I am sitting in the tour bus outside Johnny Brenda’s in the heart of Fishtown, Philadelphia. Today is the three-year anniversary of the final Luna show, as a fan in Washington DC informed me last night. We are just about at the end of our North American tour with Keren Ann, and I am looking forward to sleeping in my own bed tonight.

The tour kicked off three weeks ago on a snowy night in Boston. We have been sharing a 2004 Prevost tour bus. Keren Ann’s band is a trio, while we are four, and with the addition of three crew (Chris, Ace and Philip) and a driver (Joe Bruce) we are eleven. That’s a crowded bus — it feels like we have joined the circus. At the start of the tour we formed two groups – our band in the back lounge of the bus, Keren Ann’s in the front, but now we are fast friends.

The latest edition of the Back Numbers band features Matt Sumrow (ex of the Comas) on keyboard, and is my favorite lineup so far. Matt has brought along his Wurlitzer, a great sounding instrument. He has a nice touch on the keys, plays guitar on “Tiger Lily” and “Malibu Love Nest,” and is easygoing.

The first week of the tour was bitterly cold, but that is to be expected if you visit Montreal, Chicago and Minneapolis in February. It was 3 degrees Fahrenheit in Minneapolis. I bought myself an orange Marmot down jacket on sale (half price probably on account of the pumpkin color). Cold as it was that day, it was hot on stage at the Cedar Cultural Centre, and I had to remove my sweater during the show, revealing the T-shirt that I wore in my bunk the previous evening: BOSTON SUCKS. Of course a photo of me in that shirt quickly appeared on the internet. That’s the way it is now. Someone is always videotaping or photographing you on stage, as Michael Richards learned.

Our friends at Zoe/Rounder are based just outside Boston, and I did receive a query from our product manager on the offending shirt.

“DEAN!?”

“It’s not the people, or the city of Boston that suck,” I explained. “The shirt refers only to your baseball team.”

Driving from Vancouver to Seattle we crossed the border at 3 a.m., where a U.S. customs officer confiscated a box of clementines at the border. Ha! Got you. He threatened to fine us $300 but said since the driver wasn’t aware of the offending citrus fruit, he let us go with a warning.

Britta and Keren Ann and I performed at KEXP, before being driven to the club by an intern. We ate fish tacos at the Pike Street market and crumpets and tea at the crumpet shop. I bought 12 crumpets to go and went in search of a masseuse. I found her: Bohemia Massage, right in the market. Bohemia because she is a sixty-year old Czechoslovakian woman. I stripped my shirt off and lay face down. She oiled and massaged my back while telling me her life story. She escaped Czechoslovakia in 1981, because she said she hated the Russian presence in her country, tried to emigrate to Australia, but ended up in Detroit. “When I got to Detroit,” she said, “I realized how great communism was. I went to the doctor and I had to pay!” She talked non stop. Her parting gift was a recipe for her favorite mashed potatoes, cooked with caramelized onions and pork lard.

The Triple Door is a fancy jazz club, great sound system and good food, but it’s always odd to play to people eating their dinner. “Don’t ever do that,” said my friend Jeff. “That’s what killed jazz music.”

Vancouver was fun. Britta and I walked down to Gastown, wandering a bit too far east perhaps, near Hastings and Main, where we saw one guy shooting up on the street, and others smoking crack. It was Valentine’s Day and I brought Britta a couple of gifts – chocolates from Godiva, and a copy of the Communist Manifesto, which she has not read. Whatever else you might think, Marx is an entertaining writer.

In San Francisco Britta and I stayed with Angel Corpus Christi and her husband Rich, on 45th Avenue almost at the ocean. We took a walk down by the beach, and then up to a lookout point near the Golden Gate bridge. I was reminded of a time back in 1996 when Luna were playing San Francisco, and our A&R guy Terry Tolkin was in town. We had all taken ecstasy together after the show, and at 4 a.m. Terry insisted on hiring a limousine to go look at the bridge. So we rode out there, listening to Roxy Music in the back seat, but when we arrived a heavy fog had rolled in and we couldn’t see a damn thing.

This time we performed at Yoshi’s in San Francisco, a sushi restaurant and jazz club, long a fixture across the bay but they’ve just opened a fancy club behind the Fillmore. After the show I ran into an old friend from my Boston days – Josh Breslau, who I met one night when Galaxie 500 played Chet’s Last Call. I hadn’t seen him for 15 years. “Here’s the strange thing,” he told me, “I am Keren Ann’s cousin.” It was great to see Josh, and I wanted to talk to him some more, but one particularly drunk fan kept pushing her tits in my face and telling me that she and her husband like to fuck to Galaxie 500, and how she was my biggest fan, only she kept calling me “Mark Wareham.” I was perfectly friendly for a while, but when she asked me to kiss her for a photograph I finally asked her to leave me alone, and she was mortified. So if you’re reading this, I apologize for being rude, but you had crossed the line from funny drunk to annoying drunk.

