I spent a pleasant day in western Mass with my friends Brian and Natalie. They have a house with cedar walls in the woods near a babbling brook, and an affectionate dachshund named Buddy who spent a lot of time cuddling with me on the futon. The evening I stayed there, Brian had declared war on some wasps who had taken up residence in their ceiling. Natalie had warned him that to declare war on wasps was a bad idea, that although they're invertebrates they have a deep sense of vengeance. He did not heed her warning. The futon was right below the opening in the ceiling where the wasps lived, and as I laid down to sleep, I couldn't help but feel like a little human Hiroshima, the wasps assembling tiny little Enola Gays to drop stinging bombs on my face. Right before I went to sleep, the attack ensued, and four wasps dropped down on me. I of course freaked out, and spent the next hour sitting bolt upright in the futon, heart pounding and stings stinging. The stings must have had an effect on my brain, because when I finally got to sleep that night, I had an epic dream.

Here it was: The Dream I Had in Western Massachusetts Directed by Martin Scorcese

Starring Eric Johnson as Himself
Neve Campbell as the wife
Winona Ryder as the sister-in-law
Jim Carrey as the hippie
and featuring Mayor Richard M. Daley as Himself
and Walter Jacobsen as Himself

In the dream I was a washed up former child actor, who had been a popular Avis Rent-a-Car spokesboy in the mid-eighties This goes along with my history, because I've always dreamed I was a child actor, including when I was a child. I was married to Chicago mayor Richard Daley's daughter (Neve Campbell), but was secretly in love with her free spirited older sister (Winona Ryder). We were all living in the well fortified Daley compound, and I spent a lot of time drinking with my shiftless hippie/professional snowmobile racer best friend (Jim Carrey). Mayor Daley (as himself) was always having Don Corleone-type meetings with various people and was trying to give my career a boost (a la Johnny Fontaine in the Godfather). One day he had a conference with various high rollers from Fox 32, including Walter Jacobsen, who in the dream was a media-kingpin gangsta type, complete with eunuch chamber boys fanning him with leaves and bringing him cappuccino. Daley had these high rollers at the compound to see if they could land me a spot on some show, but I would have nothing to do with their decadent ways. Daley and Jacobsen called me up to the balcony for a drink and a talk, as a furious blizzard raged outside. "C'mon upstairs, Eric!" they shouted. I looked up and said, "FUCK....YOU!!!!" Neve Campbell tried to get me to stay, but Jim Carrey and I jumped on our snowmobiles, out onto a glacier that the blizzard had formed, and rode down the ice towards freedom. THE END

So then I woke up, we drove to Boston and we played a show there.

Since over half of everyone in Manhattan is probably not from Manhattan, I've given up on the notion on trying to pretend to be street wise when I'm there. Even people I know who have lived in New York for five years or more still look like tourists to me. Since we had Illinois plates, I thought if anyone asked, I would tell them we were a youth group from Rock Island, and were lost trying to find the Statue of Liberty. We went out for sushi before the show, and it was the last straw of sushi for me. Walking into the restaurant, I was overwhelmed by the stench of formaldehyde and eel guts. I was seriously considering bailing and running over to Burger King. Sensing my apprehension, my associates tried to steer me in the direction of the dishes that would appeal to my infantile tastes. "No, they don't have cheeseburgers, Eric, but try the California rolls...they're like Japanese cheeseburgers..." The California rolls had crunchy shit in them that I couldn't figure out, and the salmon in my Sake Maki was slimy. I summoned the waitress, "Um, I'm sorry, but, the fish inside this rancid spinach appears to be under cooked, my apologies to the chef...." I felt like such a hillbilly. But being from Rock Island, you don't get much sushi there. The Knitting Factory show was great and by the end I was feeling that maybe I wasn't going to be run out of town by chuds after all. We ran into Isaac from Modest Mouse and ended up staying in his hotel room and watching neo-surrealist children's programming on Staten Island public access. It was a show about a perverted wizard and his posse of geometry loving kids. They sang a song called "Angles and Lines" that was outsider idiot-pop just ready to infiltrate the indie scene. I finally figured out why I love this city. The next day, heads up, we were stuck in traffic in the Lincoln Tunnel, not caring. Some guy in a Cadillac pulled up next to us and asked for directions. "Sorry, we're not from here...We're from Chicago, "Ben said. The guy's eyes lit up and he grinned from ear to ear, "You're from Chicago? I'm From Honduras!!!!"

