Not Much Water Comin' Over The Hill

I

(David Berman, courtesy Drag City Records.)

David Berman passed yesterday at 52 – if you don't know who he is, imagine a richer baritone-d, off-kilter Leonard Cohen who softened his all-encompassing darkness with acid-country wit. Imagine Leonard disappeared near the height of his powers, occasionally sighted in the Internet's bowels, only to reappear after a decade with arguably the best record of his career and a slew of self-effacing, brutally honest interviews – only to pass away less than a week before hitting the road for his first performances in 10+ years.

I have to use a terrible comparison of two completely different artist in a weak attempt to express the simple fact – Berman had no peers. Very few songwriters of his (my? our? I'm 17 years younger, but grew up playing with many bands who out-aged us by a decade) generation can measure up – and certainly, his style and wordplay made him singular, even amongst aging indie demigods whose very existence in 2019 are challenged by the realities of the music industry. "Icon" doesn't feel right, but good friend Pete said it best today: "I've never read so many eulogies."

To hear him was to love him – to know him. Probably why I left a bar record night yesterday to go cry quietly in my car, feeling exactly like and completely different from the 19-year-old who did the same in his dorm after Elliott Smith. Maybe it's the additional generation that's passed since then, or just 16 years of sleeping, driving, drinking, and worrying – all that living formed callouses that yesterday's news sloughed straight through.

II

Vienna, Austria has an amazing fast, modern train whose terminal is just down a few escalators from the international airport – for 10 euro or so, you can jet right to the city center on one of the smoothest, quietest, most comfortable airport transit systems I've ever ridden on. In May, Tyler and I flew in together and had settled into said train, when I connected to WiFi to get that first news drip after hours spent on international flights.

In a tumultuous spring, I had publically asked for – then received! – news of a new Bill Callahan record. Thought I'd try my manifestation luck again in April by asking the Gods for Dave Berman to return. The first thing I saw upon turning on my phone was the Purple Mountains news. I'd done it! Manifested another record out of the ether – I put my phone in Tyler's face, we high-fived, then bounded out of the train into a sunny Vienna, late afternoon, basking in the Stadtpark while watching toddlers scoot over a pedestrian bridge and summer revelers sip wine and chat in earshot of a quiet city stream. 

2019 was looking up, ripe with the return of possibility – right as we overcame the bland vagaries of adulthood to take a group ride down the Danube.

III

It's Spring 2006 and Everything, Now! is touring in a disused airport shuttle bus with handicap lift built into the rear door – most of us are in school at Ball State, so we've called the tour SPRING BAKED. Not only is the band a 6-piece at this point, but we've also got two good friends and roommates along for the ride. It's basically a rolling party bus – one overnight drive, I hear screaming and nervous laughter and it's because one of the guitarists is pissing out the window while driving through Georgia's foothills so fast that the pee is just streaming back the side of the bus in warm rivulets, losing additional flow in each gap between the cheap sliding windows like a leaky irrigation channel.

At the close of this tour, we made a 2-night stop in Athens, GA (our lead singer/songwriter's hometown) to play one of our favorite DIY spots – a multi-story-tall basement set into a hillside beneath street-level commercial storefronts. Because it was a weekend, the show was scheduled early-ish, 7pm, so as not to compete with all the other venues in town. 

We'd begun making friends in Nashville with a bunch of angel-voiced, bearded dudes who played multiple instruments and had a shit-ton of great rock-n-roll bands: Hands Down Eugene, The Carter Administration, and some others I can't remember. Through one of these connects (God knows how any of these super-talented Nashville folks dug our shit-gear, longhair, psych-punk-junk-prog jams...) we met a brilliant slide guitar player. That night in Athens, he was sitting in with a band opening for the Silver Jews at the 40 Watt.

[Note: I'm realizing with some research tonight that this was the first Silver Jews show ever. Previously...I was only aware that it was their first tour.]

