EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY 2 ...

DAY 2

I've drawn the early shift. Gentry has driven from 2 in the morning to just before dawn; it is 6 or so, and now I am to take over. I have dreamed of playing a very orange, very angular ESP guitar. It has rained very, very hard- practically the entire night. I would wake up and look to see where we are, and out the windshield is only sheets of rain and I cover my ears and hope to fall asleep before the van spins off on it's side into the dark.

The early shift is my favorite shift to drive. The roads are quiet; I am a nervous driver, and I'd rather drive on empty roads. This morning is beautiful, the clouds are luminescent and high, the far edge of the storms we followed (or followed us?) across Wyoming and most of Nebraska, shaded and blushed in the sunrise in the parking lot of a gas station that is still closed for the night, which is across the street from what seems to be a motel that is closed for the rest of the decade, towards which I stumble to take a piss into a broken-out window.


******


Tour is waiting: waiting for sound check, waiting for a shower, waiting to leave, waiting to get there. The first day of a tour is even more waitingly so. Reading at the bar during sound check.


*****


SHOW REPORT: CHICAGO

A middle-aged man with a lisp asking too many questions about too many metal bands of my fellow merch monkey at the t-shirt table. I don't make eye contact. Tyler at his Vistalite anvil, all sweat and skin and hollow logs and thunderheads; Gentry upon the stump-pulpit, acrylic mocking birds flickering out from his thumbs and palms. Then fog, robes.


*****


'Let's get the fuck out of here and find some fucking pizza!' When Tyler says this, he does so very loudly, so much so that the bar tendress, who 15 minutes before last call (an hour ago) floated me a bottle of Old Style, turns and looks and drops her hands to her sides.

'Umm, ok.' Gentry isn't drunk. Tyler's drunk, but I don't think that he means to be drunk. I'm not drunk. I am tired. It might be 2 in the morning. We are loading our gear, but no one else is loading their gear.

'Yeah man, pizza would be kick ass.' I don't think that I mean it.


*****


'I fucking put my balls on this fucking p'roni! Can't you fucking handle that? Huh? Huh!'

The kid in front of me doesn't even flinch, just scratches his chin strap. Behind the counter, the second guy doesn't flinch, he only just sweats and grins and is soft and puffy under his golf shirt, which is splotched with flour.

'Can't you fucking do this? Can't you fucking handle this!' The guy yelling must own the place. He's screaming at everybody like he owns the place. His skin under his chin is blotchy and looks like scar tissue.

Greg Anderson, from Sunn O))), grinning, steps up to the counter: 'I'd like one large veggie pizza-'

'I'm not fucking doing no veggie fucking pizza! We're out of fucking veggies! It's too fucking late for veggie fucking pizza! I'll put my balls on the fucking veggies! Can you fucking handle it!'

Greg steps back, turns with his hands a bit up from his waste, and goes out the door still grinning.


*****


We're asleep. We're in the front room of Trevor de Brauw's apartment. No, Gentry and Tyler are asleep- I can't sleep. Cats, I am allergic to cats, and in this apartment there is a cat. Tyler is asleep, but I can hear him moving on the couch. Twitching? No, he's kicking his leg. His kick drum leg. and his arms are swinging.


*****


Administrative note: Some of this is going to end up in the City Weekly: http://www.cityweekly.net/utah/

EAGLE TWIN TOUR NOTES DAY .5, 1...

DAY .5

'Mother fucker!'

'So we'll just glue these bitches on the edges-'

'Mother fucking shit! Fuck!

'What?' Gentry asks.

'Fucking fuck mother fuck! Agggggggghhhhowwww!

'What the fuck is his problem?'

'I shot my fucking thumb! Fuck!'

In a warehouse divided with 8 foot chain link fences into individual storage spaces. Saw dust, radial arm saw, liquid nails on everything, stained rags, aluminum burls. Gentry Densley and Tyler Smith are trying to finish up the three stacks of 4X18 speaker cabinets that are blocked about the cement floor.

'Fucking shit!

'How did you shoot your thumb?' asks Gentry.

'Fuck! With the god damn fucking nail gun! Fuck!' says Tyler.

It's Tuesday night, 11 or 12, maybe 1. In Salt Lake City. Eagle Twin's first show of 2 weeks' with Sunn O))) is in Chicago on Thursday. Chicago is 1,400 miles from Salt Lake City. Tyler holds his thumb and yells and kicks one of the cabinets and then says that he is done for the night and then he goes home.

'What the fuck,' Gentry says.


*****

DAY 1

I'm tired. I did not sleep much the night before; I woke up in the middle of some one or something telling me a racist joke in my dream. Right at the moment the punch line should have been delivered, I woke up.

The van is not running very well. That's not it. It is running fine, it is 29 years old. I am 28 years old. It is just running hot. We've stopped somewhere on the high sage brush plains, in a town with not enough teeth, it seems. Tyler is haggling for parts, I am dosing in the passenger seat, Gentry is in the parking lot.

He's feeding the seagulls. A lot of them. They are on his shoulders and at his feet and he is grinning and holding up bits of a sandwich in his gathered fingers to the birds as Tyler comes out from the sun-faded auto-parts store.

'Let's get this show on the road!' Tyler says. He heaves up into the drivers seat, scooping a poke of Winter Green Grizzly into his lower lip with his right hand while clicking his seat belt with his left.

'Those were the coolest seagulls I've ever seen.'


*****

'I just can't fucking wait to see Nebraska!' Tyler says this as he is driving and he is pounding ceiling of the van with his fist. 'I fucking love Nebraska!'