A Peaceable Tour Diary

Part Ten: East into the west

Thursday, July 18
San Diego, CA

I am thankful to have a night back on the bus, our little roving home, even if it’s for a short overnight to San Diego. I sleep well and rise late-ish. Outside, it’s a blessed seventy two degrees and there are the masts of ocean-faring ships everywhere. We are playing Humphry’s Concerts on the Bay tonight and we are in very tony company indeed.

Several of the bandmates opted to stay behind in Los Angeles and do the drive during the day — I cannot fathom why. It’s just tour manager Heather, Lizzy, Victor and I on the bus this morning and there’s plenty of elbow room. I make my way to the venue, hoping to shower.

We’ve played here before — it’s an outdoor stage on the grounds of a hotel-resort. Our backstage will be hotel rooms. There is also a pool right next to the shade and I find my way there to take a quick dip and read my book. At lunchtime, I take a car across town to meet up with my friend and lit agent, Steve Malk, and we talk shop over veggie bowls. He drops me off back at the venue; he’ll be there later tonight with his family.

There is a daysheet still hanging on the wall of our backstage from last night’s show, the “Happy Together Tour 2024.” A truly stacked lineup if ever there was one. If ever you wanted to see a Badfinger with only one original member play for twenty minutes, that was your shot.

We stand on the shoulders of giants

Soundcheck is uneventful, though we’ve changed up how we’re doing the song requests during the VIP event. Instead of having everyone shout out what song they want to hear and have Jenny haphazardly try to pick one, we’ve queried the registered guests ahead of time for song choices. We play “Clementine” and “Myla Goldberg.” It is, above all, much less chaotic. Then it’s back to our little rooms to bide our time.

The show tonight is sold out, which feels great, obvs. It’s a beautiful night and the moon is hanging in the sky just above the hotel restaurant like a dewy little gem. There are people in dingys out in the bay, skirting the need for a ticket, and all is well and right with the world. The setlist is a variant of our one from Bend but my voice is feeling a *little* more up to the task this time.

And that’s it! The bus carries us ever onward. Good night!

Friday, July 19
Tucson, AZ

For whatever reason, the ride from San Diego to Tucson is a very smelly one. I keep waking up to strange miasmas in my bunk — burning rubber, gasoline, sulphur. It’s like we’re traveling through the layers of hell. It is very hot outside when we arrive at our destination. The high today will be 104 degrees farenheit. It doesn’t sound pleasant. Perhaps we have arrived in hell after all.

We’re playing at the Rialto tonight, here in Tucson, not in hell at all, and I do remember playing here before. Chris Funk, hanging in the front lounge with his coffee, does not remember this. A quick reference of setlist.fm settles the debate: we played here last in 2006. For whatever reason, I have a distinct memory of waiting to go onstage, standing in the alleyway in front of the stage door. Petra was there, so it must’ve been the year prior — 2005. I wonder if they’ve revamped the backstage amenities at all in our absence. They have not. The stage door is still just a door letting out on to the alleyway behind the building, the dressing rooms a concrete bunker just next to the theater. The area around the Rialto has been transformed, however. There are apartment buildings here where there were no apartment buildings before. The Hotel Congress is still there, though, and I make my way thence to shower.

Refreshed, I seek out the Mexican restaurant that the venue’s production manager recommended, La Chingada Cocina. It’s only a few blocks away but it feels like I am stumbling through miles of Kalahari wasteland. A woman outside the bus terminal starts following me, filming with with her phone. “I know who you are!” she shouts, but before I can be flattered by being recognized by a super fan, she explains that she knows I’m with the FBI and that she’s filming all of us motherfuckers, all of us anti-terrorist motherfuckers, and she’s on to us, she’s watching us, she knows. I gingerly cross the street and escape. I have huevos at La Chingada Cocina; I return to the Congress, avoiding the bus terminal as I go.

Time for soundcheck arrives soon enough. We play “Oceanside” and “Hazards of Love 4” for the VIPers, the former for a five year old named Annabelle. Then it’s back to the cinder block backstage to await our time to play. I steal away to the day room at the Congress and sneak in a nap.

At show time, we gather at the alleyway door just like we did in 2005. The show feels strong and buoyant. My voice is managing to hold together, day by day. We play “Burying Davy,” now with improved arrangement, and it goes pretty well. We do a marginally better job with “The Island” tonight — as compared to Los Angeles, when we last played it — but I do manage to mess up the instrumental bridge in “The Landlord’s Daughter.” We finish with “Joan in the Garden”: the soundbath (“Joan Space,” as we call it) feels particularly inspired.

