Notes From the Road: Long Days, Lyrical Nights With De Jarnett, Falcons

“Agggh! Rock ‘n’ roll is the only religion that never lets you down! Garble . . . mmmpft!”

That’s the sentiment of Lemmy, the gravel-voiced lead icon of Motorhead, at the tail end of the band’s “Killed by Death.” The song is perhaps best heard at cell-crushing volume at 4 a.m. while assaying a gray strip of New Mexico highway with a bed still hundreds of miles distant.

Lemmy may have a point about rock’s station, because if it isn’t a missionary zeal that drives bands to spread their music by interstate highway, then it must be a monumental stupidity. After 2 weeks of traveling on the road with the Orange County-bred Ann De Jarnett and the Falcons, I’m still not sure which it is.

Who would rationally buy into a deal like this?: You drive to the Mississippi and back, tacking on a couple of extra thousand miles for detours such as Houston and Lincoln, Neb.; outside the car windows passes an America untainted by tourism, the festive avenues of Pratt, Kan., and Dripping Springs, Tex.; and each tour stop offers a panoply of sights, the squalid motel, the dank club, the Circle K.

Then there’s the sleepless joy of hauling several hundred pounds of cumbersome equipment about, and performing for audiences who oftentimes haven’t heard of you, or sometimes aren’t even there. With luck--and some additional hustling of T-shirts and cassettes--the tour breaks even, not counting the weeks of pay that band members lose wiggling out of their day jobs.

When musicians do this, they call it “a living.”

Increasingly of late, Orange County acts have been upping their commitment to their craft by taking their music on the road. A Houston nightclub’s recent schedule could have come from the heyday of Huntington Beach’s lamented Safari Sam’s, with National People’s Gang, the Swamp Zombies, De Jarnett and the long-enduring James Harman Band appearing there within weeks of each other.

Like NPG and the Zombies, De Jarnett records for the aggressive little Dr. Dream Records, and her tour was booked by former Big John’s manager Jim Palmer out of Dr. Dream’s Orange offices. As this was the band’s first time on the road, and in the dead of winter, no less, it seemed an ideal time to tag along as road manager (pronounced: slave ) to see what it was all about.

Monday, Jan. 9: Singer/violinist De Jarnett, bassist Mark Soden and drummer Mike Sessa convened for a 9 a.m. departure at Ann’s Long Beach home, where her boyfriend was dishing out multi-grain pancakes. The group also has a guitarist, Chris Ruiz-Velasco, but, true to band members’ predictions, he was still asleep in Anaheim when they phoned at 9:50.

Our home on wheels for the next 2 weeks would be a tan ’73 Caprice wagon rented from the Swamp Zombies and a stubby equipment trailer, dubbed Blue Lou. Those familiar with the Zombies might have expected the wagon’s interior to be somewhat akin to a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket, but it’s surprisingly clean. The only condition they placed on the rental is that a leering, carved devil’s-head talisman remain dangling from the rear-view mirror.

Both wagon and trailer were riding low to the ground before we even picked up Ruiz-Velasco in Anaheim--a move preferred to trusting his snooze alarm. In addition to the band gear and Soden’s essential coffee-brewing materials, we had packed enough wool, polypropylene and goose-down clothing to stuff a Fotomat. Temperatures in Lincoln had dropped recently to 7 degrees, and a knowledge of Midwest weather, based on repeated viewings of “The Wizard of Oz,” had band members already wishing that Blue Lou had a cellar.

Heading out on the 91, we got a parting word from Orange County: a BMW dealer’s radio ad featured a Yup couple struggling through tough aerobics-wear purchases and long office days, “but because we deserve the best, it’s worth the extra hours and sacrifice,” said the missus. The day ended in an overheated Tucson hotel room, where a roller-bed barely puzzle-fit between the two doubles, driving home the idea that the five of us were going to be living together for the next two weeks. Thankfully, no one snores or watches “Geraldo.”

Tuesday, Jan. 10: A determination to reach Austin, Tex.--530 miles away--by evening was swayed only by essential stops such as pawn shops, convenience markets, Mexican restaurants and the Thing, a 75-cent roadside attraction that looked like a crafts-class statue of Iggy Pop made of chicken bones and vacuum cleaner dust.

At a chilly gas station in Ozona, Tex., Sessa struck up a conversation with the attendant, who felt sure he could get the band booked at the local bowling alley next time through. Meanwhile, the middle-age occupants of another car noticed the guitar cases and introduced themselves as proprietors of a heavy metal accessory shop in Houston, showing us an array of garish skull rings and bootleg Guns ‘n’ Roses bandannas. Sizing up the band, one asked, “Are you guys into Christian rock or something?”

