2004 Tour Diary: Europe (then back to slap-fighting The Decemberists)

We’ve been in Europe the last month and, in my defense, it was almost impossible to keep a regular journal what with all the sitting around in black berets smoking unfiltered cigarettes and arguing about dialectical materialism in French that needed to get done.

But now we’re back in the States and on a steady diet of chicken-fried everything for a few days and our sanity slowly returns. 

Just to recap the Europe tour… well, it’s a lot harder to tour in Europe than it is in America, and I’ve been trying to put my finger on what it is, exactly, that makes it so much different and the best I can come up with is that everyone lives so much closer together over there, and there are so many more people shoe-horned into such a much smaller area, that there is a steadily growing feeling the longer you’re there that you’ll never really be alone again or ever escape from each other or from the narrow mazes of towns for even a moment for the rest of eternity.

Really.

This is mitigated considerably by the great people and fun times, sure, but as Americans we are so used to the feeling of endless space and… headroom, I guess, that touring overseas begins to feel a little like you boarded an airplane to take a trip and several hours after you first started wondering when it was going to land it dawned on you that it never was going to land.

That said, the Spanish were unbelievably welcoming and hospitable people and I finally fulfilled my lifelong dream to quietly eat a plate of sardines while the rest of the people at my  table gossiped in Basque; our visit to Austria was highlighted by coffee and cake in a café with (next to) the  Cardinal of Vienna(!), plus I finally found an audience that laughs at my Austro-Hungarian Empire jokes, (I have so many!); in Germany we played in a 14^th century stable, (the fabulous Toneneburg!), an old slaughterhouse, an East Berlin disco, and then in a rocking club in the center of a village of about 400 people; Belgium opened her arms to us again proving the old adage that the reason Belgium is surrounded by France, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands is that she is really popular; and finally the Netherlands themselves, our home away from home, where we were received like conquering heroes, albeit like heroes returning from an unpublicized war of conquest that may have happened a few years ago.

So, that should bring us up to speed.  For the most part no one in Europe really wanted to talk politics, which I found surprising.   I fully expected to sit with my head in my hands night after night listening to over-excited, unemployed 22 year-old German and Dutch political scientists explain to me why George Bush was the new Hitler, but most everyone I met left the topic completely alone.  I think the concept that there are “two Americas” is pretty widely understood now, and no one doubts which America we’re from.

One other thing:  let me dispel for all eternity the idea that Europeans are good drivers.  They MAKE great cars, sure, and they typically obey their traffic laws more dilligently than we do, which lends an atmosphere of conscientiousness to the roads, but in actual fact they drive just as poorly as the residents of rural Wisconson, who set the standard for shitty driving world-wide.

So… we returned home on Tuesday and our first show with the Decemberists was Thursday, which gave us plenty of time to brush our teeth thoroughly before setting out on tour again.  Meeting up with the Decemberists in Portland there was a little getting-aquainted period where we sort of sniffed around each other trying to size up what the next month of touring together was going to be like.

Last year there had been a little mock-feud between the Long Winters and the Decemberists that took the form of some good-natured shit-talking from the stage when we played each other’s home towns, and also a little email flame-war.  The nature of the feud was essentially that the Decemberists thought the Long Winters were “meanies” and the Long Winters thought the Decemberists were “sissies”. 

But then the feud kinda petered-out, so I asked the Decemberists what had happened to our mock-feud, and they said that they had stopped feuding with us because they were afraid that they might hurt our feelings.

Is that not the SISSIEST THING YOU’VE EVER HEARD??  They are unbelieveable.  I’m sure they apologize to their poo before they flush it.  Anyway, I assured them that whatever feelings the Long Winters had had left the band with Sean Nelson, and they were free to insult us as vitrolically as they wished.  They blushed and talked amongst themselves and after awhile agreed that we were definitely “meanie-heads” or something, and Jen, the keyboard player, punched me softly on the arm.

We played the Sasquatch Festival, which everyone agreed was a total highlight of the year, and then met up in Boise the following night to watch the Preston School of Industry. 

2004 Tour Diary: East Coast & Southern U.S.

Coming from the west coast I have to admit that I have a total fascination with the American South, and our national tours only really start to feel like an adventure when we start heading toward the Mason/Dixon line.  The northeast is becoming so familiar to us from frequent touring that the exoticness is wearing off, yet when we turn to head south there’s still a thrill of heading into another country.

We take a little detour between New Jersey and Pennsylvania in order to cross the Delaware River over a little rickety bridge built near where Gen. Washington crossed during the Revolutionary War.  The British had hired a bunch of German mercenaries to fight the Americans, and they were all holed up in Trenton, New Jersey preparing to assault Philadelphia.  Washington decides to launch a sneak attack on Christmas, crosses the river and just creams the “Hessians”.  It’s a battle that truly turned the tide of the war and the humble little park that commemorates it was suitably shrouded in fog.

