"You're A Very Antisocial Band"...

Or: How to Say "Blow Me" in Several Different Languages

Me asking Dan Adams if he is, in fact, talking to me. I mean you gotta be talking to me. No one else is here. So, that’s right: you talking to me?

If you had ever seen Black Flag back in what people are fond of calling “the day” you knew there was a lot that was special going on, outside of the music. Socially speaking what was happening with them was something that many/most of us hadn’t felt yet: the curiously cult-y thing that happens when you jam six or seven adults in a van-sized space for weeks.

The language changes, “jokes”, as they were, get streamlined into catch phrases and the entire traveling party coheres into adventurers after non-duplicative experience. By way of playing music. And all of us who later found our ways onto the roads and byways of this deal discovered ourselves out there on the blacktop.

Of course, that’s tour number one.

Tour number 47? The entire experience is distilled into a glower that says nothing if not, “how will today fuck us?” And if your framework is the fucking you’re expecting to get, it gets hard to focus on how cool it is to not get fucked (over) when you’re fully expecting to.

This is a mitzvah.

[I]f I take your cellphone from you and jam it into my underwear where it will remain ensconced against my wet and sweaty penis during a show? Yeah: good times.

So is threatening to punch someone in the face every day and then not having to punch them in the face because the threat actually worked. But pulling into towns where we’re greeted by seas of smiling faces it sometimes makes me feel bad that the best I can muster in these waves of enthusiasm is “where’s the food?”

And yet…I’m as happy as I have ever been. It just gets processed…differently.

How differently? Well, if I take your cellphone from you and jam it into my underwear where it will remain ensconced against my wet and sweaty penis during a show? Yeah: good times. Good times. So here’s to good times. And deeply antisocial behaviors.

LEEDS: You have to understand something…we’ve been doing this long enough that blur is the operating mode. However, one thing that’s remembered, at least by me who has to manage energy levels over the course of an hour-long set? Sizes of stages. And the best thing about having played the place we were playing again in Leeds is that the stage was relatively small. Now “too small” can be a problem, but smallish can be cool.

And three big stages in a row might be a skosh exhausting, so I’m glad to be in Leeds.

However, business in Leeds has, apparently, been very good for Leeds and the stage and the entire club has been expanded and redesigned and it is now a big stage. Which means aspirin, stretching and some weird green oil that my hair stylist got me for aches and pains. Because the best pain meds come from guys who cut your hair.

Plus this weird dollop of paranoia: an internet friend who showed up last show had suffered an amazing downturn of circumstance. He lost both jobs he had, his marriage was going down the toilet, the police had arrested him for a variety of charges and added to the mix he had, he confessed…right before he professed to being disgusted that I was what he called “a pornographer” …he had started abusing steroids.

Given the internet circumstance it seemed best to me to tell him to fuck off. And to tell all of his subsequent burner accounts to also fuck off. I hadn’t done the math about returning to Leeds though so I’m on edge. On edge with an edge. Or a few. Which is a total felony in the UK, but you know…blackbelt in jiu jitsu or not, I’m about getting out of trouble just as fast as I can get into it.

He doesn’t show though and the show proceeds with nary a hiccup, big stage or not. After the show though we’re some version of mobbed by Leeds with the kind of enthusiasm you find when you haven’t managed to stink up the joy. One guy, looking amazingly familiar comes up to me, his cellphone held aloft.

He’s got a picture pulled up and it’s the two of us from the tiny stage time we played Leeds.

“Remember me mate?!?”

“Yes!” I say and then, “Looks like you’ve gained a truckload of fucking weight since we took this, eh?”

I’m not sure what I was expecting, as I’m not sure I even gave much thought to it as my default setting most of these days is just “whatever comes out of my mouth I can’t be held responsible for” but I do feel kind of surprised that he’s taking umbrage at my fat shaming. A fat shaming that in no way is lessened when I say “that’s OK. I’m a fat fuck too!”

In any case autographs are signed, we decamp for Ibis, the UK motel of choice for weary travelers and Serbian criminals, and I fall into a deep and dreamless sleep.

BRISTOL: I had the benefit of being able to shill this show when I played here most recently with BUNUEL last October. Don’t know if that made a difference but pre-sales were good enough that the club folks when we showed weren’t rude to our faces. The stage is manageable and one thing I am doing consistently this tour that I don’t usually do is…soundcheck.

If the club is full when I am doing soundcheck? I usually stop doing soundcheck. If club folks are hanging around? I don’t soundcheck. But my soundcheck ways fuck me, so this tour, soundcheck. For another reason too. Mostly, it gives the lighting guy a chance to light my face and account for my height.

