Two days ago we arrived in Long Beach. It was the first show of the tour. It was our first night in the rig. It was our first night away from Portland. It was the the Summer solstice.
Not all these symbolic events were planned. Unless you’re into fate & the agency of the unseen. I do like that we went west to the Ocean. I’ve always hated going west to the Ocean as long as I’ve lived in Portland. East: Ocean. West: Mountains. We are setting on a musical Odyssey and we head west to the sea, but that is prove we can control the direction of the question, “Which way to the beach?” Depends which coast.
Everything changes when you move into a truck with a toilet. The is not post office at Walmart but I can begin to see the cultural legacy of Sam Wall far more clearly. In much the same way that Henry Ford changed assembly line work or how Andrew Carnegie changed the public library system (with his filthy lucre).
We have now sat in parking lots & played artsy hipster music. Beat that you PBR drinking, beard sporting motherfuckers. We have jumped off the twee dock that is our dear Portland & now bob, somewhat ungainly, in the waters of the rest of America. We are not in Brooklyn, or San Francisco or Robert Seigal’s apartment in northwest D.C. We sit in parking lots of retail outlets that are kind enough to let us park on their pavement. In the initial days of departure, this oddly provide some familiarity. How sexy is that?
But leaving from the Pacific to drive to the Atlantic was not planned. The first gig I booked was the Adrift Hotel. It happens to be on the the Pacific Ocean. It also happened that June 21 & 22 were available dates. I do most certainly not control the gods of booking.
What exuberant caprice is booking.
But still, on the grassy beach western ocean, at dusk (at 9pm!) on the Summer Solstice before your first gig in a (hopefully) long line of shows, is when I saw the bald eagle. It sat perched on a large dead branch watching the same damn Ocean I beheld at that moment. And that’s when the Peter Gabriel song dropped into my mind & if all that wasn’t enough, (and mind you, this would be cheesy were it not all factual & factual events are exempt from the calumny of cheese) my heart *was* going boom, boom, boom.
