Sleep No More, Forever
Reading Bruce’s book was a blast. There were things I probably didn’t need to know, but I read them anyway. I am nosy like that. There were insights about people I know and love that I may disagree with. I am disagreeable like that. Bruce and I made noise together for many years, and our friendship outlasted many of the pitfalls that rock and roll egos usually lay to waste.
See, I know most of the people in this story on one level or another because the people in the main narrative all lived in Los Angeles, at least for a spell, and that spell was when this narrative took place. Some of them are my friends, and all of them are people I respect. It wasn’t easy to read some of this. I wanted to yell at them, “Don’t say that! Don’t do that!” Some of their actions could have been game changing finales.
Ratboy. Bruce. Z-Man. Dahl. They were all part of an exciting rock and roll scene that essentially went ignored by the bulk of America, but fortunately not by the rest of the world. There were parts of the world where people actually cared about rock and roll. The trick then, as it is now, lay in finding those boroughs of light in the darkness. The time chronicled here was the beginning of an age of some of the greatest rock and roll bands to grace the planet. It was dirty, sweaty, and fun rock and roll infused with all of the pitfalls of punk rock. One of many golden ages, this one was the beginning of the age dominated by bands like The Humpers, The Dragons, Clawhammer, and, of course, by Jeff Dahl. Unlike other great eras of rock, however, this one was largely ignored by the larger audiences, too.
Jeff is a great singer/songwriter, and I saw him play many times, going back to the time he was in Vox Pop. I was lucky enough to see many great bands before I was sixteen years old, including the Germs, The Weirdos, The Zeros, X, Middle Class, D.O.A., Red Kross, Black Flag, and Agent Orange. It was a fertile time. By the time the eighties were drawing to and end, and the nineties were upon us, the scene that had once flourished was but a microcosm of what it had been, and the bands had taken refuge in small bars and parties throughout Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties. It was kept alive by dedicated musicians and fans.
Touring any band is rife with unwritten rules, and is absolutely dominated by survival. Many bands disintegrated as a result of touring. So did relationships—romantic and otherwise. They dissolved into a bitter pill that was impossible to swallow. Touring was a difficult, debt infested disaster at every turn. The trick was, and is, keeping as far out of the red as possible in case that money was needed for a bailout of some sort.
This tour diary is truly about a different time. The Berlin Wall had only been down a short time. This was a era without cell phones, without computers, and without GPS for navigation. In Europe, there was no single currency, and to pay out a per diem in one country would prove utterly useless in another. Record labels were clueless on how to help. Though eager to send their bands out, they generally lacked the knowledge necessary to navigate through promoters, clubs, and hanger-ons to actually provide the support needed. It was a different time.
For someone handling the managerial aspects of touring, this meant maximizing output while minimizing costs. Failure to do so meant bankrupting the tour, possibly being stranded yourself, leaving a lot of other people stranded, sinking your recorded output into a debt so severe that you’d never recoup the advances you probably used on the tour in the first place, and never getting your music back. This is what record labels were founded on, and it was not a pretty picture.
The manager, or in this case, the leader of the band, has a great deal on the line. This is not a shared responsibility. If the tour does not recoup, the band leader has to absorb the debt. Unlike a manager who can cut, bait and run like hell, in another direction, the band leader is bound to the record label through a financial obligation that almost exclusively favors the label. There's reason to why most musicians were not upset to see the death blow administered to the music business.
Touring was one of those great rock and roll jerk offs that sounded so glamorous to anyone who hasn’t done one. It is an integral ingredient in the great rock and roll lie. It is also a critical piece if you want people to actually hear your music the way it is intended to be heard—live and in your face. Touring is also the great equalizer. It pits you against yourself. Being trapped in a van for a six-hour drive every day leaves you at the mercy of your past. The longer the ride, the rougher the path.
Sitting there, squeezed between luggage, gear, and sweaty clothes with five other guys is probably not the glorious rock and roll dream you fantasized about when you were a teenager. The sights, the sounds, and the smells—as fascinating as they may very well be—are not enough of a distraction to stop your past from haunting your present situation.
I admit that I always envied the one guy in the band that could sleep through the whole goddamned thing. No matter how safe the trip, and no matter how reliable the driver, trying to sleep in a moving vehicle is impossible for some people, as is the case for me. My naps are generally brief, nightmarish visions of rolling cars and Jayne Mansfield decapitations; a haze of Weegee and Highway Patrol black and white ooze. Hardly something to sleep through. They are always disrupted, intense affairs—deep, sporadic spurts of density littered with winding corridors, sirens, and flashing lights.
