Saturday, October 4, 2008

Go Team Tour March 89 PT 7

Post-script 2008. At some point on this tour, Robert called his girlfriend Denise from a phone booth and asked her to marry him. We had been driving all night and were in a parking lot and the sun was coming up. He walked back to the car and told us he was getting married, I was like, uh…”why?!! Are you insane?!” I didn’t really get that--like you are on tour and you want to go home? And get married? The road makes you wanna settle down? He said he missed Denise and he didn’t want to be away from her ever again. It was a mystery to me but he knew what he wanted to do and in retrospect I’m glad he was smart enough to live his life the way he wanted to. It was only on this last tour that I began understand how he must have felt. He and Al were older, they were turning 25 and had just graduated from college and they were ready to settle down. I liked Robert, but we argued a lot, he was always talking about wanting to grow old gracefully and did stuff like listen to Frank Sinatra and wore old man sweaters. I remember wishing I had met him when he was a young, wild punk kid. He spoke in aphorisms, so it’s cool that there are so many Robert quotes in here. I was turning 20 and returning to Olympia to finish my first year of school but I all I wanted to do was hang out and play music 24/7. I was trying to formulate my next band. Calvin was 26 or 27 and was working on K full time. Mecca Normal were older too, I looked up to them because I had seen them on the Black Wedge tour in when I was 16 and was blown away but they seemed like authority figures to me, because they were older and serious…I related to Billy and Jenny best, they were older--Bill was 23 and Jenny 25 I think--but they were both wild and up for kicks ….so I was the baby of the tour, still a teenager and a little scared of everything but trying to break out. I would spend much of the next several years on tour. Bikini Kill started touring the summer of 1991, but first there would be another Go Team U.S. tour (fall 89) as well as a west coast tour playing drums with Some Velvet Sidewalk (spring 1990).

Cheers to Robert and Denise. Cheers to Al & Jenny, Bill and Calvin and to Jean and David. Thanks for bringing me on the road.

1 comment:

Mike said...

Awesome, Tobi. I would be really interested in reading your autumn 1989 tour diary, as that's the only time I ever got to see the Go Team live.