Off To See The Elephant
Via Chicago/Hello, Resolven
Wrapping up Heartstrings tours for the US and UK: Fall, 1999 - Spring, 2000. Opening for Wilco, meeting John Peel, and an unexpected surprise in Oxford, by way of a chartered bus from Wales…
Via Chicago
On July 30th, 1999, Beulah was reaching the end of the second Apples in Stereo tour and played a show at the Lounge Ax in Chicago on a hot summer night. Earlier that day we went to Wrigley Field to catch a few innings of the Cubs v. Mets, but we left after the fifth inning. It was 100 degrees.
At some point during our night at the Lounge Ax, Pat got to talking to a woman behind the bar named Sue Miller. She happened to run the place. Sue is also the wife of Jeff Tweedy, lead singer and songwriter for Wilco. Pat gave her a CD of When Your Heartstrings Break.
I’m not sure if this is the reason we would end up opening for Wilco later that November, but it certainly didn’t hurt. Jordan Kurland, our manager, is from Chicago and knew Tony Margherita, Wilco’s manager. And we also knew that their latest record, Summerteeth, released that March, was a departure from their twangy roots, and what we were doing on Heartstrings was compatible with what they were up to on Summerteeth.
We were home for two days from our UK tour before we headed right back to the airport to fly to Kansas City to play our first show with Wilco at the Beaumont on November 3rd. Leaving the airport, the first things that struck me were the wide open roads, the open sky and barren landscape with the cars back on the right side of the road.
We arrived at 4:30 sharp for soundcheck. We watched as Wilco took their time to settle in and work through their sound check at a glacial pace. It felt like an hour just for the kick drum. We stepped away from the proceedings and some of us took turns riding the mechanical bull located in a section cordoned off in the back near the bathrooms. Everyone fell off within five seconds.
Once every single channel in the backline was gone through to a painstaking degree, Wilco played a long list of songs. It was almost like we watched a whole set all to ourselves. We weren’t used to this. And it was great, but we would wait. And wait… and wait for upwards of three hours until, it seemed, we were allowed to set up about fifteen minutes before showtime. We didn’t really get a sound check at all, just a quick line check, and then off we went.
This turns out to be standard practice in the industry. The big headliner is the draw, the opening act is just happy to be there. And we were. But whether Wilco had a hand in it or not, and I tend to doubt it, their stage manager, John “JP” Parker, was not exactly going out of his way to make sure we would be in a position to upstage the main event. Not that this was in the realm of possibilities. We didn’t have any roadies or techs on retainer, let’s put it that way. JP was just doing his job, but maybe a little too well. This would be yet another rite of passage. Going through one song would have been nice.
All that said, we must have done something right because the crowd seemed to dig us. At least, the people in the front did. We got a lot of positive feedback after our set. We adjusted quickly to the circumstances. We were used to playing in small, dodgy clubs where you couldn’t hear yourself very well anyway. It was just a matter of modifying our expectations. By the time we got to Cincinnati, we knew the drill. We paid a few more dues on this tour and learned how to run a tighter ship. It was nice to be back hanging out in a proper backstage, at least. We didn’t have to worry about the dump factor.
Occasionally we’d run into surreal “rock star” situations we weren’t expecting. After leaving the Cincinnati gig in our van, a group of fans chased us, and we sped off like we were filming a scene for “A Hard Day’s Night.” We had to open the side door while we started accelerating to let St. Cin jump into the van because we’d almost forgotten about him.
We got to hang out with some of the guys in Wilco a little bit more as the tour wore on. We took some photos, got autographs for our wives and girlfriends, though in my case all I had was a yellow legal pad. I cut it out, shaped it into a heart, and slapped it on a poster later. That was a salvage operation.
Good ol’ cheap flash photography. L to R: Ken Coomer, me and my Oxford United scarf, Jeff Tweedy.
This tour was a dream come true for long-time Wilco fans like Pat, St. Cin and me. Miles was a cautious entrant into the Wilco fold. He didn’t really care for their first two records as much but was probably the biggest fan of Summerteeth. This tour was significant, helping us down the road, especially in the Midwest. Miles would correspond with Jeff Tweedy in the coming months. It was cool just to be backstage and watch one of our favorite bands play night after night. And it was great to meet Jeff Tweedy who, in my view, will be remembered as one of the best American songwriters of the late 20th and early 21st Century. To think he liked our little band was, for me at least, a validation of anything I might be struggling with.
