Mystic Minute- Sept 19th (from Spirit- A Supernatural Life) Chapter Twelve The Tour From Hell It was hot and uncomfortable on the small stage. Between the lights, room temperature and being below sea level, it all added up. I wiped the sweat off my black Fender Stratocaster and laid it in the case on the edge of the platform. We had a fifteen minute break before starting a fifth set and I needed air. The cool February breeze felt good on my face. The air had a sweet smell coming off the Mississippi, mingled with a light rain. The sidewalk between our makeshift venue and Decatur St was covered with wet strings of beads and candy thrown from a parade that had just ended. It had been moving past while we were inside laying down our funky groove. I stooped down amid the beads and other Mardi Gras trash and picked up a coin. “Krewe of Orpheus. Mardi Gras, 2002” was stamped into the metal around their logo. I shoved the coin in the pocket of m jeans. Now I knew who they were. We had come to New Orleans ten days before on the “Tour from Hell”. This was not our ministries official name for the event, but this was how we referred to it in private. It truly was the tour from Hell. The months leading up to our hitting the road just after Christmas were filled with everything that could go wrong. I had become obsessed with completing a six week tour with our Christian Rock band. We started in Wisconsin, travelled cross country to California, then headed South to New Orleans. Obsession will make you do strange things. As the previous summer dragged on, I experiences marital problems, business problems, ministry problems and, of course, the whole world lost its’ mind on 911. The more obstacles we faced, the more determined I became. Nothing in this life would stop me from doing this. It became a Holy Crusade in my mind. I do not recall any guidance from Spirit to make the decision to do it in the first place, but when the decision was made I knew I had to do it. We left Wisconsin in two vans during a snow storm the day after Christmas 2001. The weather pressed a full frontal attack all the way South. Our first stop was a bad neighborhood in St Louis Missouri. After playing our set in a drafty storefront before five or six people, our hosts put us up on the couches of the coffee house. At the end of our show they passed the hat for us and then spent half an hour telling us how badly they needed money. We dropped what they handed us into their collection box when no one was looking. We spent the night shivering and counting the mice that ran over our thin blankets. This was the life of a Christian Rock Star. Three weeks later we were in Morro Bay California. The sun was shining beautifully. We were out of money, out of love and almost out of faith. Jared, the bass player, and I each had a nasty case of strep throat and we spent three days recovering in a cheap motel. I was not sure what the rest of the band was doing with their time, but they met us with their new plan when I woke up. Two of our group were heading home the next day and taking most of the sound system and lighting with them. One of the ones leaving was my wife. It had been twenty-one days of cancelled gigs, being stiffed when it came time to be paid, broken promises and religious bullshit. A pastor in New Mexico had, in August, signed a contract to have us perform in January. In Mid-December, he stopped returning my calls. I called each church, coffee house and venue once a week to insure we were still on. This particular pastor used his secretary to dodge my calls. On the day of the gig, we arrived in the church parking lot and the secretary called my cell phone before I could get out of the van. She was fuming mad at her pastor for making her lie to me all that time. He had not bothered to put the show together and was too embarrassed to tell us. We were fifteen hundred miles from home, nowhere to stay and not enough money to get anywhere else. We drove to a McDonald’s parking lot to pray. This was typical of the things that happened on that tour. I don’t remember who said it first, but it truly was the “Tour from Hell”. Our New Year’s Eve gig in Little Rock had fallen through the day after we left Wisconsin. Dallas called the next day and cancelled. A chapel service on an Air Force base was cancelled due to an exercise. On and on it went. Last minute cancellations while we were on a road to nowhere. In the days after 911 America opened its’ heart and wallets to the survivors of this national tragedy. The Red Cross received record donations. The Firefighters and Police of New York were rightfully blessed with money, thoughts and prayers. All this transfer of capitol to help heal our wounds left little else for churches to operate on. Religious institutions everywhere were seeing record crowds, but donations dropped greatly. I know of several small ministries on the edge of survival that had to throw in the towel due to lack of funds during this period. All of our events had been booked months in advance. Most of our performances were booked prior to September 11th 2001. My band rarely charged a set fee for our performances. We asked for a donation of whatever people felt the Lord lead them to give. We really were in it for the ministry and not money. With that being said, however, it takes money to run the vans from one church to another. We needed food and shelter once we arrived. None of us were looking to get rich; my wife and I paid the other musicians a small fee of $100 per week to keep them in spending money out of our own pockets. This was usually replaced by offerings, but this time out, our funds dried up after week one. The money aspect of things was stressful, but the ugliness we encountered in the name of Jesus was the truly distressing thing. In Phoenix, a pastor insisted on praying for deliverance over our sound man because he discovered him smoking in the parking lot. It was a tense moment as he pushed himself on us in the name of “Gawd”. We were openly and regularly lied to by pastors, deacons and other “representatives of Jesus”. Congregations were told their financial offerings would be going to the guest ministry to help cover our expenses. We usually threw the money we made from CD sales into the same basket that held our offering. More than once, the money given to us at the end of the event was less than the amount we ourselves had put in from sales. This means they lied to their people, stole from us and, ultimately, stole from God. I went to bed in tears and woke up the same way every day. I love You God, but Your people suck. The church secretary in Albuquerque New Mexico called me back as we sat praying in the McDonald’s parking lot. She apologized for her pastor being a rat bastard and gave me the names of a few other ministries in town that could help us. We spent the week playing worship music at a coffee house, a women’s bible study