In 1972, Ian Hunter of Mott The Hoople wrote a book called Diary Of A Rock Star, in which he detailed the day to day workings of a rock & roll tour. Hunter had gotten engaged and (largely) given up drugs before the tour he chronicled and so had ample free time to devote to literary projects. Since Ed and I have long ago given up drugs and are happily married (to our respective wives, not to each other) I thought I would take a shot at the same endeavor. Elsewhere on this site you will find a link to Ricki C’s Tour Stories, the more out-of-the-ordinary occurrences on the road – visiting the site of Buddy Holly’s plane crash, Ed accidentally getting into a car full of drunken teenagers, etc. This piece is meant to illustrate the more mundane aspects of these road trips, interspersed with those little sparkling glimmers that always seem to happen and make the hours and miles easier.
DAY ONE – FRIDAY, AUGUST 18, 2006 – DAYTON, OHIO Ed picks me up in Columbus, Ohio, my hometown. By this point he has already driven 582 miles from his home in Ossining, New York. We continue on another 85 miles to Dayton to play the Canal Street Tavern, owned by the inimitable Mick Montgomery, my favorite club owner of all time. (See Tour Stories Dayton, November 2003.) I often tell people that the shows at Canal Street are inevitably the best of any of the Ohio venues that Ed plays. The sound is always great, the staff is the friendliest anywhere and the audiences are clued-in and receptive. Tonight, however, it occurs to me that we don’t often play Dayton in the summertime. There’s a minor-league baseball stadium right behind Canal Street that takes up ALL of the available parking (Dayton city fathers – build a parking lot, for Chrissakes) and Mick tells us that it just kills his weeknight crowds. That’s brutally apparent. Ed plays an uneven set to a small but definitely vocal crowd. He’s breaking in material for his upcoming one-man show, some of it hasn’t been fully memorized or integrated into the larger whole, and the result is a show that lurches between high energy peaks and confusing valleys. Ed finishes blazing and the encore cooks. All I can say is: Dayton, I promise it’ll all come together when we see you next winter. After the show we head back to Columbus. Distance traveled – 752 miles, Ossining to Dayton, back to Columbus (for Ed), 170 miles (for me).
DAY TWO – SATURDAY, AUGUST 19, 2006 – DETROIT, MICHIGAN The second night’s venue is nestled in an industrial strip of dollar stores, check-cashing places, pawnshops and no-tell motels – WE MUST BE IN DETROIT! And so we are. I played at a place called Midgard Comics for a couple of years early in the 21st century. It was a functioning comic book store adjacent to a large empty storefront where owner Keith Cousineau booked kid punk bands on the weekends. Tonight’s club, The Modern Exchange, reminds me mightily of Midgard. Up front it’s a store selling vintage clothes, posters and vinyl. In back is a good-sized club with a pretty nice sound system and a huge stage. If any of the members of the opening band are pushing 21, I can’t tell. A couple of them, including their whiz-kid drummer, are solidly teenaged. The drummer is, in fact, the best drummer I’ve seen of any age in a lotta years. He’s Keith Moon back in ‘65 at the Marquee Club in London, scattering great fills all over his kit and effortlessly, though unintentionally, making the rest of the band look silly. When I compliment his performance afterwards, he shrugs off the accolade and says, “I dropped a stick on the last song.” As if this invalidates the preceding 35 minutes during which he powered the entire performance. I love this kid. However, back to Hamell On Trial. I can’t really tell from our loft dressing room overlooking the stage and club floor if there’s actually anyone here to see Ed. There’s a definite “friends & parents of the opening band” vibe rising from the audience. Sure enough, much of the crowd melts away as I reset the stage. By the time I go out to the car to wake Ed from a pre-show nap, there’s only a small but dedicated group of supporters left in the club. I wrongly advise Ed that maybe he should just dispense with the one-man show presentation tonight and just play a rock set, which both of us later regret. I think this crowd would’ve been right there with Ed from the beginning, would’ve stayed through thick and thin, and would’ve dug it. When Ed calls for requests, one young lady asks for “Grover’s Eulogy” from Yap, rather than the more frequently requested “Blood Of The Wolf” or “Big As Life.” It’s that kind of crowd. Detroit, I should never have doubted you. Merch sales are brisk after the show and I set a new one-night, per-audience member dollar record. Thank you, Detroit. Miles traveled – 366, round trip, Columbus to Detroit.