We played at the Grog Shop and Tim Loftus' Cleveland mate Jake Janofsky showed up in a curly haired wig, thrift store suit, and blue blocker glasses. I'm encouraging all Califone fans for the remainder of the tour to follow suit; it helps us focus and play better. Lots of yapping at the Grog Shop show, people just couldn't seem to keep their mouths shut. I have a new technique to deal with this. When people are talking, I scan the audience with my eyes and send out waves to settle down the hordes. It makes me look insane, but it works. But the talking was too much for even my quiet-rays to handle. We decided to leave Cleveland at about three in the morning and I was at the wheel. Ben stayed up front with me to keep me awake. We pulled into a rest stop outside of Toledo, and silence was haunting. I was standing looking at a mileage map when I felt a slight breathing over my shoulder. I turned around and was faced with a bedsheeted bedouin of a man, who looked like a Jesus People USA person gone astray. All of a sudden I noticed about twenty of these wide eyed bedouins streaming out of a two door car like that old clown gag. But with no smiling, just with dead eyes in the still Ohio morning. Tim and Joe were sleeping in the van and I prayed that their souls hadn't been stolen. I jumped back in the van, and drove the rest of the way to Chicago like a zombie.

EJ and the Steak Sandwich: EJ (Jonathan Lipnicki) is a young high school student livin' and lovin' in the go go nineties. There's only one catch! His wisecracking dead father (the voice of Christopher Walken) has reincarnated into a talking steak sandwich! Laugh at EJ's pain as he struggles to not eat his dad...giggle at the embarrasing highjinks that ensue at the Sadie Hawkins dance...and you want A-1 sauce product placement tie-ins? You got em!!

Governer Dada: The state of Texas is turned on it's ear-with incomprehensible hilarity-when the voters elect the state's first Dadaist governer. Governer Dada (Joe Don Baker) passes bills that insure Texans can smear themselves with peanut butter while speaking pidgin english to goldfish. And the very special episode where the Guv goes to the US summit of Governers in DC? Watch out Capitol Hill...your'e gonna get a stopsign monkey town face guasdiasdi.Hnnnnnng. Stay tuned for more sitcom ideas...or e-mail me with your idea, and I'll steal it and claim it for my own...Now we resume the tour diary:

St. Louis to me signifies lots of playground beatings, since when I was a kid we lived for a short time in Springfield, IL, which is a town divided between Cardinal and Cub fans, with the Cardinal fans outnumbering the Cub fans four to one. I wore a Cubs t-shirt one day in second grade and sustained life-threatening injuries from noogies, wet willies, and wedgies. The moment we pulled into town for the show,we noticed there was a game at Busch stadium. I made sure my underpants were tucked way down into my trousers, and we proceeded. After the show we drove over to Collinsville, IL to stay with Chris' folks. All I can say it was one of those beautiful moments on tour when you find yourself what seems to be light years away from the show you just played...the show at the absolutely filthy wretched disgusting punk rock club with racist and homophobic graffiti all over the place that's staffed with angry people still pissed off about Cobain selling out....you find yourself away from there and sitting on a beautiful back deck of a beautiful home in the suburbs, and the trees smell like heaven and there's been brownies made for you and you're discovering the magical comination of brownies and wine...