So I stand at the mic, stand up straight while watching him and let him work his magic.

A magic that seems woefully absent during the show as I sort of stalk these shifting nodes of light. Never where I need them to be when I am there. Always there when I am not. It’s baffling, however the only reason I have remotely come to give a shit is that Kiran is here. He directed our “Icy White & Crystalline” video and also has balls big enough to think he can make an OXBOW documentary (the fourth one in actual fact). So fleeing the shadows in search of light is necessary for…filmic reasons.

The show screams to a stop, thunderous applause, which is still surprising to me since the set largely revolves around four or five of our newer songs, and then a request for an encore. Returning to the stage, I step to the mic to thank the audience and then I am hit with the most perfect, yellow and candescent light I have ever seen.

“Wait a minute,” I say, my back teeth grinding against each other so hard that I’m not sure I can even be heard. “You’ve had that light the whole time? And you’re just now using it?” The audience laughs despite the fact that I am not.

I’m looking at the lighting guy and he’s looking at me. I later ask Michi our sound guy, what the lighting guy did after I disappeared into the next song, shaking my head at the almost perfect fuck you goof ever.

“Oh,” said Michi. “He was smiling.”

Which, finally and actually, really made me smile.

LONDON: September in London. The heat has started to dip right? WRONG. The permanent outfit for urban dwellers here is my least favorite as shorts and flip flops now just serve to generate a low grade anger in me. Why? Because it lets the lazy hide in plain sight. I mean what do you leave the house wearing when you can barely be arsed to leave the house in the first place? You got it: shorts and flip flops.

Which is why I am wearing a track suit.

Is it hot? Yes. But I owe it to the world to try a little bit. Just a little. But I am being dropped off at NTS Radio, to do an interview about the memoir. I’m late getting there but once there everyone is amazingly…relaxed. The conceit is simple though: I have generated a playlist for the memoir. So I play the songs, talk about the songs, shill the memoir.

If we ever get to starting. Which it doesn’t seem we’re getting to and my New York energy is starting to get pushy. I mean it lasts two hours and I have soundcheck to do so let’s get popping.

“Oh. Yeah,” says the DJ I’ll be doing the show with and her producer.

So they grab a bunch of stuff and start out the door. Out the door of the nicely airconditioned office into the Sahara of East London. Where we find a metal storage locker in the sun.

“What’s this?”

“Oh,” she says. “This is where we do the recording now that we’re under renovation,” and as she opens the steel doors it’s like opening the doors of hell as waves of heat radiate from the inside out.

No fan, it’s noisy, no open doors, outside it’s noisy, and so we sauna sit through my 21 song playlist. Of course dying from the heat is the least of my concerns. You see the playlist features music I mention in the memoir. A lot of this music I have not heard in years and my response is unexpectedly…emotional. So, now I am sobbing and sweating, and praying for the set list end before she and I expire like some kids left in locked cars.

I make it to the show end, alive, rush over to the venue, and make it in time for soundcheck. Nordra played with us. The show was packed. In a weird turn of events during the show I look out at the audience and make a mental note to myself: “surprising that there are still people striving to look like Nick Cave,” until I find out after the show that that was, in fact, Nick Cave’s son. So less about trying to look like Cave and much more looking exactly like Cave.

The show was great. We drive out of town an hour to beat the London traffic the next day.

KORTRIJK: Totally swank venue. Like, amazingly so. So big and confusing that on a trip outside to let in the puzzle man, I realize having to take a piss I will never find the toilet in time. Looking around I figure I am in a pretty secluded spot, and so let fly only to look up and see I’ve chosen a spot in front of a massive picture window where Michi is waving at me.

Picture pissing in front of the Guggenheim and you’ve got it.

The puzzle guy though…this is high wire act of some doing. We’re selling these custom made boxes. Ten only. Inside of boxes you will find Love’s Holiday, in four of the boxes only you will find one of the last four of the extremely limited Thin Black Book, and finally a 500 piece OXBOW puzzle. The total cost $300.

The art was by Evil Jay, the box and the carving by Lionel Arlen. However UPS wanted to charge $483 to ship it. The US postal system wanted $152. I went for USPS and while I can hear you all screaming not to I, of course, did.

The puzzle pieces are not here yet though. And this should surprise no one.

However, American audiences might be happy because this means it won’t have sold out before we get back to the US shows and sooooooo…Europe’s loss is America’s gain.

But the show? A blast. Now if I can only figure out how to pronounce the name of this wonderful Belgian town so that it sounds like something other than KorJuJick.

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