DAYS THREE & FOUR – SUNDAY & MONDAY, AUGUST 23 & 24, 2006 – OFF DAYS, COLUMBUS, OHIO There are two days off after Detroit, so we beat it back to Columbus for some rest & relaxation. Ed works on new material, I spend Sunday trying to advance the upcoming shows. Advancing shows consists of contacting clubs to determine soundcheck times, arranging hotel accommodations, etc. At this point we discover that we can stay in an apartment upstairs over the venue in Ft. Atkinson, Wisconsin, on Wednesday night and that the promoter, Bill Camplin, is possibly the most accommodating guy on the planet. And since he is so nice, and since Ft. Atkinson is only an hour’s drive from Tuesday night’s show in Milwaukee, I immediately push our luck and ask if we can come early and stay there for two nights. Bill readily agrees. He gives us an inch and we take a mile. What a classy guy. On the downside of advancing shows, the phone number for the club in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, – a bread & butter gig for Ed where he’s played many, many times and which is always well-attended – has been disconnected, with no forwarding number available. I place the first of many calls to the owner’s cellphone with no response. This does not bode well. I work Monday at my day job at Ace In The Hole Music, an indie record store. Ed wakes up and stops in around 5 pm to pick up the recently released comeback CD by The New York Dolls. This might be the place to discuss sleeping schedules. Ed doesn’t like daylight. No wait, Ed hates daylight. No wait, Ed despises daylight. He normally sleeps from between 4 am or 6 am to about noon or two in the afternoon. I normally sleep midnight to 7 or 8 am. This works out great on tour. I drive during the day while Ed takes a series of vampire naps. Ed drives through the middle of the night, jazzed on post-show adrenaline & Red Bull, when I can no longer function. It’s a highly efficient touring set-up.
DAY FIVE – TUESDAY, AUGUST 22, 2006 – MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN Ed goes to bed at 7 am Tuesday morning, I wake him at 9:30 am, we hit the road to Milwaukee by 10:30. Needless to say, I’ve got the first driving shift. It’s a solid seven and a half hour drive to Milwaukee and we don’t want to hit Chicago at rush hour. It’s 80 plus degrees outside, the car air conditioning goes out somewhere around Indianapolis, three hours into the drive, and I sweat my ass off for the next two hours until Ed wakes up and tells me that when the A.C. fails you gotta turn it off for five or ten minutes, then cut it back on. Nice, now he tells me. The rest of the drive is uneventful, Chicago traffic is not the parking lot it usually is, and we actually arrive at the venue early, partly because we gain an hour driving west. Since we’re early we drive around Milwaukee a little and Ed grabs an ice cream. We ask the counter girl where Laverne & Shirley lived, whether she ever met them, where the Schotz Brewery was, etc. She’s not amused. Soundcheck is cool, Ed tries out some new songs. And while we’re at it, let’s talk about new songs. For those of you scoring at home, since the release of Songs For Parents Who Enjoy Drugs, Ed has already introduced five new tunes into the set – “Chris & The Angels”, “When You Are Young”, “Your Mom’s Hot”, “Global Tattoo” and “Pat Robertson”. On this tour he adds “You Oughtta Marry Her” and “My God/Your God” (all titles approximate) to the mix. These are all solid tunes, there’s not a throwaway in sight. I am constantly amazed at the quality and the sheer output of new music from Ed. To put this in perspective, The Sex Pistols wrote less than 15 songs in their entire career, including reunion comeback tours. And just how many new songs has Pete Townshend graced us with since the last Who album in 1982? But I digress. Lots of familiar faces in the Milwaukee crowd – J.J., owner of J.J.’s Pub, the bar Ed plays in Racine has made it in for the show, some friends from Madison, some transplants from Stevens Point – it’s a Wisconsin homecoming special. The show goes great. Ed introduces a new spoken word intro, “Snowflakes & Fingerprints” to the show. “I’ve Got An Idea For A New TV Reality Show,” another spoken word piece is added, the new songs and old songs blaze, altogether it’s a killer set. A kid comes up to me after the show while I’m selling merch and asks if I saw the recent Woody Guthrie American Masters program on PBS. I tell him yeah, and that I loved it and he says that Hamell On Trial is the only act currently going that could live up to the Woody Guthrie legacy. I’m stunned. I said EXACTLY the same thing to my wife back in July, when the Guthrie show first aired. I didn’t get the kid’s name, but if he ever reads this, thank you for making the entire tour and all the miles worth it in that five minutes we talked. Thank you. Miles traveled – 458, Columbus to Milwaukee.
