Lisa Savidge

Tour Journal: Days 1-3

DAY ONE:

Well, this one was a bit strange.  The rest of the gang showed up in LA with just enough time to settle in before the first show of the tour, which was nice.  We got down to the venue and – as promised – there was no signage whatsoever for us to know where it actually was.  Luckily, there was a Jack in the Box next door that was easy enough to spot, and double luckily, I actually found street parking right out front to make load-in a little bit less of a chore.  We were the first “full band” of the night, so we were able to get all our stuff on stage before the show began, which always makes things a lot less stressful.  No sound check, though, since someone (and I’m not naming names) had forgotten to pack an extremely vital piece of gear and a last-minute run to Guitar Center was in order.  Thank god for a 14-day no questions asked return policy.

The place was cool enough, and some press was on the scene – having heard that we were coming to town – but other than that, it wasn’t exactly our crowd.  Note to self:  If you don’t want to end up on a female singer-songwriter bill, don’t name your band as if it is one.

Still, not ones to be deterred, we dug in and played our asses off – winning over at least some of the crowd in the process.  So much so, in fact, that one guy ran up and interrupted us in the middle of the set because he absolutely had to buy a CD right then.  OK, I’ll take it.  In the end, it actually seemed like the whole affair might have been a good thing, since the industry people we did have on hand commented on how impressive it was that we were able to pull off a good show despite the circumstances.  I’d heard this before…  The true measure of a band is not the show where everything is just right  - it’s when everything’s gone wrong, the room is tough as hell, and they still go out and give it their all.  This business is too competitive for prima donnas.  Well, at least at the beginning…  You can always become one later .

DAY TWO:

After a pretty decent night’s sleep, we ended up going to this little cafe across the street from where we were staying for a nice little breakfast.  Then, we still had a little time to kill before the next show, so we headed down to the beach…  Ya know, it seems like you’ve got to go if you’re in Santa Monica.  There’s a cool little downtown area there, which we checked out for a bit, then went to take a peek at the ocean.  We had maybe 10 minutes before we then had to head back across town to get to the show at Tribal Cafe, but it was still nice to at least be down there for a minute.

I-10 was a parking lot (big surprise), but we made it to the venue only a few minutes after the advertised start time – which as it turns out, put us about 2 hours ahead of everyone else on the show.  The owner of the place said he’d been in touch with the guy who set the thing up, and told us that he said we should go ahead and set up.  OK, no problem…  We load the gear in…  We wait…  We set up…  We wait…  We sound check… We wait… We monkey around for a little bit… We wait…  Is this show even happening?  Should we, like, play now or what?

Finally, someone showed up and we figured that now was as good a time as any.  As before, we’ve only got one speed, so we just played the crap out of those songs – audience or not.  Well, some people did end up showing up, and we ended up hitting the other two recurring themes for LA – 1:  Some guy interrupted us in the middle of the set because he loved it and had to have our information right then (apparently he does something in the music biz and had just stopped in for a sandwich – wouldn’t that be a funny story if that actually came to something?), and 2:  Some people we’d won over mentioned that it was particularly impressive to hear “such a huge sound in such a small room.”  Again, I’ll take it.  Kind of a strange groundhog day thing going on.

Afterwords, we hung out to see All Destroyed Momentarily (LA locals) doing an acoustic set that was really, really good (and again, waaaay more appropriate to the setting), and Spel (currently LA, formerly France) also doing an acoustic thing.  That last one was really something to see…  This guy with this heavy French accent gets up there and plays an hour of reggae – doing a really convincing Jamaican accent the whole time – before wrapping it up with an acoustic guitar shred that would put Van Halen to shame.  Hahaha, I guess he saw how we ended our set (Appalachacha, as usual) and wanted to see if he could do the same .

Anyway, all of those guys were really cool, and we had a good time just hanging out and chowing down on some great Filipino grub.  Hey, not every show has to be a huge deal…  Sometimes a mellow little thing is nice.

