Slow Burn Winter Tour Part 4: Misty Mountain Hop

The first time I played at Vinnies Cafe in Raglan was early in the summer of last year, and I knew straight away that I'd found the right place.  It wasn't that complicated - as I walked in the door the guy behind the bar put 'Immigrant Song' on the stereo and after that it was all Led Zep, all night long.  In hindsight, this is an issue I probably should have covered with Billy Earl and Betty Grey when I asked them whether they wanted to be my tour buddies this New Zealand winter.  I didn't  say it up front, but the main reason that I wanted to make this tour happen was not to promote my new album, or to promote their new album, or to play in any new exciting parts of the country and meet new people, or even to hang out and crack wise.  What I didn't tell them was the main reason I booked these shows was so that I could drive on winding roads through snowy mountains in a van, preferably in mist, and definitely listening to Led Zeppelin.

Mountains, misty.

For some people, the Lewis Pass is just a good way to get from Nelson to Oamaru, if that's what you need to do on a given day.  For me, it's a sweet place to listen 'Misty Mountain Hop,' and I think the reasons for this will be obvious to the astute reader. For some people, the car deck of the ferry is quite a boring place to be while you wait for the boat to finish docking in Picton.  For me, it's a chance to put on 'Black Dog,' turn it up, and rock out a little with the truck drivers.  I think I have mentioned elsewhere that as far as I'm aware, the main reason we have the Homer Tunnel at all is so people can drive through it in vans full of amplifiers, listening to 'Kashmir' quite loud. Anyway, when we started talking about doing this tour together, it's possible that I may not have made all this clear to the Teacaddies.

'Is there anything other than Led Zeppelin on that ipod?'  This was only about ten minutes, or a song and a half, into the Lewis Pass.
'I might just pretend you didn't say that.'
'Please don't make me do something to you that I will regret in years to come.  I don't think we need any more Led Zeppelin right now.'
'But... the mountains!  The kick drum sound! Come on!'
'The mountains were there before Led Zeppelin and they will still be there once you have turned it off.  Also, where the hell has Oamaru got to? We've been driving for ages.'
'Because of the Led Zeppelin thing I'm not going to tell you how much further it is, except to say that it's still miles away.  I already said I was sorry for booking consecutive shows in Nelson and Oamaru, so stop your whining.'
'Near Nelson.'
'Greater Nelson, yeah. People still came out though.'

Privately and secretly I was as surprised as anybody that we'd played to a full house forty minutes out of Nelson on a Wednesday night, but I was trying to maintain that it was all down to my awesome tour manager skills in some unfathomable way.  I wasn't having much luck with this, since I'd spent the previous week attempting to manage expectations by carefully explaining that the Nelson show was probably going to be a bit shit, and I'd only booked it for the food and a place to sleep.  Now that it had actually turned out to be a decent show, I was trying to spin the situation to make it look like good judgment rather than dumb luck.  This is a trick that political PR people learn at university, and when they graduate they sell it to their clients to use on voters.  I learnt it second-hand when I was working as a political studies tutor, and I used to make my students discuss it earnestly and write essays about it.  It's quite a popular trick, but unfortunately I don't think it works on actual humans.

'You were as surprised as anybody.  And it's still a pig of a drive to Oamaru.'
'Yeah, alright, I was quite surprised. But you know what would make the drive way faster? If we were listening to 'No Quarter' right now.  I bet it would totally synch up with the road.'
'Trust me, it wouldn't.'
'Wouldn't be way faster, or wouldn't synch up with the road?'
'Christ, neither. And I don't even really want to know what you mean by 'synch up with the road.'  Is that some hippie Wizard of Oz thing?'
'You're thinking of Pink Floyd. Which I also have some of and we could definitely listen to instead if you want?'
'Yeah, or I could drive over this massive cliff and kill us all in a fireball.'
'So you'd pretty much prefer to listed to Led Zeppelin then?  That's cool with me.'
'I don't get it, it's like you won but you didn't win at the same time. Just for the love of God let's not have any more Led Zep for the next ages. Please.'

 Taking time out to find devil horns is important.

It's surprising how often variations of this scenario play out in my life.  It's good to know that I'm not alone though. Someone similar must have got to the barman at Vinnie's, because when we walked in a week or so later to set up for the Raglan show, with me hoping just quietly in my head that he was going to drop maybe 'Ramble On' or at least 'Celebration Day' as we came in the door, the guy was playing reggae.  To his credit, and because it was in Raglan, it wasn't the piss-weak dinner-party kind of reggae that they've been piping out of Wellington for the past few years, but it sure wasn't the Zep.  I like to think I might have not been the only person there who was a little bit disappointed.

