Rock Plaza Central‘s 2007 album Are We Not Horses was an elaborately plotted and immaculately conceived album that brought the Toronto band’s Northern-gothic folk/rock accolades from both critics (MAGNET named it one of the year’s 10 hidden treasures) and academics (frontman Chris Eaton’s 2004 book The Inactivist was taught alongside Horses in a graduate English course at the University of South Alabama). Last month, RPC hit the road to support the release of this year’s … At The Moment Of Our Most Needing, and bassist Scott Maynard filed a tour diary for magnetmagazine.com. If you missed Rock Plaza Central this summer, catch the group on its U.S. tour with the Weakerthans in September.
“Holy Rider” (download):
https://magnetmagazine.com/audio/HolyRider.mp3
Wisconsin, July 23
Currently approaching Madison, Wisc., we have driven more than 1,600 miles in the past few days in an attempt to get from Vancouver, B.C., to the Hillside Festival in Guelph, Ont., in time for our 6 p.m. workshop on Friday evening. Last night we opened the 10,000 Lakes Festival in Detroit Lakes, Minn. We arrived from Bismarck, N.D., at about 4 p.m., set up, ate, played, hung out for about an hour, then got back in the van and drove over the Wisconsin state line to find a place to sleep. Otherwise, the past few days have been relentless driving.
There are many activities that can help to pass the time on a long drive. Chris and I are honing our Sudoku skills with the goal of finishing the most difficult ones without making any notes. (I am proud to report that I achieved this for the first time yesterday, somewhere in Minnesota. Now what?) There are several books in the van. Some of them are permanent fixtures (Songwriters On Songwriting, and a collection of Rumi’s poetry), some of them get passed around, then replaced, and some of them are in Hungarian and are therefore of only a passing interest to anyone but Fiona.
There are also four iPods in the van. We are all fans of the NPR show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, so Chris has stuffed his with past episodes. While Fiona assures us that there’s a wide variety of music on hers, it seems to favor Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Tom Waits and Nick Cave. Don (Murray, mandolin/trumpet/guitar player) prefers ’80s music, so I’ve come to expect U2, Peter Gabriel and the Police from him. Having cleverly poured water on my newer iPod, I’ve had to revert back to my old 16G, which necessitated a culling of the ever growing mp3 collection. Yesterday we got through Wire, Sonic Youth, the Pixies, among others. Today, however, is a classic-rock radio day, given that we are passing Chicago, home of our favorite classic-rock station, appropriately called The Drive.
We took my old friend Dan Restivo on a trip out east one winter and played quite a bit of cribbage, but cards can be difficult to maneuver in a van, so this tour has seen an extended and somewhat lackadaisical game of “Cow Cow.” Here are the rules of Cow Cow, as taught to me by Spencer Musselhead on my very first inter-provincial road trip, way back in 1993:
•A game goes to ten points
•When you pass a field of cows, the first person to say “cow cow” gets one point
•If you see a single solitary cow, that’s a “rogue cow,” worth five points
•A cemetery is “dead cow” and everyone else loses their points
•A three-dimensional representation of a cow is “monolith,” worth 10 points and the game
Hours of entertainment, I assure you. Beautiful scenery notwithstanding, these long drives are pretty mundane. Stop every couple of hours for a pee or to get some food. Switch seats to really liven things up. Sleep. And on that note …
