AllOnederlust Tour 6/26-6/28 Meandering Motor City

With a huge smile on my face and a warmth in my heart from all of my new friends and experiences in Chicago I boarded the bus to my next stop, Detroit, where new shows and friends experienced me!

Thursday 6/26

     My bus ride from Chicago to Detroit was longer than I'd expected! I realized that my O'Henry collection was unfortunately too hefty for me to carry onto the bus so I ended up listening to an eclectic mix of music during the drive including old and new music, local artists and national acts.

Why? - Elephant Eyelash

The Vigilance Committee - Lost Again

The Decemberists - Picaresqueties ep

Cage - Hell's Winter

Aesop Rock - Appleseed EP

and the "Creative Differences (A Split)" EP to be sure I was content with all of the mixing and mastering.

   

 We stopped at a "Loves" Truck stop with showers and all sorts of products like audio-books and chargers and foods and clothes that made me think about the life of a trucker and sort of romanticism it.  Driving around with all sorts of time to yourself to think and see distances measured in hours.  I arrived in Detroit feeling disoriented and out of place.  I stopped into a diner called "Luci and Ethel's" realizing that my impending show at The Atomic Dawg in Berkley was rather far from where I was. I'd hoped to just sit down get coffee and use wi-fi to call an Uber car but they didn't have wi-fi so I resignedly ate a chicken sandwich and called a taxi.  A heavy woman named Josephine ran the counter, everyone added to one another's conversations like a sitcom where everyone knew one another and joked with excess and sass.

      Arriving in Detroit, Poetry and Hotdogs

   

 To my chagrin, the taxi ride in a decrepit green mini-van cost me $40 dollars.  I arrived at this crazy hot dog place a little frazzled.  They had all sorts of hotdogs with crazy and excessive toppings and styles on them, I actually opted out for financial and gastrointestinal concerns myself!  The event was booked by international performing poet, Wayne State University professor and Detroit poet laureate M.L. Liebler, whom I met 2 1/2 years ago in a lecture series we both performed/presented at SUNY Oswego!  I had no idea what to expect and when I got the email from M.L. that I'd be featured during a poetry reading at a hot dog place I really didn't know what to expect and sort of laughed to myself excitedly.  Well, M.L. being who he is, a gregarious, talented man of many friends, had the place packed out with good people!

     Several poets performed, Nick and Dan played a country acoustic and harmonica song set.or two.   Fiction writer Brian Smith read a great short story and a hilarious and talented woman who went by Diamond Dancer shared some poems as well.  Many people purchased CDs, signed my mailing list and just gave me money "put it towards a bus ticket" they said. It was a beautiful generosity, which set the pace for the little four person family of Diamond Dancer's extremely thoughtful and generous offer to drive me the 20-30 min drive to my friends and hosts Jaye and Lisa's house so I didn't have to pay taxi fare.  

   

All five of us, Diamond, her sister and her two nieces and I piled into a van and drove to the apartment.  We all had each other laughing, Diamond's young niece was so smart and asked so much about why people were obsessed with television and their phones and such nonsense music.  They thought I was hilarious, and I feeling so comfortable and jovially warm with gratefulness!  They told me Detroit really isn't as bad as people say it is and that people are generally good if you give them a chance.  It was suggested that it was good that I'd only stopped in Cleveland earlier in the tour because it was such a crazy dangerous place.  We spoke about a lot of things both laugh and thought provoking!  They dropped me off and waved goodbye with potential hopes to come to my show at Corktown Studios on Saturday! I was so grateful for them and had such a great time meeting them and hanging out, feeling like a part of their family!  Lisa and Jaye of the awesome band ROGUE SATELLITES.  Again, being in their apartment was a weird feeling of nostalgia and even though I only spent three days with them a year and a half ago I felt immediately reconnected with old friends.  Jaye and Lisa are both so great, they're calm and thoughtful and they're playfully funny without sacrificing their intellect.  A great and sometimes cynically humorous couple who make awesome music and art, that's a life I could live out!  After recapping some events in both our recent lives and plans for the weekend, they had to go to bed in anticipation of work and I was rather tired so we all retired.

