Over the Rhine Tour Diary
Linford Detweiler
December 15, 2000, Day Etcetera Whatever
We're on the edge of Cleveland in a neighborhood called Lakewood. The bus is parked in maybe a foot of snow along the curb. People walk by on the snowy sidewalks in their own worlds, bundled thickly in hats and scarves. Children are coming home from school, hollering happily, tossing handfuls of snow at each other, making ghosts with their breath, roses in their cheeks. A grade school girl wears black pants under her blue checkered accordion skirt to fend off the cold. Cars drive by, their tires slurping through the brown salty slush.
Jack and Karin and I got up this morning at 6am after riding through the night from Columbus. We were supposed to do a performance on a morning news program on the local Fox TV station here in Cleveland. Spinner called four cab companies trying to get a cab to come get us, but apparently no one wanted to venture out in the dark ice and snow for a handful of unpredictable musicians. After waiting for over an hour, we called the station and apologized, and crawled back in our warm bunks. I didn't stir until after noon.
When I did get up, I wandered down Detroit Avenue and found a little restaurant/deli and had some lunch. What I really was hoping to find was a place to sit and write undisturbed for awhile, but the only real contender it seemed was a lonely laundromat, and since I had to do a phone interview at 2:30pm anyway, I ended up just traipsing back to the bus.
I called the journalist in Pittsburgh, and he was friendly and supportive and very taken with the band. I don't know what it is exactly, but there seems to be a lot of excitement in the air about Over the Rhine once again, and it's contagious even for those of us in the band. It's not hard to get excited about Over the Rhine while we're recording, or playing together in front of an audience. But increasingly, there is cause to "count our blessings" at odd moments throughout these scattered, unpredictable, infinite days.
And what a tour this has been.
While we were sleeping soundly on the bus last night after the show in Columbus, it took Big, our bus driver, over four hours to drive just 100 miles through freezing rain and snowy night roads. But I pan back even further in amazement, trying to pick up the story where I left it.
When I stepped off the bus that morning in Chicago and the cold air hit me square in the face, I knew for a fleeting moment how very much I'd been given, how very alive I was, and I had to try to write some of it down. What can I compare this feeling to? Waking up in the early hours after midnight and realizing your lover is awake too? Seeing the sun begin to rise like a wrapped gift after having driven all night? Heaven wants you to tear it open and don't even think about saving the paper: there will be new wrapping paper tomorrow, and new unmentionable gifts.
In Chicago, a total of 479 people, not counting guests of the band, crammed their beating hearts into Schubas for the two sold-out shows, a room that is supposed to hold 200. I think it was a record.
A couple of booking agencies had been courting the band, and representatives from Billions Corporation attended the late show in Chicago. I got to meet with them afterward, (their agency has been described as hip and eclectic), (and they book Nick Cave, what can I say!), and we ended up signing on a few days later. For the first time in five years, Over the Rhine will begin working with the support of an experienced agency, rather than just picking up the phone in Cincinnati when someone calls the office out of the blue, inviting us to come perform our songs. Plans for next year are simple: tour pretty much all of North America, and stay open to the idea of opening for the right band when the opportunity arises.
We'll be seeing more of you from the sound of it.
I had also recently asked someone who we had traveled extensively with a few years ago to consider helping out with managing Over the Rhine. It's all been a little overwhelming to say the least. Blair Woods (a boy I went to school with in the fourth grade in Meadville, Pennsylvania), was in Chicago as well, and accepted the invitation after seeing both shows. Blair has worked with both Cowboy Junkies and 10,000 Maniacs, and will take a lot of the pressure off the band when it comes to coordinating plans with the label for the new record etc. My life might actually be simplifying somewhat.
Blair hadn't had a chance to see the band since we toured with Cowboy Junkies for about four months in 1998, and he said he couldn't believe the difference--especially in Karin and Jack. He said that Karin seemed so much stronger, more confident, much more comfortable with what she does, and he just couldn't believe it was the same guitar player playing with the band. He also said he would be hard pressed to remember me smiling on stage, and there I was, grinning like a fool at times during the set, unable to help myself.
Well, we hadn't really thought about it at length, but if the whole thing is distilling a bit, maturing, coming into its own, opening wider, so be it. All I could say to Blair was that I'm having more fun making this music right now than I ever have. The rest will take care of itself.
I guess Karin and I have always felt that since we were drawn so deeply to Jack's songwriting, and to what he had to offer as a human being, we couldn't go wrong in the end. Jack knows how to ask penetrating questions, which have a way of making life more flavorful, without compromising his ability to laugh heartily at himself and at the absurdity of the numerous contradictions that define all of us. It continues to amaze me, being an American, to see how Jack and Hazel have lived very rich lives, and have gained a wealth of experience and fond memories without ever pursuing or even entertaining seriously the concept of accumulating money. Jack is a man with a well-developed repertoire of simple pleasures, very few of which, come with any significant price tag attached. Walking with his girl, looking around a new city, a glass of red wine with dinner, a good draught of ale and some lively, honest conversation--these are some of the things that Jack values.
To me, Jack's guitar playing is very much like his songwriting: he is trying to get at something utterly heartbroken.
