The Miracle Mile
Ok, so I haven't posted in a while.
Between things going on in my life and the world, I was kind of taking a bit of a music breather.
I'm back though. I was listening to Silkworm's album Firewater which is a pretty intense listen. In fact, I definitely forgot how intense that album is. It swept me up and wouldn't let go. If you want to hear some great songs about lonliness, pain, being in an unpopular band, and always being drunk, this is the album for you.
The song that inspired a whole bunch of memories and the idea for this post was Miracle Mile. Its an acoustic song about how bad a tour can get. It is about the challenges that "four dumb hicks from hunger" as they refer to themselves face when you get in the van and tour. In the song their van gets broken into outside the Knitting Factory by a homeless junkie (I think they are referring to the original East Houston location in the song, not the fabulous new Leonard street one) and blows up in Texas after scumbag mechanics do a shitty repair job and take all of their money.
My first serious band owned a van. We had a Chevy Beauville. If you have never seen one of these vehicles it was HUGE. I think it is bigger than my apartment. It was, I believe, a 15 passenger van which we mostly gutted. We could only seat about 6 people in the van, and the rest was empty space for the gear. It was pretty out of control, but it was cheap and this band had a lot of gear. At our fullest we were a six piece band with two drummers and a horn player.
The van was a beast, and a money suck. We kept it parked in Astoria, one of our members moved it every other morning. 30 bucks of gas (in early 2000's gas prices!) wouldn't come close to filling up the tank, and if you kept it under a 1/4 tank it would stall in the middle of the street. Our spedometer didn't work and there was always something new going wrong with it.
We loved it though. It may have been a gas guzzling, take up both sides of the road screaming white death machine, but dammit it was ours. That is until we drove through Weedsport NY (somewhere around Rochester or Syracuse if I remember correctly) and our van died. It was dramatic. There was smoke. A state trooper drove us to the garage and asked us to thank him on our next record. He had a badass shotgun mounted to the front seat. I asked if he would cuff me and drag me out of the car. He wouldn't.
When we got to the mechanics garage in Weedsport, the van had already been towed and two of our members were already there. They told us the van was dead. Real dead. Not coming back except as a zombie van dead. The mechanics crossed themselves (literally, that was pretty funny) and gave our van last rites. We had the choice of either spending 2500 dollars on a brand new engine or leaving the van there. I don't think they even offered us money for the van, just the opportunity to not be charged for them to bring it to the junkyard.
We were in our early 20's and pretty sheltered. We were now broke in the middle of a hick town (albeit an extraordinarily friendly one) forced to make a really hard decision. We also had no idea how we were going to get home if we left our van, our only form of transportation here in Weedsport. We were pretty far from anywhere.
Our decision ended up being to junk the van. We left the poor girl there to be brought to a junkyard and turned into scrap metal. We ended up taking a very long and expensive cab to either the Syracuse or Rochester airport (I think Syracuse) and renting cars to drive back to NYC.
We never bought another vehicle. We figured things out for out of town shows, and we got very lucky when we booked a tour. Some friends of ours were showcasing all over England to get signed (the Strokes, Mercury Rev model of building hype in England and riding it back home to the USA. It worked for this band as well and they got a major label deal out of it) and so they let us borrow their van for a couple of weeks.
Now the Metal band I'm playing in wants to concentrate on outside of NYC shows, but we don't have transport, and the non-drivers outweigh the drivers 3-2. I also have some serious doubts about these guys being able to make it on any sort of long term outing. Most of the band is over 30, and our drummer is in his early 40's. The drummer and I are the only people with any road experience. I can't see our lead guitarist staying in someone's house and sleeping on the floor, or even worse, sleeping in the van to keep watch over the gear. It will be interesting if we decide to tour how it goes down. These guys are a bit past the "roughing it" portion of their lives and it is just not feasible to stay in hotels all the time, or avoid fast food. I just don't see us touring unless we get signed, and I don't see us getting signed unless we tour.
*sigh* that's what its all about I guess.
Thinking about drinking.
