Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four
Part Five Part Six Part Seven Part Eight
I put Pennsylvania in the title but I guess this might have happened in Ohio, West Virginia or any number of Northeastern states. I wasn’t involved with booking any of the Living Hell shows so for most of the tour I didn’t need to think about where we were located geographically for any particular reason. The things I am certain of is that there were gigantic colonies of tent caterpillars for this leg of the journey and we left the bus in a picturesque little village with an “Old Dutch” feel.
Dave had a couple friends named Jeff and Shira who were getting married and apparently decided to surprise them by crashing the wedding with the entire Bus. There must have been an announcement in the last preceding major city so that anybody who didn’t feel like being at a remote destination wedding could hop off and meet back up with the tour later but I wasn’t about to miss it. Who doesn’t love a wedding?
I didn’t know as much about the ins and outs of wedding planning at the time but I’m retroactively impressed with the graciousness and flexibility of the bride and groom and their respective families for accepting the last minute addition of a bus full of a dozen or so freaks without so much as raising an eyebrow. I guess that’s an exaggeration – a single eyebrow actually does a fair job of approximating the extremely minor reaction. Somebody referred to us as “wooly” – a description of our freakishness which was both accurate and of less than mammoth proportions.
The venue for the wedding was somebody’s family farm. I’m not from that region, I don’t even know where I was, so I couldn’t say if the wild abundance of tent caterpillars was typical for that time of year or not. I mentioned being in Illinois for the emergence of Brood XIII in another one of these pieces but those cicadas had less of an appreciable effect on the overall landscape than these caterpillars. You’d be hard pressed to find a table cloth that they weren’t crawling across.
It created a nice visual theme for the whole affair by lending every single one of the guests coordinated living accessories. I’m the type of person who enjoys the look and feel of being covered with living invertebrates but even for anyone that wasn’t they could only remove the caterpillars that they had actually become aware of. In that way everybody ended up looking “wooly”.
A special pavilion had been set up for performances as the happy couple came from a musically inclined community. All of the guests had actually arrived on a bus though it wasn’t The Bus – a specially chartered shuttle bus ferried passengers from a parking area to the more remote farm. Without our mobile home we weren’t going to be offering up a Living Hell performance but it was the perfect opportunity to try out some other things.
Corey Hucks was already a friend of Jeff and Shira’s and did a few songs on acoustic guitar. The wedding might have even been the moment that brought Corey onto The Bus and tour – I don’t remember the precise details but I know he wasn’t there from the beginning. I also forget if it had been me or Vanessa that first came up with the concept for an a cappella industrial project called Cannery Row but the wedding offered the perfect opportunity to turn an inside joke into a reality.
Dalton joined up with us for this one. The idea was to make rhythmic sounds that simulated a cannery as a back drop for spoken and syncopated lyrics but in practice this presented extremely similarly to what would generally be called beatboxing and rapping. That ended up being something of a theme for me: I had no way of knowing at this point that I’d soon be creating the project Bleak End at Bernie’s that awkwardly toed the line between rap and industrial.
I couldn’t say if our performance was inspired by or prescient of our visit to a former cannery in Liberty, Maine because I can’t remember the order that the two things happened in. Based on my limited knowledge of our tour itinerary and everything else either way would make equal sense. If I had made up the project name I wasn’t inspired by anything in the actual novel, which I hadn’t read yet, but only the status of a cannery as a thing that is industrial.
Vanessa clearly had read the novel as she came up with all the lyrics that directly reference elements of the book. Perhaps Dalton had also read the book and helped make them up. I just remember both of them quickly teaching me the following words:
“What you know? What you know about Cannery Row?
And what you need? It’s all on credit at Mr. Lee’s
Down by the water, across the tracks, in your face!
<raspberry sound>“
It all came together very organically and naturally. I had later, separate collaborations with both Vanessa and Dalton where I basically treated them like flying monkeys – my term for a collaborator who isn’t given any creative input. In Vanessa’s case she played guitar on the second Bleak End at Bernie’s tape and Dalton and I toured the country with a project called Dealbreaker. It can be fun to be a flying monkey, up to a point, and I was acutely aware of the point when it stopped being fun for both of them.
That’s my own weakness as a collaborator. I can be too infatuated with my own ideas to leave enough space for anyone else’s. It would have been nice to do more things like Cannery Row but in my cowardice I always felt creatively safer in total control. Lately I’ve been thinking more about what I would get if I were able to wrest certain things from the cold bony fingers of intellect but I wouldn’t quite rate any of this as a regret.
We make the best little thing we can out of the Legos we were given. Some of us have a knack for it, others might have just gotten cool pieces from the outset.
Cannery Row was a moderate success insofar as it had a certain energy that appealed to the people that ended up seeing it. What I remember was that either Shira or Jeff, the bride or the groom, hadn’t actually seen it because whichever one of them it was had ended up stepping away to use the bathroom or handle some logistical issue. I guess using the bathroom is a logistical issue.
Anyway neither of them actually knew the three of us but the one that had missed it was a little bummed in that their new spouse had just seen it and was a little excited about it. It almost sounds like something out of a fairytale – a performance offered as wedding gift that fate causes one of the partners to miss. The kind of thing that would end in a bad bargain with a dwarf or goblin. In the real world they just wanted us to do it again but the thing about an improvised performance with a certain energy is that you can’t exactly do it again.
To make up for this we improvised a new performance that centered on me freestyle rapping and culminated with me and Vanessa peeing our pants at the same time as I rapped about us doing exactly that. This presented less of a logistical issue. We were pretty drunk. It was a really fun wedding.
I’m not sure if I’ve ran into Jeff and/or Shira since but I had a great time meeting them at their wedding. I hope they’re happy or if they realized they weren’t happy they were at least happy about the decision to stop being married. That probably sounds really weird – what I mean is that I’m a big believer in serial monogamy and people figuring out that they are either happy together or happier apart. There’s a lot of different ways of being happy – it doesn’t always look the same.
I love being married and the institution of marriage. Here’s to it!
<imaginary glass>
Cheers!
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 