To that point we had the impression that almost all of the guys in Wilco were down to earth, except one. Jeff was really approachable but was usually busy. John Stirratt, their bass player, was fun to hang out with. Ken Coomer had that dad energy and St. Cin chatted him up about drumming and being a new dad, and LeRoy Bach was the new guy – at that point was considered just a touring member, but not for long. LeRoy seemed shy, but not standoffish. The exception was Jay Bennett. He seemed pretty distant. We hadn’t really talked to Jay at all. But then, as we were loading up our van after our show in Pittsburgh, we were talking amongst ourselves, or perhaps to some fans who had lingered, about the recording process for Heartstrings. I started to get a little deeper into the technical weeds and along comes Jay. I hadn’t realized he overheard us nearby. He opened up and was really chatty all of a sudden when the conversation had been steered to the technical recording process. Sometimes guys are just awkward or painfully shy and that can come across as aloof. I can relate.
We drove out from Pittsburgh right after the show that night to pick up some mileage on our way to Hoboken, New Jersey. Somewhere along the road in rural Pennsylvania (Pennsyltucky, as some call it), I had a little scare. We were really loopy after some strong weed had been passed around and it was late at night in the middle of nowhere. I had to take a piss, and in this part of the state, many gas stations weren’t open for 24 hours. Nothing was open nearby, so we pulled over to the side of the road. When I got out, I was just about to unzip when I decided to step forward a tad so the oncoming cars wouldn’t see me. Next thing I knew I was rolling down a steep hill for about fifteen yards. Finally, I got stopped by a wire fence. I slammed my forehead into it and for the next few days I had a big “X” branded on my face. Everyone was calling out my name and I just started laughing hysterically while blood was running down over my nose, saying I was all right. I peed right along the fence, looked up and noticed what appeared to be a large cliff on the other side. I kept laughing, but that fence might have saved my life.
The next morning, leaving the hotel from wherever we ended up staying in Pennsylvania, things got a little stupid and we collectively decided to pull a prank on Jordan by having Miles leave him a voicemail message telling him that we wanted him to “get in touch with NASA” so that we could be the first band to play a gig on the moon. I swear we must have spent over two hours plotting the concept. Miles is known for his tirades with businesspeople on the phone, so we thought it would be funny if he called Jordan and went into a fake rant, threatening to “put a gun to his fucking head” if he didn’t “make this happen.” “I’m dead serious, Jordan, we want to play on the moon, or you’re fucking fired!” This sure seems idiotic now, but we spent a good share of the ride to Hoboken thinking it was the funniest thing ever. I’m not sure why.
Opening slots are great for exposure, but rough on the pocketbook (and our sanity, apparently), and we realized after the Wilco tour that we should start thinking about breaking out on our own. We felt that by the time our next record came out we would have a decent enough draw to do it. $250 per show, the standard for openers at the time, for a band of six people was not exactly lucrative. Opening for a band like Wilco was a great privilege, one that most bands don’t get, but at some point you have to bite the bullet and see who shows up for you.
We were already looking to make a move in the record label department. One major step towards doing that had been at the CMJ show at The Knitting Factory in New York, the night before we left for our first UK tour back in September. It was a Sugarfree Records showcase in tandem with Jeepster Records, a label based out of London that had Belle and Sebastian and Snow Patrol on its roster. If there was any doubt about moving on from Sugarfree, which there wasn’t, the experience we had that night sealed the deal.
Sparklehorse was the headliner at the CMJ show. I forgot why they were on the bill, as I don’t recall their being affiliated with Jeepster or Sugarfree. I guess their closest connection might have been with producer Dave Fridmann (also Mercury Rev and Flaming Lips), who was in the process of polishing what would become an album called “Hope and Adams,” by our soon-to-be-former labelmates, Wheat.
Sugarfree had signed us to a one-off. We were only obligated to release one record for them. So when, once again, the folks at the label wanted to place Wheat in the most favorable slot for the CMJ show even though we were selling a lot more records for them, we’d had enough. We could either play a better slot or not play at all. Though we’d end up getting the slot we wanted and played a great show, we knew it would be our last showcase for Sugarfree records.
We already knew we weren’t a good fit with that label’s roster anyway. The truth is, we were going to move on either way. Loyalty goes both ways - and even bands who stay loyal to the indie that first signed ‘em, that loyalty can only go so far. See: SST Records1.
Our next path didn’t take long to present itself. It happened that night. After our set at CMJ, I was in the front room by the merch table and a guy named Jason introduced himself. He said that our band was “kick ass.” We talked for a while. I figured he was a fan at first until he gave me his card: Jason Walden, A&R, Capricorn Records. I handed it to Miles later and they took it from there.
