Magnolia Electric Co. Tour Diary Vol. 3: Between Missoula and Seattle

Before I knew what vapor lock actually was I suppose I processed it as something that had to do with a line in Star Wars or V or NASA’s space program. Imagine my surprise in July 2003 when my brand new Chevy van on my first West Coast tour (I was on tour with John Wilkes Booze) stopped accelerating while driving up a very high mountain. And then it kept stopping like that, but only in places of high elevation. Sure enough the owner’s manual pointed out my problem – vapor lock. Apparently the lack of oxygen can mess with your engine’s fuel intake and you have to, essentially, “burp” the engine to clear the lock (which can be done by putting some moderately priced gasoline [thanks, Exxon!] into the tank). Us Midwesterners don’t have to deal with this problem, generally, and the mechanic in Lawrence, KS had no idea what I was talking about when I told him what was happening. “Looks fine to me, maybe you’re just a bad driver,” he said to me. He might have been right, but some relatives in Denver confirmed my fear and told me that it’s a problem they deal with daily. A billboard in Denver boasted “the country’s third worst traffic,” and my guess is vapor lock has something to do with it.

Three years later vapor lock is still a problem on tour (I don’t know why I would think it would be otherwise). Upon completion of the last chapter of this diary, while leaving Buford, Wyoming, literally as I closed the laptop, the van lost power and the fear hit me like a good, solid kick to the gut. I’m not sure if it’s fear of repair costs, death, or just being stuck in the desert, but it’s a tangible, adrenaline-rush causing fear that leaves me sweating every time. At least a flat tire is visible and fixable, but vapor lock is the demon in the highly elevated desert that looms around every 75 MPH turn and in every sixty miles between gas stations. The van started again, of course, but arriving in Salt Lake City was a great relief – sort of. SLC is a strange place, and I am intending no religious discrimination with that statement. What’s strange is how clean it is, how nice everyone is, and how unfamiliar of a landscape it is. The mountains watch over the high rises and the spaceship-looking temple (unvisitable if you are not of the Mormon persuasion). The billboards advertise Coke on one side and sexless Temple Dresses on the other. It’s unfamiliar culturally and geographically, and they certainly don’t make it easy on people to come out and see a rock show. You must be a member or a guest of a member to get into a club. I don’t know if it’s city-wide, but you can’t order doubles of liquor – if you want a double you have to order two of whatever it is. Oh, and for the most part the beer is half as potent as it is everywhere else in the country. Those not affiliated with the local religion told me that they see these things as only tiny roadblocks on an otherwise perfectly paved highway that is living in such an affluent and clean city. They realize they’re living in a place that wasn’t built for them but will allow them in if certain rules are followed, and the two parties leave each other alone for the most part, although everyone knows it’s an impossible task for that to work perfectly.

The show turned out to be a great success, with about triple the amount of folks at the show in comparison to the last time we played in the salty city. The Urban Lounge was a nice place with a good beer selection and a friendly staff. They provided us with free vegan gourmet sandwiches (the Philly Cheez “Steak” was good, as was the “Chicken” Pesto) and the opening band, The Band of Annuals, was great. Ladyhawk was amazing as usual. Folks traveled from as much as five hours away to see us. The pressure is a little higher when you find that out, but even without a soundcheck and after a killer drive that featured not only vapor lock but a stop at a gas station that had a full glass case of knives shaped as animals and skeleton hands we pulled it off relatively well.

There is something extremely lonely about touring, no matter where you are but especially in the West. Your connection to home is severed when there is no cell phone service, and things like vapor lock threaten to even sever your local, temporary connections with club owners, promoters, and fans. There’s a point on a long tour where everything becomes routine (except, hopefully, for the shows) and your emotions become a little more stable and hidden. But it takes time. Missoula, Montana, felt like home last night and gave me a much-needed reminder that those local connections should not be taken for granted. Magnolia hasn’t stopped in Missoula for a long time (ever, actually, since we’ve been called Magnolia–Songs: Ohia was there in the early 2000s) and, like SLC, it was sort of a wildcard. The promoter, a very nice woman named Niki, held a little cook-out for her friends and for us. The show took place at the Raven Café – a room that isn’t the best for a rock show, really, but the crowd was so excited to be there and all of the bands were good. The first of four, a singer songwriter named Travis who told me he often performs for children, did the first live non-karaoke version of “Somewhere Out There” I’ve ever seen. Oblio Joes was great. Ladyhawk had the fire. Whether or not we played well (and there were certainly some technical and auditory obstacles) the crowd was with us the way no crowd has been on the tour so far. It felt like family and it was fun, but, as always in these situations, bittersweet. Although it feels like home you know you have to leave the next day, drive for hours, and throw the dice and hope they come up with a good, attentive, and reactive audience the next day.

