BOILED PEANUTS SUCK!!!! But we had to try them. The road that runs through Dothan, Alabama, the proclaimed Peanut Capital of the U.S., is lined with vendors flashing loud Neon, Vegas-worthy signs, each with an invitation to try their nuts:
“Boiled Peanuts!”
“Fried Peanuts!!”
“Green Peanuts!!!”
“Get ’em now!”
“Taste Them! Wow!”
“MMMM!”

Always up for an adventure, Dellucci pulled onto a grassy shoulder and we poured ourselves from the blissfully airconditioned cabin into the soupy southern humidity. We copped a sandwich bag of boiled nuts from a wiry-haired woman who’d just dropped her dentures in a plastic cup full of coke when we approached.
“Takes the rot off’um better than Listerine,” she laughed when we declined her offer of beverages with our order. Off to the side, in a gravely patch, Soucy insisted we film everyone’s first experience with boiled peanuts and giddily handed each of us a shelled nut from our newly acquired stash. The normally dry husk I’d grown attached to belonging to my peanut experience was soggy and slimy. It didn’t make for a great first impression.

Kenny went first, not that we were going in any specific order, he just got to the nut before the rest of us. He popped the rubbery, albino nut in his mouth and his face wrenched into a scowel of cartoonish proportions. You’d think the rest of us would’ve heeded his reaction, but like anything disgusting, one needs to try it first hand.

The peanut was a slug in my mouth, deceptively tolerable, before its flavor kicked in; a combo of something rotten crossed with an oil refinery. I swallowed as fast as I could to get the foul flavor out of my mouth. The consensus was immediate—boiled peanuts were an acquired taste we hadn’t quite acquired. I approached our toothless vendor again. She laughed like a banshee when I told her I’d take her up on that beverage after all. But all the orange soda in the world wouldn’t erase the taste in my mouth.

“How do these peanut galleries have enough fans to survive?” I wondered aloud as we drove away.
“Maybe they make their living off ignorant, curious tourists like us driving through their nutty capital,” suggested Kenny.

A ½ mile later my mouth still tasted skunked so I insisted we stop at a supermarket to find something to de-funkify our tastebuds. My cell phone rang in the middle of the store. It’s always embarrassing to have an alarm-like ring go off in a public place but how extraordinary to be able to wirelessly communicate almost anywhere?!?! It was my friend Jayson from Chicago who said he might come to the show in St. Louis. I was overjoyed. We chatted as I perused endless isles of processed food. In the end, I settled on some loose carrots and a squeeze bottle of honey mustard. Back in the van, I used a dull-bladed carrot peeler to scrape the carrot skin into an empty coffee mug. I should have gone on vocal rest after our last show, I reflected. I’m starting to get horse and, what the band calls ‘krevelly,’ a mixture of gravely and straight-up crappy. It started to rain, that Florida-style fat droplet rain, and I sat shotgun, peeling carrots, doing vocal exercises hoping my voice would de-krevel by the time we got to the gig.

By the time we showed up in Destin, the weather cleared. Thankfully too, because Harbor Dock’s stage is a pier… not on a pier folks…but, a literal pier.

Eric (our favorite bubble machine opener) drove down from Mobile to see us. In our days apart, he’d written and recorded a tribute to our time together in NOLA when he had to sleep with six strangers. The song was genius.

As a massive crowd filed into Harbor Docks, it suddenly occurred to us it was Memorial Day weekend! Shit!!! How was this huge, extremely drunk, youthful crowd going to react to our folking music?!?! As I’d predicted, our first set was…. eh hem…difficult. We had about 50 people up front who were diligently listening and growing increasingly annoyed with the drunken bantering the rest of the crowd was doing. Halfway through the set, a very drunk pair of brothers in cargo shorts started heckling us, so I grabbed one of them up on stage and told the audience he was going to do a modern dance interpretation of the next song. The guy proved hysterical! He danced offbeat and flapped his arms like a mating ostrich. At the end of the song, he decided he didn’t want to leave. In fact, he wanted to sing a Johnny Cash song and called his brother up on stage to join him.