Of course, and as expected, the show went swimmingly.

Slow Burn Winter Tour pt 3: Running a little bit late on the road

You should take it as a good sign that it's going to be a good show when you're running a little bit late on the road - partly because you maybe slept in, partly because you stopped to look at the view too many times - and when you give the venue a call to sort of apologise and let them know what's going on, muttering some desperate excuse tailored to seem plausible without making you sound completely useless, instead of yelling at you to hurry up, time is money, the hosts say 'mate, relax.  You need to stop at Ohau Point and look at the baby seals, you will not be sorry.'

 

Betty Grey and Billy Earl, stopping to look at the view

This was on Sunday, and we were on our way to the Wairau Valley, running a little bit late on the road.  We were a little bit late because this was in the South Island, and on the South Island leg of the Slow Burn Winter Tour, I was the Sort Of Tour Manager.  Unfortunately, it turned out that I was the sort of tour manager who would prefer to get a half-hour more sleep in the morning and another cup of coffee on the way rather than hassle everybody to leave on time, and after the least rock'n'roll car crash back in Wellington, I was not the sort of tour manager who was inclined to encourage people to make up for lost time on the road by driving like maniacs.  Especially when we could stop to look at awesome things like the view or baby seals instead.

Sometimes, though, it probably does pay to adopt a less lackadaisical management style.  The mood in the van was tense as we rolled into Blenheim, around ten minutes before we were supposed to be walking on-stage.  I muttered "Ah, yeah, it shouldn't be more than about ten-fifteen minutes or so now."
"Ten to fifteen? How is that possible? Blenheim's not that big, surely?  This is Blenheim, right?"
"Yeah, it is. But the show's more sort of near Blenheim. Um. I think I said."
"Ok."
"They did say we should stop to look at the baby seals.  That's a good sign in my books."
"Right."
"Really, I'm pretty sure it'll be sweet.  I don't think actually that we're going to get eaten probably."
"You need to stop talking about how we might get eaten at this show."
"Yeah, OK. Sorry."

Everyone was too nice to yell at me about it, but I was acutely aware that our ETA would leave us with approximately negative five minutes to lug all the gear out of the van and into the venue, set up the PA, run a sound check, set up the merch table, pull on our gig shoes, and start the show.  Eight shows into the tour we were getting pretty slick at executing this sequence of tasks, but undeniably it was still taking longer, on average, than negative five minutes.  There is also a school of thought that says you should try to sit down for at least ten minutes or so between driving for five hours and playing a two-hour show, but somehow that hardly ever seems to happen.  It certainly looked like it wasn't going to happen that day, and I was starting to wonder whether I had really needed to insist on the second and third cups of coffee in Lyttelton that morning.  It was difficult to see how it would be anybody's fault but mine if this show turned out to be pretty miserable.

There's something about the afternoon of a show that brings out the pessimist in most musicians I have known, and I include myself in that count.  People will say of musicians (and performers generally) that you're only as good as your last show - you've probably heard that. When you're strapped in the back of a van though, running a little bit late on the road, on your way to only god or the tour manager knows where, and you know that when you do get there you're going to have to bugger about setting up the PA while the audience files in to watch you tripping over cables and squealing feedback in the monitors - or, what is worse, possibly they aren't filing in at all because somebody (me, in this case) has booked the show not even in Blenheim but near Blenheim, and on a Sunday afternoon at that - well, then it's not about the last show.  The last show is forgotten, blurred into all the others, and your self-worth is now bound up wholly in the next show.  It's the next show that's important, and it could all go horribly wrong.

That's why it's important for tour managers to project an air of confidence, and to have spreadsheets and ready answers.  It's also why I'm not a very good tour manager.  When a musician says 'so where is it we're going tonight?' they want to hear the tour manager say 'somewhere where there is delicious food and really good on-stage monitors, where they will tell you that you are awesome at playing your instrument, and after that you can sleep in a nice warm bed or stay up drinking the appetising local beer, it's up to you.'  Unfortunately that isn't me, though. When I am pretending to be a tour manager and people ask me that question, I say: 'I don't really know.  I think it's in a shed or something, and we will probably be eaten by hillbillies, if anybody turns up at all.  We should probably figure out a) who's going to sleep in the van with the gear, and b) who we will let them eat.  I hope everyone brought a sleeping bag and a gun.'  I probably don't need to explain that this tends to erode morale.

