Band Rides West.
As soon as you start talking about mystique, you have none.
- Neil Young
_____
In a parking lot somewhere in Texas, I popped the ash tray out of its socket. The sun was at the horizon and I was the only one up. This day was going to be a long one and I wanted to make sure we could leave on time. Now though, there were so many cigarette butts in the ashtray that it felt heavier than I thought it would. Even though I’d done this plenty of times before, I looked down at the heft in my hands and stared at the micro tornados of ash rising up out of there on unseen thermals, thin as twisted hair.
I dumped the whole mess behind a wheel stop at the back of a parking spot a few down from our van. There, the slew of yesterdays smokes from the front riders lay in a heap. The used up cigs looked like bodies from a bus crash. Later on this blacktop lot, still cool now from the semi-merciful Texas night, it would begin to bake and then fry as the sky hammered it with so much blistering heat that even these used up old smokes would probably shift and morph into something stranger than what they already were. Yesterday, on the long ride from Arkansas to this service road in the middle of nowhere, it had been the same as it always was. Me in the driver’s seat and my brother riding shotgun and the rest of the band on the bench seats in the back. Me and him had the ashtray up front, the rest of them, if they were man enough to smoke, they could flip their burning butts out the cracked side windows.
“Just make sure they don’t blow back in,” I’d told them long ago. Other than that, I didn’t give a damn. If they burnt down a vast wild grasslands, I mean, that wasn’t our intention. We just didn’t have any ashtrays in the back of the Sprinter.
I dug out my half-crushed box of Marlboro Lights from my shorts pocket and shook it with one hand until a single smoke appeared. I wrapped my lips around the familiar end and lit it with a lighter fished out of my back pocket. While my fingers had been back there grappling for the Bic, I’d felt my guitar picks splashing there in the dark. Deep drag, morning lot. A Mexican dude was the only other person around. He was twenty spots away, looking out at the horizon, his hand on the handle of a roller suitcase he’d dragged down the steps from a room upstairs. He didn’t look at me as he sized up the sun. We are fellow travelers, I thought to myself. I wonder where you are going, amigo. I wonder why our paths cross now, never to cross again.
He stood there looking out at the long desert to the mesas revealing the orange sun.
I watched him like a fellow soldier. I eyed him with far-off respect.
He cleared his throat violently, dragging up the sleeping ghosts of the dirt weed he’d gorged on last night. His racket sounded out of place. The sun stopped rising for a few seconds until it figured out what the hell was happening. I stood motionless, my cig in my lips, fascinated by the unfolding scene. Then he laid a lone finger alongside his nose and blew a snake out of his skull towards an SUV with plates I couldn’t see.
He was about the same age as me.
I headed for the lobby for a little cup of coffee and maybe a donut from a box.
_____
When I look back on what the band was, what we were setting out to do, I rarely can get much past the strange authenticity of our unbelievable ineptitude. We lacked almost everything it takes to be successful in the music business except the unmistakable magic that you only find once in a while when it comes to music. The band was not born to be a machine or a triumph or even an example of what could happen when you chased your dreams. The band was born to exist in certain real time moments in order for it to ultimately disappear. The very existence of something radically special in this world is not rare at all. What’s rare is the existence of something radically special that manages to attach itself to the skin of an era long enough to gorge itself on the blood of the people. Or, in other words, bands we love/ how often did they last/ how often did they maintain a presence in a world like this?
So many have, indeed.
But what about this. What about this hard question. Is rock-n-roll a 74 year-old? Is it an 80 year-old? What will happen when it’s a 100 year-old man or woman with the perplexing energy of someone zapped by witchcraft that comes dancing out of the darkened shadows to spin and leap across a sold-out stadium stage?
What kind of what is that?
Was that fucking Dio hologram real?
Do we even give a shit about real in the first place?