In drunk-eese, he shouted into the mic, “We’re gonna sing, we’re gonna sing…..shhhhhh… We’re gonna sing a REEEEEAL song now. ‘Walk the Line.’ Hit it boys!” The band looked at me and I shrugged and suggested we play along. Promptly, the pair forgot all the words to their song. They spit ropey saliva all over my mic and treated us like their private karaoke party.

“All Southerners aren’t rednecks,” a clean-cut gent near the front yelled apologetically as we took our set brake early. The harbor was directly behind us and a crowd of respectful pelicans watched, flapped and dried their feathers atop barnacled pilings. Soucy suggested we skip the rest of the gig and just play for the birds.

We decided to kick the second set off with “If I Had a Million Dollars” by The Bare Naked Ladies. Eric joined us, lifting our spirits significantly. If only he’d brought his bubble machine for this crowd. Uninspired to play our songs to a Memorial Day crowd that preferred to sing Johnny Cash songs they didn’t know the words to, we riffed on a funky made-up song that got people on the dance floor. Since we were making the song up as we went, we didn’t know exactly how to end it, and, like Chevy Chase, unable to get of the roundabout in National Lampoons European Vacation, we wound up playing the same song for an hour. I even took a break to get a drink at one point and no one in the crowd was any the wiser.

Harbor Dock’s may not have been my favorite gig but the venue did hook us up with 3 (not 2 but 3) rooms at the Best Rest Inn and I got my own room!!! I love my guys but man, it was nice to be lonely for a night. The room looked like an old shoe, not because of it’s size so much but because it felt so worn in. It looked like it’d walked through puddles and grown fungus and lost a chunk of its sole but I got some dreaming done and to sleep alone so I can’t complain.

Cheers to the adventures that await, to the friends along the way, and yes, even to the peculiar tastes we brave. After all, doesn’t every memorable tale deserve a flavor all its own?

Picture this: Five amigos ride into town on their trusty white steed “Moby” for a two-show night in Georgia. The adventure unfolds under a skyline lit up like a treasure chest.

The plan was ambitious; a 6:30 sound check at The Variety Playhouse for an 8:30 opening set for Beth Nielsen Chapman. In the two hours between, I’d slip over to Smith’s Old Bar across town, play a solo set on a revolving stage as part of an unplugged artist series.

The Variety Playhouse was a sight for bar-bruised eyes. Gold ornamental filagre and cushioned theater seats sat in orderly rows basking in lightly lavender-scented air. This weren’t no 25¢ Beer night folks, this was the big time. I daydreamed of someday headlining a place like this as I dabbed my fat lip from where the mic punched me back in Tuscaloosa and watched Beth take the stage for her sound check. Jessee, our handsome promoter, welcomed us with open arms leading us downstairs into our very own private green room stocked with our rider’s requests and then some.

I took my guitar out and started strumming GCD GCD GCD GCD over and over while we waited for Beth to finish her check. We sang all the songs we could think of, cooked out of that magic chord progression; “Louie Louie,” “Hang on Sloopy,” “Wild Thing,” and all of them at the same time so that the soup of songs combined into one giant gumbo making it sound like we were speaking in tongues. Beth appeared and told us she liked what she was hearing coming out of our dressing room which made me question how hard she’d been listening.

Beth was delightful and let us teach her some of the dance moves we’d learned from Eric, our bubble-blowing opener from Mobile. We taught her the “Egg Beater,” the “Super Shopper” and the “Lawnmower.”

Beth has an amazingly strong and angelic voice and it was a joy to open up for her, so much the opposite of the crowd at Smith’s Old Bar where Jessee shuttled me in his midnight black truck between gigs.

