Lisa Savidge

Tour Journal: Day 7

Woke up this morning to the sound of the person in the room above me apparently training for a marathon…  I say this because they literally did not stop clomping around for a good 90 minutes…  Yeah, I was watching the clock.  I tried taking an extra Valium to see if I couldn’t catch a few more hours of sleep since the show tonight will be a late one, but it wasn’t to be.  I finally decided to grab a shower, but the power suddenly went out.  I could clearly hear someone else talking to the management about it from outside, so I figured it would sort itself out in due course, which it did…  At which point, there was no hot water.  Great.

Well, I just kicked around a bit – catching the latest Daily Show on streaming to give the water heaters to do their thing – all the while floating in the benzo haze that comes with dosing twice in a 12 hour period – and eventually was able to clean up and get the day started.

Oh, that’s the other thing…  In all of the prep for the tour, I’d completely forgotten about my own supplies and the fact that my next appointment to get refills of the myriad pills that make my day-to-day possible fell smack in the middle of the tour.  Luckily, Angel was able to get my prescriptions and fed-ex them up here, so today is actually the first day of the tour that I’m able to drop the severe rationing – seeing how much pain and discomfort I can take between doses so I won’t run out – and actually hit some kind of equilibrium.  It’s a rather comforting thought.

I decided to walk across the bridge into the better part of town to see about grabbing some breakfast…  I hadn’t been in the car for a solid 12 hours and that suited me just fine.  As I walked, I got to thinking…  Portland is a fine little town; definitely a cool place, but something always rubbed me kind of the wrong way here.  It can’t really be the weather, since I’ve never had any qualms in Seattle, but I just couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

As the cyclists blew by me in their utterly elaborate get-ups and I found my way to some little cafe for some kind of extremely elaborate dish (I couldn’t even tell you what was in it or how it was made – just some eggs and toast or whatever was not to be found on the menu) it sort of dawned on me.  LA’s always been kind of weird to me on account of people seeming to be really intense about all of the wrong things (a condition that seems to have spread along the 10 to Phoenix, as well) whereas here, people seem to be intense about just about everything.  On the surface, it’s an extremely casual town, but as you really get into it nobody does anything halfway here.

Take the cyclists.  They don’t just get a bike…  They get the most elaborate bike for their given purpose, the wardrobe to match, the particular kind of bag, etc.  Seems like a lot of that goes on around here (that actually seems to be the main running joke on the very funny Portlandia).  It’s not a bad thing at all…  I admire people’s dedication to doing everything with gusto, and that’s certainly been a running theme to how I’ve approached music (both the songs themselves, and what we do with them), but I have trouble relaxing when everyone around is extremely involved in something or other all of the time.  Overall, I’d say that’s more my problem than Portland’s, but it means I don’t exactly fit in here all the same.

As I made my way back over the bridge, I noticed a little sign for the suicide help line…  Not, in and of itself, and uncommon sight on bridges pretty much anywhere I’ve been, but this one struck me as a little odd.  There was a big picture of a flower on the top, and the text was quite small.  I tried to imagine, being in a suicidal state of mind, how somebody might notice what the sign is about in order for them to consider making the call.  I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t some academic somewhere who came up with the design, having found that the dominating picture of the flower somehow increases the odds of someone calling or something like that.  Like, this little piece of metal could very well be the culmination of somebody’s doctoral thesis.  Kind of an odd field of study, but when you’re looking to do something original with your research I guess you take what you can get.

This also had me peering over the bridge as I crossed, trying to figure out where one would jump if that’s what they were looking to do.  The first part was a drop straight onto concrete, but not terribly high to where it would be a sure thing (and this seems like something you would want to be sure about).  Any further up, and that puts you over the water, which I imagine would break your fall some.  I guess you’d need to go head-first on the concrete part, but that strikes me as being perhaps a bit on the gruesome side.

Anyway, I also caught a bit of vertigo doing this, which terrified me.  I’ve never been good with heights, though a passer-by probably wouldn’t notice.  That’s the upside to being terrified all of the time…  That an unseen bomb is suddenly going to go off, that every stranger is a potential assailant, that each time the phone rings it bears the worst of news, or that even the mailbox is looking to indirectly kill me with whatever horrors lay within those envelopes…  You learn to stop showing weakness (lest those assassins in every corner see an opportunity to strike).  I don’t know what this has to do with anything, but it is what it is.

