Tuesday 19 October 2010

Graceland and Highway 61 (the long road south)

Eventually we found our way out of Nashville and on the road to Memphis. I think it was the 65. Americans don't appear to use sat navs yet. Maybe this is because they're further behind than the UK in technology stakes, or maybe they just know there way around better than we do. I never worked it out. In any case, our hired car (with aircon, interior mood lighting, automatic sliding doors, under floor smuggling compartments and all the country stations you can imagine as standard) did not have GPS. It had a compass. In the dashboard.

Graceland was something I could not miss, I don't usually go for the 'tourist' option but I grew up listening to Elvis and as a performing artist, he kinda wrote a lot of the guidelines. The house itself is a strange environment of Presley's tacky and usually ridiculous decor, but kept absolutely faithful. It's exactly as he left it. Definitely got a sense of the family man and held-back artist. He always yearned to perform in Europe and the fact that he never did is a huge shame. The Presley memorial/grave meditation garden is one of the strangest, enchanting places I went. You should see it if you pass by.

We hit the road for the South. New Orleans via Highway 61.

This is called the Blues Highway because it passes through Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana. It's slower than the interstate but has beautiful scenery as you get into Mississippi and then Louisiana.
We drove for a few hours and with our minds made up about sleeping somewhere, (New Orleans still five hours away) we said, passing through a one horse town, that we'd stop at the next motel we found. This turned out to be over an hour away, so somewhere in-between our misinformed decision and Greenville, where we finally stopped, I had to take a leak.
As good ideas go, the next one isn't flying high. We stopped in a closed gas station, and as I got out to find a tree I realised that we were in the midst of a huge trailer park, on both sides of the road. The trees were unbearably close to these palaces on wheels, so laughing nervously to myself, I pissed on the gas station instead.

Greenville's claim to fame is that Jim Henson was born there. And Kermit. That's all I could find. Neither are there anymore. We stayed in a motel with the trucks balling by outside. The usual argument began on who was going to share rooms with who. In Nashville we had been split in half, with everyone having his own double bed, Chris in the live room, Dan and Jake in their own personal bombsite, and Mike, George and myself in the other studio with a such a selection of strange items suspended from the ceiling I felt as if we lived in a chandelier reject emporium.


So after Mike deals with the sleepy proprietor;
Mike: We'd like three rooms please.
Man: That is fine. Where are you from sir?
Mike: London.
Man: (jabbing himself in the chest and slightly raising his voice) I am INDIAN.
Mike: I know.

We moved in for the night, we appeared to have four rooms. Chris with me, to watch apocalyptic cartoons until we fell asleep or the world ended, whichever sooner, Jake and Dan the slothmen together, foolish idea if inexperienced. We have poured water over Dan's head in the past. George and Mike had double rooms to themselves. Unless they both ended up sleeping with rednecks and just didn't mention it in the morning.
When the sun rose I woke up and wrote to a few people at home before walking to 61 and gazing down it. After everyone was awake apart from The Other Room we moved the car and hid it around the back of the motel, I had a vision of Dan and Jake sloping off down the highway with their instruments. In fact, Jake appeared shockingly promptly looking suave and collected and I don't think Dan even noticed it was in a different place.
The filter coffee replaces the blood.
After the carnivores (everyone else) hit KFC for breakfast because there was nowhere else I felt thankful for being a plant-eater, and we rolled onwards towards the South.

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Friday 15 October 2010

In which the right party takes place in the best wrong house possible.



Following the bluegrass pickin' party, (we were there with Robin, our producer, Mike the tour manager, Kentucky Kenan and our recently acquainted friends, Anna, Dana and Ben) we were asked to leave by the police. For some reason they got involved in the party and were quite stern about everyone getting off the land immediately after the curfew. Having no plan, we were invited to go back to Anna's house to have drinks and stay. As there were eight bodies going, it was too many for one truck, so I jumped in Kentucky's truck with Chris and the others went with Ben. Going via a gas station (they call them gas stations) to pick up beer and chips (they call them chips), we still hadn't really been out of Nashville at this point, so I for one was still surprised at the sheer scale of trucks and Coca Cola servings... on the contrary, the others were more surprised at the Corona bottles being undersized. Practically able to finish one in a couple of swigs. Deceptive... as it turned out later on.

We pulled up at a turning off the main road that winds it's way into the countryside from Downtown Nashville, and bade farewell to Kentucky Kenan, leaving us with just the one truck. It was quite a long way out, far enough for the houses to look like mansions. This was no exception. It had everything; pool, walk in wardrobe, garage bigger than my house in London, bathrooms round every corner, a bookshelf with three copies of War and Peace and a fully laid out dining table - which was odd.

The kitchen was spotless. I'm used to living in a constant state of transition between spotless and bombsite in my kitchen, but this was well and truly sparkling. After a couple of minutes of Anna searching for the lightswitch, (sure, I lose my lightswitch in my house too occasionally), we had a good look and I noticed a champagne glass full of skittles. I thought nothing of it, the surreal tangent this night was taking was making me think differently about suspicious details, especially when Ben turned on the oven and after a few minutes smoke started to billow out from the closed door. A common occurrence in new ovens. Thinking back, I'm still not sure what he was planning to cook. I remember there only being a bag of cookies, the aforementioned glasses of skittles in each room and a huge bowl of lemons. "Here, we have plenty of lemons! Let's jump off the roof!" announced Anna, with the gusto and presence of a ringmaster at the start of the circus.