I was 3 or so years into a deep Pavement obsession that started the second I heard S&E – Silver Jews ambled into my ears via a burnt CD from some friend and the laconic sounds of what I first thought were Pavement gone honky-tonk eventually seeped into my veins. When Tanglewood Numbers came out in 2005, I was Music Director at WCRD – and songs from that LP that should be goddam standards today ("Punks in the Beerlight", "Sometimes A Pony Gets Depressed", "I'm Getting Back Into Getting Back Into You") rapidly made their way onto our automated playlist and my regular show. 

Back to Athens – slide guitar guy gets ahold of Jon and asks if 2 of us want on the guestlist for the Silver Jews show. We figure we can make it straight out of our set, and agree. I'm not sure how we decided it was us who could go out of the 8 other than...we were the biggest fans? It was Jon's band? Regardless, I remember squeezing into the packed club and hearing the Joos rip through a great set, Dave dressed in a maroon blazer and towering over the stage and band. Once he started singing, all felt right. 

This was a musician's dream – the best night of my life! I was pretty sure – I remember coming down from the basement keg beer, thanking Slide Guitar, and leaving 40 Watt on cloud nine, a completely different person than the shy, uncultured nerd who nervously moved into a dorm 3 years earlier. We decamped back to the DIY space and drank through a 3rd show of the night – some fast-as-fuck punk via Guyana Punch Line that jackhammered thankfulness into my skull.

(Everything, Now! circa Spring 2006, on a beach in St. Pete, FL.)

IV

As I sit and stare at my wall of records, I suppose that the reason my shelves are always overflowing (besides an addictive personality) is that music affords you a workingman's way to connecting with a higher power – 5, 10, 15 bucks to see or experience art created from some body/soul/sweat/tears – art that takes you places, bridges divides between strangers, and attaches itself, barnacle-style, to events in your life, accentuating and colouring in the meaning of life events and decisions that you don't recognize the Power, Importance, or Heft of when you are in them. 

Only later. The gift of hindsight is a weird drug for self-analysis. In some ways, a curse: it's hindsight and our need to shape stories in order to make sense of the World that forces Berman's existence into an arc, when, like our own, it was more likely a squiggly line, frayed here, grayed there. We wanted to see Purple Mountains as a redemption, as someone defeating something inside themselves, for a moment or a hundred moments, and emerging the victor.

Upon his passing, the arc shifts: the album becomes a presage; and who but ourselves can parse the two-sided coin of self-lacerating wit and darkness? Sometimes we don't even know what side of our own coin is heads up.

I'm deeply sad that DCB won't be able to look back at the outpouring of love inspired by Purple Mountains and his passing. I hope he found peace.

EuroVelo #6 – Vienna to Budapest: Prep, Gear, & Schedule

Rental bikes parked in a Komárno courtyard.
Took me the full week to figure out how to keep my extra bag
from swinging off to one side six times an hour...

Prep
On an average week, I bike 20 miles total to-and-from work, with an odd mile ride to the grocery, pub, or on an errand (in addition to a mix of running and HIIT workouts during the week). Since pleasure rides in Indiana are usually out of the question from November-March, I only started accumulating miles about 6 weeks before leaving. Starting with a couple 10-mile rides, I quickly worked up to a max of 30 miles. My high total for 7 days was about a week out from the trip, where I rode ~90 miles in the span of 6 days. I tweaked my groin near the end of that, meaning I took most of the last 7 days before the trip off.

This amount of prep was sufficient, however, I probably could've done with a couple more back-to-back rides. After 3 consecutive 35-milers near the end of the trip (plus pulling a whole extra bag & a final day high of 85), I was pretty thrashed.

