I love you even when Rosie, sitting in the lonely bar in Saskatchewan that I’m playing at, is laughing the haggard, asthmatic, pre-laugh wheeze of a life-long partier. Is it possible that I’m loving you because of people like Rosie, who has obviously led a…rough life? I think so.
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Notes From The Caravan
Wherever music has taken me.
Music. I haven’t told you this in a while but. . . I love you. Again.
Thursday, August 12th, 2010Never Leave Home Without. . .
Saturday, June 19th, 2010
the stuff i need on tour
Bus Invaders
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
Boulder, Colorado
I am awoken at 4am by the opening and closing of the tour bus’s back lounge door. Giggles and muted conversation follow. A few moments later the lounge door opens and a girl comes out into the hallway. I know it’s a girl because in my curiosity to find out which band member is partying in the back lounge, I peek under my curtain and see in the dim light, the bottom half of a young lady in tight, faded blue jeans. Her exposed belly button says hello to me. She pokes around in the bunk above mine– my “junk bunk”, where I keep my bag of clothes, camera, computer, wallet and all sorts of personal odds and ends.
Strange, I think to myself, what business does this person have going through. . . wait a minute. . . now she’s opening my curtain, one velcro attachment at a time!
Why European Hipster, Why?
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
The tropics, as you may know, are places around the world that are tropical- hot, sticky, moist and really hot.
Why then do European hipsters, when traveling to the tropics, insist on dressing as though they were still in Manchester or Bratislava or Berlin or wherever it is they come from? Is this thing the kids are concerned about, this… ‘indie cred’, is it so very important?
Canada in the winter can be unpleasant. Vancouver in the winter can be down right Blade Runner. So when I get the opportunity to wear my banana-hammock and nothing more on a lovely, white-sand Caribbean beach I do. I do, till death do us part.
So I’m laying there, adjusting my banana in its hammock when I see, through the heat waves coming off the sand, what appears to be a mirage. Strutting down the beach towards me in tight black jeans, t-shirt with skinny tie, stingy-brim fedora (a.k.a. Pete Doherty’s hat), Chucks and, what I can only assume, is a perpetual cigarette in his mouth as though it were an appendage, is a hip young dude.
On a tropical Caribbean beach? I think to myself.
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They Eat Horses Don’t They?
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
photo by R. Chursinoff
Nic Johns ate horse meat. Raw horse meat.
I toured with Nic a few years back in the Ben Lee band. That’s when he ate raw horse meat.
According to wikipedia.org,”horse meat is sweet, tender, low in fat and high in protien. However, just like beef and pork, in some societies there is a taboo regarding the consumption of horse meat“.
Apparently not in Japan.
Light Enough To Travel
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
I love airports. One of my favourite parts of touring is waiting in an airport lounge watching all the characters passing by.
I once saw a tiny lady who appeared to be well into her 60s, skin bronzed to perfection, wearing a beige, velour pant-suit pulling a four-car train of floral print luggage on the way to Gate B34. She towed this freight with the zeal of a woman half her age and twice her size, tromping along as if she were on a treadmill with the speed level set at the point just before running.
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