Rock and Hard Places
Page 1
Table of Contents
Praise
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword
Chapter 1 - IN A BLUE YORKE STATE OF MIND
Chapter 2 - I’M THE TURBAN SPACEMAN, BABY
Chapter 3 - BALKAN AFTER MIDNIGHT
Chapter 4 - YASSER, I CAN BOOGIE
Chapter 5 - EVERY WHICH WAY BUT MOOSE
Chapter 6 - FRIDAY I’M IN CHICAGO
Chapter 7 - APATHY IN THE UK
Chapter 8 - NO SLEEP TILL TRAVNIK
Chapter 9 - HUNGRY HEARTLAND
Chapter 10 - THE FIRST TIME EVER I SAW YOUR FEZ
Chapter 11 - EYE OF THE GEIGER
Chapter 12 - STRAIT TO HELL
Chapter 13 - IF YOU WANT MUD (YOU’VE GOT IT)
Chapter 14 - BASTILLE CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
Chapter 15 - WHOLE LOTTA FAKE KING GOIN’ ON
Chapter 16 - TAKE THE VEDDER WITH YOU
Chapter 17 - 24 HOURS FROM TUZLA
Chapter 18 - BORNE TEHRAN
Chapter 19 - (GET YOUR KICKS ON) BEIRUT 66
Chapter 20 - CALIFORNIA SCREAMING
Chapter 21 - YEN WILL I BE FAMOUS?
Chapter 22 - WHAT TIME IS LOUVRE?
Chapter 23 - IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR ROUBLE
Chapter 24 - MID-LIFE STRAIN TO GEORGIA
Chapter 25 - CRAZY NORSES
Chapter 26 - MAGICAL MISSOURI TOUR
Chapter 27 - LEMON ON A JET PLANE
Chapter 28 - I WANNA BE YOUR ZOG
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
ANDREW MUELLER was born in Wagga Wagga, Australia, and lives in London, England. He writes about various things for various titles, including The Financial Times, Monocle, The Guardian, The Times, Esquire, Uncut, Australian Gourmet Traveller, New Humanist and, frankly, anyone else who’ll have him. Another book of his, I Wouldn’t Start From Here: The 21st Century and Where It All Went Wrong, was lauded as “not bad for a guy from Wagga Wagga,” by The Wagga Wagga Advertiser.
Andrew Mueller is also the singer, songwriter and rhythm guitarist with The Blazing Zoos, an incipient alt-country phenomenon who released their debut album, I’ll Leave Quietly, in 2010. Mueller plans to spend the royalties generated by its success on an immense and triumphantly gauche Nashville mansion with rhinestone-studded gates and a guitar-shaped swimming pool. Or, a sandwich.
His hobbies include swearing at televised sporting fixtures, sighing at newspapers and the maintenance of a minutely annotated list of people who’ll be sorry when he’s famous. Form an orderly queue, ladies.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
ROCK AND HARD PLACES
“Andrew Mueller’s piece on my band’s tour with The Hold Steady is my favorite thing ever written about us . . . The fact that he is a war correspondent (although he claims otherwise) and music journalist and approaches both with a similar slant makes him one of the most interesting writers out there to me. The fact that he also is such a great storyteller and does so with such an acute (albeit black) sense of humor makes him that rare beast whose byline I seek out every month.”
—Patterson Hood from Drive-By Truckers
“Andrew Mueller knows the best stories usually linger at the edges of the main event. No matter if it is a rock show or a war, Mueller finds the longest way there . . . This is just good storytelling. He conveys a sense of world-weary cynicism and sublime humor in the same paragraph and I imagine he has distaste for happy endings, even though he seems to keep living them, over and over.”
—Bill Carter, author of Fools Rush In and Red Summer
MORE PRAISE FOR
ANDREW MUELLER AND HIS RECENT BOOK
I WOULDN’T START FROM HERE
“The best foreign correspondent of his generation.”
