Over the Rhine Tour Diary
Linford Detweiler
Day Three: December 1, 2000
We wake up on the campus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison near the little Gothic Chapel where we'll be performing. I have lunch with Dave Nixon and Spinner. One of the local papers has run a piece on the band and the journalist writes that if he had to sum up the music of Over the Rhine with one word, it would be "Lambent". I'm afraid this might mean meek, polite, inoffensive, but I ask Dave and he thinks it probably means shining, a source of illumination, from the same root where we get the word "lamp". He says that throughout history, the letter "b" and "p" would often exchange places in words because the sounds they make and the way the sounds are formed are similar. Lambent: the word of the day. We don't have a dictionary with us so we can't confirm his theory but I hope he's right. And he does read Greek and Latin fluently not to mention speaking French and German so chances are good his instincts are on the mark. Dave might be a contender for the most over-qualified merch-dude in the history of rock and roll.
There is a cigar shoppe next to the hotel, and sure enough, they do have Hemingway Short Stories, so I buy four and stow them away for Dale's eventual introduction.
Once again, I spend most of the afternoon in the hotel room answering e-mail from people at the label and so forth. I head for the chapel and it's a chilly room with a tall arched ceiling. The radiators are all cold and the sound system looks pretty inadequate. Because the room is so reverberant, we decide to focus on some of the quieter, dreamier, introspective numbers. We decide to pull out a few tunes we haven't done on the tour yet: Rhapsodie, Mary's Waltz, Bothered. After playing for ten years, one learns not to make a room do something it's not meant to do. It would be a travesty to try to rock out in this space. Stages have different keys too. Some stages are in the key of "E" etc. One learns to respect the personalities of space.
We begin soundchecking and it sounds like there is a kazoo player in the speaker cabinets on the right side of the stage. Spinner and Farns end up completely rewiring the system, pulling extra gear out of the trailer to make it all work, and the audience has to wait outside the hall while they get everything together. But it's always worth it to take the time to make a system sound as good as it can, and the doors only open about a half hour late or so.
The chapel fills up and there are people in the balcony as well: another receptive audience. The vibe couldn't be more different than the night before, even though some of the colorful people from Dubuque have made the trek. That's touring for you: each day is its own unique collection of possibilities and variables.
Other than Terri's bra coming unsnapped about four songs in, everything went pretty much as expected. Farns got under the hood at the back of the stage and had her hooked back together in no time. Farns can fix anything.
Tag, the promoter, lights a fire in the next room after the show, and I hang out for awhile and talk to people who have found us, a significant number for the first time. When I crawl into my bunk at 3am, I am tired. I only make it through a few paragraphs of the Wendell Berry book.
. . .