Gear
My resistance to "gear" goes way back to not knowing what the fuck I was doing joining a DIY/punk band at the age of 19. My "gear" was always second-hand, bootleg, soldered and duct-taped together, hand-painted, falling apart – it sounded "right" but definitely worked wrong. Despite my cheap Lutheranism encouraging me to wear ratty zip-ups and various free, leaky windbreakers I've accumulated over my 35 years...I actually bought some decent stuff, mixed in with cheap imitation gear. Knowing the forecast showed a 75-degree day and a 40-degree wind-and-rain combo, I was worried about overpacking and having to carry a bunch of stuff I wouldn't wear, but bike-wise, everything I took was utilized.

• Columbia quick dry dad pants - yes, these zip into shorts, because I'm An American. They were invaluable, warm, windproof, and never got smelly. The material is very thin, so they pack down nicely. Later in my trip, temps hit 90, and these were my only shorts.
• Cheapo Chinese padded shorts - one of the seams chewed my inner thigh, I got a saddle sore from chafing on my quad on day 7, and my assbones felt like they were on fire halfway through day 1 due to switching from my normal road bike to an upright-style touring bike. Still, without these, it would've doubtless been worse. The fit is nice and they did seem to wick when it was hot.
• SmartWool Merino long-sleeve baselayer - definitely the most expensive piece of clothing I've ever purchased, and turns out the most comfortable. This was exactly as advertised, and the perfect baselayer to wear for a week straight, at which point it only smelled mildly. Merino sheep must be comfy as fuck all the time.
• Pearl Izumi cold-weather wind/waterproof jacket with hood - almost didn't bring this, because it doesn't pack down and is very warm. But I wore it the whole first half of the week over the baselayer, and it was pretty perfect for the cold air, on-and-off rain, and wind (which was always way more intense when we were riding on river dikes). Note: the model I own is 3 years old and this is the closest current match...
• Cotopaxi Sambaya stretch fleece - how the fuck did I never own a fleece before? This one was just ridiculously comfortable, and I was pretty much wearing it at all times off the bike until the temps hit 70. Was also my go-to walking around jacket through the rest of the chilly weather I encountered. Anyways, guess I'm a fleece guy now. I listen to alt-J and wear cargo shorts and drink Stella. 
• Shoes - well, I wore some Puma flats I've had for awhile and got on clearance. They worked out and I may not have looked that stupid. They also don't smell after a day on the bike, and trust me...I breathed deep. 
• Evenings - I had one pair of jeans and plenty of t-shirts, which combined with my fleece and an ultralightweight Cotopaxi zippable windbreaker/shell, kept me comfortable walking to dinner and around town each night.

I don't think I would've changed anything here for the weather, other than getting better padded shorts (lesson learned!). I had my trusty LUNA sockhat but never needed to wear it (except when summiting the Zugspitze) since I had a hood; though it did suffuse my bag with good vibes. In hindsight, I should've shipped my extra bag ahead to Budapest, but didn't arrange it ahead of time. I considered using NannyBag at the last minute, as I had a 60-minute layover on my train from Budapest to Nuremberg, but I'm glad I didn't as that would've been a pretty major hassle, and that time was better used eating falafel...scharf. That said, it's a cool service that I'd revisit when needing to stow luggage in a big city.

Schedule
We picked up bikes from Pedal Power in Vienna on a Monday (€109 for a week; included helmet, pannier, lock, pump, repair kit + spare tubes; another €65 to drop-off in Budapest). In hindsight, I would've picked up earlier so we could leave earlier. C'est la vie!

This is just what we ended up biking each day; more to come on the daily rides.

• Day 1: Vienna -> Bratislava - 42 miles (we probably did closer to 46-50 due to a couple wrong turns...)
• Day 2: off day in Bratislava (it was 38-degrees...& rainy...thus we decided to take an off day)
• Day 3: Bratislava -> Mosonmagyaróvár - 24 miles (then we hopped a train to Győr as the temperature dropped sub-40 and it started raining quite hard at noon; this saved us ~20 miles of not very scenic riding...)
• Day 4: Győr -> Komárno - 37 miles
• Day 5: Komárno -> Esztergom - 36 miles
• Day 6: Esztergom -> Szentendre - 38 miles (we probably did closer to 40 due to riding past a ferry we needed to take...)
• Day 7: Szentendre -> Budapest - 12 miles

I didn't use Strava, but we logged close to 190 miles in 7 days (with 1 off day) – definitely lifetime highs for all of us. I do still have a pang of guilt for taking a train, but the entire train ride (and the mile walk to the hotel) was pouring cold rain, so the afternoon would've been miserable at the very least, or made us all ill at the worst. 

