Mid-October 2025 tour notes
This round, as usual, I’m jotting down some memories and reflections from a recent run of show dates, with hardly anything about the shows themselves, because that’s sort of boring. But I decided to write it as segregated notes on a few discrete topics rather than as a continuous essay. Somehow the trip suggested that to me.
HOUSE SOUND
Every show night is another blind date when you don’t have a front-of-house engineer on board. The more players you’re hauling around, the more you need your own dedicated person, and the less you can afford one, speaking for my economic bracket. Toting up the variables in advance (how much trouble am I liable to run into, in these towns with this group?) is an art not a science. The least-risk scenario, as my friend Liam Davis once said, is when you’ve got a plugged-in ensemble that’s medium-loud. House sound guys relax when things are shaping up as medium-loud. They’re used to working with cabinets with lines out the back or dynamic mics in front, and conventional 4- or 5-piece drumkits, and guitars with transducers plugged into direct boxes. That’s stuff they can set up and EQ in their sleep. Also, to their credit, they usually have an informed sense of dynamics based on the properties of the given room. But present any unfamiliar instrumentation or amplification procedure, or thrust upon them an over or under the median in the decibelage department, and see how the risks mount. The phenomena include shrill blasts of feedback from a monitor speaker close to your head, and an inept front-of-house mix that makes you sound substantially worse than you are. Just as frustrating is the time wastage, because check and dinner go together in tandem, on paper. At times bad attitudes arise on either end, polluting everyone's precious air.
A thing I’ve learned, or gotten in the habit of, over the last 20 years, is being kind to the sound person. Overt, bright yellow, an-inch-from-obnoxious, Fred Willard-level congeniality. “I am here to collaborate with you, buddy” is as good as plastered on my forehead. I don’t know that this has any effect on the sound. But it makes the night go a little easier for me, when the engineer is truculent, unobservant, or unskilled. Some of the old Ray Charles “Ain’t gonna worry my mind” goes…not a real long way, but some ways. It doesn’t lift the disappointment of having travelled hundreds of miles to find yourself in a totally discretionary fix, where you sound absurd to yourself and likely to the paying customer too. (Who really knows, you’re not out in the room to hear it.) But the Ray spirit probably adds 15 minutes per soundcheck to my lifespan. If you’d seen me in Newcastle a little over 20 years ago you would not have seen a relaxed and collaborative performer at soundcheck. You’d have seen a country singer spiraling toward an early demise. “I’m done,” I told the soundman through gritted teeth, after he had spent nearly an hour trying to get my mics EQ’d for a solo show. “I’ll be back in 40 minutes. Ring out these monitors meanwhile, and good luck.”
Whether you’re mean or nice, you’re finally reliant on these strangers to figure it out and make the show go forward. Some guys, who I won’t name but you’d know them because they’re more popular than me, will walk off mid-show. Or pick up a wedge and throw it across the room. (Okay, I’ll name one: “Here’s what I think of your monitors,” cried Joe Ely as he victoriously hurled the offending thing.) Or leave the venue shortly after showing up, because the tech people are clearly unprepared (or worse) and contractual stipulations clearly ignored, leaving fans to get their tickets refunded. One time I was soundchecking at a small-town bar, and it was taking forever, partly because the guy was confused, but partly because he was wasting time verbally deflecting the problems back onto me and my players. When he told Nora O’Connor to raise her mic stand a little, and also instructed her on how to raise a mic stand, she had had enough. “That’s the end of soundcheck,” she announced tartly, and walked out. You gotta love that Nora.
But for that kind of authoritative action I usually lack the nerve. With me, things just muddle along, as I hold my tongue and try not to make things worse than they are. Sometimes, “worse” is a hard place to imagine. I should have walked out and canceled the date when a sound guy in Florida emotionally and intentionally dropped my expensive condenser mic on the floor to show that he wasn’t going to be using it. I should have offered a hearty “go fuck yourself” to the guy in North Carolina who didn’t want us to use our own instruments, back in the Nineties. No kidding — he had cheap versions of the instruments we played set up around the stage, and explained that they were all dialed in and it would be a lot of trouble for him to move them. Good Lord. In case I’m not presenting my side sympathetically enough, suffice it to say that it's very disheartening to work on your craft, invest in good gear, and drive long distances, just to bump into harebrained obstacles like that. The takeaway: Don’t work in shitty rooms. Have a great career and make a lot of dough. People, from the promoter on down, don’t behave like that when there’s more at stake. Also, though, aside from money, there’s a basic incentive misalignment when your engineer is paid not by you but the promoter. Cough up money for your own engineer when you can. Advice for about two readers over.
