Tour Diary Part 5

Features: international travel!

Tuesday, August 16
Chicago, IL

I walk into the front lounge on the bus and see we’re parked in the middle of State Street in Chicago. Cars are whizzing by in both directions. Out the window is the marquee for the Chicago Theater, where we’ll be playing tonight. We’ve been here before, a few times. It’s a beautiful spot — one of those truly grand old theaters. The backstage walls are cluttered with signatures and graffiti of the touring Broadway shows and bands that have played here over the years. We have one such piece of graffiti, done by Carson and some friends back in 2015 — 7 years ago! I find it in catering, hidden behind a stack of Igloo coolers. Ah, fame.

A Carson Ellis original, just behind the chafing dishes and go cups.

I haul my bag up two flights of stairs to the dressing rooms; there are no elevators in this joint. I am — and have been this whole tour — very thankful I took a moment and shook up my timeworn tour packing system. Time was, I would leave on these two week plus tours with a giant roller bag and a backpack. Having dragged said roller bag up too many flights of stairs in aging theaters, I decided to heed the advice of The New York Times and be one of those one-and-done packers. And I can safely say, dear reader, that I am never going back. I invested in one of those all-in-one carryon backpacks (it’s a Cotopaxi, if you must know) and I will never look back. One must be on one’s laundry game a little more frequently but it’s a small price to pay.

I escape the dull confines of backstage for a brief and somewhat half-hearted walk around downtown Chicago; I wind my way toward Millennium Park thinking I might do one of those bean selfies, but what little inspiration I have for such a thing quickly fades and I turn around and walk back. The streets are jammed with people and my covid paranoia, even out in the sorta-kinda open air, spikes. Safely back in the backstage, I huddle and wait.

Soundcheck is quick and easy. Everything’s in working order, the song’s are (for the most part) down pat, and tour malaise has set in: just the right environment for a Classic Rock Soundcheck. The Shebangers are mercifully ushered in, bringing an end to this torture and we play “After the Bombs” and “Hazards of Love 4.”

We gather for catering; the chalmon are abundant in the Chicago area, apparently. Afterwards, I shuffle my laundry around (Chris Funk is behind me in line) and we set in on our second attempt at the April session of Pandemic, which is now casually referred to as “Pan-D” or “Panda.” Via Twitter, I learn that game designer Matt Leacock has, in fact, planted a Decemberists easter egg in the game, which we had entirely missed. We lose astonishingly quickly; the medusa virus blows up immediately in Cairo and our stock of little green cubes vanishes within a couple turns.

We walk on stage at 9 pm, a very late hour in the context of this tour, and play our hearts out to a full house. The crowd is standing from the get-go, a vanishingly rare occurrence in a seated theater, and thankfully the setlist is mostly uptempo so there’s not so much of that sitting-and-standing-and-sitting calisthenics a crowd has to go through. We play “Shiny” for the first time in a while; we end with “Meant for the Stage.” “June Hymn” is the top of the encore and as I round into the chorus, I look out into the crowd and lock eyes with none other than Nora O’Connor, our erstwhile backing vocalist and collaborator. It’s a sweet moment; I choke up the tiniest bit in the middle of a line.

After the show, I Facetime with the family at home; I miss those dudes. Then it’s off to the bunk, where I am currently sucked into episode two of “Brideshead Revisited: REMASTERED,” which sounds like a terrible video game, but is in fact just the old BBC mini-series, all polished up. Charles Ryder is sipping at his claret as I fall, blissfully, asleep.