—P.J. O’Rourke
“His face has the same expression every time: comic disbelief. He can’t believe it’s happened to him again . . . he thinks it’s the poor directions, the road maps or the unkind stranger that pointed him here. And where is here? Nowhere . . . it’s not who he likes to be lost, it’s just that he likes the company of the lost. Be very careful reading this book.”
—Bono
“That perfect blend of investigation, humor, drama, and above all, insight into the global human condition.”
—Robert Young Pelton,
author of The World’s Most Dangerous Places
“A tour-de-force of hilarious, harrowing and ultimately enlightening reportage.”
—The Washington Times
“His sardonic, self-deprecating perspective makes for unstuffy company.”
—The Los Angeles Times
“A joy.”
—Financial Times
“A gung-ho Candide with a taste for places it is wiser to avoid . . . graphic, comic, bemused and properly contemptuous of faith and ideology.”
—Evening Standard, Books of the Year
“An utterly sui generis report from the world’s plague-spots.”
—New Statesman, Books of the Year
“A mix of dark humor and incisive political discourse.”
—CNNGo
“Peppered with trenchant observations that reflect a nimble, cut-to-the-chase practicality, Mueller’s interviews with everyone from terrorist warlords to international peacemakers are refreshingly irreverent yet astute.”
—Booklist
“Travel writing in the danger zone that maintains its hipness and humanity.”
—Readings Monthly, Books of the Year
“I can think of no more entertaining companion on a perilous journey than the ever hopeful, wildly optimistic yet clear-thinking Andrew Mueller.”
—The Guardian
“Lively reporting from a gently humorous narrator.”
—The Times (U.K.)
“Touching, often blackly comic reportage.”
—GQ
“In the grand tradition of Mark Twain, though in a world considerably more hostile.”
—The Daily Truth
“Brilliantly observed, articulate, often funny and immensely readable.”
—The List
“An instructive ricochet between cities and continents and war zones.”
—Time Out
“Mueller’s humour saves this book from being just another danger travel memoir.”
—“The Book Show,” ABC Radio National
“Not bad for a guy from Wagga Wagga.”
—The Wagga Wagga Advertiser
For Mum and Dad
“Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.”
—DANIEL 12:4
“Road (n): A strip of land along which one may pass from where it is too tiresome to be to where it is futile to go.”
—AMBROSE BIERCE, The Devil’s Dictionary
THE GREAT LEAP FOREWORD
Introduction
ZAGREB, CROATIA, AUGUST 2009
IT IS A fitting happenstance of deadline that I’m writing this here and now—in Zagreb, Croatia, in between U2’s two shows at Maksimir Stadium. As the thrillingly witty pun that serves as this book’s title suggests, the reportage gathered in this volume straddles, with varying degrees of chafing, the realms of rock’n’roll and conflict, and it’s a version of that same ungainly feat that U2 are attempting here. The two nights U2 are playing in Zagreb are their first shows ever in Croatia, and their first anywhere in the former Yugoslavia since they took their gaudy, glitzy PopMart circus to the shattered Bosnian capital of Sarajevo in 1997.
That these shows are essentially a long-delayed sequel to the Bosnian outing was acknowledged last night in Bono’s introduction to “One,” U2’s supremely versatile lament for the los
s of love, faith or whatever you’re (not) having yourself. “The next song,” he’d said, “means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Tonight, we want to play it for everyone in this region who has had their warm hearts broken by cold ideas.” As the crowd recognised it, there was a palpable shift in the atmosphere: a warm summer night suddenly felt a few degrees chillier. I’ve heard this song played dozens of times in dozens of cities, Sarajevo in 1997 among them, but it has never sounded better than it did last night, which is to say it has never sounded more wounded and reproachful, Edge’s scuffed-up guitar itching like an unresolved tension. U2 faded “One” into an excerpt from The Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody”; in the Balkans of all places, the phrase “time can do so much” hit a note somewhere between a threat and a promise.
