Tonight I'm going to jail (part 2)

It's the next day and the DAGGERS show up at Trax recording studio for our after-hours, under-the-table time as the previous, better, more responsible band was loading out the last of their gear. Trax is a really nice, really professional studio that's super big money and staffed by consummate professionals. Luckily for us, one of them was sorta goofy and had agreed to record us after his paying customers are done that night, it was only one song, we should be able to knock it out in a couple hours.

We loaded in our gear and started setting up, it was about one in the morning. Rob and I set up our stuff and went to go wander around and check the joint out. It was beautiful-hardwood floors, and crazy windows, and a full kitchen! Sweet! Me and Rob began rooting around to try and make coffee. We found coffee grounds in the fridge, but couldn't find a coffeemaker. We banged around in the cupboards, opening and slamming drawers and doors and swearing loudly when we hear from the door way behind us,

"Wellll, hellllo boyyzzz, whaddaya doooin'?"

I knew the voice instantly, instinctively. But, how, why, here...? I turned around and sure enough, there in a white terrycloth bathrobe, stood JELLO BIAFRA. Wow. And we'd woken him up!

I apologized and told him we were pulling an all-nighter in the studio and were trying to make some coffee. He was nice, said it was no biggie, he was just crashing there while making a new LARD record. And as far as coffee goes,

"Alllll we've got is a french pressssss..."

We did our thing in the kitchen, then did our thing in the studio. We were loading back out as the sun rose misty and cool over Lake street while a cop car parked nearby, backed up against a wall, it's windows all fogged up.

Tonight I'm going to jail!

So, my band THE DAGGERS had somehow lucked into a Friday night show at the Double Door. It was our first time playing there, and while most bands would be stoked at the opportunity, we just saw it as a chance to act like assholes through a nicer p.a.. We were already a week late delivering a song for this compilation we were supposed to be on and hadn't even recorded it yet. We had set up some under-the-table recording time at Trax studio for the next night after-hours, but had been forced to shitcan the last couple practices and were pretty rusty. And drunk. So, Rob decides we should just play the song we gotta record in 22 hours, "Tonight I'm going to jail", ten times in a row. It was a brilliant idea then and it's a brilliant idea now, so it was a go.

My guitar amp was on the fritz, so I sauntered up to the girl who played guitar for that evenings headliners, whose name I've long since forgotten. I introduced myself and asked if I could play through her amp that night.
"Ummm, I guess..., but you can't touch the knobs...." she said, seeming a bit miffed.
"Can't touch the knobs, why not?" I asked
"My boyfriend set 'em for me." she replied.
Huh.
Ok.

So I found the dude from the other opener and asked him if I could use his amp and he said sure and rolled it over. I got acquainted with it and tuned up while Rob wrote out set lists that just said, 'Tonight I'm going to jail' over and over.

We were up. Rob leaned into the mic and yelled, "We are the Daggers and this one's called 'Tonight I'm going to jail'!" and we ripped through it, a little sloppy though. Next song, "This one's called 'You're Weak'!" and we ripped through 'Jail" a second time. Better. Next song, "This is a song about broken hearts, it's called 'If my baby rides a Variflex'!", boom, 'Jail', pretty good. By about the six or seventh time, we had really hit our groove, really fuckin' nailin' it. It was dead silence between songs, except for the bartenders laughing. We really having a blast and besides, we had to record this thing in a few hours and don't really practice. We wrapped it up after an encore ('Tonight I'm going to jail') and said our goodnights.

While loading out, As I walked past that chicks guitar amp and took my finger and ran it across the tops of the knobs, turning them all the way up. Every single knob.

Rainbow Gathering

We’d been on tour for a couple weeks and were broke, dirty, and hungry. The show in Louisville had been cancelled and it was too late to make the drive to Nashville, so a free place to crash was the order. Rob said that some hippies he met in a gas station told him about a Rainbow Gathering nearby. A Rainbow Gathering is a floating hippie commune of sorts that moves around from one national park campsite to another. The idea didn’t hold much appeal but Pete mentioned that our friend Chuck might be there. We discussed it back and forth; how sweet it would be to hook up with our friends, eat some free food, scope some naked hippies. On the flip side, it WAS a Rainbow Gathering.

We said fuck it, and decided to try and find it, so Ron and I located on the map what HAD to be the correct national park while Pete and the others loaded up the vehicles. There were already eight of us on this tour and the thought of adding three more of our closest friends to wreak havoc on Kentucky hurried us along.

After a few hours, we pulled into a gas station outside the entrance to the park. I filled up the van while Ron went in to grill the attendant for info; perhaps he’d seen an unusual number of dirty hippies for this part of Kentucky. Suddenly a Subaru station wagon passing on the road locked up it’s brakes and skidded sideways into the gas station. The car slammed into reverse and and screeched up next to van. I feared the worst. Then, amidst much screaming, who should appear from the Sabaru but Chuck, Arnold and Cathi! Much rejoicing was done in that gas station in Kentucky and we were all reminded what a small fucking world it is indeed.

