:: Tallboy6: mike errico - spring tour 2002 ::

:: Thursday, May 02, 2002 ::

5/2 – Greencastle, IN – Depauw U.

Well, here’s a new one:

It turns out that the hall I was supposed to play burned down a couple of weeks ago. They were going to try to repair enough of it for the show to go on, but I guess they didn’t get it together in time. SHOW CANCELLED. I think I’ve only had one other cancellation, a 14-hour drive to Virginia Beach for an outdoor show to open for Cowboy Mouth that was cancelled for rain. I stood on the soaked stage with the sound crew and watched dolphins play in the waves before getting back in the car and driving home. This time, I hung out in a bar and watched rabid Pacers fans curse the Nets on TV.

I still got paid. Whatever.

Total YAHOO! miles: 9861.76
Quote of the day: “Mike, I did what I could, but plans A, B, and C didn’t come through. Enjoy your night in Greencastle.” – the promoter of the DePauw show.

:: mike 7:52 PM [+] ::

5/1 – Day off in Notre Dame, IN

What to do in South Bend? Well, it’s the home of the College Football Hall of Fame, but looking in at the collection of weird leather helmets that offered no protection, I glazed over with boredom. I don’t watch college football. I mean, it’s fine, but not something I need to know more about, so instead, I bought a postcard for JoBu, the college football guru at Maxim Online, and headed off to the Studebaker Museum, a converted warehouse manned by a single, smiling old lady.

The Studebaker was a truly amazing car from the 1950’s and 1960’s, and the museum housed tons of them, shining and silent, their hoods and trunks open for inspection. I was the only person there, besides the old lady, smiling and impenetrable, who took my four dollars and went back to smiling out the window. The only sound in the cavernous showroom came from a single TV which echoed a taped loop of old ads for the Avanti, the Daytona, and other “hot new models.” Men loved the power, women loved the protection they offered the children, but the slogans and soundtrack blurred together in the rafters, and I lay down and stretched my body across the cool cement floor. I looked up at the white-walled tires, the hulking springs, the crossed checkered flag emblems welded to cherry red front quarter panels. These cars are the history of the future. They are human imagination, a projection of where we’d all be someday. They are a lost philosophy.

One car was called a Studebaker “Predictor,” and I fell in love with it.
It was a four-wheeled missile, with an engine that could fly a plane and blow through a tank of gas in five minutes. Instead of TNT or weapons-grade plutonium, there were plush white leather seats and sheets, sheets of glass like transparent sails, wrapped around the crew of passengers. Where is the promise of these cars? Where is that bracing wind that peals through the driver’s window and blows through a hard-working, deserving American’s hair? Where is his woman’s placid smile, the satisfaction, the quiet? Where is the calmness and uncomplication of a life spent rampantly mortgaging the future?

We rarely have lofty car names like the “Predictor,” now, or if we do, they’re weirdly ironic. The “Voyager” is a soccer mom-mobile, unfit for voyages beyond the gravitational field of Wal-Mart. The “Outback” would rain a shitstorm of its own parts were it ever taken to the Outback. The “Aspire” is a humane rat-trap with wheels, marketed to those who aspire to owning a real car, some day. Clearly, our philosophy has changed, and our cars scream this truth, for better and worse. Today, the Hummer is one of the few cars that is aptly named.

After my trip to the museum, there was wandering, filming, and a great trip to a batting cage, where I tore my left hand up on an aluminum bat and $10 worth of tokens. God, I love batting cages. I love all of this. I love tour. And it’s almost over. I want to make the last two gigs worthwhile. Who knows when I’ll get out this far again. It’s not easy to predict anything in the music industry, if, in fact, this is what I’m in. All I know is that this is not a place to build a house on. Yet.

Total YAHOO! miles: 9672.51
Quote of the day: “I’ve wiped civilizations off my chest” – Bill Hicks

:: mike 7:45 PM [+] ::

4/30 Notre Dame, IN - St. Mary’s



Mike Errico, playing at a Gothic castle/all-women’s Catholic college? Mike Errico, playing an intimate room, with sunset pouring in, sumptuous desserts available, and 1,600 women wandering around lush green fields in the sweatpants and tight, fading t-shirts of their childhoods, rollerblading down serpentine paths of smooth gray asphalt and giggling conspiratorially, just out of earshot? Didn’t I just dream this, like, every night of my life? Yes, I believe so. All that needs to happen next is for a Godzilla character with my mother’s head to explode out of a reflecting pool and kick over churches. That would complete the picture.

