words

This entry originally appeared in Powell’s Books blog and is reprinted by permission.

My best friend in college was the movie actress Betty Hutton. She was too old to be in college and I was too young; this was all we really had in common, if you can call it that. Though she did like the fact that I was in a band.

“C’mon, Krissy,” she’d say, patting the seat next to her in the student lounge, “sit down! Let’s talk show biz!”

I had never heard of Betty Hutton, never seen any of her movies, and, frankly wondered if her Hollywood star persona wasn’t invented. She was awfully… eccentric, to say the least. A gigantic woman who made herself seem even bigger by wearing rhinestone-studded turquoise cowboy boots and combing her white hair straight up, she smoked menthol cigarettes.

“Minty,” I commented one afternoon.

“I don’t like minty cigarettes,” she said, “but I’m trying to quit chewing gum.”

Betty did live in a bona fide mansion, though. Right on the ocean and decorated entirely in white: white furniture, walls, carpet, dog, piano. She’d sit at the piano with her gay friends, singing show tunes. Really. I mean, I assumed they were show tunes. When the singing was over, she’d wipe tears away and hug whoever had been accompanying her.

Then, glistening, she’d call me over and say to her friend, “Krissy’s in a band. A band called ‘Throw-ing Mu-ses’. Krissy’s gonna be the new me.” So sad. That she couldn’t find anyone better than me to groom as her “show biz” replacement. All of that old school Hollywood wisdom to impart and no little tap dancing vessel in which to put it. Al Jolson once told Betty that when she left the stage, she should peek out of the wings and ask the audience with her eyes, “Do you want some more?”. Betty tried desperately to get me to do this.

“Look, Krissy,” (she always called me Krissy, she was the only person who ever did — I called her “Bob” for “Beautiful Old Betty”) “it’s not that hard. You have to play with them, flirt with them, string them along. Be the cat and the mouse, you know what I mean?”

“Sorta.”

“Well you aren’t actually doing it.” Then she’d smile sweetly. “I know you’re trying.”

“I’m not really trying.”

“No, you’re not,” and she’d laugh. Hard. I couldn’t fake her out because she actually came to Throwing Muses shows. She always brought her priest, though she never explained why, and she and this priest would stand in the back of the room and look encouraging while we played. Betty would make her eyes real big at me, I guess telling me to ask the mosh pit if they “wanted some more”. The thing was, my eyes were spirals while I played; I was so far from flirting with anyone. Lost in a swirl of sound, I never even knew where I was.

It was hard for me to explain this to Betty. “Why do we entertain?” she would ask — and then answer herself — “to make people happy!” She said this all the time. I didn’t think I made anyone very happy by playing and I told her that. “Well, you do scream a great deal don’t you? Which isn’t very nice. But that’s the style these days. And they jump around when you play. I think that means they’re happy. So you gotta show them that you love them back. You gotta earn their love.”

I couldn’t tell her that I wasn’t trying to earn love, that I was trying to own violence. I couldn’t tell her this because it would have sounded as pretentious then as it does now. So I said, “I play to make the math work”.

“Oh! Like tap dancing!” Betty was so beautiful.

Leaving a psychology class one afternoon, she squealed, “That Sigmund! What a comedian! It’s bad enough he wanted to fuck his own mother — he’s gotta write it in a book and get it published! A book people are still reading! That poor man…he’s probably up in heaven right now, with his face in his hands…”

She gave me quarters for the vending machine, still laughing. “I need an oral fix for my oral fixation!” I brought her some crackers and a soda. “What is this?” she asked, holding the crackers at arm’s length. “I can’t read the package.”

“It’s cheese and crackers.”

“But, honey, I’m not lactose tolerant.”

“I don’t think there’s any actual cheese in them.”

“Okay, look,” she said, tearing into the package. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about. It’s this: don’t ever let them feed you pills.”

“What? Who?”

“Whoever tries to do it! They’ll want to wake you up and knock you out because they make more money when they can control you physically and emotionally. Judy Garland and I had a good, long talk about this once she forgave me.”

“Judy Garland-Judy Garland? From The Wizard of Oz? Was mad at you?”

“For stealing the role of a lifetime right out from under her. I don’t blame her. But now she’s dead.”