Smith’s Old Bar was packed when we arrived and the audience was already silly drunk. The stage spun like a lazy Suzan. A solo dude in a fedora sang a cover of Toto’s ‘Roxana’ in cargo pants on the front half of the stage. He was hidden from me behind a red velvet curtain divider but I could hear the audience not listening to him. Smith’s Old Bar crew grabbed my guitar, plugged me, and yelled “Start playing!” as they spun me on the merry go round to the front of the house. The curtain tangled in my guitar string as I tried to start “Sign of Rain.” Suddenly I was playing in front of an awkwardly well-lit room of people, way more interested in scoping chicks than listening to music. I sang my three-song set staring out at what looked like a 90’s version of Beach Blanket Bingo. I competed with a storm of conversations and, playing as loudly as I could, gained the attention of about 50% of the room for about 10% of the time I was up there and I wasn’t up there that long.

As I left, a pair of middle-aged women shoved pastel-colored beanie babies into my hands insisting I take care of these stuffed animals as though they were living breathing things “and don’t ever EVERY tare their tags off!!” they insisted “That’s what makes them valuable.” I was very confused and while the stage continued to rotate without me my head felt like it was still spinning. What the hell are Beanie Babies?!?!

I woke up with a song in my head….

SALLY TAYLOR, 25¢ BEER, read the marquee—a sign (quite literally) and an omen that didn’t bode well. The boys and I gathered beneath it, laughing and snapping pictures to commemorate the insult. But honestly, I was worried.

The drive from New Orleans took six hours, an hour longer than anticipated, and was punctuated by endless wrong turns down unmarked kudzu-lined backroads that nearly brought us to blows. By the time we reached our creepy motel on the outskirts of Tuscaloosa, Brian and I were itching to shake off some steam. The motel, ensnarled in a sea of urban sprawl, hosted a ¼ mile of frontage road. Back and forth Brian and I racked up miles’ rollerblading, past the IHOP, The Lonestar Steak House, and The big box Kmart as the sun got closer to the earth. Upon our return, I insisted on getting dolled up for the show even if it made us late. I wore my mom’s 70’s black, midcalf skirt and a pair of brown boots, I made the boys wait for me to mend with a needle and thread of dental floss. They each complained we were already late for the gig but once there, they admitted they wished we’d stalled longer.

That marquee, unsettling as it was for any singer-songwriter, wasn’t the only surprise awaiting us. The stage was a precarious arrangement of plywood stapled to 2x4s which quivered underfoot like a trampoline. The bar was eerily silent, save for the Miss Universe pageant playing on the TV over the bar. We bided our time waiting for our sound engineer, by watching contestants glide across the screen in extravagant, feathered costumes, their strained smiles seemingly more cumbersome than their attire.

We were surprised when the sound in The Booth wasn’t too bad and even more surprised when the bar filled up to capacity for our show (or maybe for the 25¢ beer). Being a college town, Tuscaloosa was usually quiet around this time of year, but summer school had just begun, breathing life into the usually dormant streets.

Despite a full house and decent sound, there was no denying our stage was a dental hazard. Any time one of us moved, be it to turn up an amp or hit a drum, my mic stand would swing precariously like a metronome trying to punch me in the face. I managed to purse my lips every time I saw the mic charge me like a drunk sailor. but during the final song, just when I thought I was in the clear, the mic took a swing that clocked me so hard, it chipped my front tooth and gave me a big fat bloody lip. Maybe it was the 25¢ beer, but I managed to swallow the blow and finish the song without missing a note. The guys were impressed.

And that’s show business folks.

When we arrived in NOLA we discovered Chris had booked us into a cushy Marriot with a rooftop pool! Yay.

Unfortunately, there was only one room for the five of us… no make that six of us (we brought our Mobile, AL bubble machine toting opener, Eric Erdman along with us to NOLA. We couldn’t leave him behind after he’d provided us with the best laugh of our lives.)* Dellucci, Eric, and I would share the double bed closest to the door and Soucy, Kenny and Bri would bunk up in the other. The trouble was less with our tight sleeping arrangements (which proved pretty humorous for poor Eric, who’d only just met us) and more with the vast number of open bags lying around the room. The floor became a hazardous obstacle course when the lights went out later in the night and you could hear any one of us crying out as we tripped our way to or from the bathroom.

