My Ten Most Memorable Moments As A Watershed Roadie: part two

7) early September 2005; Akron, Ohio, or Mt. Clemens, Michigan  Early one evening before we left for a show I wandered into Colin’s hotel room* where he sat enrapt by a news report detailing Hurricane Katrina wiping New Orleans – a major American city – off the map FULLY FIVE DAYS EARLIER and we hadn’t heard a word about it.  Colin and I both sat staring incredulously at the T.V. screen as I said, around a mouthful of Hostess orange cupcake, “When did this happen?”  “I don’t know,” Colin replied absently, glued to the TV by the sight of thousands of people stranded in the New Orleans Superdome.

It brought into sharp focus the rock & roll bubble we would occasionally find ourselves in on the road: Days and days of van drives, middle-of-the-night-gas-station-meals, soundchecks, dark, loud bars and motel rooms we didn’t occupy long enough to even turn on a television, let alone watch the news.  (By contrast, on our last tour in June 2012, every second member of the band had a laptop, smart phone, or tablet, so everybody was connected to the planet ALL THE TIME.  My, how quickly times change.  I already miss the old days of seven years ago.)

Colin and I sat there for I don’t know how long, watching the misery and devastation play out.  We might’ve even caught the Kanye West “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” incident as it was happening.  I wouldn’t swear to that though, the chronology seems wrong, and I couldn’t find online what date that took place.  We might have just seen it another night as that tour progressed.  Finally Biggie came in, cutting our hurricane disaster reverie short with a “Let’s go, ladies, van call in five minutes,” pronouncement.  “Have you SEEN this, Biggie?” Colin said, pointing at the screen.  “Yeah, it’s New Orleans.  That happened DAYS ago.  Where have you two been?”  He shook his head at us, walked out of the room.  Colin and I got up, grabbed our stuff, walked out to the van and back into our rock & roll bubble.  

*Technically it wasn’t just Colin’s room.  Usually on the road we all camped six to a room.  On nights when we had the luxury of TWO hotel rooms, we divided into The Snoring Room – Biggie, Dave & me – and The Non-Snoring Room – Colin, Joe & Pooch.  It was not lost on anyone that this arrangement meant the frontline of the band – the guitar players – had one room and the backline – drummer & road crew – were relegated to the other.   

8)  Saturday, June 18, 2005, Valdosta, Georgia  We were on our way to Jacksonville, Florida, from Atlanta, Georgia.  Somewhere north of Valdosta, Biggie could no longer keep the van at our normal highway cruising speed of 70 mph.  Twenty minutes later, he couldn’t keep it at 60 mph.  By time we hit the outskirts of Valdosta, we were doing maybe 50 mph, maybe less.  We got off I-75, made it into a Firestone Service Center about 5:45 on a Saturday evening.  The place closed at 6 pm.  No way IN HELL did that Firestone manager want to deal with our sorry rock & roll asses, but he was an extraordinarily nice guy and got one of the mechanics to come out in the lot and look at the van.  (They were not about to take it into their building, thereby taking responsibility for it.) 

Mechanic-guy crawled under the van, determined the catalytic converter was shot, and a long back & forth conversation ensued between Biggie, Colin and manager-guy about how we had to get to Jacksonville, Florida, that night for a gig and couldn’t they please stay late and fix the van.  Manager-guy tried to explain they probably didn’t even HAVE the right catalytic converter in stock at the station, we’d just have to stay over and they’d try to find one and order it Sunday morning.  He was telling us where there was a motel close, just up the street, when I spied a puddle of liquid forming under the front part of the van.  “Is that from the catalytic converter?” I asked.  The mechanic who had been under the van previously crawled back under, put his hand in the liquid, sniffed his fingers and announced, “No, this is brake fluid, you’ve also got a broken brake line.”

That was quite enough for manager-guy. It was then 6:20 pm, I’m sure he just wanted to get home to dinner and his family after a long week, and he said quietly, in a smooth Southern drawl, “I’ll see you in the morning, boys,” and walked away.

He was barely out of the parking lot when Biggie was on his cellphone, calling Dave Cook, the band’s go-to mechanic and miracle worker.  (I’ve often wondered why they had me in that van instead of Dave Cook.  He certainly would’ve been a lot more valuable.)  Biggie sketched out the problems, filled Dave in on what the Firestone guys had said, and asked what we could do on our own, just to get to Jacksonville.  (Which was, to Biggie, just a tantalizingly close 125 miles away.)

To make a long story short, Dave dispatched Biggie and Joe to a WalMart store adjacent to the Firestone to buy a drill, duct tape and some brake fluid: the drill was to be used to make holes in the catalytic converter to allow in more oxygen and the duct tape was gonna be used to shore up the broken brake line just long enough for us to reach Jacksonville.  It was like something out of that movie Apollo 13 where they had to fix a spaceship with just the materials on board the rocket.   As dusk fell on Valdosta I watched Biggie work on that van like a man possessed.  I walked over to Colin where he sat reading on a concrete parking block and said, “He CANNOT fix that brake line with duct tape.  That is not going to work.  I’m not getting back in that van.”   Ever the optimist, Colin replied, “It COULD work.  We’ve had stuff like this happen before,” but I could tell from his tone that even he didn’t believe it himself.