Well, the rest should be arriving soon, so I need to start working on my state of mind so I can perform tonight.  The show isn’t ’till late, so maybe (if anyone has the urge) I’ll have some company to walk downtown a bit and settle my nerves.  I think about the hollywood version of what playing is supposed to be like…  Thinking of 8-mile and Mr. Mathers vomiting from the pressure and freezing up.  It isn’t like that at all…  It’s just something you do.  I imagine that if I wasn’t already so anxious all of the time, it wouldn’t be an issue at all.  Or maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe that’s why all of those rock stars shoot all of that smack and guzzle all of that hard booze…  To get the courage to get on stage.  I’ve never played an arena, so who knows?  I guess I assume that that would actually be easier – you don’t have to interact with the audience before or after the show at all, the promoter isn’t breathing down your neck about how many people are going to show up, professionals are handling all of the technical stuff, all of that.  It’ll be interesting to see if it ever happens.

All right, off to hopefully find some serenity and hopefully play the best show yet.  Time will tell.

Posted in Lisa Savidge/Lisa Savidge, National Shows, Tour · April 7th, 2011 · Comments (0)

Tour Journal: Days 5&6

I got up in Eugene and decided to head downtown (right down the road, it is a small town after all) to find something to eat.  The downtown area really is quite nice there, and I shall have to remember to try and get a show going there sometime…  Maybe if we end up doing SF over the summer, we can tack on a day to head up there.  Oddly, though, the downtown area seemed to be completely devoid of life, which struck me as odd for 10am on a Tuesday.  Isn’t this a college town, and isn’t school in session?  You’d think a whole contingent of the university crowd that had mostly scheduled their classes for the afternoon areas would be milling around.  Oh well, I just headed out of town and set my sights on something along the highway to Portland – though, not before grabbing a copy of the free weekly up there so I could take a look later to get a sense for where we should be playing (and with whom) should we make it up that way at some point.

By the time I did decide to stop, the breakfast hours had gone by, so I grabbed lunch somewhere in Springfield (I think) instead, before heading straight into Portland.  The in-laws live up there (or here, I should say) these days, so I just went straight to their place to see what was up.  We caught up a bit, hit a diner, and I got some laundry done (quite the luxury, indeed).  That’s something strange about touring if I do say so…  When you’re on the outside of it all (or when you’re just starting out) the concept of “playing rockstar” seems to be built around limousines and 5-star hotels, but in reality just getting more than one room at the Motel 6 or having clean clothes to wear or eating anything above fast food starts to feel pretty ostentatious.

Not much else to report, other than heading down to the venue to scope it out and see whoever happened to be on in the evening.  The band was good, though I didn’t catch their name, and the venue seemed really cool.  Again, with the changing expectations, I found that I was elated with the whole scene – not because the place was huge or well-appointed, not because there seemed to be a huge crowd of potential fans milling around…  No, simply because the music was good and loud & had a rock ‘n roll vibe meaning that – for the first time since our CD release show – we’ll actually be able to run our amps at the level they’re supposed to be at.  If nothing else, at least it’ll sound right and we’ll have a lot more fun…  Making a racket is ALWAYS more fun.

The road finally caught up with me, though, so I headed back to the in-laws’ place to grab some sleep on the hardest futon in the universe.  We’ve got a bit of an in-joke of referring to the thing as “the Chevy” on account of it being very much like a rock.  Again, just having a quiet place to lay down and a clean bathroom felt like the upmost luxury, so all in all, a good time.

DAY SIX:

A leisurely morning, including – miracle of miracles – a breakfast I didn’t have to go somewhere to get, set the tone for a pretty nice day.  It’s cold here, much colder than the snow-peaked mountains for whatever reason, and raining, but it’s good to get out of the sun and heat for a while, so I’ll take all I can get.  I spent most of the day just catching up on all of the e-mails and what-have-you that’ve been piling up (gotta make sure people remember we’ve got a show coming up, and gotta keep the Black Cactus wheels turning), plus sorting out accommodations for the upcoming days.

