Now Focus

We were watching the signs go by: Antwerp, Leuven, Amsterdam, Groningen. Felt like we'd been on the road for weeks. Eric asked if I was hungry.

I turned to answer him, expecting to see him gripping a steering wheel. Which would have been odd, because we were sitting on the couch. The film we were watching, "Still Crazy", about a group of aging rockers who reform and tour the dumps of Europe, had us revisiting the types of places we'd been spending every evening in, only a few short weeks ago.

"Look at us," I said. "We can't stop touring. When we're not out there, we watch other people doing it. We could be watching "The Man Who Would Be King".

"Is that really much different?" Eric asked.

We started with Saxondale, the brilliant Steve Coogan series about an...ahem, aging roadie who keeps fighting the good fight while running a pest control business in the suburbs. The music of Focus screeches and yodels over the opening and closing credits.

The show only ran for two seasons, so to stretch it out we watched Oil City Confidential, the new documentary about Dr. Feelgood. I knew enough about the band to be interested, but wasn't prepared to be completely blown away. Wilko Johnson is a complex, entertaining narrator and the way Julien Temple pieced together band footage with old British gangster films (what movies are these clips from and where can I see them?), photos, clippings and some soft fictional footage was clever and imaginative but to a point. One of the best band documentaries I've seen.

Then we went back to Saxondale for a few more days, until we'd watched even the extra features a few times. Not ready to move on, we fell back on Still Crazy which is corny as hell but always works for me.

I keep coming back to one scene - there's this snowy parking lot in the middle of nowhere. The band pulls up to a deserted cultural center and follows a lone set of wet footprints in through the theatre doors. The place is completely dark except for cold blue stage lights. A smoke machine is hissing, the smoke swirling and catching the dim light. Steely Dan is blasting from the P.A. while a shadowy figure sits in silent reverie in the center of the theatre seats, hands folded as if in prayer. The sound man.

They ask him if there's any way he can get someone to clear the ice away from a treacherous loadin area. Like the Grim Reaper, he points them to a broom closet, where there's a crude shovel and bag of rock salt.

After the interminable soundcheck, he tells the band about the highlight of his year, no - his life, when a certain Dutch group came to play, only three short months before. He rhapsodizes about their musical brilliance, their humanity, while barely hiding his contempt for the band in front of him - as if to say, "see what I'm reduced to now, working with you losers".

To emphasize his point, the dressing room has one of those hospital-style TVs mounted high up on the wall, where a video of Focus' live performance at this very venue plays relentlessly. The group asks if they can turn the TV off, or at least turn the sound down. He says he'll see if he can find a ladder. But he never comes back.

Shit. That wasn't in the movie, that was some Belgian venue a few weeks back.

I Hereby Resolve...

I celebrated the New Year by looking at my horoscope - Susan Miller advised me to figure out which bad habit was always cropping up to set me back. Peering into the lights of the Christmas tree (as much as one can peer into a strand of twelve budget lights on a misshapen pine branch), I thought for a while.

"Self-sabotage. That's my worst habit." I remembered all the incidents of self-inflicted ill-timing (Norwich stage dive anyone?), strings broken at key moments mid-show and me with no spare G or D. Relationships I knew were only going to lead straight to the sackcloth, or the therapist's couch, often embarked on just as I had a new record out. Split-second decisions made almost in defiance of good judgment and the resulting fallout that constitutes, if not the entire thing, then at least major portions of my adult life.

I blame a lot of it on being half-Irish. Who is more willfully negative and fatalistic than an Irishman or woman? Things are bound to mess up anyway, so having a hand in the disaster at least lends a sense of control.

But how to change something so ingrained, so much a part of my makeup? It would be like asking someone to have their dodgy eyes exchanged for a better pair. The new ones would help you see better, but all the adapting you'd learned, the odd perspective you'd grown up with and adjusted your behavior to, would have to go out the window. Leaving you more effective, possibly, but in a cold Children Of The Corn kind of way.

No, I decided that maybe the best course of action was to work with the bad habit. To embrace my contrariness. By cannily planning to do the opposite of what I should be doing, surely I might succeed about 50% of the time, due to ingrained bloody-mindedness and the law of averages?

So here are my new year's resolutions:

Drink more - one or two glasses of wine a night is not nearly enough. Why not aim for a whole bottle?

Why bother trying to maintain some kind of an artistic profile? Putting out records, busting my ass booking and playing shows, maintaining websites, trying to get promoters to put my name on the poster - why? Embrace obscurity. Demand to play in a darkened corner of the stage, wearing a hood, with my back to the audience. Become a "whatever happened to?", another Bobbie Gentry.

Accept that I may have already said everything I need to say. Exalt in the emptiness.

All my journals over the years sing the same sad refrain: "I need to make more money." "How can I make more money?" "There must be some way to make more money." Never seems to work. This year my goal is to earn less. Or nothing.

Stop worrying about getting in better shape. So what if my clothes no longer fit - that's what those big sweatpants they sell at the market in Chalus are for.

I have yet to begin investigating all the canned and frozen, heavily-processed food I see in the French supermarkets. Why fret about making balanced meals with fresh ingredients when there's a wealth of already-prepared exotic crap with high sugar and salt content to choose from?