Playing Philadelphia, despite the fact that it typifies everything I love about American cites, is always an oxygen-less experience.  The city is so full of Historical sites, and so wrapped up in the lore of the founding of America, that it’s a little like visiting Athens, Greece.  It doesn’t take long for the abundance of “history” to become boring.  I’ll drive two hundred miles out of the way to see a patch of grass where William Tecumseh Sherman farted in a glass, but in Philadelphia I almost can’t be bothered to cross the street to look in the windows of the building where they signed the Constitution. 

It’s something about the city, I dunno, that makes it feel small and forgotten, even though it’s a major metropolitan area that is crammed with people and sprawls for miles.  I haven’t worked it out.  It has the bombed-out neighborhoods that make Detroit so exciting, it has the racial tension necessary for a dynamic culture, plenty of non-functioning public transit, in short everything to put it into the ranks of America’s great, crumbling metropolises, yet it scores high on the snooze-meter.  Perhaps the city of Philadelphia, so close to New York, lives forever in its shadow despite 1776.

Next we head down into Virginia to play in Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia which, despite being founded by Thomas Jefferson, now echoes with the sound of a thousand cricket bats whapping the asses of a thousand sophomore pledges.  It’s nice to know that our future Assistant Under-Secretaries of State are still receiving an American education unsullied by the passage of time.

Central Virginia has one of those magnetic-field vortexes which cause me to completely lose my sense of direction.  I’ve experienced this before in other places and I can’t explain it other than by resorting to made-up geologic terms, but there’s definitely a sub-ferroclastic, lithospheric anomalous splidge there.  We drove up the hill to visit Jefferson’s home at Monticello, but the whole place was overrun with middle-class, middle-brow American families.  The thing about Jefferson is that he can be adopted, or appropriated, by almost anyone.  Maybe he’s an atheist, maybe he’s a Christian, maybe he’s a racist, maybe he’s just a slave-lovin’ horndog, perhaps he was serious when he called for a revolution every twenty years, or maybe he was just, y’know, saying.

The result is that everyone can take a piece of Jefferson and claim to be his spiritual descendant.  Clinton did, and so did the Montana “Freemen” who hated Clinton.  It’s curious that the current Administration doesn’t invoke Jefferson at all, probably because they think he’s an Atheist, cross-breeding terrorist in their secret hearts.  Those of them what can read.  Anyway, the line was too long to get into Monticello and I couldn’t bear the thought of spending two hours overhearing various buttoned-down fathers lecturing their families about how Jefferson was the author of Magna Carta, or that he was a Seventh-Day Adventist, or that he invented the printing press.

Next we zip back up to D.C. to play at the awesome Black Cat.  Travis Morrison of the Dismemberment Plan comes to the show and afterwards we compare our performance styles.  Apparently he likes people and I hate them, which affects our performance style.  He was in New York the week before and had come up to me in a bar and said, “I love the song ‘Blue Diamonds’, and I use the lyrics in my daily life”, but at the time I had never been introduced to him so I thought he was an appreciative fan and I said, “Thanks kid, you’re the best, don’t be late for school”, or something like that, and then Ira from Nada Surf says, “Wow, Travis Morrison,” after he leaves and I felt like I hadn’t shown proper indie-rock respect.  So we get to talking in D.C. and it turns out he’s a stupendous personality, very awesome, and I’m digging him, but we aren’t talking for five minutes before I realize that somehow we’ve started having the D.C. rock conversation about how Fugazi is the greatest rock band ever.

Now I’ll be honest and say that I hate talking about Fugazi.  I don’t hate Fugazi, I just hate talking about them.  I used to pretend that I was confusing Fugazi with Fishbone, and carry on my half of the conversation as if Fishbone was the topic, but no one ever got it or thought it was funny and after awhile I forgot how to even talk about Fishbone, so now I just sit patiently and nod while whoever it is explains to me that Fugazi invented rock.  I figure that Fugazi must be a metaphor for something, that their integrity caused them to sabotage themselves in the name of principle, but I can think of plenty of examples of that trope even in my own family and I can’t get excited about it.  I keep trying to turn the conversation to  Cult,’s “Love Removal Machine”, or how good Triscuts are with cheese, or “this damn cell-phone”, until something works.  After this interlude we resume talking about life and everything else and Travis Morrison becomes my new, totally straight, boyfriend of the day.

Then it’s on to the South proper, by which I mean North Carolina.  The Carolinas are not only the South, they’re surrounded by the South, so unlike Virginia they couldn’t sneak over and become the North if they decided they were tired of being the South.  Right away the atmosphere changes.  I’m basing this mostly on the number of Christian bumper-stickers I see, but bumper-stickers are a pretty fair way of judging the character of a particular region, and immediately upon crossing into North Carolina we are assailed by tail-fender messages exclaiming that life is something precious and that our troops are important, and that various vehicles are favored by God, and even Calvin stops pissing on Chevys and starts kneeling before the cross.

Down through South Carolina and Georgia it’s more of the same, until it seems like every other driver feels the need to remind the drivers behind him that there are certain ideas that are simply not open to discussion and that there are certain truths which cannot be debated or questioned.  This atmosphere puts me in a more and more disagreeable state of mind until I am muttering witty retorts at every exclamatory sign.  So after a couple of days of this, it will cheer my Christian readers to report, I pick up a Bible in one of our motel rooms and start at the start, Genesis, and begin to read about how God created the world.

