Day Three of the 30th Anniversary of our Slam Tour Diary. 6/1/90 Chapel Hill, NC at Cat’s Cradle. We left Richmond after having breakfast with David from Camper at a cafe that his girlfriend worked in. I’m sure we picked his brain about life on a major label, a situation that may have had a lot to do with why they ended up breaking up later that year. After a quick walk to the Edgar Allen Poe museum, we got on the road and headed to the next show.
We always loved coming into Chapel Hill, it felt like the first real southern town of our tours and I especially enjoyed the laid back feeling of the town. I can’t remember if we ate at Mama Dips Country Kitchen this time, but it was a tradition for us when in town. As I recall, they had a cocktail that was called ‘The Big Dipper’ on the menu. The Cradle was a great club and felt like a home away from home.
According to Jeff’s diary from the tour, it was a great show, although plagued by technical problems early in the set. This was to become a theme of the tour as everyone in the band had upgraded their equipment a bit when we got our (meager) advances and, for Bill, that meant buying a new guitar and a wireless unit, so he would be freed up to wander and dance on stage, unencumbered by a guitar cord. Of course, the movie Spinal Tap is funny because it’s true, and Bill had constant problems with his radio unit, although we luckily never got military transmissions over it.
Jeff’s diary also reminds us that we got stoned in the RV after the show, another theme of the tour, and a practice that had begun, I believe, when we were recording Slam in Charlotte earlier in the year. Our young drummer had always enjoyed the demon weed, but the rest of us had indulged infrequently, if at all. For some reason, maybe it was the stress of the major label scene, we all got in the habit of smoking after dinner break at the ‘Slam’ recording sessions. That might have led to some questionable decisions during mixing, but, hey, the Beatles had made almost all their records while stoned on something, and if it worked for them, right? I think the effects of the Sativa are most noticeable on ‘Life in the Cemetery’, where we turn a rockin’ song into a snoozefest.
We stayed at the local Knights Inn, on a tip from Dumptruck, who loved the restful royal purple bedspreads and curtains. Tomorrow- We’re heading South and things go south.
Calculating Route... 