Welcome back! it’s Day Four of the Slam tour, and we are driving to Atlanta for a show at the Cotton Club, maybe the first time we’ve headlined in Hotlanta. We arrive in the RV, hoping to find the stage set up and ready for soundcheck but the club says they haven’t seen or heard from the crew. After an hour or more of nervous pacing and frantic phone calls to our manager back in NYC, the van pulls into the parking lot with a badly damaged front end and a very shaken Jim and Woody. It turns out that they were involved in a crash on the highway a few hours from Atlanta and, in those pre-cel phone days, had no way to get in touch with anyone. Luckily, Jim and Woody were unhurt but the front quarter had been pushed into the driver’s side wheel well and made the van undrivable. They had to be towed to a garage where a mechanic was able to pull the fender back enough so that they could finish their drive to Atlanta. Up to that point, we had logged 10’s of thousands of miles on the road, in the US and Europe, without so much as a fender-bender, and now, in the first week of our big tour, we were dealing with a badly damaged van. I think the brush with mortality freaked everyone out a little bit.
On the plus side, Nic Close joins us from Athens to round out the crew. We had met Nic while on tour with Camper and hit it off with him. He had somehow parlayed that gig into a job as Mr. Stipe’s personal assistant and we were anxious to hear some rock royalty stories from him.
Again, I don’t remember much about the Atlanta show (this is where you jump in, dear reader, and fill in the deets) but Jeff’s diary does not paint a pretty picture. I do remember eating at the Varsity after the show and staying at Jeff’s Uncle’s house, a sprawling manse outside of Atlanta. We got in around 3 am and Gary and I were crashed out in the den. At about 7 am, one of the kids, probably no more than 7 years old, decides to play his antediluvian video game very loudly, about 5 feet from our heads. Mom comes in and apologetically hustles him off but we’re already awake. It’s just as well since we had a day off between our next show in New Orleans and so the decision was made to drive there and find an auto body shop that could get the van back in shape.
Linus and Schroeder limped the nearly 500 miles down through the cradle of the Civil War, and we arrived at dusk in the Big Easy. Tomorrow: Off Days and Batman.
Calculating Route... 