But it doesn’t take.  God may have created the world in seven days, but he hired some pretty boring publicists.

Funky Martin Luther, or, An Autumnal Update

Hello all and sundry Long Winters fans, acolytes, tourists and contributors. I have been a very neglectful contributor to our Internet salon over the summer, and unfortunately missed out on the scintillating political discussion that flared up on the message board, but now I’m taking my vitamins again and the coming of autumn has me all excited to put on my wooly sweaters and jump back into the fray.

First let me say that our message board community has stunned me with their enthusiasm and breadth of topic. I’ve been futzing about all summer, drinking Arnold Palmers and yelling at people in supermarkets, and it’s wonderful to find that you’ve been so talkative in my absence. I would like to claim that the summer was a deeply reflective period during which I renewed my commitment to the artist’s life and lay on my humble pallet feverishly dreaming of jabberwockies and scribbling it all down in an opium-infused lucidity, and so I will claim that and I dare anyone to refute me. Now that fall is here, while the first scent of decaying leaves is still fresh in our minds, let’s take a gander at all the wonderful developments in the world of the Long Winters.

We went right back in to the studio as soon as we finished our last tour and tried for another month to wrap up the third Long Winters record, to no avail. Of course, there were only two actual Long Winters still left alive at the start of July: the redoubtable Eric Corson and myself, and Eric was often busy with his other band and his many social obligations throughout the summer, so that for several weeks I was simply floating unrestrained in my musical imagination, aided only by our recordist, Tucker Martine. The result is, thus far, a pretty fanciful and schizophrenic project that is miles away from the stripped down and lean, “River Otters Tours” of the spring. I fully intended to make a record that reflected the energy and humor of our live set, but once in the studio I discovered that my interest as a songwriter is not in making zippy, snarky music. Who knows why this is? I suppose I could force myself to sit and listen to an exclusive diet of the Red Hot Chili Peppers until all I wanted to sing about was my funky sex organs, but I made the mistake of reading a book on the Reformation instead and so all my songs are about funky Martin Luther.

This dichotomy is confusing to me. I love putting on a ‘rock show!!!’ with three exclamation points, but then I turn around and write a dozen songs of broken-heartedness and despair and record them with no thought to ever having to play them live. It’s clear that there will need to be a couple of new Long Winters brought into the fold this fall and I’ve been putting the word out in a quiet way, testing the waters, but it is such a major commitment to add new members that whenever the topic comes up between us, Eric and I just roll our eyes and put it off for another month. We’ve already destroyed the lives of several former Long Winters, reducing them to quivering lumps of ectoplasm by our constant touring and joyless, ashen-faced commitment to the purest form of “indie rock”, so finding new members is going to involve a protracted initiation so full of unimaginable horrors that I don’t relish the prospect of dreaming them up.

Maybe for the first time in my life I’m sated with traveling. This time last year we were leaving on tour with Death Cab, having already been to Europe once and out with Centro-Matic and Nada Surf, and there were half a dozen tours to come, with Nada Surf again, and the Pernice Brothers and the Decemberists, and twice more to Europe. By the time July was finished, our new record half in the can, I just wanted to sit in the garden and read, oblivious to rock music and the so-called “year that indie-rock broke”. Well-meaning friends have encouraged me to strike while the iron is hot, to not be gone too long so that people forget about the Long Winters in their rush to buy the hot new releases, but I feel no panic. First off: to hell with everyone. Secondly: go ahead and buy the hot new releases, we’ll all be dead in seventy years no matter what you do. And C: whither thou goest, go thither, or whatever. Rather than work too hard at music and thereby deprive myself of a full and varied life experience I started writing every day, writing prose instead of songs, and working furiously on the book I’ve been trying to finish for the last five years about my walk to Istanbul. I started working on this fucking book five years ago, when it was doubtful that I would ever have a band again and when the thought of playing music made me itchy and paranoid. Here I am five years later writing the same story and enjoying the fact that the circumstances of my life have completely changed. Hopefully I’ll have the book and the new record done by the early spring.

I’ve made a few attempts to write something for the site about the current political situation, just in order to not feel left out now that everyone who ever opened a can of Mountain Dew is prattling on about their views, but I couldn’t bring myself to complete the thought. Since I’ve chosen music as my way of expressing myself I feel like I owe it to you, the listener, to not tax your enthusiasm by asking you to endure the conceit that I am also a political scientist. Not that I don’t have political opinions: oh, I do! But nothing is more ridiculous than newly politicized pop musicians exhorting their fans to political action. Entertainers should confine themselves to banging their tambourines, as should ministers, and leave the business of government to the highly qualified gentlemen at Hallibuton.

Whatever happens this fall, the Long Winters are going to be a different band when you see us play again. We’ll be reinvented by the process of learning to play our new songs and our old songs will find a new life as well, probably closer to the way they were recorded but with all the innovations that came form playing them so many different ways over the last two years. Being a fan of this band requires a certain resiliency, and I hope that you are rewarded for your open minds. Excelsior!