Spend more time on the internet. There's probably a very good reason why I need to know what other movies the guy who plays Matthew McConaughey's buddy in "Failure To Launch" has been in. And while I'm checking that out, might as well take a look at Terry Bradshaw's bare ass scene from the same movie. Which reminds me, how have the Steelers done this year? Better check and see...

And on and on. By resolving to do worse, any promise I fail to keep will at very least keep me right back here at square one.

That Lonesome Valley

At least I didn't sob when we put my daughter on the train in Angouleme yesterday. My mother used to do that every time we said goodbye and it always made me feel bad. Like the life I'd be returning to was so unspeakably awful, such a disappointment compared to what she'd hoped for me, that maybe a total meltdown was in order. Or did she just miss me so much as soon as I was out of sight, that the mere thought of the void I was about to leave turned her into a blubbering wreck?

All I could feel yesterday morning, as Hazel regarded us from under perfectly lined eyelids, smiling sweetly and waving calmly from her window seat on the TGV, was pride, hope, happiness. Even though so many questions remain unanswered for her just-starting-out grown-up life, and even though she barely washed a single dish all week and constantly bummed tobacco rollups from Eric's daughter Luci's boyfriend Luke, being near her - even to say goodbye - makes me glad.

It was good to be together with "the kids". We ate a lot, watched Peep Show, wished it would stop raining. Then Christmas turned sad with the news of Vic Chesnutt's death. Eric and I had been invoking his name frequently during the Kevin Coyne tribute shows as there was a point where he was supposedly going to come to Belgium for the shows - no doubt a mere pipe dream of the well-meaning but inept promoter.

I remembered him saying, southern boy-style "I love me some Kevin Coyne" when Eric and I played with him in Angouleme last spring, replacing the missing Raveonettes on an interesting double bill. He'd been pretty surprised to see us in the middle of the French countryside. I liked him from the first time I shared a bill with him at Fez, back when I'd just begun playing solo shows, and after that I always looked forward to seeing him, at this club or that.

At Winnipeg Festival a few summers ago we were on one of the workshops stages together, where everyone had to play favorite cover songs. He started strumming "Ode To Billie Joe", one of my alltime favorites, and I got all eager and joined in immediately on guitar, as musicians are wont to do.

"No." He shook his head at me so emphatically, I practically threw my hands up above my head so he could continue with full confidence that I wasn't going to play any more. It filled me with admiration, knowing how hard it can be in those free-for-all situations to demand the right to play completely solo, without the well-meaning participation of anyone who has some inkling how the song goes, and often those who have no clue whatsoever but just need to keep busy. He apologized as he started again, saying his timing would be too hard to follow.

Boy was he right. He played the song like he was telling a Flannery O'Connor story, and I listened. I know he was a very creative songwriter - he should also be remembered as a great, unique singer.

It broke my heart, the statement from his record label saying he died surrounded by family and friends. He was loved by many, many people. But this line keeps running through my head, from a Kevin Coyne song called "I Confess" that we'd been playing last week, with Kevin's sons Rob and Eugene: "I'm a rebel and a rebel is alone." Kind of like someone might sing "Everybody's got to walk that lonesome valley, they got to walk it by themselves" at a Southern funeral, it comforts and explains, a little. Only Jesus doesn't step in to sort things out.

I did feel like crying today, after we dropped Luci and Luke at the airport. They're expecting a baby. Breathtaking, wonderful news. Wreckless Eric a grandpa! Me, I just want to follow them around with an umbrella, open doors, make sure they always have cups of tea, seats on the train and that everyone treats them well.

Something Red & Green

I've been trying to write a post about the Kevin Coyne tribute shows, Gent, and coming back to spend the holidays with my daughter Hazel and Eric's daughter Luci and her boyfriend Luke. Foie gras, oysters and a huge mysterious bird called a chapon that we ended up eating around 11 PM last night.

I can't make it all fit together. And I don't have an appropriate holiday photo either. But I wanted to send everyone who drops by some holiday wishes, cheer, love and gratitude for visiting my blog. It's been three years since I started writing regularly (or semi-regularly). Even though I find myself straying into Twitter and Facebook, sitting down and writing here is still the most satisfying, and I want to keep going.

Even if it's a lame, cobbled-together post like this one.

Stage Outfit

It won't stop raining here in France, so we're heading to sunny Belgium.

Join us for "The Real World: Gent" as Eric and I bunk down in an apartment together with Jon Langford, Brendan Croker and Rob and Eugene Coyne and also some Belgian artists with names I've yet to learn (damn, I've caught that Bataclan disease) - all in preparation for the series of tribute shows to Kevin Coyne we'll be doing in Belgium for the next week.

I haven't had a chance to put together a new stage outfit, but I'm imagining something like the one above, from a ladies room door in Austria.

Don't forget to check out the new Wreckless Eric radio show and our new single, available as a 7" record right now, and as a download very soon.

I'll let you know how we get along with our roommates - Eric and I are planning to be like the gay couple from "Best In Show", with our own candles and linens and silk kimonos. We're still looking for a cute little dog to rent to drive everyone nuts.

His n Hers

Red guitars, Dusseldorf

Men's & Ladies room signs, Slovakia


Heavenly Georgia & Ira, Le Bataclan, Paris


Lunch on the Autobahn

Star Treatment

I'd been wishing they'd put our name on the big marquee for the Bataclan show, underneath headliners Yo La Tengo.

Then I saw the sign on our dressing room door.