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Tour Diary: 1995 (Niko) > Page 1
You are absolutely hateful. The devil is the flesh of your brain, your eyes, your hands. You are reading this. - First page of tour diary
There are very few things in the world that really piss me off. The last was when I came home and found a guy I'd never met banging away on my old Martin, a guitar that I've loved and played for 15 years. I was so instantly incensed, filled with tear- making blistering rage I realized later it must be like coming home to find a strange man sodomizing your girlfriend in her sleep. Being on tour is often a vigilant avoidance of situations like this. Traveling with a band is for me a bringing of what is most precious into public places. For instance: those little communication devices called instruments are of necessity left lying about in dark smelly clubs in dodgey parts of large cities. Too, touring can be like the vulgar practicing of religion in public: I believe like Stravinsky that praying is something you should do at home, if you must - in private. Just so, playing our music has to be very personal, or it shrivels up like a dead insect. For people watching us, that don't go with us and the sound, I suppose it must be a little embarrassing. At best on a good night however, the good people that stand facing us in the dark are become holy too.
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Tubingen
The first show in Tubingen, Germany is remarkable for being such an incredible, needed release after the months of preparations for the tour. Blood, bright red, all over my white Stratocaster guitar from a cut on the little finger of my right hand - from hitting the strings too hard. Earlier in our set, I almost start crying, thankfully don't. At the end Tom knocked my newish Les Paul off a speaker cabinet by mistake, bending the guitar jack and ruining the patch cord. But what a release! I've been waiting for a real tour for Oxbow - especially a European tour - since we became a band around 1990. Finally on stage and playing our music to a room full of people, far from San Francisco. This first show is a little loose. But, there really is no way to be fully prepared for the uncertainties of performance. So all we can do on stage and especially at this first show, is follow our feelings. To close eyes and go to that strange beautiful place... |
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The Near Room
The Near Room is where the great American boxer/poet Muhammed Ali said he went when he got knocked on the head too hard. I see it as a kind of subconscious, dream playground. Ali described it as inhabited by all kinds of weird shit: crocodiles playing trombones, bats on trumpets, bright flashing colored lights, screaming snakes. Chaos. Or, just like playing on stage with Oxbow. As I said, this first show is memorable too for almost making me cry. I'm not exactly much of a weeper, but last fall when I was in Europe I broke up badly with what had been my long time girlfriend. Really a horrible time. Anyway, being back in the same atmosphere, specifically in Germany brought all those old feelings back in force. Then, I had been over playing guitar with the English band God. This time from the moment I got off the plane in Frankfurt, all through the show in Tuebingen I kept reliving the past in my mind, in the most horrifying realistic ways. Truly a source of stress.
Coupled with the fact that the basic source for all Oxbow music and lyrics is love gone bad, the release of the show nearly released my tears too - nearly drove me to the kind of crying jag that just can't be stopped.
Thankfully it didn't start, I kept it together, kept playing, and the shaky moments passed. A stage is not the place you want to find yourself with that kind of hopeless self pity. The show was videotaped by the cool Thomas Venker.
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