Slim and The Beast: The Touring Diaries Part II
Day 2: Lille — City of Local Pastries and Rain
11:15 am
Bought a cheap sandwich from Monoprix because they didn’t have the wraps I usually like, the chicken ones that come in three and taste good because they’re expensive. Also had a mint tea at the Grains de Prod offices. We hit the road with time to spare.
E — — , our tour manager on the road, is from Alsace-Lorraine. She studied theater and drama before moving to Paris to work in music. She is kind and organized and on top of her game. Young people continue to impress me. When did they get so mature?
There’s a restaurant in France that makes me think of Golden Corral and it’s called Flunch. We won’t eat there, ever, but it’s on the road and it’s cheap, so don’t speak too soon. Pocket change can go a long way when you can get a piece of meat and a plate of potatoes for 8 Euros. At a gas station there were shakable Snickers and Twix drinks. We did not drink them. American culture — the one of plastified comfort and consumerism — is everywhere. Which isn’t to say sooner or later we won’t stop at a McDonalds.
We passed through Arras, where British and French armored and infantry divisions held off but failed to push back the German offensive in 1940. I know these lands because I play a videogame called Battlefield V. In a virtual world I have taken up a sniper position amidst the yellow fields of canola. Driving through the town, I could make out a church steeple but I couldn’t be sure it was the same one that existed in 1940.
Green Room, circa 3pm
Lille was a busy one. We had three interviews, two radios and one web magazine, and all three interviewers were kind and interested. One was around twenty, a journalism student at a local university. The other two were middle-aged men who love three-part harmonies and have spent a life appreciating music.
Everyone in Caravan Palace is incredibly kind and open and of course they are also talented, inspiring artists. It’s incredible how much time and effort is required to put on a thirty-minute set, not to mention a 1.5-hour spectacle. The rehearsals and the commutes and the sound checks and the energetic excitement building for hours upon hours stretching into days, and in thirty minutes it’s finished and you wonder what just happened. Aaron put it well “It’s like you’ve been hired to star in your own reality TV show that begins and ends with your first and final steps onstage.”
Surreality comes to mind, in the literal sense of being “above” reality. You’ve always been in the audience, looking up to these stages. To be standing there performing in front of 2,000 , you risk floating away. In this moment you aresomeone else, part of something far bigger than yourself, not the least because it is hard to compute that you’re staring out at thousands, playing the songs you’ve always played. Too much focus on their faces and you will forget the chords, muddle the lyrics. In that moment you become an amalgamation of smiles and fears and the desire to seem natural onstage whilst knowing that it isn’t natural — how could it be? — to stand in front of so many faces. And yet it has to be natural. This is what you tell yourself. In any case, it is becoming natural with every successive performance. You are becoming someone who is meant to be on a stage. And this is when you realize that the chord you are playing and the lyrics you are singing are the only natural thing about this moment. And this is where you find your Happy Place.
Lille felt different than Rouen, harder to connect with. There were twice as many people and yet the room felt smaller, somehow, packed to the brim with eager faces. The lighting seemed different too — everyone was illuminated — and there were many moments where I forget to focus on what I was playing, was distracted by people who were neither moving nor bobbing their heads, and I started to wonder if I was playing something wrong, if I wasn’t doing the right thing, and this is the danger when you’re onstage. If you forget about why you’re playing, if you start to play for the expectant faces, you’re totally fucked. If you begin to play in expectation of a reaction instead of a recognition that the reason you’re here is because you and your brothers find peace in music together; if you forget about the happy place you’ve found for yourselves, you will take unnecessary risks with a chord voicing or a different melodic solo and this will take you and your brothers out of it.
In the Adam Sandler film Happy Gilmore, the Happy Place is a garden with a smiling grandmother and a lover wearing black lingerie, serving sweet ice-tea with floating lemons. For us, when we’re up there, the happy place is living inside the vibrations of the harmonies. It is in living inside the voices that tell the stories that bring us all together, that bring us all to our own versions of comfort, of home. In Lille I had trouble finding this place. I felt like I was performing a show instead of living an experience. But afterwards, despite such feelings, E — — said everyone loved us and we played even better than last night in Rouen. Just goes to show how perception from the outside is so damn different than within. If I keep returning to the analogy of trying to explain a psychedelic experience, it’s not for nothing: externally, there may be no way to tell whether someone is having a bad trip — it’s all happening in their head — but then again you can always tell when someone is having a good one. The smile is everywhere. With this show in particular I was stressed that I wasn’t going to play as well standing up as before. I’ve done it before and I’ve learned to find my happy place within it, but learning how to perform as a pianist is very different than learning how to perform as a singer. Standing up to do the latter is a novel experience for me, something that can only be practiced once you are on the stage. Playing harmonica is easier. I’ve done this before. It’s also easier for me to close my eyes while I’m playing, easier for me to feel it … there’s a primordial fear about performing piano that was instilled by a certain Italian Grinch named Mr. Ricando. He yelled at me if I played the notes wrong. He was the reason I stopped playing piano, initially. And remembering not to worry about playing the wrong notes is a hard lesson to recall when you are distracted by two thousand faces. Once you start thinking about it, you’re fucked. This is the lesson. This is why playing harmonica gets me “there” more quickly. I taught harmonica to myself. I never yelled at myself in the mirror. Starting with “Harvest Moon” did help in some way-helped me get prepared for the 4-piano-sound epicness of “Pasadena”. But I learned my lesson in Lille, especially as I looked ahead towards tomorrow’s Paris’ Zenith: you must let the thought float by and let it pass. There’s no place for fear of failure when you’re playing with your brothers on the stage, because there’s no such thing as failure when you’re being yourself, totally free.
After-show
The Lille after show was nice and relaxed. We ate spicy Jamaican chicken with red rice and beer. What a pleasure to be well fed … it almost makes you forget you aren’t paid to play. A young man with a mustache wearing a strange hat came up to us at the Merch Table and told us that he loved our music but that we were thirty years too late. We should have played music in the seventies, he said. He said we were too late. He meant it as a compliment, we think — he did insist that in terms of our music in this day and age “nobody gets it” — and what can you do but smile and say thank you for coming to the show? We got back home around 2:30 a.m. Tomorrow would be the biggest of our lives, playing to 4,500+ people at the legendary Zenith à la Villette. Woke up late and met S — and M — for Pho. They came from London just to see us. They’re amazing humans and even better friends.
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