Eminent Hipsters (9781101638095) (15 page)

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B
ecause of the out-of-phase-sounding acoustics due to the band shell and the freaky blowback, the band was not on its game tonight. The audience didn't seem to know the difference, or maybe they did and didn't care.

Tomorrow's off, at the Henry Hotel in Dearborn, Michigan. I've got a long Stravinsky playlist on the Apple and that's what I've been listening to every night to go to sleep: the Odes,
Le Chant du Rossignol
,
Apollon Musagète
,
Pulcinella
,
Symphony of Psalms
and so on. It's really ill to wake up in the middle of
The Rite of Spring
—it's like waking up with the bed on fire. I also now have a small photo of youngish Igor on the desktop of my laptop, one in which he's staring into the camera with that look that's supposed to terrify pitchy violinists.

This latest recurrence of Igormania led me to watch a film streamed from Amazon,
Coco & Igor
, about a supposed affair between Stravinsky and Coco Chanel when Chanel invited the recently exiled Russian and his family to live at her high-style digs outside Paris. The film starts earlier, in 1913, when Coco attends the infamous premiere of
The Rite of Spring
and sits right through the riot, seemingly fascinated by the nutty new music. She doesn't meet him again until seven years later, when she invites him to work at her house. And yet, for the rest of the
film, we watch this curiously buff Stravinsky apparently
recomposing
the
Rite
on Coco's piano. This paradox is never explained. I guess the filmmakers couldn't resist the idea that when Igor got to shag Coco, he was inspired to compose this wild, atavistic, new kind of music, in a sort of reversal of George Clinton's slogan “Free your mind and your ass will follow.”

In truth, by the early twenties, Igor was actually through with that stuff and had retreated into a more conservative “neoclassical” phase. It's much more likely that Coco, who would eventually become a Nazi spy, fucked Igor into a reactionary spin that would last for the rest of his life. Good music, though.

The Henry is a hotel in Dearborn, Michigan, Henry Ford's hometown and the headquarters, I think, of the Ford Motor Company. This morning I actually managed to get up and accompany Catherine, Carolyn, Vaughn and his nanny to the Henry Ford Museum, a huge building filled with old cars, planes and other relics from the history of motored transportation, including a massive Allegheny locomotive, the Lincoln in which Kennedy was murdered, Rosa Parks's bus and the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. Vaughn had a great time with the trains.

I was going to ask if they had a vintage copy of
The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem
, the first of Ford's screeds blaming the Jews for all the world's ills, but I chickened out. Igor wasn't that crazy about Jews either, probably because he was often assumed to be one, with that nose and all. There's a story that, on a bus, a grateful fan once addressed him as Mr. Fireberg.

After the Detroit show, on the road, late, heading toward Interlochen, Michigan, which is a music camp with a theater and a lake. Walt Weiskopf, one of our reed players, spent a summer there. He remembers the theater, but he doesn't remember the lake. How do you like that?

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W
e're about an hour away, and I just saw a sign that said:

PRISON AREA

DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS

Does that mean that the prisoners frequently escape, roll down the embankment and try to thumb a ride? There's your screenplay right there, folks: Magwitch, the scary escapee (let's give him a Cockney accent; why not?) rolls down the hill, pulls the sign right out of the ground and throws it in the bushes. He's picked up by a crew bus jammed with happy, drunken roadies on their way to Wisconsin. Years later, having made a fortune in the . . . er, um . . . cheese business, he becomes the whole crew's anonymous benefactor. No? Okay, no worries—the Banana Man's got a million of 'em.

As I've mentioned, Boz and Mike mostly sleep on their buses, forgoing the hotels. Last night Boz's driver drove straight to the gig, the music camp. He found a place to park near the stage and they all sacked out. Early in the morning, one of the roadies was watching as campers set up chairs and music stands on the
lawn facing Boz's bus, a whole symphony orchestra's worth. I guess it was their regular outdoor practice spot. Kids with instruments soon took their places—I'm talking about a huge string section, trumpets, tubas and trombones, woodwinds, a full percussion unit with tympani, giant cymbals, everything. I don't know what piece they were rehearsing, but apparently it was a real flag-waver, double forte. Our man couldn't stop laughing as Boz's bus quickly revved up and moved to a more restful location.