After checking in, we escaped our close quarters. Some of us went to read books through slats in pool chairs on the roof. But I wanted to go shopping and, generously, Eric agreed to accompany me. At “Hemlines” a French Quarter boutique at 609 Chartres St, Eric patiently took a seat on a mocha leather bench and let me try on 50 outfits for him. He generously approved of each and every one of them in a southern drawl that could charm the panties off a nun. I left a little lighter in the wallet and extremely grateful for Eric’s admiration and attention. I think I have a little crush on him. No one can make me laugh the way he does and walk away without my heartstrings attached.

We opened for The Continental Drifters at The Howlin’ Wolf. Overall, it was a pretty uneventful set except that during “For Kim,” Kenny was wriggling around a whole bunch. He was trying to hint at me that he had to pee but I just thought he was dancing funny. Finally, he couldn’t wait any longer. He dropped his bass mid-song and flew off, stage left only to discover the restrooms were located on the opposite side of the stage……I’ll spare you the details of the debacle but let’s just say that the cup wasn’t quite large enough. It happens to all of us at some time. Poor Kenny.

Late night, we hit “The Bitter End,” a bar uptown where our friends George Porter Jr. and The Running Partners were playing. Man, did they make it funky in that humid little joint. We snagged beers at a round table close to the band. Cigar smoke billowed in the blue stage lights and Brint Anderson’s guitar, wawa-ed it’s sexy filth into our souls.

*See The Bubble Machine

There’s no curfew in Mobile, Alabama so college students tossed “wanna fight?!?!” glances and ill-advised pick-up lines at each other into the wee hours of the morning.

As we rolled the last of our gear past the backdrop of this drunken scene, I found myself grappling with how to share the uproarious, effervescent, and brilliant spectacle that unfolded on stage earlier that evening.

Let me begin by asking if you’ve ever known the thrill of riding a rollercoaster of infectious laughter. The type that starts as a gentle simmer, a bubbly sensation, as though being shaken like a soda can, until suddenly, the pressure’s too great, and you can’t keep it in. It’s not just any type of laughter; it’s the bottle rocket, explosive kind; the type that starts with your lips tightly sealed, trying desperately to hold it in, until a sound you’d expect to come from an elephant’s trunk, comes out of your own mouth and the sound, in itself, is so funny and embarrassing you might, for an instant, forget what made you laugh in the first place and start laughing at yourself for the noise just emitted from your body.

It’s that elephant noise that kills you man, every time, because if you’d just let yourself chuckle a little “te-he” in the first place, all that energy would have dispersed evenly, the way you can let air slowly out of a shaken soda to avoid a catastrophe. But not after the elephant sound….no, no, no…Because then you are doomed for the rest of your life to laugh not only at the funny thing, not only at the embarrassing elephant squeal you allowed through your lips but at the fact that you shouldn’t even have been laughing at the funny thing in the first place.

THE FUNNY THING
Eric Erdman, a talented, charismatic, bubble-machine-toting virtuoso, was our opening act. He held the philosophy that a performer plus bubbles didn’t just equate to a good show but transformed it into something spectacular. He insisted, and I quote:

“A good performer makes for a good show, but a good performer with bubbles makes for a GREAT show.”

-Eric Erdman “The Birdman”

Eric had rigged his whimsical bubble generator to his guitar pedal board so that, with one stomp, he could turn any stage into a magical bubble wonderland. Did I want to use it for my set? he asked. Uh, hell yes I did.

The bubble machine was deceptively simple; a seemingly innocuous black box filled with ivory liquid soap. But inside, it harbored an arsenal of at least twenty bubble wands and a fan that could have cooled a small desert. I didn’t think to use the machine until we were about to play “Red Room.”