“Yeah, she is. I really don’t think they do the pill thing any more.”

“Stay clean, Krissy. And then you won’t end up like Judy Garland.”

Years later, in a London hotel room, I was to reflect on this conversation while staring into the palm of a tour manager who offered me a fistful of pills. The yellow ones were for waking me up, the blue ones for knocking me out.

Betty died earlier this year. I hadn’t seen her since I was a teenager. In 2002, we lived a few miles from each other in Palm Springs and never knew, so I didn’t ever see the beautiful very old Betty.

To mark her passing, I rented one of her movies, though. In it, astonishingly, she plays an un-wed mother. She is lovely and girlish and completely over the top, just like I remember her. I can see her working to earn love, asking stuff with her eyes. I don’t see the deep well of sadness that once moved her to perform, as her final thesis, a soft shoe of “Me and My Shadow” in a college classroom, tears running down her face. What I do see in that gorgeous face is the wide-eyed openness of a lady who could think that Sigmund Freud was a comedian and that I was an entertainer.

• I often feel there is an inverse relationship between quality of output and material success in the music business. This is distressing, but not out of line with what I’ve come to expect. Throwing Muses would wander the halls of Warner Brothers back in the day, muttering, “You don’t have to suck in order to work here, but it helps.”

• Now, however, the financial climate and current upheaval in the music business mean that musicians like me are genuinely poor investments for the traditional powers that be. We do not engage in lowest common denominator trendiness, and so don’t warrant the expenses of marketing dollars and company overhead.

• Okay, I get that; this is a business. However, I believe that when you sell toothpaste, you should be selling a goo that helps prevent cavities and when you sell music, you should be selling sound that enriches the listener’s inner life. There is today a twisted kind of natural selection in the entertainment industry — a sort of “survival of the blandest” — the result, I imagine, of mind-fucking marketing techniques, bandwagon appeal, hype. To me this stuff is ugly, not beautiful.

• Given this, I can only assume that record labels are not for me. I’ve said it before — I will always play music — but in the past, it was a record company’s job to make sure you heard that music. They sold their product; they had funded it, it was theirs to sell. How to sell music without them? I liken our situation to that of the family farmer’s — how can we keep from going under without going corporate?

• This is what I think: we specialize — we offer an organic product. It is lumpy and expensive and made with love and it can save you. It’s the right thing to do. It isn’t shiny or poisonous, which can be disconcerting to people who’ve been raised on shiny poison, but it’s natural, it’s high-end and we want you to eat it.

• To that end, I think I need to engage in a grassroots kind of capitalism, choosing principles over profits, values over image, ideals over marketing. I have to create a permeable membrane between artist and listener — I’m a craftsperson, after all. The church of the rock star that the music industry televangelists hawk has always been anathema to me anyway. This is about songs and sounds, nothing else.

• Music is a tenuous profession in good times, hard times mean some of us disappear. I’m not looking for pity, but collaboration. Coming to you is the best way I can think of to continue being a musician.

• The model is not new, it’s akin to public radio’s listener supported programming and Community Supported Agriculture’s subscriptions to underwrite crops. In other words, music grows on trees, but money doesn’t and I’m unwilling to suck in order to work here. Therein lies the value proposition. This little business will be interactive and intelligent; you will not be lied to, no shiny poison, no middle man.

• The idea of relying on listeners, treating music as a cooperative, is humbling, yet interesting to me. This is a bit of a manifesto, I’m sorry, and now I’ll shut up, but I wonder if we might be able to do this together.

More soon…

Love,
Kristin

Best signage in the Northwest: “Free Beef with Tire Purchase” and
“Non-Emotional Caskets”

We have four days to make Minneapolis. An easy schedule to keep with Super Billy at the wheel unless, of course, the universe tilts on its axis and everything goes all haywire and the Family Bus blows up. Which it does.

We’ve broken down before. In fact, we break down a lot. Our bus is a sensitive dullard of a machine. A princess who feels every pea and can’t begin to figure out how to overcome even one of those peas. But never before have we ridden the professional and financial line so hard. This tour is barely breaking even and may lose money. I worry that I won’t be able to pay the other musicians and that my attendances and therefore guarantees are falling to the point where I can no longer afford to tour.