Friday 6/27

Wandering amid decorative ruins

    The weather was brutally hot and humid out and Jaye and Lisa were at work, so I spent much of the day writing. I wrote and submitted a new story to a publication.  I also Listened to Sadistik's new album "Ultraviolet" and really have loved it!  Go and get it, it is worth your time, surely! I finally went outside to an uncomfortably aggressive sun.  The neighborhood was oddly quiet.  Wandering around the half alive near-ruins of Detroit I'd felt initially uneasy but then remembered by conversation with Diamond's family and that what I was experiencing was a reaction to a pre-existing stigma the area had and that people are all generally good if you give them the chance.  I walked through a place called Grand River Creative Corridor, and as though to apologize for the crippled structures strewn abundantly about the neighborhoods, vibrant, beautifully painted graffiti murals swirled and corkscrewed confidently along the wounded walls, it was all very inventive and impressive! I liked that the city seemingly sanctioned an area for people to do something positive and creative and "doll up" an area that was hurting socio-economically.  It was a progressive and intelligent point of view. Make the best of what is available to you!

     I had a few people begging me for money and such, I felt bad for them but they also felt predatory somehow.  They were aggressive at times, but never harmful.  Hungry and sweaty I was craving a milkshake and so I ended up in this Motor City Grill.  Plexiglass bullet proof wall separated myself and the cashier.  The food came out on a lazy Susan made of the same materials.  Hard to believe.  The burger I got was huge but so was it's price, luckily it was really tasty.  The chocolate shake was good, and my cheeks hurt because of the narrow straw, that's a real milkshake!  I called my grandmother and spoke to her and wandered back to the apartment where I wrote some more and waited for Lisa and Jaye to come home.  They were actually going out to a Ringo Starr and The All Star Band concert but ended up missing it and arriving with more greasy burger food and milkshakes...typical for neither of us but coincidence prompted it!  I didn't have the heart to tell them I'd already eaten so I gobbled it up.  Some days are milkshake days!  Although I'd been eating strictly healthily all year, the tour motto dietary wise has been "take what you can get while it's there" within reason.   

  

     Since Jaye and Lisa ended up having their night open, we went to a local show at New Way Bar where I met lots of Jaye and Lisa's friends.  Encountering someone's group of friends is a decent way to judge or learn about those you are with.  For one, they have friends, that probably indicates something, and two, In Jaye and Lisa's case, the company they kept was primarily a group of talented, interesting and kind people.  We saw two bands, a touring group called Ghost Wolves from Austin, Texas who were kind of trying to do a Yeah Yeah Yeahs meets The White Stripes duo thing with a sexy high pitched female singer with a distorted guitar and a drummer who beat mercilessly on the drums, passionately if not skillfully.  They had a crazy and practiced (maybe too inauthentic at times) stage presence and they rocked out like it was an arena despite there being only 20 people in the audience at most.  They were signed by a small label it would seem, as they had a while and overstuffed merch table!  Later they brought an actual pet wolf of theirs into the bar, what  a way to be memorable. Beautiful animal!  While their music wasn't amazing, they certainly knew how to make an impression!  Next up was a big local band "Duende!" who were fun and odd, full of good people that I'd met earlier.  After the show we went to Eric, Rick and Sean's house of the psychedelic rock band "Sisters of Your Sunshine Vapor".  They were great guys, goofy who meant well, very smart, shared tour stories and ridiculousness.  They didn't take themselves seriously but clearly took their music and care for it seriously, I envied their focus and connection. It made me miss original trio of AllOne & The Room how we would hang out constantly and make music together, appreciating one another and our creations strongly!  I ended up going to sleep around 3:30 am!

Saturday 6/28

The Last Day In Detroit

     Saturday was a quiet start, I woke up around 7:30 and stared at the ceiling and tried to focus and let my mind wander in my thoughts and reminisce.  This was to be the last day I was in Detroit, after the show John and Jeremy were going to take me back with them to Canada for some fun there!  For whatever reason,  I felt introspective and hypercritical and as though I wanted to cry.  Wrote a little bit... 

"My life schemes are most people's pipe dreams. You know what a mid-life crisis is?  It's that wake up call, reminding you've got life to live, you realize you could have done what you might have wished."