On my mid-October quartet outing, there were twelve dates, eleven house sound persons. Two were a bit of trouble, but not really an unreasonable amount. Suboptimal stage sound, likely inoffensive house sound. Another nine seemed perfectly fine at the job. Good odds there, for the savings. Thanks, house sound people! You toil in anonymity for low wages, and I sincerely hope you either rise quickly through the ranks and go on the road with an act you adore, or else get a job that is better on both your wallet and your ears. I’m talking to you, Jake of Cleveland and Bucky of Newport; such under-acknowledged skill, such good-natured men. On our twelfth and final date, in Chicago, it was nirvana, as I had my longtime traveling gal Juliana at the helm. She knows a lot about physics, has a strong work ethic, knows how I like to sound, and is relentlessly upbeat. It doesn’t get better and it can’t.
It’s good to plunge into some moderate risk and emerge mostly unscathed.
ILLNESS, DEATH
Go out alone for a couple weeks and there’s some small chance that the storms of life, those so expertly crooned about by Mr. Randy Travis, will intrude. Go out with three other people and the chances triple. With sickness and debility and general despair, it’s worse with older people. While we old men were on the road those 14 days, all of us but one got sick, maybe passing around the same thing, and one of us had a parent die. He (I’ll protect his privacy) left the run for a couple days.
Gerald, our Salvadoran-Irish drummer, was diagnosed with an upper respiratory infection shortly before we left. That scotched our rehearsal and left him out of the first day’s long drive, lucky for him. Some people, outside the squalid world of professional music, find it a little mind-blowing that you can go out on a run, playing 90 minutes of music including some tricked-out arrangement gewgaws, having had a single rehearsal, or even none. Some also find it weird that you can head out confidently on a run, as I’m doing in November, with players you haven’t met.
There’s no magic. The world of good players, selected down to this or that scene or style, is pretty small. People tend to know who plays well and travels easy because they play in lots of groupings and situations, and word travels. My October crew were three people, Robbie Gjersoe and Casey McDonough and Gerald Dowd, who I’ve known for decades, so no mystery there. Going into a show under-rehearsed does make me skittish. But our first show, in Buffalo, went fine, and the entire run was modeled on Paul Reubens’s nationwide 1980s run that finished in Los Angeles. The idea, as the documentary explained it, was to audition the character in an exciting live context before three or four execs who’d be at the L.A. show and might green-light Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. The rest of the run was rehearsal.
Thinking of it that way, along with the anti-improv precept instilled in me by Steve Martin, I kept from going mad, doing the same set, same sequence, same patter more or less, night after night. When we were unexpectedly a trio for two shows, things did shift a little, but mainly I focused on the crowning show, with a hometown sold-out crowd. No execs, no movie deal. Just imaginary rewards, and a good payday too.
Gerald had fallen ill on Sunday morning, and he was back in tip-top form by Wednesday, with an impressive amount of whiskey consumption between. Shortly after that, Gjersoe fell. He was in urgent care in Columbus on the following Sunday morning, and put on some strange only-in-Columbus drug cocktail. The next day, I started feeling off. It was like a cold, nothing debilitating, and it didn’t stop my swimming or driving, but my voice was subpar most of the week. I monitored it closely and warmed it up with care pre-show. How Casey floated blissfully above us all, who knows, but I noticed, again, that he was downing plenty of brown liquids every night. Might that have steeled his system against viral and bacterial foes? Let’s have another look at that theory when we know the order of all our deaths.
POLITICS AND CRAZIES
At least two of the four of us had a predilection for unfancy food at regular times, like eggs in diners in the morning, sandwiches at noon, and meat and potatoes around dusk. After hunting around for a morning diner in Warren, Michigan, we landed on a creaky joint with one sad woman inside at a table. We sat down three tables away from her and ordered breakfast, which turned out to be fine. But the woman was upset by the No Kings rally on the tee-vee overhead and couldn’t keep her own counsel. One of the speakers apparently said something about Mexico. “Hear that?” the woman said to us. “Mexico? Why doesn’t she go there if it’s that great?” I smiled at her with some small offering of low-cost human kindness — the same treatment I give to asshole sound people.