and a youth group. It was one of the most blessed and fun weeks of the tour. By Morro Bay we were beyond the last straw. My wife headed back to Wisconsin with the sound man. The drummer, Travis and Jared the bassists decided to tough it out the rest of the tour. It seemed to me that I had no money, no wife, no ministry and no hope that it would ever get better. Driving East into Arizona the next morning was the first of a hundred thousand kicks in the nuts over the next few years. So this is what following God feels like? There were no great spiritual encounters and no amazing revelations during this time period. Jared and I were each able to prophecy over a few people as we prayed for them, but every day just dragged. The three of us held our breath this way for weeks. “If we can just hang on until we get to New Orleans.” I promised, “everything will be OK. The people we work with there have their act together.” I told the other two this every day. We held on to this one thin hope. I tried to sound convincing, but inside I was a solid core of fear. I had been working with an international ministry in New Orleans for a few years. They were organized, understood our approach and had always been a joy to work with. We straggled into the Big Easy on fumes of gas and even less hope. It was ten days before Mardi Gras 2002. I knew they would save us. Meeting with the head of that ministry, it was obvious that they too had forgotten all about us. Our host group was not at all prepared for us. They were kind enough to wave the normal fee to stay in a ministry house, but we were, once again, the illegitimate children of the bunch. There was no advanced planning for using us as a band and we had scheduled to be there two weeks. Someone threw together the idea of using an empty building in the French Quarter as a makeshift coffee house. We were the entertainment while others offered coffee and cold water to the partiers during Mardi Gras. We played our hearts out for five hours a night as drunks staggered in for a break. They were met with fresh faced collage kids telling them of their need to repent and accept Jesus as their Savior. It may have been a buzz kill, but it was a “Holy” buzz kill. During the day, we wandered the streets of the French Quarter, enjoying the shops and history, while sidestepping drunks with their shirts half way up. I have a romantic attachment to any place where people have lived, laughed, loved, shed tears, cried out in pain, celebrated the milestones of life, ect. There is an energy deposited in the wood and stone that calls to me. New Orleans has all that in Spades. There are times in each of our lives when we know we have to do something. Something with no earthly explanation, but deeply ingrained in our soul. I knew I had to be there. I knew, no matter what the cost, this was my path. The cost was more than I could have imagined at that moment. After the Twin Towers went down on 911, sports seasons were interrupted and games pushed back a few weeks. The Superbowl ended up in New Orleans a week before Mardi Gras. That was one big, strange party. I had attended other Mardi Gras there and the difference was instant. Armored personnel carriers in the street, heavily armed police, National Guard, plain clothes cops; every third person was some sort of government agent. Nothing says “Show me your boobies” like a row of dudes in riot gear carrying M4s. The country wanted to party, but terrorism had won. We were all terrorized. On the afternoon of Superbowl, I stayed in my modest room, kneeling at my bed in prayer. Eventually I fell asleep with my face still wet by my tears. Sometime during the evening, Jared woke me. “Let’s take the ferry across to the Quarter and soak up the game.” We hiked along next to the levee, 18 feet below the Mississippi to the ferry. Past the Po Boys and local shops filled with water creatures, simmering in metal pans of luke warm water, the smells were alien, yet inviting to my Mid-Western nose. The air was cool and the breeze felt heavenly. The ferry ride only took a few minutes from our temporary house in Algiers Point to Canal Street in the Quarter. Once across, we joined the teaming masses headed into the light. It was impossible to miss the stadium. It is a Mecca of light and testosterone. The whole world looked on as we celebrated our national violence, but we were never able to put the very real violence out of our thoughts. Jared and I chose an alley within sight of the stadium to make our approach. An armor plated Hummer sat surrounded by soldiers of the Louisiana National Guard. Everyone thought our enemies would strike again soon and the Superbowl seemed like a great place to do it. A Sargent set down his rifle and wiggled the rabbit ears on a portable television set. Bono peered out at me with his sungoogles and big Irish smile. There was no point in turning the sound up. The sound system in the stadium blasted as U2 ran through their halftime set. A private offered me a spot on her tailgate and, together, we pondered the surreal turn our country had taken. It was good to talk to someone who was neither drunk nor a religious fanatic. She seemed like a nice young lady with her smooth Southern accent. Soon, she and Jared chatted happily. Sitting across from us was a man in dirty jeans and a plaid shirt. He looked to be in his early forties, blond curly hair down to his shoulders and physically fit. He regaled us with stories of his trip across America. After September 11th, he left his Wall Street job in New York City and decided to find himself and his country. The walking kept him in shape and he laughed honestly and often as he spoke. In his backpack were spiral bound books filled with the notes he would use to write his masterpiece. At that moment, he was taking a break from washing dishes at a restaurant around the corner. I could not help but think he needed to throw himself in for a few rinse cycles. I have read Travels with Charley, Blue Highways and On the Road enough to listen to anyone with a road story. He had good road stories. The sound blasted from the stadium. Our hosts, the soldiers, offered us hot coffee. A waiter from Café Du Monde, a few blocks away, brought free Beignets to their protectors. We all ate with gratitude as powdered sugar sprinkled everywhere. It was the most peace I had experienced in months. My thoughts turned to the story of World War One troops meeting in the No Man’s Land of Belgium on Christmas Day 1914. As the traveler described hitchhiking in South Carolina and Jared enthusiastically talked Japanimation with our one striper, I imagined Silent Night played on a harmonica and the sound of distant gunfire. Back in my room, I buried my head in my tear soaked pillow and prayed myself to sleep.
Posted on: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 00:06:15 +0000
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