Spring Tour Diary, part 2

Our first night with the Pernice Bros. in Minneapolis was effectively our first show as a three-piece and we were all amped-up to play well and do a good job.  We were joining the tour midway and our first show was the last show for the Bigger Lovers who had been the support band up until this point.  They were indulging in some end-of-tour celebrations with the Bros. and there was much ass-grabbing posing as back-slapping and other drunken revelry at the end of the night. 

The Long Winters are not really a particularly “drinky” band, and so during this first night of getting to know each other there were numerous occasions where one or the other of the Pernice Bros. would offer us a beer or a shot and, for the most part, we would politely decline.  Perhaps, thinking back, they also may have attempted to tell one or two ribald jokes to break the ice with us and it is possible that I may have responded to those jokes by just staring back at the person, unsmiling.  This is my way of being friendly.

Anyway, one way or another the Pernice Brothers got it into their heads that we were a straight-edge, Christian band.  For the next few nights they spoke to us in that hyper-polite way that musicians use to speak to “straight” people, where they open their eyes extra-wide and nod emphatically at every stupid thing you say.  As soon as I noticed this vibe developing I played up to it even more, refusing to laugh at even the most innocent joke and making extra-vague comments that suggested maybe I was in the service of a Pentecostal Rock organization.  Why not?  It beats watching TV.

We all had a good laugh about it later when Joe Pernice finally made a cautious enquiry about whether or not we were Christians and I told him to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut.  Good times.

For some reason this tour is turning into the Indian Wars Battlefield tour, as Michael and I made a detour on our way to Indianapolis to visit the Tippecanoe Battlefield.  Actually, we stopped to get a sandwich at a charmless gas station and then saw the signs pointing to the battlefield.  I vaguely recollected that Tippecanoe had something to do with the War of 1812, and I knew the slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler too!”, but I had no memory of what happened there or why it should have happened in rural Indiana, or what Tyler had to do with it.  We followed the road through a couple of po-dunk towns and found the battlefield park off some forgotten road.  It’s not such a hot destination anymore.

Well, it turns out that it was another battle between the Army and the Indians who were, as usual, refusing to be put on reservations and continuing to stand in the way of progress, etc.  The great Indian leader Tecumseh, (after whom many Midwestern strip-malls and roadside motels are named), was trying to unite the Indian tribes to resist the whites and Indiana was then the Western Frontier.  The Indians lost this battle and the US Army burned their villages and declared it a heroic victory and so forth, and many years later William Henry Harrison used his status as hero (!?) of the battle to propel himself into the White House.

Now, I'm a sensitive, lefty indie-rocker with the best of them, but I don't subscribe to the viewpoint, popular among the activist set, that the American Government is some monolithic entity which is now and has always been bent on war and enslavement, and that their treatment of the Indians constitutes a genocide on par with the extermination of the Jews, and that it represents a consistent, racist agenda which is written in a secret, leather-bound manual hidden in the pant-leg of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. 

This version of American history is very popular among high-school sophomores who love Jim Morrison, Antioch dialectics-majors, Germans with “Crazy Horse” tattoos, and New York fashion models whose boyfriends’ friends read “Dude, Where’s My Country?”  I guess it’s a more enlightened view than the old ‘50’s grade-school history version, wherein the Cowboys and Indians shot cap guns at each other and then, poof!, everyone went home to dinner and Eisenhower built the Interstate Highways, but this ‘new history’ where Uncle Sam has dollar-signs for eyeballs and is crushing Indians and Blacks under his jack-boots is worse than false, it’s dull and false.

All these battlegrounds that dot our landscape represent a European invasion of America, a pestilential spread of humans from one place to another.   It’s what people do, when we’re not building aqueducts and mud-mounds.  Travelling back and forth across America you take notice of the fact that every county in the Midwest has a Fredericksburg, and a Louisville, and a St. Wackadoo, and that all of these dried-up old towns sprung up where some German or Norwegian or French settler stopped his wagon and started cutting down trees.  Humans are a plague, and determining who’s responsible for the death of the Indians in America is like trying to lick a bee.

Here’s what Tecumseh said, (probably liberally translated by his literary-minded biographer), when he returned to the site of Tippecanoe in 1812:

I stand upon the ashes of my own home, where my own wigwam had sent up its fire to the Great Spirit, and there I summoned the spirits of the braves who had fallen in their vain attempt to protect their homes from the grasping invader, and as I snuffed up the smell of their blood from the ground, I swore once more eternal hatred- the hatred of an avenger. 

Yes!  Fuckin-A!  The hatred of an avenger!  This kind of shit makes me cry, my heart filling with doomed glory.  Too bad the white people just kept coming with their damn wireless internet.  Or rather, too bad Tecumseh didn’t invent the Gatling gun.

Sooo… meanwhile, back on the indie-rock front, shout-outs to our homies in Milwaukee, Chicago and Ft. Wayne, big ups to the Leopold Bros. crew in Ann Arbor, and mad props to Brooklyn and Boston and the Doberman Rescue Society.  Word.

