Intermezzo 9875

I forgot to mention that we'd been offered a two-week run with the band Say Anything during the space between our ill-fated college tour and the beginning of our long and quizzical stretch of dates with post-grungers Smile Empty Soul.

This marked a well-deserved return to large stages and sold out venues and guaranteed free dinner every night there was a show. A tonic for the ego, even though the inevitable subconscious fan envy would undoubtedly take hold the minute we watched our tourmate's merch tables get mobbed. Regular hot meals would almost make up for it. Almost.

The band had a singer named Max who, it was said, suffered from an acute personality disorder that required fistfuls of medication in order for him to function properly in normal society. I talked to him a few times during the run, but most of the time he shuffled around the bus area in pajama pants and a band t-shirt. Every interview I read about him started with a few paragraphs about an infamous incident where he was found running down the middle of a Manhattan street, naked and incoherent.

He may very well have been certifiably insane, but the way his batshit antics were almost too perfectly baked in to the press release made it seem as if there was a preconceived marketing concept at work under the surface. And to those of us who were under some real mental duress at the time, any insincerity in Crazytown was highly, highly frowned upon. I kept my eyes open.

But in the meantime, I grabbed a couple days of work from the glass and aluminum shop. I grew to hate the cochlea-raping scream of the aluminum saw that used to hit me as soon as I walked in the door at 5:55 a.m.. I wore headphone-style hearing protection to keep my wits and the integrity of my most valuable asset, but I realized I liked the solitude of not having to hear anything in that shop, ever, and I eventually never took them off.

I didn't have much to say though, and I don't think a lot of my colleagues were all that anxious to hear what an on-again-off-again rocker had to say about anything, since most of the rock guys they knew were local burnouts who played The Water Bowl once or twice a year. They were nice guys but I could see their eyes glaze over when I told them about the "other thing" I did.

To some it was a glaze of disbelief and to others it was the glaze of "you're not living real life." It certainly made for awkward conversation when a publicist from New York would call me while I was up on a ladder in Blackford County to talk about doing editorial for Alternative Press, a magazine you could buy at the supermarket across the street from our employee parking lot. It would seem too surreal, and I would feel like I was coming across like a kid who makes outrageous lies to get attention.

One guy said he picked up the new Brazil CD at Best Buy, which lent a good dose of proof to my burden. But the idea that a guy that sweeps floors at a metal shop behind a Wal-Mart supercenter could have an album available in the electronics mega-mart across the highway was beginning to illustrate a hard truth that was not always apparent to a casual observer.