nice places to visit
If you travel much for your work, you are probably wise to the fantasy of piggybacking any kind of adventure or sightseeing onto a business trip. Our neighbor a few years ago worked for a big pharmaceutical company and was gone a lot. One Sunday night we were having a beer in his driveway, when he said he had to turn in, because early the following morning he was off to Naples for 12 days. I think he was sighing and wincing as he said the name. "But Naples, wow!" I said. "You'll have a little time off the clock here and there to nose around the town, won't you?"
"Nah, not so much," he said. "Twelve hours of conferences a day. Dinner with the group. After that you're tired, you go to sleep."
Wild times we live in, when people are routinely flitting off to such desirable and faraway locales and hardly leaving the Hilton. I like to think that if I had the chance to visit Naples I'd trade a couple hours' sleep for a stroll down a piazza and a slice of pizza, if that's what it took. But as a traveling musician I know as well as anyone that work, whether you do it in an office or on the moon, is work, and sightseeing is yet more work, requiring its own time allotment and shielding from competing concerns. Most of what I've seen, for instance in the last several months, of Montana and Vermont and Michigan and California and New York and Sweden, has been immediately visible from a major highway that connects an airport to a hotel. When my neighbors ask me what wonderful things I did in Sweden, I try not to sigh.
Even so, I do leave these places with clearly individualized mental pictures, and not of the hotels or airports, but of the landscape and food and accents and weather and pace of life. I try to take note of what kind of people seem to be connected to a place, and what they work at, and what kind of music tastes they suffer from -- people usually tell you this without your asking. If a town is clean and feels safe after dark and seems to run well and people are proud to live there and know a little about its past, all of those leave a vivid impression on the traveler.
In the last three years, since I've been reducing my annual mileage somewhat, I've found myself thinking wistfully of towns that left strongly pleasant impressions, often enough that I realize, to my self-satisfaction, that 24 years of troubadouring have not left me quite in the travel-is-so-deadening condition of my Hilton-incarcerated friend. I am especially grateful, maybe smugly so, when I look at some of my peers who have been knocking around as long as I have, with their heavy eyes and dilapidated vans with peanut butter sandwiches on the dashboards and Motel 6 catalogs in the glove. How easy it is, after that many years of deadheading, to build a mental database consisting only of grimy dressing rooms, shrill monitor noise, and vomit stench. I like non-commercial music as much as the next mammal, but yikes.
Anyway, I think the ten towns in America I'd most like to revisit, in no particular order, are:
Chattanooga, Tennessee
Charlottesville, Virginia
Louisville, Kentucky
Asheville, North Carolina
Portland, Oregon
Missoula, Montana
Salt Lake City, Utah
Boulder, Colorado
Tucson, Arizona
Oxford, Mississippi
Does this post have a base, capitalistic subtext? You bet it does! If you promote country shows, run a house-concert series, etc., in any of these splendid places, and can send me an offer that may bring me to you, please drop me a line. Though not without scars and repressed vomit memories, I am yet a man who thrives on beauty and culture, and can still put on a right kick-ass music show. Better than ten years ago, if you ask me. I'm not in it for the sightseeing, but...Asheville...oh, man.
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12 comments
Oxford, not Lula, MS?
Elkton, MD??? I could send you a welcome packet that you won't open until arrival.
As a fellow (former)travelling musician I can identify with your view through the windshield. Often what passes for a memory in some cases is not the landscape but the people you meet. The only difference between your excursions through the heartland and mine is mine happened in Canada; a vast open space with beautiful cities plopped willy nilly, usually very far apart. So instead of driving for two hours through a bunch of small towns to get to the next show we would often drive for hours through huge stretches of prairie with nothing to break it up but wild open fields and the occassional truck stop, where we would be guaranteed a few stares and glares from the locals. My only conclusion is there are rednecks everywhere just as there are honest, open people who oddly enough don't judge you for your appearance or what you try and do for a living. I suspect on your list of 10 probably half of them have nothing to do with the beauty of the surroundings but the people who live there. The only thing I feel jaded about is the fact that after years staying in hotels of varying size and cleanliness I am now never excited to go anywhere, at least in terms of the accommodations. A hotel room is a hotel room is a hotel room. However what's outside that hotel door is why I still don't mind when I have to take a business trip or the occassional gig out of town. It could be worse right?