Grabbed a spot at a motel just on the “wrong side of the tracks” (quite literally) from downtown Portland, and checked in down there so I could be ready and waiting for the band’s arrival.  I had all kinds of big plans for heading downtown (I’m directly across the bridge from the Pearl district) but I was still just completely worn out…  I ended up doing what I used to do when I’d be stuck in some hotel on assignment with the intelligence guys, and just laid back to watch some Discovery Channel and run the heater (probably the first time I’ve actively watched TV in 6 months at least).  I’ve actually got a smoking room (those seem to be going the way of the dinosaur), so the added luxury of being able to sit in comfort while having a cigarette completely overshadowed the fact that this is – by far – the dingiest place I’ve stayed.  Half of the light switches don’t do anything, the bathroom door appears to have been kicked in at some point, there are places all over the walls where it appears that holes have been patched, the sounds of the highway stream constantly through the paper-thin windows (at least I’ll hear if someone breaks into my car to steal the gear – which seems quite possible in this mostly industrial neighborhood), and the ceiling creaks with every footstep in the room above.  Oh well, it still beats sleeping in the car.

Posted in Lisa Savidge/Lisa Savidge, Tour · April 7th, 2011 · Comments (0)

Tour Journal: Days 3.5&4

Welly welly well, it’s been some interesting times.

After my post last night, as foretold, I joined up with my old army buds (specifically, Vincent & Sobe) for some dinner and drinks.  We wandered around for quite a while looking for a place that both looked good and was open (I’d say it was around 9pm on a Sunday night).  This is a common issue for me since, on my usual schedule, I’m often having breakfast at 11-noon, and I’m often out late either working or supporting some event or another, meaning that A – I usually catch dinner close to midnight, and B – I’m usually looking to eat out somewhere.  I despise the very concept of drive-throughs…  The food tantalizing you with its smell (or alternatively, repulsing you, because you need to eat SOMETHING, but you aren’t super-enthusiastic about your choice and would like it to be over as quickly as possible) as you drive… Plus, there’s the principal of it, which is that the price of that fancy restaurant, with the chairs and tables and all, is built into the price of the food, so I’m paying for a premium service that I do not get to use.  I swear, put me at a coffee table with a bunch of other guys and ask me about drive-throughs…  No more than six hours later most of us will be dead following a heist gone wrong.

You know, it literally just occurred to me that Reservoir Dogs is nothing more than a Shaggy Dog Story.  How about that.

Back to the point, being that I didn’t expect this sort of trouble in a town where everyone tells you that “you simply must try the food while you’re there!”  We did, in fact, find one of those white collar bar/bistro places (with the single-sided, single-paged menu, where every dish is a variation of steak or the sort of seafood to be found in the local area, and they don’t use ‘cents’ in their prices…  Like “Caesar Salad……27″).  I’d also venture that we were a little under-dressed for the occasion – I in my touring musician wear (ripped jeans, plain black t-shirt, thrift store hoodie), they in their “still obviously in a uniformed service while being not in uniform” garb.  There’s a certain look you learn to spot a mile away in any base town – ESPECIALLY with the males.

I could see it in the eyes of the matre-d’ that he intended to turn us away, but that simply wasn’t happening.  You see, the last time the three of us had stood in the same room it meant that someone was about to die (or wish, at some point, that they had), and the energy just kind of picked up where it left off.  Within an instant  (and with no words spoken to this effect) we were not a couple of guys and a gal out on the town after work – we were a fire-team cruising the mean streets of Frisco, not in charge of any law – be it street or judicial or societal – but not subject to any law all the same.  Not like gangsters or something like that – we weren’t intimidating anyone (not much, anyway), but more approaching with the sort of swagger that says “I am not to be bothered, and I’ll be seated wherever I wish.”  They complied with due haste.

This, perhaps was the hardest thing to let go of, and something we would end up lamenting later on.  This is how Mick Jagger walks into the room.  This is how Tom Cruise does it.  For a brief, shining moment in our lives, we were rock stars – or at the very least, had the key element of being rock stars…  The one where you walk around the metal detectors and no one dares question you – or better yet, walk right through them, hear all of the alarm bells go off, and just keep walking without so much as a glance.  This seems to be the thing people really dream of.  The money and all of that is nice, but it’s the permanent inoculation to all of life’s little indignities that definitely would not come with a winning lottery ticket.  It seems unreasonably cruel to let someone taste that at such a young age, and then take it away just as quickly.  Suddenly all of those little indignities aren’t so little anymore.  After all, nothing about you has changed, and what you’ve done is permanent.  It’s only limited by the willingness of others to recognize it.  Am I wrong to blame them?  I don’t feel like I should be.

