18 Oct – Grey Eagle (Asheville, NC)
w/ James McMurtry
I have asked Robyn, who will be coming on the Florida trip, to remind me later what I am saying on stage, since for the most part I am babbling and I don’t remember a bit of it later. The quote from this show:
“I’m prostituting myself just for you.”
We left early afternoon on Friday and hit a lot of traffic on the way up. Lee and Lyle were both sick and so the ride was pretty quiet. We got in an hour late but the headliner was still loading in so it was no big deal. I know who James McMurtry is (apart from being Larry McMurtry’s son), his first album came out back when I was working at BMG and it was being pushed hard to college at the time. I saw him while we were loading in, but I get the feeling he must be a pretty introverted person. We may have shared a slight head-nod in each other’s direction.
The club is strange in a good way. It was much bigger than I had expected, walking in you come into the large room that looks sort of like a VFW hall or something. The sound there is very good, nice raised stage. the people working there were very friendly (so was the eventual crowd). They set up and sound checked a song or two and then left. We set up and got a sound check as well, which was a surprise but good.
The crowd started to file in. The show was $15, so the people who were coming were obviously coming to see James’ band. They play this sort of poetic, intelligent stuff that is nonetheless very straightforward and sort of basic rock-based. Like a sort of Americanized Tragically Hip. Which is all well and good, but I started to worry about their reaction to us. I wasn’t quite ready to go the “Good ‘ol Blues Brothers Boys Band” route, but I thought maybe some effort to match the crowd might be a good idea.
I think in retrospect I was about half right.
We were opening with “King Sham” which I thought was a bit too pop so I swapped it with another song and put it in the middle. Of course, it seemed to get a big response when we finally played it, so I was off-base, I guess. The crowd were mostly older, and when we started I really didn’t know how we were going to go over, but they were very responsive. We played a little subdued, I think, in part because Lee and Lyle didn’t feel well, but I was also sort of restrained because I didn’t think the crowd would really go for me being too pop. I think in that instance I was right. Robyn says they were really impressed with “Jeff Lynne,” I can’t verify that.
In the end, I think the crowd didn’t expect much from us and they ended up pleasantly surprised. Unfortunately, “pleasantly surprised” doesn’t seem to translate into CD sales or people signing up for the mailing list. Still, there were a lot of people who came up after the set complimenting us. I was very good, I thought, and fought my natural urge to be shy and instead talked with people at length when they came up. I met two people who worked for the two entertainment weeklies, respectively. I talked for a while about guitars with a guy who’s girlfriend really liked James and so he was wandering around the club during his set, he had really liked our set. Meanwhile, Lee was getting sicker, I think, but still managed to get us paid for the show, which was not originally the deal. She says it’s much easier to be outright about this stuff when it’s not her band, so she went up and asked about our guarantee as if it was a given and he paid us. He also found me later and told me to let him know when we were going to be back in town, so (again, fighting my natural urge) I just asked how far ahead he booked and told him I’d call him this week to schedule another show.
I’m not sure how that will work, to be honest… from the photos on the wall they book mainly singer-songwriters and bands much like James McMurtry (in both instances). I don’t really fit that crowd, though I can apparently win them over to an extent. The one thing I did notice was that Josh Joplin’s photo was there, too, so I’m going to try to get in touch with him and see if he still plays there and if he’d be interested in doing a show together. Hell, if he’d be interested in doing a show together anywhere, really. I don’t know if he’s in any position right now to book like that, but I should have asked a while ago.
We crashed pretty much immediately afterwards at the hotel, on rollaways and a pull-out couch (this is a luxury compared to what we can expect in Florida, where we’ll have to rotate who gets the bed while the rest of us sleep on the floor). The drive back the next morning was good, Lee felt better and we talked most of the way back about music, bands, and crap like that. The sort of thing you’d expect band people to talk about, I suppose. But it was still good.