In Los Angeles we went shopping with Matthew Buzzell. He drove us in his new old Fiat spider convertible to Amoeba Records, where I picked up a cool disc of Jack Nitzsche doing Chopin, the soundtrack to Wong Kar Wai’s 2046, and a compilation of guitarist Mickey Baker (of “Love is Strange” fame).

We had a little party on the bus after our show at the El Rey, with Matthew and his friend Chris Parnell (of SNL fame), fueled by a bottle of bourbon and a diet of French rock played by Thomas (Keren Ann’s bassist). Till the driver showed up at 1 a.m. and we kicked our friends off the bus and rolled on to Tucson, Arizona. We were back at the Club Congress, last seen in the Luna documentary, where Sean is lying on a bunk bed crying “Look at me – I’m on a bunk bed in Tucson!” That’s because at the Hotel Congress they keep the rooms just as they were in the 1930s – no TV, no phone. It’s a great place.

The next stop was Marfa, TX. Both No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood were shot around here, but the town was is best known as the site of Donald Judd’s sculptures. We had two days to visit the Judd and Chinati foundations, and see how Donald Judd lived. It was a treat to see where he lived and worked, but I can sort of understand why his wife didn’t stay long, running back to New York City. Judd bought up buildings all over this little town, and many of them bear his name (like a very tasteful Donald Trump perhaps).

Anthony and I decided to have a race in the afternoon – a 50-yard sprint. I have always been a fast runner, but today I had to face the facts – that he is 20 years old and I am 44. Anthony had me beaten out of the box, pulling ahead after ten yards, but sadly he tripped and fell hard on the street. I guess that made me the winner.

First night in Marfa we piled into a couple of pickup trucks and drove out to see the famous Marfa lights. But all we saw was a few car headlights in the distance, and a plane taking off from a nearby airport. Still, our tour manager Chris insisted that he saw the magic lights, and that I had a bad attitude.

“Yeah,” said Phillip, “I was just cleaning out the bowl when I saw them.” That would be the bowl of his weed pipe.

From Marfa it was on to Austin, where we played two shows at the legendary Cactus Café, where folks like Townes Van Zandt and Lyle Lovett play. It was a long day but we found time to have dinner with Sonic Boom, who was doing his own show in Austin later that night. I wish we could have made it over to his show, but the bus pulled out of Austin at 1 a.m., with us in our bunks.

Sunday was a day off – the bus stopped in Metairie, just outside New Orleans and we took taxis down to the French Quarter, which looks much the same as always, lots of drunk people wandering around Bourbon Street. This part of the city avoided the very worst of Katrina. I had the oyster plate at Mother’s, followed by their amazing bread pudding, and wandered the Quarter for a bit. “It doesn’t look very French around here,” said Matthias (Keren Ann’s drummer). Britta and I headed back to the hotel in Metairie to watch the Academy Awards, which show was as dull as ever. The worst part is always the musical numbers.

We moved on to Atlanta and then Chapel Hill, where Thomas joined us to play tambourine on “Bonnie & Clyde,” the last song of the night. It sounded cool - Thomas is a terrific musician. Then he vomited in the toilet on the bus and went straight to his bunk.

They are all good players, Keren Ann’s band – a trio who play and sing with great precision. One fond memory on tour was backstage at the Lakeshore Theatre in Chicago, watching Anthony (LaMarca) and Matt (Sumrow) and Thomas play the piano and sing David Bowie songs.

Britta and Anthony and I ate at Crook’s corner in Carrboro. I had the cheese pork, delicious, while reading the preview for our show in the Independent Weekly: “Wareham’s music never had much of a pulse. Sure, this pretty couple has the look, but will Britta’s icy Nico-ish demeanor rate outside ‘90s alt-rock refugees looking for an easy, risk-free evening in the rock club? It shouldn’t.”

We moved on to the Black Cat in Washington D.C., where we had the best crowd of the tour. Anthony and Matt fetched chili dogs from Ben’s Chili Bowl after the show, washed down with chili fries and vanilla shakes, a delicious American meal, as I pointed out to our French friends.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 9:09 pm and is filed under Dean Wareham's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.