Two days before we flew out, I felt a sharp pain in my side. The more hypochondriacal part of me momentarily feared appendicitis. But I chalked it up to the typical pre-tour anxiety and set forth with all of the enthusiasm and eagerness I could muster.
ATP is held in the south of England at a resort called Pontins. The American equivalent of this facility would be like staying at a Super 8 motel still decorated for Easter three months past the holiday and featuring a rain-soaked outdated McDonald’s play area partially closed for construction. Here, the pain in my side bloomed into a small rash. Yet much of tour is about ignoring the body instead of listening to it, so we continued on to France. By now, instead of the rash spreading or dissipating, it had become a series of perfectly round blisters. They were painful but the surface area they covered was small. I convinced myself that it was from my guitar, the combined result of sweat and chafing, even though nothing of the sort had ever previously occurred. In addition—and to feel like I was being proactive—I purchased a cream at a pharmacy, since cream seemed like the least intrusive and most readily available solution. On we went to Germany.
By now I was walking around in a state of anxiety. I would fall in and out of panic attacks; the feeling of breathlessness and choking was intermittent, bordering on constant. More disconcerting was the feeling of unreality, similar to what I’d experienced in the bathroom mirror before the show in Portland at the beginning of the Woods tour. I felt separate from my body, a tingling in my limbs like a slow vanishing.
After our show in Berlin, with the symptoms and the unease now impossible to ignore, Janet and I took a taxi to a hospital in the eastern part of the city. We arrived at a series of austere, windowless structures. They had an eerie architectural sternness, a building crossing its arms. In the waiting room a young man sat with a bloody urine sample in his lap. The act of sitting, of waiting—despite being in a foreign country, despite not even really knowing what was wrong with me—was strangely familiar and comforting. This was consistency. Being sick had become my remedy for tour.
Finally I was escorted down a dimly lit hallway to a small room with an impossibly high exam table. I sat in an adjoining chair and waited. A doctor came in and looked at my stomach. He spoke very little English and I spoke no German. He left the room and returned with a book. He opened to a page with a series of pictures. I felt like he was a tourist trying to order at a restaurant, using one of those pictorial guide books that allow you to have little grasp of the language but to nevertheless explain your needs by pointing at what you want. What this doctor wanted was to show me what exactly was ailing me. So he pointed at a close-up photograph of a rash that looked like mine. Written below the photo was the word, first in German, but then in an array of letters that I understood: shingles.
He gave me a prescription for anti-viral meds and pain pills and I was off into the night. We stopped at a 24-hour pharmacy and went back to the hotel.
The next morning we met in the lobby to set off for our next shows. Embarrassed, I let the crew know about the shingles. There was talk about whether to cancel the tour, but I was convinced that we shouldn’t. There were only about two more weeks left.
Shingles, in case you’re under the age of sixty-five or have never been ridden with stress-induced illness, is a reoccurrence of the chickenpox virus, which lies dormant in your body. Painful blisters form along nerve endings, usually only manifesting themselves on one side of the body. Shingles is quite contagious, especially before the blisters have fully scabbed over, though you can’t give someone shingles. You can, however, give chickenpox to someone who has never had it. And what I swiftly found out was that Janet had never had chickenpox.
I felt like a walking infection, zombiefied and pestiferous. Tour’s insularity can be what makes it wonderful and magical and sort of like summer camp. But that same insularity coupled with an infectious illness is more a horror film. If we could have found humor in the situation, it would have made for an amazing parody, but there was very little laughter at this point. We were driving around Europe in our van, with a limited amount of air circulating through a cramped space. I was very conscious of trying not to expose Janet to the shingles, and she obviously didn’t want to be anywhere near me. I kept my headphones on and stared at my computer. More than the virus, a sense of disappointment filled the air.
By the time we’d reached Brussels, my body felt like a bag my brain was carrying with me: heavy, the weight unevenly distributed, the contents mashed and scrambled. I felt raw and scraped, like a human crayon, dragging myself across surfaces, leaving a foamy smudge.
The show in Brussels was at Le Botanique, a greenhouse-like structure, glass and octagonal, with an abundant echo both of history and of the voices and footsteps of the present day. It was grand, superb. I was a sick speck.
Janet was on the phone with one of her sisters, a doctor, who explained the airborne nature of shingles. I was contagious, unleashed and on the loose. I felt nothing but exhaustion, guilt, and shame. That’s when Corin helped me with my shirt; she was delicate on account of my own discomfort but also hers. Here she was mothering me, missing her own kid back at home. This could hardly be worth it, I thought, for her, for me.
It was time for us to play, but I for once couldn’t access any reserves. I felt like mush, murky. I was an outsider and outside, undone and unraveled. I started to cry. It was that ugly kind of sadness, of wailing, where your face distorts, lips curl, your features cascade like a waterfall. And then . . .
WHACK.
I punched myself in the face.
