I just watched this documentary called The Cruise about Tim ‘Speed’ Levitch, who you may know from his animated appearance in the movie Waking Life.

Here’s a clip from one of my favorite scenes of The Cruise, which I can’t embed, unfortunately, but it’s well worth your time to watch it.

I’d like to take a minute to tell you a story in the long string of heart-warming online tales that illustrates the power of the internet to connect people who have been estranged for decades.  It also illustrates the power of music, and the power of a certain kind of mental pathology, too.  You’ll see what I mean.

One of my cohorts from Iron Horse received an out-of-the-blue message on Facebook yesterday, at 1:30 in the morning, from someone he didn’t know, that said, “Are you [misspelled his last name] from [our high school]?  I remember you; we wrote a song in detention.’  He named the song, and correctly wrote out the chorus.  No, I’m not going to quote it here, because then it would be searchable, but he totally nailed it.

His profile was private, there was no picture, and he had a very unusual first name, but my friend didn’t recognize him in any way.  He had eleven online friends, all of whom shared his surname.  My friend responded, “Yeah, that was me.  I kinda remember writing that in detention. . .I changed the lyrics around, and my old band used to play that song.  Do you have a picture or something to jump-start my memory?  What years were you at [our high school]?”

The guy wrote back that he moved away from Yakima in 1987, and that he’s living in California now.  He’s of a certain nationality, and “try to get sum pic’s.”  (I took the liberty of cleaning up his grammar and punctuation before, but it was all typed lower-case, with slightly awkward punctuation.)  My friend accepted his friend request, and we’ll see where the story goes from here.  The two of us can’t help but wonder what the guy’s life is like, since he’s writing to someone he met only one time, in high school detention, twenty two years ago (!), and seems to be hoping to rekindle a friendship where it left off.   I mean, sure,  my friend is a great guy, and we were a pretty good band, but this guy doesn’t even know about the band, because he left town before my friend and I even started it.  Oh, AND.  I should mention that my friend was neither a miscreant nor a ne’er-do-well (I love those two terms, and I love it when I get the opportunity to use them), he was only in detention that one day, and never saw this guy ever again.  He’s not anyone I knew, either then or now, but I haven’t been able to find my yearbooks to investigate him.

Incidentally, speaking of the band, the community access TV station still plays our videos to this day, which completely mystifies my friend and me.  These are not new videos I’m referring to, either.  They were filmed and originally aired during that same time period, from 1987 to ’89, which is when the band was in existence.   We were just a bunch of high school kids, playing some songs that we wrote ourselves, and I can’t imagine why anyone watching now would even enjoy the songs these days, let alone find a bunch of kids from twenty years ago compelling.

Be all that as at may, I admit that it’s gratifying (in a weird way) that they do still play that stuff.  We had a good time making the videos, and like I said, we were a pretty decent band, but we had no delusions about our abilities or chances for stardom, either.  We were just a bunch of kids who had a band, like a million other kids in a million other bands.

Just for fun, here’s a picture from our very first show.  In fact, it could well be of the song in question, too, because I just now remembered that I actually sang the whole second verse of it (and I didn’t sing lead very often), so it seems very likely that this picture was taken during that song.

I just love the oversize mirrored sunglasses, and you can see that I was working hard on Mullet Number One as well.  Gee, I wonder if this was the 80′s?

Meanwhile, back to the topic at hand.

In the interest of full disclosure, and the interest of fairness to this guy, I’ve spent the better part of this month reconnecting with friends from years ago, one of whom had also been twenty years ago (she reads this blog, too, by the way), and it’s been really great for everyone involved.  You probably already knew that if you’re reading this, though, since I’ve written a bit about it lately.  More than once but fewer than three times, in fact, just in case you were counting.   So I have no business knocking the guy for trying.  As human beings, we all are basically social animals (some of us more than others) who are looking for connections wherever we can find them.  But the people I’m talking with are people with whom I had actual relationships and friendships.  They’re based on more than just a one-time meeting, in detention, more than half a lifetime ago.