But no, this was reality, and Momzilla never arrived. I got to raffle off a stereo—a Sharp XL-1200—after the show, and Erica, who’s come to several shows in this area, won it. I was really happy that destiny paid her back, though I bet the college people were a little disappointed that a St. Mary’s woman didn’t go home with me. I mean, it.

Total YAHOO! miles: 9668.51
Quote of the day: “Comparisons are odious” – William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

:: mike 7:41 PM [+] ::

4/29 – Decatur, IL - Millikin U.

More NYC shots have come in from friend/cover shot photographer for “Tonight I Drink You All” Alyssa Scheinson: CLICK HERE

The Red Couch is a cute little place in Decatur that is run by beautiful women. Very strange. Everyone behind the bar was a hottie, and they looked at me with the mixture of belittling disdain and mild interest that I love so much. It reminded me of home.

I’ve finally turned east, are people outside of the schools I’m playing are starting to come to the shows, which is a welcome sign. I played requests, instead of just playing. Matt gave me a taped show that I played a couple years ago. Thank you for that, Matt. After the show, a couple invited me out for drinks at the Winery, a divey little bar lit solely by promotional goods from beer companies: dioramas, neon signs, faux sconces, billards table lamps, etc. We ordered Domino’s to our table, and one woman began opening up about life in Decatur and how badly she wants to get out. She wants to be a singer, like Ani, and “take over the world,” as she put it. I didn’t know what to say. Decatur’s a long haul from nowhere, it seems, and maybe that’s just because I’m a New Yorker, and biased (by the way, if New York is “somewhere,” then nowhere’s the place to be), but still, I felt for her, and think she was right to consider leaving. As for taking over the world, well…go for it. It beats the hell out of the options.

Total YAHOO! miles: 9427.29
:: mike 7:37 PM [+] ::

4/28- KJHK radio show, Lawrence, KS

KJHK kicks ass. I recommend you check it out on the web, as it’s better than most all of the radio I’ve heard in the country – and I’ve heard the radio in this country. “Route 66” is the show, and I think you can order CDs of the interview if you go on to the site. Evan and I talked about all kinds of nonsense on the air. He asked me if I'd been to jail, before, and I said that "jail" was a metaphor for a place that we've all been. I hadn't thought about it, but once he asked, it made sense to me. He played “Springtime” from the disc, I played “Shook Me All Night Long” and “Daylight” live, and then we finished up with “When She Walks By” from the disc. They gave away a copy on the air, and then we went out to lunch with at a great restaurant called Free State, on the main drag in town. What a place. It’s just great here. I’m always happy to roll through Lawrence.

After, I went to the Love Garden, a CD store, and dropped cash in order to stave off the religious right stations and crop reports that clog the air here.

Bill Hicks, Rant in E minor – Blake Morgan, producer of my last disc, had this and raved. Bill’s a comedian, and this was in the ‘comedy’ section, but it is a spoken word/comedy/political rant – totally insane, and not nearly as “funny” as it is bitter and broken hearted about the stupidity of the human condition and the utopian possibility that we never live up to. How he shares bin space with Weird Al is unreal. Still, I would recommend it. I did laugh out loud a couple of times.

Tricky, Maxinquaye - After screwing up and buying every other Tricky disc, I finally found and bought the ‘good’ one.

Steven Malkmus, Steven Malkmus Just to check it out.

Patti Griffin, her new one, I’m psyched to hear. She works with Jay Joyce, who did the “God” demo that’s on my site, in the “audio” section

Mark Eitzel, The Invisible Man I just love him, ever since Mercury with his other band, American Music Club. He’s the most depressed human you’ve ever heard on CD.

Groove Armada, Vertigo For just chilling

Splitlip Rayfield – couldn’t find what I wanted, so I let it go…but I have to get a disc of theirs at some point. It’s like banjo-punk. That’s the only way to describe what I heard.

Evan also gave me live stuff from the Bottleneck, a popular Lawrence venue, recorded in ‘93 and ‘94, when Lawrence was being swooped down upon by The Industry as the “next Seattle”. Pretty damn interesting. I wonder what happened to “the last Seattle” which I guess was Seattle. The ‘93 stuff is awesome, though I have no idea who the bands are, since he gave me a burned copy with no liner notes. Oh well. It still rocks.

