Comfy little college town, good coffee. Right this second a photographer is shooting pictures of me while I sit on the john, backstage at the club. Pretty empty but good folks and a comfortable vibe. Could it be we are getting used to this? He's got me with my pants around my ankles. The door to the bathroom is open and he's sitting on his haunches firing off shot after shot. The repercussions of this will haunt me, I am sure. He lines up another angle while the Psyclone Rangers (outta Philly) play the middle slot. The first band was Supervixens, a B-52 clone if there ever was one. But, of course, they're really cute. My butt is getting cold.

The show was minimally attended but the folks were enthusiastic. Even the people who work there, as is (thankfully) often the case, love the music. These people see bands every night. After the show we hang for a couple of minutes at the cool 24 hr. coffee shop while the photographer shoots a couple more. We make friends with some girls from India. Undergrads at the med school. We talk about friendship and arranged marriages. Martyn displays his weakness for women from Asia Minor.

Graduation Ceremonies, Mermen
Assertiveness & Self-Awareness
Training School's "Building Better
Surf Music Through Belligerence"
(with The Penetrators, Star Bar, Atlanta, GA)

The Gavin Convention! Junior radio participants, trading tshirts, cold looks and handshakes. I suppose some business gets conducted here. From the driveway of the Atlanta Hyatt I can't tell. It looks like spring break. Mark is upstairs getting advance copies of our new cd: "Songs Of The Cows". It's done! We've played the Star Bar before, it's little. The prez of our label shows up with some of his people in tow. Preceded by The Penetrators (a surf band, you guessed it!), we play to another small but enthusiastic crowd. Before we play the bartender tells me I can have all the Bud ("within reason") that I care to drink but after we're done it's "anything you want". We have to prove ourselves worthy of the good stuff. I do my drinking after the show. A body can rationalize anything. The Penetrators wear matching red turtlenecks, blue blazers and khakis. During our set I offer to trade shirts with their lead guitarist, "Rip Thrillby." He declines, saying he doesn't strip in public.

Bill Vivian, a San Francisco big wave surfer currently living here, puts us up for the night in a beautiful old three bedroom house in Decatur, GA, about 30 minutes outside of Atlanta. Built in the twenties, it has an enormous stone fireplace in a main room with a vaulted ceiling, a 20 ft. sq. screen porch, and a feeling of intimate despondency. Set in acres of thick woods the brown shingle home breathes an inexplicable sadness. The decrepit condition of the walls and floors, the palpable memory of a family...love, laughter and light lingers in the daylight of this surfer's squat.

There are some people who drove 3 hours to see us in this out of the way city. The club is an old warehouse where chairs were manufactured. Everyone is unexpectedly gracious...maybe because they are so faraway from big urban sprawl. The fire marshall sign says that 500 people is the max allowed by law but 1500 people could fit in here with room to dance. 150 people paid. Leslie wins the pool/bet over how many will show up. After the first song Martyn cajoles everyone into coming right up to the front of the stage. Later he complained of playing under the influence of monsodium glutamate (we had chinese for dinner.) I spend a couple minutes wired up to the clubs' phone lines, the duo and modem power cords stretched across the bar. It attracts a lot of attention. It's a good show, playing-wise and an enthusiastic audience wires us up. During load-out I get to spend 15 minutes in the dressing room vibrating in the chiropractic rolling spine-loosener chair. It hums and buzzes but not gently. It roars. You can hear it all over the club now that they're sweeping up. Every time the roller passes my lumbar I shiver. We drive away at 3AM headed for Cape Hatteras.

Leslie dreams over water
(Swan Quarter/Ocracoke Ferry, Pamlico Sound, NC)

Ferry to Ocracoke
(Pamlico Sound, NC)

It's cold and sunny on the Atlantic coast. High mare's tails of cirrus sweep the sky. The air is crystal clear. We drive onboard the good ship "Carteret" and I cajole one of the crew members to boil some water so I can make coffee. San Francisco's own Peet's Guatamala at 10AM, on deck. The crossing is serene, if cold. The sunlight on the waves and the drone of the engines lull me into a false sense of security. 2 hours and 45 minutes of peaceful dreaming later we saddle up and pull off the ferry, onto Ocracoke Island, NC. Leslie is driving and a state trooper waves her over to the side of the street. He tells her to get out of the van. I wander over and a sk him what is going on. He tells me to wait. He asks Leslie for her license and he asks who is the owner of the vehicle. I tell him I am. He asks for my license and I give it to him, asking, again, why is he doing this. He has flecks of dead white skin around his nostrils and mouth. Late 20's. Very white, very southern. He looks at me and Leslie and says : "We have a report that there were some people in the van smoking marijuana on the ferry."

Mark and Roz empty their pockets
and smile at the nice police officer
because they know that he is there
to protect them.
(Ocracoke Island, NC)

