Chapter Sixteen

On the road again...and again: Dallas, Dublin and a promising encounter in Hull.

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Transcript

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Chapter sixteen More Gigs The West Coast with Richard Schindell A Texas Jaunt, a midwestern swing, on focus, on Lancer, on Saturn, on Stratus. They were running out of names for cars to the Gulf of Mississippi, Glacier State Park in the San Joaquin Valley. I traveled to Alaska to open a few shows for Todd Snyder, who was sort of the diametric opposite of Schindell, where Richard was almost professorial, Michael Douglas and Wonder Boys, Todd was Stone Surfer, Jeff Spicoli's older brother, blonde, barefoot, and hilarious with his shaggy dog stories. Todd was John Pryne's protege, a slacker golden boy tarnished by life. I'd fallen for him as an artist the first time I heard him, in a hotel room at Folk Alliance in Vancouver. So any chance I could, I'd open a show for Todd. The point where the artists I opened for intersected was that they all appeared to be completely comfortable in front of an audience. They knew who they were, on stage at least. I felt like I was still looking for that ease. When would I reach the moment of believing I had a right to be up there on that stage? Would I always be most at home as the opening act? I lost count of broken guitar strings. I slept on floors, futons, comfy beds, lumpy mattresses, and velvet couches. I flew Southwest Airlines so often I ended a show with, I know you have lots of entertainment options out there. Thank you for choosing me. I was always coming and going, traveling somewhere. That's what musicians who lived in Nashville did. If you wanted to play gigs, you couldn't just hang around town like musicians in New York did. In the early 2000s, there really wasn't enough of an audience to go around. I checked out of a hotel in Dallas and headed for the airport in my rental car. It was a familiar feeling, looking for a place to fuel up at the last minute so I could return the car, hike my guitars and bags onto a shuttle, check into the flight, and get to the gate on time. Post September 11th, flying had become fraught, the waits at security long, moments of indignity more frequent. It was impossible to drive to the airport in Dallas without thinking about the motorcade of John F. Kennedy. I might have been distracted by those thoughts, but soon I began to feel desperate, driving up one side of the airport highway and down the other in search of a gas station. This was touring, part of what made it different from driving to the same job every day. The daily actions of touring were always the same, finding your way in and out of town, keeping a vehicle working or hiring one, finding food and shelter. But you also needed to navigate the culture of every single place you passed through. Boston had students, bad weather, and Revolutionary War history. LA had jammed freeways and great Mexican food. In Dallas, the JFK assassination was part of its DNA. Touring artists are chameleons. At the same time, we're the tourists in loud shorts at the Acropolis, only instead of cameras we carry guitars that loudly proclaim, I'm not from around here. Finally I saw a gas station on the other side of the divided highway. I doubled back, pulled up to the pump, and jumped out of my generic white compact. Shoved the nozzle into the gas tank after determining which side of the car it was on, then flipped the notch to begin fueling. Nothing happened. True, I'd practically knocked over a bright orange cone that was blocking the pump. I ran into the store to find out what was going on. No gas today, ma'am, the clerk said. No gas in Dallas? I thought Dallas was nothing but oil and gas. I jumped in the car and drove madly out of there, feeling a bump as I exited. Maybe I hit the orange cone again? Up on a hillside I saw another sign for gas. I raced along the highway, cars honking at me, drivers gesturing and waving. I flipped them all off, squealed up the hill into a Sinoko, and around one of the islands, I jumped out, grabbed a nozzle from the pump, and went to shove it in my tank, but there was already a nozzle in there, and about ten feet of hose trailing behind me. That bump I'd heard had been the sound of me ripping the entire hose from the empty pump. A guy stared open mouth from beside his pickup truck one pump over. He shook his head admiringly and let out a low whistle. I'll be damned, he said. I always heard about that happening to people, but ain't never seen it till now. At last I'd made an impression in Dallas. Getting more than ten people to one of my shows there had proven impossible. Articles in the Dallas Herald or Weekly raving about my work looked great in a press kit, but had no effect on the general public. Either potential concert goers didn't read the paper there, or they took a look at any article about me and immediately made plans to be somewhere else that evening. But now, finally, they'd be talking about me. You won't believe what I saw at a gas station out by the airport today. The pickup truck guy would tell the man next to him when he grabbed a beer and some barbecue later that evening. Soon the whole bar would be laughing, whooping and hollering, celebrating that hapless stranger who'd snapped a rubber service station hose. I threw the hose behind some bushes, filled the tank, returned the car, and managed to make my flight. Compared to my US touring, with frequent domestic flights, rental cars and decent hotels, thanks price