It was almost dark when Biggie finished drilling the holes and taping up the brake line.  He poured the extra brake fluid into the reservoir to replace what was puddled in the parking lot and I tried to figure how I was gonna get to the Valdosta Greyhound Station to get a bus for Columbus without shaming myself in front of the guys.  By divine providence, when he rolled the van a few yards and put the brakes on to test the line it immediately broke apart again and dumped the fluid right back out.  I think he was getting out of the van to give it another try when Colin and/or Joe said, “That’s it, Biggie.  Call the club in Jacksonville, we’re not gonna make it.”

We got the guitars out of the van, walked up the street to a motel (sound familiar? see previous blog) and Colin said, “You’re not coming out with us anymore, are you?”  “I don’t know, Colin, I just don’t know,” was my reply.  There was a dive bar almost right next door to the motel.  I think I stayed behind to mull over my future with the band while the guys went out for drinks.  As always, they made fast friends with the bartenders and patrons.  I think they briefly considered hauling the gear up the street from out of the van and playing at that bar, but it was too small. 

The next morning Biggie and I got up bright and early to get the Firestone guys to write up work orders for the van.  When they put it on the lift one of the mechanics said, “Who drilled holes in the catalytic converter?”  “Uhhh, I think it was already like that,” Biggie replied innocently.  “Not when I looked at it last night, it wasn’t,” said the mechanic who had crawled under Saturday evening.  At any rate it was going to take Firestone a couple of days to get a replacement catalytic converter.  Everybody had to be back in Columbus on Monday for work or, in Joe’s case, for his teaching assistant gig at Ohio State, so Biggie had them just fix the brake line.  The manager of Firestone explicitly warned us not to drive all the way back to Ohio without a functioning catalytic converter and probably made Biggie sign something to that effect, to remove his liability.  He also told us not to shut the van off on the drive, or it probably wouldn’t start up again.  He further advised us to keep all the windows open on the trip home to forestall dying from carbon monoxide poisoning.

We did in fact drive all the way back to Ohio in that van, with all of the windows wide open to try to dissipate some of the carbon monoxide pouring in from the holes in the catalytic converter.  I think I lost a LOT of brain cells on that ride.  About all I remember of that journey was crossing the bridge from Kentucky into Cincinnati and freezing my ass off on that chilly night, as it got colder & colder in the van with the windows open, and I hadn’t brought any warm clothes with me since it was summer and we were gonna be in the South that whole trip.

As I recall we made it home about 5 am Monday morning.  I had a carbon monoxide headache for two days afterward.  The next road trip we had a new van.  More on that later.                 

© 2012 Ricki C.  

My Ten Most Memorable Moments As A Watershed Roadie: part one

Watershed has a couple of shows coming up this Saturday, September 15^th: The Independents’ Day Festival at 6 pm and later that night at Ace Of Cups (2619 North High Street) around 11 pm, so I thought I’d run the next installment of my Watershed series this week. 

The first three Memorable Moments are detailed in blog posts Colin & The Stairwell, Watershed & Kamakaze's (January 2012) and The Strange Case of the Somnabulistic Stickman Streaker (April 2012).  The remaining seven moments, in no particular order.....

4)    April 10, 2005, somewhere north of Ann Arbor, Michigan  It was my first out-of-state road trip with the band, we were coming home from Marquette, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, it was just about dusk on a Sunday evening.  The van lost power on Route 23 South, we coasted off a 180-degree freeway exit cloverleaf and came to a stop without even having to put on the brakes IN A GAS STATION PARKING LOT!  Plus the gas station was no more than 100 hundred yards from a little motel.  They were the only two buildings in sight.  It was the most amazing vehicle breakdown I have ever taken part in.  Since it was Sunday, no way were we gonna find anybody to work on (or even look at) the van, but the gas station guys hooked us up with a tow to a local garage for Monday morning.

Michael “Biggie” McDermott wasn’t along on that road trip and as the towing guys were hooking up the van I said, “Don’t you think we should take the guitars with us to the hotel instead of leaving them in plain sight in the van?”  “That’s what we hired you for, Ricki C.,” laughed Colin, “you’re ALWAYS thinking.”  The five of us (me, Colin Gawel, Joe Oestreich, Dave Masica and Mark “Pooch” Borror) each grabbed a couple of guitars and headed off to the motel.  As we checked in, Colin’s first question of the desk clerk was, “Where’s the closest place to get a beer?”  “No bars around here,” the desk clerk answered, “but there’s a bowling alley up that road about a mile or so, they serve alcohol.”  He pointed into the now-inky darkness.  This was my first experience with the lengths Watershed will go to drink; we were going to walk a couple of miles, in a pitch black Michigan night, on a dark country road with no streetlights whatsoever, to a bowling alley, for beers.

