(In the van. Just past Katy, Texas. Thursday. Doughty here, with theweekly Soul C's dispatch. Mark, honorable keyboard sampler man, will beproviding a weekly sample to go with these dispatches, one that you candownload. We're heading to Austin, currently, with Tucson and LosAngeles and San Francisco off in the up ahead. We're out with Sunny DayReal Estate and Shudder to Think, curling through the South, then uptowards Seattle.)
"Where's Fredrickburg?" I ask our tour manager Gus, who we've taken tocalling Roy for some mysterious reason.
"You're soaking in it," says Gus.
Ah, the van life. The basic mental haze of it settles in quickly. Andwe've been out here just over a week. This sort of general blearinesssets in; sort of like being somewhat drunk all the time. A kinda ofcrazy restlessness. I kinda like it; I kinda bliss out on the generallack of a destination. Why use drugs when sleep deprivation can conjureequally stimulating side effects?
Play. Drive. Sleep. Rinse, repeat.
The shows have been cool; we've lately settled into this sort oflowdown pimp-suit groove. Everything is laid back and full of space. Ithink it has something to do with being in the South; something to dowith the fragrance, the humidity. I love it down here; I have an UncleJunior that lives in Tullos, Louisiana. We schemed to stop off inTullos and chill with Junior, but, I fear, we ended up taking a quickerroute to Houston and missed out on Tullos entirely.
Anyway, we've been throwing weird things into the set--"Woolly Imbibe,""I Got Lost In The Parking Lot," which is a new one. We did this thingcalled "Henry Rollins Has A Very Large Neck Indeed" on a closed-circuitUniversity cable station in Atlanta. We've been playing this other newjoint, "White Girl" pretty much at every show; it's vaguely about myrecent ex-girlfriend, so it's a decent crutch for me. The bassline isthis way slippery, creepy thing that Sebastian came up with during thisridiculous video shoot a couple months back. We come up with stuff inthe oddest moments--at the time he improvised it, I think somebody waspowdering his face.
Sebastian likes me to draw pictures of bears on his set list, afterwe've all written it. The more notable recent bears--ChampagneGlass-Shaped Weeping Bear, Aerosol Bear, Shriner Fez Bear, DigitalBear, El Oso con Queso y Jamon, Taco-Shaped Bear. People keep stealinghis set lists from him after the shows, and it really bums him out. Helikes the Bears as a souvenir.
Yuval's taken to speaking in a Texas accent; given his uniquerelationship to the American dialect, it comes out sounding like BorisBadenov with a strange, whistling lisp. We used to want Yuval topretend he's not from Israel, and tell everyone he's from Pittsburgh."Where you from, Yuval?" "I'm from Peetsburgh."
Finest Yuval quotes of the week:
"Go, G, with that hundred of thousand of watts you got there."
"Yo, Larry, if this is the South, where is it?"
"This looks a lot like Italy."
We admire Yuval for the way he has with a non-sequitur.
Our soundman Larry is the King of the Eighties. We don't know why. He'sjust got this thing around him that suggests thegetting-ready-for-the-big-dance sequence in Footloose. "You're soeighties," says Gus/Roy, in amazement. "That's so hot." Subsequently,Gus/Roy and I have taken to dueling non-sequitur eighties-references; Iwon the last round with a sudden-death mention of Hardbodies.
For similarly little reason, everone is calling Mark the Horsey.
At a Flying J truckstop now. Gus/Roy has a peculiar affection forFlying J. While we're in Europe, he has to drive the van from Seattleto Iowa; he's plotted his journey so that he hits the maximum number ofFlying J's possible. Yuval and Sebastian have vanished to thepayphones; they're always vanishing to the payphones. Who are theycalling, we always wonder. Nobody knows. Every time we stop, one orboth of them are on payphones, making their mysterious payphone calls.
Dan, the lanky, bearded guitar fellow from Sunny Day, won't go toCalifornia, and no one knows why. He completely refuses to enter thestate, and won't tell anyone the particulars.
"Yeah," says Sunny Day's fresh-faced and affable drummer, William. "Hewon't tell us. We've heard some pretty weird rumours, though."
"That's so hot," says Gus/Roy. "I hate California."
Gus/Roy is madly in love with Claire Danes, star of TV's "My So-CalledLife." All one has to do is say "Claire Danes" and he'll let out thissort of anguished, fevered "Ohhhhh ho ho ho." He sent her e-mail lastweek and now checks his twice daily to see if she's written him back.He invariably returns crestfallen. She's on the guest list plus one forevery show we do, lest Claire show up looking for this legendary Gusfellow and end up stuck outside. Hopefully, if she shows up, she'lleither show up at an all ages show or they won't card her, being thatshe's a big TeeVee star and all. Claire, if you're reading this,there's a special place on the Soul Coughing guest list for you. Youmight not wanna take advantage of the plus-one, though; I think Guswould be a little hurt if you showed up with a date.
This is a poem I wrote in the van somewhere between Fredricksburg andChapel Hill;
BUTTER/LOST
Against hands, a smooth is smoothed around and skin rushes up to it,cooing sweat like a whistle defecting a steampipe.
Oiled, the machine chuffs and the brain is dry, and the nerves scurryoff with messages to no one in charge, while this equals this: twoarms locked into each other are without a mind to differentiate betweenlimbs and hips, therefore, I have come here to get lost.
Currently on the Soul C's van-stereo hit parade; Cibo Matto, a duo ofJapanese women we know from New York, one of whom lays down the funkloops on sampler, while Miho, the vocalist, yelps groovily; "ExtraSugar! Extra Salt! Extra Oil and MSG! Shut up, I want to eat!" It'sinsanely funky. Also George Jones' Golden Hits, and the LatinPlayboys, naturally. We had a deep listening-drive through Alabama withExile on Main Street. Prince's Come is a big favourite. On a trulyspecial day, Mark is planning on whipping out his tape of the Hi-Lo's.
We're soaking, as Gus/Roy would say, in Austin now. Thousands of milesand four days from now, we're playing a pajama party in Los Angeles. Ifonly we can locate some pajamas.
--Doughty, November 17, 1994