When you start going on Tours and playing in different big cities and small towns you inevitably start putting together a list in your head. The names of places where you haven’t played a show yet but would very much like to. Maybe it’s a place you just like the name of like Sixes, Oregon. Maybe it’s a big city but the thing it’s famous for is so far removed from a DIY punk or noise show that you want to just feel the contrast like Las Vegas, Nevada. Maybe you were supposed to play a show there in a house that is supposedly haunted by the ghost of a small girl but it got cancelled at the last minute and the cancellation, for lack of a better word, haunts you like Manhattan, Kansas.
On what’s already a list of oddities New Haven, Connecticut stands out for me as a bit of an oddity. I must have been remotely aware that Yale is located there in a kind of back-brain Jeopardy! clue capacity but that didn’t have anything to do with my desire to play a show there. I’m not sure if it’s on the Greyhound route between two more popular cities or if I had passed through because of visiting my brother in Danbury, Connecticut but I know that I was on a bus pulling out of the New Haven station when it happened:
It was a sunny day, probably Spring or Summer. The bus station is on a very different side of the city than the Yale campus, mostly Black and working class from the looks of it, and on this particular day everything felt good. People were walking around the neighborhood, greeting each other on porches, riding bicycles but from what I saw from the bus window everybody was smiling and in a nice mood. When you ride these inter-city buses a lot you get used to falling asleep on them and then you kind of wake up at the stops to grab a snack or use a better bathroom and then ease back into sleep as the bus pulls out. It was in this state that the following thought took hold of me:
“This looks like a real nice city. I’d really like to play a DIY show for a dozen or so people here someday.”
So there it was, playing a show in New Haven, Connecticut wasn’t much of a dream but it was mine. I put the word out and on the 2010 Tour with Generation it became a reality, we played in a small garage adjoining a Popeye’s Chicken that was creatively known as Popeye’s Garage. I don’t think Barkev, performing as Bernard Herman, set this one up but he definitely played it. The big thing I remember about that show, besides the sweet satisfaction of checking off a box, was that it was the beginning of our travels with Relay for Death.
I think my first exposure to Barkev was a brief glimpse of a Hard Worker comic that CF was excited about when I drifted through Boy’s Town in 2007. He played as Bernard Herman when the bus came through Providence the following year and Raphael Lyon was very excited about it. Some of his later trademarks were present at this early stage, colored lights and keyboards, but the performance didn’t really grab me.
It must have been the Summer of 2012 when I caught the songs and performance that got me excited enough to urge him to come out to the West Coast so I could set up a small tour for us. The one with the costume changes and handmade masks designed around characters from the Comedia Dell’Arte. The one that was collected and released on the album 1000 Masks. There was a bit of a Goth and Darkwave trend in the Underground Music World that year but the most exciting aspects of his performance were both timeless and somewhat niche in their appeal:
The presentation of a live music set as Theater where each song draws a brief portrait of a different character – complete with struggles, motivations and flaws.
I still haven’t gotten over certain childhood traumas enough to learn to drive a car but when I go on tour it’s usually with someone who can. It occurs to me that Barkev probably did know how to drive one, as most adults seem to, but I don’t think he ever made the suggestion of renting one for this week of shows. It might have worked out slightly more favorably from a financial perspective but doing things the way we did was certainly more interesting.
We did the whole thing through the “cross that bridge when we come to it” method – we knew where we were scheduled to play, when we were scheduled to play there but the how of getting from one city and venue to another was a little logistical puzzle that had to be solved every twenty four hours or so.
The Counterfeit Greyhound Pass method had been a non-starter since around 2008. I used one a few times that year, and even did some touring with them, but I was getting turned away more and more often and it seemed prudent not to press things to the point of punitive fraud charges.
In the end everything worked out. We made it to every show on time without having to make any cancellations. We found trains and buses that were running between the places and at the times we needed and in one case a friend decided to make a timely trip down to Arcata. I should mention that his vehicle experienced total mechanical failure the moment we rolled into town but the blame for this spot of bad luck can hardly be placed upon the tour. The Universe tapes up the casting sheet and we play our roles – brave faced or kicking and screaming it all turns out the same way.
In a strange twist of fate this same friend just recently had his car totaled getting rear ended by a Mustang in Albuquerque, New Mexico but they say that any crash you can walk away from is a good one.
The proceeds from the performances also covered the diverse transportation costs, in fact we may have ended things with a small surplus. Certainly nothing worth writing home about but it’s always better than concluding a tour in the red. I should clarify that none of this takes into account the expenses incurred by Barkev in flying across the country in both directions, especially as he had to trace a kind of triangle due to the tour beginning in the Pacific Northwest and ending in Southern California. As so many artists often do he wrote the whole thing off as a vacation: while this does nothing to soften the blow financially it can be quite effective from an emotional standpoint.
Anyway I’ve probably bored everybody enough with timetables and logistics and it’s high time I got to the real meat of the story: the interpersonal stuff. We had met a couple times, we liked each other’s work but how would we get along as tour-mates? I had invited him to come play some West Coast shows and he had enthusiastically agreed but what if the whole scenario had been an elaborate ruse for one of us to prank the other in revenge for a perceived sleight in a Punk’d-like scenario?
That wasn’t the case of course but just imagine if it had been!
What did end up happening was that Barkev seemed to feel a constant need to “alpha dog” me in a variety of tiny ways: grab the highest value seat in a transportation setting or the “cush” sleeping spot in a crashing scenario, behave differently in subtle ways in the presence of attractive women and socially important men – you probably get the general idea. I’m fairly used to it with several of my male friends and it doesn’t really get to me. At six foot five it’s easy for me to quite literally be the bigger person.
Besides that I’m a California guy, bred if not born, and we’re a more mellow and easygoing lot than our East Coast counterparts.
Olympia, Washington was our first port of call and essentially the “wedding night” for the larger tour dynamics. We played a very stylish goth bar called Cryptatropa that was owned by a local figure commonly known as “Duane the Dark Dentist” – he is known for owning houses all over town that he rents to punk kids at a bargain rate with the stipulation that the exteriors remain painted black.
The show was on the sparsely attended side but the ambience more than compensated for any disappointments in that department. A friend of mine worked in a local sandwich shop and brought by a couple of sandwiches that had either gone unsold or he had been able to make for us especially. I forget who we were crashing with but suspect it was Ben Trogdon who made the Nuts! large format newsprint zine. Somewhere around three in the morning I got hungry and decided to eat my sandwich.
I looked around but couldn’t seem to find it. I asked Barkev if he’d maybe seen it. He turned to me with a solemn expression:
“I have a confession to make. I ate both sandwiches. I’m fucked up. You had to find out sooner or later.”
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 