After the Milwaukee show we took a day off in Chicago. After sleeping for a thousand years, never leaving the room, I'm now on the bus heading toward a gig in nearby Highland Park for the Ravinia Festival. Three more gigs and I fly home. My spider bite is beginning to heal.

All that sleep and yet I feel strangely unrefreshed, still tired and kind of jumpy, perhaps indicating the beginning of Post Tour Disorder. It's probably going to take several more millennia of sleep before I feel better. It always does.

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T
he show at Ravinia, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, was, I don't know, tight and polite. It's that kind of place. In a desperate attempt to deal with my agitated mood, I asked Pasqual if I could have a tiny toke on one of his thin, neatly rolled joints a half hour before the show. This was a very unusual move on my part. I hadn't smoked any pot for, literally, years. The experience was immediately both familiar and sad. Time stretched out, elongating the spaces between the
beats. This gave me more time to think about what I was going to play, and more time to execute. On the other hand, I felt dissociated from the event as it was unfolding. Each song seemed to take forever to wind through the arrangement, and I even lost my place a couple of times. On the upside, I felt a little less wired. But, ultimately, it was a classic bummer.

On the way to Indianapolis, an alarm went off indicating some problem with the bus, forcing Geoff to pull over onto the narrow shoulder. Incredibly, the point at which the system shut down left us without lights, including emergency lights. The traffic couldn't see us until they caught us in their headlights. Each time a huge truck hurtled by, the bus would shake and seem to lift off the ground. For a few minutes, we sat there like idiots on the side of the dark highway, and then scuffled off the dead bus to stand in the weeds while Geoff pointed a blinking flashlight at the oncoming traffic.

Just about the time Geoff figured out how to get the emergency lights working, Vince and I were picked up by the Horn/Nerd Bus. We took off, leaving Geoff to try to deglitch the system. Everyone had conked out except Jay Collins, who was watching a DVD of
The Constant Gardener
. Then he turned in as well.

As I sat there, wide awake, thinking about the bus breakdown, two literary references came to mind. The British sci-fi author J. G. Ballard was fascinated by the way in which technology has dehumanized the world, particularly with highways, parking garages and traffic. In
Concrete Island
, a driver crashes through a barrier and ends up on a traffic island below a network of highways. Unable to crawl up the embankment, he
has to live on the island à la Robinson Crusoe, scavenging material from his totaled Jaguar (this was long before cell phones).

The other reference was to the last, lovely lines of
Moby-Dick
. After the white whale sinks the
Pequod
, Ishmael is in the sea, clinging to Queequeg's unused coffin:

On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

How cool is that?

I was woken up in the Indianapolis Omni by a band outside somewhere, playing a medley of Eagles tunes. A food festival or something. Then we bused to the Fraze Pavilion in Dayton, Ohio.

When my family moved to Ohio, Dayton was the first place they settled. I asked some of the ladies in catering if they remembered the Burger Chef franchise. Nope.

Last show, in Indianapolis, outdoors. Super crowd: old stoners, fortysomethings, college types. Afterwards, there was a band dinner at the Omni. Like all last-night get-togethers, there was apprehension and sadness beneath the surface, people worried about the transition into other gigs, other lives. McDonald was
already on the bus back to Nashville, Boz up to Maine somewhere. We'd reconvene in October for the trip to Japan.

Vince rode with me to the airport, where he was getting a later flight to LA. After all the vexation and euphoria of the tour, I was feeling strangely placid, or, perhaps, feeling nothing. The greeter person, a young black guy, seemed to think I was a sports agent and asked me how to get into the business, but just then we arrived at security and I didn't have to answer. Bye-bye, Indiana, I've become airborne.

