Calculating Route…

About 8 1/2 years before tonight’s show, I met Gary Waleik through an ad that I had placed in the Boston Phoenix classifieds. I was looking for musicians to form a band in the style of, if memory serves, Mission of Burma, Buzzcocks, Flipper, and The Monochrome Set. He answered the ad and showed up with his bass and immediately proved to me that he was a consummate musician so I had him be the drummer. (I was a very confused 21-year-old and he was a flexible 19). Our first show was a ‘New Band Night’ at the Channel that was a leftover booking from my previous band, Patio Act. I decided to keep the gig and use it as an audition for the new guys: if they were game enough to play the show with a couple of rehearsals, these were people that I wanted to play music with. The show was shambolic, in fact, we may have invented the cliche that night, but it was fun and the band quickly morphed into Terror Train, playing a couple of shows with Bob, a guitarist who was definitely on the Spectrum and unable to play anything the same way twice. Soon thereafter, we ditched Bob and joined up with Peter, with Gary picking up the guitar, and things went into overdrive. Fast forward to 1990 and, after many permutations of musicians, he and I are playing together for the (seemingly) last time on that very same stage where we started. The show was booked in April as a triumphant return home after our successful major label tour but, as you’ve been reading for the past couple of months, things didn’t go as planned. At the record release party on May 19th at the Paradise, our spirits were high, but now, the gig is a reminder that bands are difficult and fragile entities and we all just need to get through the night and get on with the rest of our lives. Happily, the club is packed and everyone, including me, is getting well-lubricated. In spite of the circumstances of my leaving, I’m very proud that the band can pack a major venue like the Channel, even after the relative failure of the latest record. ‘Love Barge’ and ‘Impossible Things’ had enjoyed decent airplay on WBCN and WFNX and the band hadn’t lost the hometown crowd. Besides, everyone likes a potential train wreck, and a band member’s last show promised at least some drama, right?The excellent Channel history website (https://bostonsbestliverock.com/?page_id=543) tells me that the opening bands were The Piv Nerts (no idea), followed by Yo La Tengo, a husband-wife combo out of Hoboken. When I had told Ira and Georgia about my leaving the band at our NY show a couple of weeks prior, they had been upset and promised to dedicate a song to me at my last show. Ever since I had met those two back in the Volcano Suns days, they had been great friends who always had my back. As usual, they put on a great set that night and had earned an encore but the dickhead staff at the club decided that they wouldn’t get one and turned up the lights and started the DJ music as soon as they left the stage. Ira was livid, as was I. “We didn’t get a chance to play the song for you” he complained and I apologized on behalf of the band. They had to pack up and head back to New Jersey as they had another show the next night, so we said our goodbyes. Meanwhile, to quell my nerves, I was taking full advantage of the free beer backstage and, by the time we started our set, I was well into my cups. I quickly realized that it was a mistake as I wasn’t used to playing drunk. When it came time for ‘Easter Eve’, I sincerely wanted it to rip, but the beer didn’t help my already challenged vocal stylings, and I felt bad that I wasn’t able to give a decent performance. Of course, the crowd didn’t care; it was a Saturday night in the summer and the people were just there for a good time. For our encore, we decided to reprise the solo ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ schtick from Columbus and I announced it by saying “this is what I get.” It was a drunken mess but, the crowd was in a charitable mood, given the circumstances, and ate it up. The band rejoined me on stage for the rest of the encore and Gary let me know that it wasn’t ‘all I got’, as I would, of course, be buried in the Big Dipper National Cemetery. The show complete, we hugged and I went out to say goodbye to the many friends, family, and well-wishers who had come out that night. That part of my life was over and I felt like I had gone out with a bang. In 10 days, I’d be on a plane to San Francisco and soon after, with a few distractions thrown in, be going to college for the first time in my life. It would turn out to be one of the best decisions that I made in my life but, as you can tell from this diary, I still look back fondly on the music and the friendship of those days. Oh, and here’s the song that Yo La Tengo had planned to encore with that night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvhjSK1gVLc&fbclid=IwAR30B8Gs0hgaYZvtJb6LCCAoGr18WHy_07u9UFXJUwvIcMnunEdN1ZrSC_Q

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.

