Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Back from Tour

Well, I returned from my tour yesterday. (Edit: when I started writing this, it was yesterday; now it's last week.) It was quite an experience. It has seemed for a long time like things have been building up to this, and now that I'm back I hope I can find an equilibrium again. I was proud of myself in January and February for averaging about a post a week here---I fell off that wagon in March, but I hope to get back on it again.

The tour was a really interesting experience. I'm not sure how much it was a typical band van tour experience, but it was fun and very educational.

Some weeks ago I signed on to play bass for Bill Tucker and Friends, specifically on a tour that Bill had set up of the south. Some of the gigs we were working towards fell through, but in the end we played three shows in five days. Along the way I learned a lot about a segment of society I haven't had much contact with.

My bandmates are all in their mid-twenties, about 15 years younger than me. I don't really know many people of that age group, and as I've been sliding into middle age I've seen myself settling down into a fairly regular, comfortable existence that doesn't involve interacting that much with the rest of the world, so spending six days in close contact with four twentysomethings, traveling through their community of friends and associates, was bound to be educational.

There was something of a paradigm shift that took place among American youth in the late 80s or early 90s, by which point I was already beyond the point where I would have been susceptible to it, so I didn't really appreciate it. But younger people who grew up in the 90s and 00s have been more seriously affected by it. I think it comes from a sense that We (the country, or humanity in general) is doing bad things, of which young people do not approve and with which they do not want to be associated, but at the same time feel powerless to affect. Reduced to simplest terms, whereas when I was growing up there was generally a sense of optimism, societally, nowadays I think there is more of a feeling of pessimism, if not despair. I think this underlies the "angst" that has defined a lot of youth popular culture since the late 80s or early 90s. People of course react differently to this, but some (including some of my bandmates and their friends I met on the tour) respond by to an extent anyway withdrawing from society and living in a strange and interesting countercultural world, under the radar of society at large. One of the most interesting aspects of this is an anti-consumer mentality: "DIY" is apparently a movement, i.e., people making things themselves instead of buying them, and/or repairing broken things instead of replacing them with new purchases. Another manifestation is a practice of buying as much as possible used instead of new.

Having lived a pretty much middle-of-the-road existence myself thus far, it was interesting and thought-provoking to live in that world for a week.

But anyway, here are some pictures from the tour. First, the band:

Bill Tucker, guitar and vocals; moi, bass; Chris Castellan, drums; and John Salt, tuba.

Here's John and Chris with the Sparrowses, a husband/wife rootsy/bluegrassy duo with whom we shared the stage in Bloomington, Indiana. They also put us up for the night after that show.

We had some time before the show in Bloomington so we held an impromptu parade.

Our arty band photo. Astute blog readers may recognize the Beer Nuts t-shirt. This was at a gas station somewhere in Mississippi or Louisiana, I think.

On stage at Sluggo's in Pensacola.

On stage (well, patio) at (well, behind) the Ole Mug in Foley, Alabama.