I’m guessing you’ve never played a set with your fly down. What about an entire show?

The Mango Grill was pretty full for the week after graduation. Most patrons sat up front, their eyes at about, I don’t know…. crotch level. There was no green room in Kathy Griswold’s charming, family-style restaurant turned venue, so I made my grand entrance from the restroom, which ironically had a green door, near stage left (sometimes you’ve got to improvise). This entrance was also convenient, I told myself, as I got to use the facilities while I waited “in the wings.” But somehow in my pre-show excitement, I forgot to zip up. This might not have been catastrophic. After all, my painter’s jeans were baggy. In fact, they were intentionally unrevealing. But!!! Because I was holding them up with a belt, my unzipped pants formed a gaping hole that left little to the imagination.

The first set I thought we played really well so I was dismayed the audience looked away from us seemingly distracted or bored. I was pleasantly surprised, however, when at set break those same seemingly unenthusiastic characters raved about how much they were loving the show and bought tons of CDs (we’re down to 60 now … uhho).

The thing is. All those Wisconsinites had more than ample time to confront me about my nearly naked state and not one of them did. My bandmates, facing the same direction as me, were excused. But why did not one Cheesehead pull me aside and point out the cavernous hole sharing the spotlight with me? Perhaps they each expected someone else to do it? Perhaps they secretly liked the side (peep)show? Or perhaps no one saw this illicit feature? NOT. This brand of ‘egg on the face’ was a stunning Easter souffle I assure you.

What’s nice about embarrassing the shit out of yourself on tour is that you’re gone by morning and no one in the next town is any the wiser. Casually you can then call your booking agent, depending on the vulgarity of the embarrassment, and ask him to kindly pass over that stop on the map for your next 2-3 routings.

So how, you wonder, did I find out about the open gate? Kenny pointed it out as he and Dellucci harnessed Moby for a late-night 4-hour trek back to Minnesota where we’d forgotten some of our equipment at The Caboose.

“Sally Taylor, paging Sally Taylor,” He pointed at my pants, “please bring your tray table to the upright and locked position” And suddenly all my slightly askew interactions throughout the night came into sharp focus.

But…. after my initial humiliation, some roll on the floor, full band laughter and a commitment to never buckle before a precursory zip, I found gratitude. Yes, gratitude folks. It’s stuff like playing a gig with your panties showing that makes you remember that this music stuff isn’t about candy-coating art with glitter to feed your ego. It’s about sharing time and space and giving an audience the opportunity to see humanity in the nude (and I mean that mostly metaphorically).

I must admit, I had my concerns when we approached the Cabooze. If the name of the gig didn’t give the vibe away, in front of the venue was a deck of motorcycles lined up like metal middle fingers asking for a fight. A deck of hairy-looking Harleymen stood guard around their bikes with crossed arms and leather faces. I tried to envision these burly dudes swaying in unison to Tomboy Bride. Humm, unlikely.

If I’d held out any hopes about what we might find inside the venue, they were shattered upon entry. Pinball machines, fluorescent lights flashing “beer,” “beer,” “beer,” and a line of faceplanted barflies balanced on barstools. I felt a little out of my element. But I misjudged the place.

Our opener, Linda Robert’s Band, delivered a heartfelt performance that concluded around eleven o’clock. We took the stage half an hour later, under the shadow of my earlier apprehension. But it’s funny, just when you brace for a nosedive, life has a way of surprising you by lifting you up. By the time we got on stage, the burly crowd had thinned out, vacating the premise for a presumably rougher establishment with more grissle on the bone. In their place, a new crowd flooded in. They danced and cheered, clapped and whistled. They shouted words of encouragement and brought their audience A game. A night I was sure would end in a bar brawl ended up with an extra enchor! It just goes to show you can’t judge a show by its cover.

On a different note, our supply of Tomboy Bride CDs is running startlingly low. We hit the road with only a hundred left. I wasn’t expecting them to go so fast on our last tour. Before leaving Boulder I placed a rushed reorder but we won’t see new stock for at least two weeks, a detail which makes me both giddy and worried as proceeds are covering most of the band’s salery.

