 So it's Friday morning and I'm in the lobby of the Clarion Inn Hotel on I-35N coming out of Austin. Yesterday was a real humdinger, our first day at the festival, my first day ever in Texas. The Southwest is my last frontier in the lower 48 and I was sort of expecting some kind of mind-bending Texan experience. We got up around 10 and were out by 11 and driving toward Austin. It took us just short of four hours to ride down from Greenville. The I-35 corridor could be anywhere but I noticed the arid stretches of chaparral scrub. Another clue to my new reality was the increased density of rock vans. Rock vans are long Chevy's and Fords, always well dented up, that look like surveillance vehicles but are packed to the gills with instruments and tattooed guys with greasy hair. License plates from every imaginable place.
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 Wednesday we drove from Louisville, KY to Greenville, TX, a highway road stop about 30 miles north of Dallas. It was a long ride, about 800 miles. The Walkmen open their South By Southwest rounds at 4pm Thursday, and we still had 230 miles to cover before then. You might wonder why a successful rock band would travel like this, in the back of their friend's Toyota Corolla with no a/c and no stereo. I mean shouldn't there be a giant tour bus with a tiger airbrushed on the side and sleeping couchettes for each member, a chef, a bar for God's sake? The answer, as you may have guessed, is money. But there's more to this whole racket than just being cheap.
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 Surprise. It does not take long to start feeling skuzzy on the road. I have not exercised since we left, I have been eating fast food twice a day, I have stayed up til three every night, I have been drinking more than usual, and I spend much of the day crouched behind the wheel of an overloaded car. Today we get to try to drive to Dallas from Louisville. The Walkmen play an afternoon show in Austin tomorrow, and we've got somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand miles to cover between now and then. The good news is that somehow in Louisville, the home of Hunter Thompson , we had the kind of night you expect from rock n roll bands.
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 I pulled up to the Alamo rental car return at Midway airport thinking I was picking up Walter for the drive to Cincinnati. I'd spent the morning writing about the show the night before and packing in the sort of gleeful and obsessive way you do when you're going on a car trip. Of course I need a soccer ball, a Frisbee, a hatchet, and some fishing line. Anyway I looked up and Walt, Paul, and Stretch were ambling towards me hauling on two massive guitar amps. I looked around for the van. They smiled and waved. It wasn't until they actually got right to the car that I realized they all intended to fit in to my 1994 teal Toyota Corolla with the shot brakes.
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 Last Thursday evening I broke up with my girlfriend of 1-year, tasted the bitter fruit of failure, heartbreak, and loss again. The next day I was editing Chapter 8 of Westing and reading the lines to a song by the Walkmen that I had quoted. "When I was told she lied to me, I hung my head in shame..." They weren't applicable to my situation but the emotions they conjured were. It made me miss my friends. I grew up with the members of The Walkmen in Washington DC. We all went to grade school together. I need friends right now. I went online and looked at their tour schedule and realized they were coming to Chicago to play two shows at Schubas before making their way down to Austin for South By Southwest. Light bulb. I would see if I could go with them as a roadie, and meantime write, travel, and heal.
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