|
 |
Tour Diary: 2002 (Eugene) > Page 7 |
|
I climbed down the ladder and moved through the crowd and we sang the song or as much of it as I could remember but I could remember very little and in any case the sea swell of proximity to her was easily much more significant to me and I could tell by her restraint that her man was in the audience but fuck it, she had been warned and my hands did my hands thing and she stiffened and I cared not at all because her eyes were like inkwells and I was bent: over the mic, next to her, and out of shape.
The song rolled to a close and I scrambled back up the ladder and watched OXBOW right the stage and later when we finally started and the waves of everything started sweeping over me, hard hard hard. The songs like lightening rods for the places and people that had given birth to them and The Doctor in my mind and in the audience, observing, notating, witnessing what would become of me when I became undone and from my left a voice. "She's a lady, whoa whoa whoa..." Was that Tom Jones? Shit. There's always that guy. That guy that thinks *It's funny to request a) Freebird, b) Stairway to Heaven, and b) anything ELSE that's NOT on your set list *It's even funnier to request it again and again and again. This Frenchman's variant was to scream out the lines from the Tom Jones song until he got my attention. And he did. And it's a blur sort of but I remember choking him, kicking him, making him sit on my lap and sing and slapping his face before finally losing him and then chasing him off with a kick that didn't find its intended target because of a shoelace untied and the desire to have my foot kick him and not lose my shoe in the process. 
The LSD Monologues: Underdog's Underwear Photo: Scott Walter What else I remember: I remember a woman's face finding me through the crowd and her mouth warm on my face while her boyfriend tried to face mask me and separate us. I remember a long and tearful tribute to The Doctor. And as if this wasn't enough I remember Sasha coming back to sing on an OXBOW tune and me groping her and going across all the obscene boundaries and then I remember it being over. Me wandering through the crowd looking for The Doctor, finding him and knowing that all was all right with the world at least right now. My victim and fellow Tom Jones fan fled, though to my chagrin his retard cousin followed me around for the remainder of the evening mouthing and then shouting the words BOO. Had he been anything less than what I thought was a horrible figment of my state of mind, I would have given him The Treatment but alas, no. I was free. Or at least I thought I was. Or rather I was until The Dude made himself known. Now I didn't know who Sasha's man was but I knew I'd know him when I met him and I did. Frenchman, steely gaze, firm handshake, anger in his eyes. "Hello." "Hello." Perhaps he spoke his name. Perhaps not. But he made it clear that he was The Dude and Sasha never spoke to me again, which also made it clear that he was The Dude and I wondered if he wants to go, make a poke, take a chance at the merry-go-round of wonder and hit me, but he just wanted it known and I now that I knew I also knew that I didn't give a fuck as I had a mission: wring the fucking rag dry. So dressed and unmessed, me and The Doctor wandered the streets of Paris, past the hookers and techno pimps, onto the boat where my fear of the gendarmerie and my lack of command with the language sent a sense of fright through me that drove me off the boat and back to his hotel where we held forth on the impermanence of love and his refusal to accept anything other than its permanence and my total and overriding belief in the Church of the Received Blow Job and how I've abandoned integrity as a personal standard leaving it to fellows like Rollins, Biafra, McKaye and others who have a much better handle on shit like that then I obviously do. I stated my intent to, in total James Brown life and death fashion, embrace experience and then I gobbled a handful of valium and sleeping pills and nodded into dreams about Mexican temple gods whose names I cannot pronounce nor do I think I should. It was heavy. So heavy it's really going to take some time to talk about. |
|
PARIS END NOTES
*I wander into the bathroom to take a crap and when I return The Doctor is reading my Witkiewitcz book. "This is fucking horrible," he says and I grab the book from him, a gift from the Mad Pole Robert Iwanik and I read right to where my eyes have fallen and Witkacy, as he was also affectionately known, was holding forth about suicide, suicide, suicide and it suddenly dawns on me that sort of maybe, possibly my downer mood was owed to Witkacy. Maaayyyyybbbeeeee. I mean it's easy to make him my Christ and so I do. It's his fault. I'M fine. Everything's great. HE'S the one who cut his throat. Me? Well I'm, well I'm... fucking lost and adrift and I blame no one and nothing but my crippling dependency on destiny. Well I mean that and my total lack of fuck action. |
|
09/27/02: Astrolabe: Orleans, France
Big theater, another hardcore band opened for us. It was crowded. I pissed in a cup. My one and lasting memory: the Frenchman who screamed and waved his hands through the entire OXBOW set, staying at the lip of the stage where he had been during the set for 40 minutes AFTER the set, screaming at the top of his lungs. He was committed. Or he should be. I'd like to say more about this show-the folks who booked it were cool, the food was great, the meat was gourmet fucking quality-but I could feel my noose on the loose leg of reality just slipping away and so the rest is reportage. This is the journal. I'm the journalist but I'm not too sure of almost anything else. 09/28/02: Jardin Moderne: Rennes, France
On the way here we stop in Nantes and do another Acoustic Show with the whole band this time and we draw 50 people. It is cool but we need to rush to Rennes so we don't miss sound check and we don't and we get there early and everything is okay except for my state of mind, which is like the edge of the knife I carry: serrated. But we have a special feeling for Rennes. Like St. Etienne we have a love affair with it. Inexplicable this collectivism but it's there and so is our friend Sylvain from Rennes who now lives in Berlin and who introduced me to Red Bull and Vodka as an aperitif, his ex Sandrine who I'm deeply in longing for, Xavier, and a few others, and everything feels okay. There's meat on the table, a toilet in the backstage room (hence no piss in a cup), and at show time a fucking whole crowd of people. We play, no one gets fucking hurt, and after the show we make the decision to drive all the way to England tonight and NOT stay at Sandrine's place and she starts crying and my cock gets hard and she says she loves us and wants us to stay, and we promise to come back and when she goes to give me that two cheek Euro-kiss thing I almost embarrass us both. What do I mean BOTH?!?!? Hahah... I'm sort of well beyond being embarrassable it seems but I feel for her discomfort at my slipping the generalized intent of her feelings of sibling-like affection off of me and going straight to my cock commitment. That is to say: I wanted to fuck her like I wanted to draw another breath but it was on to Calais to catch the ferry and all of my longing and not sleeping and glowering at Temple Gods and playing this music, always this music, catch up to me and I go to sleep in the back of the van to the very old feeling strains of Reservoir Dogs, the video of which we've drug along. |
| Previous | Next |