30 years ago this week, Big Dipper set off on a six-week tour of the USA in support of their recently released major-label debut, Slam. We had high hopes that the record and this tour would take us to the mythical ‘next level’, but the album flopped and the tour was beset by myriad logistical, mechanical, and personal problems, culminating with Steve leaving the band. As much as we can piece together from our collective memories of 3 decades ago, we’ll present a daily journal of the ill-fated tour here over the next month or so. It won’t be easy: some of the memories are painful, and a lot of these shows have faded from memory but maybe YOU were there and can help us fill in the gaps? If you saw one of these shows, please share what you recall with us. For the band members, it was a difficult tour but we’ll try to find the humor in all of it.

We had reason to be optimistic on the eve of the Summer of Slam tour in 1990; Our major label debut record had just been released with the full power and might of CBS/Epic (soon to be Sony) Records behind us, we had a video produced by the guy who had directed the popular Roxette promos, and the label had agreed to pay us tour support so that we could tour in an RV, making the rigors of the road much lighter with a luxurious, portable dressing room and rolling extra bedroom. We were being booked by Frank Riley, one of the premier agents in the indie rock world, and we were promised a full calendar of promo events at various radio stations, record stores, and distributors across the country. Our manager, Bob, had recently hired an actual music business professional, Brenda Dunlap, who left her job managing Pat Metheny to oversee our career (sorry, Brenda!).

On the minus side, we were touring in the summer, the complete opposite of how we usually planned things, and the colleges that we had relied upon for radio promotion and crowds were out of session. Epic had been excited about the record and wanted to get it out as soon as possible instead of waiting for the autumn when the schools were back in session. But, we figured, those students had to live somewhere, and hopefully, they’d come out and see us in their hometowns (spoiler alert! they didn’t).

Another bad omen: on the eve of the record release, our radio promotion guy and chief booster at Epic, Jack Isquith, took a leave of absence to deal with a family emergency. That made us a little nervous but, at the time, we believed in the record and hoped that the songs would sell themselves.

Tomorrow, the first show of the tour at Dobbs, in Philly. I’ll be honest, I don’t remember much of that show, altho I have many fond memories of playing there on previous tours, like this one

Alright, is everyone packed and ready to relive the Slam tour that started 30 years ago today? We will do our best to remember a tour we probably worked hard to forget and present it in a more-or-less daily diary. If you have any memories of gigs on that tour that you’d like to share, please save them for that day so we can piece it together, together. Let’s begin on Day 1, 5/30/90. Destination: Philadelphia for the first show at JC Dobbs. (by Steve)

Leaving on tour, particularly a 6-week trip, was always a logistical challenge for any band, especially so in those pre-internet days. Arrangements had to be made to leave jobs, pay bills, and put relationships on hold. At the time, I was living in a big, shared house in Jamaica Plain, and I had to pay June and July rent and all my bills in advance, which would have been a burden. At that point in our career, we were getting a monthly stipend (I almost typed ‘salary,’ but it wasn’t quite that..) to be in the band, so that helped ease things. But the toughest part about doing our first summer tour was that we would have to put our weekly Sunday softball games on hold. Gary had organized those games, featuring our friends from the scene (and beyond) for the past 3 summers and they were always a high point for me.

This was the first tour that we were going to be traveling in separate vehicles and we were excited. We had rented a Fleetwood Tioga RV for the band to travel in and the roadies (Jim Vincent and Nic Close) would drive the gear in our Chevy Van. I’m pretty sure that our road manager/sound man, Woody Nuss, drove in the RV with us but I could be wrong. The personnel and the seating chart would change as the tour went along.