Every date is a question mark, a potential indicator of my future. I say I don’t believe in the music business because I hate what it celebrates and yet…I have no other business. Like it or not, I rely on the same construct I always did, the same Handicapper General that trades in some of the most offensive marketing on this planet; the same business that turns music – which is my religion – into nothing more holy than Fritos. I have to care if no one buys my record, I have to care if no one comes to my shows.

I have to care, because soon, there may be no place for the next song to go. I think I’ll always play music. I think I have to. I’ll play in my bedroom, in my car, in my garage…but without an audience, without money, I won’t be on the road and I won’t be in the studio. And like it or not, music is a social endeavor. I wish it wasn’t, but it is and as such, it’s impact is stunted when it’s invisible. Music isn’t supposed to stay in the bedroom, the car, or the garage. It’s supposed to be given away, to become other people’s soundtrack.

So what happens is, we’re driving through the mountains and I’m stumbling around the bus, listening to music, making sandwiches for the kids and laughing with Bernie as we barrel down the highway like we have so many times before. I had just stepped over a dog to hand Wyatt a cup of milk when Ryder yelled, “Fire!” from the back bedroom.

Instantly, the bus filled with smoke. I grabbed the baby off of his stool and handed him to Rob who was sitting on the couch. Bodhi’s eyes were huge as Rob wrapped his arms around him. Then Bernie found a fire extinguisher and ran into the smoke; I ran after him as the bus careened across lanes of traffic, Billy trying to pull off the road and yelling, “Don’t go back there! Don’t go back there!” I found Ryder in the back and pushed him into the kitchen, then I grabbed Wyatt and put him on my lap. We fell onto the couch next to Martin and Kim and that’s when everything slowed down.

The smoke billowed, Bernie appeared through it, people were yelling, Billy worked to keep the bus on a twisting mountain road without power steering or brakes…and all I really saw was music going away. Up in smoke, as it were. The last piece of the mother/musician conundrum falling out of play.

We lived, of course. But the impression of life being in slow motion persisted through what came to be three days of being stranded in Idaho without cell service or hotels. I don’t remember much about this time. I remember Billy somehow finding “s’mores” ingredients for the boys: from Super Billy to Super Dad. I remember making a fishing rod for Bodhi out of a stick and some dental floss. I remember cutting my hair in the dark, just to get it out of my face. I remember a band meeting where four exhausted, hungry and unwashed musicians all voted unequivocally to stay on the road and not fly home. “Anything to keep playing,” they all said, “we’ll do whatever it takes” and I had to leave the room because I’m not a girl and I don’t cry.

I remember the children packing their lives up as we left the bus, their only consistent home for the last 7 years — and at the time — their only home. Wyatt was in tears because he might never see it again. We all knew we probably couldn’t afford to fix it.

I remember waiting for Billy, Rob and Bernie to arrive with a truck and a van so that we might at least make Chicago and limp through the rest of the tour. The little boys blew dandelion seeds into the air while we waited. I sat in the grass and watched them through a haze of grief, knowing that since touring costs money and recording costs money, I could no longer work. I wondered if there was such a thing as life after music, wondered if I could live such a life, wondered if children ever forgave mothers who couldn’t live life. I was pretty low.

Bodhi approached with a dandelion and blew the seeds into my face gravely. “What’d you wish for?” I asked him.

“To live all the way to the very last day of my whole life.”

No, then. Mothers aren’t allowed to go anywhere. I’ll have to work it out somehow. Christ, the things they say sometimes.

And we do work it out. For the time being, anyway. Bernie and Rob drive the equipment truck while the three boys and Martin and Kim and the three dogs all ride in the back of a mini van. Billy and I ride up front like the Mom and Dad we’re supposed to be and pretend to yell at our passengers, slapping blindly into the back seat and threatening to “turn this van around and take everybody back to Idaho”.

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!” they all scream. Martin and Kim get very good at passing snacks, books and Kleenex into the back seat and then books, garbage and used Kleenex into the front. We discuss the idea that God has it in for us, a long-held theory of my brother’s. “Look at the facts!” he has said, “Everywhere you guys go there’s a natural disaster. In fact, all you have to do is think about going somewhere and awful things happen there. Do me a favor and don’t ever move to my neighborhood.”

