Dispatches: Franz Nicolay: 2012 Tour Dispatches, Part 1

Having kicked off his US Tour in October, Franz Nicolay has begun sending us dispatches from the road. He sent us his first last week but we ran a bit behind due to the hurricane

Anyway, you don't want to know about all that, so here is the first episode of the dispatches.

You can click Read More for the entry.

I was pretty sure I had all my tour ducks in a row:
ordered and received CDs, arranged to pick up vinyl, got packs of
strings and picks, checked to make sure the accordion wasn't
falling apart. I'd take the clothes to the laundry, come home and
pack, and hit the road. I may as well have been whistling a happy
tune Friday morning when I went out to the car, and noticed the
front driver's side tire was flat. Too bad, I thought, but not a
crushing defeat - there's a Firestone a quarter mile from here,
I'll just get the donut on there and pop on down.
"Weird," said Maria. "It looks like it was
slashed."
I looked. Sure enough, there was a ragged rip on
the side of the tire. Not only that, but the whole thing was at a
cockeyed angle.
"When did that happen?" said Maria, pointing
at a table-sized dent I'd somehow avoided noticing.
"Oh…" I said, fingering the flecks of white paint
now apparent on the rearview mirror and across the front corner.
"Somebody hit-and-run us overnight."
You can't get very far in a car with one wheel
pointed north and one pointed southeast, so we got the poor thing
towed around the corner and I got on the phone with
insurance.
"Our nearest appraiser is in New Hampshire," said
the State Farm lady.
"But I'm in Boston. You literally don't have anyone
in Boston?"
"Doesn't look like it, no."
"And I can't have them fix anything until you look
at it?"
"No. Someone can get there by Monday, at the
earliest. We can provide you with a rental car until the repairs
are done."
I explained that by Tuesday I would be, if I had a
way to get there, in Virginia; by Wednesday in Georgia, and by
the next week somewhere in the Missouri plains.
"Let me call you back."
Well, reader, I have to give credit to at least
this corner of the much-maligned insurance industry; because
within the hour I was at the wheel of a brand-new rental car for
the month-long tour, sponsored full by State Farm. I do love a
happy ending.
The first show was Sunday night at Sarah Lawrence
College north of New York City, but we had a cat to sit and a
wedding to applaud in the meantime, about which I will say in
short that advocates of gay marriage are really slacking on one
of their strongest arguments: matching outfits. Our friends Dan
and Dany - cutely, Dan y Dany, since the latter is Venezuelan
(which has got to be the classiest of the Spanish accents) - had
identical tan corduroy suits with black bow ties, topped by green
wreaths, and recessed to the Talking Heads' "Road To Nowhere."
The cat I was sorely tempted to throw off the balcony.
Sarah Lawrence is a petite and sheltered campus
just north of the Bronx. I'd been booked by a good-hearted
enthusiast named Sam, but as happens more and more these days, my
real connections there were with the older folks, in this case a
couple of the faculty: Toby, a grad-school friend of my wife's
and my banjo consultant (I'd brought him in as a stunt banjo to
play an 8-bar passage on my last record for which I didn't have
the chops), who runs the bluegrass ensemble there; and the
composer and cellist Pat Muchmore, my colleague in Anti-Social
Music, who's accumulated a following of students appealed to by
his booted-and-Mohawked take on contemporary classical music and
pedagogy in general.
College shows can be awkward for a variety of
reasons, and this one looked as if it could be: I'd play in a
cozy, well-lit library, unamplified, ringed by couches. Sober, I
thought, until the accordionist in the opening folk band shared
his pint of Jack Daniel's. In the end it was familial and
supportive, a couple dozen punks, collegiate folksingers doing
novelty covers, and androgynes who cheered in the right places,
laughed at the jokes, and roughhoused out the door and back to
their dorms.
I bustled around the city running errands the next
day - the city clerk had been trying with increasing urgency,
during the six months I'd been out of the country on tour, to
assess my suitability for jury duty; culminating in the letter
threatening fines and jail time if I didn't present myself at the
courthouse to, in the end, sign a piece of paper. Civic duty
fulfilled, I headed to Philadelphia.