He asks me if I am carrying any weapons. I tell him I am not. He asks me to empty my pockets on the trunk of his Crown Victoria, engine running. He looks at my pocket knife and says: "That's a weapon." I say: "It is not a weapon, it is a Swiss-Army Climber, sir." He tells me he is just kidding around. I start to get really mad. He asks us if we were smoking marijauna. I tell him flatly that we do not, have not and will not smoke marijuana in the van, we are a "professional music group, signed to Atlantic Records and are on a three month tour of the United States to support our latest album." Inside I am hoping my vibe of mild indignation at this minor inconvenience will provide a credible counterweight to our ragged driving-all-night-on-the-road look. This is Bible country. I am seething. We have been compromised in public. Another trooper arrives and everyone else has to answer the same questions, empty their pockets and stand around while the first guy does a cursory search of the van. Meanwhile Leslie is chatting up the 2nd trooper. I do not become involved in the conversation because she's doing an admirable job of charming the shit out of him. The skin-fleck guy, overwhelmed perhaps by the massive quantities of STUFF all over the interior of the van, finally wanders back over. Jim gives them a couple of cd's. We get asked, one more time, if anyone was smoking marijuana in the van. We all shake our heads. Turns out a "correctional officer" on the ferry had reported seeing "marijuana being smoked" in our van. The crew radioed the information to the authorities at our destination, who then set up the roadblock. A team effort on the part of the Ocracoke Law Enforcement Community, the North Carolina Ferry System and a regular citizen, like you, vigilant of a dark threat to the fabric of our society. They let us go. We drive away in silence.

art shot
(lighthouse at Cape Hattaras, NC)

We stop briefly at the Cape Hatteras lighthouse. 208 feet tall and built in 1870, the sign says that, because of shifting coastlines, this lighthouse may be moved. By now I have slept two of the past 31 hours. We hit a Comfort Lodge close by the shore. Sleep, blessed sleep.

The cold is deepening as we move north. Clear and about 40 in the sunny cloudless sky. Sandspits, shallow water and ocean haze as far as the eye can see from the bridge over the Oregon Inlet. We stop at beach after beach at the urging of Salt-Water Thomas. It always turns out to be beautiful and restful, if brief. No surfable waves today. We are running out of room for our found objects. Shells, detritus and sand litter the floor of the van. From the rear-view mirror hangs a kinetic sculpture. Three rubber fish skeletons. One horseshoe crab carapace. Driftwood. Some dried wildflowers. A laminate. A sun-bleached leather thong. A small wooden spider. A stuffed mermaid. Seaweed. A stick figure made of twigs and mud.

The daily meals on the road depend on regional customs dictated by economics and availability. I document here the acceptable truck-stop fast foods. Snacks grabbed while gassing up, products consistently available all over the country. V-8 juice. Cashews, peanuts and sunflower seeds, cooked in oil and salt. Apple juice laced with spirulina (brought from home) Sardines and anchovies preserved in oil and salt. Good digestion is the barometer of happiness.

all it takes
(Wright Brothers Memorial, Kill Devil Hill, Kitty Hawk, NC)

We visit the Wright Brothers Memorial in Kitty Hawk, NC. On top of Kill Devil Hill we take pictures of ourselves underneath the inscription: "dauntless resolution and unconquerable faith." Jim stands under "unconquerable." I stand under "faith." Martyn stands under "and."

The weather turns dark, cold and rainy as we get in the van and head to DC.

Formerly a barrel factory and then a speak-easy in the twenties, this pit/monument to dinosaur rock in the east coast played host to John Entwistle last week. The Potomac river flooded up to their front step. Once again we missed the horrible weather. Knock on wood. Met and enjoyed the two bands opening for us, Outer Body Llama and Fun Lovin' Criminals, but the staff of the club was stand-offish enough so that I never actually met any of them until we were leaving. The stage is six feet above the dance floor and surrounded by a balcony. It's the Christians and the Lions.

We meet Ivan Pongracic (or "StratoCossack") from the Cowabunga Internet Surf Music Discussion Group. Here is a man with a pronounced accent and to whom English is a second language but you would never be able to tell from his postings. This is one of the things I love about the Internet. I could meet and talk with every person from the net and I would never be able to identify any of them. Their face and language do not, in my eyes, fit with their postings to the web.

Bill Henke meets us by arrangement at the club and takes us back to his parents house in Bethesda, MD. They are home, but asleep. Too bad...we can't play with 'em. He tells us that they are intellectuals and that he is a "big disappointment to them." He's 32 and living at home in a bedroom transplanted from another time and place into a house belonging to two retired people. I spread my stuff out on the floor of the family room. That's the East Coast catch-all term for a room that is full of stuff and things. Not to be confused with The Den, or The Living Room, or The Rumpus Room. The house is well-insulated from the 3:30AM blow-up outside. 30 mph winds bring the chill factor down to the teens. I am reminded of the houses of my friends families from my childhood. I sleep like a rock.

Mom's Gift
(dinner w/ Mom, Easton, MD)

Mom's Gift
(dinner w/ Mom, Easton, MD)

We spend a night at my Mom's house. She and my step-dad, Jim, live on the Tred-Avon river in Easton, Maryland, about 90 minutes from Washington, DC, due east. The house is right on the water and surrounded by trees. We have a big dinner, do laundry, and my Mom gives us all monogrammed handtowels that say "The Mermen" and have our first names on them. Awww Mom ...geez.

Jim doing a phone interview,
dusk, 20 degrees fahreneit (somewhere in NJ)

"and you'll have a place to sleep
every night, it's exciting, it'll be
GREAT, you'll LOVE touring!"
(Brighton Bar, Asbury Park, NJ)

Breakfast followed immediately by lunch at Mom's. Photographs. Up the NJ coast to Long Branch. This is a neighborhood rock and roll bar at the Jersey shore. 4 TV's, all on different channels. A young Goth couple approaches me after the set. Len tells me that he and Joanne were at the show we did last year here (attended by about ten people.) He tells me that in 16 years of music playing and listening tonight was the first time he had ever cried at a show. Great turnout and response and we spend the night at Jim's brother's, in Tom's River, NJ. The genetic resemblance is startling. But there the comparison ends.

Jim and his neices
(Tom's River, NJ)

On to my birthplace, Philadelphia.