Boulder, CO – “Vanity Fair”- Between Tours – August 30, 2000

After the John Cafferty show I flew to Martha’s Vineyard for a family photo shoot with Annie Lebowitz for Vanity Fair. I know, this is a huge honor and how dare I mention all this privilege in one sentence. It’s disgusting—an embarrassment of riches — and I should hate myself for normalizing it and I do, believe me, but it gets worse. In the following days, People and US magazine sent reporters to the island to do stories on me—Just ME!!! and I got all caught up in my ego’s sparkly spiderweb. The attention made me drunk and blind and disgustingly ambivalent about it all. Make-up artists curled my eyelashes, lighting specialists lit angles I didn’t know I had and cameras snapped mechanical bites off my soul.

But as the fog of attention lifted and I made my way back to Colorado on the 25th, I felt a brutal hangover from drinking so much false love. I was worried about how easily I’d given myself to the adrenaline and glitter of being celebrated. Didn’t I know better than to get high off that kind of affection? Hadn’t I gone to therapy for a year, for god sake, to ensure I wouldn’t get hooked on applause and yet there I’d been—no resistance whatsoever—guzzling for the cheap buzz People and US and Annie and Vanity Fair offered. I wondered, as I wandered past first class, to my coach seat in row 16B, if my recent heartache had something to do with how readily I’d welcome the drug of artificial affection.

Thankfully, Boulder brought me right back down to size. Rehearsing for a week in a rundown, grungy garage warehouse sandwiched between a homeless shelter and “The Bus Stop” (Boulder’s local titty bar) will bust even the most resilient of egos.

Tonight was our last practice before we leave for the West Coast tomorrow. The warehouses were quiet when I arrived at 7:30 but within the hour, 20 bands would fill North Boulder with a soup of colorful sound—Thrash, Bluegrass, Punk, Rock and Reggae would all blend in the humid air outside our open garage doors until the neighborhood was a brick of impenetrable noise. There would be bad covers of “Brown-eyed Girl,” bad covers of “Blinded Me with Science,” and bad covers of “Fire and Rain.”

While I strung my guitar, musicians skulked like skinny, crooked shadows in the slick, wet parking lot — smoking cigarettes and waiting for their drummers to show up.
Some of them actually live out here in the warehouses — those who can’t live off their gig money or tour too much to justify paying rent on a real apartment. Kyle, our own drummer, used to be one of them. He showed us where he’d made his bed in the very space we were practicing in. “Unit #50 costs $35 bucks a night whether you’re rehearsing or sleeping,” he told us.

Even though it was raining, we left the door open, like the rest of the bands, to avoid the musty, dank, moldy stench that grows on you if you hang around one of these spaces too long. The fan was on and I came up with the brilliant idea to spray my gas station imitation Drakkar into the spinning fan blades to make the room smell better, but when I spritzed the fan, the imitation Drakkar flew directly back at me, into my hair and eyes. The guys howled at my idiocy and I laughed along with them.

We rehearsed for a couple of hours just to polish intros and outro’s and then, loaded up the van. We leave for Salt Lake City in the morning. As I helped Delucchi shove the last guitar into the boot under a yellow street light I thought back to Martha’s Vineyard just days ago — how fast I’d gone from feeling like the bell of the ball to just another struggling musician in a van. I hugged my guys goodnight and drove home to get one last good night’s sleep. I crawled like a hermit crab into my bed and dreamed of the road ahead. It’s good to have my feet on the ground again.