Photo credit: Chris Sikich
Tell us about your tour vehicle. Any notable breakdown stories?
We gave up on owning our own van a long time ago. BANDAGO is a great company from San Francisco that specializes in band-friendly vehicles. We’ve been renting from them for 20 years. Of course, our van on this tour had a transmission meltdown before the first show! But Bandago got us a new van by the next morning. It could have been a lot worse.
How do you eat cheaply and/or healthy while on tour?
Get good stuff on the rider. Not Doritos and Cokes and cookies. Hummus, carrots (which admittedly have not been popular on this leg, so far), pecans, almonds, bananas. Then there’s the bad but necessary shit: Red Bull, Tito’s Vodka, a few beers (reg and N/A), red and white wine. Stopping at Love’s, Pilot, and Sheetz doesn’t help either. All that being said, I’ve refrained from getting Lance’s Captain Wafers at every gas stop, so we’re doing OK.
How many strings do you break in a typical year? How much does it cost to replace them?
My goal on this tour is to play all 30 shows without a broken string or string change. So far, so good! I haven’t bought a set of strings for years. I think we’re still living off R.E.M.’s relationship with D’Addario. Sorry if I got that wrong! I do have a basement-full of low-E-strings – is there a recycling program?
Where do you rehearse?
We sometimes rehearse in Peter’s (Buck) basement. It’s got a real old Shure PA head that doesn’t even take XLR jacks. It’s great! Steve (Wynn) & Linda (Pittman) have a joint called The Chimp Factory. It’s very cool, and haunted, and has a well-stocked cocktail cart, for mixologist Linda to devise exotic drinks during pandemic live-session streaming. For this tour we practiced at R.E.M.’s studio in Athens, which is very civilized, except that it was in Georgia – 100 degrees and hot soup for air.
What was the title and a sample lyric from the first song that you wrote?
The first real song I completed was called “The Ballad Of Captain Stan”, co-written with buddy Dennis Berry. It was the opening song of a Firesign-Theateresque radio play we were concocting. We put a Radio Shack mic inside my Blue Chip stamp acoustic guitar. Sample lyric: “His life is being a rocket ranger, he’s constantly at grips with danger / Amidst the battles and cosmic slaughter, he dreams of Euna, the commodore’s daughter”…
Describe your first gig.
I think it was a “Dance” at Saratoga Youth Center with Hannibal’s Chorus Boys circa 1972/73. Not a lot of dancing, but I remember two high school girls having a savage hair-pulling nail-scratching fight during our slow-dance number “Don’t Look Back” (a John Lee Hooker tune via Them). Other likely songs performed: “Satisfaction”, “Gloria”, “Honey Don’t”, “Waiting On You” (Dave Mason), and a few originals like “The Modesto Jive” and “Burnt Raspberry Dainties”.
What was your last day job? What was your favorite day job?
I’ve just started collecting social security so I won’t need a day job, until the Republicans destroy funding. My fave day job was working at Cellophane Square Records in Seattle. That was a huge boon to my music knowledge and exploding record collection.
How has your music-related income changed over the past 5-10 years? What do you expect it to look like 5-10 years from now?
My music-related income is weirdly somehow steady, considering it relies on so many different acts and various factions of the music industry. I’m not really expecting new wild earning opportunities in the future, but I must say, this current Baseball Project tour is really kicking ass! Basically my career has been a combination of Not-Planning and Astounding-Good-Luck. So we’ll see how that all works out.
What one thing do you know now that you had wished you knew when you started your career in music?
I wish I’d known that I could have changed keys (or, even, god forbid, have bought a capo) before recording loud electric versions of all those songs that I wrote singing sadly and quietly in my bedroom. Otherwise I’ve done everything right!