Have you been back to Tucson since you played there in 2001? Such a great show! If I remember correctly it was shortly after 9/11. It was the first time I saw you and the band live and made a lifelong fan outta me.
Though I don't live there anymore, I agree, it's a great place to visit. I still do from time to time. My sources in the music scene say contact Curtis McCrary at the Rialto Theatre
http://www.rialtotheatre.com/
or David Slutes over at the Hotel Congress.
http://www.hotelcongress.com/
Hmmmm. One time when I was a kid I walked in a couple (heavily sleeping) in that Chattanooga Choo Choo Hotel. It looked like a train car and as I understood it I was going to see an old train. Looked really gay 90's brothel in there with red satin bedclothes and fancy wallpaper. But Mom, how come there are people in bed in here? Oops. Chattanooga is really pretty landscapewise, too. I don't know anybody there but I kind of recall Sis Draper (Ms. Manning) from the old board has generations of family there. Maybe she does. If you see this, Sis ...
Paul Williams (Memphis Pablo) may very well know someone to talk to in Oxford. I think that's where he goes to see shows as there aren't many shows to see at home in sHitsville. If he's not sweating away over the bins at Audiomania maybe he will see this and talk to someone in Oxford.
Nita might know somebody in Louisville. Louisville charmed me half to death. I really adore the place. It's a nice place to visit AND I think I could live there (sorry Louisville). Nita--I will "have her to call" you.
I can hook you up if you want to be the guy inside the dunk tank at a Portland fair. For that you should see Mister Wade Hockett of Mighty Hawk Concessions. He has a radio show, too, that he can put you on. As far as places to play? Who knows. His daughter is in a performing bicycle troupe (gotta love Portland) and you can make it an artful weekend for sure! Will Stenberg (of eCowboy fame) is moving to Portland. He has a band now, too. It's the scene. To the guy with the Airstream next to the warehouse ... book me for the Robbie weekend. There will be four of us. Thx. Bye.
..and the places you'd not be too hot on returning to? Meridian Mississipi is one place where I stayed the night, breakfasted at Wendy's and got the hell out. This weekend, I'm driving four hours up to a beer festival in Cumbria, near the Scottish border, doing two sets, driving back and then catching the train the next day to play the Mayor's Thames festival in London on the south bank of the Thames. Then it's get back on the train and go to work the next day....but when someone says "What did you do this weekend?" I like my answer....
Another fellow musician here. I think motels have gotten worse and worse as time goes by. Sure, you wi-fi, but increasingly, there are screw-ups with the reservation that "can't be fixed b/c the computer won't let me." etc.
I always pay a little extra for a Holiday Inn if I can (not the Express, the real one).
Nowadays bed bugs are a real concern. Let's pretend I didn't say that...
http://www.willstenberg.com/albums/sixteen-seasons/
^ That's our existential cowboy. I see he joined the msg board and I want to beat him to the big announcement. Maybe he doesn't know there's more traffic here than on the msg board.
To the last Nick who posted--the bedbug resurgence is no secret. I am told that there is a woman who actually photographed her bites and included them on her TripAdvisor review of the offending hotel. Don't know if they remain. I do know I want to party hard with the man who wrote this: www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g60763-d122011-r3401054-Hotel_Riverview-New_York_City_New_York.htm
Interesting. They are all college towns.
You accidentally listed Charlottesville instead of Richmond.
I had the pleasure of interviewing you at WNCW in 2006 when you came through the Grey Eagle. Great set in both places. I've been an Ashevillian since 2000 and have yet to be satiated on its food, scenery, music, and people. I hope we'll be fortunate enough to have you pass through town again.
Oh, sweet lord: Come to Oxford.