TheOXBOW.com: OXBOW - Trouble That Will Trouble The World

Tour Diary: 1999 (Eugene) > Page 2

The Viking King

It's Oxbow and my weight is topping the scales at 260 pounds. So the first stop? Some place where we can get some "real" Japanese food. The authentic shit. What the natives spend their hard earned yen for. So we hit "The Viking King". Natch. A deli type deal we spend our per diems for the first week in a half an hour. Shingo, Chika, Kenmei, Bobo, Kentaro are all in attendance. They form the nexus of the totally (and now signed to a huge Japanese label) coolio band 54-71. My dream is to get them on tour with the famed swiss outfit 16-17. Forget the tour, just the intro would be cool. "54-71? Meet 16-17. 16-17? Say hi to 54-71." Jay-zus.

They're young guys though and though their english is not bad (and our Japanese is horrible and mostly limited to screaming and shrieking phrases from the Samurai Fisherman) they do manage to express their complete enthusiasm for musical art, a topic that while Niko, the most gracious of us banters about, and Fozzie, the most enthusiastic of us, is interested in, interests ME about as much as my aforementioned Balls. Which interest me much less than my never-ending international search for the unwholesome.

"Do you like/know The Champs?"

"Yeah, yeah, say, where does somebody go around here to get some, um, really, really hot sweaty man to man action porn?"

They look from one to the other and back to me who's at this point laughing hysterically.

"What I mean are there book stores around that sell photojournalistic essays on the angle of the dangle and angels in pigtails?"

Chika, having been schooled in Tennessee as an exchange student and hence knew exactly what kind of academic treatises I was pursuing said, Rappongi (A place that by the end of the tour we still had not gotten to). I was mollified and the next day was spent in a haze of the most powerful jetlagia that I've ever experienced.

20,000 Volts!

...which continues. I sleep back stage at the club. A 4 story below ground bomb shelter of a club. All of our friends are there, the guys from The Ruins, the guys from Zeni Geva, Melt Banana is supposed to show up. I'd have said Hello if I could have opened my fucking eyes for more than five minutes. I'm rousted only when our eager hosts and the men in 54-71 wake me up.

"We're to go on."

I want to say, "So?" But think of the advisory and the incarceration caution. I watch them play 2 songs and the club is crowded, all good signs. And they're a good band. But Morpheus is calling me and I'm out again, back stage again and sleeping and snoring like a motherfucker. The other bands play, the power blows out, the power comes on and Greg is waking me since it seems we didn't come 11 million miles to this isle of powerful sleep ju ju to, um, sleep.

I wander out onto the stage where we're noodling through an intro that in the snap and flash of lightening bursts into song and we're off like idiot savants. There's always a strange sense after we've played recently that something un-right has occurred.

We played with Perfect Circle, the spin-off from Tool project,in San Francisco right before we left and after ward things, the air, the club, the vibe was disturbed and disturbing and distinctly NOT right. And it's no different tonight. I'm not bragging on us, because I don't know that it's a skill exactly, but I see a few people in the audience catch their throats like they've opened their eyes onto something their eyes weren't ready to see and then I don't remember anything. Which could mean the usual, though I think Fozzie in an aside to Chika said it best while gesticulating through a boat rowing motion_"we're just getting going." I would have said "we're just rowing over there to get some fucking crackers," but that's just me.