A July July! Tour Diary

Part 1: Maundering in the maritimes

We Decemberists are embarking on a short little jaunt through NE Canada and some eastern/midwestern US cities. I’ll be doing my thing here, cataloguing all the tedious and banal sorts of things we get up to while on the road. Join me, won’t you?

Tuesday, July 15
Portland > Ottowa

This, this is what I have to leave behind.

Also this

and this…. sigh

I’m never quite sure if I should ever include the first travel day in these things, but this tour is such a shorty (sub-14 days) that I figured I might was well, if only to pad the thing out. I might’ve mentioned this in past diaries, but I’m too lazy to do the research so I will simply repeat the anecdote: back in my younger, grimier tour days, back when we hauled ourselves around the country in a red Chevy van, I recall talking to a fellow Portland band and being subjected to their time-worn theories about rock tour — namely, that any tour shorter than two weeks is not a tour. They didn’t specify what it was if not a tour, but their tone suggested that it was something on which only cowards and layabouts embarked.

I am a coward and a layabout. Even a thirteen day leave-taking from the comforts of my home is too much for me. The day prior to leaving on tour, for me, is what I tend think of as “days of long sighs.” I do my laundry; I sigh. I water the garden; I sigh. I make myself lunch; I sigh. Of course, once I’m actually *on the road* I tend to sigh much less. I think it’s that transitional moment, that liminal space between being homebound and bus-bound that is so difficult. It’s made even stranger this time since Carson and the kids have left for Bend and I am alone with no one but my cats to hear my long sighs. Sigh.

At the airport, I am met by my bandmates. We are flying to Ottawa, Ontario, to start this tour. That is in a different country on the other side of the continent. We are routed through Vancouver, Canada, and are made to wait on the tarmac before departing for Ottawa because, the captain tells us, there is a plane in the airspace that is not communicating with the tower. The whole airport is grounded. I don’t know why they felt they needed to tell us that, that there was some kind of rogue 747 above our heads, ghosting traffic control, but maybe that’s just good old fashioned Canadian candor. I’ve recently finished Nathan Fielder’s brilliant The Rehearsal so I can only imagine what sort of conversation is happening in that cockpit. In any case, this errant plane stops giving YVR the cold shoulder and we are clear to depart.

I watch the Brazilian movie I’m Still Here; I read my book, which is Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. More on that later.

We arrive after dark in Ottawa. Blessedly, the hotel restaurant is still open to feed us bedraggled Americans at 10:30 p.m. Not only is it open, but positively hopping. Maybe I got Ottawans wrong — maybe 10:30 on a Tuesday night is the perfect time for an Italian meal with your friends. I snuggle into my bed and, after watching about fifteen minutes of Kenneth Clark’s Civilization (my go-to simmer down bedtime watch), I am asleep. Good night, Canada!

Wednesday, July 16
Ottawa, ONT

I wake, lucid, in my hotel room at a decent hour. I have had dreams about strange structures being built in a vast desert. I order up avocado toast from room service; it arrives in a to-go container as if to say: your time here is up. Eat your avocado toast and be on your way. And I shall!

I make my way to the hotel lobby at noon and am greeted by Chris, Nate, and our tour manager Katy. We load into a van are driven across town toward the site of the Ottawa Blues Festival, which is where we’ll be playing tonight. We are not a blues band, and yet here we are. Our bus is here and we, each of us, go about the diligent task of claiming a bunk. Everyone has their designated preference by now, so there’s no bickering over who gets which one. There are eight to choose from in this configuration and I claim my usual driver’s-side-back-top. I like to be away from the ruckus of the front lounge and to be a bit elevated, so to better feel that rhythmic sway of the bus as it careens along the highway. There are only six of us on this bus: the five bandmates and TM Katy.

More on that: We have decided to do this short run without our ever-rotating lineup of auxiliary members. Back to the “core five.” Longtime showgoers can attest to the fact that we have, over the years, experimented with adding one or two members to the touring group in order to cover various instrumentation and vocals from the recordings. This is all well and good and we have been blessed with a stable of very talented musicians and singers on the road. But it has occurred to me lately that maybe it’s been inside us all along. Now begins a new era of lifting up the immeasurable gifts of the core members of the band — we are five!

Plus, we have two free “junk bunks” now and you’re less likely to have to wait for the bus bathroom in the middle of the night.