Phoenix, we’re coming for you!

Photo: Reed Harmon

Saturday, July 20
Phoenix, AZ

It is forecasted to be 114 degrees today. We are in Phoenix, a place that tends to spring to mind when one thinks about climate disasters. No slight on the good people that choose to live here, but my god, I’m not sure how you do it. I’m sure there are reasons — reasons I can barely fathom when I only experience the city (or its suburbs) from the very restricted confines of a venue backstage.

There is a security checkpoint just outside the bus. A guy standing beneath a pop-up awning asks for our laminates, gives us a wristband, and asks to check our bags before we go inside. This is not a thing that happens very much. Maybe the venue — the Van Buren — has had some shit go down in the past, but I can say I’m a little chagrined to get the pat down to walk into my own backstage. The bag search is laughably perfunctory, though. I zip it open the smallest amount and the guy tells me I’m good to go. I head inside; this poor man has to sit outside in 114 degree heat all day. Nice work, Live Nation.

What to do now? The only brave souls who head out are John and Lizzy, who walk across the street to the Goodwill. They return advising against leaving the building at all. That works for me. The backstage at this place is spacious and accommodating. It even has natural light! I guess this was an old car dealership at one point before Live Nation cast its wand and turned it into an 1800 capacity BDRC. One thing they certainly did was invest in high powered air conditioning; we all have to put on sweaters before we go onstage for sound check.

Dinner is then waiting for us in the green room — it is hands down the best catering we’ve had all tour. Many kudos to the Van Buren team. I hope the security guy under the pop up awning outside our bus, currently suffering from heat exhaustion for no clear reason, had a chance to sample it. JFC. We play a couple rounds of Flamme Rouge (a perennial favorite) as we bide time before the show. Victor wins one round, Jenny the next. We haven’t really been playing board games on this run, so it’s refreshing to crack open the old road case and dig one out.

The room is packed and unbelievably chilled as we head onstage for the show. You wouldn’t think it was still over 100 degrees outside. The crowd seems pretty lively; I see a few folks from Tucson up against the barrier — including the (maybe?) six year-old kid named Annabelle with her mother. I hope we don’t cause any lifelong trauma for the child. Highlight of the show might be “Beginning Song,” our encore finisher. I’m not sure how popular it is among the general show-goer population, but I always look and see a couple people for whom it clearly resonates very heavily. I always appreciate that.

Show’s over; I brave the still-sweltering heat for the few seconds it takes to wander from the backstage door to the bus. Blessedly, the man under the pop-up tent is long gone. I hope he’s in an ice-bath or something right now with a frigid glass of rosé. You earned it, buddy.

This is Santa Fe

Sunday, July 21
Santa Fe, NM (day off)

I have never been to Santa Fe before. I’ve heard a lot about it; a friend of mine lived here for a while back in the ‘00s, an assistant for an art dealer or something. My mother in law really likes it here, I guess. We are playing at an outdoor venue tomorrow and have the day off in the city. I will get to see it for myself.

From the first glance out of the bus windows, it looks as if I’m on the set of a western. Everything is adobe. Every building has its ridge poles — or whatever you’d call them — sticking out under the roof eves. All facades are western facades. I gather my bags and go the wrong way through the parking lot. I end up wandering through — I shit you not — a street fair that appears to exclusively selling turquoise jewelry and Navajo-patterned shawls before I find my way to the front doors of the hotel. My room has an adobe fireplace (decommissioned) and an adobe porch that looks out on an adobe landscape. I am in adobeland. Everything is ochre.

To be honest, I’m a little thrown by Santa Fe — but I soon realize that’s because we are staying in what might be called the “downtown core” which looks and feels much like some dusty corner of Disneyland. I find my way to a diner and order chilaquiles, which feels apropos. I read on my phone that Joe Biden has dropped out of the presidential race.

I spend the rest of the day wandering this wonderland; I find a bookstore and a record shop. I nap, briefly, in my hotel room. At my manager’s recommendation, I walk twenty minutes through a gantlet of art galleries to a restaurant called Geronimo. I end the evening on my adobe terrace, watching the sun go down over the distant mountains, the sky all cleft by storm clouds. Inspired, I watch about fifty minutes of “The Magnificent Seven” before I drift off to sleep.