line. UK dates were a much leaner affair. I'd tried to put Bob Newworth's advice into practice. When we'd played in the round at the Bluebird a few years back, he'd said go by train with just your guitar. That approach wasn't possible in America, but elsewhere, why not? I traveled with an acoustic guitar on my back, a rolling suitcase full of CDs to sell, and a duffel bag of clothes over my shoulder. I was in reasonable shape at the start of the run, but after only a few days on and off trains and up and down station stairs, I was a giddy combination of fit and exhausted, like a recruit after the first week at boot camp. On board the trains I fell asleep, my bangs cushioning my forehead when it bumped against the train window. Shouldn't I have been enjoying the scenery? Newcastle, Leicester, Nottingham and Brighton, green fields and sheep. I spoke to no one until I arrived in whatever town I was playing. Sometimes the promoters met me at the station, usually a freezing, cavernous, antique structure with birds swooping around the ceiling. I was shocked the first time a promoter took me to the venue by bus, then felt like a spoiled American brat for assuming everyone drove or owned a car. Andy Richardson met me at the train station in Hull, in the northeast of England. Was it really just a little over a year ago? The Hull audience seemed to like the humor in my songs. There was a definite lack of pretension there that reminded me of my hometown of Pittsburgh. It was a city of underdogs. Underdogs like underdogs. We ordered tea and biscuits in the station hotel bar to warm up. From what I could tell, Hull was almost always cold and wet, but this day felt colder and wetter than usual. The newspaper announced snow was coming. We took the Beverly Road bus along to the hotel where I'd stayed my last time in town. Run by two brothers. It was an old school bare bones B and B, with toilet and shower in the hallway, and a sink in the room, along with twin bed, small TV, an electric kettle, teacup, and more biscuits. I appreciated the biscuits. You'd never get those in an American budget motel. There were modest perks to playing in Britain. I showered down the hall and blew my hair dry in my room. The light bulb couldn't have been more than forty watts, but I aimed for as much glamour as I could muster because that night a genuine pop idol would be in attendance at my gig. Reckless Eric had his own performance scheduled the two following evenings there in Hull, and had agreed to spin records before and after my show. Gigs started earlier here than in the US, and in Hull dining choices were limited to curry, kebabs, fission chips, or pizza. He described sheets of ice falling all around his car, how a final shard descended just before they closed the bridge entirely. He made it sound like a wonderful adventure and supernatural act of gallantry. Eric had history with Hull, having attended the art college there back in the seventies, and played early gigs right in that very room. People of Hull considered him one of their own. He began setting up turntables. He just moved from France. I think he lives on a boat, said Andy. I heard Eric drop the needle on You're the One That I Want from the Grease soundtrack. He wasn't too cool to think Olivia Newton John and John Travolta were cool. My interest in him was sealed. I played my set, and with the snow falling outside and it being a weeknight, the show felt like a meeting of a secret society. I asked Eric to come up on stage with me to play whole wide world. He unpacked his microfret guitar, which was the same horrible but wonderful green color as the Greco Electric I used for band gigs back in the States. I felt I'd met a kindred spirit. I started playing the song and saw Eric craning his neck, looking at my hands on the frets. I'd transposed the song's key from E to A. The song has two chords, he said to me, and both of yours are wrong. We made it through okay. I apologized afterwards for ambushing him. After almost two years in Nashville, a town that owed a big part of its identity to people who wrote songs, I would have felt weird not inviting the songwriter of a classic up for everyone to celebrate. Eric was amused. We made a vague and general plan to meet up again, hopefully soon. I said goodbye and headed back to my room at the Mayfair Hotel, where I slept in my twin bed, accompanied by the snores of a man on the other side of the wall. Next day I caught a train to Doncaster, and another to Newcastle, then the train down to London, where I said I'd been in Hull the previous night to elicit a guaranteed laugh and nod of respect from the audience. I didn't play whole wide world, thinking it was being played as well as it possibly could be that night by the man who wrote the song in the room where he first played it. I hoped I could get to know him better. It didn't seem that crazy to imagine. If a song brought us together the first time, maybe gigs or friends or the internet would intervene and make it happen again. The world wasn't that big. Another UK tour under my belt, some shows better attended than others. I wasn't playing to big audiences in the British Isles, but I loved playing for people over there, enough to keep going back. Then I finally had a gig in Ireland, a country that embraced a certain kind of singer-songwriter. It was cheap to fly to Dublin from Glasgow after playing a few shows in Scotland. Part of the beauty of touring in this part of the world was the relatively short distances, even from country to country. I often stayed with friends