It's Grim Up North (Part ii)


Seattle is wet and overcast. Out hotel is in the middle of University-land, which is a good thing, as it means there are coffee shops and record stores nearby. Normally in Seattle we stay in downtown and although there are plenty of Old Navy and Gap stores around there’s nothing to do or nowhere to go to eat at night (or even anywhere to buy clothes, for that matter). Not that it's so important, we arrive at 11PM and check out the next day. I do manage to find (in Rite Aid) a foam mattress which I use to pad out my bunk on the bus. I also load-up my bunk with about 10 novels and my stuff. I’m living in it for about a month so I might as well make it as homely as possible.

The first show is packed and sweaty. After load-out I set departure time to 3AM so everyone can hang out. We’re only going overnight to Portland and we don’t have a hotel so there’s no rush to get going. At 2:30AM someone bangs on the door of the bus to tell us some wanker has slashed our trailer tyres. Sure enough, someone has. Our driver spends all night on the phone trying to get someone to come out to replace them but in the end he fits the spare tyre onto the trailer instead and drives to a Goodyear garage to get the slashed tyres replaced. There are so many pointless time drains on tour, life you never get back, waiting for tow-trucks in the rain, or, as with the case of Portland the next morning, waiting for cabs who are never coming to take you to the hotel. This seems to be a theme on this trip already. Or maybe I’m just noticing it more this time around?

The ass bone of a Goodyear mechanic repairing our trailer tyres outside Seattle in the rain. Mmmm yes.



In Portland, after a wasteful half hour of trying to park the bus (which was an uneccessary bore because someone had left their van in the wrong place – see previous gripe about wasting time) we go to the hotel to shower. It's a La Quinta, and so basic that I feel vindicated that I’ve brought some of the stolen soaps I’d taken from posh hotels with The Strokes last year. They are perfect travel sizes and they smell nice, which can’t always be said of the hardened cow-fat cubes at La Quinta hotels.

In Portland, at 11AM, I go looking for a diner for breakfast. Twice within five minutes people try to stare me down – I think the venue is in the Portland version of The Tenderloin or The Bowery. It’s a draggy way to start your day after 4 hours sleep. I stare back, ludicrously ready to get into it with anyone this morning. Stupid, I’d probably get my ass kicked (although secretly I'm convinved I'd get a couple of good ones in on my way down that would make it wiorth it. I'm in that kind of mood. What can I say? I'm from the Midlands...).

Later, a waitress in a diner is nice to me and it makes the whole day better. Thank you, Portland waitress. I will never forget you. Although I will, of course, by about tomorrow. I am nothing if not fickle and self-serving.

Outside the diner someone had tied a golden plastic horse to the curb with a short steel cable. I'm glad someone had remembered, I'm always forgetting to do this.




Here is the dressing room in Seattle.





Here is the production office in Portland.




Notice any similarities?

That’s right! They’re both designed to induce suicide. The Portland room had the added bonus of being cold and damp. Bad things had happened in that room – I think people had been killed in there, for real. It felt so bad I had to keep stepping outside so as not to get too depressed. Every time I’ve been to this venue in the past year (3 times) I’ve felt the same thing. I think it’s spooked. And I’m not really one to believe in such things. Even now, lying in my bunk driving through the Southern Californian sunshine, it gives me the willies. Definitely murders or suicides.

The Seattle dressing room was a typical club dressing room.The dressing room in Osaka looked very similar, only it wasn't slimed with disease like this one was. I've seen rooms like this all over the world. It's universal: the shitty seats; the tiresome grafitti by loads of no-mark bands; the giant penises drawn on the walls; the boring logo stickers of bands, most of whom will get no further than this room because they’re crap or more likely, just very average. It’s overwhelmingly dispiriting, and a really common sight. If I never see another room like this it would suit me just fine. This is the glamour of rock and roll the Hard Rock Café doesn’t quite pick-up on. If they really wanted to steep their casino and restaurants in rock and roll verisimilitude then they’d let a load of unsuccessful, unimaginative, bitter egoists run amok with sharpies drawing giant ejaculating penises on the walls and writing “your gay” ungrammatically under each others names in the lobby. Then they would bore you titless with their fucking demos and sour tales about how every other band (esp. those who've had any succes--no matter how miniscule and fleeting) is crap, based on a nebulous criteria that can only be accurately (But never actually) summarised with the credo: "Because they're not me."




This wall reminds me of the stream of headlights driving into Vegas every night to lose, except it's not pretty to look at like headlights in the desert are.

Sunday I slept all afternoon in my bunk. I only went there to read as the lounge was getting crowded and I get really really claustrophobic. I fell asleep. There's something about the curtain being closed and it being all dark that makes it easy to sleep in there during the day - like a vampire or a cokehead. (I did get to enjoy one truck-stop stop where the radio was playing an awful country song where the twat of a singer was reacalling fondly the days when his father beat him for 'diggin' in the dirt' - whatever that might be. I presume this twat is legally allowed to carrry a gun, too, wherever he's from. That's scary). When I woke up at seven pm it was time to book a hotel for the night, just as we were hitting the pass through the mountains and we lost cell-phone and wireless connection.

Eventually we stay at Knotts Berry Farm in Anaheim. We eat in the restaurant of the Knotts Berry Farm resort hotel. It's called Amber Waves, it has all the atmosphere of a dentist's waiting room. The food is defrosted. The kid waiter is stressed out even though we're the only customers. The highlight of the evening for me is when Matt tells me he likes Monkey Movies. It makes me feel better. It's the OC. We've arrived, mum, we've arrived.