After the glory and wonder of Wichita had to come the confusion and awkwardness of Oklahoma City. As all things have their beautiful rises, they must also have… well, Oklahoma City. We played in a small juice bar with an adjoining music space and no one knew why we were there. Everyone looked stunned at us and kept saying, “What are you doing in Oklahoma City?” (Our explanation was long and convoluted. It made sense to us, but became too hard to tell over and over again, like the story of why your spleen had to be removed.)

It was one of those shows where you set up your equipment in a completely empty room and then sigh softly and think, “Well, at least we’ll get some practice in.” While we were setting up, another band drove up in their van, a heavy-rock band from Seattle on their way to South By Southwest. (They couldn’t believe that we were on tour and in Oklahoma City and NOT going to Austin the next day… “South By Southwest is like Disneyland for bands!” one of them said. I thought to myself, “I never liked Disneyland.”) They were looking for a gig—in fact needed a gig—as their van was almost out of gas and they were completely broke. We said they could play after us, but I looked around the empty room and wondered how they could make any money doing that. At least we had a guarantee from the bar. We played our set to a maximum of maybe eight people, and when we took down our stuff, half of the crowd left. I was still feeling sick and just wanted to get out of town and I knew that I couldn’t physically stay and watch the other band, even if they were desperate for an audience. As we finished packing our van, they started playing and it was so loud it rattled all the walls. I just wanted to leave, but Scott went up to the room they were playing in and peeked in the door. He started waving frantically at us.

“Come here! You have to see this!” he yelled.

“No. I’m sick,” I shouted back, stepping into the van. “I can’t handle loud music.”

“But you have to see this! Come here!”

We reluctantly walked up to the door and saw this scene that changed our lives, I swear to God, in Oklahoma City. And may it change yours:

Three people in the audience of a nondescript concrete box, watching a band of three kids dressed in dark clothes playing loud rock music on the stage. One of the kids was playing drums, one of them was playing bass, and one of them was playing guitar…(I would not just make this for the sake of a story)…while hanging upside down from a water pipe near the ceiling. It was absurd. It was ridiculous. It was awesome. He was hanging from the ceiling for the benefit of three people. It was obviously a part of their show that he included whenever the proper ceiling fixtures were in place, and even though the audience was so small this particular night, he still did it. We put a twenty dollar bill in their tip jar and left. The lesson: if your thing is that you hang from the rafters, then you do that thing no matter how many people are in the audience and no matter that you’re in Oklahoma City. You just hang from the rafters and everything else will take care of itself.

Not that I would ever hang from the rafters. But there was a thing that we did well that we hadn’t really done yet on this tour, and that thing was playing music on the street, or “busking”. It was something we stumbled upon randomly in San Francisco last summer, and since that moment we began to look at every square-inch of this country as either “buskable” or “not-buskable”. And now we routinely drive slowly past public squares and promenades, plazas and esplanades, look out at the people and try to determine what kind of mood they’re in, how open they are to new things, and how much money they have. We are sometimes mistaken, like in Lawrence, Kansas, where the night after a gig where I finally broke out of my sickness we played on the main street during the middle of the day. Nobody stopped to listen. Nobody would even look at us, or in any way acknowledge our presence. And we were four odd-looking boys with weird instruments playing music on their street. Granted, we might not be as amazing as we think we are when we are playing in San Francisco and everyone is dancing and smiling and throwing us money. But surely we are not as bad as the passers-by in the town of Lawrence thought we were that day. We were apparently not even worth someone pulling an iPod earbud out of one ear as they strolled by so they could listen for a few seconds. The one person—the only person—who stopped to listen to us that day on the street in Lawrence was a little girl, maybe five years old, who made her embarrassed mother stop walking so she could watch us and jump up and down continuously for a few minutes while we played. And, per our lesson in Oklahoma City, it is always worth playing for the one little person who is jumping around and freaking out. Her mother gave her a dollar to put in our case, the only dollar we made that day in Lawrence. We packed up our instruments and drove on.

We played in Kansas City, then drove up through the frozen cornfields of Iowa, played in each of the Twin Cities of Minnesota (one of the twins being much more well-endowed than the other, in my opinion, though I won’t say which) and then on down to Chicago where we stayed in another mansion and ate more wonderful meals. Then quickly through the toll-roads of the Midwest (”This road sucks! I don’t want to pay for THIS!”) to Philadelphia and New York, cities of a grand scale, where one gets swallowed up in all the transportation and the commerce. There Jason Leonard flew out to meet us for a few shows. He checked his glockenspiel in the underneath luggage department and they apparently tossed it around wantonly until the case busted and they lost it. He had to wait around all day to get it delivered to him. The show in Manhattan was at the Knitting Factory and occurred on Ingrid’s birthday, so she too flew out from Portland to see us and spend time with her boyfriend Nathan, and invited all her New York friends to the show. Daniel Flessas from Portland was in town as well with his family, coincidentally, and after the show all of us walked out onto the cold lower Manhattan streets where Nathan read another poem, yelling it out to the canyon of buildings and tearing it up immediately after. I’ve started to enjoy more watching people’s reactions to Nathan’s poems than watching Nathan himself. When they see that he is actually going to tear up the poem, they always wince a little, as if the dove from a magic show is inexplicably getting eaten by the magician.