He has a point. We have suffered damage of biblical proportions in the last several years. Earthquakes, floods, conflagrations and tidal waves seem to track our movements across the globe. “Maybe the universe is trying to tell us something,” Billy suggests.

“It wants me to quit? Why?”

“Who knows? Maybe you have more important things to do.”

“Like what?” I ask. “I can’t do anything but music.”

“That might actually be true.”

The Minneapolis show is canceled, but we make Chicago in time for soundcheck. A friendly restaurant owner in town has read about our plight at the website and brings a beautiful Italian dinner for our entire touring party to the Lakeshore Theater. During the set, my children dance around the dressing room singing, “Polenta! Polenta! Ya-ay, polenta!”

Most of the audience seems to be aware of our recent struggles, as they line up to buy five or six CD’s at a time after the set. “I already have this, but, you know…Christmas is coming,” says a woman in a red blouse. As I sign four copies of Learn to Sing for her, I remind her that it’s May. She smiles. “Well, Christmas is coming eventually,” she says.

By the time we reach Indianapolis, I’ve learned that the amount of money in the tip jar at throwingmusic.com has increased along with our bad luck. “The tip jar is overflowing!” says Tine, our webmistress, “and more is coming in as we speak. I’m watching it grow before my eyes!”

I have wildly mixed feelings about this. I am amazed and grateful, of course, but also heartsick. I’d feel okay taking some sugar daddy’s money, some record company or wealthy patron or…well anything but money from these people who’ve already given so much of their time and support over the years. But because of this swollen tip jar, it looks like the tour will break even: the bus will be fixed, the musicians paid, their flights home bought. Absolutely incredible. I’m proud that this “tribe” that music created solved the problem for itself, without the help of Corporate America – or anyone else.

At The Ark in Ann Arbor, a man holds up his copy of Sunny Border Blue and tells me, “If you ever stopped, I think I would, too.”

After the show at the Crystal Ballroom in Cleveland, a woman hands me a wide, flat cardboard box. I am so hungry, I think she’s given me a sheet cake. “Is that a cake?” I ask her.

“Did you want a cake?”

“Well…is it one?”

“No, it’s a picture, but I could get you a cake…”

“No, I don’t need a cake-”

Then Kim hops up onto the stage. “Yum! Cake!” she says.

The woman looks sad, “No, it’s just a picture…”

Billy leans in to pack up my stomp boxes, “Wow! Is that a cake?” he asks, grinning.

Now the woman looks distraught. “I’m sorry…” she says.

In Pittsburgh, Vicky and Slim Cessna smuggle their children into the venue to watch the set from the back of the room. During the show, Slim, a man of very few words, leans over to Billy and says, “I know it’s been hard lately, but this is important.”

We meet Orrin at Hi-n-Dry in Cambridge to shoot a DVD of the last night of the tour. This place was the late Mark Sandman of Morphine’s loft, back in the day. Now it’s a full service studio/performance space and it’s beautiful. With its funky oriental rugs and easy hominess, it so reminds us of Kingsway Studio in New Orleans that it’s eerie. There are even Boston versions of our New Orleans friends there. So strange, yet so comfortable. “Welcome home,” someone says to me when I walk in.

I am, at this point, physically and emotionally spent by the tour, yet terrified by the idea that in the morning it will all be over. Five months is not a terribly long time, but we sure packed in a lot since January. Goofiness and trauma, gourmet dinners and starvation, sleet and sun, boats and buses, mountains and deserts, days spent asleep, nights spent awake…Jesus, we’re like a bad movie.

The thing is, there was always playing. Every day had a point and that point was songs. Whatever happens next, I’ve been so blessed.

—

Painting: “Stranded – In Beautiful Mountains” by Victoria Cessna

Best signage on the way to LA: Space Is Limited

Orrin shows up at the El Rey theater with a new joke template. It is addictive. It gets stuck in your head like a melody ‘til you can’t think about anything without trying to fit it into the template. It goes something like this:

“I used to work in (blank), but I was (blank), so they (blanked) me.”