Wednesday, August 18
Grand Rapids, MI

It’s a fact of touring that those classic, ornate theaters that every major city seems to have — the ones with the latticed prosceniums and gold-leafed arches everywhere — tend to all blend into one inscrutable jumble in your mind, like putting “grand old theater” into one of those DALL-E clones and seeing what comes out. The places that do stick in the brainpan are the odd ones. Today is an odd one: the Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, MI. It’s an outdoor amphitheater in a botanical garden. This is the third time we’ve played here and I recall each of our appearances distinctly. We played here in 2016, between records, and I think we might’ve debuted “Once In My Life” on the stage. The 2018 show, as setlist.fm reminds me, was not so friendly. My voice was going and we had to cut the show short. Dismal times. I’m in good voice today, though, and pretty well slept, midwestern interstates notwithstanding.

They’ve redone the backstage, and the people who endowed the new rooms are keen to remind you that your gifts as an artist are granted you not just by God, but specifically the holy trinity, lest you get your notions of godliness elsewhere. One of the pretty significant downsides of terrible public funding for the arts.

Well, okay then.

The day goes by unremarkably. We have some lunch, we kick around a bit, we are called to stage for soundcheck. I’ve put “Rusalka/The Wild Rushes” on the setlist and we give it a go. It doesn’t go, really, so we decide to put that one off another show. We do, however, give “Days of Elaine” a quick kick of the tires and it seems to hold up okay; we’ll play it tonight. Shebangers are ushered in; it’s a small crowd, which seems weird, since tonight’s show is sold out. We do our bit, play our songs, and then it’s off to catering for an early dinner.

Pandemic Legacy is laid out; the gamers sit down to game. We win the month of May and are feeling confident. Our agents will prevail!

Showtime is 7:45; it’s full daylight as we walk onstage. It’s a very everyone-in-lawn-chairs scene and that, frankly, can be a real vibe-killer. But we are professionals and do our thing. There’s some standing up and sitting down — about half of the crowd remains mostly standing — but it’s hard to pull a lot of energy from this one. “Days of Elaine” goes off without a hitch; the extendo-jam in “Severed” feels nice and hazy. I have to cut the subsequent extendo-jam in our set closer, “California One/YABB,” short because I have had to pee since, like, the eighth song in the set. Thankfully, this being a botanical garden, there are plenty of obliging shrubs behind the stage and I return, triumphal, for the encore.

We bid adieu to the Grand Rapidians, pack up off our stuff, and prepare for the overnight ride to Toronto.

Thursday, August 18
Toronto, Canada (day off)

And here we meet yet another of the great indignities of tour-life: bus border crossings. In order to get to one’s destination in good time, and keeping in mind that the bus driver’s schedule is such that he is ideally only driving at night, border crossings must occur in the early, early hours of the morning (or late, late hours of the night, depending on your particular circadian rhythms). The bus rolls at 3 a.m.; it arrives at the border at 7 a.m. I spend those four hours in a kind of liminal state between sleep and wakefulness. There’s always a hope that the border agents will allow us bus riders to stay in our bunks; alas, this is rarely the case. So we all, zombie-like, emerge from the bus in the half-light of dawn and shuffle into customs, trying to answer questions like, “What’s your band’s name?” and “What do you play in the band?” I can manage questions like these pretty handily with all my senses accounted for; they are like answering final Jeopardy questions while in the haze of poor bus-sleep.

In any case, we pass muster, we are given the green light, and everyone wordlessly returns to the bus, returns to their bunks, to whatever form of sleep they might win before we arrive in Toronto, three hours later. The bus can’t stay near the hotel — we are in bustling downtown Toronto — so we have to hastily collect our things and relocate to our hotel rooms.

Always helps to have a view from a hotel room that reminds one where one is.

Now what to do. I bide time till it feels like a reasonable lunch hour and order a scallion pancake and some dumplings from Mother’s. I read my book; I play my video game. I take a very long, delicious nap. I wake at 4 and decide I need to leave the confines of my hotel room. I walk north, toward the university. I walk the leafy ramble of The Philosopher’s Walk. I listen to Cocteau Twins while doing this; it’s a nice match.

Back to the hotel; delivered Indian food for dinner. It’s delicious. Then I absorb various forms of media till I get it in me to fall asleep. Eventually, I do.