After dinner we head to a shady looking bar near my hotel called “Wouldn’t You Believe?”  Yeah…  A real class act.  Over a round we really got into it – the slow-motion train wreck of my downfall, the unwitting roles we had all played in the things I had discovered later…  How do you tell a friend that they unknowingly but directly participated in the perpetuation of a genocide when they thought they were doing the right thing?  It was a bitter enough pill for me to swallow, and I wasn’t sure how to pass that along.  I floated the theory that maybe we’d been avoiding each other on purpose for all of these years for just that reason…  We knew judgement day was waiting for us and we thought we could beat the system by never being in the same room together again.  Still, you can only run for so long.

To lighten the mood, we spent the rest of the evening wandering around the blocks and recounting old war stories in the shorthand we’d developed long ago (but had forgotten up until that very moment).  ”Remember the time we were doing that sneak and peek up by team clownshoe and the skipper was freaking out that the bird was gonna have his ass cuz I’d waxed so many more people than his precious gator-radors – but those guys weren’t putting in the hours!  If you want the shit, you gotta put in the hours!”  ”Yeah, no shit, the hours is what it’s all about.”  We must’ve sounded crazy.

On the other hand, maybe we were crazy.  Somehow, pulled back into that context, all of the old coping mechanisms kicked in.  ”Remember the time you cut that guy in half at the hospital in Khadimiyah?”  This is one of those things that had always troubled me.  I never got confirmation the guy was up to no good…  It’d be way too much of a downer for me to tell you how this particular guy actually got himself killed by my hand, suffice to say that I’ve lived this scenario a thousand times in nightmares.  But now, how do I react?  I practically fall off of the curb, laughing my ass off.  People always say “oh, that’ll be funny later,” but there’s a certain kind of horror that’s funny only when you’re there.  And there we were – one foot on Geary in San Fransisco, and the other on Haifa Street.

The other running theme at the end…  Even amongst 99% of other troops who were in Iraq, you can’t even tell the truth because they wouldn’t believe you.  But we were rock stars once, and now – each of us in our own ways – has spent the last half of a decade pursuing some pale substitute of the real thing…  Always with the faint hope somewhere in the back of your mind that the phone might ring one day saying that they need someone like you to do the things you do in some corner of the world.  How can we just accept that our early 20s were such a vast summit above anything else we’ll ever do?  Why bother living if there weren’t at least hope that the next rush might actually materialize at some point.

In a lot of ways, that’s why I do what I do now.  When you get up under those lights…  Or when you’re in the studio and the tape is rolling… Or when you’re sitting with the notebook and the guitar…  It’s as close as I’ve ever gotten without having to pay the terrible cost (though the cost still is high – but acceptable).

The gang had to work early the next morning so they took off around 11:00.  I headed back to the room…  The past all dug up and the dirt all over me, but no more jovial framework to put it in.  I looked at the clock and realized April 4th was just an hour away.  The date of the first time I killed another human being…  What are the odds that on this night of all nights, I’d find myself so deeply entrenched in all of that old crap?  I went and got a jack and coke, my first in well over a year, washed down my pills, and settled into a restless night.

DAY 4:

I woke up and burned out of town ASAP.  San Francisco is not the place to be when you’re driving a vehicle with no visibility and no sense of how the streets work there (hint:  They don’t).  I figured I’d make it as far as Medford, OR, making for an easy drive on day 5 to get to Portland, and a bit of time to get on point for the back-to-back-to-back shows in the Pacific NW.  I stopped in Redding for a bite and some fuel, and decided I needed something new to listen to if this was going to be a full day of driving.  Turns out Redding has a Barnes & Noble, so I selected a BBC audio production of Brave New World and was on my way.