A Man of Letters

[Part of Think Kit by SmallBox. Today's prompt: First line. Pretend you're writing your autobiography. Give us your first line, a first chapter, or even just an image. What's the story of you? Based on a previous discussion with a friend, I twisted this prompt and imagined a future in which I was a known entity, and my letters would be collected, published, and dissected. A real 'man of letters' – an anomaly in 2015.]


I tried many times to become a man of letters, before it took. There were the various journals, construction-paper-and-staple bound in bold colors around the gray, lined, re-used pulp paper that tore easily under my pencil's eraser as a seven-year-old. Those entries were mostly rote; who did what at lunch, my after school concerns – the neighborhood crew I was running around with, or what was new at the small creek that ran through our 1960s-era subdivision.

In high school there were composition books, the black-and-white speckled covers, the inside flap penned with a thousand iterations of signing my first time. This must've seemed more pertinent in study hall than reading or writing – although there were poems of a sort interspersed with math and history notes, mostly paired couplets with seven or eight words per line, hard end rhymes, and choruses that were about as pathetic as you'd expect.

Other beginnings included the magnetic-clasped, faux-leather-bound half-size volume from Carmichael's in Louisville. This went with me on my first few full-band tours, tucked into a backpack full of unwashed clothes, peanut butter jars, and squished loaves of Aunt Millie's Honey Wheat. In fits and starts this filled up with paragraphs of floors I'd slept on, weird things that people said in the back of the van, to-do lists, directions to bars or clubs or the last homely house – pre-smartphone-era, most things I owned were fair game for jotted down, turn-by-turn instructions that ended in bold-faced, underlined addresses.

Even postcards from sojourns would often go unsent – even, embarrassingly, after they were addressed. They'd get stuck in a book purchased on the road, or like a weed poking out of a clump of receipts. And once I came home, it seemed an affront to the addressee to send the postcard stamped instead with INDIANAPOLIS IN. They'd notice, judge me (correctly) for my sloth and inability to write three sentences that basically summed up the weather, my location, and what I'd done in the past 24 hours.

In the end, it was the omnipresent, real-time connectivity imposed on me by the all-too-consuming digital world that made sitting at the table, curtains open, coffee steaming, in front of a pen and stationery – where else could one carefully compose thoughts that were meant for a single reader? Away from the screen strain, I gradually shed the filter of my online self one scribble at a time.

west, vol. 6 (interlude: maps)

During my travels, I developed a slight obsession for mapping. I've been using Google Earth (and maps) for a couple years at work, mostly unsuccessfully, but have finally found an outlet plotting points of interest, bike & hiking routes, and running loops. Running routes actually provided my entry-point; while running my neighborhood route at home, I plotted it via Google Maps so I could calculate the distance I was running.



View Neighborhood Running Route in a larger map
And here-in lies another obsession; when I began running almost 18 months ago, I began to keep strict track of the distance and time of each session, perhaps a way of tracking my improvement, but more likely an outgrowth of my somewhat obsessive-compulsive personality.

The small 4-bedroom house in the West-side 'burbs of Kokomo necessitated that my younger brother, Wes, share a room with me, in which we had homemade bunk beds, a Nerf basketball drawer, more Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles paraphernalia than would seem financially possible, and most notably, a 1960s-era map of the United States, measuring at least 6-feet across, that my Dad had salvaged from a defunct classroom set-up. I remember plotting points and routes on the map, far before travelling by plane. Most years, our vacation consisted of driving south to Nashville, Tennesee, to visit relatives, or further south to Gulf Shores, Alabama, where we camped in pine-covered swamps at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico.



