west coast tour part 2.

well, we went the whole tour without posting anything. this seems to be the norm. it was partly due to the lack of reliable internet connections around the country, but more than that due to being so busy and lazy. or busy and tired.

internet access around america kind of feels like, we imagine, phone service was say, during the depression. big cities, you were pretty well covered. out in nowheresville, it was sketchy.

flora and i whizzed back across america in the silver streak, which is full of all our gear. middle america is a bleak and foreboding landscape, but no more so than texas. or Arizona or new mexico. or parts of California. its very very beautiful. the rest of the band flew home a few days ago.

i’ll start with the last show first, because its freshest in my memory.

SEATTLE

Tractor in Seattle was definitely when all the wheels were turning the best for both the bands: winterpills and for the as yet unnamed kris delmhorst experience. (kris and the band of delmhorsts, the delmhorst whisperers. leading a delmhorst to water.)

full house and the room sounded great think i lost my favorite t-shirt at the show: if anyone finds a black “Janus Films” t-shirt in seattle, please send it back to me. this pic is the empty stage after the last show. sadness and pain, mixed with joy.

before the show we snacked on a cheese plate and some fine wines at a wine bar right next door. seattle was left largely un-explored, but we loved the small taste of it we got, which was all in the Ballard district. i was happy to see my old college pal Lori Goldston, who does her own project with the Black Cat Orchestra and plays often with Mirah. also sweetly spotted was Max’s sister Lucinda.

as Kris’s ‘keyboardist’, i have to say i felt like this was the first night of the whole tour where the parts were coming together, i wasn’t overplaying, and my ghastly mistakes were kept to a minimum.

the last evening was bittersweetly topped off by all of us drinking a bottle of lovely small-batch brandy that Kris gave to us as a gift. though great with child, Kris took a sip. her doctor said it was ok.

PORTLAND

a double-header in a tiny sold-out venue, Mississippi Studios. very intimate and both shows wet over well. of course for us it was 4 shows, so by the end of the night we absolutely exhausted. promoter Jess Beyer left us with a nice bottle of spanish wine. the green room, which doubled a recording studio, has an impressive collection of paint-by-numbers artwork. this one was my favorite.

hmm, maybe i lost my t-shirt at this venue. please call.

EUGENE

WOW Hall is a big place. we did not fill it at all. but the crowd was very attentive and the sound was great, and the monitor engineer was very sweet and gave Flora a sprig of lavender.

this was our first sampling of the famous northwest beer phenom. it was very strong. i played our set rather tipsy from one beer.

Kris noted during the set that we seemed to have entered a certain technical malfunction vortex once getting into oregon. things were just not quite working right. cables were lost, little boxes did not function, strings were un-tunable. we adjusted. also, kris finally made a special announcement (see photo). bold girl.

SAN FRANCISCO

Cafe du Nord. packed and boisterous, this place has a great old-fashioned salon-type feel. saw many old friends. time in SF was way too short.
part 3 to come. we head south, backwards in time.

west coast tour, blog one. pre-tour.

the first part of this tour consisted of flora and philip driving across america with all the band’s gear. since no actual shows occurred or ion fact anything musical at all except listening to endless country and talk radio, ipod mixes, and the occasional cd,  reading books (night by elie weisel; the sheltering sky by paul bowles; vanity fair) its hard to determine if it should count. suffice to say the time was treated like something of an adventure/vacation for us both. flora had never done such a trip; i’ve done several of them with my family when i was kid as we were a bi-coastal family, but its been ages. i for one was eager to revisit with newer/wiser eyes the haunts of my youth, and flora was eager to see new sites that before had just been images in books.

since many sites we simply tore through, the ones we chose to stop at were given fairly basic tourist treatments by us, but believe me even that is a lot. new orleans made us to actually want to live there even though we did not visit the destroyed parts of the city (what exactly kind of tourism would that be, unless we were there to help in some way? we were haopy tio help with our meager tourist dolars)). anyway, hours spent walking around the french quarter with a warm humid breeze coming off the gulf and eating (in the space of 12 hours) jambalaya, crawfish pie, crab, file gumbo, beignet and muffaleta, was exactly the brief taste we wanted.

then, it was a hallucinatory and beautiful trek across the vast expanses of west texas, a sunset in new mexico that burned the sense, a genuine mexican meal in the tiny hamlet of lordsburg, and the next day the high pilgrimage of the trip to the grand canyon, where 18 hours were spent with our senses completely flooded with the quietude and vastness of  the place, our heads dizzy with the altitude, and later with the copious zinfandels we drank, sitting with our feet dangling over a 3 miles drop into the canyon. just watching the light change within the space of 10 minutes in the canyon feels like lifetimes of actual seeing. no one should eve live without visiting this place.

shortly we will post a video.