For example: “I used to work in ceramics, but I was always getting baked, so they fired me.” Or: “I used to work in lingerie, but I was barely there, so they gave me the pink slip.” Or Wyatt’s: “I used to be an ice cream man’s apprentice, but I was tired of playing second banana, so I split.”

This goes on all afternoon.

During the McCarricks’ set, Jonathan and Dav Dolorean and I get stuck backstage, unable to get to the dressing rooms (to the beer) without crossing the stage. We play out various scenarios in which we are able to sneak past the musicians and the projector and the screen and the equipment, while remaining invisible to the audience, but Jonathan is jumpy, having just the night before, leapt onto the stage during Martin and Kim’s set and spilled Jack Daniels all over the cello.

At one point, he hisses, “Cover me!” and crawls on stage between the screen and the projector, shimmying past amps and drums, only to come back dejected a minute later. “It’s no use,” he pants, “the projector is blocking the stairs to both dressing rooms.” This information sobers us in more ways than one. Dav escapes to the bar, but I’m afraid of being talked to out there and Jonathan is too nice to leave me alone.

So we sit. And hum the word “beer”. He tells me that his girlfriend is Kaitlyn from the High Violets, not only a superior Portland person and great musician, but one of the best ladies ever. This makes me so happy, I give him a big hug. A good couple makes a great person.

Tonight’s show is intense. We play hard, like 50FootWave covering KH material. I guess we’re nervous; this is a hometown show for us (one of our hometowns, anyway). Afterward, we load out with the El Rey staff who are so lovey-dovey that we get hugs at the end of the night. Honestly, New York and LA are the warmest, fuzziest cities.

The next day, Billy gets prickly as we enter Monterey. “This is a good place,” he says. “I can feel it.”

It is extraordinarily beautiful. Mountain air, misty beaches and Dr. Suess trees. We park on a lovely little side street around the corner from the club. The Family Bus is so tacky next to these quaint homes, though, that it looks seriously incongruous—embarrassed, even. Poor old dumpy bus in fancy-ass Monterey. It’s like taking your children to a rich kid’s birthday party.

After the show, the bus refuses to start. It won’t leave Monterey. It won’t even go back to the club for the equipment, so we have to leave our stuff there overnight (so embarrassing). Billy actually dons grease monkey coveralls (Bernie: “You look pretty cute in those”) and works into the night. After standing around and handing him tools helpfully, we begin to fade and hand him tools lamely, then I send the band to a hotel in a cab and watch Billy work in the cold (he does look cute in the coveralls). Then Ryder takes over and the little kids and I crash on the couch.

With the help of our LA friend Colin on the cell phone (he speaks engine and doesn’t go to bed ‘til 3 in the morning), Billy convinces the bus to cooperate and it begins coughing back to life. When it sounds almost normal, we sneak out of town, drive to the nicest RV park in the world and wake up to sunshine and horny toads.

Santa Cruz…hippies, hippies and more hippies….sigh. But hippies don’t come to the show. Hippies don’t like me.

We play food frisbee backstage until people start showing up, then we sneak out with dip on our clothes. The Attic is a great club; 50FootWave played here when it first opened. It’s a nice, grown up room, but it doesn’t feel cold.

After the show, Bernie gets stuck in the elevator with a bunch of gear. It’s not between floors or anything, it just won’t open, so we stare at him through the window and he stares back. Eventually, we pry the door open, but he refuses to get back in, so Martin gets in with the next load. Then he gets stuck. We pry the door open again and I take the cello from him but let the door go. It locks and the elevator goes away with Martin on it. He smashes his face against the window as he disappears.

Mothers Day in San Francisco. I am treated like royalty. We’re invited to a friend’s ranch in Carmel for brunch; the boys are on their best behavior. Doony, the boy who isn’t here, calls during soundcheck. I’m sitting on the stage at the Great American Music Hall, taking a screwdriver to my guitar, when B carries my cell phone over, “It’s the big baby,” he says.

I grab the phone. “Doony?”

“Happy Mothers Day. I was gonna send you flowers, but then I didn’t.”

“Flowers are boring.”

“That’s why I didn’t.”

Such a good boy.

