John Roderick’s tour diary:

This version of American history is very popular among high-school sophomores who love Jim Morrison, Antioch dialectics-majors, Germans with “Crazy Horse” tattoos, and New York fashion models whose boyfriends’ friends read “Dude, Where’s My Country?” I guess it’s a more enlightened view than the old ’50s grade-school history version, wherein the Cowboys and Indians shot cap guns at each other and then, poof!, everyone went home to dinner and Eisenhower built the Interstate Highways, but this ‘new history’ where Uncle Sam has dollar-signs for eyeballs and is crushing Indians and Blacks under his jack-boots is worse than false, it’s dull and false.

This is to remind you that John Roderick is an interesting person, and that his band, The Long Winters, is an interesting band (even if their last album was only so-so), and that the Long Winters will be opening for another interesting band, The Decemberists, at Trees Monday night. All right-thinking Dallasites should be in attendance for what promises to be a show of great import.

Long Winters tour diaries always make for good reading. They’re a bit more comfortable with the magic of prose than most bands. Although it’s a year old, keyboardist Sean Nelson’s diary from last year is a personal favorite, filled with great tour-bus mise en scène. Sean’s Day 21 entry is also where I first heard of The Loser’s Lounge (“The Lounge is a loose collective of New York musicians, artists, and actors who get together once a month and pay tribute to a great songwriter who somehow fits the banner of loser” — including the Bee Gees, George Harrison, Rod Stewart, and Harry Nilsson). Also liked this quote from that entry:

With a couple of hours to kill before the first show (8 and 11), I browse the little independent record store in Cooper Square that’s right across the street from the big ass Tower Records. Browse browse browse. There was a time when I would go into record stores on tour just to have an interaction with the clerk, to prove that life was actually happening. And then, the process became so refined that I would go just to have an interaction with the records. It was like visiting friends; bands I knew, bands I liked, bands I didn’t. The records I bought were like souvenirs of my visit. Now, the refinement is complete. I just go into these stores and look. A wise man I know makes a physiological distinction between shame — a tingling, burning sensation around the scalp precipitated by something that has already happened — and dread — a bilious lump sinking into the chest as a harbinger of things to come. Either way you slice it, record stores are problematic for me.

18 June 2004

Comments

Post a comment

Name (required):

Email (required, not shown):

URL:
    Remember Me? Yes No

Comments: