is now PhilaMOCA. The show? Stellar and made more so by the bands Omit All, and then our support for the rest of these shows, Couch Slut. Who managed to successfully get our attention by naming their band after a line in one of our songs: “I’ve got couch sluts of every stripe…I got your boys…and your girls…and those in-between types…” Good thing they are great. And offering me mushrooms and a wide variety of narcotics before completing a full sentence to me makes me love them even more.
During the show I check to make sure the BJJ crew showed. And they had. As had my man Jimi Izrael. Writer extraordinaire who, due to his uncanny, police blotter likeness to me, totally gets in for free. Moreover, people are having conversations with him as though he was me. I can hear the conversation from the balcony greenroom and I think seriously about franchising my act out. I mean Izrael is killing it at being me.
But post-show I call up the fight crew and wedged between a couch and a balcony 15 feet above the stage floor we go for it. I start off with my standard “Do you know what the number tool in my arsenal is?”
“Technique?”
“I don’t know this technique of what you speak. So, no. It’s mockery!” I saw this right before shaking his hand and refusing to let go while telling him, all snark, how good he is. But the reality is, he is good. And for the first time I contemplate the downsides of losing. Well, there are none but one of their guys is filming so I have to hold it together. Of course, after the show, I’m beat but not so beat that I can’t keep from getting beaten.
Tim though has a lean and hungry look and immediately leaps into a fairly good try at a gogoplata. I bury my forehead into the floor and shuck his foot looking for all the world like that meme with the sweating James Brown after I successfully do.
They brought a blue belt with them and he’s now insisting. I was about to shine him on but figured out that black belt vs black belt not much happens but with a blue belt in the house? MEAL TIME. Minutes later when I am driving my knuckles into his jaw and then lowering my chest on to his face for a chest smother, aka Mother’s Milk, and a submission, my work here is done.
And I am sore, tired and on schedule to sleep about five hours of sleep before heading to Portland, Maine where the last time we played there, some 20 years ago, I was a streetfighting fool. Or at least I was streetfighting a fool. And now we’re back.
PORTLAND, MAINE: A beautiful art space. With a gallery next door where I am doing a book reading. I love Maine and it loves us back with icy rain needling into our faces as we load in.
We see faces of folks we haven’t seen here since we played last. I head up to the gallery to sit down to read. TO an empty room. The promoter comes in to tell me we’re pushing the time back 25 minutes and I am relieved. While reading to an empty room might sound fun to some, to me? Just interferes with nap time.
But when the 25 minutes is up? The room is packed.
I tell them that I don’t read, and assume they can, but I’ll tell stories that didn’t make it into the book. As long as no one films it, I tend to go wild and the audience is nervous as I trundle through stories that would make the most mild itch. But it works.
Then the show. Birdie opens up and it’s their third show but they are phenomenal. I try to find them to tell them so, but I can’t so I don’t. Couch Slut? Again: stellar. Followed by a bone crushing narcotic fueled drive to? Another Heritage Inn, or some such place like it.
Then…New York…where I am writing this. In the greenroom, in Brooklyn. Where it’s time for soundcheck. So, we’ll leave you to it. And let’s hope no one dies tonight.
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