We went to this Vietnamese restaraunt in Memphis and I ordered too much food. I had this really good hot and sour soup, which if you haven't had it is kind of like a spicy version of Cambell's chicken noodle, really really salty, and with eggs floating around in it. They brought it to me in a gigantic porcelain bucket and you had to eat it with a shovel. The next thing they brought me was some chicken with lemon grass, but as soon as I saw it I remembered something freaky I once saw. I once saw this show on PBS which was all about different kinds of weird food people eat all over the world, like bugs and bird embryos and stuff. There was one feature they did which was about how there's a place in Beijing that serves rats, and it's the most popular thing on the menu. This plate of chicken in Memphis looked creepily like the rat meat served at this place in Beijing. I pushed it aside and ate my bucket of soup. When we got the fortune cookies, mine read "Never rely on anyone but yourself"

When we got to the club, which was a cavernous urban barn in the demilatarized zone industrial corridor, the sound was haywire. Mills started his set and as he was playing, the sound guy started clanging around some metal stuff really loud. Chris, really politely.."Uh, could you not bang stuff around while I'm playing really quiet stuff? I don't mean to be a dick.." And the sound guy, into the MIKE, "You don't mean to be a dick, but you are.." Chris managed to keep his cool and proceed to pull off an emotionally charged set that included teary eyed testifying, a sad dancing monkey, and a voodoo ritual that set half the stage ablaze.

We met our new partners in crime, Canyon, who played an amazing set and had no sound problems. When we got on, the sound problems began, and we just decided to go completely avant-garde, so we just let the feedback and clanging metal improvise itself, and we just sat backstage and played scrabble. The hipsters loved it, the people raved, everyone was happy, except for the dead rat meat in the garbage can, never to be eaten, never to be prayed by me into nirvana.

It's always difficult for me to explain to people why I love Texas so much, so I won't. But I do. We had a day off between Dallas and Memphis and stayed at a motel in New Boston, just west of Texarkana. I had a childhood fixation with Texarkana (along with Mackenzie Phillips, making lists of imaginary AAA farm teams, and the letter Q) so I was bummed we didn't stay there, but New Boston was better. Our motel was called the Tex Inn and it had a pool. We spent the day lounging in the water and there was no one else there and you could smell mesquite from somewhere and there were no clouds. Those poor saps in Florida paying eight times as much for the same things are all stupid.

We drove to Dallas the next day and played our show, and for our services we were payed sixty dollars. Canyon got twenty seven, and Chris got fourteen. Chris promptly spent his money on Bazooka Joe comics. We asked the door guy for directions to the highway and he explained how to get there by using only landmarks from the Kennedy assassination.."OK, you need to go across the grassy knoll, take a left at the book depository, and you know that one turn they take in the Zapruder film?.." We understood and drove out of town that night to the sight of another great American event, Waco. The next day we ate lunch at Luby's, which is the cafeteria chain where that guy shot a bunch of people. Except that Luby's was in Killeen, where we stopped for gas a little ways down. This cavalcade of death landmarks was creeping us out, and we looked forward to Austin, where there haven't been any assassinations*.

* [young EJ is omitting the quintessentially texan episode of charles whitman, who, in 1966, gunned down a few dozen random austinians from a tower -- and who dodged dozens of rifle bullets fired back at him by the well-armed populace as well as the austin police before he was treated to a hole in his stetson --texan death landmarks editor]

The Austin Motel in Austin is a great place to stay, and one reason is that it has a great swimming pool. I've decided that during the mass amounts of down time that I have on this tour, I'm going to train for a career as an Olympic swimmer. I'm a little old to start now, and really out of shape, and I can't really swim, but I can stay afloat and move fast if I have to. If there are any swimming coaches reading this, give me a chance, I can do it

There were only like six people at the show in Houston, but four of them were the most dedicated Superfanz of 'em all. To the superfanz: Even if we get mad at you sometimes, we still love you. We're proud of you; stay in school. And stop smoking! I wish I had at your age. Look at me now, I'm addicted. My lungs ache with every breath.