The title of this entry, incidentally, comes from a book that our high school’s choir director had on the bookshelf in his office, and it seemed apropos to use it here.  Iron Horse shortened it to ‘Mental Game’ and we used it as the title of our album.  I mean cassette.  Oh, how dearly I wish I had a copy of that.  I have a lot of old videos, and tapes, and pictures, and notebooks, but I’m not sure I have that cassette cover floating around anywhere.  I’ll have to do some digging.

I can’t wait to see how this story unfolds.

Saturday night I had an interesting gig.  We played one of those cancer benefit walk-a-thons at a ritzy high school in a suburb south of town.  Nicest football field I’ve ever seen outside of the professional leagues, and even better than many of those, I’m sure.

We were scheduled to play from seven until eight, and we were scheduled to open for the 80′s band Quarterflash, but we found out that the city was worried about security for Quarterflash, so they cancelled them and hired an Elton John impersonator instead, who arrived in a blue Cadillac stretch limousine, pulling a trailer, with his entourage of two SUV’s behind him, each pulling its own trailer too.  They proceeded to unload, and unload, and unload, and we kept watching the clock.  Seven came and went, and seven-thirty came and went, and still they weren’t even close to being set up.  They brought their own intricate PA system (despite the fact that the one already on stage was perfectly good), lighting trusses and lights, a huge electronic piano (which looked like a real piano, until you got up close to it) and a set of drums.  This was all to play for a cancer benefit in a high school stadium, by the way, where people aren’t even there to listen to music, they’re walking around the track all day and night.  We could not believe it.

I walked behind the stage to move my cello to a safer spot, and I happened to overhear a very funny conversation between the piano guy and a couple of his friends.

Friends:  Hey, your car’s still running.  Is it supposed to be?  Don’t you want to shut it off?

Piano Guy:  No, Maurice (the dog) is in there.  I leave the car turned on all the time for him.

Friends:  [exchanging befuddled looks and smiles in my direction]  Uhhh, okay. . .just trying to save you some gas money.

Piano Guy:  Oh, yeah, that car idles for about fifteen hours a day.  It’s okay.

Friends, and me:  [jaws drop]

At almost eight o’clock, we just decided we couldn’t wait any longer.  We ran up and just set up around them, which apparently was supposed to be the plan, anyway.  [Slight geek-out:  It was my first time playing the cello through a big PA since I installed the pickup on it, and used the DI box.  Oh.  My.  God.  What a difference!  It sounded SO MUCH better than it ever has before.  Okay, end of geek-out.]  It was a pretty good show, but I wouldn’t count it among our best.  It certainly wasn’t bad, though.  Our final song sounded so great, in fact, that we decided to stop there and end our set with it, instead of the additional song we had planned.

We stuck around to talk to some friends afterward, and the EJ impersonator still hadn’t finished setting up.   I don’t even like the real Elton John, so I had no desire to stick around for his act, though I have to admit that after all that setup time, I was intrigued to at least hear what they sounded like.  But my overwhelming desire, especially since it was an hour later than we were supposed to be finished, was to go home, so that’s what I did.

This was another one for the Sometimes Gigs Are Super Weird file.

Saturday morning, after a train wreck of a gig in Renton with my friend BT, and having stayed up until four o’clock in the morning the night before, I got up and nine o’clock and drove up to my brother’s house.  I got to see Niece #2 for the first time, and she’s almost five months old.  She was very quiet and smiley, and she instantly grabbed both my thumb and pinky finger in her tiny hands, which seemed to surprise everyone.  “She never does that with us,” they said.

It was great to see them.  The last couple of times I’ve been up in Seattle, they had been in Portland, so our paths hadn’t crossed.  We do talk on the phone regularly, but it’s not the same, especially when a new baby is involved.  We went for brunch at a delicious Mexican restaurant called Azul, then went back to the house and just kinda hung out for a while.  They were packing for a trip, so I just stayed downstairs and played with Niece 1 and Niece 2 while Nephew was upstairs sleeping.

