Slam Tour Diary: the Final Weekend July 27, 1990. Welcome back! After an almost two-week break, the band is back together for two last shows to wrap up the touring in support of Slam; tonight in Portland, Maine, and tomorrow night, My farewell show at the Channel in Boston.
Once we landed at home, no one was in a hurry to see each other and I don’t believe we even bothered to rehearse for these shows. We did have a band meeting at my apartment in Jamaica Plain where I reiterated my desire to leave the band and we worked out how that would look on the business side.
The drive to Maine on a summer Friday was hot and slow and we were back in our van, the rear bench seat still busted from the accident on the way to Atlanta, so it wasn’ the most comfortable drive you could imagine. Jim Vincent was with us, but no other crew. Back to the basics.
Maine had never been a big market for us, having only played Portland once at a bar downtown (interesting info from our gig book: we never once played in New Hampshire!), and this show was at some sort of big resort-type place near the ocean, definitely not our scene. I’m sure there was discussion beforehand of canceling this gig but the money was good and we were all interested in splitting it four ways. It would cover my airfare to San Francisco at least.
I can picture the venue in my mind, a barn-sized building with picnic tables topped with checkerboard tablecloths, a big, oval bar in the middle of the venue, and a large dancefloor, all of it leftover from the Big Band days, the kind of place that the Neighborhoods could fill on a hot summer night. The Big Dipper mania hadn’t made it down Maine, though, so our crowd was sparse and we did our 75 minutes and got back on the road.
The next night promised to be an emotional one for me. That days’ Boston Globe had carried a Jim Sullivan interview with me in a story of my departure and the band’s return to Boston after the less-than-successful tour. The reality was setting in: I was playing my last show with the band (at least for the next 18 years). Tomorrow: Channel Hell.
Calculating Route... 