My Effin' Life Tour Book
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- ATTENTION-RASH WATCH ARE BASS PLAYERS HUMAN TO
- Pine StreMATION unterpar touri994 DOTE
- Page 455 AUG
- Page 6THOUGHT IT WOULD BE FUN TO INCLUDE A few anecdotes drawn from the original 1,200 page draft (yes, you read that right) of My Effin' Life that I submitted to the pub- lisher, but which obviously did not make the book (otherwise I would have had to name it Every Effin' Detail)... A few times in my life, I've attempted to keep a diary. My first effort was more a bookkeeping exercise than anything-a dry record of gigs with columns listing city, venue, attendance and what we got paid each night. Later on, my scribblings became more authentically diary-like, noting my moods and day-to-day experiences, in three sep- arate categories, no less: physical, intellectual and emotional. I rated our gigs out of five stars, talked about missing my girlfriend (and later wife) Nancy, about contract negotiations, about writing songs on the road, about interactions with other bands, etc., etc.. I even wrote down what drugs I had taken, including how effin' high I was from night to night. It was a travelogue of sorts too, and ultimately a more sophisti- cated record than just the collection of hotel room keys I amassed on our very first tour in '74, when even Evansville, Indiana had seemed exotic to me and I thought I'd probably never return. I was doing my best to cope with the wide range of hopes, triumphs and disappoint- ments I was experiencing, and only half a mind to keeping a record for posterity. Which turned out rather useful, wouldn't you say?
- Guy Rating (performanceRespase Poor
- Page 10T THREE MOMENTS
- DON KIRSHNER'SROCK CONCERT CHRIS FRITZ & CO URIAH HEEP
- Page 14coming out of the UK, and being a bilingual country with a large French-speaking population we also felt a certain French influence; in addition to that we had instant access to U.S. culture and thus, as music fans, were on the concert circuit for British, European and American bands. So, on the eve of the tour we smugly figured we had the U.S.A. sussed out. A naïve and foolish notion. We soon learned that although our countries looked a lot alike, we were very different indeed-not least, in this case, because America was born of a revolution, while Canada's independence was a product of a negotiated evolution. That was evident to us in the behaviour of American audiences, which were more confident, louder, brasher, ready to party hearty; you sensed that this was a people who had the willingness to fight for what they believed in. Canadians are so much more reserved in that regard-you could say that in their quiet and thoughtful way, they sit somewhere between the clichés of the loud and ugly Americans and chilly British reserve.
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- Thanks for such a greatGarden W Garden
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DON KIRSHNER'S
- ROCK CONCERT
- CHRIS FRITZ & CO URIAH HEEP
- STAGE PASS
- RUSH
- KISS RUSH
- BACKSTAGE -
- ETHOS
- PASS
- BAY 2
- KISS RUSHER
- NAME
- SHOW
- CAUTHORIZATION.
PEAKING OF television, LATER THAT year we were flown to Los Angeles to perform on two national U.S. broadcasts: Don Kirschner's Rock Concert and ABC In Concert. It was also our first time ever flying
First Class-bell, yeah. Mercury Records had ponied up for four seats, which meant one thing to us young sophisticates: free drinks! In those days Boeing 747s had an upper lounge, so we scram- bled up the stairs and proceeded to tank up on all manner of fuel for our trans-American flight, while our responsible road manager How- ard "Herns" Ungerleider stayed sober as a judge.
When we arrived reeking of booze at the storied Sunset Marquis Hotel in Beverly Hills, we crowded into the teeny-tiny elevator in the parking garage and squished James Mason, star of North by Northwest, Lolita, A Star is Born and innumerable other movies into the corner. We did our damndest not to turn and stare, whispering way too loudly, "Hey, look, it'sh Jamesh Mashon." Alex, a mondo fan of WWII movies and knowing him best from The Desert Fox, mouthed, "It's Rommel... Rommel." Poor Herns was more than a little embarrassed.
A S WMMS IN CLEVELAND CONTINUED to beat the drum for us, we made some new American friends. Backstage there was a Southern belle hanging out with the Uriah Heep entourage, not at all shy, who came right up to us and said in her South Memphis drawl, "I never heard of ya'll's band. Where y'all from?" We told her, and she replied, "Canada? Oh. Y'all have yer own Queen there, right?" We looked at each other and smiled. “Do y'all have yer own money? Can I see some?" I pulled out a Canadian two-dollar bill, thinking for sure she was having us on, but she was perfectly sincere. So we started telling tall tales about Canadians, how we drink Moose Milk and live in igloos, until she coyly laughed with a kind of “ptee-hee-hee," and we started calling her "P'teh." She was anything but a fool, yet ignorant of much outside of her own immediate experience. This was our first exposure to how little Americans know about Canada, which would prove to be all-too common.
Growing up a couple hours from the US-Canada border, in many ways we lived in the shadow of that powerful and highly populated country to the south. We were fed a steady diet of entertainment and news from the Big Three American networks through their affiliates in Buffalo. (They seemed to have an awful lot of fires in North Tonawa- nda.) Back then TV was the immigrants' version of day care, pretty much, so I watched a lot of it. Result: we gleaned considerable knowl- edge of far away and exotic-sounding places like Kansas City, Hous- ton, Los Angeles and, thanks to Leave it to Beaver and Andy and Opie and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., fictitious locations like Mayfield and May- berry too. But it was not a two-way street, so we really didn't expect folks like P'teh to reciprocate. We enjoyed a unique cultural vantage point: as a relatively small population sitting on a very large land mass, we studied Canadian history at school but also understood it necessary to know something about the rest of the world; being part of the Brit- ish Commonwealth, we were deeply influenced by the popular arts