The First Unitarian Church, around the corner from
the Mutter Museum, is a religious institution almost entirely
bankrolled by punk shows: hardcore in the basement, indie rock
upstairs in the main room, acoustic shows unamplified in the side
chapel, and patrolled by - at least every time I've been there -
dreadlocked patron saint Greg Daly, Philly punk institution,
longtime World/Inferno jack-of-all-trades, international man of
leisure. He's got a great story, about the drummer from a
high-profile indie-folk band who'd come through on tour with a
side project. Originally booked for the bigger (500 capacity)
room, it'd gotten moved to the smaller (75 cap) room. Still, his
big band did well and were good guys, so Greg and the promoters
were gonna make sure he was happy, and asked him, "Can I get you
anything? Anything you need?" The guy looked at him for a minute,
shook his head, and answered, "I could use some fans of my
music."
The show, fortunately for me, is with local hero
Erik from Mischief Brew, who is still well in mourning for a
close friend who'd been killed in a car accident the week before.
He's shaken and seems understandably distracted. The pews are
full, though, and he plays Townes Van Zandt's "Pancho &
Lefty" and two new songs, one of which may or may not be called
"He & She & I Make Three," may or may not be about
transgender experience, but is indisputably awesome. We do "Off
The Books" and "Fight Dirty" from the album we did together, get
back to his place in time to catch the end of the
Giants-Cardinals series, and I wake up to the eerie wail of
crying pugs.
I have a truly lovely mother-in-law in Arlington,
who, on the theory that "It has been my experience that men like
soup," has just that prepared for me when I get there the next
day. Fortified by said soup, as well as the Ukrainian comfort
dish of kasha with friend onions topped with cottage cheese and a
fried egg, I had a surprisingly solid show for a suburban Tuesday
night. My friend Amy, now quite pregnant, has been to every show
I've ever played in the DC area and as a result I feel obligated
to bring at least one new song and one new between-song bit each
time, so I pulled out "The Day All The Leaves Came Down" for the
second time live, as well as "Rainbow Connection" which I'd been
doing in England for basically the same reason. My brother-in-law
has been on a fitness regime while I've been overseas and is so
skinny as to be virtually unrecognizable.
Arlington to Asheville is either seven hours, if
you believe the ever-optimistic Garmin GPS, or nine, if your
inclination is with the more cynical and worldly Google Maps. No
matter who you believe, it's the longest drive until I get out
west. Beautiful, though - the Blue Ridge Mountains and the
Crooked Road are painted, not the aggressive reds and oranges of
the New England fall, but a more muted and matte palette of
sienna and mauve.
I had just about burned myself out on podcasts by
the end of the UK tour in September - to the point where I was
actually interested in listening to music again and excited about
some new records: Morning Glory, Hop Along, Shovels And Rope,
Future Of The Left, The Cut Ups…But I'm still working my way
through the "History Of Rome" series and love me some Melvyn
Bragg. The autodidact impulse fills up the hours with the reforms
of Diocletian and the final showdown of Constantine and
Licinius.
I don't know why it took me so long to figure out
that if you need a couple hours of office work/wifi time, skip
the coffeeshop and hit the public library. You don't get frantic
with caffeine and overheard conversation.
A couple at the Asheville show say I could've
stayed at their house, but the guy has court in the morning -
"That's why," he says, "I'm in my suit now." For what? "We got
busted smoking weed on the sidewalk." "Is that even a crime in
Asheville?"
Maria calls with an unsettling story. She'd been
out walking by the Charles River - we're living in the Boston
area while she has a semester-long post-doctoral fellowship at
Harvard - and choked on the scent of decay. On the riverbank lay
a man covered with a coat. There's no good option in that
situation: best case, you wake up a potentially dangerous,
certainly disgruntled, hobo. Worst case, you're face to face with
a dead body. She called 911 and hoped for the best.
It's a true culture clash at Wonderroot, a
community center in Atlanta with an acting workshop for
middle-aged African-Americans upstairs and a packed bill of
Fest-bound bands from Bloomington and Pomona in the truly
foul-smelling basement. I saw someone I swore was the smiling
fellow from Defiance, Ohio; then realized that Ginger Alford's
new band was on the bill and that the whole thing was a kind of
Bloomington caravan. One dude brags that he's not showering for
the two weeks until he gets home, another is hawking a t-shirt
with a glow-in-the-dark connect-the-dots of a giant penis. Stay
classy, kids.