The band does look a tad tame, if only because most members got their fashion statements and vices out of the way in seminal OC bands. Ruiz-Velasco had been a founding member of Berlin, De Jarnett had been in Pneumonic Devices and Soden had the Nu-Beams, a band that responded to the lack of OC new music venues by playing guerrilla gigs in Laundromats. Several years younger than the other members, Sessa has played in the Joneses and other county bands.

All have significant others at home, and outside of Soden’s ugly caffeine habit, the band doesn’t touch drugs, prefering the cheap high that comes from reading the Weekly World News tabloid. The choicest headline this week: “I was kidnaped by a tribe of Al Jolson look-alikes!”

Wednesday, Jan. 11: We pulled into Austin around 3 a.m. The Tru-Value motel’s pool looked like there was a layer of pesto sauce on the surface, but the motel also is home to Stubb’s superfine Barbeque. The booking at an Austin club had fallen through, so this was to be purely barbecue day. We breakfasted on hot links at Stubb’s, lunching later on the east side at Sam’s, perhaps the best rib shack in town, despite its charred-catbox ambiance.

We were saved from a three-barbecue day by Soden finding a club which needed a band that night. At 6:30, we loaded into Joe’s Generic Bar on Austin’s club-packed 6th Street. As we hefted the amps and drums in, it was hard not to notice that Ruiz-Velasco was off chatting with the barman. “Um,” I asked quietly, “Does Chris have some impediment that keeps him from lifting things?” “Yeah, his brain,” Ann replied. (This proved a one-time lapse, as he toted his share from then on.)

Joe’s had Elvis-on-velvet paintings on the walls, and its men’s room sign playfully just pointed outdoors, but one standard nicety that the club lacked was a sound system. Ann wound up doing the tour’s first gig with her vocals going through a distorted guitar amp, with only 13 people (five from another band) looking on. The band got 20% of the bar sales, which worked out to $6.

While I’ve known some of the members for years, I’d had a limited enjoyment of the band’s live shows, chiefly because they seemed to lack a sense of purpose, as if they didn’t understand why they were on a stage in front of people. And here, playing an impromptu gig for chump change to a near-empty house, the band played by far the best show I had seen from it, with Ann’s vocals and violin howls riding over a frying rhythm section. Sheesh, they even smiled on stage.

Thursday, Jan. 12: That spirit carried over to a better-attended gig 190 miles away at Fitzgerald’s in Houston, a beautifully funky club built as a Polish dance hall in the 1890s. It also provided the best lodging of the trip, in a less-stylishly funky house behind the club. Though the accommodations amounted to four mattresses on the floor of a drafty add-on room, there was a homey feeling.

The club waitress who lived there cooked a shrimp curry dinner for us as the club’s publicist explained the latest Houston fad, which evidently entails nighttime roller-skating around downtown corporate plazas, drawing pursuit from humorless security guards with golf carts and brooms. Sessa touched up his shoes with a black Marks-a-Lot as he sat listening.

Friday, Jan. 13: Some places on the interstate between Houston and Dallas look distressingly Californian, with vacu-formed K marts and condos. Still, there are distinctively longhorn touches: frontage road businesses display both Texas-shaped tombstones and hot tubs; instead of a scarecrow, one farmer had three dead, splayed crows hanging from the branches of a barren tree.

For most of the trip, a horizontal rain drove into the windshield; the radio reported snow north of Dallas. Next, we figured, Hurricane Elvis would come tearing up from the gulf, consuming all doughnut stands and drugstores in its path.

At this point, the Caprice was turning into a cramped, rolling hell. A sticking speedometer cable cranked and released with spine-straightening regularity. The back-seat hump was dubbed “the vinyl horse.” Some of the perishable foods were hopelessly buried. Simple things, like changing lanes or backing up, were patience-fraying tasks with Blue Lou in tow.

After becoming lost in Dallas’ traffic for a while, we checked in to the first motel we found. Once it had been a Travelodge, but there was only a dark silhouette of where the trademark sleepy bear had hung on the concrete wall. It willingly would have chewed off a leg to get away if it could have known what the place looks like now.

In our room, the heat didn’t work, the phone had been stolen, there were no towels on the broken racks and most of the lights were dead. Ann needed to do a phone interview with a St. Louis paper, so she and Mark made the call from an open pay phone in the rain.