_____
No one would get up at the time when they were supposed to. Sometimes they would, so I shouldn’t say never, but mostly they would not. It would be me and one other guy and then the rest of them in bed. The rest of them laid there in their silent chambers of darkness. Loose threads of daylight breaking through the heavy blinds were never enough to rouse them on these mornings when we had a lot of ground to cover. East coast bands moving through the west quickly find out that the gigs are much further apart then back home. Cities (or markets as they’d say), they lay a day or two away instead of a couple hours. When you are in Texas, you are still a galaxy from LA. And you are an entire Europe and then some away from Seattle or some place like that.
Still, the necessities of a traveling band on a shoestring budget, they shape-shift along the way. Whatever was laid down as gospel truth by a manager or a booking agent weeks ago, all that becomes thrashed and tattered by the winds of the actual road. It is almost as if everything before the journey was simply a warm-up dream for this grander one. Now this dream is so mighty and convincing that it draws you in, each of us in its own tempting way so that in due time- in short time even if you’re breaking west like us- we are all fully engaged in a fantasy flow of breathing and moving according to ancient threads we’ve likely never (or rarely) been following before.
To say that the reasonably young man a thousand miles from home is a wild card when it comes to rational thought and dedicated purpose is an understatement of epic proportions.
What was happening back then, even though I didn’t see it at the time (how could I?), was the emerging locusts of multiple vessels of personality and consciousness being freed from their lairs, up from the earth, and out into a shining world that held many different meanings for each of them. Despite appearances, the collective spirit of rock/roll that people like to think exists within the thin steel walls of their favorite band’s van isn’t really there at all. What is there instead is the loose smoky wisps of a useful forward motion that feels right. It feels- and as such, it just happens that it is- the one essential characteristic that members of low-budget, largely unheard of bands typically have in common with one another.
They are all mental.
Mad.
Running from a mountain lion called reality.
Chasing that neon rainbow.
Lonely. Sad. Immature. Beautiful. Artists.
Wankers.
Cunts.
Babies.
Wanker cunt babies.
Heavy smokers.
Beer ticket peasants.
Impossible fools spreading joy throughout the land even though no one really gives a fuck.
_____
Somewhere out there an 80-year-old rock legend’s fourth wife just gave birth to a tiny pink infant.
And you wanna know something?
This next big summer tour will not be his last.
_____
_____
I call the rooms. The one next door, I can hear the phone ringing in there and it’s me on the line waiting for someone to pick up. No one does though. It’s a 50/50 thing. Eventually someone will roll over and grab the thing, but I don’t know when. I will knock if they don’t, but that’s last resort. We have so far to go if we are going to get to Phoenix on time but what can I do about it.
My anxiety already has a reputation here. So does this other guy’s unwavering unsatisfied status. And another dude, he loves to smoke herb all day long. And two of these guys, they have their own wives and no one really talks to them ever. The wives, not the husbands. But still.
This family is no family. It is not even close. This is a playground at a county jail and everyone on it got lifted up in a twister and now here we are/ changing strings/ flicking smokes/ looking out the windows at landscapes that look like the moon to us all. Our parents at work or maybe even dead or back at home folding laundry in that solid retirement zone. For years they laid it down/ their own lives to survive. And now what? Their kid is out in the west/ barreling down an interstate/ teasing cancers/ tempting fates/ standing in truck stop parking lots under wide open prairie skies with a Subway bag and a tall cup of coffee and no one to hold their hand in the afternoon and no one to whisper nice things to them in the evening.
Just the frazzled guitar boss pushing them to keep the beat way faster than the song goes on the album. Just the amigo blowing his nose in the motel dawn. Just the snoring body of your bandmate laying there in the air-conditioned darkness of a Tuesday morning in Texas when you are completely knocked out in a deep sleep that has taken you out of Texas, out of America, and away from this world where we are all desperately trying to prove to ourselves that we are worthy of love and respect even when we feel like utter shit deep down.
Yay.
Rock-n-roll.