Three hours later, after the midnight last call at the bowling alley, we were walking back to the motel.  I wouldn’t say the guys were drunk exactly, but nobody was feeling any pain.  Somehow the conversation swung to divorce and I explained the demise of my first marriage; that falling in love with the pretty 18-year old female lead singer of your band AFTER you’re already married is seldom a good idea.  Everybody got really quiet and turned to look at Pooch out of the corner of their eyes, and Pooch said to me, “Ricki C., you wanna save me a lot of time & trouble and tell me what the next two years of my life are gonna be like?”

It transpired that Pooch had gotten involved with the pretty female lead singer of the band he was in before he joined Watershed and things were fairly tense at home with the wife.  (see page 228 of Joe Oestreich’s Watershed memoir Hitless Wonder.)  Pooch’s story eventually turned out a lot better than mine; he’s still married and has a couple of great kids.  But I’ll never forget the look on his face on the side of that dark road in Michigan as he peered through his Buddy Holly glasses into a decidedly uncertain future.

5)    August 25-26, 2005, Charlotte, N.C.  In the midst of a raving, killer show at some bar in Charlotte the owner of The Capital Grille - another, different local bar/restaurant - had fallen in love with Watershed, as bar owners so often do.  He and his friends were drunk on their asses and the band could do no wrong.  At the end of the night he wrote us out a “$100 gift certificate” on the back of his business card and told us to come in for lunch the next day.  The six of us (see above, plus Biggie) showed up at The Capital Grille the next day after our noon checkout.  We were arrayed in our normal disheveled summer morning/early afternoon ensemble - sunglasses, shorts, rock & roll t-shirts, beat-up tennis shoes & sandals, very likely unshaven & unshowered - and the gorgeous dressed-to-the-nines young blonde girl at the hostess station just stared at us as we asked for owner-guy, our new best buddy from the night before.

Phone calls were placed, pointed words were exchanged, and as it turned out owner-guy was actually only manager-guy of The Capital Grille.  Also - pun intended - he hadn’t actually managed to make it to work yet that day, as he was sleeping off last night’s Watershed-induced hangover.  (Amateur.)  He told the hostess to seat us and he’d be in later.  When we walked into the dining room of the restaurant it became brutally apparent why the hostess had been gaping, open-mouthed, at us.    

The entire place was jammed with guys in coats & ties.  It turned out The Capital Grille was a really ritzy, straight-laced businessman’s lunch joint and those of us in Watershed just DID NOT FIT IN.  It was the kinda place lobbyists go to press the flesh with the local politicos.  As we were seated at a table for six in the middle of the restaurant I swear everybody in the place turned to look at us.  At first it got really quiet, then this low buzz of conversation started and it hit me: The lawyers, businessmen and politicians having their power lunches at The Capital Grille THOUGHT WE WERE SOMEBODY FAMOUS, they just couldn’t figure out who.  Because if we weren’t somebody famous, no way were we gonna be allowed in this place dressed the way we were, looking the way we did.  It was the first time in my life I truly felt how it would feel to be famous.  I bet they thought we were The Foo Fighters.    

As we opened the leather-bound menus it became further brutally apparent that our makeshift “$100 gift certificate” wasn’t going to come anywhere close to lunch for any THREE of us, let alone six.   Lunch entrees were at least 20 bucks apiece, beers were seven or eight dollars.  I think we wound up getting two burgers, a couple of salads, five beers, a Coke for me, and we STILL had to kick in money out of our own pockets.  I didn’t feel famous, or like a Foo Fighter, for long.  I still have a linen napkin I stole from The Capital Grille to this day, as a keepsake.

6)    Summer 2006, somewhere on a beach in the South  Sometime right around midnight, Colin grabbed Joe’s hollow-body Gibson six-string and an acoustic guitar we’d brought along on the tour for in-studio radio station interview shows and announced that he and I were gonna go out on the beach and trade new tunes.  Colin was more than a little drunk, he’d always played in a band, didn’t really know the ins & outs of playing solo.  I was my normal sober self, I’d been doing solo acoustic shows since 1990, I was ultra-rehearsed and on top of my game, so I kicked Colin’s musical ass around the beach for awhile.  Colin stumbled through some new material, but didn’t get all the way through a single song for the first half-hour.  I was basically performing my act that I’d honed at Midgard Comics and on the road with Hamell On Trial.  It slowly dawned on Colin that I was not just babbling before I started songs, that I was actually running through fully worked-out intros.  I only gave the illusion that I was making them up on the spot.   

I go along to roadie and sell merch at Colin’s solo acoustic shows now and he has the singer/songwriter process down to a science.  I’d like to think I had a little something to do with that education, that summer night, on that dark beach.

© 2012 Ricki C.

Watershed - The View From The Side Of The Stage, part two: The Fifth Of July and Ricki C. Joins The Road Crew

This post is maybe six weeks or so late.  It was supposed to come right after Watershed, The View From The Side Of The Stage pt. 1, but stuff happens, ya know?  Anyway, re-read that post and then come back to this one.  Also, if you haven't already, go out and buy Hitless Wonder, Joe Oestreich's history of the band, and Brick & Mortar, Watershed's new CD.  You won't be sorry, I promise ya. 

