writing

The Fringe Festival is fringe, alright. Everywhere we go is strangeness. The High street looks like a Fellini movie; weird clowns and street performers dance down the sidewalk, surrounded by thick crowds of cheering onlookers. Club kids, dance troupes and musicians line the streets, bumping into each other, smoking, yelling, laughing and drinking.

Of course, Edinburgh is beautiful in August, the Fringe events take place under a canopy of racing clouds. The resulting sunbreaks add a sweetness, a group high. It is a festival after all.

Billy and I lack the let’s-do-what-everybody-else-is-doing-that-looks-fun gene, however, so we escape to our flat with the mountain view. Maybe they aren’t mountains; I bet there’s a Scottish word for what they are. They look like tilted mesas…green, ascending meadows.

To set up house, we walk to Sainsbury’s (pronounced “Sains-breeze”). I think our new landlord gave us directions, but we haven’t been able to understand a single word he’s said so far. Which is unfortunate, ’cause he seems to have a lot to say; we’ve been nodding and smiling for a couple days now. So we find Sainsbury’s on our own and even discover a short-cut through the park so we can stop and feed ducks on the way (ducks are important).

We feel weird…more than jet lag, which only feels like a knife in the eyeballs. This is different, like we’re shaken dice tossed and left to land where they will. We figure it’s because we never just go to a place and know where we are, like most people. Instead, we bounce around a whole lot first (Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island), we stay in motels, we visit friends and family, places we used to love, places we used to live, we see rain, sun, heat and cold, fly, drive, drive, fly, sleep, don’t sleep, eat, go hungry, place children and snakes here, a dog there, another dog there, music playing the entire time…when it all stops, we aren’t quite sure where we ended up. We look around for clues–we’ve gotta learn to go native quickly in order to survive. That’s it: we feel like aliens.

It doesn’t matter, of course, ’cause we have work to do. I’ve lost my second Mudrock guitar to airline screw-ups, but this one is (thankfully) delivered in time for the show. The venue for Paradoxical Undressing’s Fringe debut is, as Billy puts it, “a dungeon of a basement of a dive”; the perfect setting for the stories I’m telling.

I decide that I’ll be brave and I won’t drink, even though I’m nervous; a decision made less impressive by the fact that no one offers me a drink and I don’t have any money to buy one. But I find it relatively easy to stay focused, given that the crowd is right there with me, laughing (and crying) and taking pictures and sending warm waves in my direction. Really warm ones; it’s about a thousand degrees in there by the end of the show.

We are all thoroughly wrung out.

Leon, Guanajuato is a city of bright colors and happy children. We spent three inspiring days there with some right-minded people who believe in making art with a lowercase “a”. Simply put: beauty for people. The FIAC festival is one that celebrates many different mediums and invites the whole city to attend.

Placed in the hands of three young men who laughed often, spoke freely of “magic” and sang at the top of their lungs, we let Mexico wash over us. Food, people, land, architecture, language..all of it astonishingly beautiful.

With 50Foot Rob on drums and my oldest son, Doony playing bass, we created a patchwork set list of Throwing Muses and solo songs as well as some 50FootWave and Appalachian folk songs, of all things. It sounded interesting: atmospheric tremolo guitar sections erupting into pounding instrumentals. It’d be a cool band except that it isn’t a band. We needed a name.

Since we make up band names all the time, we set some parameters: a band name suggestion must be something you’ve actually seen and it must be something you’ve seen in Mexico. We narrowed the ever-lengthening list down to these contenders:

“Iron Cobra” (a foot pedal)
“Wax Jesus” (a wax Jesus)
“Hover Jesus” (I don’t know how they did this)
“Commando” (Rob swears he saw one)
“Canary Room” (Billy asked for a canary to be put in our room, but they smiled and said no)

We never officially settled on a name, though Wax Jesus sort of stuck. It could be a working title, I don’t know; but speaking of working, my little baby Doony busted his little baby ass and rocked everyone’s world. After the show, he signed his first autographs and posed for pictures with entire families. Then he hosted an almost all-night tequila party in his hotel room (I’m so proud!).

We hated leaving Mexico. There’s something they have figured out there that one rarely sees elsewhere and it’s hard to put your finger on. Humanity maybe?

We left Los Angeles in an earthquake, flew through electrical storms and into a hurricane to end up in a particular kind of paradise; one in which people of all ages participate in a shared aesthetic experience. Children danced while we played, rads pumped their fists, parents and grandparents clapped and cheered. It was humbling.

