My Life With Peter Gabriel: Part Eight

My Life With Peter Gabriel: Part Eight

Is anything as simple as we remember it? No more so than as complicated. And looking back in this case, vis à vis Peter Gabriel, is a way of simplifying things: my adolescence, my development as a musician. I’m not sure this a problem, really, or a diminishment of anything. To successfully tell the whole story of a life with no point of entry or guidepost is to enter a narration of unusual skill and lengthy and committed work, things that either elude me or are simply not where I’m at. Another digression.

Jawbox left for tour in February, 1994. For Your Own Special Sweetheart was released on February 8 that year, so it was right around then. We spent something like 6 weeks in the U.S. with Girls Against Boys, friends from previous bands and progenitors of a certain kind of life-by-night music populated most often by the wit and hustle of a single consciousness, often broke, sometimes without a ride or a home but always in the game.

L-R, White Sands, NM, February, 1994: Eli Janney, Bill Barbot, Mike Harbin (falling forward), Me (getting the finger from Bill), Johnny Temple, J. Robbins, Alexis Fleisig. Photo (probably) by Kim Coletta, but it might have been Scott McCloud or Whitney O’Keeffe.

We returned home briefly, came here to New York to do some press and television stuff before we left for Europe. Although it was our first rodeo, our first intimate experience with the mainstream entertainment business, we enjoyed it.¹ We played well and found a larger audience, and those were our goals.

Our European tour is a blur. Again, memory being what it is, I’ve always thought we were there for 60 days but it was 51 days, and I thought we played 51 shows but it was 42 shows.² I can’t say for certain but my guess is that if you asked each of us who was on that tour³ what we remember about it, we would come up with things that don’t ring a bell for the others. Nevertheless, this is my version of events as it relates to one specific thread: the presence of Peter Gabriel in my life. And so, or rather, but first:

Vague memories from Europe:

• I’ve never gone so long without doing laundry; I’ve never showered so infrequently. I threw most of my clothes away before we flew home.
• I visited an emergency room in Ulm, Germany to have a cyst removed from my left earlobe in an open air examining room.
• I was struck nearly silent to learn exactly what “you’re welcome” means from a pharmacist in Hannover who sold me some superaspirin and following my expression of thanks replied, “You’re welcome anytime.”
• So many cathedrals!
• We had a few extra hours in Munich and decided to visit Dachau instead of a Biergarten. One of our hosts, upon learning I am a Jew said, “Of course you’ll go to Dachau. All the Jews go to Dachau.” Chilling for its double entendre. What a schmuck.
• I called my father collect from a pay phone in the Dachau parking lot.
• We performed in England, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, Denmark, Belgium, Scotland, and Italy (not in that order).
• All of the shows went well except Zurich where we were booked at a squat that had effectively closed the previous week due to its director’s suicide. The only people there were, as I recall, a developmentally disabled guy sweeping around who helped us set up the “club,” and the Hare Krishnas who made their regular food delivery. We played the show to Harbin and Christy and the sweeper. Where did we sleep?
• No less than we weren’t, we were a punk band.
• We had mail and fax drops at specific locations to hear from or communicate to our label, promoters, family, and friends. No cellphones, of course, and no money for frequent long-distance calls.⁴
• Everyone we met and worked with over there was friendly, helpful, and kind except the German mentioned above andd maybe one guy in Austria. One of us is currently married to someone we met in Belgium.
• Barcelona is the most attractive place I have ever been. At the age of 24 I decided it is where I would like to go to die. A visit in 2022 confirmed that I still feel this way.
• Bookstores are havens everywhere.

And yet I still haven’t gotten to the Peter Gabriel part. Here it is: the tour was arduous and difficult, though no more so than such things were known to have been among our cohort. But that made it all seasier to swallow, not easier to do. As it happened, though, we had few equipmwnt failures, only one prohibitive van breakdown, and got along well enough with each other. But we were pretty beat by the time we got to Amsterdam. It was the second-to-last show of the tour and we were all kind of sleepwalking by then, almost done but not quite, almost on our way home but not quite. In some confusion or other, J.’s backpack was either stolen or emptied by thieves. It was disheartening and inconvenient at a moment when bandwidth was in short supply. We weren’t chatting much.

In a hallway near our dressing room the was a piano, presumably rolled offstage to make room for our show. We’d all sort of taken turns plinking away at one thing or another. But then J. eased into the chords from “Here Comes the Flood,” a song that I had never heard anyone except Peter Gabriel play. I had never been in close proximity to that progression, and combined with the exhaustion and overelation of the day was very nearly moved to tears. I don’t rememember if J. played it all the way through. I’m sure one of us sang along, if only briefly. I’m also sure I blabbed about how we should cover the song, an impulsive reaction to its beauty and my desire to possess it and let it speak for me as it always had, an inner attenuation of doubt and racket and need expressed outwardly.