I know you’re not gonna believe this, but I basically had a blast in Misery.

A blast! It was so fun! Seriously!

I left LISCO at a quarter after twelve Thursday. Picked Joe up at 1-Stop Rental, drove through Taco John’s, went to his house. Left his house, went to buy an atlas at a gas station. Went back to Joe’s house so he could find some I.D. Called Brett. Drove to Batavia.

Eventually the three of us got ourselves into Brett’s truck and on the road. Brett took as much gravel as he could to get us to 63.

We drove down 63 until we hit Columbia, and found the motel. Checked in. The motel was quasi-seedy and seemed pretty much packed, and the desk staff were white, young, and oddly enthusiastic. We were in room 106 on the ground floor, with parking right in front of the door. We took our stuff in and settled briefly while Joe took a shower, mumbling something about needing his ass to smell better in case he got laid.

Brett thumbed through the phone book – something of a hotel room ritual for him – and called us a taxi. There were four companies listed. Brett said the woman he talked to was a total fucking bitch.

The taxi never came.

I called another taxi company. A man answered. He was a complete asshole. I told him I’d called another cab company and that they hadn’t come (he interrupted and said they were “the only cab company in town”). I told him there were four cab companies in the book (and he interrupted and said they owned “all four numbers”). I said we’d like a cab at our hotel and room number (and he interrupted and said they’d “had that order but that it had been cancelled”). He was a cranky, nasty old man. I assured him we had most certainly not cancelled our order, that we’d been waiting a long time, and asked how long it would take. He said they’d get there when they felt like it.

I thanked him, hung up, and Brett drove us down town and we parked outside a parking structure on the street because the structure’s spaces were literally all for compact cars which the truck wouldn’t fit in.

We found the venue and there was a long line curling around behind the building. The ticket office said the show would start at eight, so we blew off the line and found a great little bar on the next block.

All of the waitstaff sported shaved heads. The ambience was subdued and pseudo-upscale. We had cocktails. We shared two fried-artichoke-with-spicy-aoili appetizers. We had fantastic entrees. Our bill was a modest eighty-something bucks. We strolled back over to The Blue Note, presented our tickets, were stamped, and walked right in.

We have no idea whatsoever why people were standing in line.

The Blue Note is an old, funky, once-majestic venue with loges and dress circle balconies and two full bars. You can pretty much see the stage from anywhere except the upstairs bar, which is behind a wall. It was once beautiful, and is now run down and dilapidated and seedy. There are remnants of amazing architectural details. There’s water damage. There were massive holes in the plaster where things had just fallen off. The detail work high above the stage was obviously once quite gorgeous.

It was waaaay cool.

We stood at the back of the orchestra area and waited. All the seating was in the bar in the back, or up in the balconies and loges; orchestra was standing only. We watched the stage, watched the bootleggers adjust their equipment, sipped drink. Warren’s guitar tech is clearly a freaky clone of himself.

I overheard two nearby dudes remark that roadies often look nearly identical to the folks they take care of. (They also mused that they were probably the two oldest men in the crowd, a feeling I can totally grok.)

The show started. I loved the first half of the first set. Then I started having another fucking panic attack and had to go outside. It was way too hot, entirely too smoky, and of course every low bass note or kick drum strike was resonating in my chest in a way that felt like palpitations. Pissed, stressed, and thoroughly disgusted with myself, I went out to the lobby in search of actual air to breathe.

I hung out by the doors. Joe emerged from the theatre and we went outside. He was totally smoked out too – just standing in the place was a freakin’ contact high with all the pot smoking going on, and you could see cigarette smoke literally billowing when the stage lights hit a certain angle. Joe was basically green, and more or less having the same symptoms I was (the poor fucker), although he was probably having more of a hypoglycemia thang than a panic attack. After a few minutes on a sidewalk bench, he proclaimed himself to be for the truck, and I went in and got the keys from Brett.