Over and over. I repeated the motion. Each blow brought the feeling to the surface. The hatred rose up and I hit it back down. I saw the enemy and it was me; I wanted to destroy it. Pow! I couldn’t stop. Thud! You fucking fraud. I was in the ring with only myself. Here’s your fear. Punch. Here’s your anger. Here’s every sickness you’ve ever known. Slap. Here’s your powerlessness. Smack!
I boxed myself to oblivion.
I was going to make myself extinct.
—
Janet and Corin were standing in front of me now. They were yelling at me to stop and they were horrified. I knew that. I could sense their pity, fear, resignation. My hands were their voices and their judgment, their disappointment, but mostly my own. I was a child throwing a tantrum. But I wasn’t an infant. I was thirty-two years old and one-third of a band that relied on me every single day and night, one-third of a partnership wherein the other two people depended on me for their livelihood. Each hit was the end. The end. We were past the end.
In a matter of minutes Sleater-Kinney was gone. I had knocked its lights out. TKO.
We would play the next show from this fresh grave.
—
My face was hot and stinging. My skin felt loose, like it was sliding off my skull. We still had to perform. Nearly forty-five minutes late, we walked onto the stage, not looking at one another, our Belgian promoter stupefied but polite. I played the whole set looking down, feeling like an outline of myself, trying to make my shape familiar to the audience, to the onlookers, since I had no sense of my body at all. I didn’t talk, smile, look; staying put was all I had. Halfway through the set I realized that no one could tell. That the difference between half-dead and distraught and fully living could potentially go undetected. And that’s when I knew I wanted to stop. I was done. I had dragged Sleater-Kinney into oblivion, a place we used to get to with our music. I took us there with hurt.
—
When we walked offstage and returned to the dressing room, everything had changed. Colors and shapes, nothing was the same; it was a planetary shift, a foreign sphere that only hours before had signified total familiarity. I knew right then and there that the band was done. Corin wanted my father to come get me. But we kept going. We had another week or so of shows. The tension was palpable, the nights were joyless. No one trusted me. The band gave me my own hot
el room so that I could sleep; I would lie in bed at night and talk to my dad. With the time difference he was at his office. It was the same feeling I had of swimming with him as a child—I clung to him. But I felt misshapen, lost. I couldn’t locate myself on any map, in anyone’s world, least of all my own.
Tour ended. We flew home and planned our last shows. We wrote a brief letter to the fans that we put on our website. We called what we were about to embark on a hiatus, as if it were a painless, bloodless pause.
We have not talked about that night in Brussels since.
CHAPTER 19
BE STILL THIS SAD YEAR
When we returned from tour, we all felt broken. Each of us had something that wasn’t working anymore. The only reason we had kept doing Sleater-Kinney year after year was because the rewards outweighed the amount of work and the difficulties, the heartbreak and the frustrations. But we had reached a point where the cracks couldn’t easily be filled, assuaged, or mitigated by a great live show. The damage felt transparent. The larger truth was that Corin was also tired of touring, conflicted about leaving her family, feeling a disconnect between wanting to provide comfort to a child while sitting in the constant discomfort of a musician’s life. I started seeing a psychiatrist who put me on medication for anxiety and depression. I apologized, I tried to make amends with the band. After the shame of what I’d done came a kind of relief. Janet and Corin and I reached something close to peaceable for the remaining tour dates. We tried to view them as celebratory.
—
We’d always come home from tours exhausted. We’d had fights during the Dig Me Out and Hot Rock tours that were immense compared to any squabbles we’d had since. We’d been a band for ten years. With The Woods, I felt that we had accomplished a great deal, pushed ourselves as far as we could go at that point. We had succeeded in redefining our own identity, our own music, reigniting the imaginations of music fans and what people thought we were. It would have been difficult to continue on without a struggle; it seemed like the journey had run its course. We ended the band at the best time we could, when people really wanted us to stay.
If we had been more calculated or had stronger management, maybe we would have strategized the end differently, made an announcement, put a final tour on sale, so everyone who wanted to could come and see us one last time. But that wasn’t really the way that it was. Nothing felt celebratory; we didn’t want to run a victory lap, especially since it felt like we’d left the race prematurely. Certainly someone with more business acumen might have been able to capitalize on the end of Sleater-Kinney. Instead, we had some East Coast shows already booked as warm-ups for Lollapalooza. When we made the announcement on our website about the impending indefinite hiatus, those shows suddenly carried more weight and meaning.
The final show in New York, at Webster Hall, was not our best. We had hired a film crew thinking we should capture some of these performances, maybe put out a DVD. By now we felt very confident in our live show, nimble, commanding, powerful. For The Woods tours, we had brought along the lighting director Stan Elleflot. He has a long shock of white hair, dreadlocks forming sporadically: part Scandinavian hipster, part drifter. Very gentle. Like any good LD, he helped the audience hear the music through visuals. Yet for some reason, we let the film crew dictate the lights for the Webster Hall show. They claimed that they needed the lighting to be very bright, very static. It was lit like a dressing room in a department store, everything was on. My hair shrank from the moisture alone, I could feel it getting smaller and smaller, tighter on my head. Meanwhile, my shirt was completely soaked through. I could barely play from the sweat dripping down my arms and hands. It was turning into a completely aquatic experience. Even during the performance I was aware of how awful this footage would look, and that we should never put out the DVD unless we included a sticker on the cover that said something to the effect of: “Hey, the three ugliest women in America have been in a band for the past ten years, have you seen them?”