We all went our separate ways around 1:30, and since I had no agenda for the rest of the day, I decided to take a rest from driving and go sit in a park for a while.  Naturally I had to drive for quite a while to get to the park, but the plan was set.  I headed down to GasWorks Park, in the Fremont district.  That’s the short version of the story.  The long version is that there were two or three large festivals in Seattle that day, and traffic was nightmarish.  I also took a wrong turn and ended up going across the short bridge to Eastlake (I think. . .?) and hung out in a tiny little park along Lake Union for a while, exploring and walking through the neighborhood a bit before driving back across the bridge to Wallingford, which is a neighborhood that I could quite easily see myself living in.  By the time I got to GasWorks Park, I was ready to relax.  There was some sort of folk arts festival happening, so I was glad to have gotten there early enough to check it all out.

Naturally, I had my camera with me, and I was very glad I did.  There were lots of colorful costumes, great gypsy klezmer music, naked people (some painted, others not), belly dancers. . .

(Can I just take a minute here to say that the naked dancing guy had a surprisingly gigantic scrotum?  I rarely feel the need to mention things like that (mostly cause I don’t see many scrota!), but I mean, jeez.  You’d find it worth mentioning too, if you’d seen it.  I’m just saying.  The security guy finally made him wear pants, which he grudgingly put on, but kept pulling them down as low as they would go, showing fully half of his ass and barely concealing him in the front.  Yeesh.  Anyway. . .I don’t want to devote too much time to scrota; I feel that I’ve done enough already.  Moving on.)

. . .and, of course, the gas works itself.  This is one of the weirdest parks anywhere, and it’s in one of the most beautiful settings in all of Seattle.   It’s slightly sinister, utterly fascinating, and endlessly photogenic.

I seem to remember signs posted around the park that said things like, ‘Wash Your Hands After Touching Grass’ and ‘Do Not Lie On Grass; Please Use Blankets’ and things like that, but I couldn’t find any of those this time.   The city must have cleaned the place up a bit more since the last time I was there.  It’s been a few years.

Anyway,  the day was lovely, and I was glad to have had the extra time to spend in such a leisurely way.  I love Seattle, and every time I go, I toy with the idea of moving there.   Here’s the view from the park.  If you click on it, you’ll see that it’s full-size so that you can really get a sense of it.  It’d be amazing after dark too.

I don’t know that I’ll actually move there.  I have good things going for me here (not to mention extremely cheap rent), but I do love it, and I always come back and look at apartments on ListByCraig in various neighborhoods, trying to decide which area would suit me.

Le Sigh.  Je t’aime, EmeraldCity.

Friday afternoon, I drove up to Seattle (actually, it was Renton, which is the suburb most famous for being the resting place of Jimi Hendrix) to play a gig with my friend BT.   It was at a venue I was not familiar with, so when I drove into the parking lot, I was surprised to find that it was a small ‘British-style’ pub that was located next to the Department of Licensing in a strip mall.  Veeeery rock and roll.

I left my bass in the car and walked inside to check the place out and say hi to BT.  He was there, naturally, getting the PA system all set up.  The drummer was also there, and it was my first time meeting him, since he was a fill-in guy that night as well.  In fact, it was BT’s first time playing a gig with him, which can be very telling about someone’s personality.

Usually during set-up, especially between new people, there’s a lot of conversation and chit-chat about all kinds of things, but this time there was a noticeable lack of conversation, with BT over on one side of the stage, turned away and working on something, and Drummer sort of sitting behind his kit, adjusting his cymbals and whatnot.  It was weird.  I broke the ice by asking the drummer about his drum kit, which was a beautiful, custom-made kit that was much too large for such a small place.  He had about a million different cymbals, too, which were sprawled out everywhere and left precious little room for BT and me.   I moved my monitor and microphone as far forward as I could, in order that I wouldn’t have two cymbals a foot from my head.