and friends of friends in Scotland. It was a different country up there with its own press and BBC Scotland who loved me. After my shaky start at the Glasgow B, former Kramps fan club president and fanzine editor Lindsay Hutton often hosted me at his flat, situated right between Glasgow and Edinburgh, in the glow of the BP oil refinery. It helped having a man on the ground in a foreign land, a support network. My last night on this trip, I stayed at BBC producer Richard Bull's house in Glasgow. We left for the airport in the darkness of early morning, allowing me plenty of time to catch a nine AM flight to Dublin. Good thing you're not flying out of Prestwick, said Richard. But I am flying out of Prestwick. I looked at my ticket. I didn't know there were two airports for Glasgow. It was my first time flying Ryanair, whose rock bottom fares were mainly possible because they used airports in the back of beyond, miles away from the cities they claimed to fly to. What you saved in airfare, you inevitably made up for in train fares and taxis. Richard dropped me at the train station, my best chance of reaching the airport in time for my flight. Run emirun, he said with those beautifully rolled R's. I was always running in those days. I was either chasing a gig, running from the fear that I hadn't done enough, or would never be good enough. I missed my flight and paid another hundred pounds for the next flight to Dublin, which didn't leave until four in the afternoon. I spent a long day in the airport's Graceland Bar. According to a plaque there, Prestwick was the only spot in the UK Elvis ever set foot, changing planes after his army stint in Germany. I loved Elvis, and it made me sad to think the king never knew the joy of playing outside of North America. But there are only so many times a person can read a plaque. Inebriated stragglers from a weekend football match clogged the waiting area at my gate, along with a step dancing team returning home to Ireland in triumph. Rosy cheeked ten year olds with hair scraped back and tight buns broke into step routines at the newsstand in the ladies' room, and across the jetway as we boarded the plane, their feet and arms moving as if possessed. So what brings you to Ireland? the tousle haired immigration officer asked when we'd landed in Dublin. He nodded at the guitar on my shoulder. Will you be playing a little music? I tried to gauge whether he wanted me to have a gig, so he could nail me over my lack of a work permit, or because he was Irish, believed everyone should have a gig. Work permits were a constant source of stress and expense when playing the UK. Maybe Ireland was different. Sure, I said, then hedging my bets, with friends. Grand, he said, and stamped my passport. That night, in a room above a pub, I played a set following a performance by actress and singer Maria Doyle Kennedy. We had friends in common back in the US. She was a fan of my songs and had kindly offered to set something up. She'd starred in, among other things, The Commitments, a film that was part of the Irish cultural canon. She introduced me to the crowd, who'd mostly come to see her, telling them they'd love me, and they did. Next day, I boarded a Delta flight back home to Nashville via Atlanta. Why, look at you, the steward said as I carried my guitar ahead of me, hoping for a closet to stow it in up front. Let me help you with that, he said. You might be riding an economy, but honey, your guitar is going first class all the way. A little later another flight attendant stopped by my seat. Are you the lady with the guitar? she asked. I nodded, worrying she was about to tell me there was a problem, and they'd removed it from the plane. Our steward in first class is so excited to have you on board. He's been bragging to everyone that you're with us today. I sat taller in my seat, wondering how word of my transcendent show in a room above a pub had reached the crew of this Delta flight. It was only sixteen hours since I'd landed in Ireland, and here I was practically famous already. The flight attendant leaned in. I would love to get one of your CDs. What exactly do you sound like? I started to explain how I wrote songs about real life that working women just like her could relate to. When she cut me off. Oh, just a minute, hun, be right back. Two other flight attendants, also women around my age, but way better groomed than I could ever hope to be, stationed themselves in the aisle next to me. We want to know all about you, they drawled. This is just so exciting, such an honor. What's your name again? I'm Amy Rigby, I said, trying not to make it sound like a question. Then the first flight attendant came back down the aisle, waving her hands at her co workers. That's not her, she shouted. Turned out they'd held the Eurovision semifinals in Dublin the night before. The audience favorite was a dark haired girl with a guitar. Rumors spread that she was on this very flight. My new fans dropped me as quickly as they'd discovered me. When the flight attendants came back around to serve the meal, one of them practically threw a foil wrapped container of pasta at me. We're out of chicken, she said. But do you still want a C D, I said. When I collected my guitar from first class at the end of the flight, the steward who'd been so thrilled to host me was busy helping another customer. I reminded myself the Dublin gig had been a success, magical even. Eurovision was a jokey spectacle, wasn't it? Art was made to last, even if nobody was interested, unless somebody told them they should be.