So our caravan had become two cars, a van and eleven people. We were gonna TAKE OVER this hippie bullshit! As we sped along the gravel roads through the beautiful forest we told the new arrivals how the tour had been going (great, except tonight’s cancellation), and Arnold told us how their traveling had been going (great, except for Cathi’s crazy ex-boyfriend). Cathi was in one of the other vehicles, so Arnold recounted the story at length. Apparently, Cathi had met some guy, one of those old street sweepers who hang around any given scene to prey upon it’s young, naive female members, and had “fallen in love”. They bought a school bus together (the hippie equivilant to the first home) and headed off together. A week later Arnold got a frantic call from Cathi on a pay phone in Mississippi. It went bad, and she’d split, but he was chasing her. She was hitchhiking home, but he kept appearing in the bus, and she kept having to hide. Arnold and Chuck the drove to Oxford, Mississippi to resue her from ‘Sparrowhamk’ (kak!), as he apparently liked to be called, and they were now heading back.

After an hour of circling this huge park we stopped to have a conference with the others. Noone had seen a car or a fire burning or any signs of life of any kind. It certainly didn’t look like it, but this HAD to be the place. We laid out the map on the warm hood of Tom’s VW and figured that, if we kept on the way we were, we’d hit it eventually. Suddenly a roar that would’ve waken the dead erupted from the forest and headlights appeared from the opposite direction, coming towards us-FAST! We all jumped off the road as an enormous, dilipadated school bus screamed by, missing the vehicles by inches. The bus passed us and tore on into the forest without even slowing down, leaving us in a cloud of dust and monoxide.

Arnold came running up and told us that that was Sparrowhawk on the school bus! He must be staking out the Gathering looking for Cathi. We were now positive we were going the right direction and moved on, hoping to avoid any hippie domestic disputes.

We started to see these little piles of rocks here and there along the roadside and figured these must be some type of hippie marking system. Soon after we found the camp, our hearts racing at the thoughts of free food and nudity.

We rolled into the parking area and were greeted by a grungy, naked man of about 50 named Marty. Marty weighed about three bills and shook each of our hands very enthusiastically. I assumed because it had been so long since he’d touched a clean hand. Marty said to go ahead and scope a campsite wherever we wanted. Dave asked about the rumors of free food at these things and Marty sadly told us of a rift in the ‘Rainbow community’, as he called it. It seems another faction had set up a Rainbow Gathering of their own at a different national park campsite about a hundred miles away. Problem was, this splinter group had all the foodstuffs and kitchen appliances. Most of the people were just getting doughnuts at the gas station, Marty said, but they were working on constructing a new stove. I imagined a circle of confused flower children fussing over a pile of deconstructed bongs and VW parts. But, Marty said, we should have food soon. What were they gonna make, I asked. Doughnuts, Marty replied, natural ones.

We left Marty in his own stench to cordone off some solitude for ourselves. The group was tired from the drive and the heat and wanted some sleep before we plotted our next move, which would almost certainly involve doughnuts.

Pete and I counted four naked hippies on the way to our site. All dudes, all dirty as hell, topped off by the last one, a sullen-looking chap who wanted to know ‘what the hell we were looking at’.

After a few hours of listless sleep, punctuated by slapping at mosquitoes both real and imagined, Chuck, Dave and I had enough and decided to go check out the ‘kitchen’ ‘and see if there was any ‘food’ yet. At the ‘kitchen’ the ‘cooks’ were busily setting up road signs over a fire pit and generally being naked and dirty. Apparently, that was some sort of prerequisite for these things. Despite the fact that national parks have bathrooms and showers these people remained dirty as Frenchmen.

We milled around the site, kicking around empty doughnut and granola bar boxes looking for leftovers. Chuck asked for some water and a dude in a filthy GIVE MOTHER EARTH A HUG t-shirt pointed vaguely at a pile of milk jugs next to a pile of rancid garbage.

Dave and I were writing anti-hippie slogans in the dirt when we heard someone yell, “NO, not that one, that’s GASOLINE!” and turned to see Chuck throw a jug across the ‘kitchen’. We ran to help him as he sputtered and spat, retching to get it all out. Dave asked him if he’d swallowed any. Yes, Chuck said between heaves, a lot.

He didn’t start actually vomiting, per se, until we got him back to the campsite. Within a couple minutes he was on his side vomiting every couple minutes. As fountains of puke poured forth from him, Jeremy commented that it must really suck for Chuck to be tripping during all this. Seems he and Chuck had each dropped a couple hits of acid while everyone else was trying to sleep. Oh. Man.

The decision was quickly made to send Chuck home with Cathi and Arnold. It was only a days drive and with no health insurance, there weren’t a lot of options. The rest of us decided to head to Nashville. Sleeping on the side of the road was starting to sound pretty good. So we stopped at the gas station, bought the last three boxes of doughnuts, and rode on.