For all that it's easy to mock the small world of
contemporary punk, especially the Punknews/No Idea/Fest axis -
for its homogeneity, self-seriousness, privileged slumming, and
groupthink - there is still something I find endearing and
welcoming about it. I remember talking to Dave Hause on one of
our tours together about the differences between the somewhat
blindered punk world and the snobby and exclusive indie-rock
world; each protective in its own way, but the former simply
somewhat oblivious to the rest of the musical world, where the
latter can jealous and protective of its walls. The Loved Ones -
and my apologies to Dave if I'm misrepresenting this story - had,
a few years back, opened for the Hold Steady on a month-long US
tour, during which time we were playing the Pitchfork Festival in
Chicago. Dave put out some feelers to the organizers about his
band getting on as well and was soundly rebuffed: "Our crowd
wouldn't be interested." "Really? We're out with the band that
you have on your site every week!" No dice.
A prominent Chicago music writer and Pitchfork
contributor who was a fan and friend of the Hold Steady saw them
open for us, loved it, and said something to the effect of "You
guys are like Strike Anywhere but you actually dress nice!" Dave
recoiled. "You're knocking Thomas, a true punk hero, for the way
he dresses?!" "Oh what," the writer said. "You're happy in the
punk ghetto?"
I think this is a common prejudice in the
"indie-rock establishment" - indie rock, as I always feel
compelled to point out, here used as a genre signifier, not in
any sense of its independence from mainstream distribution and
publicity channels - and I think it stems from the same reason
that the indie blogosphere can feel like high-school
scorekeeping. A very common progression for serious and
emotionally engaged music fans, including the current
thirtysomething generation of indie-rock tastemakers, is to have
been deeply steeped in punk rock as a teenager and in their high
school years. And if there's one thing about serious music fans,
it's that their identity and self-conception is nearly coexistent
with the kind of music they like. And if there's one thing about
teenagers who go to college, it's that they jump at the chance to
reinvent their self-conception and repudiate their old one. For
music fans, that often involves embracing what used to be called
"college rock" - less idealist, more emotionally cool, more
self-serious - and, correspondingly, denigrating the punk they
grew up on as adolescent and essentially unserious, when what
they really mean is they think they, as teenagers listening to
that music, were adolescent and unserious. (Real adults, of
course, just listen to what they like and are perfectly content
to leave it at that.)
Anyway, bias alert! Pitchfork was last seen calling
me a "dick," so take my opinion with a grain of salt if you want.
But in my experience as someone who's been on both sides, I'll
just say this: the indie-rock world covered all kinds of
non-newsworthy things I did since I was in the Hold Steady, and
as soon as I left, they were done with me (I don't believe for a
second PItchfork actually thought my first record was a 7.3;
frankly I don't even think that.) But the punk world basically
said, "Oh hey man, you're back, cool. Want to do this show?" And
for that I will always be grateful. (And say what you will about
Punknews, but I do always get the sense that it's written by, and
commented on by, people who actually like music, which is not
always the case with their indie counterparts.) For musicians who
actually want to play music for decades, I can't help noticing
that a band that puts out indie-rock hit and doesn't follow it up
gets excommunicated. A band that puts out a couple indie-rock
hits and then one sort of mediocre album gets excommunicated. But
any punk-identified band that has one album that people liked
once can tour forever. A punk band that has a string of great
records and then makes a sort-of-mediocre record - you'll hear
people say, "Yeah, that record sucked, but I'll go see them
anyway." And if the next record is good they'll be stoked all
over again. So that's QED in my book.

As I got to Athens, I got that feeling in my
throat: I'm gonna get sick. I went to the supermarket and bought
a giant hunk of ginger and a liter of orange juice and hoped for
the best. I learned this trick from Tom Gabel and it's as good as
gargling with salt water: slice the ginger root into quarter-size
slices and stick them in your cheek like a pinch of Kodiak.