On the way in to Albuquerque, I had a score to settle. The last tour we did, I had a little freak out in a Cracker Barrell in Las Cruces, NM. The story goes (and there are many versions), we all had gotten very little sleep and had long drives behind and ahead of us. We pulled into the Cracker Barrell a bit loopy, sat down at our table. In walked our waiter, who proceeded to scream in our faces "CAN I GET YOU FELLAS ANYTHING TO DRINK.....SOUNDS SUPER....MMMMMKAY??" His schtick was the quirky waiter who was there to put a smile on your face, but to us it was pure rage. He was the New Mexico State University male cheerleader gone off the edge, and I couldn't handle what he might do next. So just as he asked me "HOW 'BOUT SOMETHING TO DRINK TODAY SIR?" I said "would you excuse me for a moment?" stood up, and ran as fast as I could out of the Cracker Barrell. Everything was in slow motion, throught the potpurri scented lobby, little bears with t -shirts that said "I Love Grandpa" laughed from their perches atop mason jars of raspberry preserves. Nature themed new age music set the score and seeped throught my head like blueberry syrup. The last gauntlet was the door greeter, a hefty Native American woman with a harelip who turned, shadows casting over her face, and sluuuurrred " Hooow wuuuuuz everything todaaaaaayy....?" Out in the desert now, it was 110, but I ran across the highway to McDonalds, got a Big Mac and ate it in the scorching hot car.

Allright, so this all happened on the last tour, but it sets the stage for me trying to find the Las Cruces Cracker Barrell to face my demons. But it didn't happen. So we got into Albuquerque and on the bill were our friends The Shins, who are psyche-sexadelic superhero music and set the place alight. The strange thing about the night was the rain which had managed to start when we arrived. It seems that when people like us arrive in the desert, we manage to bring the rain with us.

We were sitting outside of the club in Phoenix when across the street, gunfire erupted. We all ran inside, sort of giggling with that nervous energy that comes from something that's so crazy you can't quite comprehend it. When we came back out, two young boys were dead across the street. They just left the bodies there and you could see them from the open door from the stage as we played. So I started to have the "are we as a culture desensitized?" argument in my head, because after we played, the bodies were still there but people were just standing around laughing and shooting the shit. Because it was across the street, I don't think anyone had figured out it wasn't a TV show.

I can't really think of any funny smartass comments to make about this evening.

The last time I was in San Diego it was my birthday and people were mean to me. So we rolled into town and one thing was on my mind. Payback.... or an apology. But before I could get my revenge on the city, it welcomed us with open arms, clutched us to its chest and told us everything was gonna be OK. After the devastating events of the previous night, San Diego was like a warm blanket of fish tacos and palm trees. We met some Superfanz after the show who became almost immediately Superfrienz. Their names are Berkeley and Steph, and it was they who almost singlehandedly saved the city of San Diego from my wrath. We stayed at their house, which was on the edge of a canyon filled with coyotes and mist, and was surrounded by impossibly huge jade trees. Now I'm thinking about running for mayor of San Diego, under this platform: You have to be nice to people... if you film MTV Beachhouse on our beaches, you have to let ugly people come and dance as well, and dance any way they like....you have to eat fish tacos once a day....people must be required to ride horses rather than drive cars....swordfights are legal, but you can't kill anyone....people will be required to speak a language devised by me, a creole-like mixture of French, Bantu, Lapp, Gaelic, and Hawaiian, all spoken in a Chicago accent. Thank you San Diego, I look forward to leading you into a new age of automotive abolishment, free love, and tolerance for mongeese.