And stuff I can’t even remember.

Total YAHOO! miles: 9043.83
Quote of the day: “Don’t go chasing waterfalls” -TLC

:: mike 2:56 AM [+] ::

4/27 – Drive to Lawrence, KS

Tornado warnings in Missouri have created a lovely breeze here in Kansas. It gently rocks the car back and forth across the lanes of the cornfield-lined highway. How lovely. I hope no one’s being sucked up into a funnel of wind and auto parts 500 miles from here. Oh, well. It’ll be good sleeping weather.

I pulled into the Eldridge Hotel, where a friend of a friend tends bar. He was hanging there, sure enough, with a sweaty brown drink set up in front of him. He hooked me up with a Ketel One Martini, and we picked up where we left off last tour. The bar at this old hotel is great, decorated with late Victorian overstuffed chairs, dark, ornate woodwork, and a beautiful portrait of Abe Lincoln which stares down at tattooed, goateed people in Journey t-shirts, drinking big drinks and listening to PJ Harvey. This is the freedom he fought and died for. Oh well. It could have ended up much worse.

I had a gig opening “Freakbass,” a guy that is supposedly a prodigy of Bootsy Collins’, but at the last minute it fell through. I was mad, and even though I had a radio show scheduled, I decided I was going to do as much as possible to seed the clouds in this great city. I took a bunch of CDs, some stickers and postcards, and started walking around the city. Whenever I saw someone who I thought would like my music, I’d ask, “Do you like Ani Difranco? Then I’ve got something for you. I’ll be playing on KJHK tomorrow at 1:30…” and I’d hand them a free disc and stickers. I did this at the CD stores, at the music clubs, by the ice cream shop, the barber, Borders books – just giving it away. People kept waiting for the sales pitch, but there was none. Here. Have a disc.


Total YAHOO! miles: 9037.53
Quote of the day: “Yo, my brutha, you in a band? You play like Tom Petty? ‘Freeee-fallin!’ You know? I’m down with Petty” – some guy

:: mike 2:39 AM [+] ::

4/26 – U. Missouri, Rolla

After a long drive, I pulled into Rolla, with no idea what to expect. Rolla is an engineering school, like Colorado School of Mines, with the same incredibly smart student body, but with less scenery. Actually, with no scenery. But I like hanging with engineers. They’re nerdy, and so am I, in a way. I listened in on a conversation between two of the organizers, both of whom were wearing headsets and trying to coordinate the show. One gestured to the headset and said, “I feel compelled to ask people if they ‘would like fries with that.’” The second snapped back, “Well, you are utilizing the same FM frequencies.” They both broke up laughing.

It turns out that I was the entertainment for a State Fair, complete with Moonwalk, Fat suit/Sumo wrestling ring, Laser Tag, strong man “ring the bell” game where you slam the hammer down and the little steel thing goes up and determines your worth as a man, and so on. The (next) problem was that, with hurricane warnings for the area, the entire fair had to be moved indoors, to a gymnasium on the Rolla campus. Everything got crammed into the gym—every ride, cotton candy machine, ball throwing game, everything but the barbeque pit, which blew smoke in from the parking lot on the high wind and hazed over the entire place. My favorite attraction here was a 1982 Caprice Classic station wagon that, for a dollar, you could swing at with an aluminum bat. The line for that one was long, until the windshield got taken out by a 10-year-old. The line dwindled as the tinkling, shattering, dramatic accessories on the car were removed. These are the days that I have to suck it up and remember that I played Woodstock, and that nothing can scare me. Still, I was a little rattled. I won’t lie. This was not a great situation to play.

Set number one was tough. In hell, I will play set one at the Rolla U. State Fair for 10,000 years. Then I will be exonerated, cleansed, and I will play set two, where I had people dancing, and laughing, and singing along to some nonsensical songs I’d pulled over and learned, like Lit’s “My Own Worst Enemy,” which I played like a soul ballad – “…can we forget about the things I said when I was drunk/I didn’t mean to call you that…” If you know the song (it was HUGE about 2 years ago), it was really funny.

Still, I got home and hit the pillow, and slept like a dead man.

Total YAHOO! miles: 8687.53
Quote of the day: “It’s a long road and a little wheel and it takes a lot of turns to get there.” – Charlie Daniels Band

:: mike 2:35 AM [+] ::

4/25- Kansas, double duty

Two gigs, today: Washburn in the day, Pittsburg State at night. Pace, my brother, pace.

