Tales from The Road - I

So far, my Canadian tour, though brief, has been filled with a few interesting moments. Here are some snapshots:

-Last Monday afternoon, feeling a little ambivalent about the kind of day it was going to be, I discovered an e-mail in which I had been approved for a FACTOR Artist Development grant that I had applied for a couple months back (and for which I had once been rejected in the past). I promptly walked into enjoyable Toronto cafe/haunt Voodoo Child to enjoy a celebratory mid-Monday-afternoon bourbon sour.

-At one Ontario show, upon realizing I was missing an XLR cable that the venue did not have, half an hour before showtime, I ran out and gunned the engine across some backwoods country roads to make it to the only instrument store within 20 km. Bought the cable and made it back to the venue with two minutes to spare before the set was due to start. 

-Having been thoroughly frisked (metaphorically) at the US border when I crossed to attend the Millennium Music Conference in February, I was dreading what would come of my crossing at Windsor/Detroit. (Although I'm only playing Canadian dates on this tour, it turns out that the slog from southern Ontario to Winnipeg, MB is slightly less eternal when driving underneath the Great Lakes, through the US Midwest, instead of taking the Canadian trajectory over them.) This time, the interrogation lasted all of twenty seconds before I was given the green light.

-St. Patrick's Day was a half-day saga of drinking and staggering around downtown Toronto with an appropriate mix of friends and strangers clad in green. The next morning was characterized by delicious hangover-nullifying dim sum in Chinatown. Truly the noblest day of the year.

-Saw a T-Rex skeleton.

I'm currently in Winnipeg, coming off a little set at lovely local cafe Sam's Place last night, and I'm getting ready to conjure up some Sunday night rock n roll at Gimli's Ship and Plough pub, about an hour north of the capital. Tomorrow, I'll be up bright and early to do an interview and short tune on the Global Winnipeg morning show.

Then, Wednesday, westward, westward. Stay tuned.

Jonathan Coull

Broken home is where the broken heart is, I thought one day after seven weeks in Spain that seemed like years. And here I was, down in the same old digs and duds, out in the streets where strangers greet you home again.

They call me the terminal lover, born on the last day of time. I was robbed of a past that could heal me, fleeced of a future of crime.

Send me some good news from the front, tell me the lines will always be the same. Tell me the wanderers still know my name.

They tell me that I’ve wandered round this world to places that I have never seen. Whole nations scraped from the face of the earth, whole years in a dream.

I left my baby grand down in New Orleans, outside a bloody battle on Frenchmen Street, where the jazz angels sat up so long into the night. All the red light girls and all the trumpeteers, the stink of the swamp and the empty beers: blues but not a tear to be shed in sight.

Scene: a dusk-lit opening. Pete’s in line just hoping; he has plastic bags of posters, magazines and paper roses. As his movie queen approaches, the volcanic crowd encroaches, and, at last, he’s got his moment. He says: “Baby, won’t you read some lines with me?”

Eden-ite defectors, traveling with steel detectors, pause to pitch their tents out in his field. He hears the buzzer grooving, as he rises to get moving.

Even paradise has a Harley Street, some quack trying to make a buck. He said: “Here’s a pill to cure your pain, and one more for good luck.”

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