As I drive along on the Interstates at night I often find myself in a river of 18-wheelers, coursing through the night without a single other passenger car in sight.  It is an amazing natural phenomenon to feel yourself swept up in this stream; the number of semi-trucks in America is too terrible to think about.  Such an incredible dedication of resources dedicated to moving Pampers and teeth-whitening strips from one Wal-mart to another.  Meanwhile the Airforce has to have a bake-sale to build a bomber.  Oh wait… no they don’t.

One night, hurtling along surrounded by these spooky, dark creatures, it occurred to me just how many of them must have been painted by Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer.  He worked as a truck-painter for over twenty years at the Kenworth plant in Auburn, WA., and in that time must have put his hands on tens of thousands of “rigs”.  That realization made his crimes seem even more grotesque to me, that his killer’s hands were fashioning these paper boats and floating them down the stream to eddy in our rivers for a generation.

We played our own show in Brooklyn with our label-mates Aveo, and all the Barsuk kids turned out:  Matthew and Ira from Nada Surf, John Flansburgh and his wife Robin from They Might Be Giants, and the now world-famous Barsuk-mafia.  DCFC was in town too and much goofing off and drink-spilling transpired.  We love NYC so much it’s always a little sad to leave.

I spent an afternoon in the New York State Museum/Library/Archives in Albany today, looking at fakey dioramas of tenement life in the 1800’s and reflecting on how many of those Irish and Italian manequins must have joined the US Army and shipped off to fight the Indians.  The museum also has a Sesame Street exhibit, which kept me transfixed for several minutes and left me with a lingering hankering for applesauce, and a 9/11 exhibit featuring the landing gear from a 767 and a seat-belt/arm rest assembly, both of which were found in the rubble.  They were displayed like religious relics and I regarded them with reverent awe.

Berkeley Pit, Butte Montana.  March 30, 2004

One of the drawbacks of being a Seattle band is that it’s a full three-day drive across the Northern plains to get to our first show in Minneapolis.  We try and take in the sights along the way and one of our favorite stops is the famous Berkeley Pit in Butte.  Butte, Mont. is an historic mining town built on what was once called the richest hill in the world.  They sent mine shafts down into the hill from all over to pull up the copper and silver and melidium and so forth until one day in the ‘50’s the mining company decided, “to hell with these mine shafts”, and dug a huge, open-pit mine right in the middle of town.

They mined it for 30 years or so and then when the price of ore dropped they just abandoned the hole, which was now a gigantic, really awesome hole.  The problem was that they also turned off the pumps that were keeping the groundwater from seeping into the hole and so very quickly the pit filled with water.  Unfortunately the years of mining had exposed all these terribly corrosive heavy metals so when the pit filled up with water it became the largest, most toxic chemical disaster area in the United States.  Hooray!

Of course no one wanted to take responsibility for the ecological disaster.  The original mining company was sold to a bigger company, which had sold some parts to somebody else and given all the executives big bonuses and laid off the miners and so on, so that when it came time to acknowledge that someone had really fucked-up here with the whole “turning off the pumps” business, well it was predictably nobody’s fault and anyway that guy doesn’t work here any more, etc.

Meanwhile the water keeps rising in the pit.  The story goes that the water is so toxic that when birds land on the lake they die.  At a certain point in the very near future the water will rise high enough that it will spill over into the groundwater of Butte, and then ultimately into the headwaters of the Clark Fork River, which is one of the tributaries of our own great Columbia River.  It may also flow down into Yellowstone and create a pack of mutant, killer wolves that can use telephones and the internet to find the Florida addresses of the retired executives of the Anaconda Mining Corp. and go lick their faces off.  The EPA is presently planning on pumping and treating the water.  Someday.  Soon.

On our first day of driving we had one of those “three guys in a van” moments, where in the course of the conversation I found a way to make a Monty Python reference, like, “A tiger?  In Africa?”,  and then Michael said something about a “shrubbery”, or whatever, and then Eric mentioned a “waffer-thin mint”, etc., and we all did our Python bits and then Eric brought it all home by knocking on the dash and saying, “Landshark”, woo-hoo,  good times.  We’d only been on tour a few hours and we were already using up all this precious comedy material.

So… we all riffed on the landshark gag for about thirty seconds and then went back to staring out the window.  I got to thinking about those episodes of SNL and tried to recall if they had used the “Jaws” theme music to introduce the landshark.  My train of thought then meandered to the scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where the spaceship is trying to communicate with the scientists at Devil’s Tower and it uses the “Jaws” theme music for just a second.  Ha Ha, that Spielberg. 

So we’re driving along, quietly, and I absentmindedly whistle a few bars of the “Close Encounters” theme, whereupon Michael leans forward and asks, “are we going to go by Devil’s Tower?”

Well, none of us had ever been.  So we got out the map and realised that, although it was a couple hundred miles out of the way it really seemed like a good way to start the tour.  Plus, it would take us right by the Custer Battleground at Little Bighorn, so it was decided that we would detour down through Wyoming to visit Devil’s Tower.