I do try to be on time for load-ins and
soundchecks. My setup is pretty simple but accordions and banjos
are not quite as easy as just plugging in a guitar and even a
ten-minute soundcheck is better than messing with EQ in front of
a crowd. My advance sheets had a 7pm load-in and a 9:30 show, but
the door guy didn't show up until about 9, and the other bands
were still unaccounted for, so I thought "Fuck it," gave the door
guy my phone number, and went and checked into a hotel. If I'm
going to whack this cold across the forehead before it even sits
up straight, it's not gonna be by staying on a random audience
member's couch.
When my phone buzzed about an hour later and said
Shellshag and the other band had showed up, I headed back down
and found them all deep into a round of Jameson shots, which,
coincidentally, are another fine way to get your cold in check -
at least in the short term. The door guy who was nominally in
charge sullenly and insistently ceded responsibility: Start
whenever you want. I don't care what order you play in, figure it
out yourself. There's a PA onstage, do your own sound.
Thanks for the help, dude!
Shellshag, a charmingly shaggy duo from Brooklyn
who I've crossed paths with over the years but never done a show
with, shrug. "That's Athens for ya." We decide I'll play first so
I can wrap it up early and get a good night's sleep, and seal the
deal with another shot.
Most nights, during "The Ballad Of Hollis Wadsworth
Mason, Jr.," I do a bit about accordion solos to the effect of
"How do you all feel about accordion solos?" Sometimes I get
cheers, sometimes groans, but never this, from Shellshag
guitarist John: "I don't know, I've never heard one." The white
whale! The infamous low-information, undecided voter! Now I'm
doing the real ground-game work.
I get that creepy feeling every time I get to
Florida, that psychological shimmer in the air of low-level
criminal activity, drifters, and public intoxication; but there
was something special about entering Jacksonville this time. Cops
on the corners, bridges closed, drunks dashing into traffic: it's
the Georgia/Florida college football gameday. "Someone's gonna
die tonight," said the sound guy.
"Someone's gonna die tonight," said the bartender,
separately. "Always happens. Last year some drunk fell between
two parking garages and wasn't found for a couple days." A huge
water bug scurried under the pool table. I went to the Motel 6.
My wife Maria was flying in that night and I wanted to get
checked in and leave her the key. She had a conference in New
Orleans starting later that week, so we decided she'd meet me
here and we'd have a little road trip. Also, she'd gotten an
earful about the Fest from the Russian punks we'd met over the
summer and wanted to see for herself ("She wants to see smelly
suburban dudes with beards playing pop-punk?," said Greg
Daly).
The desk clerk was an imposing Middle Easterner
with thinning, gelled hair. "Can I get an extra key and leave it
for my wife?" I asked.
"Your reservation is for one person." I'd screwed
up the booking.
"Can I…make it for two?"
"It is not possible. We are full. You can have only
one person." He slid two keys across the counter. Good man. I
drove back downtown and played for the opening band, an old
friend from Jersey (who had been a circus performer for a while
but is now a strip club DJ in Jax) and her older, deeply
disinterested boyfriend. And those floor roaches. As I was
packing up the mercy, a drunk wandered in and came over. "I
missed the show, man, what do you sound like?"
"Mm, maybe better ask her," I said, gesturing to
the girl who'd just bought a CD.
"It's kind of like theater," she said. "Like
Broadway."
"That's not exactly how I'd put it," I said.
"Well, sounds interesting. I'll take a CD." He
bought one and wandered back out for a burger.
Up and at 'em and off to Gainesville Sunday morning
and over to Joey from Fiya's house where we'll be staying; we
managed to avoid the infamous state-road speed traps and get to
Joey's in time to rehearse. Maria & I haven't played together
since the end of the China tour in late July - but muscle memory
counts for a lot.
The one band I was really trying to see - I'd
missed the Dwarves, and was none too happy about that - was Hop
Along, mid-afternoon Sunday, so we sped through the set on Joey's
back porch and headed downtown. I still don't know how I'd heard
about the band - one of those things, I guess, where passing
mentions just reach a critical mass (which usually stinks to me
of a newly-hired expensive publicist, but that doesn't seem to be
the case here). In any case, I'd fallen in love with the feral
album, and lyrics mapping the profound
ambivalence of obsession, vacillating between selfish demand and
self-effacement. But the line was around two corners and didn't
seem to be moving. We gave it a few minutes past the posted set
time and bailed. Plenty of chances to see any working band next
time they come around.