I remember the first time I met Jack. It was back in 1995. Miles Copeland, manager of The Police, had invited me to his castle in Southern France to participate in a songwriters' festival called Printemps des Troubadours. I wrote with Andrew Farris of INXS, as well as the singer from a band popular in the '80s called Spandau Ballet. I laughed my heart out with Greg Alexander, a boy who went on to start his one-man band, The New Radicals, and pen the amazingly profound smash hit "You Get What You Give", only to promptly thumb his nose at the music industry and walk away, saying, I guess I have no interest in being your next puppet rock star, thanks anyway. I had dinner with Olivia Newton-John and realized the girl in roller skates who could make me swoon as a teenager, seemed more like somebody's nice Mom now that I actually had the chance to lift a glass of wine with her, and to tell her how much I had loved that song, "Suddenly":
"And I, I'm ready to sail any ocean with you."
(I suddenly wonder to myself how many of the lyrics that I have written for Over the Rhine could be summarized with this one line of that Olivia Newton John song.)
"If I'm drowning within your open sea save me."
"I feel like a castaway but I'm not afraid. You be the sea, I'll be the sky."
"I've been stealing hundreds of bells, ringing my way along your shore."
"First I'm disbelieving, then I'm almost drowning, swimming in the ocean with the sound. I can hear you breathing."
"Don't let me drown if the rest of the world's goin' down..."
"We'll be sleeping on the beach, keeping oceans within reach..."
"Hej, Hej, Hej, you wanna dance here in the sand?"
"For the night sky is an ocean, black distant sea washin' up to my window all the stray dog night owl junkies, orphans, vagabonds, angels who lost their halos."
Oh my, do I owe everything to my teenage crush on Olivia Newton-John?
I wrote the song "Thank You My Angel" during that week in France with Pat MacDonald, a tall gentle man who started a band called Timbuk 3, best known for their song, The Future's So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades).
And every evening at the castle the table is spread wide, and lavished with all manner of fine food and drink and dessert, and every night I walk alone and look at the stars in the sky and wonder if the aching inside is loneliness.
I flew to England afterwards to spend a few days alone and then to look up a friend, a young dreamer with an imagination of many colors. He took me to a tiny cottage in Northampton, near the tiny towns of Oundle and Deene, and said that he had hired a young electrician from London to rewire an old house next door called The Seahorse. According to Matthew, the electrician was a songwriter with a ragged, infinite voice. It was Jack. And later that night over my first glass of Lagavulin, Jack pulled out a guitar and sang a song called, Someone I Used to Know, and there was long-absent wetness in my closed eyes, and all writers' festivals aside, I had to ask myself if maybe this was the best song I had ever heard, and I knew why I wanted to continue being a musician and songwriter.
Shortly after this meeting, I began writing all the songs that I contributed to our record Good Dog Bad Dog. And I sent those early recordings to Jack to make sure I was on the right track.
And when it made sense to ask Jack to join the band, we weren't just hiring him to play the guitar, something, incidentally, which no one had ever asked him to do before, we were hiring a world view.
So if we cash in somehow by some unpredictable, wild miracle and all of a sudden Jack is making more money than he has ever made in his life, I'll be curious to see what he actually does with it. And if we never do, it doesn't really matter in the end. We'll both be wealthier for having seen much of the world together, and for having asked the world to teach us something good. And with or without money, we'll both look back on our lives one day and say, We did many of the things we truly wanted to do--needed to do--in order to discover our true place of birth.
Because it's only a matter of time until word starts getting out about Jack's own music, I know that the day may come when his own music beckons him away from Over the Rhine. But in the meanwhile, I'll enjoy the ride.
Karin just walked into the back lounge of the bus with her new vintage store find: a faux cheetah fur coat with leather trim. Wow! It looks fantastic. She had a birthday yesterday and is spending some of her birthday money. She informs me that the same store has some old men's caps and hats, so I'm off to see what the world has to offer my cold Cleveland head.
I opt for a pair of slightly irridescent slacks first of all, and lo and behold, what is this? It's almost a cowboy hat, and it's warm and old and it speaks to me and makes me grin--all this firm felt. The young, fashionable clerk asks me if he should bag up the hat for my walk back to the bus, and I say, Actually, I think I'll wear it and just Come Out Swingin'. He laughs and says, Well alright, and I realize he probably thinks I'm flirting with him.
* * * * *
In Milwaukee, we were absolutely exhausted after playing four days straight, with two shows in a row the night before, but warm people streamed in out of the cold and filled up the Miramar Theater, and made us feel welcome and at home. Ticklepenny Corner, a band from Wisconsin, opened the show, were very warmly received, and had done a great job spreading the word, putting up posters and so forth. It had been a few years since we played Milwaukee--we were pleasantly surprised and look forward to coming back.
Karin and I also had a chance to meet more of the people from Virgin/Backporch at the show in Milwaukee, and regardless of what happens, it was great to feel like our songs were continuing to creep into the lives of people from diverse backgrounds, people with stories as varied as the weather, people who were maybe somehow more aware that we were all connected, because they saw bits of themselves, their sweet days, their broken childhoods, their tiny unexpected bursts of joy, in the music we were making.
At the end of the day, I write and participate in something creative because it makes me more human and alive. And my hope is that our work will inspire others to write their own stories more vividly, whether or not they ever pick up a pen. And if even a few are able to risk more, reap more, breathe more deeply because of a little something we do, it is enough.
We rode exhausted and happy through the night back to Cincinnati after ordering a stack of pizzas for the bus. Big dropped us off at Saint Elizabeth's Cathedral at 9am. Karin ran to the Grey Ghost and got Willow, our Weimaraner, and brought her on the bus while she packed up her things. Sometimes it's hard to come back to Norwood, Ohio, after seeing so much of the world, but for now it's home and it's always good to be home.
. . .