Finally it was time to start, and it turned out that the drummer didn’t have a good ‘feel’ at all.  I’m a competent enough bass player and musician that I can lock in with anybody, and I could not lock in with this guy.  His timing wasn’t solid, and he put in lots of unnecessary flourishes throughout every song.  Yeesh.

When we took a break, Drummer went to talk with a couple of his friends, and BT and I went outside to enjoy the cool breeze.  He told me that the first thing out of Drummer’s mouth when he arrived was, “You set everything up wrong.  It needs to be further over.”  He told me that he’d talked with Drummer about how much gear to bring, and Drummer assured him that he’d keep it small.  Drummer also brought this weird headphone mixer and effect thingy and tried to plug it in, and got angry with BT for not knowing how to use it.  This all went down right before I showed up, which explains the air of tension onstage.

Rule One of being a for-hire musician; never bite the hand that feeds you.  You don’t walk in and insult the person who hired you, and you certainly don’t want to be snippy with them if they don’t know how to use your personal equipment.  If you do decide to do those things, however, you’d better be a good enough player that your musicianship alone will hopefully redeem your behavior, because if you’re not, you won’t be called again, and worse yet, you will earn yourself a bad reputation around town.

Drummers are particularly prone to this sort of bravado.  This guy also grew up in Los Angeles, and he had what I like to call the L.A. Self-Promotion Syndrome.  Everyone I’ve ever met from L.A. has a particular way of talking about him- or herself.  They always seem to be trying to put themselves ahead of others, or to drop a name in just the right way; you get the idea.  It’s very peculiar and specific.  So you can imagine what a bravado-prone drummer, who’s also from L.A., is like.   Ugh.

We slogged through about four hours’ worth of songs, and I think three songs sounded good in that whole span of time.  We just had to laugh, but after a while, BT’s laugh reminded me of a sheet pulled over broken glass (a very memorable image from a very un-memorable Ayn Rand book).  There were three or four times we actually had to stop a song because it sounded so bad.  We got through the night, though, and at two-thirty in the morning, we finally got everything packed up and out of there.  Drummer gave me his business card and went on his way.  BT actually had a gig scheduled with him for the next day.  I don’t envy BT.  I crashed in his extra bedroom, in my sleeping bag on the floor, for about four hours, and then woke up at nine to meet my brother and his family for breakfast.  That’s a story for the next entry.

The thing that made this particular gig bearable, though, was a guy in the audience.  He requested songs like “Cocaine” and walked in front of the stage drunkenly appreciating us when we played his requests.  Then he started requesting songs by Sublime, which none of us knew.  “I’m from Long Beach,” he said, about fourteen times.  “I usually listen to gangsta rap, but after I saw Sublime, it made me realize that you guys [meaning musicians in general] can really play.”

“Well thanks, man,” BT said diplomatically.  “We’d sure play some Sublime if we knew any.  I’ll try and learn some for you by next time.”

“I’m from Long Beach,” the guy repeated, with significance.

“That’s cool,” Drummer said.  “I’m from L.A. too.”

“Yeah, man, so you know.  Sublime, man.  That’s where they’re from too.  You guys sure you don’t know any Sublime?”

This conversation happened three different times.  And for the record, why is someone who ‘normally listens to gangsta rap’ hanging out in an English-style bar, anyway?  Hilarious.

I’m really glad none of our friends were there to see that show.  The bar owner guy said, “Hey, guys, sorry there aren’t more people here for you.  Usually Friday nights are pretty crazy around here.   I don’t know what’s going on.”

“That’s okay,” I said, laughing and casting a glance over toward BT.  “Tonight that’s probably a good thing, at least as far as we’re concerned.”

Every once in a while you have gigs that just don’t work out.  It’s totally normal.  I look back on that show as being fun, though, if only for reasons other than it was supposed to have.  It certainly wasn’t stressful or anything.  We just laughed our way through train wreck after train wreck, which has its own special form of appeal.