The next day we got to do a little more sightseeing before doing more press at the venue before soundcheck. I know, two days in a row where we got to see some of the city besides the parking lot and the green room? Unheard of. I suppose it was making up for the fact […]
I tried to fix it. I grabbed his elbows and blinked at him in surprise. “I mean, holy crap, J. I wasn’t expecting to see you until New York.” “I know.” The hurt in his eyes was just a flicker and then it was gone. “I’ve been trying to call you since I saw it […]
I was serious when I said we had enough basket cases. I really didn’t need to sit around crying about my heartache, when Ziggy was flipping out from his meds, Chris was getting pulled down by addiction, and the Megaton shit-fits were not over with yet. That afternoon we showed up for soundcheck and Louis […]
When I woke later, Courtney was gone and everyone else was already up. I was the only one in the bus as far as I could tell. I found Carynne inside the building, having a discussion with Louis and a guy I didn’t know. All three of them had very serious looks on their faces. […]
Colin was waiting for me to finish my little chat, off in the wings. I asked him how his fingers were holding up. “A little sore, but okay,” he said, then blew on his fingertips. “You want your dog tags back?” “Thanks.” I took the laminates on a lanyard he held out to me. One […]
“Today we’re going to learn to play the blues,” I said. We were sitting on the edge of the stage, our legs dangling into the security pit. “I’m betting you kind of know this already, instinctively, but it’s one thing to hear it and recognize it, and another to play it.” Colin nodded. “Okay.”
As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one contemplating a trip to another planet that night. Chris and Paco had picked up some peyote from someone they’d met in the park and I later found out they were in fact “tripping their brains out.” I also found out that the someone might have been […]
That was the afternoon I started teaching Colin to play the guitar. It was more or less a dare. “I can’t play the guitar,” he claimed. “Sure you can,” I argued back, and that led to me teaching him.
The show was at a place called the Seattle Center Arena. I had no idea what to expect with a name like that, but I knew from one of the many lists of Carynne’s I’d seen that it seated eight thousand. Inside it was kind of a miniature Madison Square Garden. Once upon a time […]
I worked on “Infernal Medicine” when I got home. I still just had fragments of lyrics–I’d crossed out far more than I’d left on the page. That was normal for me. But I started playing around with the sound of it, trying to get the aural equivalent of something deceptively sweet with a razor blade […]