Plus, special thanks to Michael "Biggie" McDermott - road manager extraordinaire and the hero of Hitless Wonder - for giving me the laptop I've been cranking out these blog posts on.  Without him, Growing Old With Rock & Roll would still be on hiatus.  Thanks Mike.

February 5th, 2005 - Watershed opened a new Columbus venue, The Basement, for their The Fifth Of July CD release party.  The place was packed and Watershed was fucking ON FIRE!  First and foremost they played THREE set-starters non-stop to open the show - "Obvious," from the new record, "Suckerpunch" and "Star Vehicle."  It seems a fairly obvious ploy now - on the latest Hitless Wonder/Brick & Mortar tour the band opened with seven songs non-stop before saying "good evening" to the audience - but Jesus it was a great way to open a show.

And after an opening that was truly and almost literally breathtaking they just kept getting better.  Watershed already had at least three solid releases behind them and with the infusion of killer new material from The Fifth Of July, all of a sudden they had a live repertoire with no weak spots whatsoever.  I buttonholed Colin after the show and blathered on like a 12-year old girl about how great the show was.  "You think so?" he said, genuinely perplexed, "Yeah, I guess we played okay."  And it wasn't false modesty, it was just the workaday, professional attitude Watershed takes towards its rock & roll that sets them apart from so many other Columbus (or anywhere else these days, for that matter) bands.  Watershed REHEARSES their songs, they PLAN their sets, they THINK about their audience and take into consideration WHAT CONSTITUTES A SHOW.  And then they DELIVER said show.  What a concept.

A coupla weeks later I was working my day job at Ace In The Hole Music when Colin stopped in.  I'd been serving as road manager for Hamell On Trial (see Hamell On Trial blog, January 2012) since 2001 and Colin asked if I'd be interested in selling merch at one of their shows that was coming up.  "Absolutely," I said, surprised at the offer, as Watershed was pretty much a closed shop as I saw it.  The band had been Colin, Joe and Biggie from the very beginning, with present drummer Dave Masica replacing Herb Schupp at the end of the 90's.  And Rob Braithwaite had been Biggie's right-hand man on the road crew for ages.  I felt honored even to be asked into such exclusive company.  (When I made some mention of this to Biggie months later on a southern tour he deflated my delusions of grandeur with, "Yeah, Colin has a whole list of people he figures he can get to do things for him.  You must have been next on the list.")

The show Colin was referring to was at a bar called Flanagan's in Dublin, Ohio, a ritzy Columbus suburb.  Flanagan's was more suited to singles' pickups and to patio volleyball than to rock & roll, but occasionally dropped their cover band policy for real music.  The place was fairly packed with a novel mix of longtime Watershed fans, along with a bunch of drunken young people who had never seen the band before. The Fifth Of July was still brand new, I had a good stock of the older CD's in place and I wound up doing $435 in merch that night.   

When Flanagan's cleared out after the show and I decided there was no more merch money to be made I wandered back to where Biggie was packing up gear.  "How'd we do on merch?" Biggie asked over his shoulder as he put Colin's guitar away.  "Four hundred and thirty five dollars," I replied, as I counted once more to make sure.  Biggie spun around, "Four hundred and thirty five?" he said, wide-eyed.  "Yeah, is that okay?" I nervously asked.  I had routinely done that much in merch on the road with Hamell, and some of those shows were in theater-sized venues opening for Ani DiFranco, but I still thought $435 was pretty good for a weeknight with Watershed in a Dublin sports bar.  "Uh, yeah, it's fine," Biggie demured, regaining his composure.  Months later, after I had solidified my position with the band, Biggie told me it was the biggest night of merch the band had done to that time.

My first out-of-town show with Watershed was Dayton, Ohio, which barely counts as it's less than 90 minutes from Columbus.  Then Colin called me up and asked if I wanted to do a weekend in Marquette, Michigan, with the band.  I said, "Sure," and later that night I went to my road atlas to look up Marquette.  I'd been going to shows in Michigan since the 1970's (see Pissing With Johnny Thunders blog, August 2012), I knew Ann Arbor and Detroit like the back of my hand.  Plus I had played Saginaw, Lansing, and a coupla other Michigan cities with Hamell.  I thought Marquette must be somewhere around those but when I checked the atlas it gave me a location that I thought couldn't possibly have been right.  Coordinates B-6 was NORTH of fucking Toronto, Canada, and on a line with Montreal.  When my lovely wife Debbie mapquested the trip it was 13 to 15 hours driving time from Columbus.  You can be in Tenafly, New Jersey, Debbie's hometown, right across the Hudson River from New York City in nine hours.  I couldn't believe my eyes.  It was mind-boggling.  How could someplace, anyplace in Michigan be further away from Columbus than the Atlantic Ocean?