I was thinkin’ to myself, ‘I’ll just turn on some bubbles to create a sexy red room vibe.’ But when I crunched Eric’s guitar-peddle bubble-button, instead of lilting sexy bubbles, I inadvertently released a torrent of bubble-bees that swarmed the air.

Now, there happened to be this liquored-up biker dude standing about eye level not 3 feet from the bubble blower’s mouth. He’d been making eyes at me all night, leaning against a wooden pillar in that “I’m the shit” way. He had wavy, salt and pepper curls, a Harley Davidson t-shirt, and what looked like 10 pounds of silver rings covering his beefy hands.

When the bubble barrage began, those shimmering suckers came out at him so fast and with such profusion, his first reaction was to fight them off and he did so with comical resistance, as if battling a soapy blizzard. At some point, he must have realized how ridiculous he looked and stopped swatting but he was too cool to abandon his post, so he just let the soapy beasts envelop him and tried to resume his composure.

The thing was, these bubbles weren’t popping. They were made of Ivory soap and they were indelible! Even after the show was over we were still finding unpopped bubbles sitting on top of amplifiers and instruments.

While Eric had instructed me how to trigger the bubbles, he’d failed to mention how to make them stop. All “Red Room” long those shatterproof bubbles assaulted and attached themselves to the Harley man who didn’t understand they weren’t just hitting and bursting. THEY WERE ACCUMULATING.

As he stood there, stoically, staring at me, listening intensely to me sing he was being turned into a bubble snowman. He was covered, and I mean covered (his whole beard and hair and shoulders) in iridescent glowing bubbles. And since he was standing in the front of the crowd, most of the people in the audience saw this accumulation too and started pointing at him which he was also clueless to.

This only made keeping my laughter in, harder, so when my tightly clenched lips cracked to sing the third verse, the elephant sound came out of me and I completely lost it. I fell on the ground kneeling over my guitar. I couldn’t hide my laughter. I was practically crying for god sake. But I felt badly for laughing at the Harly dude who, albeit drunk as a skunk, was listening so sincerely. I tried to pretend I had to fix a broken string. I tried to pull myself together and make it back for the chorus but catching the Harley dude out of the corner of my eye, now wearing a bubble robe iridescently lit by the lights from the stage, I completely blew it and couldn’t even attempt the end lyrics. How could he not know he was covered in bubbles?!?!

I’ll cherish that memory for the rest of my days.
Thank you, Mobile, GOODNIGHT.

We bolted for the door of the “Waffle House” as a thunderstorm rolled overhead. The bright, golden light inside the dinner contrasted sharply against the dark blue Arkansas sky outside. Shaking shoulders from our ears, we gleefully accepted five oversized, slightly greasy, laminated menus offered by our sunny, soon-to-be waitresses, Melba and Mary.

I lost my voice last night singing at Janita’s. In truth, it was only hanging on by a thread after belting out that acoustic set back in Millwalki. So I scribbled and smiled a greeting and quick explanation. We were the only patrons this morning at “The Waffle House,” and so had our choice of ketchup brown booths. We slid into one overlooking the parking lot with a front-row view of the incoming storm. the boys laughed at me as I whistled and scribbled out my breakfast order.

Last night after locking ourselves out of the van in the parking lot of Juanita’s, some southern gent sauntered up who said he had a coat hanger in his car and didn’t mind helping a very grungy gang of hippies break into a vehicle they claimed was theirs. As it turned out, Todd (the coat hanger owner) is not so good at breaking into cars but, on the bright side, runs the local “Waffle House” and offered to hook us up with breakfast in the morning before we split town. When I told Delucchi about Todd’s offer, I’d never seen someone’s face light up so bright, “Waffle House?!” he uttered staring off into the distance. I’d never been to a Wallfle House so I got excited just looking at his excitement.

