The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (5 page)

The show was in a basement indie cinema with theater seating. It was sweaty as a banya and there was no booze for the crowd, so, despite the show being sold out, the mood was subdued. One of the openers was named Roman, from Belgorod, across the border from Kharkov. Maria misheard this as “a Roma from Belgrade,” which would have been a more substantial trek. He was a slight fellow in glasses and a NOFX T-shirt who sang, of all things, a cover of a song by the obscure Midwestern band Two Cow Garage.

Is it possible to write four hundred pages about touring and never describe a show? I'm tempted. I'm a mid-career musician who's played thousands of shows. For me, they're the least interesting part of the story. The reader will already have noticed that there is a certain repetitive rhythm to the days as they pass. “If it be necessary that I should offer excuses for repetition and monotony, it is equally necessary that I should apologize for traveling at all,” says Custine. “The frequent recurrence of the same impressions is inevitable in all conscientious books of travels.” All the more so for a musician, whose days are organized around a predictable routine—get to show, play show—punctuated by logistical snafus and unreliable strangers. It's why the details of those strangers and the slow, or sudden, changes in scenery are what I focus on. The bones of the day are indistinguishable.

People ask, “Do you get nervous before shows?” The answer is not really, not at this point. I get nervous each time I play a show that's at a new level—the first show for five hundred people, the first for a thousand, the first time on television, the first with a new band, the first on my own. Then once I've breached that level, I snap back into equilibrium. Some I'm more excited to play, some I dread, some are clock-punchers. But they all have the same arc. I'll describe it once, then you can mentally copy and paste this into the hole I gloss over toward the end of each day.

I usually arrive at the venue around five. We go through a charade of “advancing” the show, which means contacting the promoter a few days before and clarifying arrival times, soundcheck times, and set times. But unless something is unusual, arrival is always at five or six, soundcheck to follow (assuming the soundman is on time, which is a big assumption), doors at seven or eight, show around ten or eleven.

I pull up to the club and try to park. There's parking, or there isn't, or there's metered parking until six. In some European cities, the club is in a central pedestrian zone, which I don't realize until some cops run at me, waving their hands and yelling. The club should be open, but it isn't, so I bang on the black iron doors and the windows covered with posters for upcoming shows. Hopefully one of them has my face on it. After a few minutes someone opens a different door around the corner and says, “Can I help you?”

“Hi, I'm Franz, I'm playing tonight?”

“Oh yes, come in,” they say (I hope). “I'm doing your sound tonight. The promoter will be here shortly.”

“Nice to meet you. My setup is pretty simple: three DI boxes
at the front of the stage—guitar, accordion, banjo—and a center vocal mic.” (Two vocals, if Maria is playing.)

“OK, no problem.”

As he sets up the stage, I bother him with the Four Basic Questions: Where should I set up merch? Do you know the Wi-Fi password? Is there a backstage area? Can I get a beer? Then I load our bags in, put the instruments on the stage, and take them from their bags and cases. I uncoil the cables, plug one into an instrument on one end and a tuning pedal on the other, then another cable out of the pedal into the direct box that leads to the sound system. I tune the guitar and the banjo. I change the guitar strings if necessary—once a week at least. I strap on the accordion and see what's broken today. Accordions have hundreds of small moving pieces—they look like a typewriter inside—and are not optimized for hard travel. I have a spreadsheet of accordion repairmen around the world, lonely grouches in their sixties with garage workshops an hour out of town: the sad old men of accordion repair. Between these pilgrimages I do my best with superglue, duct tape, needle-nose pliers, and a soldering iron.

I pick up the guitar and start playing and singing. The same song each night for the whole tour, usually—that way I've got a constant. The sound guy will get the idea and start turning the channels up. If he hasn't already decided he hates me from the moment I pull out the accordion or banjo, I can move through the other instruments. When we're both satisfied, I pack up the instruments and re-coil the cables so the opening acts can have the stage.