_____
I pound on the door and my brother opens it after a while. He isn’t happy or cheerful. He isn’t grinning or even a little bummed but resolute. His eyes are squinting to the point of clenched shut as the morning sun bashes his face from the sky behind me. He is already smoking, which means he either lit one before he rolled out of bed to answer the banging on the door or he has had a magically lit cigarette in his fingers all night.
I appear anxious, I’m sure. My anxiety reeks to him and this I know. In order for us to be able to move into the west, we both know that one of us has to do this work I’m doing. Someone must wake the others. But the fact that it comes more naturally to me as someone who likes the morning, or at least needs the morning so I can eek out a speck of time for myself in a world where that doesn’t really fit in, it pisses him off I guess. He needs me to be this way but he resents it deeply at the same time.
We both play the guitar.
This is one of the reasons ours sound quite good together, I think.
There is so much pent-up emotion/ titanic fury/ unaddressed love and hatred between us that each moment we are on stage produces something organically twisted and intoxicating for other people who just so happen to be standing there, not far from home, with an IPA and a belly full of seasoned pub fries, bathing themselves in our bath water. Standing close to the blast of a jet engine’s engine would kill any of us in seconds. But standing within spitting distance of the kind of intangible miasma of rock/roll, it gives us life. No one can explain it. Very few believe it. Even fewer ever went to see for themselves. But it happens that way. Or at least it did, I seem to recall, once upon a time.
_____
The band is drifting from their caves to this ride. I am in the front seat, high above the dumped ashtray of yesterday, smoking a fresh cigarette. People get in in different moods. Some you can count on to be at least reasonably chipper if not totally on fire with joy. Others are less inclined to let you have anything from them. They cling to the cool shade of their room. They drag it out here to the van like a parachute that someone gave them after the Chicago show four nights ago. They dare you to say anything about this oversized load they are bringing aboard now.
Say something, their aura hisses and dares. Say a goddamn word about this and I will cut your fucking pussy anxiety out of your throat with a broken pick, you tiring son of a bitch.
I don’t say anything though. I know better. I’ve been west before. I have seen these mornings so many times. The armadillos watch us from back in the cactus shadows behind the dumpsters where the criadas drop their bags of cans and tissues. There is smoke coming from both cracked windows of the front of this van. Back in Cleveland someone is remembering what they saw on stage this past week/ what we brought to the proverbial table/ how we punched them in the face unexpectedly with something ancient and primal and gloriously alive.
They sit in their office a time zone back as we buckle our seat belts, quiet down our little chatters, prepare for the long haul into the horizon.
We are like a long needle full of junk rubbing itself on a young whore’s leg.
We are the anxious hungover ancestors of immigrants sitting in silence as we blast off to space.
_____
Where do I end this thing? I don’t know. A section or two back, maybe? Or a few inches from here? What does it matter really? To take the ride you take the ride, right? There is no other way. And across a lifetime, any lifetime, you/ me/ them, we are all rocked and rolled by the storms on a sea that we can never fully understand to begin with. Why are we who we are? What caused us, long ago, to set out on the paths we each set out on?
The ample time we had to dedicate our lives to beauty and love, a lot of it we burned with gas. There were other callings we were hearing. Other voices made by barkers that ended up not even being real people or real things, we followed them diligently because we had to. Our needs were fueled by our desires and that’s what they taught us in a way.
You can make it, son, they said. Hard work pays off. Don’t you know that, boy?
And it did and it didn’t, I’d say now. It does and it doesn’t. One only needs to settle into the driver’s seat of a van moving into the west from back in the east in order to allow themselves an absolute view of the possibilities of true natural freedom. Lifting the veils of construct, cutting yourself free from the chains of your own birth, there is, at least for some of us, another form of being alive that they don’t teach you about in school. Perhaps now, as time marches on, playing in an unknown rock/roll band holds no relevance other than the nostalgia it churns up amongst the very few who ever did or the slightly more who watched from the shadows. It seems entirely believable to me now, this scattershot theory that certain bands were more important than we once realized. But that their vitality and their strength of life only actually existed in the unfolding moments in which they were alive. On the stages they moved across, of course. But perhaps just as importantly, the narrative needs to pay attention to them at other times as well. Unseen times that surely happened because the trail is long, the world relentless.