Afterwords, we went our separate ways – me to the north, and the rest to the east.  I made it through the mountains north of LA as the dusk rolled in, and it was just amazing.  Like, one of those once-in-a-lifetime kind of scenes.  There was this mist hanging low, and everything was so green from the recent rainfall…  It looked like what people imagine Scotland being like.  For whatever reason, I absolutely needed to hear some Dire Straits right then (especially “Brothers in Arms,” an especially Scottish sounding song), and luckily I had some handy.  Just one of those perfect moments…

The green theme continued as I made my way up the 5.  I had to refuel along the way, and the scenery was so nice – even at night – that I didn’t even care that much that it cost me nearly $100 to do so.

It was so quiet out there, too.  We forget how much background noise surrounds us all of the time until we get away from it, and it’s just stunning when we do.  I remember a time in Baghdad that we drove way down to the south side of the base that we’d occupied to check out some old bunkers down there.  The place had been utterly bombed to smithereens; a total wasteland to the point that there wasn’t even a single insect stirring.  When we shut down the truck and stepped out…  The silence was almost deafening, if that makes any sense.  I must’ve walked around there for hours, carefully stepping over the rockets and mortars stuck in the hillside, just enjoying the serenity so perfectly juxtaposed with the traces of extreme violence in every direction.  There were bullet holes and shell casings everywhere, but for that moment it was the most wonderfully calming place on earth.  Strange.

I found a nice little spot to stop for the night, and turned in feeling very at peace with the world.

DAY THREE:

I got up, had a little breakfast, and made my way across the fields and into San Francisco.  A national guard unit that had deployed with us to Iraq the first time is there, and a few of the old crew remain.  They were doing drill today, so I swung into the armory to see who was around.  It was kind of hard walking in there…  This was actually the very spot where I’d “de-mobilized” the first time in the bad old days, and that wasn’t exactly the greatest of times.  Still, it was nice to see some familiar faces, including my old friend Sobe who’d spent the second half of our first deployment as my 6 o’clock (which is to say that I ran the machine gun on one vehicle, covering 180 degrees, and she ran the other, covering my back).  We hadn’t seen each other in years, but there’s a certain kind of camaraderie that doesn’t die after a thing like that.  In a lot of ways, both good and bad, it was like I never left – and I imagine it will always be so.

I found a little place to stay in the city – I could’ve grabbed a cot at the armory, but the whole place still kind of makes my skin crawl, so that didn’t seem like a good idea – and spent the rest of the afternoon just walking around and enjoying the beautiful weather and scenery.  I found a little park and spent some time there…  Just recharging after what was a pretty taxing weekend following a pretty taxing week.  It’s this balance you need to strike:  This is such a tough, competitive business, but you’re trading in inspiration.  Somehow you need to be the zen master and the workaholic at the same time, and I feel very lucky that this trip has worked out to balance those things so well thus far.

My old buddies from the unit will be meeting me soon somewhere in the neighborhood, and I’m sure we’ll spend the rest of the evening tonight telling all of our old war stories again and catching up from the last few years.  Kind of like an impromptu high school reunion – if you had spent your high school years shooting people, but still…

Anyway, I guess I’d better sign off to go hop to that.  Tomorrow, I’m off to Oregon…  Maybe I’ll make it to Portland, or maybe I’ll make it the following day.  The trip isn’t ’till Thursday, so no rush.  That’s fine, I’ve got a follow-up album to work on, which means I need some more things to write about .

I’ll post a few pics from the last couple of days here…

Posted in Lisa Savidge/Lisa Savidge, Press, Shows, Tour · April 4th, 2011 · Comments (1)

Tour Journal – Day Zero

It was a hard run out of Phoenix. Anyone who might have been fooled by the polishing and glossing over that’s gone on in the valley in the last decade or so needs to take a run down the I-17 bypass now and again… That’s what it really looks like under the stucco facades and boutique exteriors… Concrete, cracked and decaying under an environment actively hostile to any sort of thing a civilized society might like to accomplish. Did you know that the population of Phoenix doubled within a decade of the introduction of refrigerative cooling? I try to imagine the influx of desperate urban outcasts who couldn’t make it anywhere else, drawn in by cheap land prices and the new high-tech convenience of being able seal themselves in a bubble and pretend the world outside doesn’t exist. Some kind of cross between Ellis Island, Tombstone, and Blade Runner.