View Canal Route 1 in a larger map
Despite its flaws, the canal in downtown Indianapolis is a great running route. Though I hadn't ran on it till this weekend, it is free of street-crossings & most exhaust smell. Despite the Labor Day weekend ignorant pedestrians, long, reclined bikes piloted by poor-steering 12-year-olds, and fat, Segway-riding, jean-wearing tourists; running the smooth stones alongside the slow-moving, blue-green canal was a welcome relief from the neighborhood route full of potholes, buckled pavement, loose dogs, and throttling mufflers.

I remember running my finger along routes in-between cities, wondering how so many cities could be clustered in the tiny states of New England, and reading strange place names in my head; Nogales, Butte, Amarillo, Baja California. I had never been west of Missouri at the time, and so the West held a magical sort of realism, a place so full of names that it wasn't quite real at the time, more akin to the maps I pored over at the beginning of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, which had equally strange names; Lothlorien, Mordor, the Shire.



Detail of LOTR map. I really like the contour lines denoting where the waters of Middle Earth begin. Just as when I was a kid, I always wonder what lay to the East of these mystically named lands...was it just vast nothingness? An evil worse than Mordor? I wondered the same thing about the edge of space, once I realized the universe was constantly expanding, which meant there was a constantly moving edge. Would you bump into it with your nose, like a sliding door made of glass?

At the age of 22, driving out West was a revelation in distance. Armed with only a free road atlas, highlighter, and a folder full of printed directions, we traversed the Deep South, Southwest, West Coast, Pacific Northwest, and Great Plains. All of the greens, pale yellows, and oranges of the 1960s canvas-backed map came to life in New Orleans, Albuquerque, Sacramento, and Spokane. The craggy-ridged mountain ranges were no longer bold textures drawn over blood-orange hued terrain; they were omnipresent in the horizon, looming over Seattle, obscuring San Francisco, bisected by a road lashed out of Salt Lake City that threw us out on to the plateau.



View Cabin in a larger map
Detail of the cabin weekend. Left point is the cabin, right point is Nooksack Falls. The green line is a trail running along the Nooksack River. More details on my encounter with the glacial-fed stream in my next post, West, Vol. 6.

Returning to the cool greens and yellows of Indiana was relief, though not temperature-wise, long-hair and patchy beard only exacerbating the 90-degee, humid weather. But on the eyes, after escaping through the harsh blues and yellow-browns of Colorado and Nebraska, the lush greens of Indiana, pole-straight cornfields occasionally interrupted by lush stands of elm, maple, and oak, the low-lying scruff of soybean leaves that seem a single solid mass until perpendicular to the exacting rows; the map wasn't lying with its colors, though accepting that I had traversed such a visual spectrum was still hard to swallow.



View Chuckanut Ridge Hike in a larger map
Hike taken on the last day of the 2011 Western Swing. Though the rise in elevation was only around 1300 feet over a couple miles, it was more taxing than I originally thought. Near the top of the ridge, I finally sprinted uphill as long as I could, bored by the interminable climb that had not yet produced a view. Ah, the patience of the Internet age. Less than 5 minutes later, we were rewarded with a sudden clearing on a sheer rock cliff, looking over Lake Padden to Mt. Baker.

Returning home from the West last October, after flying out over Mt. Rainier, the only identifiable Indiana object was Conner Prairie, identified by its stationary hot air balloon hanging stagnant over a quilt-work of crop fields and encroaching suburbia. There was no relief in this return, and there was none in my most recent return either, the night landscape of Indianapolis disorienting and unfamiliar, with not even a Lucas Oil Stadium sighting to grant me directional bearing. Again I had flown out in the height of a sunny day, passing Mt. Rainier while my seatmate took pictures out of the window. She noticed me staring, and paused so I could get a good look. I glanced, and realized that the view wasn't one that I could get tired of, wasn't one that I wished to leave.