Fast forward to November 10th »» Still in the midst of the Wilco tour, we broke out on our own and headlined a show at Maxwell’s in Hoboken. We met up with other people from Capricorn that night. Amantha Walden, daughter of Capricorn’s founder, Phil Walden2, was one of them. Jason, the Walden I had met, was her cousin, and he was also there, as was Phil Walden Jr., I think - who was instrumental in Capricorn’s re-emergence in the 1990s. At that point we knew Capricorn was serious - they sent damn near the whole family!
We drove out after that show as well and headed to Boston - but we struck out on finding a hotel that wasn’t already booked, so we ended up sleeping in the van. The temperature dipped down into the 20s that night. We froze our asses off and said to ourselves “never again.” We were too old for this shit.
It was a crescent moon that night, in case you were wondering. The effects of our moon fever had all but worn off.
The gig in Boston, our last night with Wilco, was at the Avalon, right across the street from Fenway Park. Then, onto the next. We flew home to knock off an item on our wishlist: We got to play the Fillmore for the first time two days later, opening for Luna. This was our second show with Luna - having also played with them at the Metro in Chicago, as Wilco had veered off somewhere else that night.
The Metro was another bucket list item - for me at least. I used to go see bands I loved in my college days. Back then it was called the Cabaret Metro. I saw fIREHOSE play there, as well as Ride, and later, the La’s, who were burnt out from the road and soon to disappear for good. I only dreamed that one day I could play a place like that in my “wannagig” days.
I first learned about Luna through my old Chicago pal Chris Holmes, who taped me their first record in 1992. They were an indie supergroup of sorts. Dean Wareham, their lead singer and songwriter, used to be the frontman for Galaxie 500. Their drummer, Stanley Demeski, was the longtime drummer for the Feelies, whose album, It’s Only Life, had been in my record collection since high school. Justin Harwood, who played bass for Luna, had been the bass player for one of my favorite New Zealand bands, The Chills, for most of the 80s on up to 1992, when they took a hiatus.
I introduced myself to Justin and chatted him up about my fandom for all things kiwi and then he asked me if I’d play his trumpet part onstage for the song “Ihop,” the opening track for Luna’s fourth record, Pup Tent. It was sort of this rambling, blurty, blasty thing. He said he wasn’t a very good trumpet player (it was very punk rock), and seemed a little disappointed that I ended up playing the part verbatim rather than coming up my own interpretation. But things by then were a blur. After the Fillmore date we played two nights, November 15-16, with Luna in LA at the Troubadour and that was that for 1999.
Justin sold his bass rig after that second night in LA to Stevie La Follette. I’d forgotten about that, and the fact that this was his way of signaling that he was quitting Luna and moving back to New Zealand. It was Luna’s last night on tour as well. My memory of this was triggered by Dean Wareham, who chronicles this in his excellent “Black Postcards” memoir, about his time with Luna, and Galaxie 500 before that3.
And then, as if waking up from a dream, the following Monday morning, November the 18th, I suited up in “business casual” and started my new day job as a file clerk at Dennis McQuaid’s law firm. It didn’t turn out to be a complete pivot from the music world, though. The drummer from the band Trackstar4, Todd Sullivan, was temping there – and it turns out that I would be his replacement as a permanent employee. I had recognized him from the co-op show in Berkeley where I saw Elliott Smith for the very first time.
Todd wouldn’t be there for long – just long enough to train me to do his job, which was awkward. So, I don’t think I told him that it was after seeing them play their set at the co-op that night, back in ’96, that I would end up tuning my guitar to C# sometimes (you can hear this on songs off of Handsome Western States like Lay Low for the Letdown, or out-takes like Dig The Subatomic Holdout #1). In fact, C# in a standard tuning configuration is the default tuning I use on my acoustic guitar at home to this day and probably will for the rest of my life. It’s totally random, but I just like the way it sounds. I suppose I could just buy a baritone guitar and capo it up one fret, but I digress.
It’s hard to describe the withdrawal symptoms I felt starting work the very next week back in a beige office cubicle, dressed in a pair of khakis, after everything I had just been through. But Dennis really did help me out. Kiera and I were so broke after those ‘99 tours. Then again, I didn’t stress out too much about the menial job and pay – or the mounting credit card debt. After all, Beulah was probably going to get signed to a major label, right?
Things were looking up as we holed up for the Holidays. Capricorn was in its second incarnation in the 90s with a roster that included Cake, 311, and Widespread Panic, all fairly big acts who got plenty of radio airtime. What we didn’t know until later the following year, after we had already signed with them, was that due to their distribution relationship going sour with Mercury/Polygram (a result of the Universal merger —which we did know about), all three of those bands were bailing out on Capricorn and signing elsewhere.