We went to Marquette April 8th & 9th, 2005.  Lake Erie was still completely frozen over.  That's how cold it stays in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  The van broke down somewhere just north of Ann Arbor on our return trip.  In fact, the first three times I left Ohio with Watershed the van broke down, stranding us in some cheap little motel within walking distance of wherever the van got towed.  The third time – June 2005 in Valdosta, Georgia – Colin looked at me and said, “You’re not coming out with us anymore, are you?”  "I don't know, Colin, I just don't know," I said, shaking my head as I surveyed the spreading puddle of brake fluid leaking out underneath the van. 

I'm still here with the band in 2012. 


Soon to come – Watershed, pt. 3; My Ten Most Memorable Moments As A Watershed Roadie


© 2012 Ricki C.

Watershed - The View From The Side Of The Stage, part one

As posted in a previous blog, Joe Oestreich - bass player & co-lead singer of Watershed - has a new book out, Hitless Wonder, his memoir/history of the band he co-founded in 1985 as a high school freshman. That's 27 years ago, folks. It's great, of course, but anybody who has ever seen a Kurosawa film knows the real story is about perspective, about point-of-view. This is my memoir of Watershed; from my point of view, my perspective, The View From The Side Of The Stage.

I first met the band Watershed in 1990 when they were still called The Wire. (I may have been one of the first people who pointed out to them that there had been an English post-punk band called Wire in the late 70's, but the news was largely shrugged off because, as Joe states in his book, Wire had never been played on Columbus' lumbering dinosaur of a classic-rock station, Q-FM 96.) They were just kids, maybe 21 years old at that point, but they carried themselves younger and I perceived them to be 17 or 18, tops. (Somehow it never occurred to me that would make them underage to play in bars.)

At that time I was employed as a roadie for Willie Phoenix & The True Soul Rockers. Willie had taken The Wire under his wing, was working on songs with them in preparation for producing their first record (which resulted in an eponymous 6-song e.p.) and thus they were our opening band when Willie held a monthly residency at a Columbus club called Ruby Tuesday. (see Willie Phoenix blog entry, May 2012.)

They were fun, they had a lot of energy and a good attitude, but really the songs weren't that great. And, as Colin has said, "We were just learning. We were flailing. One song would sound like U2, the next song would sound like Rush and the one after that would sound like John Cougar Mellencamp. We were all over the place." Partly I liked them because they were a power trio with dual lead singers playing power-pop music, a configuration you just don't see that often. I always enjoyed watching them as I tuned the arsenal of eight or nine guitars in different tunings that Willie and his lead guitarist Mike Parks deployed in those days. Somewhere over a couple of months of Ruby Tuesday opening slots they changed their name to Watershed and the songs improved somewhat but really it was just a normal young band learning curve of grindingly gradual improvement, nothing really special.

Then one month as I was at my station tuning guitars by the side by the soundboard, Watershed took the stage and launched immediately into a song called "Rise" that stunningly crystallized all the slow improvements they had made in the previous months. It was just a flat-out KILLER power-pop tune: great, clear, positive lyrics; instantly memorable melody; hook after hook in the vocals and in the arrangement. I really, in a way, couldn't believe my ears.

Even more stunningly the entire set that followed just compounded and improved on the new set-opener. It was like it wasn't even the same band I had seen 30 days before, and 30 days before that, and 30 before that. I have never to this day seen a band improve so radically almost literally overnight.

I sat there open-mouthed watching them go through a stage act full of Pete Townshend-styled stage jumps from Colin, bass swoops from Joe and drumming from Herb that was a weird conglomeration of Ringo Starr crossed with Alex Van Halen. I hadn't seen a trio that good since my beloved Boston boys The Neighborhoods circa 1980-1986. I forgot all about tuning and getting ready for Willie's set and just watched as Watershed powered to a great finish.

To make matters worse Willie and his True Soul Rockers chose that night to come out of the rock & roll gate kinda flat and lackluster, plus they looked kinda old & tired that night after the burst of fresh-faced rock that had just been thrown down by Watershed. By the middle of Willie's first set there were scattered calls from the audience of "put the first band back on" and "Watershed" and I wondered if Willie fully realized just how completely he had just been blown off the stage by his proteges.

The next month when we returned to Ruby Tuesday Watershed had been replaced by some lame rock assemblage that was absolutely no threat to the True Soul Rockers. Never let it be said that Willie Phoenix does not know a contender/competitor when he sees one.

I kept up with Watershed over the next couple of years as they went from strength to strength. They worked their asses off; first in Columbus and then, after quitting college, they hit the road in earnest, playing any rock & roll dive bar that would have 'em. Plus weirdly, they were just such nice guys that I partly kept up with them because I wanted to know how long it would take for them to turn into rock & roll assholes.

They were cute, they had gotten great, they were pretty massively popular in Columbus, so why wouldn't they become egotistical assholes? I remember, in particular, one Willie Phoenix gig at this crappy one-cut-above-a-crack-bar we used to get booked into during Willie's "We're gonna play EVERY WEEKEND no matter WHERE," phase of 1992 or so. Watershed had an off-night and came to Willie's gig just to show their support. I remember Colin, Joe, Herb and Biggie sitting at a big round table in the middle of the club with their girlfriends of the time (including Kate, who has persevered) and they looked so impossibly young, well-scrubbed & healthy; even with a truly impressive amount of drinks on the table. They looked like the princes in a court of young, affluent rock & roll royalty. It was Sonic Camelot. I was in my 40's at the time, Willie's act was going down the tubes, and the True Soul Rockers were on the verge of collapse. Simultaneously Watershed was in the process of getting signed to Sony and I remember as I looked at them they just made me feel impossibly old. Thanks, guys.