DAY SIX – WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 23, 2006 – FT. ATKINSON, WISCONSIN The Points East Pub show in Milwaukee is originally scheduled to kick off at 9 pm. Early on, Ed and I figure he’ll be offstage by 11, we’ll load-out quickly, and be in Ft. Atkinson by midnight so as not to completely inconvenience Bill & Kitty, our hosts at Café Carpe, the Ft. Atkinson venue. Sometimes even I’m astounded by our naivete. Points East pushes the start time back to 10 pm, I think we actually go on closer to 10:30 and I’m soon calling Bill to let him know it’s probably going to be closer to 1 am when we arrive. He reassures me that a late arrival is no problem at all. By 1 am, we haven’t even left Milwaukee and I’m feeling really guilty. I call Bill to tell him we’ll just hit a motel that night and see him the next afternoon but he counters that’s it’s silly to waste the money when we just have an hour’s drive. To make a long story short, it’s 3 am when we arrive at Café Carpe. Bill’s waiting up for us and that’s only the earliest indication of the truly outlandish hospitality his family shows us over the next two days. Bill & Kitty are already putting up Ember Swift, the act that appeared at Café Carpe that night & her two bandmates, when Ed and I pile into yet another guest room. I’m sure we’re screwing up the sleeping arrangements, displacing someone in the family, but that’s how nice the Camplin family is. I meet Kitty the next morning and she’s every bit as warm and accommodating to these total stranger road musicians as Bill has been. Kitty & Bill are that dream combination of club owners – fiercely intelligent, musically open & aware, and extremely sweet. Over the next two days Ed and I have the run of their house and club, they feed us, we have great late-night conversations and, oh yeah, they pay us to play a gig. I can’t figure, in this town of 5,000 people, with no connection to a college, where we’re going to draw an audience from for the Hamell On Trial show. Show time comes, Café Carpe apparently has a loyal clientele for quality music, and there’s a nice little crowd (more people, in fact, than there were in Detroit). Ed’s cousin-in-law Mark – a long-haul trucker who’s delivering a load to Chicago the next day and who has been a fan since the days of The Works, Ed’s band in Syracuse – shows up to surprise Ed. The show goes well, people seem to dig it, I set up merch on an empty table in anticipation of at least a couple of sales but every member of the audience files right by me out the door to the outer bar. I’m crestfallen. This will be the first show since I started working for Ed in 2000 with not one merch sale. And then it’s weird, people start coming back in and going through CDs, asking questions, purchasing, and I wind up almost hitting triple digit sales. Together with Bill’s over-generous split with us from the door, it’s a nice little payday AND we save two nights of Motel 6 costs. Praise the gods of rock & roll! By the second day of our stay in Ft. Atkinson, I’ve fallen completely in love with the Gilmore Girls-esque pace of small town life. I’m ready to move here. Ed, of course, being from New York is not as enamored of the laid-back ambience and is ready to put a bullet through his head. By the second morning Donnie – the proprietor of Donnie’s Eat-Mor Diner, a twenty-seats-at-the-counter, no-tables, breakfast place up the street from Café Carpe – and I are having conversations like we’re old buddies from the war. Donnie bears a striking resemblance to my sainted Italian father and seems to be just as nice a guy as my Dad was, plus he cooks up a mean breakfast. Also by the second day I’m running errands for Kitty, walking down to buy tomatoes from the warm, wonderfully nice hippie lady selling produce out of the back of her panel truck outside the Ace Hardware store. I could move here in a New York minute. Sometime during the second afternoon of our Ft. Atkinson idyll, it occurs to Ed and I that we have some grueling drives coming up – five hours up to Ontonagon in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that night after the Stevens Point gig and then at least that many hours back to La Crosse, Wisconsin, for a weekend festival – and it also occurs to us that we’ve booked the motels for those gigs for the wrong nights. I’m not a technology-friendly kinda guy. I don’t own an I-Pod or a Powerbook. I had a BlackBerry for awhile, but only because Watershed – a Columbus band I work for when I’m not on the road with Ed – made me carry it. So cruising around Ft. Atkinson in a driving rainstorm searching for good cellphone coverage in order to rearrange a weekend’s worth of hotel accommodations is not my idea of a good time. I get everything done, the contacts we have at the festivals – Zach in Ontonagon and Doug in La Crosse – are total sweethearts, and we hit the road for Stevens Point. Miles traveled – 58, Milwaukee to Ft. Atkinson, and we’ve stayed in place for two days. We’re totally, completely spoiled. Bill & Kitty, there’s no way we could ever thank you enough for your warm hospitality.
