Over the Rhine Tour Diary
Linford Detweiler

December 16, 2000, Day All I Need Is Everything

So the hard part about keeping one of these tour diaries is this: there are so many good people around to talk to, laugh with, join for a walk through a new city. And writing is such a solitary pursuit. I'm an introvert so I tend to be replenished and redeemed by long solitary drives alone where my mind can wander, or by walking alone with the dog through a leafless woods, or by disappearing for a few days anonymously to a familiar monastery. And of course scribbling a little aside in a diary helps me pan back and look around and be surprised. But on the other hand, these people I'm surrounded with are giving so much right now, and there is a community that develops and thrives on the road that can exist only on the road. When we get back home, everything changes. So this journal gets laid aside for days at a time, and I join in and get lost in the moment. And that's the way I want it.

So I have to slowly begin to work my way back. We're back on the bus. The fallow fields are blanketed with snow. I wake up at noon and walk to the front lounge and Big is holding court on the cb and the other truckers listening gratefully push in the buttons on their handsets while they laugh their proverbial asses off. I guess that's one way to stay awake. Big has a great sense of humor. When Jack finally worked up the courage to ask him how he lost his leg, he replied, Inbreedin'.

He's understated about it, but he's very quick and can get us all laughing pretty hard when he starts telling stories about driving Loretta Lynn, or growing up in West Virginia. According to Big, Loretta is brutally forthright. She starts her set with two songs, and then after that just takes requests. Loretta makes Big homemade cookies and leaves them on his seat, and when Big tells us that if he had his druthers, he'd just drive Loretta around all the time, and not mess with all the other bands, Chris says, Thanks alot. Love you too Big.

Big also tells self-effacing stories about his artificial limb. How it broke one time in the desert: not an oak tree to be found for hundreds of miles. He ended up buying a used wooden leg from a dealer in Phoenix, that had supposedly belonged to a mountain climber. One of the guys (by the name of Smooth) in the band he was traveling with at the time, according to Big, was sitting in the front lounge of the bus, 'Drunker Than Cooter Brown', and Big was putting on his shoe and the foot of the new leg sort of crumbled. Turned out it was dry rot. Smooth watched it all happen through impaired vision, and said, I gotta quit drinkin'.

But they ended up taping it back together and got it functional enough so Big could walk.

The other odd thing about Big is, no matter how cold it gets (and we've seen some downright bitter weather), he always wears knee-length shorts. Big will be standing out on the street talking on his cell-phone in shorts in a stiff breeze when it's 10 degrees Farenheit and spitting snow. Jack says, I guess there is less of him to get cold.

Terri is talking on her cell phone looking wistfully out the window. Again. We've all been amazed at how much time she has spent on this trip talking on the phone. If Terri doesn't get a brain tumor in the next few weeks, I think the rest of us are probably going to be ok. She's a one-woman focus group on the hazards of wireless phones.

Jack and Karin and Chris are playing scrabble at the table. Jack has played a few proper nouns, but even when he has to take one back, he's ahead. They let him leave "styx" on the board.

Farns and Spinner just woke up and walked out and they are staring out the windows, waking up slowly with their hot coffee. They've watched the movie Slapshot (with Paul Newman), several times on this run and they've grabbed the rest of us from time to time to make us watch their favorite bits, and walk around the bus quoting lines from the film. I've never even heard of this movie before this trip, but I guess it's an important piece of Canadian hockey folklore, fairly raunchy, filmed in the late '70's. A few years back, Spinner had his photo taken with the Hanson brothers (three of the main actors) and they gave him a pair of glasses to wear during the shoot just like the ones they all wear. I guess the Hanson brothers travel around Canada making appearances at various hockey tournaments, selling autographs etc. Spinner and two of his buddies enthusiastically wear the numbers 16, 17 and 18, on their jerseys in the hockey league in Windsor, Ontario, where they play--same as Dave, Steve and Jeff Hanson. We're talking Canadian cult heroes.