Jim Brunberg of Mississippi Studios fame, records the Portland show, at the Aladdin Theater. He hovers behind us with his headphones on all night; whenever I turn around, I get a big thumbs-up from Super Jim. This is such a nice boost, I consider taking him on the road as a permanent member of the bus family.

Portland loved ones fill the dressing room, bring us Thai food and road coffee, Virtuous news, baby pictures, music, homemade cookies…then we gotta say goodbye again. Seems like we’re always saying goodbye. Ryder and his girlfriend get one evening together before we take off for who knows how long; many tears on the family bus tonight.

We are all itching to play when we get to Seattle. After soundcheck, Bernie and Rob and I are still itchy, so we do a handful of 50Foot songs, but it isn’t enough. Dolorean feels the same way.

We have to say goodbye to them tonight; this is their last show of the tour. They have turned out to be brilliant, special, hilarious and kind; I haven’t had this much fun on a tour in a long time. All four Doloreans hang out on the bus before the show to pass around a bottle of champagne and be happy and sad with us. They talk about the day jobs they’re going back to and they have gifts for my children: beautiful books, thoughtfully chosen with each child’s interests in mind. We’re going to miss them.

I put another bottle of champagne on the stage during their set and this proves to be Al’s undoing. As our champagne buzz wears off, he stays happy and sad, then gets very happy and very sad (and very unsteady) and ends the night passed out in the dressing room on my little pink sweater. I try to pull it out from under him without waking him up (Barton: “I don’t think waking him up is what you should be worried about”), but then I feel bad and give up. He looks like a little drunk angel.

Al does wake up during load out–he sways down the ramp and pukes behind a dumpster, comes out triumphant, with his fists in the air. People cheer and blow kisses but nobody wants to touch him.

Everybody’s laughing; even Al’s laughing, but I just can’t. We all do our own version of dumpster puking when music stops. I walk back to the dressing room to retrieve my sweater.

On the way to Austin, we get the band rooms in a Day’s Inn on the highway and park the bus in the empty lot behind it. That night we are all too tired to notice much about the place other than the fact that they have two empty rooms and they’ll give them to us for less than $50. In the morning, though, I look out the bus window and see that the swimming pool is full of mud, the parking lot is full of garbage and our bus is surrounded by the rotting carcasses of former vehicles. Pieces of dead cars, trucks and buses are stacked all around us; the effect is creepy. “What’s the matter?” Billy calls from the back bedroom, seeing me peering out the window suspiciously.

“This place looks stab-stab.” A stab-stab motel is one you’ll probably die in. We’ve stayed in lots of them, but we like to think we’ve outgrown them.

“Is there a body floating in the pool?” he asks.

“No.”

“Then it’s just shitty.”

“There could be a body in the pool; I just don’t think anything would float in there.”

Billy sighs. “Why don’t you go out and look for snakes?”

I do this because it does look like good snake hunting and, it being the south, I have high hopes for pretty ones, but all I see are some robins poking around in the dirt and my dogs scare those away. I wander back to the bus to make coffee and see Martin and Kim walking out of the hotel carrying pillows. They are both walking crooked, their heads tilted to one side.

“We have stiff necks,” Martin declares, stepping onto the bus and tossing a pillow on the couch. “We didn’t sleep. Good night.” He lies down and folds his arms across his chest. Kim does the same on the opposite couch.

“You want some coffee?” I ask, but neither one answers. Then Bernie and Rob appear, armed with cell phone pictures of their room. “Evidence,” Rob calls it. There is a shot of crumbling plaster, half a bathtub (“Where’s the other half?” “We don’t know!”) and best of all — the bloodstained carpet. “Ew!” I squeal appreciatively.

“Yeah!” says Rob, “That was cool.”

Bernie looks angry. “I couldn’t sleep, there were so many bugs walking around.”

“You can’t hear bugs walking.”

“I can.”

Billy takes the evidence to Roy and Dale at the front desk and tells them he was “disappointed” because, as a business traveler, half a bathtub isn’t what he’s come to expect from Day’s Inn. This approach never fails. Roy and Dale begin writhing in professional hara-kiri. They will do anything to make good on this deal, but all Billy asks is that they not disappoint him again. Oh and also comp him the rooms. His will is done (as usual) and he somehow makes friends in the process (as usual). Martin and Kim wake up just long enough to cheer as we pull out of the parking lot.