The city does take on the look of burning in the rearview mirror – the glare of the afternoon sun off of the mirrored skyscrapers fading up into the omnipresent haze that hangs low above. I’m told it’s something to do with an “inversion layer,” but I like to imagine some kind of angry deity – perhaps of Native American origin, demanding retribution for the crimes against its peoples – laying the cloud there as a constant reminder to the perpetrators and a warning to the others. Reading the old mythology, it seems that this is how the world looked to most people for thousands of years… Maybe they were on to something.

In any case, if there’s going to be a burning city anywhere the rearview mirror seems as good a place as any, so I suppose there isn’t a lot to complain about.

I hit a rest stop bathroom for a dose and a nervous cigarette. The edge fades away as I become transfixed on a man who’s going from one trash can to the next, collecting recyclables and stuffing them into a plastic Wal-Mart bag. The whole affair becomes somewhat less pitiful when I see him get into a tractor-trailor rig and pull off… I guess the idea of a guy who will not likely be here again – or at least will only be in passing – making a few extra bucks on the side is so much less depressing than a guy living in whatever shithole desert town swooping into the local rest stop for the crumbs of families pulling through in minivans on their way to Disney Land. Like an extremely polite vulture that wouldn’t dare to actually bother a corpse, but will instead go only for the things that even the maggots wouldn’t touch.

What follows is a blur of empty nothingness – alternating between tracking the ascending numbers on the odometer and the descending numbers on the road signs reading “Los Angeles” to fight the boredom and try to seek some feeling of accomplishment. I never liked the drive to LA that way… It’s so featureless. When you take the 8 out to San Diego, there’s this climb up the mountains, the winding trails, and then the slow descent as the city unfolds before you – it really feels substantive. Meanwhile, the only way you really know you’ve entered LA metro is when you start seeing shoddy boutiques on the side of the road with ostentatious displays in their windows of white porcelain fountains and statues of cherubs. Who works at these stores and, better yet, who shops there? Who wakes up one day and says “You know what this yard needs? A miniature reconstruction of the acropolis! Hold all my calls, I’m headed out to Ontario with the Tahoe!”? I’ve always wondered about that.

One thing I do remember was that I was catching up on podcasts – This American Life for this particular leg – and an episode came on called “Will They Know Me Back Home?” It was all about guys coming back from the Iraq war and how they were having trouble fitting in with polite society. This is something I can relate to – hell, I wrote a whole album about it. I think I tried to pitch that particular story at some point, but never heard a reply… I guess they had filled up their quota and were moving on to other things. That’d be a nice luxury to have – being able to just move on like it never happened. Anyway, the whole thing had me feeling pretty despondent, leaving me writing the letter I intended to send titled “Will They Even Care Back Home?” in my head, but I already knew the answer. I skipped the rest of the track.

Next thing you know, the exit I had intended to take was closed, and I found myself careening through downtown LA at the going rate (roughly the speed limit plus 20) and trying to make Google Maps cooperate on my iPhone. Apparently the terms of service had changed, and I couldn’t look at the map until I first opened the web browser to see the new terms…

I guess this is the point where I should mention the vehicle that I’m in. I’m driving a little Kia SUV that doesn’t really have the space for the amount of gear it takes to put a 5-piece rock band on the road. I’d taken out all of the seats (other than the driver’s seat) the day before, and shoehorned in absolutely everything we could actually bring. We had to cut a song or two from any potential set lists because we couldn’t carry the specialty equipment to play them, and even then everything is piled straight to the roof from the front passenger seat all of the way to the rear hatch and lashed together with a pile of bungie cords. It seems to work, and I’m sure I’m buying a lot less $3.50 gas than I would’ve been in a “proper” van. BUT the rattling of the stuff, the lack of visibility, and the knowledge that just about any wreck could rapidly become fatal with a literal ton of hard equipment just behind my head wasn’t really helping me focus. Never mind the neon signs and billboards in every direction – actually scientifically formulated to make it as difficult to focus as possible.

Well, things worked out and I made it to the hotel with relative little difficulty from that point. I even found two huge vehicles parked really closely together that I could slide the little Kia between to help ward off would-be thieves (I’ve got a bad history with that sort of thing). The amenities are actually quite nice, the promoter for the show tonight has been in good contact (we actually get to sound check before the doors open, like a real band!), and we’ve got at least some press coming to this one… That last part seems pretty key to me. After all, there’s no telling how the audience will be (we’re all over the radio in a lot of places, this isn’t one of them), but a good review can reach a lot more eyes than can fit in any one building – even an arena.

