ROADIE-ING FOR AIRPLANE MAN

In 2004, these two girls I had heard music from in Boston visited. While they were here they asked me to roadie for them on a tour of the west coast. They were playing in San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, and LA and they needed a driver so I gladly said yes. This was a 2 piece band, a drummer and a guitar player. Both girls. When we had jammed we played Mona by Bo Diddley. Me and the drummer were laughing because it was so fun. I laughed until I cried. She didn't miss a beat. They played some garage rock but also a lot of Howlin' Wolf covers. They had fucking just seen Junior Kimbrough .

I drove them from here to Vancouver, Canada and then down to LA. They played shows the whole time. Roadie-ing is fucking fun. You become part of the band. I had two days with the van after they flew home. I spent it at these two bars in Echo Park. One was called the Short Stop and the other had no name. These bars were awesome and I love LA. 

One of the things I forgot to mention is that before one of the shows in LA we went to a diner and met fucking Billy West who was a friend of the drummer Tara. The internet was still new so I didn't know what had happened with Ren & Stimpy. He had taken over and he told me the story of how John Kay got eff'd. He just said he had been fired, he didn't say why. He said they needed someone to do Ren. Later I heard Billy West on Howard Stern but before then he had just been a guy from Boston. Now he's my hero.

To be honest he was always my hero. When I was a kid, he had characters on the radio that were hilarious. Fucking WBCN. Every day at 5 minutes past 5 they would play 5 minutes of stand up comedy. "Thanks to morons, psychopaths, and mental defectives." It was funny. And then Billy West would do his developmentally disabled character Duane Glasscock. Later when he was on the Howard Stern show he came out and did fucking Larry Fine. It was incredible. This was back when Howard had homeless Jeopardy and it was on Fox, back when Fox TV was a cool TV station.

I also need to mention that when I spent two days at the bars in Echo Park I wrote my name on the board for pool. By the time I finally came up I was playing a beautiful Latina girl. The Gypsy Kings version of "Hotel California" came on the jukebox. Talk about perfect timing.