Daron's Guitar Chronicles: Vol 4

316 MONKEY GONE TO HEAVEN

MONKEY GONE TO HEAVEN

The venue in North Carolina turned out to be another college campus, and Jonathan had to tell me all about the Duke Blue Devils since I didn't know squat about college sports. It was a basketball arena, seated just shy of ten thousand, but from the outside it was all covered in gray stone and looked like a monastery.

There were already fans there, waiting for us to show up for soundcheck. A group of about twenty. Like usual they were mostly girls with one or two guys floating around.One of the girls was pen pals with one of the girls Courtney knew, the discovery of which fact produced much squealing. I think Carynne delegated fan wrangling to Court, actually, or maybe it just happened that way. Zig and I spent a good twenty minutes taking pictures and signing autographs and answering the question "Are you sure you're okay?" a few million times. Jonathan wasn't the only one who watched the video of the explosion a million times. My eye patch was deemed "cute." Then when the girls heard that Ziggy had decorated it for me, THAT was deemed cute. Jonathan seemed to think the whole fan club thing was cute.

Then Court bossed us inside to take care of business. She was definitely taking lessons from Carynne.

The green room was a converted locker room. There was a kind of rhythmic sound coming from an open door toward the back and at first I was trying to imagine what kind of instrument it could be, and then I realized it was a huge clothes dryer, already in use, going clackety-thump. I honestly hadn't been keeping track of what all was going on with our show clothes beyond the fact that someone always took the sweaty post-show stuff away. Unlike when we'd toured on our own, doing our own driving and laundry, this was a whole different set-up. Good thing someone, by which I mean Carynne, kept track of all that stuff.

Carynne hit me with the schedule the second I sat down to change my socks. "No extra encores tonight," she warned. "Not only is there a local zoning thing, it's an eleven hour drive to Bloomington so we're rolling overnight. We're meeting up there with Wednesday's Child and The Blissmen. It'll be their first show of their tour so we don't want to be late. Then it's another eleven hours to Toronto."

"Jeez, isn't that a bit tight, scheduling-wise?" I realized the lace of one of my high-tops was getting frayed.

"There's a day off in Toronto before the show. Well, not a real day off, there's press and a getting-to-know-you party with the other two bands, a big Much Music thing." She sat next to me on the bench and flipped through the day book.

"Much Music?"

"It's the Canadian version of MTV," she assured me. "That's kind of how the whole 'faces of alternative rock' thing came together, through them."

"Both these bands are from England?" We'd put a cassette of The Blissmen into the bus player a few days ago but it hadn't left much of an impression on me.

"Um, U.K. anyway. They're both better known in Canada than the States I guess, and BNC are trying to break them to a bigger US audience."

"Okay. So why Bloomington, Indiana, then?" I kind of drew a map in the air. "If it's eleven hours over to there and then eleven hours up to Toronto..." Seemed like a really big detour when if we went straight north for eleven hours I was betting we'd be there. "Unless my geography's off?"

She shrugged. "You're not wrong. The arena's big, and it just kind of worked out that way. I agree, not the most efficient route. But sometimes you can't get what you want."

"How big?"

"Sixteen thousand. No, wait, eighteen with the general admission on the floor." She shut the book again. "If only we could play a couple more really big places, this tour might actually make some money."