That said, I suppose I still need to try and fill you in on what we did during the big summer tour. Well, we played music (but only thirty minutes a night), we played video games (some of us more than others), we played golf (those of us that were not playing video games, that is), but mostly we played beneath the tent. You have no doubt seen pictures on the website. They all look pretty much the same: a canopy of sorts, with multicolored lights strung about and a bunch of people sitting in lawn chairs, all in a circle. This happened nearly every night of the tour.
Sounds boring, right? At times, yeah, it was. But you have to understand the routine (or lack thereof) that your whole existence falls into during a tour calls out for some element of certainty. The simple act of setting up a tent and a bunch of lights, sitting like backwoods hillbillies in lawn chairs while cooking sausage on a ten dollar grill, and tearing the entire operation down again at the end of the night became something of a compulsion carried out with religious fervor day after day.
The whole thing came to mean something different for just about every person that sat beneath the canopy. For many, it was strictly social: a place where guys on the crew felt just as comfortable as the players, the tour managers, and so on. For some, it became a refuge at times, a place to get away from whatever problem they were having. You could ask every person that had been on the tour, and each would say something different.
That said, I have a theory about a deeper meaning underlying the tent, one that was never really voiced by anyone. You see, the vast majority of the personnel did not get to see home for nearly two months (24 hours every two weeks or so doesn't count... it makes it worse sometimes). Home includes the physical house, but also the wife, kids, girlfriends, dogs, cats, whatever. Everything that makes a place home was what we didn't see for two months. And after a while, that starts to get at you. Everyone reacts differently, but the inner feeling is pretty much the same: you feel oddly solemn and sort of hacked off at the world for, seemingly, no good reason. No matter how much you may laugh or how good a time you are having at any given moment, it still sort of sucks. Granted, the good times are the ones you remember when the whole deal is said and done. You tend to forget, over time, the suckiness that lurked just under the surface. Sort of like after a bad breakup: you remember the good times really well and you remember that there were some pretty crappy times towards the end, but they aren't specific like all the other happy memories. But you are dead positive they were there, dang it!
Anyhow, I believe that the tent, tikki lounge, whatever you want to call it, became the closest thing to home that any of us had for those two months. We were all in the same boat, trying to see it through till the end of the tour, and keeping each other going in our own little ways. The tent was a distraction from the pain of missing the place we all wanted to be, and a feeling of comfort that lost place normally provides. It was what we all needed at that exact point in time, nothing more, nothing less.
So the tour is over. It's been over for
a while, actually. Some of us still keep in touch, but who knows
how long that will last. What can be said about it? I don't know.
We got together, played some music, missed the same place, and
eventually found our way back there. When you think about it,
not much else needs to be said.