Here we were playing a city that had always been generous and welcoming to us, one we looked up to, aspired and strived to deserve and impress. But we turned Webster Hall into a veritable tanning salon. The footage was entirely unusable. Like many aspects of our career, it nearly worked. It almost succeeded. That could be our band biography. Almost, by Sleater-Kinney.
Then in D.C. a heat wave hit. At the 9:30 Club the generator went out: no power, no air-conditioning. Fans had driven from all along the Eastern Seaboard, as far away as Florida, for this gig, taken days off work. Panic and stress set in. Even if we rescheduled the show in a few days, would these people be able to come back? We ended up flying to Chicago, playing Lollapalooza, and then returning to D.C. Each show started to feel like a countdown. We would start playing the songs, especially ones like “Call the Doctor” or “Little Babies,” tunes we’d been playing for over nine years, and I would realize that this might be one of the last times I ever played these songs. The feeling was heavy, but I didn’t want to think about how it might be perceived from the outside. It seemed crucial to stay in the moment, to feel our way through those last shows, to enjoy them.
Except for scheduling a final show in Portland, we didn’t formalize a way for fans to say good-bye. We wanted to go out in a way that acknowledged our history, and that was also respectful to ourselves and to the fans. But we didn’t want to feel like a museum piece, to apply some kind of unnecessary or self-aggrandizing gravity to the situation. We were a band. We were here, and then we weren’t.
In August we played our final two shows—we added a second when the first instantly sold out—in Portland. Tickets were twelve dollars, our typical price. People traveled from around the world to see us out. It was flattering and bittersweet.
We rehearsed for our last two shows in a minuscule practice space inside a facility shared with countless other Portland bands. Windowless, with dirty, blotted walls, our amps set up facing one another, the drums within arm’s reach; we were a cluster, a huddle. You start in a tiny room and you end in one, too. Just me and Corin and Janet and a decade of songs between us. We had played those songs for thousands upon thousands of people, but now, as at the beginning, we would play them for only each other.
We ran through the proposed set list. We would draw from the entirety of the catalog, which was common for our live show, though we often favored the most current album. This time, however, we wanted to highlight our favorites, the songs dearest to us, the ones to which our fans felt closest. The only moment that acknowledged the weight of the situation was when we played “Jumpers,” the song about suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge, a song I had written during a bout of depression. The middle section of the song goes like this:
Be still this old heart
Be still this old skin
Drink your last drink
Sin your last sin
Sing your last song
About the beginning
Sing it out loud
So the people can hear
Be still this sad day
Be still this sad year
Hope your last hope
Fear your last fear
I could barely get the words out. When we finished the song, Corin and I were both crying. It’s when and how I said my own good-bye.
—
August 12, 2006. The backstage at the Crystal Ballroom, a historic Portland venue where the band had played some of our biggest and best hometown shows, was both celebratory and funereal. There were flowers and champagne, friends and family. We took pictures and warmed up, stretched and dressed, conferred on the set list, visited with old friends, caught a few minutes of the opening acts we’d asked to play. Our moms and dads and siblings wore our concert T-shirts from throughout the years. It was a dizzying, glorious parade but also like watching someone put your life behind museum glass; you could feel the air being sucked out of the room, of the band, of your body.
<
br /> The second-to-last show had an incredible crowd. It was the biggest mosh pit I had seen in years: the whole floor was moving, vibrating as a single organism. For the final show, Eddie Vedder came down from Seattle to give us a send-off. One of the most caring and soulful people I’ve ever met, he took the stage before we did, just like he had on all those nights we opened up for Pearl Jam. He stood up there in front of our crowd this time, ukulele in hand, and said that he’d always wished he had been able to see the Beatles or Led Zeppelin in their prime, or Keith Moon play with the Who, but that he felt lucky to have seen Sleater-Kinney. In one sentence he summed up for me what so many critics and pundits missed every time they put modifiers on our music, on our identity as a band. All we ever wanted was just to play songs and shows that mattered to people, that mattered to us. Music that summed up the messiness of life, that mitigated that nagging fear of hopelessness, loneliness, and death. That night, we played for a roomful of the people who understood that very thing. Once again, I felt privileged, lucky.
That final show was more contemplative, slightly maudlin. There was a lot of pressure on the two performances, for them to somehow—impossibly—be the summation of our entire career as a band. But there was so much about Sleater-Kinney, about the three of us, that was never sung or said or played at those final performances. I mentioned from the stage that this band had saved my life over and over again, and I think that is true. When we finished the show, there wasn’t any real closure; it just felt like it always does, the three of us trying to pass something on to the crowd, hoping it was good enough.
CHAPTER 20
Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl Page 19