Always the sirens and flashing lights. The long arm of Johnny Law is a very real engagement that any band on the road can count on. Being pulled over in a van is really not such a big deal. The premise is almost always drugs, but the excuse is always a busted light or a bunk lane change. In Europe it is almost always because they are looking for smuggling and that means they are usually looking for cigarettes. Of course, the real reason is generally curiosity than out of any real threat to international security. Let’s face it, how many times do criminals travel in packs of six crammed in a van to distribute paraphernalia?
I can’t even count the number of times I've watched as a groggy band member is dragged out of the sleeping loft because of sirens, but paired with the sounds of thunder, and the flashes of lightening in a storm, and by the sheer volume of such experiences, I can assure you that a comfortable sleep is still not to be had. Multiply that by the number of days on tour, factor in hangovers as necessary, and multiply that by a half a dozen folks and you are starting to get the picture.
Then there is the indignity of it all. Locked in a stinky van full of stinky boys, it is then necessary to take sheer exhaustion and pepper it with sprigs of paranoia, and a dash of the always faux superiority that comes blaring through by someone’s idealism. You know, the inevitable knowledge that one dummy always has to blurt out: “I haven’t broken any laws!” Of course, somebody in the van probably has, or is certainly in the process of doing exactly that at the very moment the statement is made—and is drowned out by the rushed movement of scurried baggie burials and manic yet graceful sounds of dry pill swallowing and gagging by the other five people in the van.
The curiosity of being pulled over can be a brief or a long and drawn out affair. It really depends on who is doing the dragging, and where you are located on the union mandated break schedule. I have been in a van that was put through an X-ray machine, had my hands swabbed for explosives, and had my luggage scoured for drugs more times than I can count. "In my country, I am a school teacher," I tell them. "What do you do in yours?"
Among my favorite explanations for the volumes of pills I always carry took place while I was in Bavaria: "This one is for my blood pressure, this one for my cholesterol, these are for asthma, this is for my heart, and this one…this one is for anxiety. Do you mind if I take that one right now?"
There is also the beauty of foreign product exchange. Gold Bond is familiar to anyone who travels like this. It is generally used to reduce discomfort associated with, uh, sitting for long periods of time and perspiring. It is a tour necessity. The enthusiastic gendarme as he pours it onto his palm with the familiar “Ah-ha!” associated with finding a container of white powder in every person’s luggage—and which, of course, must be cocaine—is most amusing. It is the hardest gaff to intervene on, but the thought of someone taking a whiff of Gold Bond or getting it in their eyes is too much to allow.
Essentially, though, touring in a van is the same no matter where in the world you go. From a sleep standpoint, however, it's all the same. There are long stretches of desolate farmlands, frequent rest stops selling crap you don’t need and food you shouldn’t ingest, hot desert patches, maybe, and large inhabited cities with cool shit you aren’t going to see because you are definitely going to the suburbs or the slum to sit in the club for hours waiting. That’s pretty much the scene everywhere. Well, except for Brazil, where there are patches of jungles and rainforests and cops that carry machine guns.
Just as unnerving as the obligatory storm and drag is the rushed scramble that occurs compliments of the distributor of olfactory damage: “Jesus Christ, what the fuck is that?” Amid the howling laughter, writhing pain, gasping for air, and the lunge for the now open window, sits the lone, smiling yet apologetic sadist who promises never to eat “whatever that slop was” ever, ever again. The gagging, retching, and choking alone are more than enough to stop any reasonable person from falling asleep in the van. Sticking one’s face into the shirt is hardly solace when the last shower you had was three days ago. Enjoy your patina.
You can look forward to repeating it all tomorrow, but for tonight you can look forward to laying your head on a pillow in some band apartment, sprinkled with the stale smell of old piss, vomit, cigarettes, and fuck. Bon appetite. Your lucky day has arrived, indeed. Everywhere you go, you can rest assured that someone has drawn a penis on the wall. That will, no doubt, be the first thing you see when you wake. For the life of me I will never understand what makes an undersexed and horny band of traveling marauders pull into every backstage and band apartment worldwide and draw a phalluses.
Yet, that is the glory and majesty of rock. It drips in beads of sweat on stage from five dudes (or ladies) and there it sits on those clothes and that body until next time. Or it sits in a stinking sopping wet pile in the van, with those ten stinky ass shoes, socks, and guitar straps. There is where the comparison between rockers and those other nomadic gypsies—the truckers—begins, and ends. Truckers are significantly cleaner.