 

We played our show in Santa Ana in a semi-abandoned house/cafe and it was a bizzare thing. I kept waiting for some kid's alchoholic mother to come home and start throwing things at us. Southern California is where I lived in my past life. When I was in driver's ed in high school, we were told we would be using driving simulators.I was extremely excited about the prospect of us as a class getting into high-tech computer operated video games and driving around the virtual French Riveria. What it turned out to be was a really bad grain late fifties filmstrip that we just pantomimed driving along to. That part was a bummer, but what was cool was the fact that the footage was driving around what appeared to be SoCal. But the weird parts of SoCal and the surrounding areas, weird little hills to climb, and big palm lined commercial districts with flophouse hotels and foreign-to-me West coast burger chains. There was something exciting about fake driving around these places, and also something eerily familiar, like I'd been there in 1959 when they filmed the thing. Flash forward to the Califone Roomsound Tour 2001, and here we were in Santa Ana, in my filmstrip, everything still in the sickly sweet technicolor hue of how I remembered, my past life overlapping my past life

Before the show we went to a Thai restaraunt in Silverlake and there was a man in the bathroom drinking from the sink. Waiting outside the club, there was a middle aged woman who wanted to give us money to buy her beer, and these people were speaking our language, the language of people who say to the world, "I'm thirsty, I'm going to drink water from this bathroom sink," or, " I'm thirsty for booze but lazy, I'm going to give these young men money to buy it for me or, " I'm excited, I'm going to tell the world...I'M EXCITED!!!" I saw a guy at Burger King who was an actor that I recognized from commercials and from walk on roles on sitcoms. In his head I knew he was saying, "Be patient. Be patient. Be patient..." After the show my friend Andy invited us to stay up at his house in Laurel Canyon, and, to continue on our theme (see Dallas entry), we obliged. I've felt like a member of the Manson family many times in my life, but now here we were, negotiating the steep green slopes of the canyon in our filthy old van that smelled of feet, twisting and turning up into the canyon in the pitch black, blowing filthy black smoke into the night sky. The soundtrack in my head was the riff from Revolution Blues over and over and the trees smelled like they couldn't have been growing in a huge city. LA, I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you.

Some people believe that the more beautiful something is, the more violently and dramatically it will be destroyed. And nothing is more beautiful than San Francisco, a city that will someday be shaken to rubble and fall into the sea. No one knows this better than the bums in San Francisco. Sorry to use the politically incorrect term "bum", but I'm sure the bums in San Fran prefer to be called that, in the romantic beatnik sense of the word. The bums in San Fran are like rats in a Japanese garden, scurrying around the rose bushes and grottos - and they all have this sense of the beauty around them, but they have more of a sense of apocalyptic terror than any bums anywhere else.

San Francisco, in addition to being loaded with prophetic bums, is conversely filled with rich people. The next day after the show we were walking down Haight Street, and I thought I saw this guy who I once had a run in with five years ago in Madison, Wisconsin (the San Francisco of Wisconsin). This run in I had involved this guy who was a disheveled and lost young fratboy stumbling down the street, quite obviously experiencing his first acid/mushroom trip. He came up to me and a couple of girls I was walking with, and started to try to talk to us. Everything that was coming out of his mouth was like he was puking alphabet soup, he was on a different astral plane as us and it was a very angry and frightening and dada kind of place. So we decided to walk away from the guy. Only thing was, he didn't want us to walk away, he needed us to try and re-congeal his melted brain. He started screaming at me "ARE YOU FUCKING WITH ME??? CUZ I'LL FUCKIN' KILL YOU MAN!!! LPIJL)ITYULKJLKJ RAAAAAAABAAAAANSDJ!!"He was a big frat guy up in my face and not in his right mind. At that moment he was ready to wrestle herds of buffalo on the lunar plains, so I decided I was going to need to take action. "You and me, we're the same..." I started cooing. He kept screaming. "Everything is cool, man, we're friends...we're in Madison...." His screaming started to die down. Nothing is more malleable than the mind of a feeb on acid. By the end of the exchange, he was crying and hugging me and telling me he was sorry. It made me realize that you CAN fight evil with love. And now here was this guy on the Haight, a successful dot-commer with a bright future and a house in the hills. Even so, as I walked by him, I made sure his pupils weren't dilated.

