We arrive in San Francisco and check into the very-Rock-n-Roll Phoenix Hotel, located in the heart of the seedy Tenderloin district. Since it’s June in SF, it’s too cold to swim in the pool but we are soaking up the hipster/tropical ambiance. The show promises to be one the best nights of the tour with Scrawl and the brand new Barbara Manning Band on the bill, which we headline. Earlier in the year, I had heard Barbara’s music and her band, World of Pooh, and loved both records. When WoP came east for a tour, I volunteered to drive them in our van and watched as they managed to implode spectacularly, pissing off everyone and breaking up before I dropped them at the train station back to San Francisco (they wouldn’t fly). If you look closely at the ‘Love Barge’ video, filmed later that month, I’m wearing a World of Pooh t-shirt under my green suit.
But first, there’s work to do and we meet up with Tim Thompson, our Sony Rep for the Bay Area. From the moment he bounds into the RV, we are impressed, as he’s set us up with a promo schedule which makes us feel like a hot band on the rise. First stop, Revolver Records, a hipster-run shop on Noe, near the Duboce Triangle. Tim schleps a cooler full of sandwich meats, cheeses, and soda for the staff, and he gleefully hands out lunch to the staff as we mingle with them and the customers. “People gotta eat, and they will remember who fed them,” he tells me with a wink. We bring the deli train to a couple of record stores and then we are off to KUSF, one of the sponsors of tonight’s show, for a radio interview. Meanwhile, Tim is on the phone trying to find a place that can repair our RV, He’s a godsend, injecting us with energy and confidence at a time when we most needed it. We forget our personal issues and try to keep up.
The show at the Kennel Club is one of the highlights of the tour for us as all of our friends from the last tour turn up and bring their friends. Greg Lisher from Camper is there, as is the legendary Greg Freeman. Barbara has an all-female band and they play a sublime set of minor-key folk-rock. Scrawl is their usual amazing selves, a tough act to follow, but we are invigorated by an almost full house and play a rocking set that ends with Barbara joining us on stage for ‘Scissors.’
It’s an uplifting night and really makes me think that someday, someway, I should move here. I had no idea that night I was about 6 weeks away from making it happen.
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