Washburn was an outdoor show at 11:30 AM. People lazed around on the grass, threw Frisbees, read, swayed to some of the songs. I was just setting a mood for them, and tried to do that as best I could. I don’t know if that’s some kind of latent wedding band philosophy in me, but you have to know what the event calls for. It did not call for jokes, or even talking, so I pulled out some older material, anything with a real groove, and I just let the sun and the spring do the work. It went well, I think. “Underwater” was awesome. The soundmen came up to me after the show and freaked out. “Dude, you’re amazing.” There’s nothing better than turning the head of a jaded soundman. It’s a trip. The main soundman, Dave, heavy set with a big red smiling face, started opening up after the show. “Yeah, I’ve done a lot of work, man – Stacey Q, the Jets, Jermaine Stewart, Bon Jovi, Ratt, Poison – the 80’s were all kind of a blur.” He laughed, to let me know how much fun he had. It must have been a banquet of drugs, girls, insanity. He seemed like he was now paying the check.
“How about the ‘90s?”
“Well, I never did meet Korbain. That was a regret of mine…”
Don’t you mean…oh, never mind. Good people are good people. Leave him alone.

Gig 2 – Pittsburg State – tiny place, tiny show, but the ones who showed up bought CDs. I’m just leaving a weird little plastic trail, with stickers and t-shirts. Where does it all go? Into CD collections, trunks of cars, laundry bins. Back in the car, I decided that I’ll know I’ve made it if I’m watching Cops, and some crazy crackhead starts flailing at the local Gainsville policeman wearing my baseball t-shirt. I will be a happy man on that day.

Total YAHOO! miles: 8469.95
Quote of the day: “The 80’s were all kind of a blur.” – Dave, the soundman

:: mike 2:31 AM [+] ::

4/24 – Baldwin City, KS – Baker U.

It’s been raining. I woke up in a dank Best Western, which stank of mold and truckers. I watched a woman walk her dog in the hallway of the motel, carrying a copy of USA Today. She knelt down and scratched at the carpeting while her dog, a small gray mutt, sniffed underneath the doors.

There are Amish at the salad bar of the Iron Skillet. I’ve never been here, and (surprise) it’s gross. This is like the ‘tour of bad food’ and I want to turn that around, though it doesn’t seem promising. All these nasty chain restaurants…it’s like we’ve given up on food as an art form entirely. My stomach is still churning with the contents of last night’s Olive Garden fiasco. I wish I could take a pill, or eat from a tube, like an astronaut. Mmm, steak and beans, in paste form, in highway weightlessness…

I got to Baldwin City and sent gag gifts to friends, stuff I got at the Flying J truck stop, you know. I’m the reason those things keep getting produced. Sorry.

Baker was really pretty and really remote. I had great hosts, one of whom is in the final running to be either Cinderella or Bette or Mary Poppins at Tokyo Disney. She taught me how to wave from a parade float. Left hand on hip, lean forward on right leg, straightening left leg out and right hand wave, straight and high, over their heads, 2, 3, 4, and right hand swings across your body, leaning on left leg, right leg straight out, smiling, 5, 6, 7, 8, and to the center, legs straight, both hands out in front almost like you’re about to push something, fingers spread wide, and arc both hands to either side like you’re drawing two rainbows simultaneously, 9, 10, 11, 12, pinch the sides of your dress and finish with a small curtsey, and repeat. And repeat. Smile, dammit, and repeat. You’re making $50 a day, so repeat. There are 30,000 corn-fed cuties dying to claw your eyes out and take your job, so repeat. Smile, dear…

Once again, I was billed as “Musician/comedian Mike Errico”. What the fuck? I’ve never written a joke in my life. Ever. I don’t even know jokes. Actually that’s not true. Here are the jokes I know.

a) What did one coffin say to the other coffin?
Is that you coughin’?

b) How do you catch a unique rabbit?
You ‘neak up on it!

part. 2: How do you catch a tame rabbit?
Tame way! You ‘neak up on it!

Is this the level of comedy these colleges are paying for? Or do I have no idea what I do for a living? This unnerves, but sometimes I think it’s true.

Total YAHOO! miles: 7915.01
Quote of the day:

:: mike 9:07 AM [+] ::

4/23 - day two of driving 10 hrs.

this posting is pending. hang on.
:: mike 9:05 AM [+] ::