Cheers.
Between things going on in my life and the world, I was kind of taking a bit of a music breather.
I'm back though. I was listening to Silkworm's album Firewater which is a pretty intense listen. In fact, I definitely forgot how intense that album is. It swept me up and wouldn't let go. If you want to hear some great songs about lonliness, pain, being in an unpopular band, and always being drunk, this is the album for you.
The song that inspired a whole bunch of memories and the idea for this post was Miracle Mile. Its an acoustic song about how bad a tour can get. It is about the challenges that "four dumb hicks from hunger" as they refer to themselves face when you get in the van and tour. In the song their van gets broken into outside the Knitting Factory by a homeless junkie (I think they are referring to the original East Houston location in the song, not the fabulous new Leonard street one) and blows up in Texas after scumbag mechanics do a shitty repair job and take all of their money.
My first serious band owned a van. We had a Chevy Beauville. If you have never seen one of these vehicles it was HUGE. I think it is bigger than my apartment. It was, I believe, a 15 passenger van which we mostly gutted. We could only seat about 6 people in the van, and the rest was empty space for the gear. It was pretty out of control, but it was cheap and this band had a lot of gear. At our fullest we were a six piece band with two drummers and a horn player.
The van was a beast, and a money suck. We kept it parked in Astoria, one of our members moved it every other morning. 30 bucks of gas (in early 2000's gas prices!) wouldn't come close to filling up the tank, and if you kept it under a 1/4 tank it would stall in the middle of the street. Our spedometer didn't work and there was always something new going wrong with it.
We loved it though. It may have been a gas guzzling, take up both sides of the road screaming white death machine, but dammit it was ours. That is until we drove through Weedsport NY (somewhere around Rochester or Syracuse if I remember correctly) and our van died. It was dramatic. There was smoke. A state trooper drove us to the garage and asked us to thank him on our next record. He had a badass shotgun mounted to the front seat. I asked if he would cuff me and drag me out of the car. He wouldn't.
When we got to the mechanics garage in Weedsport, the van had already been towed and two of our members were already there. They told us the van was dead. Real dead. Not coming back except as a zombie van dead. The mechanics crossed themselves (literally, that was pretty funny) and gave our van last rites. We had the choice of either spending 2500 dollars on a brand new engine or leaving the van there. I don't think they even offered us money for the van, just the opportunity to not be charged for them to bring it to the junkyard.
We were in our early 20's and pretty sheltered. We were now broke in the middle of a hick town (albeit an extraordinarily friendly one) forced to make a really hard decision. We also had no idea how we were going to get home if we left our van, our only form of transportation here in Weedsport. We were pretty far from anywhere.
Our decision ended up being to junk the van. We left the poor girl there to be brought to a junkyard and turned into scrap metal. We ended up taking a very long and expensive cab to either the Syracuse or Rochester airport (I think Syracuse) and renting cars to drive back to NYC.
We never bought another vehicle. We figured things out for out of town shows, and we got very lucky when we booked a tour. Some friends of ours were showcasing all over England to get signed (the Strokes, Mercury Rev model of building hype in England and riding it back home to the USA. It worked for this band as well and they got a major label deal out of it) and so they let us borrow their van for a couple of weeks.
Now the Metal band I'm playing in wants to concentrate on outside of NYC shows, but we don't have transport, and the non-drivers outweigh the drivers 3-2. I also have some serious doubts about these guys being able to make it on any sort of long term outing. Most of the band is over 30, and our drummer is in his early 40's. The drummer and I are the only people with any road experience. I can't see our lead guitarist staying in someone's house and sleeping on the floor, or even worse, sleeping in the van to keep watch over the gear. It will be interesting if we decide to tour how it goes down. These guys are a bit past the "roughing it" portion of their lives and it is just not feasible to stay in hotels all the time, or avoid fast food. I just don't see us touring unless we get signed, and I don't see us getting signed unless we tour.
*sigh* that's what its all about I guess.
Thinking about drinking.
Cheers.
posted by Seth at 2:44 PM