Acute Tour Disorder (ATD) is characterized by a cluster of anxiety and dissociative symptoms that develop in response to traumatic events that occur while a person is employed as a member of a rock concert touring band. Symptoms usually arise sometime during the first month of the tour and continue until its conclusion, at which time the onset of Post Tour Disorder (PTD) almost certainly follows. ATD is related to other disorders brought on as a result of severe vocational stress, such as Combat Stress Reaction (aka shell shock).

Acute Tour Disorder is caused by exposure to traumatic events that occur during a tour. Curiously, the majority of these events
are regarded by the participants as being consistent with occupational norms. These include:

• Confinement in vehicles, hotels, dressing rooms, and so on, with the same group of people over long periods of time
  
• Daily relocation to a new venue (sports arena, “rock palace,” casino theater, “summer shed”)
  
• Nightly performances in front of large, rowdy, often intoxicated crowds as well as exposure to amplified percussion and electric instruments at decibel levels that frequently cause irreversible physical and psychological damage
  

These are all, in fact, stressors that can produce a broad range of symptoms, including:

Anxiety Symptoms

Mania

Panic attacks

Inability to focus

Paranoia

Anger problems (“stage rage”)

Bizarre ideations

Replay of traumatic events (flashbacks)

Physical restlessness

Insomnia

Muscle pain and twitching

Headaches

Diarrhea

Dissociative Symptoms

Depersonalization

Derealization

Emotional numbness

Severe depression

Memory loss

Other Symptoms

Inability to carry out and prioritize tasks

Morbid fixations on minor problems

Physical and mental exhaustion

Sexual dysfunction

In addition, high levels of psychic pain and physical discomfort often lead to secondary problems, such as substance abuse, television trance and compulsive, sometimes deviant, sexual behavior.

Because the patient suffering from Acute Tour Disorder rarely seeks help until the condition has resolved itself into Post Tour Disorder (i.e., until after the tour is over), the diagnostic history is brief. Opportunities for diagnosis usually present themselves after a severe functional breakdown or when some overt behavioral aberration is brought to the attention of law enforcement and/or medical professionals. After an examination of the patient's history has ruled out diseases that can cause similar symptoms, diagnostic criteria can be set as follows:

• The patient presents six of the above symptoms
  
• Onset of the symptoms was in the first six weeks of the tour and symptoms show no signs of reduction
  

Treatment for ATD usually includes a combination of antidepressant medications and short-term psychotherapy.

The prognosis for recovery is contingent on the intensity and duration of the tour and the patient's previous level of functioning. Prompt treatment and appropriate social support are major factors in recovery. If the patient's symptoms are severe enough to interfere with normal functioning and last longer than one month, the diagnosis may be changed to PTD. Patients who do not receive treatment for ATD are at increased risk for additional symptoms characteristic of PTD: narcolepsy, major anxiety/depressive disorders and concomitant behavioral aberrations.

Of course, the best way to avoid ATD is a real-world transformation such as a change of vocation. With this choice, however, unknown factors come into play, often linked to the withdrawal of the hyperattention that is normally bestowed on the patient by audiences, members of the road crew and industry flacks, that is, a steep and sudden reduction of narcissistic supply. In theory, prompt professional intervention might reduce the likelihood or severity of ATD.

Folks who've encouraged me over the years or read through the stuff and let me know if I've said anything really dumb include Peter Battis, John Becker, Walter Becker, Virginia Cannon, Marcelle Clements, Deborah Eisenberg, Brooke Gladstone, Karenna Gore-Schiff, Tony Hendra, Hendrik Hertzberg, Gerry Howard, Fred Kaplan, Dick LaPalm, Rita Meed, Peter Mezan, Susan Lyne, Scott Moyers, Richard Ransohoff, Paul Slovak, Wallace Shawn, John Swansburg, Scott Sutton, Rusty Unger, Dorothy White, Andrew Wylie, Hassan Yalcinkaya and some other guys and gals I'm sure I'm leaving out. Sorry, y'all.