We woke up early the next day in Southern Montana and went to Little Bighorn.  Having seen the battle reinacted a hundred times on the History Channel I was somewhat prepared for the look of things out on the prairie, and I knew the story pretty well.  In fact, I knew both stories; there’s the one that was popular for about a hundred years wherein Custer was a valiant hero who made a fatal miscaculation fighting the savage red man, and the version that’s more popular with the kids, wherein Custer was an arrogant bungler in service to a corrupt and genocidal regime who got his comeuppance on behalf of oppressed people everywhere.  Ho-hum.

In actual fact it’s pretty impressive to picture those 7^th Cavalry guys pinned down on that grassy hilltop ridge, surrounded by angry Sioux provoked to their last wit.  The story gets told and retold as one of America’s founding myths, and with a little reflection I guess there’s good reason for it.  The army that won the battle ended up losing the war, and now the battlefield memorial is smack in the middle of exactly the kind of Reservation that the Sioux were resisting.  Bummer.  These days the Sioux would have to ride across I-90 to get from their camp to that hill, about a mile from the casino.

So we left there feeling predictably conflicted and drove across a couple hundred miles of Reservation land, characterized by the occasional squalid and litter-strewn communities situated in a vast and epic landscape, before arriving at the Devil’s Tower National Park, which is a really big honkin’ rock that left us all totally impressed.  See it for yourself the next time you’re in the Northeast corner of Wyoming.

After this it dawned on us to stop dicking around and get busy driving the 900 more miles to Minneapolis to meet the Pernice Brothers, so we put it in gear, ate a series of forgettable meals in roadside diners, gassed up the van at a succession of interchangeable, flood-lit islands, and slept a couple of nights in utterly barren, indistinguishable motel rooms. 

Next installment:  We meet the Pernice Brothers!  

And…we’re back

A long time ago when the Long Winters were on tour with “Carrisa’s Wierd” and “the Prom”, we were busted one day out in the parking lot sitting in our van reading books.  The kids in Carrisa’s pulled their van in next to ours and, seeing us all quietly reading, shouted, “Readers!”, and then laughed so hard they spilled their plastic gallon jug of Ten High whiskey.

We were nerds, plain and simple.

Now we’re on tour again and are keeping a tour diary which you are presently reading, making you a nerd also.  Reader. 

We’re all friends here. 

This diary should chronicle our adventures over the next three months of almost continuous touring.  We’ve never toured for so long without a break and everyone is predicting that we’ll go slowly and steadily insane, so with any luck our tour diary should be an entertaining read.  We’re starting out in Minneapolis with The Pernice Brothers, but eventually this Spring tour will take us to Europe, back home in time for the Sasquatch Festival at the Gorge, and then across America again with the Decemberists, ending sometime in the summer.  Tour dates are here.

So without futher ado:

The Diary...

Sean's Tour Diary (relocated)

View Sean's tour diary over here...

Detroit is for lovers

The tour is going great. I'm writing from Quebec City, but I wanted to start off by describing the city of Detroit, Michigan.

I'm sure that most readers of this board have some idea already that Detroit is in pretty bad shape, and many of you probably imagine that it is a frightening and terrible place. Detroit has become synonymous with urban decay. I had a web of preconceptions about the city and was excited and a little apprehensive about venturing out into the city by myself after we arrived. What I saw amazed me beyond all measure.

Imagine the city in which you live, (assuming you don't live in Detroit), and then try to imagine that the vast majority of downtown buildings have been abandoned. Not just the little Quicky Marts and other two-story crap, but imagine that all the tallest buildings, the art-deco skyscrapers and the enormous hotels are completely empty. Now picture that the actual fact of Detroit is ten times more awesome and incredible than you are picturing in your mind.

Detroit was one of America's finest cities eighty years ago. It was the headquarters of American industry and some of our richest industrialists lived there and built enormous, grand buildings, full of stained glass and copper and stone. They were arrogant men in an arrogant time and their buildings were the finest piles of shiny brick you could build.

Then some time in the 60's and 70's, when people all over America were tearing down beautiful buildings and replacing them with crappy, flat-roofed motels, the people that owned Detroit just shut the doors. It was a bad time in America, sure. Lots of angry people tired of being kept down, the old economic policies not working so well any more, whole neighborhoods being razed in New York and Chicago to build lifeless housing projects and interstate highways, and a pointless war in Vietnam to piss off the white college kids... personally I think it was the greatest time in American life. But somehow, in Detroit, the devastation was amplified so that it actually killed the city.

OK, now I recognize that words are going to fail me a little bit here, but walking around downtown Detroit is like nowhere else in the universe. At one level, just strictly from an architectural standpoint, it's one of America's finest cities, but the fact that it's frozen in time and slowly rotting makes it a totally different kind of American monument.

They used to tell us about the Neutron Bomb when we were kids, (just in case our regular nuclear war terrors weren't paralyzing us enough,) which supposedly would kill all the people and leave the buildings standing. We were expected to embrace the idea of the Neutron Bomb, I guess, because it meant that we could kill all the Russians without destroying all the lovely looted Nazi gold in the basement of the Kremlin. Anyway, the city of Detroit is the realization of this fantastically morbid dream.

