The yard looked like the Fisher Price catalog if it were shot in a trailer park after a tornado, and the house was filled with hippie detritus. (Between Springfield and Omaha, I saw more Janis Joplin posters than I had in 30 years.) We got the basement. I took the bed while Nathan took the couch. The next morning, our hostess offered us cereal while two of her kids watched Sesame Street. There was a Castle Greyskull in the bathroom.
Nathan On People Nathan is the most congenial traveling companion imaginable, once you get used to his habit of turning around in the driver's seat (the front passenger seat is reserved for Chili) to conduct extended conversations while driving at high speed. While one might expect a certain quirky eccentricity from someone with his onstage persona, his on-the-road lifestyle seems quite sane and sensible. He lives frugally and enjoys the different people and situations he encounters in his travels. What he's not: "some dirty hippie." He brushes his teeth every night, showers every chance he gets, and washes clothes about once a month. He's not into the traveling muso's stereotypical excesses, either. He doesn't take drugs and only started drinking alcohol -- which he consumes moderately, if at all, while on tour -- in the last year. I saw only two behavioral oddities while on the road with Nathan. He always eats dessert at the beginning of a meal, when the option is available. And he likes to take pictures of old people. "When things start breaking down, that's when it gets good," he says. We circled a Missouri thrift store parking lot three times while he took pictures of two older gentlemen -- slouched and sagging like galley slaves chained by the law of gravity -- who were having a conversation there. He's a perceptive observer of people. Before leaving Springfield, we stopped at a pawnshop so he could look for a microphone and boom stand. The pickings were slim, so he asked the girl behind the counter -- a slender, pretty thing with a .38 in a holster on her hip -- for directions to some other pawnshops. Outside the store, he said, "It's sad." "What's that?" I asked. "That girl has been molested or abused horribly," he replied. When I asked him later what made him say that, he said, "Just different conversations I've had with people. I've met a few women who acted the same way -- with that singsong voice, like someone who's spent a lot of time crying and talking to herself. When I talked to them more, it always came out that they'd been abused." While busking on the street in Columbia, Mo., the next evening, we met an internet buddy of mine, a teacher who runs a web site I used to write for in my pre-Weekly days. He kept yelling for Velvet Underground songs and introduced himself to Nathan thus: "I'm Phil. I own 7,000 records." It was kind of embarrassing. Phil and his wife bought us a vegetarian pizza and let me stay at their home while Nathan crashed at a friend's apartment. The next day, while we were rehearsing at his friend's place, Nathan said, "Phil's a nice guy, but he seems like he could be an ass if things don't go his way." A pretty scathing assessment, based on having interacted with someone for a couple of hours -- but also fairly accurate: Phil had to change schools because he couldn't get along with the other teachers on his team.
God Buys Nathan a Beer "I was playing in Connecticut," said Nathan, "and after the show, I was trying to impress these girls. There was a guy walking around the club with an envelope sticking out of his back pocket. The girls dared me to see if I could pull it out of his pocket without him noticing. "The next time he walked by, I pulled it out of his pocket, and he did notice. He started yelling that I was a pickpocket and that inside the envelope were some temporary checks he'd just gotten. He accused me of trying to steal his life savings of a thousand dollars. "I told him, 'I'm sorry, I made a stupid mistake, I didn't realize what I was doing, I was trying to impress these girls, I don't want your money.' He asked the girls if what I said was true, and they said it was. He still tried to make it a big thing about respect. Finally, his friends were able to calm him down, but for the rest of the night, he kept walking by and looking at me. "A while later, he came over and handed me a beer. He told me, 'I can't forgive you, man, but God forgives you.' I started apologizing to him again, and he cut me off. 'I don't want to hear your words. This beer came from God. Just shut the fuck up and drink it.' He was a nice guy, too. He bought a c.d. and everything. I'm just surprised he didn't kick my ass."
Michael and Ming Rock the Taproom "I'm Michael McDonald," said Nathan before we started playing in Lawrence, Kan., "and this ... is Ming the Merciless." Finally, an Asian stereotype I could live with. We were playing the 8th Street Taproom, a funky college bar just down New Hampshire Street from the Bottleneck, the big rock club in town. William Burroughs lived and died in Lawrence, and Jeremy Sidener, the muso/record collector who books bands for the Taproom, is a friend of James Grauerholz, executor of Willie B's estate. Unfortunately, Grauerholz didn't show up for our show, although I heard that some of the Get Up Kids did. Sidener had the best idea of all time for presenting Nathan: He wanted to book a party bus to take a bunch of people to a roller-skating rink 30 or 40 miles outside of town and have Nathan set up to play in the middle while the partiers skated around him. Everyone agreed that it needs to happen. It looked like a slow night at first. Jeremy explained that a lot of people were attending a fashion show at another venue. Nathan seemed unworried. He told me about another time he'd been scheduled to play the Taproom and things looked dead. Jeremy sent a runner -- a scenester kid who knew everybody -- over to the Taproom's "rival" bar, the Replay Lounge, to bring the crowd over. We debated going to a coffeehouse that Nathan said makes "the best spinach pies on earth." Then a handful of people wandered in, sat at a table, and started playing the jukebox. When I asked why they weren't at the fashion show, they replied that it had just ended and that others would be following them soon. The spinach pies would have to wait. At the Taproom, Nathan ran his keyboards directly through the house P.A. system, which even had a monitor, rather than using his assortment of amps, and used the sampled beats from the his keyboard rather than the drum machine. The result was the best stage sound we'd had all week. As a result, the show was a gas, with the whole crowd getting off on it and dancing, inspiring Nathan to extend some of the numbers. At the end of the night, I was standing off to the side watching Nathan cheerlead when I heard a spectator exclaim, "He's a one-man disco inferno!" By the end of the week, we'd made it as far as Watertown, S.D., a city that smelled like shit or death from one end to the other and had more bars than any comparable-sized town I've ever seen, but no gigs. We found a place where you could buy a bucket of four beers for $6 and reviewed the week's events. It was the end of the road for me, at least for this trip. I got on a bus and headed back to Fort Worth. Nathan stayed on the road for a couple of months after that, arriving in Salt Lake City with pennies in his pocket; hanging out in Kent, Ohio, for a few days when his van broke down; finally returning to the Fort on Thanksgiving Day. By this weekend, he'll be on the road again, making a swing through the Southeast, after a Wednesday-night stand at the Wreck Room. Not many musicians would choose to follow Nathan's example -- there's too much work and sacrifice involved. He's not "living large," but he's playing his music his way, on his own terms. His career, while not wildly successful or lucrative, is at least self-sustaining. Before we parted company, we talked about the shrinking opportunities for local bands in a sluggish economy, where there are lots of other entertainment options to compete with live music. "It seems like the deck is stacked against local musicians," he said. "When that's the case, you need to try a different game." His game is the road. The objective isn't wealth or fame. It's just making music.
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Sprawling Toward Gomorrah
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From the week of December 31
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