Waiting to Derail by Thomas O'Keefe

Author:Thomas O'Keefe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2018-05-11T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

10

In mid-January of 1998, we left on a six-week run that would send us out to the West Coast. This stretch of shows would take us back to many of the cities we’d hit the previous summer on the RV tour, but now we knew the gigs were going to be much more crowded. Instead of playing to 150 people in a half-empty bar, we’d be playing to three hundred in a bar that had a line stretching around the corner. Instead of playing to a couple hundred in a small theater, we’d be playing for five or six hundred. Sometimes even a thousand. Heading west out of Raleigh that January, we were propelled by one other piece of adrenaline-spiking news: five days into the tour, Whiskeytown would be taping an episode of PBS’s iconic Austin City Limits. It would be the band’s debut television appearance.

The lineup and crew were the same as on the Uncle Donnie tour, with one notable exception: Uncle Donnie himself. Over the holidays, I received a call from Four Seasons Coaches, the company he drove for. The owner of the company told me that on the Silver Eagle they had installed a computer that measured the engine’s RPMs. “Uncle Donnie was either driving in first gear the whole time,” the owner said, “or he was averaging almost a hundred miles an hour.” The owner already knew the correct answer: B. So the company was going to make it up to me, he said, by giving us a new driver and a nicer bus. Now we were pointed southwest in a deluxe Van Hool with a pristine interior, including a shower with more pressure than those in many of the Super 8s we’d stayed in.

After an uneventful show in Houston (“uneventful” in a good way, like when the plane doesn’t crash and all that happens is you get to your destination alive), we played Bryan, Texas. At the end of the show, as the band were walking offstage, Jenni’s foot got tangled in Ryan’s guitar cable, and she inadvertently knocked over Ryan’s black Les Paul Custom, breaking the headstock off the neck. She felt horrible. She’d only been in the band for three months, and now she’d accidentally gone Pete Townshend on the frontman’s first-string guitar—four days before the Austin City Limits taping.

Ryan sat in the Val Hool, staring down at the Les Paul’s broken neck. He looked ready to cry. This was his favorite guitar. “What are we gonna do?” he said.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “This is not a problem. Happens to Les Pauls all the time.” I told him we’d just mail the guitar to a luthier in Raleigh to be glued back together. After the fix, Ryan would never know the difference. In the meantime, we’d go buy a new one.

So the next afternoon, we sound-checked at Trees in Dallas, and then Ryan and I took a taxi out to the Guitar Center by the Galleria Mall. He sampled a bunch of different models, eventually deciding on a midseventies sunburst Les Paul.

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