Two other observations I feel like mentioning:
1 – Coastal California has always had this strange, dream-like quality to me. It hit me again as I emerged, blinking, from my makeshift cave the way it has every single time I’ve stepped out into a California day; even when I’ve lived there for years. The air feels different, almost lighter, and the colors are so much sharper and brighter than I’m used to. Even the cracked sidewalk across the street with the weeds breaking through and making it impassable has the quality of an artistic masterpiece. I don’t see it as coincidence that so much art has sprung from this place.

2 – I get the bike thing now. By which I mean, I had always pondered what was with the bike culture in Phoenix and other cities, and why it has been so inexorably tied to the art scene. Last night I had noted a building next to the hotel where the windows were covered with brightly painted sheets of plywood. It struck me as some kind of art collective, rehearsal space, underground gallery, or other artistic enterprise. This morning, I noticed some guys loading their surfboards out of the same building, and it all made sense. Surfing (as is most commonly practiced) is a non-team, non-competative sport, one you can do any time with as many or as few people as you like at any number of places. It requires some physical development, but you can do it in your own time and your own way without worrying about “making the cut” like in other sports (say, football) unless, of course, you take it very seriously and choose to pursue serious competition. In any case, for any person seeking self-actualization by way of being a “renaissance man” (or woman) – participating in physical, mental, and creative endeavors in equal measure, surfing is the perfect sport. Failing access to a beach, there are other options, and if the area you find yourself in consists mostly of buildings and roads, the terrain seems to dictate that the best option would be skating or cycling. It’s no secret that both have been tied to underground music and art culture for a while in their own ways, and that’d be my theory as to why.

For now, I suppose I’d better go focus on getting my game face on. By the next time you hear from me, both LA shows might be over since the second one is in the daytime so I may not get the computer set back up in between. I guess we’ll see how it goes!

P.S. New review up at Online Rock (they’ll also be at the show tonight) which you can read here: http://www.onlinerock.com/CDreview/lisa-savidge.shtml

Posted in Lisa Savidge/Lisa Savidge, Press, Tour · April 1st, 2011 · Comments (0)

The post-release era…

Well, well – A lot of things going on since the release.

First of all, there’s been something of a barrage of press stories – so much so that I can hardly keep up. Luckily, a couple of the guys have set up Google alerts, because contrary to popular belief – or more accurately – contrary to how I believed it would work, 99% of the time when someone writes something about you, they don’t actually let you know that they’ve done so. Does that justify my near-obsessive self-googling? I’d like to think so.

Anyway, you can keep up on the latest and greatest of that sort of stuff over at the Black Cactus page, which I do a much better job of keeping updated… You know, on the off-chance that some industry guy who is crying hot, salty tears of frustration because he can’t burn his piles of money as fast as the trucks are dumping them on his lawn is looking for a band that’s already doing a lot on their own. That’s certainly what they say they want, but something tells me that they’re passing the buck in order to, well, avoid having to pass any bucks.

Sorry for the digression there… Where was I? Oh yeah, the news.

So in other news, we’ve got quite a few radio stations who decided to pick up the record lately, which is pretty cool. New media and all of that stuff is pretty cool, but it still seems largely image-driven to me. The radio is still where it’s at as far as the music’s concerned, because people just hear the song and it’s either something they want to hear more of or it isn’t. We’ve got play in most states and Canadian provinces, so I guess it’s in the peoples’ hands now.

That, and we’ve got the other proving ground on the way – our upcoming tour. Most of the schedule is in the post below this one (we’re still trying to figure out the RSS situation), except that we’ve added a show in Olympia, WA. Hopefully, we’ll get the schedule thing working soon, but in the mean time, (for those in the Phoenix area) why not check out the show on Thursday at the Goathead. That one oughta be fun. Also, you can definitely get more frequent updates on all of this stuff via the Facebook and Twitter feeds linked above.

Posted in Lisa Savidge/Lisa Savidge, Press, Shows · March 13th, 2011 · Comments (0)