Last time I saw 4.00am on my phone and didn’t just roll over and go back to sleep I was in Australia (see Down & Under blog for the details). My taxi to the airport arrives in 20 minutes and the prospect of hitting the West coast is about the only thing that makes me swing my legs out of bed and stagger downstairs with my guitars. Questions like: “Am I dressed?” and “Where am I?” seem unimportant at this point. Uber and Airport are the only two coherent words I need.
There’s something very surreal about getting on a plane with all the widow shutters down then arriving six hours later having had no glimpse of the outside world moving by. The door opens and you’re somewhere else. It’s like a magic trick where people have changed the decor while the lights were out.
Todays decor is Seattle and someone’s turned the rain machine on, but then when I think of Seattle, Rain is the third word that comes to mind…right after Grunge and Coffee.
I’m at least 20 years too late to catch a grunge gig but I did see Soundgarden last time I was here so I suppose that box is already ticked. Seattle today has less of a Rock n Roll image and seems instead to have melted into the west coast world-domination-machine that, depending on your point of view, enables us to live in a global village or controls and monitors our lives. Google, Facebook, Amazon, eBay, Apple, Netflix, Twitter to name but a few, all sitting on the same coastal strip and reaching out from this elongated Rome. When Rome fell, they left us with technology we didn’t know how to use and we dropped into the dark ages…
In case you hadn’t guessed, I’ve got a day off. No gig tonight. No firm reason to be where I am for the next 24h. Days off on-tour are like limbo. The mind drifts, starts creating links between Silicon Valley and the Roman Empire. I watch people getting on buses with concrete destinations in mind. I listen to people in coffee shops discussing job promotions, cinema plans for the weekend and other seemingly mundane things that nail them down while I float on through…
Barton
French version published daily on the ROCK MADE IN FRANCE website:
October US tour day 6 – West coast limbo : « J’ai un jour de repos »