Back in the room, Ruiz-Velasco and Sessa had a hot plate dinner of canned soup and Cornnuts while a burly handyman on a ladder whacked at the heater with a mallet. Chris has formulated a new list of the major food groups: sugar, salt, chemicals, flour, grease and taste. Off to the gig.

Saturday, Jan. 14: Today, it was 360 miles to Wichita, Kan., much of it through fresh snow in Oklahoma. Big Dog Studios is a fabulously appointed club, but again attendance is light, despite a potentially misleading marquee listing De Jarnett and the opening band: “Tonight, Ann De Jarnett with Legs Akimbo.” There is not a particularly active night life in town. As the club manager sardonically put it, “Now, don’t leave Wichita without going to the Pizza Hut.”

There is a local scene of sorts, though: a hard-core band called Snotweb is due to play in a couple of nights, and the club still has the tree stump that a local metal band used to impale a dummy stuffed with red dye and luncheon meats in a concert last winter.

Here, as elsewhere, local musicians asked the band about L.A., because all are convinced they’ll have to go there to make it. We tell them they’re better off where they are, instead of competing with the gaggles of identical mascara-and-rent-Spandex glam-metal bands which pervade Los Angeles. One Wichita drummer remarked, “Yeah, we call that the ‘used whore’ look out here.”

Sunday, Jan. 15: We drove the 465-mile haul to St. Louis. There was no gig that night, so we repaired to a soul-less Italian restaurant where an easily star-struck waitress asked Ann for show-biz hair-style tips.

For those wanting to duplicate the De Jarnett look at home, she wears her hair up, held by enough Aqua-Net to stop a bullet. But there’s more than hair and makeup to the transformation that occurs when she goes on stage. Even she isn’t sure what takes over. “On a good night on stage, I go into automatic pilot,” she said, “and I really don’t know what I’m doing, but it’s a good, real high emotional thing. I want to get to a point where I can extract something from myself that will make people shocked, or feel more freedom in themselves.”

It would be fun to have some hellish arguments to report, but the band is the spirit of conviviality. Only two minor points rankle at all: Mike’s ever-deafening snare drum, which Mark has nicknamed the Discipline Ram, and Mark’s own coffee-driven mania for punctuality. He typically rises hours before anyone else would choose to, and, like the first child up on Christmas, makes a lot of noise until we’re all on his schedule. In balance, though, he also is the one attending to nearly every practical detail of the tour.

Monday, Jan. 16: The morning was spent doing laundry. During the small bit of afternoon open to the band, we took the freeway through St. Louis, just to say we had seen it, and then drove through a slum, just to wish we hadn’t. It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, making the urban desolation seem that much sadder and immutable.

Even such days without a major drive are hopelessly dissected by phone interviews and prearranged times when the band has to call in to the label. Then, the equipment load-in and sound check were usually set close enough to show time to prevent straying far from the club. Instead, one sits there in the empty venue and engages in meaningful conversation with the soundman:

“So, how come they call you Deaf Bob?”

“Huh?”

Tuesday, Jan. 17: The club in Columbia, Mo., is located across from a store whose yellow and black sign reads “Liquor, Guns and Ammo.” The club is equally charming, the sort of place that snakes and voles would frequent if they had the cash. It reminded the Ann band very much of OC’s fabled Cuckoo’s Nest. The local opening band, Psycho-welders, was so deafeningly boring that we started a new dance to match, dubbed the Lee Trevino.

Once on stage, De Jarnett and the Falcons turned in an appropriately dark, angry set. Sessa’s cousin, Don, was in attendance. A large, bald, family man, Don didn’t seem the least put off by the seamy surroundings, even when engaged in conversation by a leather-dolled fan with black mascara smeared across his face. Some decades earlier, Don had spent time on the road playing trumpet in swing bands, and nothing surprises him. As we loaded the trailer, he sat on the stage, staring at its carpet, which was mostly composed of holes, stains and old duct tape.

“It must all have been a little more glamorous back in your heyday,” I suggested.

“Nope, it’s always been just the same old crap. Nothing ever changes for musicians.”

Wednesday, Jan. 18: After an easy 290 miles, we made Lincoln, Neb., where a week and a half earlier it had hit 7 degrees. This sunny day, though, we might have been in Santa Barbara, except perhaps for the cattle and cornstalks. The band turned in a good solid set at Duffy’s Tavern, where the bar offers two innovative drinks, the Jello Shot--made with jellied schnapps--and, for those with serious leisure time, the Fishbowl.