I was less excited, however, in the morning when breakfast arrived. I didn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth but when a curdled nest of runny cheese eggs and a side of dry toast arrived on a vast white plate, I suddenly wished I’d slept through breakfast. The guys had better luck with semi-tasteless double orders of waffles, O.J. and all-you-can-drink “coffee” which I’m not convinced wasn’t just runoff from one of the gutters outside. When we were adequately stuffed and only mildly queazy, our lovely waitress Melba floated over to our table, all glowing and southern-bell like and said:

“Now, on the voucher Todd gave me, you all’ve got forty dollars and twelve cents left so WHAT CAN I GET YOU TO EAT?”

She ejected her hips back like she’d popped the clutch on them and launched into a fit of laughter. “Y’all want pie, honey? or some more grits?” We stared up at her in silent disbelief. None of us could imagine eating more Waffle House.

The previous night’s event at Juanita’s was a benefit gig to fight breast cancer, featuring not only my music but a “Poetry Slam,” I found out I’d be M.C.ing. Between 1/2 hour musical sets, poets ignited the stage with their fiery words and flamboyant styles. Some even inspired my bandmates Soucy and Brian to join in with beats and licks. My guys are truly the best.

During one of my turns on stage, a woman in all white (I’m pretty sure was on LSD) came and sat on the stage right at my feet. She kept petting my toes like they were kittens as I sang. Between songs, she tried to get my attention by pulling on the hem of my skirt, mouthing, like a hostage, that she needed talk to me about something RIGHT NOW! I thought she was pretty harmless but the bouncers removed her anyhow. I kninda wonder what she had to say.

After the gig, we still had to deal with the issue of being locked out of Moby, so while the rest of the band drank mochatinis (the bar’s signature drink), Dellucci heroically borrowed a car and retrieved the spare from the hotel

2 oz. — Vodka · 0.5 oz. — Espresso · 0.75 oz. — Chocolate Liqueur · 0.5 oz. — Simple Syrup · Garnish — White Chocolate.

At 5 am, Chris loaded our drunk asses into the back ally after getting the van opened and lovingly secured the flowers my glorious mama sent me, between the back seat and the instrument cage… “so you can sunbathe in their light on our drive to Mobile, AL tomorrow,” he said. He’s the best babysitter a band could have.

When I introduced Chris Soucy from the stage last night, I did so with a new moniker – “On guitar, we’ve got Christopher Daniel Soucy, Otherwise known as Bowling Ball Baby.” Let me explain. About 3 days ago, Chris received this baffling email from a mystery sender:

“Where were you at the show? Everyone missed you and kept asking about you. I got naked. We all did. Missing you. Love you Bowling Ball Baby!”

-Anonymous

No name. No identifiable characters. No recognizable email address. This anonymous letter has since preoccupied Chris’s mind driving him plum crazy on our drives as he tries to reclaim lost memories. “Who could this mad stalker be?” he’ll mumble absentmindedly on a quiet mile of road. And that is how Soucy got his new nickname “Bowling Ball Baby.”

Nashville proved a warm-hearted city for music. It caught me off guard too. Given its heavyweight reputation in the music biz, I half-expected a crowd with ears too worn and jaded to appreciate what we had to offer. But, oh, was I mistaken. Our listeners were nothing short of captivated and vibrant. Even so, when I suggested they might dance if moved by the music, a hidden voice from the back countered with, “Folks in Nashville don’t dance honey.” That said, a few brave souls got up and shook it (they must’ve been from out of town).

Now, in the morning we’re back on the road and I’m savoring a wholesome breakfast of gas station peanut M&Ms behind the wheel. We’re headed back through kudzu-lined roads toward Memphis then on to Arkansas. It’s oppressively hot inside Moby and Donie Hathaway is on the CD player singing “I’m Just a Jealous Guy.” I love Peanut M&Ms. I prolong my chocolately breakfast by relishing each and every smooth oblong pebble individually. I meditate on their individual characteristics, letting their sweet colorful outer coating dissolve before allowing myself the indulgence of their chocolate crunchy centers. There’s something enchanting about the road this morning; the heat, the music, and the chocolate. The sheer joy of the moment causes me, halfway through my breakfast, to turn down the music and blurt out to the boys how much I love and appreciate them. Four cupped hands immediately reach toward me in response. “How much?” they ask. Of course, I can’t resist them and dole out my prized breakfast candy to their greedy little hands.