Exhaustion hijacked us when we got to the hotel at three in the morning. Drifting off against the tail end of “Car Wash” on TV, we succumbed to sleep. Before I knew it, the front desk was calling. Leave it to Dellucci to keep us on target. He’d set a wake-up call for 9am leaving us 10 minutes to vacate our rooms and 5 to raid the complimentary continental breakfast downstairs. We slipped Captain Crunch mini cereal cartons into our coat packets and doctored to-go coffees with Carnation instant powdered milk. By 9:15 we were at our stations back in Moby, ready for a solid six hours behind the wheel.
Can’t wait!

And just like that, we’re on the road again, tumbling past tumbleweeds and thundering through endless crops. Each corn stalk salutes like a soldier as we zip by. The fanfare that marked our departure last tour was absent this time as we pointed Moby east, into the sunrise; no waving handkerchiefs, no confetti, no streamers, and no tearful boyfriends or girlfriends waiting in line to kiss us goodbye. We slipped away under cover of darkness yesterday morning before even the streetlamps on Pearl Street had gone out. Dellucchi drove all day and when night fell, we slept at a nameless roadside motel in two very crowded, creeky beds in a room with crunchy carpet and drapes the color of bile.

Now, it’s morning. As we merge back onto the highway, I can’t help but laugh and read the first billboard aloud:
“DON’T MAKE ME COME DOWN THERE” – GOD.

Buzzing from my freshly crafted cocoa coffee, I join the boys in belting out The Black Crowes’ “Remedy.”

Brian bites his lower lip, his goatee splays out like a defensive hedgehog; he drums a righteous beat against the dashboard. Soucy plays an air guitar solo, fingers moving swiftly along the neck of his ethereal Fender, while Kenny, red sunglasses perched low, purses his lips and jogs his chin in time.

There’s this fuzzy patch in the center of the window, first row back, where Brian props his head. It’s become a running joke—that his hair gel ‘Bed Head’ has left a filmy residue on the glass that blurs the view and seems resistant to Windex. We’ve come to accept it as another passenger in the van and have named it “Bart.”

I’m spacing out through “Bart,” the smudge, thinking about how lucky I am to be on the open road, the master of my destiny and not caged and this thought brings me back to the day before we left.

I’d visited a good friend—let’s call her Sam—at a mental institution, a friend who’d always been a bit eccentric but much the way I considered myself to be. Sam had been admitted to the Boulder Behavioral Correction Center by her husband after mistaking her reflection for an intruder and shooting a series of holes clear through her dining room wall.

During my visit, she’d yanked me into the restroom, whispering, “They’re listening through the walls,” and promptly locked the door. As my eyes adjusted to the echoey dark room I saw all her stuff was haphazardly unpacked into her shower stall. “People think I’m crazy but you don’t think I’m crazy,” she said in the craziest way imaginable.

She was wearing the same clothes she’d been committed in a week prior; a pair of baggy men’s pants, a dog-hair-brown sweater, and a pair of platform boots I think she must have been sleeping in. A baseball cap hid her unwashed matted hair. I was shocked the way you might be if someone threw ice water down your back. Where had my friend had gone? Had she always been this crazy? Was I so adept at normalizing insane behavior I’d been blind to who she was all along? What else wasn’t I able to see? Am I crazy? These questions ricocheted silently off the bathroom tiles.

Then, she started to cry in a way that distorted her face into something more frightening than a loaded weapon. Sam might have been crazy when she shot up her home, but this place was making her mad. I didn’t have the words, so I simply embraced her, holding her trembling, wailing form. I made promises of finding a good therapist and reassured that everything would be alright, despite my doubts.

And now I am on the road and she is in a cage and I am left to wonder at the blurry ‘Bed Head’ named “Bart,” who of us truly deserves such freedoms and restraints?