Thursday, Jan. 19: Having gotten no more than 3 hours of sleep for two nights running, we started on the real hell drive of the trip, from Lincoln to neighboring Tucson, Ariz., for a gig on Friday night. By this point, Soden already had long figured that Jim Palmer’s booking technique involved a six-pack and a spinning globe (but, seriously, folks, it’s a difficult, painstaking job that Palmer does for his bands). The band decided to get the worst over with and push on 1,070 miles to Las Cruces, N.M., leaving 250 miles to cover Friday.

Midway through Kansas, a state trooper wrote Chris up for going 7 m.p.h. faster than he actually was, and after taking a good look at us, asked: “Are you transporting any illegal drugs or guns in this vehicle?” That must say something for the weathering effect of the road, since only a week before the band was being taken for Christian rockers.

We chewed the fat with the officer for a while, about whether or not it would be fine for him to search our vehicle. He eventually opted not to, and we pushed on. Soon we passed a highway sign which read, honestly: “Drive carefully, unmarked nuclear weapons travel this road,” which made one wonder why the hell they were worried about guns.

For a band which had started the tour on health-boy pancakes, it hadn’t taken long to sink. Now we were living on coffee and Snickers, with an occasional greasy truck-stop meal. Soden had ordered one trucker breakfast platter titled “the Full Load.”

We were thoroughly zombified by the time we tumbled into a booth at a truck-stop diner outside of Tucumcari, N.M. As decoupaged Elvis clocks and worse looked on from the walls, Mark, Ann and Chris struggled with chili rellenos which looked like nothing so much as Velveeta-stuffed squirrels which had been run through a snake’s digestive system, then deep-fried. The Elvis clock seemed to beckon, “Go on, eat ‘em. I would.” We needed coffee something fierce.

Somehow, despite a Communist bloc-style police roadblock on the interstate, we reached Las Cruces near sunrise, and even slept for 4 or 5 hours before doing it again to Tucson.

Friday, Jan. 20: We met Ramon Ramirez near the outskirts of Tucson. If you don’t know Ramon, it’s only because he hasn’t rear-ended your vehicle yet. An uninsured gentleman, Mr. Ramirez took some time reaching an accord with us, and it took longer yet for us to get the damage repaired to a roadworthy state.

That killed the idea of grabbing a few minutes rest before the sound check at the club. The show’s opening band precluded the idea of resting after it. Tucson’s Club Congress is located on the bottom floor of the Hotel Congress, and our room was conveniently located directly above the stage, where this band sounded as if it were flailing at its instruments with Vise-Grips.

By the time they had cleared the stage, there were only 50 minutes left before the club closed, but Ann and the Falcons burned through every second of it, as if the last 1,300 miles had just been the windup for this pitch. Fifteen sticks of Black Love/Money Blessing incense (purchased somewhere or other in the blurred last few days) smoked thickly away at the front of the stage as Ann launched into “Money Grow on Trees,” a cynical look at consumerism and military spending that she had dedicated to George Bush, who we had heard had become President that morning.

Before the set was half through, a bartender pushed through the crowd to buy a tape of the band. “I’ve never bought a tape of anybody who’s played here before,” he yelled. “Where has this band been?”

A bit of sleep might have been nice after the gear was packed, but we needed to get Mark to an airport in Phoenix because he had to work two mobile DJ gigs in Los Angeles that coming afternoon (later, he told us that he had literally dozed off at one). But by then we could do the 117 miles in our sleep, which we did.

Saturday, Jan. 21: Approaching Palm Springs, and eventually home, the band reflected on the trip. Financially, they were ending up either $35 ahead or behind; they weren’t quite sure. Once home, the band would have only 3 days until it headed up to toward Seattle, but no one seemed particularly daunted by the prospect of the road possibly stretching on for the rest of his or her life.

“That’s the point,” Ann said, “to get to where we can survive just by doing our music like this. It doesn’t have to be in some huge way. It would be great just to be able to play and say some things with music that I think people need to hear.”

Which things?

“Just that people need to know that everyone in this life suffers, but it’s not all a dark cloud. Even though there are problems, they can lead you on with hopefully a little more knowledge and compassion. I think that’s going to be important to know in the next few years.”

Chris said: “Sometimes it takes something that’s abstract, that’s not a part of real life, like a concert, to make you feel alive. Music is so fleeting and fragmentary, it’s almost like nothing, yet it can make you feel real. That’s the whole job of the musician, and that’s what makes the rest of this worthwhile.”

There was a fiery red and purple sunset over Mt. San Jacinto, and that didn’t hurt either.

Ann De Jarnett and the Falcons play Thursday at 9 p.m. at Club Postnuclear, 775 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Admission: $5. Information: (714) 497-3881.