It didn’t pacify her, and she kept raving, not continuously but continually, in our direction. The lady was fat, unkempt, and wearing some sort of pajama uniform. It was hard to make out exactly what she was saying, word for word, and we had the strong feeling that we didn’t care to. One comment conveyed outrage at hypocrisy: “They think Biden wasn’t a king??” I nodded ambiguously and stuffed another egg in my head. Gerald, who infected or not has the nimblest wits of any of us, told her softly, “Good people on both sides.” Surprisingly, she agreed, and said nothing more to us.
Three strong, happy, privileged men. One poor, crazy, raving lady. You’d have thought we could have brushed this banal encounter off, but we were still picking it over as we drove away. These hopelessly addled red-staters, went the dialogue, lacking health as well as health insurance, fueled by tribal bigotries and mistrust of the other. Where will the madness end. I didn’t say very much, and found myself pulling away from the severity of the analysis. Two days earlier we had briefly shared a sidewalk with another raving woman. She didn’t have poli-sci thoughts to get out, but just was raving at us. My thought was that these two encounters weren’t all that different. The MAGA thing was getting in our way.
Subtract the speech content for a minute. 90% of people are no good at thinking over ideas, the ones that are floating around us like pollen. I’m sorry but half of us don’t know much about the subject we’re yakking about, half the time. Shut off the sound and just look at people, their bodies and body language, their ruined lives, their uncensored, spat-out fervor. People are in pain, and social dysfunction — accelerated, for sure, by poor leadership — is in everyone’s plain view. The older I get — and despite my hard antipathy to Trumpism — the less motivated I am to strike out at these everyday antagonists, on the street or at the Thanksgiving table, these normal-ish people saying irrational, boneheaded, or flatly wrong things. Maybe I’m just lazy or weak. But there at the wheel of the Transit, I started thinking that “politics,” as a set of partisan programs and slogans that citizens latch onto, is in a way a MacGuffin. Hardly anyone making noise about governance is very informed about it. Most are empty vessels, waiting to be filled with anxieties, fears, and less-than-grounded ideas about the future. Poor and sick, or healthy and lucky — fill the tank! The vessel is elastic.
Well anyhow, we just wanted to eat breakfast. Unlike on sidewalks, when you’re at a table eating and someone is determined to rave at you, you’re pretty well cornered.
IDEAS
On the trip I read two books, Jorge Amado’s Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon for story and Sam Tanenhaus’s biography of William F. Buckley, Jr., for fact and analysis. Amado, Brazil’s best-selling writer of the century past, came to my attention in Joe Boyd’s magisterial book And The Roots of Rhythm Remain. Gabriela, though shambling and overlong, immerses you in a wild and distant land, Ilhéus, state of Bahia, pre-World War Two, or pre-Revolution, as I believe a Brazilian would call the era. Before the fascist-leaning Vargas assumed command in 1930, republican aspirations were on the rise, and military mini-fascists and cacao plantation barons vied for power with young politicians, a weak press, and unreliable law enforcement. (I’m presenting what the novel presents, not a personally informed picture of the history.) In Amado’s tale semi-senile colonels order newspapers burned and political opponents shot, plans to modernize transportation and trade routes meet isolationist counterpressures, and plebes drinking and partying in the street are scorned by the upwardly mobile listening to boring lectures and poetry in stifling halls. Through it all, the human urge to turn a profit, eat well, and fall in love persists like a nutty earworm melody that won’t turn off.
I don’t read that much fiction nowadays, and when I do I’d rather get a feel for the faraway than bask in the familiar. But the fabricated world of Gabriela, which Amado wrote in the 1950s, does connect with the US in this moment — to wit, “under” an orderly constitutional republic, as under a rock in the woods, seethe terrible, almost ungovernable little monsters. And the progressive vision of inexorable forward motion toward paradise is also a fabrication; the ratchet may turn either way.
Segue to Buckley Jr, with a pit stop in McDonough. In the Transit, Casey, whom I had never traveled with, was a ceaseless, gushing fountain of verbatim Americana. Every cultural item, great or trivial, from the Great Depression to the Grenada invasion was preserved intact and exact in his brain. He was afflicted with the Marilu Henner disease of never forgetting. Separately, he was an excellent impressionist. When he gave you stretches of dialogue from Route 66 or a Stan Freberg radio show, it was uncannily in the voices of Martin Milner or June Foray. One afternoon he was reciting Ralph Kramden soliloquies, the next he was talking about diner eggs he had eaten in the voice of Barack Obama. I asked him to combine those two at our shows. Barack threatening to send you to the moon was greeted coolly by the first couple audiences, but Casey refined the bit and soon it was working well. At Eddie’s Attic, outside Atlanta, there were a couple teens in the room, so I said, “You younger people who don’t know who Ralph Kramden is —” at which point Gerald interrupted, “They also don’t know who Barack Obama is.” Right!