DAY SEVEN – THURSDAY, AUGUST 24, 2006 – STEVENS POINT, WISCONSIN We’re still getting a disconnected message on the Mission Coffee Bar & Lounge phone and no one is answering our cellphone messages but we set off for Stevens Point with high hopes. It’s always been a good gig – college town, great audience. I’ve never been there with him, but Ed says it’s a quality room with good people. Some girls at the Milwaukee show who used to waitress there told us that the Mission is under new ownership, but as far as they know it’s still open. I’m not 100% encouraged by that, but hope for the best. Worst case scenario: we take a picture of Ed with that day’s newspaper outside a shuttered coffeehouse and try to get paid later. It rains most of the way there. I’m not sure I’ve ever spent an entire day in Wisconsin when it hasn’t rained. Of course, the gig goes great. There are Hamell fans hanging around from the first moment we get there. The guy that owns the tobacco shop next to the Mission buys three CDs out of the trunk of the car before I even get the gear unloaded. We’re 35 bucks ahead and haven’t walked in the venue yet. We talk to the new owner, Jason, about the phone problems and it seems he’s having trouble getting phone service switched into his name from the old owner, plus he never checks his cellphone for messages. The place fills up nicely by showtime. The opening act – Maggie Wise, remember that name! – is really, really good and goes over well to a friendly, into-it audience. Ed comes on like a conquering hero, performs the full-out one-man show, does a bunch of new material, including a poem about eating pussy that, kinda without saying, goes over huge. It’s definitely the best show of the tour so far and validates the hard work Ed has been putting into the writing and performing of the new material. It’s still the punk-rock intensity of the old days, but with subject matter and nuance that carries the show to whole new territories. Wait, I just used the terms “a poem about eating pussy” and “subject matter & nuance” in the same paragraph. Maybe I’m not a good writer, maybe I’ve contradicted myself, maybe I’m kidding myself, or maybe I’ve just summed up the entire Hamell On Trial experience. Cole, thanks for the great sound mix. Jason, please get a new telephone number or please answer your cellphone messages – you ’re making your performers extremely nervous. Miles traveled – 136, Ft. Atkinson to Stevens Point.
DAY EIGHT – FRIDAY, AUGUST 25, 2006 – ONTONAGON, MICHIGAN Ed and I set off from Stevens Point for the 207 mile drive to Ontonagon sometime after midnight. On the way we encounter thunder, lightning, driving rain, hail and that kind of dark that you only get when you’re driving in truly desolate locales, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan being one. We have no cellphone coverage and no open gas stations, but discover that if you use your credit card, you can get gas even at closed stations, something I truly did not realize until now. We arrive at the Superior Shores Motel at 4 am, forgetting that we’ve lost an hour going from Wisconsin back to Michigan so that it’s really 5 am. It’s pitch dark but we can hear waves on Lake Superior crashing just a few feet away. Our room key is taped to the office door. We go in, all the windows are propped open, it was probably hot earlier, but now it’s about 40 degrees in the room. We fire up the gas heater, I pull every available cover over me and hope we can check out later than eleven, a scant six hours away. I wake up at 8 am, will myself back to sleep until 10 am, then bargain with our hosts Don and Linda for a 2 pm checkout so Ed can get a little more sleep. I head into town for breakfast (Syl’s Diner, another great meal) and to try to find a music store since we’re running low on guitar strings, but no luck. I wake Ed about 1:30 pm (he went to bed at 7 am), he grabs a sandwich at a Subway and we hit a laundromat to do a load of wash. Ed sleeps in the car while I read and tend to our mishmash of black t-shirts and jeans. While I’m waiting a bottle-blonde single mom comes in, throws in a load of skimpy pink outfits & soiled baby clothes and asks if I’m in town for the music festival. I say yeah and she tells me the name of the club where she’s dancing that night and says I should stop in. I thank her for the info but say we’re leaving right after the set. She