This may never happen again, but during the set, I looked at my smiling drummer and beautiful son and felt honored to have done this in my life.

Pioneertown, California is so wild and pretty that it hurts. Shady Circle songs are also wild and pretty, and honestly, they hurt a little, too.

Saturday night was a peak experience, being in that pristine environment with such fascinating people. Violet and tangerine clouds plus cold beer and warm bodies’d make any event spectacular, but put them next to our friend Eric’s desert palace and I’m left speechless.

So I won’t talk anymore…this photo says it all anyway.

photo credit: tad lostlen

A few months back, Billy started hankering for another Throwing Music experiment in keeping with his “Works In Progress” mp3 subscription series of 1998 (we’ve been selling mp3s for 10 years now!?!), which he followed with the on-line only release of “Murder, Misery and Then Goodnight” later that same year, and the 50FootWave “Free Music” name-your-own-price experiment which resulted in more than 2 million Ep downloads in 2005 (yeah, 3 years prior to you-know-who “inventing” the idea) . He likes to get music directly into the hands of listeners whenever possible.

This time, the Great Idea Inside Billy’s Head was this:

“We’ll offer people in our web community the chance to buy CD-R’s of Kristin playing 10 songs of their choice. They’ll pick the 10 songs from a menu of 200 — no guesswork on our part as to what anyone wants to hear — they’ll tell us. We’ll burn the CD’s ourselves and Kris can personalize and sign them: 10-4 (your name here).

We’ll charge $50 for this CD, ensuring that only a few people will partake initially. But if they like it, word’ll spread.”

Wicked, I thought. I never know what people want to hear. Some seem to only like old Throwing Muses songs, some only like the most recent release, some people only like Sunny Border Blue, some people want unreleased material, some like me to scream real loud, some like me to whisper, some just like Your Ghost over and over and over again. Now the set list can be someone else’s fault decision. And when ThrowingMusic webinatrix Tine says, “I want one!” I know it’s a good idea.

We sold 100 in record time (under 20 minutes). Of course.

“A hundred?” I asked.

“A hundred,” answered Billy.

“Literally a hundred?” I asked, hoping he was kidding.

“Get to work, he replied.

As it turns out, 200 songs is a lot. And my songs are not the easiest to play. For two months, I sat with my iPod, marveling at the disgusting complexity of a Throwing Muses song, wondering who the hell wrote all these “Kristin Hersh” solo songs, filling notebooks with lyrics, chords and time signature notations, asking questions like, is a piano instrumental even a song?

Creating an acoustic version for each song and then getting it performance-ready was like preparing for ten tours at once. I tried shifting my focus to the first few orders. Now I know what songs people want to hear: generally speaking, songs that I would never, ever choose to play live. Which sort of makes sense.

When I finally felt that I was able to tackle the first few orders, my gear wasn’t. It buzzed and clicked and ultimately choked. I wondered if I should just concede defeat and offer refunds.

Then I had an idea: offer an upgrade. I bought time at Stable Sound and started over, recording clear but still raw versions of all the songs people had asked to hear. I built personalized 10 song sets out of this session, dedicating each 10-4 to the special boy or girl who’d ordered it.

When we happily told folks that some high-quality 10-4’s would be on their way soon, they expressed great disappointment. Initially, we were taken aback; then I came to appreciate what it was they were after.  They wanted truth in real-time.  Warts and all. And they wanted it played just for them: a musical prayer. I can get behind musical prayer. Way.

So, months behind schedule, I started over again and we offered refunds in case some people didn’t want to wait. No one asked for a refund.

It takes me about an hour to learn each song on a 10-4 and get it up to speed, then maybe another hour to  record. Billy lies on the floor and listens, we appreciate each song as it goes by and reminisce about the time it was written, recorded or toured. We laugh a lot, cried once or twice. We get through 1 or 2 orders on a good day.

It’s been a real nightmare learning experience – like all great ideas. I keep telling Billy that he thinks I can do anything, when really, the opposite is true: I can’t do anything. But we’ve come to love diving headfirst into this ocean of songs and swimming around.

Note: The Online Store is offering some of the songs I recorded live to tape at Stable Sound in a series of 5 volumes called “10-4-All”. Here’s an mp3 of one of them, “Cathedral Heat”. And in case you’re interested, here’s an outtake from an actual 10-4 recording, “Mexican Women”.