See us then: in the vans we sat slumped in. Hearing the knocking on the motel door. Unloading our bags at the back of the club. One expressionless man pushing open the emergency exit door for us. He says nothing. His eyes meet none of ours. He is immune to our charms. He voluntarily forfeits a return on his kindness in favor of this silent treatment we know too well. It isn’t always this way but it happens enough. And we were quiet in our ways, too. Our sullen nervous vessels. Our hiding behind volume. Our little songs written with so much blood, disposable to the sound guy. They were never songs to him and all is forgiven. They were ticks on a clock that kept him from his apartment. They were old smokes in a heap that someone dumped on the curb.
_____
See me, then: standing in the first rays of that cooled hot sun. Texas all around me. See me smoking in the parking lot as a major snake lies there watching me not far away. See me in the mist of the ocean on the edge of Oregon. See me in the northern California pines, getting pulled over by a state trooper, and he’s gonna let us go. See me drinking coffee in the afternoon, Montana sky spreading out above me. See me having breakfast in Los Angeles, lonely and tired and doing alright. See me looking at the antelope running away from the interstate. See me taking my focus off this fast road and fixing them on these weird wild creatures. See me clocking them. See me seeing them bounding swiftly towards a moment when I will never lay eyes on them again.
See me glancing at the shotgun rider as he looks at his novel and ignores my face.
See me looking in the rearview mirror at the bass player smiling at his USA Today.
See me passing a semi in the hard Wyoming wind.
See us slip back into the purple evening we crawled from long ago.
please
Hello. I hope you’re doing well. Thanks for reading me this week. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber to Thunder Pie, I really hope you’ll become one today. That kind of support is what allows me to keep writing for folks like you.
Have a great week.
sb
please
I was directed and commanded by another power. The power of darkness. The power that you've heard so much about. The power that a lot of people don't believe exists. The power of the Devil. Satan.
- Little Richard
THUNDER PIE T-SHIRT UPDATE!!!
Thunder Pie t-shirts will be mailed out very soon! These were DIY printed by my buddy Bill from Gleason’s Drift right here in Pennsylvania. I’m super grateful for his mad skills and mega kindness. The shirts are so freakin’ badass and I’m excited to get them to you. Thanks to each of you who ordered one.
For those about to buy me a beer/ we salute you.
Rock music is not meant to be perfect.
- Ozzy Osbourne
Things I Liked This Week.
Arle and I watched two Neal Brennan comedy specials this week. I’d never heard of the dude before but both specials made me laugh out loud quite a bit. Guess that’s a good sign if your occupation is comedian, huh?
I’m reading a couple books right now. One of them that I just started is The Black Death: A Personal History by John Hatcher. It’s a heavily historically-based but fictionalized account of a single village in England around the outbreak of the plague in the 14th century. So far it’s fascinating, grim, and extremely detailed. And I’m digging it a lot.
Listen to this sensational Jimmy Smith album.
I just saw the first eastern redbud blooms on a patch of trees on a farm that I wait all year to see. It’s pretty cool to wait on nature, to have reached a point in life where you’re simply hoping a short-lived pink flowering explosion will happen soon.
I loved discovering Episode 375 of The Rest is History podcast this past week. ‘Hitler and the Mitford Sisters’. Fascinating tale. Really kind of scary.
Thunder Pie is edited every single week by Arle Bielanko.
Photos/ Art: SergeB
Email: sergebielanko@gmail.com.
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We are the anxious hungover ancestors of immigrants sitting in silence as we blast off to space.
LOVE THAT.
Fantastic. Thanks for this.