Flying from Italy to Spain was certainly easier than driving, but my Ryanair flight from Rome to Barcelona was no vacation. Heavy traffic on the way to the airport, long lines of pushy American tourists, debates with the check in attendant about the length of my guitar case vs. the length of the overhead compartments, a delay at the gate of a half hour, then and hour, and then two, a completely packed, turbulent flight, and a mad rush from the airport to the venue made for a stressful day. When I got behind the mic in San Feliux an hour after landing, feeling dirty, exhausted, and out of breath, I just let it all pour out. The small bar was packed with maybe 40 folks; half seemed to know my music and half probably never heard of indie rock. I stomped my feet as hard as I could as I picked the hell out of Trouble in Mind, Spike Driver Blues, and Last Kind Words Blues along with a handful of my own songs, and even improvised a few tunes. Even the most skeptical bar rats gave me a hearty “Whooo!” and a nice loud hand, and it turned out to be a cathartic, high-energy show. I was finished by sundown and spent the evening drinking beer, eating fresh tapas, and catching up with my friends Tule and Berta who had organized the Spain leg of the tour.
That night every tiny noise reverberated against the cement walls and floor of the hotel, and I probably slept 4 hours before being awoken at 8AM by maids slamming doors, flushing toilets, and dragging cots across the floor as they cleaned and rearranged the furniture in adjacent rooms. Staying in a Southern European hotel during the off-season is usually asking for trouble. Most of the rooms are empty and nobody knows you’re there, and there is almost always either construction, extensive cleaning, or raging alcoholic students on spring break, 6 or 8 to a room. A few days of this can make the drives feel longer and the days drag on and on, but at this point I hadn’t had 8-hours of uninterrupted sleep for over two weeks. I felt exhausted in Italy but now I was feeling downright weary. My skin was jaundiced and pale, and morose brown circles hung under my bloodshot eyes. As I looked in the mirror I imagined I was a heroin addict or a hard drinkin’ troubadour, but the diet of greens, bananas, yogurt and OJ that I had adopted by that time belied the image. I was a complete wreck by the time I caught the train to Zaragoza, and the show ended up being so smokey that I began coughing and feeling something growing in the back of my throat. I had memories of the Karate tour in Spain when I developed a lung infection from the combination of exhaustion and singing in smoke filled rooms. I only finished that tour thanks to my mates treating me like an invalid, and I was laid up for almost a month afterwards. This time there was no band or tour managers to take care of me, and it gradually dawned on me that sickness was a real show-stopping possibility.
That night at Helioglobal in Barcelona, I could barely make it through the set. Every time I opened my mouth to sing I had no idea what sound (or fluid) might come out, and my performance felt tense and labored despite about 40 or 50 attentive fans. Fortunately my friend Artur whipped up a healthy, home-cooked meal and put me in a quiet bedroom, which gave me the energy to forge ahead. The next night in Tarragona was smokier still, but the club was completely packed. After my tentative performance at Helioglobal, I was determined not to let the adverse conditions get the best of me. It was another skeptical bar crowd, so I kicked off the set with some more old-timey blues to great effect. Nothing like a loud, droning E chord and a stomping size-13 leather boot to get a folks going! I quickly won them over and the show ended up being a total blast.