Now is my downtime. I've usually got about three hours. Sometimes they've made dinner for me—as cheaply and easily
as possible, but free food is free food. In Scotland it's often chili. In England, pasta. In Germany, what we simply call “vegan slop” over rice. (In America you won't get fed. Pizza if you're lucky.) Anything you can stick in a big pot, turn on a flame, and feed two to ten people.

Otherwise, I head out and wander around the neighborhood. It's my last chance for some peace and quiet. Sushi or noodle soup and some hot sake is the ideal preshow dinner: filling but not sleep-inducing, with a little warmth. Mexican or Indian food is absolutely off-limits—too heavy (the only time I've vomited onstage, a burrito was the culprit). If I'm overseas, my phone's on airplane mode, so I can spend some time with a book. Treat yourself.

If I time it right, I'm back at the club about an hour before set time. I've missed the first opening act or two. There are a decent number of people milling around. Mostly people won't buy merch until after the show—who wants to carry around an LP for another two hours?—but I go lurk by the merch table for a few minutes anyway. Now it's time to get dressed.

Country star Porter Wagoner was once asked why he wore sequined Nudie suits. “I don't know what business you're in, but I'm in show business,” he replied. I've always dressed up for shows. They're a special occasion, and you dress up for a special occasion. And it's a way of making the psychological break between the daylight introvert and the effusive nighttime persona, a way of getting in character. Like Superman putting on the cape. For this tour, I'd brought just one black suit with a white French-cuffed shirt, which I wore with an open collar and a maroon pocket square. I had a pair of pewter cufflinks with the head of a Spanish conquistador on them. They had belonged to
my great-grandfather, a clotheshorse in his time. I had a round black-brimmed hat and a pair of $30 black shoes from Target I wore until they fell apart. With luck, there is a back room or a kitchen or at least a storage closet to change in. Without luck, the men's room. Maria has a couple of dresses (they pack smaller than suits) and a pair of short heels, and she puts on bright red lipstick and liquid eyeliner.

Now it's showtime. There are usually a decent number of people in the room, not a lot, but maybe the promoter won't lose money. They're young, mostly. Outside of the UK, people over forty don't really go to bars to see live music. The young men tend to wear black cutoff shorts, a black band T-shirt with white print, slip-on skater shoes, a scruffy beard, and earlobe plugs. The women are usually in tight black jeans, Converse, black tank tops, Bettie Page black bobs and bangs or bleached and chopped and dyed hair. Neither, for some reason, wear socks. Everyone has a can of cheap beer. Some of them sit cross-legged on the sides of the floor, most stand. Sometimes they clap in time.

“Hello,” I say, “hi there,” loud enough to get their attention, “I'm Franz Nicolay, from Brooklyn, New York, it's great to be here!”

I open with an accordion song: “The Hearts of Boston,” usually, a new song, on the record that's not quite out yet. It's rousing, with an Irish-sounding riff and a foot-stomping tempo. Maria plays banjo. It makes the point: I'm not just another guy with an acoustic guitar. On the first three songs of the set I play accordion, guitar, and banjo, to set the parameters of the night. I stop in the middle of songs to comment on the action. I tell stories. Like a standup comedian, I only have one or two set stories for each song, but I can play with the length and eliminate beats
if I feel like the crowd isn't in the mood or their English isn't strong enough. I try not to repeat the stories in towns I've been to recently, but that's not a problem in Russia.

            
I recently befriended a five-year-old kid with the unlikely name of Jasper Christmas. Well, I say befriended—this was two years ago, which is a long time in the life of a five-year-old. He may not even remember me by now. Jasper had discovered that if you use the construction “Do the [blank]” that that's a dance craze, and he set himself to the task of coming up with dance crazes. He had one called the Snail, in which you get down on your knees and pull yourself forward with your hands. He had one called the Pillow, in which you curl up in the fetal position on the floor and you don't move at all. Very popular dance. Anyone can do it, and most people do. And he has one called the Struggle, in which you take a chair, and you put it up against the wall, and you take the top of your head and you put it against the back of the chair, and you run your feet as fast as you can and try to push the chair through the wall. I heard that and I said, “Jasper, you're a fucking genius,” and then I thought, “Shit, I shouldn't say ‘fuck' in front of a five-year-old,” and then I thought, “Fuck it, he's going to have to learn from somebody.” Jasper, you're a fucking genius. That reminds me of all my friends who are activists, and touring musicians, and spend their lives trying to push chairs through walls. This one's for them, it's called “Do the Struggle,” and it goes like this . . .