     We all had an early start and wore bright yellow shirts without discussing it.  That made me laugh. Simple things, easy things sometimes hit the spot!  We went to breakfast at an awesome place named after Brooklyn, and there were all sorts of artsy and musical types there and a merging of generations and such.  It's funny to see places or things named after what seems hip and mysterious and yet is so within reach to me!  There was a young beautiful waitress decked out fully in tattoos all over her neck and hands and skin and she had sub-dermal piercings and gauges in her ears and colored short hair and she was serving an elderly group of women, which was funny to see the interaction and made me nervous for both parties but they all interacted with engaged and respectful amity, which made me happy to see.  We went to Corktown Studios which had changed on the outside having added a sculpture garden of sorts.  Jaye and Lisa have a new vinyl project out and you should pick it up...HERE.  I played guitar for a while and they cleaned up the art space.  We got a late lunch/early dinner at a place called The Green Dot which was like a bar-restaurant and they had incredible sliders and fries! I got a BBQ Bacon and Buffalo chicken slider with chili cheese friends.  Nothing short of amazing!  Jaye fronted the bill again on the food in his typical gentlemanly hosting fashion that I was really grateful for and admired a lot.  They are good to people in a way that chokes me up sometimes thinking about it!

Returning to Corktown

  Corktown Studios is an artist space/gallery/performance space in Detroit that Jaye and Lisa work through.  Last year my show with Alexa there was easily my favorite of the bunch so I was really excited to return!  I practiced my songs while Jaye and Lisa worked on setting up the space for the show.  It was to be an acoustic show where we cycled out after three songs.  Jaye played solo, then Eric played and I played.  Jaye did some great acoustic originals while Eric did some more electric riff driven guitar playing.  "When in Rome..." the saying goes, so I opened my set with an acoustic song that I wrote called "Never Return".  Because the environment was so intimate, I performed a set entirely of unreleased (at the time) songs.  I also performed "Work In Progress" "Quality Vs. Quarantine" "Rush Hour '98" "Sloth" and "Riches Of Value [Her Account Of A Chase]" over the course of the night, material spanning four different forthcoming projects.  It was a small but an appreciative and attentive group that sat in (literally!).  Jon and Jeremy came in and caught the last half of the show! It was good to see them again.  Jaye and Eric were both extremely generous and forfeit what they made during the show to support me on my trip.  Beautiful people.  

A Return to Canada!

     I said my goodbyes to Lisa and Jaye, who I felt much closer to than last time I left and who I'd be seeing in NYC in September as well as Detroit later in September at their sidewalk festival.  I stocked up on delicious cookies and went along with Jon and Jeremy to head over to Canada.  It took a lot of walking to get to the Rosa Parks center.  I got to catch up with them a lot, spending the first extended amount of time with either of them that I ever did.  Jon is more abstract and enthusiastic while Jeremy is more practical and mellow, they make a good team as friends and do a cool project called "Signols".  At the border, they asked me rapid fire questions at 1am and kept trying to catch me in lies "Where are you from?" "How do you know Jon and Jeremy?" "How long will you be here?" "What are you doing?" "You're a musician? Where's your instrument?"  ?"What do you do back home?" "how do you know them again?" "Where are you from?" ect.  Finally they relented and let me through.  Once we crossed the border to Windsor, Ontario, we walked with my maddening broken-wheeled suitcase to get to Kayla and Jesses' big old house!  It turns out Jesse is a big fan of my work.  The story goes that when Jon and Jeremy asked if their rapper friends could stay at her house, she was wary about the idea.  When they mentioned "Oh it's our friend AllOne" she lit up and accepted immediately!  Upon meeting her, she exploded praise upon me and funny enough, sad "Somehow I thought you'd be chubbier" which of course I laughed at.  The fact that my music stretches this far and connects so strongly with people baffles me.  It is surreal and I feel blessed. I've always said that I want to have a relationship with the supporters of my artwork that would allow either of us to be mutually comfortable to invite one another into our homes, both in the nature of my work and the connection with my audience.  This was "international" example of that goal being accomplished in some wonderful small way and it was astonishing and inspiring!  After a few hours we decided to go to Jeremy's to sleep, the walk was brutally sweaty and the suitcase being broken was really cumbersome but eventually we got to Jeremy's little apartment and I passed out promptly, looking forward to several days in Canada!

"Make the best of your situation, 

and also allow your situation to make the best of you!"

-AllOne