Our dressing room is a well-appointed trailer in a gravel driveway behind the brutalist concrete slab that contains the Canadian War Museum. We are told that said brutalist concrete slab will be a sufficient sound-block against Def Leppard, who will be playing on the opposing stage at precisely the same time we will be. We are dubious.

No sooner have we moved into our bus bunks than we are called to the stage for soundcheck. It’s to be a brief one — which is better than none at all. It’s also in the 90s and very humid so the less time spent on an open air stage, the better. We run through our different instruments, getting various levels and sounds, until our production manager, capable Troy, gives us the slashed-throat signal. We haven’t played a show since August of last year; we’re going to have to leave some of our readiness up to chance and adrenaline. It might’ve been wise to book a warm-up show in a club or a theater prior to playing a festival, but here we are.

We take a hot and humid golf cart ride to catering later in the evening for a taco buffet. Everything has corn in it, which might be a Canadian thing? In any case, Jenny has a longstanding aversion to corn and must be mindful with every bite. Then it’s back to our little compound behind our stage to await showtime.

Jenny, John, and I meet up on the bus and do some vocal sectionals, making sure we’re covering all our bases without our typical backing vocalists. Before we know it, we’re getting a text from TM Katy that we’re thirty minutes out — time to don show clothes, to do one’s vocal warmups, and open a bottle of wine. We’re back on the road, here.

The temperature has swanned down into the habitable 80s. There’s a nice full crowd here and it feels exciting to march on to a stage once again — that part never seems to get old. We launch into July! July! which has the two-fold quality of both referring to our current month *and* referencing French Canadians. The crowd has been appropriately pandered-to. Things start going wrong, however, right around the time we hit Legionnaire’s Lament. The vocal mic is cutting out. It’s pretty jarring. We try to soldier on — the crowd seems to be unfazed. Turns out it’s only happening in our monitors — only we can hear this cutting-out, and it’s not just happening on the vocal mic, but on everything. Production Manager Capable Troy advises that we take a five minute break and cycle the power on…something. I agree; we announce to the crowd a small intermission while we hover on the sidestage and hope things will get fixed. They don’t.

Alas.

But, since the audience can’t hear it, we agree we should just soldier on and make do with the cut-outs. It’s a bit frustrating and not a little bit distracting and there are plenty of mistakes made by everyone that I would like to chalk up to the fact that we were dealing with this mechanical glitch and not, say, the glitches of our own rusty, aging minds. Insult is added to injury when we hear, during each song break, the plangent sounds of Def Leppard handily scaling the impregnable barrier of the Canadian War Museum. Hysteria, indeed.

In any case, we had fun and we made a lot of mistakes and there were a lot of happy-seeming people out there, so all in all it was a win. Here’s what we played:

JULY
BURIAL
ROX
BUS MALL
WRONG YEAR
ELI
LEGIONNAIRE
MAKE YOU BETTER
SEVERED
CRANE 123
OCEANSIDE
WOODS¹
RUSALKA²
DBTW
VALENCIA

Then it’s back on the bus, riding eastward into the Maritimes. I settle into my bunk and try to quiet my spinning mind. Eventually, it finds some kind of equilibrium. Fare thee well, Ontario!

Thursday, July 17
Riviere-du-Loup, Quebec
Day Off

The picturesque St. Lawrence River

We had been so basked by the heat and humidity in Ottawa, there was some excitement among the gang to have our day off on what appeared to be a riverfront resort on the way to Halifax. Jenny even mentioned swimming in the St. Lawrence. However, when we rise and emerge from the bus at this halfway juncture (a stopover day off, as its known) we cannot see the river. We can barely see across the parking lot to our hotel. My phone tells me that the current weather is “Squall Watch.” It is 60 degrees. It is not swimming weather.

Some days off are placid and wholesome in which one’s hours are spent blithely refilling the emptied tank of one’s soul; today is not such a day. Purely to remove myself from the blank walls of my hotel, I borrow an umbrella from the front desk and make a half-mile trudge in the rain to the nearby shopping mall. I inscribe my report to the rest of the gang via the group-text: “Le centre commercial est déprimant.”

Bus call is 11 pm; I am there at 10, ready to heave on eastward.

1. Axed because we were short on time during our technical delay and it also wouldn’t have suited being accompanied by Pour Some Sugar on Me.

2. Again, axed for time because of the delay. But we were also probably going to run long anyway.