We had gotten the RV idea from a show we had played years ago with the Meat Puppets. After seeing how cool it was to have your own dressing room (altho I’m sure the Puppets did it so they’d have a protected space to smoke their odd-smelling, hand-rolled cigarettes), we had always dreamed of the day we’d be able to travel in style. To help with the logistics of the caravan, we bought CB radios for each vehicle and christened the RV, Linus, and the van Schroeder. We had a lot of fun those first few days, as I recall, pretending to be truckers keeping an eye out for Smokey.

I honestly have no personal memory of the Philly show so if anyone else in the band or any fans can fill in the details, I’d appreciate it. I’ll eventually cover every gig so please join in if you were at the show. Any setlists would also be greatly appreciated. I’ve got names in the book of some of the opening bands but if I can’t remember, please help out. Again, if you can wait to share your memories on the anniversary post of your show, that would be great.

There will be laughs, there will be tears, but always the Rock and the Roll. Come with us.

Day Two of the Slam tour, 30th-anniversary edition. Were you at this show? 5/31/90 Richmond at Metro. I’m sure that things will improve as we move along but I’m trying to remember these first two gigs of the tour and I’m drawing a complete blank so let’s talk about something else and hope some fans can fill in the gaps in the memory. We had played Richmond only once before on the return from an east coast Camper VB tour and had gotten the feeling that it wasn’t exactly an alternative music hotspot. Was it us? I mean, we could play in a much smaller city like Charlottesville, VA and have a much better time. Maybe Richmond lacked a good college radio station? Discuss.

Anyhoo, at this point, we had no idea how things were going to go for the record. When we left Reflection Studios in February, we were pretty hot on the record but early reviews had been lukewarm, with the main complaint being that Slam was too slick. We knew by putting keyboards and horns on some songs that we ran the risk of alienating some of the fans that had loved us for our rough, early sound but we didn’t know that we were driving into a fierce headwind of backlash. Truth be told, we had never sold a tremendous amount of records (not that we had ever gotten an actual accounting from Homestead) but we had mostly enjoyed good reviews in the press. Christgau trashed the record in the Village Voice, calling it ‘just sad’, and giving it a C+ and the reviews didn’t get much better from there.

In addition to a shiny new album, we produced a video for the first single, ‘Love Barge’ that cost almost as much as the entire record to produce, thanks in part to the decision to use Doug Freel, who had wild MTV success with Roxette videos. I’m not sure why anyone would think that Roxette magic would rub off on a bunch of scruffy rubes like us but Epic was willing to pay him a lot of money and we stupidly went along. Phil Morrison was the runner-up in the battle to produce the video and he just went on to direct some of the best videos for Yo La Tengo and others while we got this mess of a video, filmed in an abandoned building on the lower east side of NYC.

We had to perform the song standing in a sea of discarded needles, thoughtfully left behind by the junkies who used the spot to shoot up. Meanwhile, we saw Mr. Freel for about 10 minutes the whole day, the rest of which he apparently spent in his trailer doing blow with our video advance money. A quick check on the 120 MInutes archive shows that the song got played a total of 2 times on MTV before getting tossed into the dustbin. (btw, there are 18 seconds of silence before the video starts)

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.

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.

Day 5 of the Slam Tour. 6/3/90 An off day, the first one of the tour. Off days can be welcome, or necessary, but they can also be awkward or sometimes depressing. Some of my favorite days on tour have come on off-days, like the Wednesday after our show in Berlin where Bill and I wandered around on a very ‘Wings of Desire’-themed tour of the city, or a fantastic day exploring the free museums of DC, or a psilocybin-fueled Sunday walking tour of Lawrence, KS. On the flip side, having all that time can make you remember that you’re hundreds of miles from home, squeezed into a truck with a bunch of guys who may drive you crazy on the odd occasion. You don’t want too much time to think when you’re on tour.