If this book is about any one thing—which, just so we’re clear on this, it very definitely isn’t—it’s about moments like that, when music steps beyond its boundaries of verse and chorus and becomes a soundtrack or accompaniment to something somewhat larger than itself.
THIS IS THE second introduction I’ve written for this book. I wrote the first a little over a decade ago, when a slightly different version of Rock and Hard Places was published in the United Kingdom to widespread indifference (it was, however, a minor if weirdly enduring cult hit in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, from where I still receive emails about it with baffling regularity; I can only conclude that the entire print run was mistakenly loaded onto a barge bound down the Danube, where it ran aground and was subsequently looted by delirious locals in some sort of Whiskey Galore scenario). Having just re-read said introduction for the first time in nearly that long, I’ve decided to lose almost all of it except the headline.
It’s not that I believe the original introduction is bad, exactly. Indeed, for something composed in a hungover fog in a hotel room in Boston—where I was, at the time, on tour with The Cardigans—it’s reasonably coherent, and contains what I still think is quite a good joke about orangutans. It’s just that ten years is a long time, in which much has happened, both to the world in general and to the journalist meandering about in it. The difference between the world this book was first published in, and the world this book is being re-published in, is neatly illustrated by the blurb which appeared on the cover of the first edition—and which, for reasons which will become clear presently, does not appear on the cover of this one. It was contributed by the very great P.J. O’Rourke, who very kindly appended his name to an observation that the writing about rock music and various screwed-up locations contained herein was “as spectacular as a Taliban attack on Lollapalooza—which come to think of it, isn’t a bad idea.” Which is to say that, back in 1999, the idea of a gaggle of religious cranks based in Afghanistan threatening the destruction of an American institution seemed so preposterous as to be the stuff of throwaway whimsy.
All the pieces in this book were first commissioned as journalism by various publications (except the last one—incredibly, nobody wanted to spend money on an account of taking a country band on tour in Albania. And they wonder why nobody’s buying newspapers anymore). The versions of them collected herein are, however, longer than those which were originally printed, which is to say I’ve put back in all the jokes, digressions, tangents and a crashingly self-indulgent flourishes which are invariably—and usually quite rightly—the first things to perish when an editor swishes his machete at one’s copy. As will be noted by the dozens of owners of the initial pressing of Rock and Hard Places, as they while away long winter evenings by comparing that with this, some old stories have been jettisoned in favour of some newer ones. The older ones appear, despite the occasionally retrospectively horrified urges of the author, unaltered from last time out—except for a few excisions of trivial and now irrelevant references to contemporary phenomena, which really didn’t merit the explanatory footnotes that leaving them in would have necessitated. The new ones don’t have quite so many trivial and irrelevant references to contemporary phenomena: let it not be said that I’ve learnt nothing these last ten years. And all the stories have introductions composed especially for this volume, seeking to place them in their proper context, wrap up what happened next, and/or basically explain to the reader what the heck the author thought he was doing at the time.
Rock and Hard Places is not intended to be a serious, or even a frivolous, portrait of our times (my other book, I Wouldn’t Start From Here is, however, and remains freely available) or of anything else. The stories gathered here have nothing much to do with each other except that I wrote them, so taken as a whole, this tome doesn’t really demonstrate much besides the sorts of things that can happen when someone decides to be a rock journalist, and then a travel writer, and then a foreign correspondent and, finally, a country singer. I have gleaned some insights along the way, however. Young men carry electric guitars and rifles with the same insouciant swagger, both implements prized as they are by vindictive and resentful males for the instant, if often ill-deserved, gravitas they confer. In countries at war, the food is invariably worse than in countries at peace, but the coffee is always better. The more alcohol a people drink, the worse they look, except in Iceland. The major difference between America and the rest of the world is that America is unconcerned about becoming Americanised. Finally and most importantly, travelling yields no answers, but it does, if you keep your eyes and ears open, occasionally give you ideas for better questions.