An abandoned skyscraper has a terrifying density. Your mind cannot help but race through all the empty floors, scattering moldy papers, trying to evade the chill of the wind whistling through broken windows 30 stories up. What terrible gangs of mutant punkers must be living on these floors? What nightmarish Michael Jackson video-shoot scenarios must be playing themselves out in the darkened catacombs of abandoned banks and railroad stations and hotels? How is it possible that the most humble public building in Detroit makes Seattle's grandest structures look like train set models, and yet the entire ruined city is mostly forgotten and ignored by the world?

Of course the story is written in the same familiar script of poverty, racism, urban-"renewal" and short-sighted capitalist aggression as a million other stories, but in this one particular case the results are so out of scale, so off the charts, that it's amazing that the whole fucking city isn't declared a World Heritage site. The fact is that when we talk about economics we often use the language of war, and the reason for that is that economic policies often wreak warlike devastation. The capitalists describe these events in bland terms of market driven effects, and they place the blame for the consequences on things like "urban unrest", (which is code for angry blacks), or on environmentalists or peacenicks or lazy workers or vegetarian pizza or whatever. But the fact is generally that by the time the lazy environmentalists are angry enough to fight, or the urban blacks are burning down their neighborhoods, the economic damage has already been done.

Holy shit, I sound like a goddamn hippy! Look, all I'm saying is that Detroit is definitely terrifying, but it's also maybe one of the most awesome places on the planet. It is a truly singular experience and I reccomend it to everyone. It is obvious that the city fathers of Detroit are pursuing the same broke-dick "fix-it-up" renewal policy that every other pinstriped shitheel in the country thinks is the secret to urban success. In other words, they plan to tear it all down and replace it with malls and sports stadiums and other worthless shit in the hopes that they can erase the past and replace it with the sound of shrieking cash-registers and la-dee-da, multi-decibal, pan-ethnic Nu-soul.

Visit Detroit! Put aside your "21 Jump Street"-era fears of yellow-bandanna'd gangsters kidnapping you into their "shooting gallery". If you have any fantasy/nightmare about a Blade Runner/Matrix/Escape From NY style future, well... the future is now.

Arcadia

Hi. We're on tour and visiting in Chicago with Evan Sult, former drummer of Harvey Danger, and his three cats. I wanted to write another diary entry now that the debate on indie-rock pretentiousness has dried up. So far our tour with Nada Surf is going swimmingly. They're treating us very well and are excellent men.

I've realized in driving across the Midwest time and time again that I have a deeply sentimental attachment to the idea of a bucolic white farmhouse on a few acres of land. We drive over hill and dale and everywhere are these little dilapidated farms with a crumbling barn and some raggedy-assed cows and I realize that somewhere in my heart I'm saving my pennies to one day get a little farm for myself.

Of course, I have no intention of actually farming anything on this farm, nor do I want any cows or any other stinky animals or anything, really, that requires any husbanding. I really just want a place where I can sit on the front porch and shoot a .22 at cans, where the barn would hold a couple of '60's Pontiacs with bleached paint and a Triumph motorcycle that I was "restoring", and where I would spend all summer building a fish pond, (did I mention the stream?).

This isn't really a bold fantasy. It doesn't involve any European fire dancers. And I guess that's what's surprising to me. Which isn't to say that my fantasy life has very much in the way of European fire dancers generally, but more that I can't really pinpoint where and when this rural farm fantasy took hold.

I think originally it started with those John Cougar Mellencamp videos of the mid-eighties. Growing up in Alaska, where we were definitely American but seperated from America by thousands of miles, my friends and I had many different fascinations with what we imagined was American life. I would never have admitted it at the time but those damn John Cougar videos, with all of the cheerleaders dancing in the back of rusty 50's pick-ups waiting at railroad crossings on the Fourth of July, filled me with longing.

Now I've travelled all over and I know that John Cougar's America is just a fantasy, and worse it's a fantasy that, more often than not, is used to sell a chickenshit, xenophobic 'patriotic' America back to us, but because I remember a time when that vision meant something to me I refuse to think it's totally bullshit. And it's not bullshit, because on an individual level I meet people every day that reaffirm some aspect of that initial dream.

I have no idea if I'll ever really fulfill my Midwestern farm fantasy, (namely because it's in dramatic conflict with my Brooklyn loft fantasy, not to mention my Istanbul magic palace fantasy,) but it's a big part of where I spend my imagination time during the long drives... when I'm not listening to Sean and Michael declaim the history of rock music like blind Talmudic scholars describing an elephant.

Alignment

On the topic of pretentiousness:

It may surprise you to learn that some of the members of the Long Winters struggle with pretentiousness. In fact, I can only think of one of the four of us that doesn't seem to struggle with it and I'll leave it open as to which one of us that is. Point being, when I say we struggle with it I mean a couple of different things and they relate directly to my writing on this web site so I want to cover them early on. So follow me.

The first part of struggling with pretentiousness should be obvious. Nobody wants to be pretentious or to be thought of as being pretentious, and if you're a wordy person or one who likes talking about ideas the threat of being called pretentious is a constant worry. The result is that one maintains a semi-conscious vigilance over one's language to avoid using words or mentioning ideas or even, in some cases, using correct grammar that might leave one open to the charge of 'putting on airs'.