View Bellingham Overlook in a larger map
A bike-ride-turned-hike to a spectacular ridge overlooking the city of Bellingham and the bay. An army of 30+ mountain bikers passed us near the top of the ridge, though I was glad we left our bikes at the trailhead a mile back. The trail opened to a dusty, street-wide path atop the ridge, and we plopped on rocks and tree stumps, eating blueberries and basil-wheat bread with goat cheese, warmed by the sun.

musing on 27

The first time I really felt old happened at a house show. I was in Greenville, North Carolina, a shitty town in the no-man's tobacco plains between the college metro areas to the west, and the barrier islands of the Outer Banks several hours further east. Maybe it wasn't as shitty as it appeared on this particular day, one of constant drizzle, the whole atmosphere remaining a cold, steely gray through all waking hours. It was early November, and we were on tour.


Played in a house like this. Maybe this house? Add soiled mattresses against the wall, elbow-to-ass crowd, and sour puddles of beer and cigarette butts.

Summer is prime touring season for any number of reasons. Weather is great for driving long-distances, bands full of college-kids have extra free-time, people like to go out more often, spend more money, get more drunk. November is not prime touring season. It is cold, or rainy, or close to the holidays, impressing their moral glow on social activities. And the November immediately following one of the biggest recessions since the 1930's, well, let's just say this might have been the worst-timed tour possible. I was burnt out from working a full-time job and trying to book shows that we wouldn't completely lose our ass on. The van had died in Texas more than a year previous, thus we'd be packing all of our gear into Dave's mom's minivan.

If I had the choice between buying booze and forgetting myself, or buying records and thinking about the human condition...fuck it, I'm going to buy booze. Idealism fades in the face of shitty economic conditions, especially when any media source you can hear or see is inundating you with fear. Fear of disappearing jobs, fear of government, fear of your neighbors, your boss, fear of change, fear of anything that could change your shitty way of life.


Insert 5 dudes (the smallest, me at 5'11" & 160 lbs). 1 full drumset. 2 guitar amps. 1 bass amp. 1 keyboard amp. 1 box of cables. 3 guitar cases. 1 keyboard. 1 keyboard stand. Sleeping bags, food, coats and hats.

So, everyone there got drunk. Raging drunk, set-piles-of-stuff-on-fire drunk, pour-a-Forty-into-the-donation-bucket drunk. But it was a good-time buzz, enjoying the bands. We turned in a sweaty set marred only by Dave breaking strings and sitting down in the room's only floorspace--directly in-front of the kick-drum.

Outside, the fire now composed of treated lumber pallets, its sinewy, chemical smoke trail twisting up to the streetlight illuminating the sandy yard, we sat on broken benches, salvaged chairs, overturned objects. Kids (twenty-somethings, really) were buzzing about while Titus Andronicus set up for their guitar-army overdriven punk sound. Their van shone somewhere in the distance, a reminder of how far we hadn't come; 25 years old and still borrowing someone's minivan to pile in.


Titus Andronicus. This show did lack crowd-surfing, since the room was barely wider than the length of a body. Nice dudes, they offered to trade albums, and were a bit taken aback when we told them we had five. One asked, "How old are you guys?" I spent most of my time outside coveting their van and probable-hotel-money.

A couple songs into their energetic set, I was squeezed out of the bedroom-sized space by jostling bodies. Scrambled back through the fetid kitchen to the fire, still burning. From inside, the chords began playing a note-for-note cover of Weezer's "The Sweater Song." Kids in the yard, kitchen, street, immediately exclaimed, dashed in noisily to fill the room even more beyond its breaking point.

I stared into the fire, put my hands deeper into my pockets, watched the bodies stream in until the yard was quiet save for the brief sounds of traffic, moisture popping, snapping as the fire leached into the sky.