There’s a moment, right? A precise moment when a landscape changes around you, enveloping you in a whole new dimension. It hit us full force as Aerosmith’s “Walk this Way” on the radio was abruptly replaced by a show debating the morality of cops in biblical proportions. “COPS, SAVIORS OR SATANISTS?” – and just like that, we knew we’d entered the deepest part of the bible belt.

Dellucci, our cultural tour guide was excessively caffeinated having roused us at dawn in preparation for a full day of Memphis sightseeing. In the morning we visited Graceland which was both shiny and candy-like AND a little moth-ball-y and creepy-town. I mean, one minute you’re in the perfectly preserved shimmering “The Jungle Room” marveling at Pricila’s lively choice of palm prints, and the next, your eyes drift out to a headstone on the lawn where Elvis is literally lying, buried alongside his mum and grandmum for god sakes. Heebie Jeebies abound! Shoulder to shoulder, we shuffled from room to room, clutching our audio guides like lifelines, stealing glances of rock history through the gaps in the crowd. I came away feeling slightly hollow. I got the sense poor Elvis’s home was a museum long before he ever moved out onto the front lawn.

Our afternoon was crowned by a visit to iconic Sun Studios where Howlin’ Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, and other greats got their start. I was midway through a cell phone interview when we pulled up to the museum so I invited the journalist on the other end of the line to accompany us into the birthplace of rock-n-roll – a virtual first for him.

Tired and sunburnt (with literal red necks) we wound up the day at Newby’s – quintessentially a bar in every sense. Our first set was Chinese water torture for us, with people talking so loudly we could bearly hear ourselves up on stage. But when songs ended, these same people would clap and cheer as though they were inspired and moved by every word I’d uttered. Now, I don’t consider myself a particularly sensitive artist. I mean I’ve played directly underneath a TV broadcasting the World Series at a sports bar, but I can fairly say that this was a more difficult crowd to engage. I’ve never felt quite that invisible before.

Thankfully, as the night evolved, so did the energy in the bar. The second set brought the crowd to life, with grooves that got people dancing – a rare sight at Newby’s, according to Mimi, the barmaid who grabbed a CD, too proud to take her discount.

I did have a guardian angel who stood off of stage right and sang along with every word on the album. She was gone by set break but whoever you were dear angel, thank you for buoying my spirits and keeping me going when I thought I might just have to up and quit.

We woke up to a hurricane in a Chicago suburb that came off the lake. It was my turn to take the rollaway last night. Each night we book two rooms at The Fairfield Inn. They all look 100% the same which is both unnerving and comforting — We play at a different venue every night but come home to the same room. Our rooms are divided into “the snoring section,” housing Dellucci and Brian (this is also where MJ gets smoked), and “the non-snoring section,” the room Soucy and I share. Kenny is the floater.

Our accommodations provide us with four beds and one rollaway which, we take turns in. The rollaway is a guaranteed bad night’s sleep. These beds are notoriously squeaky, rusty, broken medieval torture devices.
Often, though we’ve requested an extra bed months in advance, the hotel will have forgotten to leave one in our room. That’s too bad for the designated rollaway-er who’ll usually fall asleep on a filthy carpet waiting for staff to bring up their sleeping arrangement.

There’s a song, a take-off on The Grateful Dead’s “Roll Away the Dew,” that we sing each night in the interval between when Delucchi secures room keys and the ding of the elevator which opens to unfurl us onto the long tongue of a hallway where we drag bags in search of room numbers we only vaguely remember —

KENNY: “Was it #307 & #308 or was that last night.”
SOUCY: “That was last night.”
BRIAN: “Shit.”
SALLY: “I’ll go ask the front desk again.”
DELLUCCI: “No, it’s #418 and 19, we just got off on the wrong floor.”