We played another two sold out shows in Philadelphia last night, and we hope the next time we come to town, we can play at the Theater of Living Arts on South Street, a roomier club that used to be a theater, with a bigger stage. We left a good bit of the gear behind when we loaded in for these two shows in Philly, because the stage at the Tin Angel is the tiniest imaginable. Chris bought a beautiful little acoustic guitar for $85, and was playing it in the back lounge of the bus. The guitar is probably at least 50 years old and sounds like an old vinyl record. It was as if you could open the door to the back lounge and step squarely into a rural county in Mississippi. Chris knows his way around on numerous instruments: electric and upright bass, piano, guitar... He even plays viola de gamba in an early music ensemble in Nashville.

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On the road, sooner or later, everything is in the present tense.

We stop at a rest area South of Ann Arbor and Karin borrows my Pea Coat and slips it over her pajamas and when she walks back toward the bus through the snow I look out the window and wonder who is this dark woman with head of ample tousled blonde? Oh this is Karin. Ohhh. The colder it gets, the more Swedish Karin looks. I used to joke with Karin that Swedes weren't known for doing much of anything except each other. But I guess there is a pretty significant Nordic tradition of singing. I know Karin's ancestors were mostly known for herding reindeer or making music. The music part makes sense when I see Karin in action, but what about the herding? Well, she did put some reindeer antlers on Willow once I think.

The audience is very attentive at the Tin Angel for the first show, but they are so quiet between songs it almost makes us feel a little self-conscious. It's great to have people riveted on what you are doing, but if their isn't a little give and take, it can feel less like a concert, and more like church. I remember Jane Siberry saying once that all art is prayer. I like this theory, and it resonates with me. But when it comes to playing in a band, I like the prayer to feel more like the praying that takes place in a black congregation, where the audience participates.

One time on tour we visited Al Green's church in Memphis and listened to him sing and preach for almost three hours. (At least half of his sermon was sung. They had a sound system set up in the sanctuary, and on top of both stacks of speakers were Leslie speaker cabinets, and the Hammond player was amazing of course.) But Al is one of the only people I've watched perform that has to regularly take breaks so that he can get his joy under control. He turns his head to the side and looks away from the microphone because he is smiling too wide to continue. And the whole service is about the give and take between what is going on in the front of the church, and what is going on in the pews. It's very rock and roll.

One of the reasons that every night is different on the road is that every audience is different, and the audience is a big part of what goes on at a concert. Sometimes I think people don't realize how empowered they are when they attend a show. They can very much effect what actually happens on any given night.

One of the worst dynamics is to have a room full of people talking loudly over what you are trying to play. This used to occasionally happen to us in the early days, and oddly enough, when we made Eve, we seemed to attract people that weren't all that interested in listening to the music. We experimented at the time with turning up and we dropped a lot of our more introspective songs from the set. We thought if we played louder, or revved it up more, people would be forced to listen. But it seemed to only aggravate the problem. After we made Good Dog Bad Dog, audiences began listening again, and now, it's not uncommon to play for extremely attentive audiences that largely want to close their eyes and just get lost in what we're doing. It was extremely rewarding to participate in this change over the last handful of years, learning that an honest whisper could be more powerful than a Marshall Amp.

But touring to me is increasingly about energy, about feeling something electric and unpredictable in the air. And while I love the fact that people are often listening so thoroughly, I also want to feel like we all drifted, or climbed, or soared somewhere together, somewhere we couldn't have possibly arrived apart from each other.

People that open for us almost always comment about how gracious and musical our audience is. Ron Sexsmith made the comment after his set at the Taft Theater, There are a lot of good people out there in that room.

I think for some of the younger performers that open for Over the Rhine, it's often their first experience with a discerning audience that is really paying close attention to what they are doing and trying to say, and it almost always makes a lasting impression on the performer. Maybe that's why we have boxes of cd's from bands that are constantly asking us if they can tour with us. Much of the credit for that phenomenon must be given to our audience--an extremely eclectic and enthusiastic menagerie of music lovers from around the world.

* * * * *

So we arrived back in Cincinnati after the concert in Milwaukee, and even though we were home, it was like we were still on tour. We did some radio performances and press interviews to promote the big hometown show coming up. It's never a no-brainer to sell a few thousand tickets, even in your hometown, and we always work pretty hard every year to make these concerts fly.

I was also helping to get everything together for the artwork for the new record, working with Owen Brock and Michael Wilson, trying different things to see what felt right, what fit the music. The days were very full.