I proposed to Kiera Christmas Eve. I had originally planned to do it as the clock struck twelve on New Years, 2000, but at the last minute, thinking that was too obvious, I put the ring at the bottom of her Christmas stocking right before we went to bed. Minutes later, she came into the room and said “why don’t we open our Christmas stockings before we go to bed?” My parents were visiting and asleep in the other room. We woke them up and cracked open a bottle of champagne.
The turn of the millennium came and went. My new fiancée and I stayed at home for a quiet night, with mild trepidation about the impending “Y2K” crisis.
Hello, Resolven
Y2K crisis averted, Beulah started the new millennium with unfinished business in the States and did a final handful of shows over in the UK for Shifty Disco. With the spring of 2000 approaching, we played Noise Pop in SF and then did another opening tour with British jam band Gomez.
For the Noise Pop gig, on March 2nd at the Great American Music Hall, we pulled out all the stops. We had an elaborate film and light setup and extra musicians, including Shitty Shitty Band Band alums Ben Riseling on sax, John Peters to harmonize with me on trumpet, and also Tommy Casey on the grand piano provided by the club. Tommy was the drummer of For Stars by then, another one in a long line of drummers they had, before and after my two-gig stint in ‘98. He was a multi-instrumentalist, and his day job was teaching music at a high school somewhere down the Peninsula. It was our first big headlining gig and a taste of things to come. The sudden need for more visuals was inspired by a show we had seen by the Flaming Lips at South by Southwest the year before, where there was a ton of high tech. Miles felt we needed to up our game. We rehearsed a set list more rigorously for this show than for any we had done before. Fun fact: One of the openers for our Noise Pop 2000 gig was Trackstar.
One week later we flew out to New York for our final US tour in support of Heartstrings – opening for Gomez, who I hadn’t heard of but were pretty popular among aficionados of the Dave Matthews Band, whose label they would sign for later. Our first date was at the historic Roseland Ballroom on 52nd St. We were proud enough for having finally played the Fillmore in SF when we opened for Luna, but the Roseland was another level. Think of all the legends of jazz, because chances are they all played there. I had dinner with my old 17 Reasons bandmate Seth Walter that night before the show, and he gave me the lowdown on the history of the Roseland. Louis Armstrong played there. ‘Nuff said.
Our billing with Gomez seemed like it might be incongruous due to a certain “Deadhead” contingency, but they had enough of a crossover in the indie world where it worked. Their audience was receptive to us. Open minds, man.
From Philly we went to DC and then down to Atlanta, where Capricorn put us up at the Four Seasons. We took a tour of the Capricorn facility the next day and got to meet the legendary Phil Walden. Phil told us stories about his life, how he was Otis Redding’s tour manager back in the early 60s and that he got a lot of threats in the south because of it. He talked about starting Capricorn Records, The Allman Brothers and all things Southern Rock, and his philosophy with signing bands: Develop at your own pace. He seemed to care more about the quality of the music than most label heads, who were often more concerned about units sold and not as much about what was being sold. He pointed to posters or records on the wall to illustrate this. “That blues guy over there, one of my favorite artists, he’s sold us a grand total of 150 records.”
I don’t have any pictures of that visit, but here’s one of Phil Walden, arms crossed, to the left of our Nation’s 39th President5:
Perhaps someone can help me identify the bearded gentleman on the right.
The Gomez tour ended with a final gig at the House of Blues in New Orleans, and Miles and I got into a backstage fight. Things had been brewing between us for more than a year. I forget now what stupid thing I said to provoke Miles to go ballistic on me, but it had something to do with rental bongos left behind in Austin, Texas. It was the closest we ever came to an actual fistfight. Miles threw a punch, but I ducked, and he missed. The other guys stepped in and broke us up before I was able to retaliate, not that I would have. I’ve never thrown a punch at anyone. But I’m not sure who else knew that — I was bracing myself and I am not small. And I do seem to remember thinking about throwing a chair. Or maybe he was threatening to throw it at me. We were not in a place where we could talk to each other about our feelings. He later apologized to me onstage, in front of everyone.
Miles was charming that night. He managed to get members of Gomez to come down and play percussion and whatnot for our final song with us. Later, Gomez asked us to do the same and though Miles didn’t go down, the rest of us did. St. Cin made an impression, doing some of his classic dance moves. I haven’t mentioned them ‘til now because they’re tough to explain. He’ll get down on his knees, looking a little like the scene of Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire at Woodstock, but then get up from that and almost look like he’s throwing in some John Travolta moves mixed in with a little James Brown. Meanwhile, I got blisters on my hand from playing a tambourine.