As Jake, Anna and myself sat down at the beautifully presented dining table, we realised that we did have some other form of nourishment, a bag of popcorn, and a bag of genetically-altered popcorn which were all the colours of the rainbow. We chose this and served it out onto the heart shaped crockery infront of us.

As Jake and Anna were getting on like a house on fire, discussing literature, I glanced out of the open door just in time to see Chris flip into the pool in his boxers. The darkened garden beyond that had no movement at all. It was the middle of nowhere. Just trees, this mad house, the stars and the road outside.

Jake stood up and rubbed his nose on a porcelain toad sitting on the mantlepiece.
"Hello Toadle"
Turning and announcing to us, he continued;
"He was my brother, I knew him well. He's my favourite author..."
"Who was?" replied Anna.
"Adolf..."
"Hitler?!"
"Yeah! But he smells of ham."
"What's your favourite book?"
"The one about the horses and the bear...and how they find a balloon."
"Mein Kampf?"



I headed outside to the pool to find Dan and Dana sitting at the table, and I lit the lantern as it was the darkest part of the night, and a fog was rolling across the fields towards us. Slightly nervous about the qualities of an unknown fog, I stripped and jumped into the pool. I still can't dive. I never have been able to. In fact, I get nervous about jumping off things into water, even if it's a few feet above the surface. Dan is a great diver, and back in Albania we had a great time abusing the swimming pools in the hotels on tour, but when there's a diving board present I get queasy and tend to stay away from it. Dan persuaded me to try and launch myself off the end but upon arriving at the moment, my left foot got scared and just fell off the edge, I followed, ungainly smashing into the water sideways and coming up with water in my nose and ears and Dan laughing at me.

In our hosts pool, in the middle of the night, with cooling fog gradually drawing itself like a vast blanket across the stars, I felt calm and excited at the same time. There's something strange about floating in water, looking at the sky, in a place you've never been. I have experienced this exact feeling a handful of times this summer and it's a moment you want to bottle and keep, but obviously that's impossible. So, true to the cause of feeling floating cosmos oblivion, I am just going to have to end up in situations where I can do this.

Tired of jumping in and out of the pool, the popcorn eaten and a suggestion that we should put the barbeque, tables and chairs into the pool dismissed as not worth the repercussions, a giant woozy game of hide and seek ensued, with the obligatory countdown leading to some amazing hiding places being discovered, or not, as in Chris's case.
I hid on top of a massive oak wardrobe and survived a raid of inside the magnificent specimen of furniture by Dan and Jake, who never looked up, only to be busted by Dana dryly saying "there's someone on top" from the doorway.
After about two hours of searching for Chris, we gave up and fell asleep with the sun in the east starting to burn away the fog. From what I gathered the next morning. Chris had been discovered on the roof, like a crazed cat clinging on to the chimney and refusing to come down and accept that he had been 'found'. Giving up, the discoverers of his whereabouts went to bed themselves and we were all woken up in the morning by the front door opening.
A stout figure, slightly rotund with impressive whiskers stepped over the hearth and gaped.

Keep calm. It's probably her dad.

I rolled off the couch and pulled my boots on.

"Who are you? What are you doing?" he fired at us, metaphorically.
"Er... we're leaving? Who are you?"

"I'm Dick. I'm selling this house. What are you doing in it?"

OK. Panic now.

I had to remember which shower I had left my sodden clothes in. After taking them off to jump in the pool, the splash of us bounding in and out had made them just as soaked as if I had just gone in with them on.
While I was picking up items that belonged to me and my eyes were adjusting to the increasingly bad situation, I passed someone completely naked wrapped up in a carpet. You learn to just accept these things.

The last words he said to us were "You better roll your joint and get out".

So we did.

Saturday 9 October 2010

Making the new Tankus the Henge album









photos by Jim DeMain

Full Moon Pickin' Party with added accordion

Bluegrass instruments: guitar, banjo, fiddle, dobro, upright bass, washboard, saw. Do you see 'accordion' in that list? No, neither do I.
When we arrived at the Full Moon Pickin' Party, it was well under way, and there were hundreds of folk playin', eatin', drinkin', and dancin' on a farm in the middle of nowhere. We'd been invited along and told to bring our instruments, so there we were. Bluegrass is a genre rooted deeply in american tradition, and most of the songs date back to the beginning of the world. (that's about two hundred years to you and me)
In fact, a lot of the songs were imported using the minds of unsuspecting Irishmen hoping to find their fortune in a new and exciting land.
I approached a group with my abomination of an instrument and they were enthusiastic, if a little nervous, about my entrance. They asked me if I knew any bluegrass and I replied in the negative, hearing this, they launched into 'my grandfathers clock'. The eagle eyed among you will remember that Dan and myself had recorded this, as a joke, for a post on facebook videos. It's probably still there. I couldn't believe my luck. Instead of being embarrassed with not knowing the song about moonshine, the dog and how the grass looks better in the oklahoma sun, I actually knew the chords, the words and all the harmonies to boot. I waited a few bars to make it seem as if I was working it out, and then joined in with Ol' Wheezy. The musicians, delighted (or it may have been relief) that I could actually play, asked if I had any tunes and we played a gypsy number before the rest of the band sauntered over and gave a spirited rendition of 'life is a Grimm tale' to the crowd of puzzled, amused faces. We made some good friends that night and I have been back to a couple of bluegrass jams since.

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