Chris Donohue had previous long-standing commitments for the weekend of December 8th and 9th, so we called our old buddie Wade Jaynes to fill in on bass. And Don Heffington had significant conflicts develop, so we asked Dale Baker from Sixpence if he would fill in for our show on Saturday, as well as playing his own band's set. He graciously agreed...

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Jeff Bird from Cowboy Junkies is also coming into town Wednesday evening. He'll stay with Karin and I at the house, and we'll get a good rehearsal in on Thursday, and then run the show Friday in Lafayette, Indiana, a perfect opportunity for a dress rehearsal before the big homecoming concert.

The best laid plans...

Thursday morning, the professional movers arrive. I've used this company for a few years to carefully move my Hammond B-3 organ in and out of the house so that I can use it for both touring and recording. Even after a few years of touring, it's pretty pristine--in exceptionally fine condition. These movers use a system where they strap themselves to heavy pieces of furniture and lift with shoulder straps. I guess it saves their backs in the long run. I was amazed when these same guys moved my heavy upright piano down steep stairs, down from my third-story bedroom in the neighborhood of Over the Rhine when I finally let go of my flat and moved into the Grey Ghost, our 110 year-old house. One of the guys on the bottom of the piano was actually strapped to it! If somebody slips, there is a dissonant chord and a roll and a crash, and fifteen hundred pounds of iron harp and hardwood land squarely on the unfortunate victim. Let's just say they really commit.

Well, to make a long story short, this particular morning somebody slipped on the front steps and there was a tumble and a crash. I look up from the street and my Hammond is upside down on the cement sidewalk with two guys strapped to it sprawled on the frozen ground at odd angles.

Miraculously, the movers are fine, thank God. But what about this 40-year old B-3 that I got for a steal, a mere $3000? It's upside down on the cement! Will it ever make another sound?

They gingerly put down a blanket, and slowly flip it over and it's a bit scuffed, and the lid is cracked toward the back, and I don't know what's going on internally--I'm afraid to look. So off it goes to its road case and I have no idea if I'm going to have a B-3 for Saturday's show or not. We'll find out when we get to the theater.

Then we learn later that actually Dale won't be able to make the Indiana show at all, so we'll be playing Duncan Hall in Lafayette without a drummer (not a huge deal with a six-piece band). But what it does mean is that there will be a band walking out on stage the next night in our hometown in front of a few thousand people--a band that has never played together before. It's a tiny bit unsettling. No run through with Wade and Jeff and Dale: we'll have to dive in and go on Saturday.

After we see the cozy little historic hall in Lafayette, it makes no sense to play a set anything like we had in mind, especially without a drummer, so we pull out a batch of songs that we haven't played on the tour thus far, the most intimate armload we can conjure up, and it all starts to make perfect sense. Jeff Bird's harmonica and mandolin works beautifully in these sparser settings, and they have brought in a beautiful Baldwin grand piano on stage, and we have a wonderful time playing. The show is sold out in advance, there are people in the balcony, and the hall is packed. I'm told that there are signs on the front door begging people not to come in if they don't have a ticket--there is just no room in the inn. Another first.

Jack discovers a brewery in Lafayette right next to the venue and reports that they brew the best ale he has found since coming to America.

We spend the night in Lafayette. Karin is taking antibiotics for her sinus infection and doing amazingly well all in all. Several of us are battling colds, including Dave Nixon. I'm a bit worried about him. This is his first tour, and as much as Dave flourishes in the face of hardship, the hours are a bit brutal, especially when you're sick. Dave is a trooper though. He insisted on driving separately this weekend so that he wouldn't infect any of us. He's been doing a beautiful job setting up our wares, and he's consistently sold significantly more than I projected for this tour. It's very humbling to see him serving us so willingly, throwing his heart into the mundane enterprise of selling recordings for what may turn out to be nothing more than a misfit ensemble of hopeless romantics. Very humbling indeed. But I know that he's been able to write for at least a few hours a day, and I know that there is something about being on the road that fires the imagination, and breaks down barriers. I think Dave will write some delightful and important books in the years to come. (He recently let go of his full-time ministerial duties to devote his days more fully to writing.) He contributed some wonderful poems to Michael Wilsons' book, First Kind Sight, and is working on a new collection of poems that revolve around the theme of repentance. What a gift to have him traveling with us.

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