Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 26-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
1989. Mecca Normal’s second album, Calico Kills The Cat, was due out any day. I was the driver of the 1972 Impala on a cross-country U.S. tour of K Records bands—Some Velvet Sidewalk (Robert Christie, Al Larsen, Jenny), Go Team (Calvin Johnson, Tobi Vail, Billy Karren) and Mecca Normal. We left Olympia and didn’t actually play a show until Minneapolis. This gave us a chance to get to know each other. Dave and I had never met Billy, and I’m not so sure we knew Robert or Al yet, either. They were all in our car—Dave and me, Al, Robert and Billy. It was early spring, and there was still snow on the road in the mountains. Round about Pittsburgh, I started hearing a rolling around sound in the back end. We got to the Masonic Temple, where no doubt Manny had booked us—he’s done almost all of our Pittsburgh shows. I remember that we spent some time looking for Al’s contact lens during the Some Velvet Sidewalk set and that Robert walked around the room banging a drum. Dave has a photo of us looking for Al’s contact lens, but I don’t recall a photo of Robert with the drum. Actually, I see Al is wearing glasses in the photo, so I’ve remembered something wrong. A photo of Robert would be good to have. He was killed in 2001 in a car accident on a road between their small town in northern Oregon and Astoria, out on the coast. He and Denise and their two kids were driving to Robert’s parents’ for dinner. Dave and I had visited them not too long before that, a number of months. I remember standing with Robert in one of the kid’s rooms. I was transfixed by a book that I’d had as kid: A Child’s Garden Of Verses. The same edition. I wanted to pick it up and dive into it, to look at the illustrations I’d looked at when home from school with some minor ailment. The words “The Land of Counterpane” came into my head, and I was thinking about that word—counterpane—and how, as a kid, I didn’t really know what that meant. I don’t remember what Robert was saying, something philosophical about children, I think. Robert made us an excellent dinner: fresh tuna with a bit of teriyaki sauce. I kept saying how great it was, how the teriyaki was the X factor, on and on about how good the tuna was.
Rich phoned to tell me. I found something online: “The crash occurred when the Christies’ car made a sudden turn across the highway and was struck on the passenger side by a pickup, whose driver suffered minor injuries, authorities say.” I started thinking, “Maybe he was trying to turn around on that stupid road, the road we’d just driven several months earlier, turning around to get the teriyaki sauce.”
Denise came with me, and Dave went with Robert. I forget why we had two cars, but we’d gone to Robert’s parents’ place and we were offered cookies and I think I probably wanted to say, “Mr. Christie, you make good cookies.” Maybe I did, but I probably didn’t. We bought the tuna for dinner and drove back to Robert and Denise’s. I remember worrying about the road, the drive, and how weird it was to not have Dave in the car. When it started to sink in, that they were all dead—Robert, Denise, sweet little Ted and the baby—weird things started going through my head, like, “If I hadn’t kept saying how great the teriyaki sauce was, maybe they would have skipped going back for it.” I was nearly certain that, knowing Robert’s parents didn’t have teriyaki sauce, they’d turned around when they realized they’d forgotten it. I imagined the conversation in the car. “Jean said it was essential. We must go back for it.” … Sound of tires screeching … crash …
In Pittsburgh, while everyone else was doing soundcheck, I was dealing with the car in the parking lot, in the dark. I jacked up each end of the car, put on a different tire and drove the car around trying to figure out where the noise was coming from. Not the tires. The next day I phoned a friend back in Vancouver and described the sound. He said it sounded like the CV joint: constant velocity joint. I’d never heard of it and therefore figured it couldn’t be too important, maybe like the appendix, one of those take it or leave it parts, but he made a comment about the axel dropping and us pogo-ing across the highway to land upside down in a ditch. That image, those words, stuck with me. The next day it was snowing and I phoned around to find a garage and then I had to find the garage and I think I took a cab back to where we were staying and luckily it was with people who allowed us to stay an extra day—all eight of us. We had to cancel the show in Portland, Maine. I think that’s where the next show was; with those people that did a song about a lawn dart in someone’s head. Ed’s Redeeming Qualities. It turned out that we could do the show the next night, so it wasn’t a total disaster, but I recall people on the tour not liking it very much that I made the decision to fix the car. I recall someone suggested we just turn the music up louder.
I think it was the following year, or maybe later that year, that Dave and I organized the cross-Canada—well, as far as Montreal, anyway; we call that cross-Canada—Black Wedge Tour on the D.O.A. bus with Nelly Bolt driving, Bryan James, Rhythm Activism, Mourning Sickness, Peter Plate and Mecca Normal.
We were in Winnipeg after a show and Sylvain ordered pizza for everyone, but when the pizzas arrived, they cost basically what we had just earned that night. It was a sad moment, an error. We sat and ate over-priced pizza in the room we had just played to a decent-sized audience, now gone home. I thought we slept in the venue after sweeping the crap off the floor, I thought this was where I recall sleeping on the stage, but I have another memory of Winnipeg. I thought it was our host in Winnipeg who was driving past striking workers—she’d honked and waved at the folks on the picket line and managed to ram into the car in front of her. She was upset and we’d arrived and things were not good, but she wasn’t hurt.
Once, just when we arrived in NYC, Dave slipped on some stairs—I think we were going to Vickie and Dan’s—Autotonic—which is where I first saw the idea of freezing stinky garbage until it can be thrown out—I still do this. I think we met Dame Darcy there, too. Dave slipped, his glasses went flying and broke. Dave is not an opt-out-of-glasses-kind-of-guy. He needs his glasses to see. Anything. I guided him to a glasses store and we got the lenses replaced in a very reasonable amount of time. This has always been a triumphant Mecca Normal success story. Some bands may boast of metallic interpretations of their albums worth—gold, platinum, sliver—or of sell out crowds and famous people attending their shows. We can say that certain famous people were at our shows, but I’ve never been very clear about why, so it isn’t worth mentioning. And there’s a very good chance that they came out of curiosity, were appalled and left. Like, I think the Smashing Pumpkins guy came to our show in Berlin. But I feel idiotic saying that, and he probably hated it. Us.