We ambled like a couple of ancients the three blocks to the truck and talked about how thirty-something pretty much sucks compared to twenty-something, and he wondered if he’d overeaten or something, and I catalogued the idiocy of my own symptoms. After five minutes sitting in the Dodge, we decided we were gonna get our money’s worth and went back to the venue feeling a little better for the chill and the air and the time.

It was intermission. I sat on the iron bench again and meditated a little. Joe went inside. My heart pounded and I could feel the jolts of unneeded adrenaline as they hit my bloodstream. I was patient. I was calm. I waited. The sidewalk in front of the theatre was thronged; people discussed the minutest details of the set they’d just heard. The crowd was almost entirely younger white males. The chick/dude ratio was totally off. All the young white males love Warren and talk about Gov’t Mule sets as if they were Dead sets. It was almost interesting, but I was waiting primarily for my 120-beat-per-minute pulse to Fucking. Slow. Down.

I felt Brett’s hands on my shoulders. He rubbed me for awhile as I sat with my eyes closed on a freezing iron bench. My ass was like a popcicle. He and Joe stood behind me, there was small talk. After awhile they went back inside.

I heard an odd noise and opened my eyes; a boy was on a skateboard in front of me. A co-ed with brown eyes asked me if I was alright. I said, “I’m fine. I’m just having an anxiety attack.” Her face crumpled with sympathy, as if I’d said I was dying on the spot. “Do you know what that is?” I asked. She said “No,” so I said, “It’s just too much adrenaline, basically. Uncomfortable but harmless. It’ll pass. I’m okay. Thanks for asking.”

She bowed a little, palms together, and smiled. I grinned at her and said, “Namah Shivaya, little sister,” and she smiled and waved and walked into the venue.

Fucking hippies. (Snort!)

I went inside.

I loved the first half of the second set, too. It was groovy and danceable. I focussed outside of myself, aware that if I passed out someone would surely notice pretty much right away because I’d hit their feet.

I did not so much dig the second half of the set, which was basically 25 minutes of while male guitar hero crap (except for the drum solo, which was also pretty masturbatory but damn the man can fucking play. And with such inspiring economy of motion!). The audience dug, and I mean REALLY DUG, the showy, hackneyed extended jams way more than I think they should have. Those young males LOVE Warren, and he can basically do no wrong in their eyes… not even when his solos are entirely too long and some of the charts are embarassingly cheesy.

Overall, though. Despite my criticisms, the band was tight, hot, and pretty groovy. (What I would give to have ever fronted such a tight band!) They all knew their shit, and I particularly admired the drummer and keyboard player. I really enjoyed myself a lot, and would see them yet again with no qualms.

But to harp on my favorite observation of the whole scene, it really is a white boy band in the sense that the whole scene seems to resonate primarily with 18-to-35 year old males.

Joe and Brett argued with me that the male/female ratio was normal, but they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. After I noticed the lack of chicks, I paid attention. Serious attention. There were fifteen, twenty minute stretches where I could see maybe fifty people around me, and only four or five of them were female. It was spooky how male the crowd was! There were chicks there, I saw them around and in the ladies and everything, but not enough. The redheads said they’d looked and that there’d been women there, and yes there were. But not enough to be a ‘normal’ crowd. It was the opposite of a Prince crowd, which is typically 80% female.

If either Joe or Brett tries to argue my observation with you personally, disbelieve them. They’re wrong. There just weren’t the proper number of chicks there. Period. I am so right about this.

The encore was Soul Shine, of course. We all sang along, and the spots revealed a truly gross amount of smoke in the air.

We walked to the truck. I had a strange conversation with a couple of guys who were headed our way for a block; they had no idea what I meant by “jerking off” in reference to a particularly long and meaningless solo on Warren’s part.

Don’t get me wrong, here, though. I really like Warren. I like his voice, I like more than half of his songs and/or song choices. I enjoy his playing, his tone, and his style. But at some point “extended jams” become “jerking off,” and that’s just a law of nature. It’s not really something I can do anything about. I calls ’em like I sees ’em, people.

Please note that if I played guitar like Warren, I’d jerk off in long extended meaningless solos too, especially if I had an avid and adoring crowd who freaking LOST IT whenever I did.