I recently read the book, ‘Trouble Boys’, which is the story of the Replacements. Westerberg insisted that when the band was on tour, they not do any sightseeing. “We’re on tour, we’re not tourists” was his warning to the band. Well, I’m here to tell you that Paul’s a clown. Visiting the local sights was half the fun of being in a band and I often sacrificed sleep to enjoy it. I woke up at dawn in Vienna once to take a walk through that city, knowing it would be a long time before I got a chance like that again.

Anyway, today was a driving day, a long one for sure, but with no soundcheck to make we could at least enjoy it a little. As I mentioned, the van had been in an accident the day before and we knew it needed some attention with 8,000 miles of driving ahead of us. I remember us running into an absolute Biblical thunderstorm along the way, and it so happened that we had the Batman soundtrack by Danny Elfman playing on the stereo at the time, the music merging with the storm into one giant symphony; frightening and beautiful.

We arrived in New Orleans, checked into the hotel, and began scouring the phone book for an auto body shop nearby. We all wanted to be tourists in this mythical city (confession: most of my knowledge of the place coming solely from ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’, ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, and my roommates’ Meters records) but first, we had to get the van in shape. Tomorrow: Walking underwater and the legendary Tipitinas.

It’s June 4, 1990, here in Slam Tour diary land and we have arrived in New Orleans, a city that I’ve always wanted to visit. It’s our first show ever here, at the historic Tipitina’s club and we are all looking forward to sampling some of the great New Orleans food and playing in a city famous for its music. First things first, however, as we must bring our damaged van into the body shop to get the front quarter pulled away from the wheel.

We find one close to the river and arrive as they open. We tell him the scenario and he informs us that, based on the rust on the damaged front end, there’s no way this happened only two days ago. I’m like, “My dude, did you know that you live under a river and the humidity since we crossed the Mason-Dixon line has been 104%?” Crikey, who cares when it happened, we’re paying cash! Just fix the damn thing and spare us the lectures on oxidation!

We leave the car and take a cab to a fancy breakfast joint, with checkerboard floors and well-dressed waiters. We enjoy as much food as our per diems will allow and head out to explore the city and are immediately struck by the force of the humidity, which we, as Bostonians, are no stranger to. But we’re walking down the street in early June and it feels like we are swimming upstream. Guided by Woody and Nic, we find a back-street seafood place and tear into a bucket of crawfish and some local beer. The food is great but I really can’t imagine myself ever living here, thanks to the torpor we get from the think, moist air. It’s a very interesting city but I can only take so much and head back to the hotel for relief in the air-conditioned room.

With the van in the shop, we had to move all the gear into the RV and the 7 of us all squeezed in for the ride over to the club. Tipitina’s is a beautiful place, full of history, but way out of our league. The audience barely outnumbers our entourage in the huge club (was anyone out there at this show?) and for the first time since the tour began, I think, it becomes obvious to us that the tour is not going so well (I know, I know. But we were in a rock band, you see, so we worked VERY hard to ignore reality). Sure, we are still looking forward to the shows in Austin, LA, and SF, and our first trip to the PNW, but there’s a lot of real estate and shows between them.

It’s a game of expectations, right? On previous tours, we had rarely expected much from our shows on the road; just some fans, some free beer, a decent place to sleep, and enough money to get to the next show. but, now that we had invested real money in a record, a video, and an RV, we were hoping that we’d see an uptick in enthusiasm but the opposite was happening. It was disheartening but we still had hope that the record would start getting airplay and good press, and that the crowds would pick up.

The next morning, we picked up our van at the auto body shop (though we would soon discover that the accident had also damaged the radiator) and headed to Texas, where we looked forward to shows with Scrawl and the Silos. Tomorrow: another off day??

6/5/90 Off/driving Day to Houston. No diary entry. For those of you who are recreating the tour in real-time: we took Highway 10 and stopped for gas outside of Lafayette. Tomorrow: Houston: not the *worst* city in Texas.