Earl's II

Being the first part of the esteemed author's travels with her musical group The Coughs in the great state of Texas

A lot of my tour horror stories start in Texas. Texas is a place that has grown on me a lot from playing in Dallas and Denton and Houston, but when I first starting playing there, I was terrified of it from growing up in Chicago. And then, our first experience playing there was one of the scarier live shows I’ve played.

 The bad vibes of this first show were added to by the 12-hour drive in 100-degree temperature. The Coughs van had no air conditioning, so we eventually had to cover the windows in fabric and close them because only hotter air came in through the open windows.

 In general, the southwest has always been a dead zone for touring despite an occasional bright spot, in those days it usually involved driving 12 hours to play for 10 people. Or in one case, drive all day to discover the person who set up the show has ghosted you and you have to sleep in a public park. This sounds awful but I actually got the best sleep of my life interrupted by a random person’s dog licking my face.

These shows were not fun but also unexceptional, the show in Odessa TX was frightening from the get-go. Jon Ziemba was immediately losing his shit the moment we pulled into the small city. “this place sucks, fuck this is where we’re playing!”. As usual we dismissed him as being Jon, but everything that happened confirmed his anxiety and lead him to be like “See! See! This is what I was saying”.  Pessimism has the advantage of bragging rights when things actually go wrong.

We picnicked outside on canned goods from the grocery store.  Coughs in that tour was like the military, we were determined to spend as little money as possible. But our picnic was interrupted by some teens in a car throwing a firework at us. 

We arrived at the venue called “Earls 2” which was a pool hall playing classic rock. Things immediately got off to bad start. I think I went in to use the restroom and the female bartender/ owner was so upset by my being a trans woman that she retreated into the back to loudly screech jumbled slurs to herself “N$$&&$F887$TS!!” ( a bizarre combo of the slur for a black person and a gay person.) that I could still hear from inside the bathroom.

The well water in Texas was hard for us to take and the bar wanted us to pay them to drink it. In addition, there was issues with us being barefoot in “Earl’s 2” which the management claimed was a public health hazard. In reality this might have been for our own protection as it’s not the safest thing to have bare feet at a dive bar. 

Behind the venue was a destroyed trailer full of children’s toys and detritus that looked like a crime scene. 

There was actually a decent audience but equally there was large contingent of dudes who were playing pool and listening to AC/DC. And the moment we turned the PA on and started sound checking, interrupting the hard rock that was playing, the patrons of the bar started loudly yelling various slurs at us.

 In the face of the confrontation we performed pretty well, Anya announcing from the mic,

“Hey, we’re coughs, we’re a bunch of f@#&ts from Chicago.”  For my part, I climbed on a pool table which the owner really hated. Carrie got really nervous that we were about to cause a riot and so we toned it down for the remainder of the set. 

I don’t know exactly how, but I antagonized this blond teenager who seem to fancy himself a local franchisee of the Eminem brand. Most likely, I was getting in his face and blaring saxophone at him as I often did in those days. I have some idea he was a relative of the female bartender but I’m not sure.

When I was loading out and he was standing there in my path I nodded at him just to be like “Hey we’re cool right?” and to mellow any antagonism. He took this for some sort of crude proposition because the next thing I knew all 85 pounds of him was in my face, not really doing anything violent but making the macho noises that portend a fight starting 

“Get out of my face!” He yelled “I’m not tripping dog, you fucking stink”

Luckily, one of the promoters was standing nearby and he was a big burly dude. He calmly told the Eminem-like to cut it out or he would kick his ass. 

Barely acknowledging my savior, I went back and hid in the van for the remainder of the show. Everyone else was hanging out and having fun but I was terrified and demanded we stay in a motel that night. 

The next day we played in Austin, Texas at Emo’s. This could be me adding to our list of misfortunes because we were playing with Japanther. 

I’m not sure why Japanther became such a joke in the noise scene but it seemed to be due to some messy personal behavior. Pretty much anytime I tell this story about them, no one has a kind word in their favor. It seems their reputation got so bad, that they had to switch genres to the pop-punk scene to find success which they eventually did.  

We had played a show with Japanther before in Detroit and they had gotten flummoxed by the time-zones and shown up as the bar was closing. The bar told them they couldn’t play because they were so late. It’s notable this bar were huge assholes and extorted money out of us for breaking a mic cable when one of our cymbals fell over.

I think we were generally supportive and even waited for one of the members to try to plug in his amp at an outlet he had found outside in desolate Hamtramck. This was even though we had to drive back to Chicago that night. Nevertheless, we did find the whole thing pretty funny and maybe our laughter added to the humiliation of the event and I remember us pulling off in our van as it turned out that the outlet was unpowered

Despite the fact that their misfortune was more due to the management of the bar than anything that we did, they held a grudge against us. At the end of their set in Austin, they made an announcement at the end of their set that they were playing a house party and everyone should leave right now to go to it. They were opening for us and this cleared out like 90% of the paying customers. We were left us to play for our friends in Mika Miko and a few stragglers. But I remember our performance being really fun. 

Despite the anxieties of having to perform live, as a performer you get used to playing to a generally sympathetic audience who is at the very least indifferent to you playing live. So, in doing any performance that the audience is opposed to is demoralizing and exhausting. This is one of the reasons it became such a burden to perform as Forced because part of the point of performance was the discomfort it caused.

 I’ve experienced this several times and every time, it’s been emotionally difficult.  But what’s interesting is the next performance after such an incident is a joy. Partially because all the pent-up emotion from your failure is being expressed and partially it’s just refreshing to just be able to perform your music free of opposition. That was true that night and as well Emo’s had a great PA.