One song epitomizes for me this daily reclamation and loss of home while real home is unable to be reclaimed until the long tour is over, and it is by a band called Drakkar Sauna and is curiously called “How to Approach an Accident Victim” (mp3). Drakkar Sauna, a two-piece from Lawrence, KS, is, without hyperbole, my favorite living and working band. They’re hard to describe without pigeonholing them as a country duo, a harmony group, or “freak-folk” (which, I think, is one of the most unfortunate genre labels ever) but they’re probably all of those things. I’ll attempt it this way: One of them, Jeff Stoltz, sings, plays kick drum, air-powered organ, mandolin, guitar, and various percussion, often at the same time in different permutations, and the other, Wallace Cochran, sings, plays guitar, and percussion. When they sing together they sound as if they share the same vocal cords. Their lyrics might, at first, seem strange, or oblique, and they have been, more than once, mislabeled as a comedy group, but they sing songs full of heart, remorse, hope, shame, drinking, sex, disease, loss, death, and everything else good songs are written about. The contrast of the beautiful harmonies with the dark and sometimes completely surprising lyrical turns is magical, and I find myself unable to shake the sounds or the words for hours or days.

I remember the first time I heard “Accident Victim” (which can be found on Rover, their amazing debut album on Marriage Records). They were a three-piece at this point, with a stand-up bass player. They were opening for John Wilkes Booze and the Impossible Shapes at the Replay Lounge in Lawrence, KS, the same day the mechanic posited that I sucked behind the wheel. We were a few days from home and I was tired and extremely homesick. The first line of this beautiful song mentions Indiana and I immediately imagined the rest of the song to be about me and the tour that was getting close to wrapping up. It turns out it’s not exactly about me, but I still take the liberty, to this day, of applying it to touring and homesickness. “Your brain is too big for your skull/but you’ll feel better tomorrow” describes, perfectly, that terrible hangover you get at least once per tour after reveling, a bit too much, in that home-away-from home feeling that is so rare on the road. But what gets me the most is the way these two sing the chorus. To this day I have no idea what the last word is – it’s probably a name – but I like to imagine it’s “left,” as in “went on tour,” and this could be my apology to those I leave behind every time I go off and play music for people I’ve never met. The voices crack with such sadness and meaning and soul and it makes me homesick every time I hear it, even if I’m at home. “I’m sorry/I’m sorry/I’m so very sorry I left” (in my world, at least). And then, at the end, “It’s good to be with the one that you love/It’s good to be in love” is such sweet and sour that I usually have to listen to the whole thing again to decide which way I want to go. To me this is the perfect love song to the Midwest, to home. Jeff and Wallace acknowledge that traveling (through Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, away from their more Western Kansas) leads to a newfound love of where you belong, and funny, like most things, it takes being away to grow an appreciation for something called “home.” The song itself, though, gives me a sense of home – partially because they’re good friends of mine but mostly because good music is a home in itself.

So now we’re on the less-elevated road from Missoula to Seattle and Drakkar Sauna is squelching my homesickness and reminding me that I’m a pretty lucky guy to have experienced some terrifying sci-fi-sounding thing called vapor lock in the middle of the dessert – I hope all Midwesterners get the chance to feel it sometime, too. In the same way I’m also happy to have experienced – and will never have to experience again – the removal of impacted wisdom teeth. Thank goodness we’re close to sea-level and home is a press of the “play button,” a cell phone call and, hopefully, a city and stage away.