Close to midnight we pulled in to the motel in Cleveland, and Digger and Carynne did this little vaudeville act at the side door of the van. (“After you.” “No, after you.” “Ms. Manager, I insist.” “Oh no, you first Mr. Manager.” and so on until they both moved at the same time and bumped […]
I’m glad that Jordan turned out to be an incredibly cool dude, and that he didn’t turn the album into top 40 crap, and that he and I spent a lot of late nights talking about music and history and stuff. That wasn’t the only eventful thing in the spring besides my birthday of course. […]
Spring in Boston comes a lot later than it does to New York. When New Jersey is yellow with forsythias and daffodils and stuff, up here we’re still looking at gray skies and piles of dirty snowplow snow. We’re talking way into March, sometimes April. People still have ski racks on their cars and snow […]
“Everything come out alright?” Chris said. “Yeah, fine.” No one said anything for a few minutes while we ate, mouths full. And then Jordan started the talking the next time. “So how many tunes do we have to work with?” He was picking pieces of fatty beef out of his noodles with chopsticks and eating […]
Ziggy and I didn’t try again during the rehearsing. Personally I felt fine the next day as long as I didn’t think about what had happened. He did not bring it up and I was not seized with the urge to scream again. I kept my distance and he kept his. Essentially, we went back […]
Digger’s advice to prevent a hangover was to always drink a glass of water before going to bed. I didn’t really believe him, because he often had a hangover anyway. However I always drank a glass just in case it helped. My theory was that if it did help at all, it was that the […]
Yeah, so much for keeping my birthday a secret. I got my license the day before my twenty first birthday and somehow that turned into me driving the van the next day. When Bart climbed in he smiled and hit me on the shoulder, but then sat pretty quiet like maybe he was afraid of […]
Okay, I exaggerated. It wasn’t all work. Christian and I managed to get drunk at the house a few times, too. I was staring at a half empty bottle of Southern Comfort when I got to thinking, as I probably often did while drunk, about whether Digger felt at all like this when he got […]
There’s a stage of rehearsal when everyone is learning their parts, where every part of my brain needs to be involved. But when everything works, and the parts fall into place, things become automatic. When I described the feeling to Bart, he compared it to driving a car. Unfortunately, at that stage, driving a car […]
So, what did I do for the two weeks while the others were gone? Watched a chunk of Christian’s video collection, dragged out my old method books and flexed my fingers, and slept a lot. What do other people do with themselves? I found myself wondering, not the first time I’d tried to imagine how […]