The most we got to see of Portland was that big pink building peeking over some trees as we drove by. PORTLAND: WE'RE SORRY!! We love you so much, and we are more bummed than you are that we didn't get to play. Long story short - Tim got pretty damn sick and had to go to the hospital (and he's fine now so don't worry) and we just couldn't make it. Me, Matt, Joe and Ben were gonna come up and play as Foaming Midget Horses, a tribute to Califone, but Tim and I decided that probably wasn't a good idea. The last time Califone played in Portland, I had to miss the show because I was in a wedding. So I am bummed out to the max. We'll be back.....

Since we missed Portland, we had to blaze on up to Seattle all the way from San Francisco in a day. So we had the whirlwind view of the upper west coast at eighty miles per hour. There are unusual places in Northern California and Southern Oregon where all the people are descendents of Donner Survivors, exiled Mormons, and Alien love children. Pulling into Seattle is like pulling into some strange eden. I felt like there should've been a classical overture playing when the skyline came into view, but all I could think of was the theme from Frasier. In the middle of our set at the Crocodile Cafe I had to pee really bad. It's this nervous habit that I've started to develop. I went to a doctor to see if I was diabetic, and he said, "Nope, you're just a nervous fucking wreck." So we were just about to finish the show when Seattle called for an encore. Tim decided to do our twenty-five minute long Tayzee Nub into Cambodia into Dark Star into Cambodia into China Cat tease back into Cambodia Jam. I thought to myself "Would anyone really notice if I pissed my pants? Will it spill down my leg onto the floor or into my socks?" Later that evening we went to Thriftway which is an excellent supermarket they have out there and got some Tim's Cascades potato chips and some Tillamook cheddar cheese, and cursed our feeble Jewel Osco, Jays and Vitners, and Dean's milk. Seattle, I don't think you're the poor man's San Francisco. I think you're a beautiful thing all unto yourself.

We got over the border just fine (see Windsor, Ontario entry) and rolled into Vancouver, which is a beautiful town that I've never been too. Since we had already played in Toronto and Montreal on this tour, I got to brush up on my Canadian. Football up there is called soccer, and soccer is called hockey. They also have this strange kind of bread they eat called pita bread, which is like a bread that's like a pocket. We played in this gigantic concert hall that used to be a strip club, and the dressing rooms still had that strip club feel, so much so that we took to picking on the new girl who just ran away from home in Saskatoon to make it in the big city. When you're a band like Califone playing in a new place, a giant hall is not the best idea. There were probably about forty people there but it seemed like five.

We left right after the show to drive to Seattle, and the American border cop was a flattopped babykiller who wanted to show us his new flashlight and shine it as much as possible in our eyes. He was the kind of guy who probably was too dumb to get into the FBI. This made him very angry that he was only given a flashlight. Just short of the body cavity search, he finally, and quite reluctantly let us over. We felt very unwelcome in our own country, with a large portion of it ahead of us, to drive and drive and drive over...

We arrived in the land of my forefathers after a long drive through rain and freezing temperatures. The sun was shining down on the Twin Cities like Odin watching over them as only he can. The sweet smell of lutefisk and frukstoppa hovered in the air, and you could almost hear Garrison Keillor whispering in our ears as the IDS Tower came into view. Let me tell you, there is nothing like springtime in the upper midwest, where vegetation that was not long ago battered by freezing wind and covered in ice and snow now covers the land and good Swedes and Somalians live in peace and harmony, watched over from a tower in St. Paul by a pro wrestler and a writhing snake. The best part of it was I got to hang out with my sister, Christine, who lives in lives in a clean apartment with familiar things all around, to remind me of home, and right around the corner from her house is a pizza place where Ethiopans slather giant slices with whatever your heart desires. If I was a bad comedi! an (and I am) I might ponder "Wh at is Ethiopan cuisine? UN rations? Rocks? Bugs?" We played at the 400 Bar, a great place, to attentive crowds and a warm reception. I realized how lucky I was to have this town just seven hours to the north.

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