Research

Blog! said Greg Daly, so I blog. Normally, Greg Daly drives the van, but he’s resting in the backseat and Franz is driving. I’m here in traffic in southern California, drunk, in a van with a six-person rock and roll band. Normally, they’re an eight-person rock and roll band, but some people have to work, sometimes. Pity. All the other people on the road here in California have been working all day, instead of getting drunk in a van.

Getting drunk in a van is a serious business and we appraoch it accordingly. This morning began in Vegas with a martini and some video blackjack. I left Vegas down $7.00 but up one shower, which I consider a triumph. You see, I ‘ve become the biographer of the Greatest Rock and Roll Band of All Time. I think it’s going to be an opinionated biography, lacking some of the detachment of most journalistic pieces, but including more of the drunkenness. Last night the band played Vegas and I did my best to observe their every action by getting drunk in the van in the desert and then passing out on the couch in the Double Down Saloon (slogan: “The Happiest Place on Earth”). Somehow I managed to wake up in time to see the band play a great show. “Band played a great show,” I wrote dutifully in my notebook. “Got drunk and passed out on a couch in the Double Down Saloon in Vegas. Rock and roll is here to stay.”

This isn’t my debauchery, it’s my research. Thanks to network television, mainstream publishing and the NEA, too many undeserving stories have been told, and I am here to tell one of the more important stories I’ve happened upon in my sweet short life. (“Goddamn you’re old,” cackled the woman who scrutinized my ID at the rest stop outside Vegas.) And so in the name of research, and storytelling, and the imortalization of those few who actually deserve immortiality, I have sacrficed myself to a week of drinking, sleeping in punk squats lacking toliet paper and other amenities, and subsisting on a diet of pretzels and boxed wine.

How often do you get to put your iPod on random and when a song comes on, it so happens that the entire band that recorded it is sitting all around you, drunk and stuck in traffic? That is the sort of event I wish to bring all several dozen of you, dear readers, from the trenches of human experience–the experience of touring with a rock and roll band and letting them judge you by the shuffle of your iPod.