When the band got their quarter of a million dollar record deal with the Epic Records division of the Sony empire I was sure that's when the asshole process would really kick into high gear. And - truly amazingly - it didn't. They remained the same nice, polite boys from the mean streets of Worthington, Ohio, that they had been all along. And then, in the space of two years when Sony well & truly fucked them on their record deal, that was the time I was absolutely CERTAIN rampant assholism would set in. I had seen that kind of disappointment and bitterness ruin better people than Watershed.

I ran into Colin at a CD-101 Day Show that Howlin' Maggie was playing. Howlin’ Maggie was Columbus' new up & comer band that, strangely, was That Year's Model being signed to Sony and I was certain the shit was gonna hit the fan. I liked but didn't love Howlin' Maggie and made some comment to Colin about how much more Watershed deserved a major label deal than Happy Chichester's crew. But Colin shot right back with, "No, these guys are great. They deserve every bit of success they get." with the same unguarded generosity and unbounded optimism he displays to his fellow rock & rollers to this day. I remember being truly astounded he could be that magnanimous and positive. I'd have badmouthed Howlin' Maggie up one side and down the other if I had just gotten dropped by a major label, but that's just the kind of guy I am.

I caught sets of the band all through the 90's, right up through the early 2000's. I played softball with Herb at musician pick-up games at Schiller Park in German Village. I'd run into Colin at different shows or exchange a few words after their sets. Strangely, I don't think I ever had a credible conversation of more than ten words with Michael "Biggie" McDermott, who is now probably easily my best friend in the band.

In 2002, after a long break from performing and releasing records Watershed blazed back onto the scene with their CD The More It Hurts, The More It Works and I was just fucking floored. It was easily the best thing they had ever done, a masterpiece of blazing rock & roll combined with truly great slow tunes. You show me another band capable of "Can't Be Myself," "Merchurochrome," "Over Too Soon," and "Romantic Noise" ON THE SAME RECORD and I'll show you Big Star in the early 70's. It was their fifth or sixth full-length release and definitely the best thing they had ever done. And NOBODY has their best release come that late in their career. To this day I think it's the best record to come out of Columbus, Ohio, EVER.

(coming soon; Watershed, The View From The Side Of The Stage, part. 2; The Fifth Of July and Ricki C. joins the road crew)

© 2012 Ricki C.

Watershed "Can't Be Myself" (Bonus Video Friday)

In less than a week I'll be hitting the road with this band, Watershed, for the better part of June.   As such I'm not sure how much time or opportunity there will be for blog action.  (I don't own a laptop and I can't say how often I'll be able to cadge time on Joe's or Biggie's.)  Bass player & co-founder Joe Oestreich's book about the band, Hitless Wonder, comes out June 5th, as does the band's new record, Brick & Mortar, you're really gonna need to buy those.  I hope to be coming at you from the road, blog-wise, we'll see what happens....... 

inspirational verse; "I don't know how long I can hold out." Colin Gawel & Joe Oestreich, 2002


© 2012 Ricki C.

Tales of Watershed, part three: The Strange Case of the Somnabulistic Stickman Streaker

It was the mid-2000's, I was on the road with Watershed somewhere in the South.  (Colin and I were recently discussing the fact that "Somewhere In The South" might not have been a bad back-up title or subtitle for the upcoming Watershed book, Hitless Wonder, penned by bassist and co-founder Joe Oestreich.)  (Wait a minute; now that I think about it I just remembered that we were always either somewhere in the South in the middle of the summer or in Marquette, Michigan, way the fuck up in the Upper Peninsula, north of some parts of Canada, in the winter.  Those Watershed boys just had no concept of temperate zones.)  As usual we were six to a room, everybody was asleep except Biggie, who was working away on the computer when I dozed off.  What seemed like only a few minutes later I woke up to some kind of ruckus in the room.  Biggie was dashing by the bed I was in towards the room door and I said, "What's wrong?  Is it the van?"  (I think I had just been dreaming the van was being broken into, a paranoid roadie-dream I used to have all the time on the road.)  "It's fine, go back to sleep," Biggie said over his shoulder as I heard him go out the door and into the hall, still running.

A couple of minutes later, before I could fall asleep again, Biggie led drummer Dave Masica back into the room and got him to lay down in his sleeping bag.  (Dave, owing to back problems, always slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of our hotel rooms.  See Colin and The Stairwell, January 2012 blog entry.)  This shepherding of the drummer by the road manager was unusual in and of itself, but was made even more unusual by two facts: 1) Drummer Masica was stark naked, and 2) Drummer Masica was still sound asleep.