says, “Is that your buddy outside sleeping in the car?” I say, “Yep.” She asks, “Why is he sleeping in the car?” I reply, “Where else would he sleep?” That pretty much ends our conversation since we now seem penniless, and therefore incapable of mustering the cost of a lap dance. A pudgy friend of hers stops in with more skimpy pink clothes to throw in with her load and says, “There’s a guy sleeping in his car out there.” Then they both take off in a beat-to-shit Camaro. Ontonagon, I love ya. The second annual Porcupine Mountains Music Festival is held at a ski resort outside Ontonagon. Much like in Ft. Atkinson, we cannot figure where the festival will draw its audience from. Ed’s appearing on the second stage, which is some ways off in the woods. I think about walking over to check out the stage and site, but cannot bring myself to leave our comfy dressing room in the ski lodge. It’s starting to hit me that I haven’t slept more than five hours in a row since we left Columbus for Milwaukee and that we have to leave tonight, right after Ed finishes playing, to drive back to Wisconsin. Lo and behold, when 7 pm comes a nice little crowd has gathered. The second stage is set up right under the beginning of one of the ski lifts and we propose that they rev that baby up so Ed can drop out of a cable car RIGHT ONTO THE STAGE for the beginning of the set. The festival organizers and stage manager are less than enthusiastic about this plan, so Ed just walks on instead. The set goes great, Ed tones it down to a PG-13 affair, given the family-oriented, kids running around atmosphere of the festival. Later he asks the crowd’s permission to push the presentation to an NC-17 and they readily agree. Ed does an hour, once again finishes blazing and afterwards greets a large group of well-wishers backstage. These new fans include a group of 60-ish women who introduce themselves as members of WAMM, Women Against Military Madness. In other words, a perfect Hamell On Trial crowd. I help out with merch sales at the festival booth while Ed hangs out with various festival officials and altogether we can’t figure how the second annual Porcupine Mountains Music Festival could have gone much better. It’d be great to come back for year three. We hit the road around 9 pm for the six hour drive back to La Crosse, Wisconsin, for the Great River Folk Festival. Miles traveled – 207, Stevens Point to Ontonagon, and we’re in Ontonagon less than 16 hours.
DAYS NINE & TEN – SATURDAY & SUNDAY, AUGUST 26 & 27, 2006 – LA CROSSE, WISCONSIN We speed back through the Wisconsin night with our usual soundtrack of Little Steven’s Underground Garage blasting on the Sirius satellite radio. Early in the tour I mentioned to Ed that there ARE at least 149 other stations on Sirius, and that some of them are actually pretty rockin’ but his station of choice never deviates from Underground Garage. I cannot say this is necessarily a bad thing, just a little limited. We get into La Crosse around 3 am and while we’re wandering around lost, looking for our Econo Lodge we find a music store, which strangely is closed at this hour. La Crosse is a college town, where are the 24 hour string shops? Breakfast the next morning is at a Perkins Pancake House up the street, and allow me to make this observation: the breakfasts at the small town diners inevitably taste better, the portions are larger, and the bill smaller. Please support your local merchants. To hell with Wal-Mart. It’s on this breakfast outing that I happen upon Margaret’s Hip Hop Fashions, which, in my admittedly rudimentary knowledge of La Crosse, would not seem to be a thriving enterprise. There is a Clearance sign in the window, however, so maybe I’m right on the money concerning supply & demand in the Wisconsin hip hop community. Ed does not initially believe in the existence of Margaret’s Hip Hop Fashions, so I drive by on our way back to the hotel that night to prove it to him. Ed is playing four times at the 35th annual Great River Folk Festival. First up is a 2:45 pm workshop entitled Make Me Laugh, a round-robin affair with singer-songwriter David Massengill and a young woman named Celia, who seems to consider her long, curly red hair as a prop, and she uses that prop a lot. Ed, in my humble opinion, is the most successful at making people laugh, partly because Massengill keeps returning to his father’s death in his song