At the end of April, we flew overseas for one small final tour for Shifty Disco in support of Heartstrings, scheduled around a Peel Session show at Scala in London where we got to meet the man John Peel himself. Our set wasn’t very good. At least, my performance wasn’t. The stage was super cold, and I broke two strings in one song (wires tend to disconnect). I kept playing during a solo break, and the recording of the show clearly reveals that this was not a wise decision. But who cares? We got to hang out with a legend and play with Super Furry Animals. That’s the name of a band from Wales; in case you didn’t know. The Super Furries had also been on Creation Records.
When we did the GLR radio show on the previous tour, it was live to the UK listening audience, estimated by someone at about a million listeners. During a quick rehearsal, Pat was playing his piano part for “I [heart] John, She [heart]’s Paul” and Miles started singing “Hello Great Britain, hello to you all, wake up the King, wake up the Queen, everybody laugh, everybody sing for Beulah.” To ease our nerves, we ended up doing this bit to start off the radio gig, and eventually this intro would morph into the song Hello Resolven, the opening track for our next album. The reason for this began at the second gig on this three-date tour in April of 2000.
April 21st would end up being our final gig at The Point in Oxford, before it closed down a year later. I wrote in my diary that we weren’t expecting much, that this gig was a toss-off, last minute add-on to fill out our time and justify flying over to play for John Peel. What resulted was anything but. The night at The Point turned out to be the final peak of our original lineup. The scene was something else. A charter bus chock full of people from a town called Resolven, Wales drove four hours all the way to Oxford for one thing and one thing only: to see Beulah. We were absolutely floored! How did this happen, and why?
It was home taping! And word of mouth. Murry the Hump was a band that released a single on Shifty Disco and Matt, their lead singer and songwriter, was from Resolven and had played our record for some of his friends there. Pretty soon people were trading cassettes and the next thing we knew we had one large contingent of screaming Welsh fans at The Point yelling “Beulah! Beulah! Beulah!” between songs like we were at a football match. My sister, Cathy and her husband, Pascal came over from Paris to see this show and bear witness to the mayhem.
After the gig we went “for a curry,” as the English like to say, thinking we’d have a nice quiet dinner of Indian food to ourselves. Then one of the Welsh fans who happened to be walking down the street spotted us and minutes later they all poured into the place. They told tall tales, sang songs from the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and When Your Heartstrings Break in their entirety…a cappella. One guy read out of a recipe book dramatically, like he was acting in a play. It was the most compelling display of absolutely nothing at all that I’ve ever seen. I’ll never forget it - except, I guess, what the recipe was.
Some of the guys were in a band called El Goodo. They knew their rock history – better than most Americans. We kept in touch with some of them over the course of the next year or so and decided that one way or another, we would do a gig in or near Resolven. They chartered a bus to come and see us, and we’d return the favor next time.
I don’t have this picture of our friends from Wales in their bus in my personal collection, so I grabbed this lo-res scan, probably taken in 2000 from our still-running website, a relic of web 1.0, beulahmania.com. Back then there was a suggested file size limitation because most people still had dial-up modems. If this ever becomes a print version, I will try and secure the original and get a better scan, which is to say “having someone take a picture of it with a smartphone.”
Our last show on this tour, and our last for the year 2000, was for a festival called “London Calling,” at Club Paradiso in Amsterdam. The club was a converted church, and this gig was our first on the European continent. At one point I was walking around the venue amidst the crowd gathering for the show. Unless I happen to be floor level at a basketball game, it’s rare to walk around feeling like I’m the shortest person in the room. Right – Dutch people are tall. I read that somewhere.
Backstage before our set, Richard Cotton from Shifty Disco made another pitch for a tour during the summer festival season, maybe thinking we were in a loose enough state of mind to argue against one - it was Amsterdam, after all. But Miles said enough was enough, that more touring in support of Heartstrings for Shifty Disco would be like trying to squeeze blood from a stone. We were already getting ready to record what would become our third LP, The Coast is Never Clear. And we’d spend the rest of 2000 recording it.
“It better be as good as When Your Heartstrings Break,” Richard said.
[Next chapter here.]
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Corporate Rock Sucks! But no one is immune to corruption.
Do any Beulah + Wilco gig posters from that tour remain in your collection? I would love to see some but can't seem to find any online - I will continue hunting.