The rest of the night went much as you'd think: A
spirit-enriching show. The treat of Kepi Ghoulie, whose "Rock 'N'
Roll Shark" I maintain is one of the great Cro-Magnon one-chord
mission statements of our times. An increasing number of drinks,
which makes the timeline a little muddled. Reggae Shack for jerk
tofu and tempeh curry. We finally caught Hop Along, checked out
Smith Street Band, saw old friends and met some new, and then
just set up shop in the back of 8 Seconds, where Maria whacked
away at the boxing machine (settings: "Anemic," "Brutal") while
the lesbian security guard flirted with her.
We had plans to shoot a video with Andrew Seward
Monday morning but he had late-breaking band practice, so we did
laundry and talked politics with Joey. He's a labor and union
organizer, deep in the weeds of the Obama ground game and with a
lot of interesting things to say about local politics. Which,
since it's politics after all, I'll keep to myself; but if and
when he runs for Gainesville City Council all the punks better
get themselves registered. Next show isn't until Halloween in New
Orleans, so there's time for a slow drive.
I had been vaguely aware of something people were
calling a "Frankenstorm," mostly via Twitter jokes, but solo
tours aren't always the best way to keep up on hometown news, so
I didn't fully realize that what was about to happen was a
hurricane hitting New York, and that our house in the Gowanus
neighborhood in Brooklyn was in the evacuation zone for what they
assumed would be the flooding of the infamously polluted Gowanus
Canal. It was only as we drove to Pensacola, our radio news and
Facebook feeds filling with increasingly agitated comments, that
we really started to worry.
"Is our renter's insurance up to date?"
"Mm, better call…Nope, we let it lapse when we
were overseas on tour."
Damn you, me from the past. "Call the office, see
if we can pay it up?"
"There's no way they'll let us do that…Office is
closed anyway."
"What's in the basement?"
"Mostly CDs…my keyboard and amp…a couple boxes
of old band flyers, photos, and love letters."
"Maybe you'll be happier if all that stuff is
covered in toxic waste anyway."
We decided that since there was nothing to do but
get more worked up about something we were in no position to
control, we'd go to a movie, a long one, until the high tide in
New York was past, and then see if our home had gone underwater
in the meantime. The New York Observer twitter feed was showing
the water up on the streets on the other side of the Canal and
over the bridges. It didn't bear too much thinking about. When
Hurricane Irene had come through last year, our landlord Felipe
had sandbagged around the house, and our subletter this time
texted saying that the power was still on and "Felipe is prepared
for the apocalypse."
We went to see "Cloud Atlas," which basically
short-circuited my critical apparatus. It was laughable, chaotic,
impossible to take seriously, felt five hours long, and yet
somehow by the end managed to do the thing it was trying to do -
whatever that was. I couldn't possibly tell you whether I think
it's any good, though. Read the book.
We left the theater, somewhat shaken. Scratch that
"somewhat" as the first photo I saw when I checked my phone was a
gas station a few blocks from our house underwater, and a string
of reports of explosions, power outages, floods. I had a familiar
feeling - I'd been away on tour when 9/11 happened - a confused
and morally conflicted combination of anger that I wasn't there
to be able to protect my house, regret that I'd be missing this
communal, if disastrous, shared experience, and guilty relief
that I was miles away, in safety.
The owner of the pizza shop - they were closing,
but made us a takeout pie - saw us staring at the TVs over the
bar, and we said we were from New York. "Well, you'll want these
then," he said, and put a couple bottles of Dos Equis in a
plastic bag. "I'm not supposed to do this, so don't open them
now." ("I thought you weren't gonna drink tonight," said Maria.
"Somehow I don't think I can just watch hurricane footage and eat
pizza without a beer," I replied.)
On the way home, we heard from our subletter, a
painter. The water had come about a block away, but had begun to
recede. She still had power. The roof had blown off a restaurant
down the block. But it seemed like the worst was over. I can't
tell if it's technically irony that the safe place to be, away
from hurricane flooding, was on the Gulf Coast heading towards
New Orleans, but it feels like it might be.