intros, which is not a time-honored tactic for spreading mirth. The Saturday evening concert comprises Joe & Vicki Price, a husband and wife blues duo; the Guy Mendilow Group, an Israeli world-music band; Ann Reed, a really fine Minnesota singer-songwriter; Ed bringing the East coast punk-rock energy in the next-to-closing slot; and husband and wife bluegrass duo Mike & Amy Finders finishing the night. Motley is the definitive phrase for this crew. If we were to compare and contrast the audience in La Crosse with the one in Ontonagon, it would go something like this: the La Crosse crowd was mainly seated comfortably on lawn chairs, the Ontonagon bunch were sprawled around in the grass; the La Crosse crowd listens to NPR and writes well-considered, strongly-worded letters to their local newspaper about issues of the day, the Ontonagon bunch listens to short-wave radio beamed from a secret location in the woods and constructs Molotov cocktails, whether they actually use them or not. Ed once again goes with a PG-13 show, but lines and sentiments that draw a sharp intake of breath from the La Crosse crowd would have brought guffaws from the Ontonagon bunch. Plus it strikes me as odd that Ed would omit “Coulter’s Snatch” from the PG-13 show (for obvious reasons), but still include “When You Are Young,” with its ribald tales of drug abuse, and still think this will be acceptable to a middle-class group of festival attendees. And in fact when a ten year old girl stops near the stage, fully illuminated by the stage lights, transfixed by the bald, sweating madman with the acoustic guitar, Ed goes into a spiel about, “Run, run, little girl, run back to your mother. If you do drugs THIS is how you will wind up. Do not do as I have done. Run, run back to your mother.” When the girl’s mother comes to lead the shell-shocked pre-teen away from the spotlight Ed throws an aside to the audience, “I’m the best anti-drug commercial you people will ever have,” and revs into “Your Mom’s Hot.” Ed’s 1:15 pm workshop on Sunday – Surviving On The Open Road: Motel 6, Mapquest & Prozac – is packed, perhaps a carryover from the Saturday night performance. He runs through a history of the Hamell On Trial act, interspersed with expository tunes – “Blood Of The Wolf,” “Big As Life,” “Downs,” and the weekend’s first performance of “Chris & The Angels,” given the (almost) all-adult makeup of the workshop audience. (Ed meant to take questions about life on the road at the conclusion of this workshop, but forgot. If you have any questions, feel free to direct them to me through my website at www.folkitup.net/RickiC.html and I’ll do my best to answer.) His final performance of the weekend – the 2:45 pm Original Songs workshop (hey, Great River, did you run out of ideas for names of these workshops?) – finds him in the company of singer-songwriter Johnsmith, whose daughter joins him from the audience for some nice harmonies, and Mustard’s Retreat, an Ann Arbor duo. Mustard’s Retreat are very nice guys, but tend to go on a bit, musically and song intro-wise. One particularly protracted discussion of the validity of differing political views brings a sharp “All right, sit down Ghandi.” from Ed, my favorite offhand line of his for the weekend. After the workshop a 60-ish gentleman from the audience comes up, shakes Ed hand and thanks him for illustrating that folk music can still be played with energy. It’s a great moment and I think Ed is truly touched. We settle up at the merch tent. La Crosse, you LIKED Hamell On Trial, thank you for your kind support and your dollars. I say goodbye to Doug, our host and contact for the weekend, and we hit the road back to Ohio and New York. I take the first driving shift, since Ed had just played afternoon shows through all of his normal sleeping time. I get us as far as Indiana, then Ed takes over and drops me in Bowling Green, Ohio, where my lovely wife Debbie will pick me up the next morning to return to Columbus. Ed and I exchange a goodbye hug in the parking lot of the Buckeye Budget Motor Inn at 3 am and he drives off east into the night, headed for Ossining. In October we’ll do it all again. See you then, America. Miles traveled – 329, Ontonagon to La Crosse Total miles traveled on the tour for Ed – 3787. “I never thought I’d travel so far to work.” (from “Motorway” by Ray Davies of The Kinks, 1972, Everybody’s In Showbiz LP.) |