It was really just my good luck, then, that I had been told to book that day's show at Las Fronteras.  There aren't that many other places where they'll tell you to stop and look at the baby seals when you're running late for no good reason, and there's not many audiences who are that good-humoured about turning up at the same time as the performers and watching them frantically scrambling around setting everything up.  There's not that many places where the hosts will diligently call around all the neighbours ahead of time to tell them there's a show on that weekend, so that when the band does turn up, late and smelling like seals, they find a warm room in a beautiful valley filled to the doors with what looks like everybody who lives in a fifty-k radius, as well as a pack of friendly dogs, all with smiling faces and not looking like they want to eat anybody at all.  As a tour manager with a fairly half-assed approach to timekeeping and poor attention to detail, I really had no right to expect anything good from that show and I knew it. That day, though,  my luck was good, the hosts were amazing, and the show went off like a double happy in a gas-tank.  That was the final gig of the South Island leg, and it was one time I think we were all happy to be only as good as our last show.

Slow Burn Winter Tour 2: The least rock’n’roll car crash

Anybody who knows me will tell you that if you want to get a moment’s peace around here then the last thing you want to do is ask me to start talking about myself. As a consequence, therefore, I don’t usually get the chance.  For some reason though when you put out an album the convention is for people to ask you to talk about yourself, and often they tape you doing it  and put stories on the internet or in the newspaper.  It is fashionable during this process to pretend that you don’t like all of the promotional nonsense and the interviews and so forth, and you only go along with it all because it is how the game is played or because you are made to, perhaps by the man.  I’m generally out of step with fashion though, and I find being given a chance to talk about myself in public really quite exciting.

St Peter's Hall - sweet gig.

So on Saturday afternoon, the day after a fine gig at St Peter’s Hall in Paekakariki, I was in Wellington, looking forward to the show at the Garden Club that night.  I was feeling pretty chuffed because I had just been up to the radio station to talk to a nice man about my album and play a song, and then I had sat for quite a pleasant half an hour in a car-park talking to another nice man from a newspaper about what some of the songs on my album mean (again – usually not much, they just sound good), and before that I had done a fascinating questionnaire for a website (fascinating, obviously, because it was all about me), and the whole thing was making me feel like kind of a big deal.  I was born in the eighties of course, and my teachers, following the educational style of the time, spent most of my primary-school years doing their utmost to build up my ‘self-esteem’ to borderline psychopathic levels. Like most people of my generation, then, it doesn’t take much external stimulus to make me feel like I’m kind of a big deal.

In and of itself this may not necessarily be a bad thing, but as Narcissus drowned in his own reflection (at least I think he did – remember, my teachers were too busy telling me I could be whatever I wanted to be to properly teach me the classics) so was my inflated sense of self-worth my undoing on this day. As I exited the car park, having finished discoursing at some length on the subject of me, and mentally congratulating myself on what I was deciding to call my lucidity and erudition, I somehow lost track of where my vehicle ended and other parts of the world began. Specifically, the parts of the world attached to other people’s cars.

‘Gosh!’ (You may recall I only say that when things start to go a bit wrong.) ‘Did I hit you?’

‘Well. My car wasn’t moving, and yours, I think, was. So yes.  You hit me.’

‘Ah. Ok. And… your bumper.  Was your bumper like that before all this happened?’

‘No.’

‘I see.  It was… shinier? Less sort of scratchy? And more firmly attached to your car?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah.’

This was fine.  This was sort of OK.  This is what we have insurance for, to make these things go away.  So we exchanged names, the way people do.

‘Prebble?’  She seemed aghast, or at least surprised. What was this? Was I being recognised, in a carpark, by a member of the public whose car I had gently nudged with my car?  I was still thinking that I was kind of a big deal at this time, so you never know.  I felt simultaneously awesome and not awesome.

‘Which Prebbles?’ She asked.  I told her, as light began to dawn. This was going to be one of those ‘only in Wellington’ scenarios.

‘Young man, your uncle is a colleague of my husband. How are your parents?’

The awesome part of how I felt went away, leaving behind only the ‘not awesome’ component.

‘Ah.  Well, actually.  Yes.  Quite well, thanks.  Um.  They own this car, in fact.  I’m looking forward to telling them that I have driven it into a friend of the family.’

This is what touring in New Zealand is like.