Sometimes check-in is slowwwwww. The front desk attendant is absent doing something untoward not expecting a band to show up late night. We park our butts on the curb outside and start to hum our rollaway tune.

This is all to explain the crinkled state I found myself in this morning, groggily dragging my ass downstairs in only my orange oversized John Forte T-shirt, no pants, no shoes, mascara gathered like tribal war paint under my eyes, to fetch the guys coffee in the lobby. The woman at the front desk was very surprised to see me in this state.

Back in the “non-snoring” room, I slurped my coffee loudly hoping to “accidentally” wake Soucy and Kenny who were slumbering like two quiet cherubs in their cozy, non-rollaway beds but I slurped in vain. When the guys finally did wake up at 11:30 they wanted to do yoga, which meant moving most of the unglued-down furniture onto the beds and then modifying downward dogs and warrior stances to navigate the air conditioner, TV, and bedside table.

Last night was a late one despite our early gig. We opened up for Richard Buckley who was great (but I was already a fan). We had an hour set. My voice hurt from the night before, screaming at that unplugged show at Thai Joe’s, but I managed to belt out a couple of notes for an attentive full venue.

Shuba’s is a fabulous place to play. The staff is unapologetically hip and the ones responsible for keeping us up so late. We basically closed the bar down laughing and listening to tunes on the badass 70’s rock jukebox. I especially enjoyed the free photobooth where I got to take pictures with the band and some of the audience members. We’d jumble behind the red curtain and I’d shout expressions between flashes.

1. Sad (flash)
2. Busy (flash)
3. Happy (flash)
4. Goofy (flash)
   Fun……..

The show was a blast, even though it initially seemed doomed from the start. When we arrived for soundcheck, the situation looked pretty grim. Thai Joe, stood on the curb outside his shuttered establishment. He was smoking a clove fag in a splinter of sunlight that had elbowed its way between two buildings. He seemed preoccupied with more pressing issues when he casually dropped, “Show’s canceled.”

Turns out, Thai Joe’s had run into some trouble for operating under an unlicensed name, not to mention an unfortunate little date rape that had occurred at the club earlier in the year. I stood there speachless in my overalls and soft purple t-shirt waiting to hear his plan B but Thai Joe was clearly busy nursing invisible wounds and a canceled gig seemed the least of his worries.

For the next two hours, I stood like a dejected team mascot outside the club, shaking hands and turning people away as a bartender unceramoially scraped “Thai Joe’s” logo off the front door. Some people already had tickets. I felt awful, especially as Thai Joe was in no position to offer them refunds.

Suddenly Joe reappeared beside me, breathless with good news. “The chief of police just gave the thumbs up,” he announced, with one caveat—it had to be an entirely acoustic performance. Energized by the challenge, I hurried to catch up with the band. I found them in a sun drenched deli, hitched to a red and white checkered table cloth, waist deep into some impressively large sandwiches.

“Fancy an unplugged set?” I asked. They didn’t hesitate.

Back at Thai Joe’s, a skeleton crew turned some lights on us and the audience (the ones I hadn’t turned away) gathered around us closely like a corset. We rooset on some brown pleather stools atop a makeshift, wood slab stage. Soucy abandoned his electric guitar for my acoustic one and Brian slapped and banged everything within arms reach. He even turned my empty guitar case and the leg of my chair into percussion instruments. Lyrics flowed, stories unfolded, and new songs like “40 years” and “Nisa” were bravely debuted. I sang my lungs out to the intimate audience and they brought us out from cold, opening their warm hearts to us.

After the show, Joe showed his gratitude with dinner on the house. I must say, Thai Joe’s was the most open “shut” bar I’ve ever been to.
Hoping to get into a little late night Milwaukee mischief, the four of us trotted out into the night. It was raining and we repourpoused our jackets as umbrellas. Just when we thought Milwaukee had no adventure on tap and were about to abandon our mission, a bowling alley bathed in blue lights and swirling silver stars caught our eye and we thought –Why not bowl a game or five?

Goodnight Milwaukee!