We tumbled into the truck and drove back to the motel. We stopped for beer, and got a sixer of Bud, a pint of vodka, three containers of cranberry cocktail, and a bottle of water.

In the motel, we drank, laughed, talked, got tipsy, and scoured the yellow pages for places that would deliver. I called three or four places, Brett called a couple, but Joe hit the jackpot: a pizza joint willing to deliver “for a five dollar tip.” (We laughed.) We ordered a pizza, fried ravioli, and a salad. When it arrived, the nice young, blond, pudgy delivery guy asked us if we were in town for the wrestling – the hotel was packed with high school wrestlers in for a state competition – and we nearly collapsed with laughter after he left.

“Like we LOOK like we’re in HIGH SCHOOL!” Brett enthused, giggling in the way that he does when he’s had several high-octane Missouri beers and some vodka-and-cranberries. “High school!”

The pizza was awesome. It came from a place called IMO’S and they used some kind of magically weird Mexican/Italian melting cheese. We all groaned in drunken ecstasy as we inhaled our 12:30 AM second supper. I sucked down half of a large salad and the redheads ate deep fried beef raviolis with gusto.

Not long after that we were all suddenly Done. For. The. Day. The giggling and witticisms trailed off; the redheads even quit watching out the window for highschool girls to dart out of their rooms.

Joe closed the curtains and fluffed up his bed of pillows and blankets on the floor. Brett stretched out next to me on the bed.

I woke up five times that night to the amazing noise of Joe’s snoring. MY FUCKING GOD, IT’S UNREAL.

My sinuses were dry. I was exhaused. I wasn’t over the flu yet. The room was either too hot or too cold because that’s how wall unit heaters in motels work. Brett was lying in the middle of the bed, leaving me the wall to battle with. Joe was snoring like a… like a… In all honesty, nothing sounds like Joe snoring. It’s that bad.

At one point, I woke up because Brett had kinda smacked me. He said, aloud, “God damn it! You’re rocking, Joe’s snoring, what the FUCK!” And then he threw his leg over the side of the bed and kicked Joe, which stopped his snoring almost long enough for me to get to sleep.

Morning, surprizingly, came rather quickly in spite of all that. We all woke up cheerfully, Joe apologized for being too exhasted to control his noise (which he can do under some circumstances), Brett and I forgave him, and we all reiterated that we were having a remarkable amount of fun so far, considering we were in Misery.

I showered (“Watch out in there,” Joe warned. “I’ve had better showers on boats.”) We packed up and checked out. Brett headed out of town.

And found a sign saying AUTOMOTIVE SWAP MEET. We went there. He fell in love with a rat rod. We left and went to breakfast at The Waffle House (WHICH WAS TOTALLY AWESOME AND FUN!!!) and when we were done he still wanted it.

We went back to the fairgrounds again. We wandered through the indoor part and discovered the event wasn’t actually starting until the next day. We found the coolest tail light ever, but neither of them bought it. We went back outside and Brett bought the body of his future rat rod and the sellers helped him load it into the bed of the Dodge.

Sigh.

He and Joe assure me it’s totally tits, and gods forbid I should ever doubt them, but to me it looks like, well, it looks like a four hundred dollar pile of rusted out sheet metal: in other words, garbage.

Brett’s stoked. Utterly. He keeps asking me if I’ve found frame rails on the Internet for him yet. (!!!) I keep telling HIM he needs to sell something pretty much right away if he expects to be eating actual food next week. Snort!

After the rat rod acquisition, we headed on to Iowa, stopping before the border to get some Missori beer and some road munchies. When we hit gravel near home, Brett cracked a PBR and gave me a taste. Damn if it doesn’t taste like beer did when I was little! Remember the sips your old man would give you when you were six or so? Remember how skunky and good beer tasted? THAT’S WHAT MISSOURI BEER TASTES LIKE! I actually drank one when we got home, and my annual beer intake is probably less than a six pack.

I was congested, exhausted, and had had a great time. I was asleep by four-thirty and probably slept thirteen hours that night. All in all, a damned good time in Missouri, people!