We went up through Vermont, where we soon found ourselves at another gourmet dinner in a fancy house. Scott made some beet salad, a specialty of his, and we all sat around the table talking about the Civil War and its effect on Vermont. Emboldened by two childhood viewings of the complete Ken Burns series, I excitedly told one of our friends, a Civil War buff, that I thought that in a past life I fought in that war and was bayoneted in the stomach, and that’s why I have a sensitive stomach now. She said that everyone thinks they got bayoneted in the Civil War in a past life, but the reality is that bayonets were rarely used. I sheepishly stopped talking about the Civil War and went back to eating my beets. (Does everyone really think they were bayoneted in the Civil War? How unoriginal are some of my other thoughts?) At one point during the dinner a guy with several tattoos and piercings who was sitting with us at the table turned to William and me and said, “So you’ve been on tour for three weeks? This must be a nice change for you, getting to eat a nice meal instead of eating White Castle in a dirty van…” Me and William looked at each other and stifled an embarrassed laugh. Perhaps we were spoiled. White Castle? Do some bands really eat that every night on tour? Dear God, the worst thing we had eaten all month was an Egg McMuffin when we had to get out of Chicago at six in the morning to make it to a gig in Philly that night. I was eating better on the road than I ever have at home. Sleeping better too, in better beds. When I wrote before that touring musicians should get a really bad bed for their home so that all the beds on tour seem luxurious, I was actually kidding. But now I’m in the position where my bed at home is a terrible broken-down thing, and every night I find myself for some reason in somebody’s mansion, sleeping on Egyptian cotton sheets with a high thread count. How had we slipped through the looking glass so completely? At what fancy dinner party would some authority figure break in and drag us away, and send us back to a lesser life? Would that ever happen? It would be best, I figured, just to keep chewing my beets and not say anything.

In Burlington we discovered another magical place to busk, a place with the holy name of Church Street.. (You know you’ve found the right place to busk when the crowd starts forming as soon as you start setting up your equipment. “What is that instrument?” “Well, this is a glockenspiel…”) The weather was cold, in the thirties, but the sun was shining on that particular pedestrian walkway that day. I had to blow on my fingers between every song to keep them from going numb, like Brett Favre at Lambeau Field, calling out the plays, directing the boys, trying to win the game. And the crowd was on our side. And the other team was only in our heads, in the form of insecurity and doubt. In fact, now that I think of it, the other team didn’t even show up that day. We were able to just walk right down the field and score every time. We won the game.

And the next day it was down to Boston, to a gig near Harvard Square, with enough daylight to try busking again. Could we find a new magical busking spot two days in a row? The prime space seemed to be just off of Church Street (again! could the secret be to find a Church Street in every town?) There was a plaza with a great open space that was unfortunately taken up by a lethargic singer-songwriter with a tambourine tied to his foot and who was singing through a PA. Not cool at all. We found a spot just around the corner from him where there was a business that had been boarded-up with plywood and a lot of people walking by. We set up our gear and put out our cds and a poster advertising the gig that night.

And again, it went amazingly well. We have found the right rhythm. Play a few songs without much time in between, and then stop for a few minutes to give the assembled crowd a chance to come up to Jason (whythey always choose to talk to Jason I’m not entirely sure) and buy cds and then we can tell them about the show that night and then another crowd comes up and we play a few more songs and the whole process makes everyone happy and leaves us with a lot of money. It’s really a miracle solution that helps promote the show and helps us to sell cds at the same time. The crowd that we play to is as much of a random sampling of the population as is possible, with all age groups and economic classes and political affiliations drifting by that particular patch of a city. And if someone doesn’t like the music, they can just keep walking. And if they do like it, they can stay and buy a cd. Our band is in the unique position of being able to play on the street in that we have all acoustic instruments, including an upright bass instead of electric, and lots of curious things that you don’t see on the street everyday, like a clarinet, or maracas. Yet we have enough rhythmic songs that can catch people’s attention, with certain repeated phrases that people can grab onto. And all I have to do is project my voice as proudly as I can (PA’s are for cheaters) above the music and the traffic and all the other sounds of the city. Pro-JECT like in the thea-TRE, where your voice has to reach the person in the back of the room. And sometimes the band sings along and makes it all easier for me. And on a day like that in Boston’s Harvard Square, there is truly no better place to be. People smiling, people dancing, me having conversations with strangers I never would’ve met…

From there we had dinner and then we went to our gig down the street at the Lily Pad. It was a small room, with maybe 50 chairs in it and a grand piano. Nathan, who had taken a couple days off from the band to stay with his girlfriend in New York, re-joined us at the last minute and was stunned at the crowd that had assembled to see us. “Oh, we played on the street today,” we told him. And the people that had come to see us were so amped up they jumped in the aisles and danced, they cheered so loudly and laughed and cried at all the right moments. At one point I looked out at the crowd and asked who had seen us play earlier that day in Harvard Square, and about half of them raised their hands.

“Well then,” I said. “I’m glad we did that.”

Links:
Nick JainaSpace
Brett Favre at Lambeau (YouTube)

Brooklyn Photo courtesy of Mr. Jaina