We meet up with Dolorean again in Austin where a beautiful, beautiful rain is dumping. Hippie chicks dance in the fountain outside the Cactus Café, but the rest of us just stand under the eaves and watch. Then the club bartendress makes me my first Texas margarita in a year. I decide I never want to leave Austin.

The stage is picturesque: small and well-lit. The Dolorean guys look great, like they’re shooting a video. Of course, my band barely fits on the stage. Bernie isn’t even technically on the stage. Before the first song, I lean over to ask Martin how he’s doing. The McCarricks are squished into the corner, Martin’s cello shoved up under his chin. “I feel like a peanut,” says Martin.

“What the hell does that mean?” I ask Kim. She shrugs and smiles, her violin crushed against her chest, her tiny feet jammed under my amp.

Best signage on the way to Albuquerque: “Jesus Is Gay”.

Neil, the Albuquerque promoter, just bought a house and inherited an apiary with it. This interests me — I’ve wanted to be a Bee Guy ever since our New Orleans Bee Guy showed up to deliver honey and bee pollen in the full suit (the mask was under his arm, but he modeled it for me), so I pummel poor Neil with questions about bee care. He is somewhat taken aback though, and doesn’t seem to really know anything about bees. “The guy I bought my house from just left them behind the garage and they won’t leave. I was scared to go back there, ‘cause, well, it’s full of bees.”

“You’re not a Bee Guy?” I ask, disappointed.

“Well, I am now…I’ve got bees.”

“But you got honey from ‘em, right? Did you buy a bee suit?”

“No, I just wore long sleeves. They got really mad and stung me. I’m gonna have to get a hockey mask or something.”

“Wow. They stung your face?”

“Oh yeah. They’re not pet bees, they’re just regular bees.”

Then he thrusts 3 honey bears into my hands to take back to the kids. Bernie walks up as he’s doing this. “Look at this!” I say, showing Bernie the bears. “Neil’s a Bee Guy!” Bernie spins on his heels and leaves the room. He had a bad experience with bee pollen once in New Orleans. In fact, I almost killed him by giving him a few grains as he was heading out for a run. I was living on the stuff and loving it, but it made Bernie’s head blow up. So he keeps his distance from Neil for the rest of the night, waving politely from across the room, and retreating when approached. Nothing scares Bernie more than bee pollen.

There is a dusting of snow on the way to Phoenix. This whole tour’s been hot, so we all get out of the bus and run around with the dogs and kids by the side of the highway, taking pictures of snow on cactus. I used to love waking up to snow in Pioneertown — silver rock piles and frozen cactus flowers. This is similar, but flatter. Scrub desert. The dogs run and run, we run and run. We play for so long that we’re all frozen by the time we get back on the bus.

The show tonight is at Modified, an art space rather than a club. It feels clean and civilized. The promoter is a woman named Kimber who teaches a music business class to young adults. In this class, she plays hit songs from the 60’s and 70’s and shows the students pictures of the artists who performed them. She then plays music from this year’s Billboard Top 40 charts and shows the class pictures of the people who made that music. Apparently, it’s obvious to even the most brain washed junior high schooler that what is being marketed today in the music business is bimbo bodies, not music.

I tend to think this has always been true, but the music they sell these days *is* decidedly awful, the bimbo bodies awfully offensive. It’s about time somebody thought to point this out to the people who are being marketed to. By the time we leave Phoenix, Kimber is our new hero.

Tucson! I love Tucson. Our beloved Howe Gelb is away on tour, but his family takes us in. We park our fat-ass bus outside their house and play and eat and drink amazing coffee for 2 days. It feels like the old Kingsway studio in New Orleans, only here it cools off at night. Sophie Gelb even supplies my children and me with hand-me-downs. She knows it’s been a tough year for our family, but there’s no pity in the offering, only kindness.

It’s hard to leave for San Diego after all this coffee and love. We promise to come back again when Howe’s around, then we check out the Tucson night sky one last time and take off. Bodhi waves goodbye to his friend Tallulah out the bus window, then turns to me and asks, “Why do we live on a bus that always drives away?“