Afterwards, Ivan, the promoter, took me to a restaurant that specialized in local Catalonian cuisine. I had only eaten a croissant and a banana the entire day, so I was quite excited to see the waitress approaching with what appeared to be a couple of huge steaks. But when she came closer I realized she was serving us each a large piece of toasted bread and a small over-ripe tomato. Ivan told me Catalonian shepherds used to rub this special kind of tomato on stale bread to soften it up, a tradition that continues to this day. So we dined on beer, tomato-softened bread, and savory jamon, as Ivan told me about his recent trip to Paris, where I was heading in a week. After a good conversation, a few beers, an unexpectedly tasty meal, and a walk back to the hotel in the salty sea breeze, I felt refreshed and started to relax for the first time in a few days.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that my hotel was clean, comfortable, and absolutely silent. I was out for a solid 12 hours that night and barely missed my train back to Barcelona, but I was reticent to leave the seaside anyway, and content to feel human for the first time in many days. That night I opened for the Japanese hippy/improv/jam band Mono at a great club called the Apollo where Karate had played a few years back. The best way to describe Mono is predictable, but not in a pejorative sense. As are most Japanese bands I’ve met, Mono were predictably sweet and friendly, and they were predictably good musicians who cared a lot about their sound. They also predictably traveled with twice as much gear as they needed (including a gong that may or may not have been used in one song), and predictably played 20-minute long bombastic epics that started quietly and slowly got louder and louder, and just when you thought they were finished, they got louder still. I can’t say I heard much difference between Mono and the Godspeed-inspired bands that have been floating around for the past decade, but they put their hearts into their music, and that counts for a lot.
Sara Lov is a singer/songwriter from LA who happened to be playing upstairs that night, and was neighborly enough to come down and introducer herself and her entourage during Mono’s set. I wasn’t familiar with her music, so I didn’t think much about the CDs we traded. But when I did get a chance to listen, I was blown away. “Seasoned Eyes Were Beaming” is a collection of 10 pop gems, and every second of every perfectly crafted song is engaging and charming. The lyrics are distilled down to concise, powerful images: “Fountain, fountain, we are the same / You with the water, me with the pain / Turning it over and over again / Don’t you wish you could throw their pennies back at them?” Sara’s CD became the soundtrack of my week in Spain, and I still think of the Catalonian countryside every time I hear her wonderful songs.
Speaking of wonderful songs, everyone I met in Spain loves Ainara Legardon, the musician that I was slated to play with in Madrid. Everywhere I went in Spain, folks said that she wrote inspired songs, played a mean guitar, and was quite a sweatheart, all of which I can now verify. Ainara and I shared beers, Bacalao, and tour stories at a Basque club before returning to the Circulo de Bellas Artes, the gorgeous theater in the center of Madrid where we were to perform. Ainara stepped on the huge stage with only her Fender Coronado and an old German tube PA amp, and proceeded to hypnotize me and 100 other fans for the next 45 minutes. She picked droning, distorted bass lines with her thumb and abstract melodies with her fingers, as her brooding lyrics reverberated through the Baroque hall. Her songs simmered and smoldered like the darkest Robert Pete Williams or John Lee Hooker, building up so much intensity but never quite reaching catharsis. When a song would finally explode it was for only a moment, and it would only hint at the underlying power of her music. I was entranced by the her performance and couldn’t wait to step on stage, and I ended up stomping and strumming as hard as I could and playing one of my best sets of the tour. People seemed to react to everything I played, and the event felt like some otherworldly conversation between the audience and myself. It had been the best show in a long time both for Ainara and for me, and her performance was an inspiration that would propel me through the coming weeks.
After the show we found each other backstage, and both seemed to recognize what we had exchanged: that rare feeling of working on something so weird, specific, and ineffable at home alone for many years, and then finding someone else halfway across the world who was also working on that same weird, specific, ineffable thing. But all we could do was smile and tell each other how inspired we were by each other’s performance. She also talked about some recent health problems that put her music on hold, and she thanked me for giving her the opportunity to get on stage again. She even told me how much she had loved Karate, which made me feel quite proud.
But it wasn’t the first time that I managed to spoil the moment with some social foible: When I asked Ainara if we could trade records, she said, “Didn’t I already give you this when I opened for Karate in Madrid?” Huh? How did I miss that? We had played together before and I couldn’t even remember meeting her! I figured out days later that said meeting had been during the aforementioned Karate tour of Spain, when the rest of the band had poured my ailing bones onto the stage and then into my hotel bed after the show. But I still had to confirm the truth: “I’m an asshole,” I replied. We both laughed and all was forgiven.