I try to play about an hour. Twelve songs, give or take. More if the crowd is with me, less if they're not. End with a rousing crowd-pleaser, usually “Jeff Penalty,” a semi-novelty song about the replacement singer of the Dead Kennedys, with a “whoaoh” sing-along chorus. I drop to my knees with mock guitar heroics in the bridge. Then I use my instincts: end it there, on the high-energy note, or unplug the banjo and sing a sentimental ballad in the middle of the floor. That can be a magical moment. I've got a couple sad banjo ballads—“This Is Not a Pipe” or “Cease-Fire”—but the longtime winner is the Jimmy Durante song “Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo.” If there are tables or a bench, I'll get up on them. End on a showbiz major sixth, doff the cap, and skedaddle.

Exit to the backstage, or the bathroom, for a polite minute or two, then reappear behind the merch table and sell some CDs, LPs, and T-shirts, pose for a few pictures, sign some things (keep a Sharpie in the suit pocket), and try to pack up the stage before the club staff are all packed up themselves. I change back into my street clothes and hang the suit on hangers so I don't have to put it away sweaty and wet. Mostly I don't have that luxury, though, and at the end of this six-month tour the suit will be unsalvageable, crusty with white salt, the hat bent and ripped, the knees of the pants patched and patched again. I promise Maria we'll have a ritual fire and feed the suit to the flames.
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Then it's off either to the stranger's house where we're sleeping—the last great suspense of the day: will it be a bed, an air mattress, a couch, or a floor, and how many cats?—or to the train station, to pile as quietly as possible into the coupe with all our bags without waking our new roommates.

There is a ritualistic quality to boarding a sleeper train, and a liturgy of grunted courtesies. You slide open the walk-in cooler door and nod to the strangers who got there first, and perhaps claimed the lower bunks. Personally, I prefer the foldaway upper shelves, both for privacy and for the dismount: at least then you're the one stepping on someone else's bed, not the stepped-on. You stash your luggage in the metal storage box under the lower bunks and the deceptively spacious cubby over the door. You unwrap the cellophaned and starchy sheets and the scratchy wool blanket and make, of the plastic-padded bunk, your bed. The attendant checks your ticket and offers tea or instant coffee. You prepare your supplies for the night: water bottle tucked against the wall, book and headphones and earplugs handy in the net pocket on the wall. The passengers separate into two tribes: the men in track pants and shower shoes, traveling alone, who stand in the corridor staring at passing fields, and the women and families who share the small tables that jut from below the curtained compartment windows.

One of the great treats of train touring is those times when the ride to the next show is long enough to spend a night, the whole next day, and another night on the train before disembarking. You snack, snooze, scribble, read, have a beer, nap again, wander to the dining car, get some fresh air at a provincial station, and try not to get left behind. It was a twenty-four-hour journey from Voronezh to Saint Petersburg. Through the window coquettish beech leaves flashed their silver undersides in the breeze. It was the kind of manicured forest you see from eastern
Germany through Poland: tall thin pine or birch on a lawn of low grass and shrub or middling oak, the sign of a land that has been logged and resown again and again. Every few kilometers, a small village huddled its hovels shank by haunch: amid an endless expanse of land, they shared waved-tin fences between their small gardens, brick walls, and moldering plaster. Then a few miles of marsh, the trucks on the Don highway visible just to the east. Then a sort of plain, where the shacks by the tracks showed their peaks over squat fruit trees.