1
IN A BLUE YORKE STATE OF MIND
Radiohead in America
OCTOBER 1995
ALMOST ALL TOUR features in all almost all music journals are frauds perpetrated against the reader. The wretched reality masked by the “On the road with . . .” headline is almost invariably as follows. The journalist is flown somewhere at the grudging expense of the band’s record company. Arrangements are made for said hack to attend two—perhaps, if they’re incredibly lucky, three—consecutive shows of the tour in question, ideally in towns not too inconveniently and expensively far apart. A formal interview will be scheduled in a dead hour one afternoon along the way, after lunch and before soundcheck, so that sufficient quotes to fill the writer’s word count may be prised from the half-asleep singer. An invitation may also be extended to one or more after-show parties. In the event that the band actually deign to turn up at one of these wing-dings, the ranking of the journalist in their order of priorities may be precisely calculated by counting how many famous people, influential music industry panjandrums, and attractive young women are also in the room (one swiftly learns to avoid the rookie error of pitching for the gigs in big, glamorous cities: the solidarity fostered by adverse circumstances, and the absence of anything else to do, ensures that you’ll generally get far more out of any given band when they’re marooned in some misbegotten midwestern swamp than you will when they’re larging it in Los Angeles or New York). After all of which the journalist will transcribe his tape, decipher whatever notes he might have scrawled, meditate briefly upon the relative nature of truth, and compose a few thousand words subtly conveying the impression that he had bonded with the group in question to the extent that they had all but asked him to join.
The story that follows, originally written as a cover feature for Melody Maker, was an exception to the above rules—as are, in general, all the tour stories gathered in this book (the ones about underwhelming encounters with Belgian art rock ensembles, and waiting three days in Seattle’s Four Seasons hotel for a fifteen-minute interview with a band whose management were suffering terrifying delusions of majesty, are being saved for a subsequent, woefully inferior and utterly shameless cash-in volume). It isn’t a definitive portrait of the subjects. Indeed, it would be ridiculous to have entertained any pretensions of that sort—how firm a grip on the essence of your being would someone have who’d just hung around and watched you at work for a few days? It is, however, a reasonable summation of what sticks in the memory after a few days on tour: the fleeting impressio
ns, of unfamiliar places and people, smudged at the edges by drink, jetlag and exhaustion, haphazardly focused by the oncoming deadline.
“IT’S A VERY good idea,” nods Thom Yorke. “It’s not the idea I’m arguing with. The idea, in itself, is fine.”
Thom, sunglassed and shrouded in an enormous fake black fur coat, is sitting on a luggage trolley in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel in Hartford, Connecticut. He has just stumbled off the tour bus after a long drive from Philadelphia. Behind him, a bow-tied porter hovers vaguely, as if unsure whether to heave this bedraggled apparition into the street, or ask him which room he’d liked to be wheeled to. Crouched on the floor in front of Thom, Radiohead’s bassplayer, Colin Greenwood, is earnestly outlining his plans.
“My question,” continues Thom, at pains to sound reasonable, “is where the fucking hell we’re going to find five hundred fucking ping-pong balls at short notice in this fucking place on a Sunday afternoon.”
A pensive silence ensues. Thom has a fair point. I’d hardly been able to find a cold beer in Hartford at eleven o’clock last night.
“We’ll just have to think of something else,” says Thom, and chews on a thumbnail.
AN HOUR LATER, with everyone washed, changed and infused with caffeine, we pile into a minibus to the venue, and Colin explains a few things. Tonight, Radiohead will play the last of their shows as the support act on R.E.M.’s “Monster” tour. They have been warned to expect some sort of practical joke by way of farewell. Clearly believing that revenge is a dish best served pre-cooked, Radiohead (Thom, Colin, drummer Phil Selway, guitarists Ed O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood—from whom, presumably, Thom stole the “h”) have been plotting their retribution in advance.