The second part of struggling with pretentiousness is a resistance to this definition of pretentiousness. I've seen many innocent remarks put down as pretentious by people who want to make the smart person feel dumb. Many people who like to use big words to talk about esoteric ideas confine themselves to little ghettos of brainiacs because they're afraid of being called four-eyes. Other of these smarty-pants decide that they're going to "keep it real" by totally fronting some fakey 'hard' street persona. Still others are constantly apologizing for their thoughts and scraping and bowing to make themselves understood until their lack of self-confidence makes them incomprehensible.

The thing is, American popular culture has elevated the base, the shallow, the stupid and depraved to such an extent that many innocent people with regular intelligences are left feeling uncomfortably "too smart" when they interact with their world.

Think about it. In mainstream rap, rock, punk and pop cultures the status quo dictates that the artist "represent" as being poor and uneducated, and in many cases defiantly ignorant of the world. The music is lyrically callow, focusing on pecking orders, status sex and bullying. She's not just a shallow, materialistic showbiz brat, she's also just Jenny from the block. Almost all punk and metal is about the simplest adolescent defiance. Either angry, "Fuck you, you're not the boss of me," or fun, "Fuck you, let's party."

In light of this, even the simple desire to not be called either a pimp or a ho can be seen as pretentious. For years people have been 'ironically' calling each other pimps and hos to signal that they don't really think that each other are pimps and hos but they're not so square as to want to be called something else, but irony is ultimately dull and insufficient. Normal, totally sane people who just want to have a little dignity and be respected are calling themselves "white trash", or saying they grew up in the "hood" or the "ghetto", and cherishing every bit of evidence they can find to prove that they're not prosperous, middle-class people.

You can see where I'm going.

The Long Winters make what is dubiously called indie-rock. It is not exactly written in a slave vernacular. Yet this prejudice against 'too-smartness' has infected the American culture so much that even in our rareified, middle-class, nancy-boy rock world there are social pressures to be less verbal, less curious, and less accepting. In indie-rock the dumbing down manifests itself differently, as our peers outdo each other in who can be more autistic, more emotionally damaged, more gape-mouthed and stunned.

The fashion for coy, "don't-hurt-me" vocals is another version of the "I'm a' fuck you" rap. Both are cartoonish reactions to looming adulthood, and neither one admits the possibility that someone can grow up without either exploiting or being exploited. What are their aspirations? On the one hand to grab as much literal and figurative booty as possible, and on the other hand to be recognized, through passive maneuvering, as perhaps too delicate and sensitive to survive.

Well... I hope you get what I'm saying. By no means am I suggesting that the world was a better place when people were deeply classist, prejudiced and snobby, but neither is it much of an improvement now that we've asked our heroes to prove how fucking crass and stupid they are. (...fucking crass...get it?). Instead, all this respecting diversity we've been doing for the last twenty years should start reaping some benefits in the form of a culture that includes some of the elegant and graceful ways people around the world have devised to live gratifying lives. A culture where pride isn't shorthand for "me first". And where pretentious can go back to meaning ostentatious.

Our Promises

Hey everyone, thanks for visiting our new site. We're putting it out here in conjunction with the release of our new record but we'd love it if thelongwinters.com became a regular part of your internet life. To that end we'd like to make a few promises to you, the viewer, so that this site can be a safe place for you to return to time and again when the pressures of daily life become unbearable.

Promise #1: We promise to try and keep in mind that we're a rock band and not a messianic cult or a fad diet. We'll never tell you what to eat and we'll always pretend that we're not really telling you how we think you should live.

Promise #2: We promise to regularly update our web-site, and to not gum it up with a bunch of neo-Japanese Flash animated crapola. We'll provide regular screeds with next to no justification and we'll ramble, blather, contradict each other and lie.

Promise #3: We promise to keep producing rock music. We'll try out every chorus pedal in the store and then buy a dollar's worth of picks. We'll jam for 40 minutes on what we think is the riff for When the Levee Breaks. We'll whisper and shout and jump all about.

Promise #4: We promise that love will find a way.

Why we made a web-site

When it came time to make a Long Winters web-site we worried that it might be a big waste of time. Plenty of people told us that we needed a web-site for ‘commercial’ purposes, but those people tended to be the same ones that asked us repeatedly when we were going to go back to college. We didn't start a band because we wanted to be merchants. Obviously, the real appeal of the global inter-web is all the conversation taking place.

At a certain point we wanted to get in on the conversation. Really, the Long Winters’ records are meant as contributions to this conversation, and they would have been meant that way even if there wasn’t a global inter-web. People only have so much to talk about, and songs about feelings are easier to talk about than feelings themselves.

So when it came time to design a web-site we wanted to focus on the talking. The first thing to go up was the message board and in some ways it’s the most important part of the site to us. There are also these places where we can write directly. Sometimes one wants to start a conversation with a monologue, or an essay, instead of just saying “s’up?”

In short, although there are links from our site to purchase our shwag, the real reason we wanted to appear on the internet is to provide our friends another place to congregate, and to mark a place with our own stamp. Hopefully, the character of this site will reflect our cautious bemusement with modern life.