So: for all you teenagers who don’t know who William F. Buckley, Jr., was, he was a midcentury journalist, and one of America’s most skilled debaters, who recreated American conservatism around a fusion of anti-Communists and free marketeers, expelling various extremists along the way. Only Tanenhaus’s meticulous research dispels some of that description as mythology or exaggeration. Buckley cut loose the John Birchers reluctantly and late. He badly lost two of his most important debates, those with Gore Vidal and James Baldwin. His widely-read opinion columns were sometimes tainted by his backstage consorting with powerful politicos; he spun off seductively worded arguments while failing to disclose personal interests. Only about 50 of the book’s 847 pages focus on Buckley’s life past 1980. As a result his adjacency to white supremacism, his warps from an exotic family upbringing, his enthusiasm for Joseph McCarthy, his extended attraction to the sweet-talking murderer Edgar Smith as well as to various violent right-wing despots, and his failures in business investing easily overshadow his later-life corrections and the suavely reptilian elder statesman role he came to embody in the Reagan-Bush years.
Against those grievous character flaws and misjudgments is the offstage WFB, the hyper-social charmer and loyal-to-a-fault friend. He adored the company of, broke bread with, and platformed left-leaning intellectuals like John Kenneth Galbraith, as well as edgier figures like Jesse Jackson, and full-tilt wackos such as Eldridge Cleaver and Norman Mailer. Also he was crazily generous — again, to a self-defeating fault — with his money.
“A person of admirable private virtues who committed public harms” — a eulogy none of us wants. None of us will get it — the life was extraordinary and highly unique — yet I think the biography prompts useful questions for regular folks to ask themselves. Questions like: When should I cut myself off from people I love, on principle? How are the ideas my parents instilled in me early on distorting my vision? Am I adequately stress-testing my priors and passions?
Regarding sheer lust-for-life, though, my question is, how can I have more of it, as much as this guy had? All of us who were adults in the back third of the 1900s knew the polemical pencil-sucking guy who performed on television. But off of it Buckley was, obviously, different, more himself. In Tanenhaus’s account, he was ruled by seven passions roughly equally: the God of the Catholics, family, friends, sports (that is, skiing and sailing), music, politics, and ideas-in-general (literature, philosophy, the Oxford English dictionary). That’s a lot to be paying close attention to, to be engaged in full-throttle. Remarkably, music appears to be the only one given short shrift; his time on the Gstaad slopes and his ocean crossings dwarfed his hours at the harpsichord. He burned through his days on the other six obsessions. (He had one child, and it’s not clear whether the “family” category included parenting.)
Should any or all of this private virtue and appetitive ardor be weighed on the life ledger opposite having served as press agent for Tailgunner Joe and Jim Crow? You tell me.
THE DIRTY PAST: NOT DONE WITH
People from 40 and 50 years ago kept popping up. They never popped up this much at shows in years past. The kind of people that wander through your mind late at night after a glass of rye, but who, when they come at you in the flesh and bearing photographic evidence, induce a mixed response. Sometimes a hug, sometimes a hmmm.
In Nashville, a Miss Helene Brown, who served alongside me at Jenner & Block on the soporific and almost endless General Dynamics v ATT case back in 1983-86, appeared with a deeply incriminating tranche of black-and-white 8-by-10s. I think the word count on all our conversations during those years would not have greatly exceeded the one we enjoyed at the merch table. Even so, I’ve thought of this marginal acquaintance now and again since exiting the groves of litigation, just as I’ve randomly flashed on twenty other workmates from Jenner. One of them, my still-friend Steven, appeared big-boned and grinning in a 1984 shot, as did my oldest child at age 0.7 and his not-much-older mother. Then there was me, in a ragged Wellspring Grocery (hi, Durham hippie people) tee, earnestly playing a cheap banjo with a big resonator into a mic, also cheap. I had been warming up the stage for the late great Mike Jordan, a heroic though then unknown-to-me figure in Chicago music. That afternoon Mike played harmonica behind me as I sang a Merle Haggard song. (“You Don’t Have Very Far To Go” I think?)
“Do you know the song?” I asked him beforehand.
“Do I need to know Merle Haggard songs to play them?” he shot back.