The drive was fantastic.  As a matter of fact, while I’ve come to hate driving in my daily life – it just puts me on edge a little bit too much…  Almost every sudden and horrible thing that’s ever happened to me happened on a highway, and I don’t think my brain’s ever lost that connection.  Wait, where was I?  Oh yeah, as a matter of fact, I’d say the driving has in many ways proven to be the best part of this whole excursion.  The solitude, the freedom, and the ever-changing scenery along the route granting a sort of feeling that I’m actually accomplishing something while also actually having some time to simply sit and think without feeling guilty that surely there’s something productive I could be doing right now.

It was hot enough in Redding that I found myself running the AC, but very shortly thereafter I was flanked by snow on all sides.  I stopped for a moment at a gas station in Weed, California (I must be clairvoyant – I had predicted that the gas station would be full of overpriced crap that traveling college students and burnouts would buy by the bushel  because they said “weed” on them, and lo it was so) just to take it all in.  Mt. Shasta had a ring of fog obscuring the top and blending the white snow of the mountain into the white sky – almost as if the world had turned upside down…  Really something to see.

All the while, the production on Brave New World was unfolding quite nicely, although there seems to be a bit of a problem.  In the event that you haven’t read it, a lot of the central conflict rotates around an outsider to the civilization being completely unable to relate to the world that’s been created, while the inhabitants of that world simply cannot comprehend living any other way.  Everything is just so ingrained that it is just assumed – to the point where no one can adequately describe why things are the way they are, and furthermore, can’t fathom why they should even need to explain it.  They’re all just talking past each other.

Anyway, it seems that Mr. Huxley had made the same assumptions about the reader having a certain perspective – which may well have been reasonable in 1931 – but don’t relate at all to me 80 years later.  Really, most of the time I find myself siding with the “wrong” people, and if it hadn’t been set up so deliberately to make the leaders of the “civilized world” the bad guys, I’d be with them 100%.  A bit odd, considering that they had pulled out the old trope (or perhaps it was new at the time) of censoring all “high art” because it could lead to descent by making people think too deeply about things, while I myself am driving across the countryside in an effort to pursue the very same, but I’ve seen the “instability” (as they like to keep referring to it in the book) that they’re combatting, and I can’t help but wonder if it isn’t a small price to pay.  Certainly, I wouldn’t feel so inclined to say the things I’m saying with the music if the circumstances around it weren’t so patently awful at times.

Anyway, after having caught a dose in Weed (the irony – or actually the opposite of irony, but there seems to be a lexical gap as to what that should be called – wasn’t lost on me) and I was feeling pretty good…  Almost as though I might make it all the way to Portland.  Unfortunately, the weather turned against me in the mountains, so I compromised by blowing right through Medford and stopping in Eugene instead.  I believe my IQ must’ve jumped a few points because I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.  A nice place, and probably a bit extravagant for my purposes, but it was nice to be in a kind of classy setting after what feels like a never-ending procession of motels and gas stations.

Posted in Lisa Savidge/Lisa Savidge, Tour · April 7th, 2011 · Comments (0)

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 (Addendum)

Just thought I’d throw in some pics of the vehicle. First of all, here’s the Honda Civic parked next to me, with my car in the background (I know it’s hard to tell with the perspective, but they’re almost identically sized in terms of the floor pan).

After that, we’ve got a couple of shots of how the gear is packed – one from the back hatch, and one through the front passenger window.  Crazy, right?

Posted in Lisa Savidge/Lisa Savidge, Tour · April 2nd, 2011 · Comments (0)

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)

Getting Ready to Tour!

Well well,
I’ll be taking off on the day after tomorrow to get our big tour kicked off. Fun times!

Gas prices being what they are, and us being stuck using two vehicles anyway, the cargo van is out. So, if you’re looking for me tomorrow, you’ll find me in the garage with a wrench pulling all of the seats (but one, of course) out of my car so we can fit the gear in. Yeah, we know how to party.

I’ve decided that I’m going to be really really good and actually keep a tour blog going on this here page from the road. I’ve got my fresh new laptop all set up (much obliged to whoever stole the last one and got me the insurance money for an upgrade), and I plan to make use of it. So stay tuned! Good stuff is sure to be ahead!

Posted in Lisa Savidge/Lisa Savidge, Tour · March 30th, 2011 · Comments (0)