It turned out that Biggie was computing away when Dave got up out of his sleeping bag and started looking around the hotel room.  "Is everything okay, Dave?" Biggie asked, but instead of replying Dave walked over and started hugging the television set.  Then he hugged the hotel room floor lamp.  Realizing that this was anything but a normal night on the road, Biggie nervously repeated, "Dave, you okay, buddy?" as Dave started walking towards the bathroom.  (Biggie told me later that his main fear at that point was that Dave was gonna start pissing all over everything in the room.)

Instead of going into the bathroom, however, the next thing Biggie knew the door was closing behind Dave's bare buttocks as he exited the room.  That was the point at which Biggie woke me up dashing outside to retrieve Dave.  Once in the hall Biggie realized that Dave was sleepwalking and that he had to find a way to guide him back inside our room.  (I'd have paid good money to see Biggie and Dave in that hallway, encountering some other late-night guests.)

None of the rest of the band woke up throughout the entire episode.  When we related the story to Dave the next morning he had no recollection of the hallway incident.  "Oh yeah, I do that sometimes," he said matter-of-factly of the sleepwalking, "just wake me up if it happens again."

Less than two months from now I will be back on the road with Watershed.  I will turn 60 years old in the course of that tour.  I am SO looking forward to the trip.

Watershed, Somewhere in the South, summer 2005

left to right; Pooch, Biggie, Colin, Dave and Joe

ps.  Apropos of that June Watershed trip, there is a Kickstarter link to raise funds for tour support.  Click here and help us ruin our lives.

© 2012 Ricki C.

Tales of Watershed, part two: Kamakaze's

another Watershed road story, for a full intro see Colin and the Stairwell.....

First off, let me set the scene and make a statement: Only Watershed could have two gigs spaced a distance of an hour and a half apart, allow six hours for the drive, AND STILL BE LATE! How, you might ask? I’ll tell ya.

It was 2005, Watershed was on a short run of shows opening for The Clarks, a popular Midwest band that hails from Pittsburgh, Pa. After a killer show the night before, we left the hotel in Morgantown, West Virginia, at noon. (That was a minor miracle in itself, since a noon checkout time to Watershed generally means sometime vaguely before 3 pm.) It was an unseasonably warm 69 degree November afternoon so we decided to hang around and explore downtown Morgantown since we couldn’t imagine that Chester, West Virginia - our destination for that night’s show - was going to be a thriving metropolis. (In that we were correct.)

Everybody scattered, I found a really great comic book store where I killed a couple of hours. I also ran across a passable used CD store in the back room of a neighborhood bodega, but managed to not spend any of my tour money. We all met back up at 3 o’clock, and a back road "scenic route" was mapped out to take full advantage of the fall foliage. (I realize that makes us sound like hippies, but we’re really just Midwest boys with a Kinks-inspired songwriter’s respect & ache for autumn.)

Van discussions/arguments for the day included Pooch seeing Ted Nugent on T.V., talking about surviving after Armageddon and whether we thought we could kill a deer for food. Pooch expressed profound doubts about our city-boy capabilities in that field. That was when Biggie pointed out the fifth roadkill dead deer we had passed that day and said, "There you go, Pooch, I have to go out of my way NOT to kill a deer on this road and you think we’d have trouble hunting one down?"

Anyway, after meandering through several tiny West Virginia hamlets (which seemed to consist almost entirely of churches, bars, and cigarette stores) we were within one mile of that night’s club when there was a traffic accident that culminated in a pickup truck resting on its roof on our left and a couple of cars in the ditch on our right.

Six or seven police cars, ambulances and fire trucks converged on the scene and we came to a stop right outside of a bar called Kamakaze’s. (For all of my fellow World War II Japanese Divine Wind suicide pilot buffs out there, I fully recognize and acknowledge the misspelling. It WAS a bar on the outskirts of Chester, West Virginia, after all.)

A large sign outside Kamakaze’s advertised "exotic bartenders." That sign launched a full 10 minute discussion as to what constituted an "exotic bartender." Were the bartenders topless? Were they dressed in Playboy bunny outfits? Were they women dressed as birds like in that old Goldie Hawn movie Protocol? Indeed, were they women at all?

Finally, as befitted their position as leaders of the band, Colin and Joe asked Biggie’s permission to get out of the van and explore the bar. We were now almost late for load-in, but it was painfully clear we weren’t going anywhere soon, so Biggie grudgingly granted permission.

Joe and Colin walked across the parking lot, entered the bar and not two minutes later Colin returned breathlessly to the van and proclaimed, "The bartenders are TOTALLY NUDE. They’re hot chicks and they are TOTALLY NAKED." Many, many doubts were expressed about this fact and Dave, Pooch and I were given leave to go and confirm said report.

Sonofabitch if Colin wasn’t right on the money. The bartenders at Kamakaze’s were, in fact, totally naked. Wait, let me correct myself – the girls were, to be 100% accurate, wearing flip flops, so as to not stick to the crummy floor of the bar, I would presume. And let me say this, these girls were not middle-aged present or former crack whores, my friends, they were really fairly attractive young women in their mid-twenties. Let’s say they were cuter than girls you see working in WalMart, but not as cute as the girls pole-dancing topless at your local strip joint. Imagine the West Virginia cousins of Miley Cyrus’ or Lindsay Lohan’s entourages/posses, and you kinda get the picture.