I flashed the photo of me holding the banjo to Casey, Gerald, and Gjersoe, bringing on a mild uproar. I was too embarrassed to show them the other photos. What a fresh-off-the-farm putz I was! An organic grocery logo, big wide eyes, a banjo, and a bastard child.
I loved the kid like crazy, though. How does my ledger look?
In Greensboro, all manner of persons materialized. Jesse, or Jessie, daughter of Tommy Thompson of the Red Clay Ramblers. Theron, beloved slacker-goofball-housepainter, inspiration-in-chief for my song “Fare Thee Well, Carolina Gals.” Carolina gals Jenni, Danielle, and Yvette. Yes, good old Yvette Bonaparte — what a name!
Allow a short digression, please. When I was 15, my dad, who taught at the Quaker school that all these people and I went to, drove a schoolbus for extra money. His annual income in 1978 was $12,500, and my mom didn’t have an income at the time, and there were four of us. So whatever extra the bus route brought in was welcome. Anyway, we’d head out, my dad and I, from near Creedmoor on chilly weekday early mornings, driving the sputtering rattling beast for almost a half-hour before reaching the first stop, Yvette’s place. She was a beautiful girl, a little older than me, and it wasn’t quite clear from how she marched past my bench seat toward the back whether I was a visible, corporeal being. We’d occupy the vehicle together without speaking for another 10 minutes before it started filling up….and this bunch of nothing was the sum total of my relationship with Yvette, until the other week, not counting some ghostly wisps conjured by Bulleit rye.
Jesse and I had sung Jimmie Rodgers’s “Any Old Time” in Maria Muldaur’s then-contemporary arrangement at the school talent show in 1978, and we sang it again — possibly to less acclaim? — there in Greensboro. Jenni and I spoke warmly, Yvette and I as well; Theron, no matter what age you find him at, continues to manifest the deep-dyed stoicism, gentleness, and thoughtfulness that I still aspire to. He seems unburdened by ego — can’t be true. As for Danielle, she brought me a short stack of color photos — Jesus, people, the photos! — of her family and mine at the beach in the slightly later mid-1980s, probably 1986. I was once again appalled to see how long it took me to grow the fuck up. 23 with sugar plums dancing in my eyes.
Danielle’s mom was close friends with my folks. She, Danielle, leaned in to tell me something at a low, confidential volume. “Your father married your mother only because of the Vietnam draft,” she said.
It took me a moment to register (no pun) this thing I had not heard before. “You’re saying,” I said, “that if not for the war my life would have worked out completely differently? Like I’d have been raised by an unwed mother?”
“That’s right,” she said. I think Danielle must have been the third or fourth person down a whisper-down-the-lane chain. There was surely talk of marrying or not, and of aborting or not, back in my fetal months, and I am sure that after a couple beers tongues were wagging, many years later. But there were only so many advisers on the ground in Hanoi in late 1962.
These returns to old places bring on a rush of unhelpful counterfactuals — what if one had stayed, or gotten a normal job, what if one’s mom had stayed as sensibly clear of one’s dad as Yvette had from one, and so forth. Such a house sound guy-like waste of time and neurons. I believe that the clearest perspective on what appears in retrospect a storyline composed largely of personal choices is the one in my song, “The Thirty-Year Marriage”: “Some things we tried mapping/Most things just happened.” The closer you inspect your past decisions, taking into account as honestly as you can your past frame of mind, your environment, and the information you had, the less personal choice seems to have been involved at all. You’re buffeted along on events like a cork. Consider that depressing, or liberating.
I was on my way home from the tour when I got a ping from Tim Triplett’s sister on FB Messenger. Skinny funny Tim was my part-time accomplice in the 5th and 6th grades in Charlottesville, where he still lives, according to his sister. After the 6th grade, Tim did other things for 50 years. Evidently he still recalls, maybe fondly, the cruel and crude comics I used to draw, with our classmates as cretins, japesters, and racial stereotypes, and our teachers as big-breasted nudes. When Miss Carter, our music teacher, stumbled upon one of the comics, which portrayed her conducting our recorder ensemble in the altogether, I was instantly sorry I had ever drawn these cartoons. I am sorry still. I need to be watched in order to do good work, rather than make one person after another gasp and cry. For this reason, I am grateful that some people pay attention to my music — knowing that they will makes it a lot better than it would otherwise be.
As for old friends, most have fallen away, having fulfilled their part in my retrospectively stitched biography. It’s a little psychotic to want more than that, as I sometimes imagine I do. I thank my wife, kids, grandchildren, and about four other people for standing by. Much more isn’t necessary.