Anyway, not unexpectedly, the bar was packed, and not just with local working-class joe's. (Though, to be fair, there were a fair amount of tractor-ad baseball caps in evidence on the clientele.) There were probably as many women as there were men in Kamakaze’s and nobody, other than probably the Watershed crew, was openly gaping at the nude bartenders. It seemed like everybody in the town had come to a kind of accommodation with the nudity factor and the atmosphere was fairly light. There was certainly no heavy-duty strip-club vibe.

After about ten minutes my inherent Catholic-boy "I MUST be doing something wrong, this is a sin" guilt kicked in and I walked back out to where Biggie was sitting in the van on the road outside the bar. I filled him in on the nudity factor, we ascertained the cops were making no headway in clearing the road, so Biggie pulled the van in the parking lot and checked Kamakaze’s out for himself. At some point we realized the drummer of The Clarks was also inside the dimly-lit bar, which took a lot of the pressure off being on time for soundcheck. (In point of fact, it was not said drummer’s first visit to Kamakaze’s. He wasn’t a regular, exactly, but he sure seemed to know his way around the place.) I walked back out to the van, settled in with my book, and after about an hour the police finally cleared one lane for traffic. Biggie and I collected the band from their bartender-ogling and we drove the remaining one mile up the road to the club. We were then almost two hours late for load-in after leaving six hours early. Just another afternoon on the town with Watershed. Just another day on the road.


postscript; A couple of weeks later I was at a party at our friends Danya & Mike’s house telling the Kamakaze’s story when a drummer friend of ours (who shall remain nameless) walked in on the tail end of the story. Drummer-guy was pretty smashed, possibly as drunk as I’ve ever seen him, and he seized on the "nude female bartender" part of the story, and seized HARD. He started asking/demanding/slurring, "WHERE IS THIS PLACE? HOW CAN THE GIRLS BE TOTALLY NUDE IF THEY’RE SERVING ALCOHOL? WHERE IS THIS PLACE!?!" I tried to explain that it’s in West Virginia, I don’t think Ohio topless bar laws apply there, and our drummer buddy did everything short of grabbing my lapels and shaking me, saying "Where IS this place; EXACTLY?" I expected him to grab a pen & paper, write down the name of the town, jump in his car and light out right that moment for the Ohio/West Virginia border. The entire time his immensely patient wife was sitting right next to him, just kinda sighing. Another Saturday night. Another rock & roll party.



© 2012 Ricki C.

Tales of Watershed, part one: Colin and the Stairwell

January 3rd, 2012


I joined the road crew of Columbus, Ohio’s pride & joy rock band, Watershed, sometime in February of 2005. At that point the band consisted of Colin Gawel, lead vocals & lead guitar; Joe Oestreich, lead vocals & bass; Mark "Pooch" Borror, guitar & backing vocals; and Dave Masica, drums & backing vocals. Michael "Biggie" McDermott was the road manager, my boss, and was, and sometimes still is, largely the brains of the outfit.

Colin and the Stairwell

When Watershed hit the road we stayed in a really nice chain of national hotels (which shall remain nameless) because we used to stay for only $35 a night, owing to a family connection to one of the band members (who shall further remain nameless because I don’t want said family member to lose their job). Only two members of the band would actually register at the hotel, but all six of us would pile into one room to sleep and cadge the free hot breakfast buffet the next morning. The first four guys asleep shared the two beds, Dave always slept in a sleeping bag on the floor owing to a bad back, and whoever was the last to crash would just lay down on whatever was left (room couch, two chairs pushed together, rolled up in a blanket on the floor, wherever).

One of those hazy nights somewhere in the South I awoke sometime before 6 am to find Colin standing over me in the dark saying, "Ummm, we might have to leave the hotel early." There was a hotel security guard standing in the doorway of the room, surveying the murky scene of five band and road crew members strewn around the room, and he didn’t look happy. (I don’t think the profusion of beer bottles and guitar cases lightened his mood either.) Colin told me that he had gotten really drunk & disoriented, somehow left the room in the middle of the night, couldn’t find his way back, and wound up falling asleep in the stairwell of the hotel. He got kicked awake by the hotel security guard and against all odds remembered our room number, and now we were probably getting booted out.

I just kinda murmured, "Oh, Colin," rolled over and went back to sleep because I figured I could get at least twenty more minutes of rest before we were thrown out. Amazingly, either the security guard never reported us, or the management of the hotel decided to give us a break because nobody ever came to kick us out. All six of us ate breakfast in the hotel dining room later that morning, I cadged my usual yogurt & banana for lunch in the van and we rolled out for the next gig. We were never blacklisted by the hotel chain and nothing ever came of the incident.

Thank you, Mr. Security Guard, wherever you are today.
　
　


© 2012 Ricki C.