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PASSPORT, PLEASE
A Tour Around the World with The Lead Singer from The Orchestra
February 2007
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By PARTHENON HUXLEY
 elcome to my debut column for Bluerailroad. Editor/savant Paul Zollo has asked me to chronicle tales from the road, which I shall do gladly. Perhaps a few months from now, once I'm sure Paul's too busy to edit/care about my pithy bulletins, I'll start sneaking in all kinds of other stuff, too.
This will be fun.
I'm pleased to put "Journalist" back on my resume. I used to review rock shows about seventy-five years ago for Spectator magazine in North Carolina. I chatted up Andy Summers, pissed off Alex Chilton and interviewed a naked Iggy Pop. But that was then.
Nowadays, I have three great jobs. The first two are 1) dad and 2) recording artist P. Hux.
My third job puts me on the road. I'm guitarist and singer for a six-piece band called The Orchestra. In the last eight years The Orchestra has taken me all over the United States, to Central and South America, Western and Eastern Europe, and to Russia and the Middle East. We've played New York, London, Madrid, Buenos Aries, Moscow and Dubai. We've brought the rock to Vegas, Dublin, Guatemala City, Santiago (Chile) and Copenhagen. We've also been troubadorial ambassadors to towns you pretty much have to Google: Antofagasta, Punte del Este, Tallinn, Sofia, Ufa and more. It's a fun job.
We play all kinds of venues. Theaters, large clubs, festivals, casino showrooms, sports arenas, stadiums (well-cough--stadium parking lots), you name it.
The Orchestra's full descriptive slogan is (inhale) The Orchestra Featuring Former Members of ELO and ELO Part II. We'd make it longer if we could, but our tour posters would be the size of bed sheets. (Joke.) We'd prefer to be called something simpler but we can't at the moment. I'll get back to you if our lawyers tell me something different.
Before I get out my passport, let me introduce you to the guys in the band, since I wouldn't be traveling to wonderfully weird places if it weren't for them.
First, from England, we have three lads who've reached the toppermost of the poppermost. They've sold out stadiums and listened to themselves on the radio for the last thirty years. (And now they're in a band with me--how the mighty have fallen.) Presenting the former members of ELO:
Mik Kaminski -- violin, humor, beer, wine, horseracing. Audience sees him: front left. Mik hails from Yorkshire, England, and none of us understands a word he says. He has to repeat everything, usually several times. Since he's always joking, the rest of the band laughs with him at staggered times, depending on when each of us has deciphered his foggy utterances. Mik's an incredible violinist. He's adept at switching modes on the fly and taking the audience with him to exotic melodic territory. He joined ELO in 1973.
Kelly Groucutt -- bass and vocals, gadgets, hand rolled cigarettes. Stage position: front, center. I'm about ten inches taller than Kelly. His first words to me--at my audition--were: "You're too tall!" He still agreed to have me in the band. Kelly lives with his wife and about twenty birds in the Gloucestershire, UK. He is easily understood, and speaks often. In fact, Kelly's voice is the trumpeting variety and you don't need a lot of it in your monitors. He's a remarkable bassist and a terrific singer, often simultaneously, which is not easy considering our material. He joined ELO in 1974.
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Louis Clark -- Orchestral keyboards, conductor, beer, wine, sport coats. Looking at the stage: back row, left. Growing up in Bridgnorth, Shropshire between Birmingham and Wales, Lou probably never imagined he'd settle in the States, but he did. (Hello, Cleveland!) Originally a bass player, Lou got hooked on arranging and conducting and began his association with ELO in 1974 on the El Dorado album. Normally pretty taciturn when playing keyboards, Lou becomes an animated firebrand when he conducts. It's an impressive transformation. Unlike the rest of us, Lou can sleep through the worst travel conditions. Once he even fell asleep during a live TV interview. The band decorated him with cold cuts.
And now, from the USA, the former members of ELO Part II:
Eric Troyer -- keyboards and vocals, vocal arranger, tour manager, health nut. Stage position: back row, center. An Indiana native, Eric has lived much of his life in the New York area. A superb singer and vocal arranger, he's sung on records by Meatloaf, Celine Dion, Billy Joel and John Lennon ("Woman") among many others. As a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, he agreed to be a medical guinea pig for the Army -- you don't wanna know some of the stuff they did to him. It may be why he takes such good care of himself now.
Gordon Townsend -- drums, gearhead, neatnik, Philly native. Audience view: back row, right. Gordon's been the drummer of my other band, P. Hux, since 1994. He joined me in The Orchestra when ELO founder Bev Bevan flew the coop in 2000. Mr. Townsend's a Ringo/Bonham hybrid -- superb taste, great time and lots of power. Perfect. Gordon's also good at disappearing on the road. At dinner, in a bar, at an airport, it's now a longstanding joke for the rest of us to ask, "Where's Gordon?" Gordon doesn't think "Where's Gordon?" is all that funny. He's probably right.
Me -- guitar and vocals, coffee, annoying pantomime. Audience view: front, right. I moved to D.C. last year after 18 years in L.A. I've been writing songs and playing guitar since I was ten. Still learning. I joined the band in 1998, when it was called ELO Part II. I am everybody's best friend in the band, the most liked and respected, and clearly a crowd favorite. The previous sentence may not be true, but who's here to argue? Get your own column!
John Shipp -- front of house engineer, acerbic remarks, Family Guy junkie. John lives in Boston. He's been making the band sound good and loud for a few years now, and we're glad he puts up with us. He's a great engineer, he knows every piece of gear ever invented, and he can fix anything. He used to have quite a bit of face tackle, but I think he grew wary of airport metal detectors.
So, that's who we are.
Since the seven of us live in seven different places, each tour is like a little reunion. We'll meet up somewhere in the world and snap into band mode. Responsible husbands and fathers switch to alter egos as band dudes, road dogs, goofballs, and whingers. Weeee!
We normally don't rehearse. At our first soundcheck we'll dust off the latest additions to the set and we're good to go.
The opening show of a tour is always fine, but the second is better. All the little parts get nailed down tight. When we get a nice long run like the twenty-five-date tour of the UK this past summer, we get scary good. I think Shepard's Bush in London was show number eight or nine and we blew the roof off.
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Now, I don't know any other way to say this, but please indulge me: we're a terrific band. Every guy in the Orchestra is pretty great at what he does. We're not the original ELO, we're not even called ELO Part II anymore, but the name of the game is we kick ass. In eight years, we have never left an audience anything less than thrilled. Our show goes down so well, I almost feel like I'm not a part of it, do you know what I mean? We have that wonderful BAND thing, that je-ne-sais-what that transcends the individual parts. If you're a musician you know what I'm talking about. It's magic.
Thanks for letting me get that out of the way!
So what songs do we play? Our typical set has classic ELO hits like "Evil Woman," "Do Ya, Livin' Thing," "Showdown," "Sweet Talkin' Woman," etc. We do some more obscure ELO cuts like "Standin' In The Rain" and "Confusion." We also play selections from our most recent album No Rewind like "Jewel & Johnny," "Over London Skies," "If Only and Before We Go." And, we'll occasionally do a Beatles or Move cover. The set changes depending on where we play.
For this inaugural column, we'll be playing in some excellent Google towns. Are you ready?
Samara. Kazan. Tyumen. Krasnodar. Sochi. Perm.
Know where we're going yet?
Okay. How about Chelyabinsk, Volgograd, Yekaterinburg?
If you're still unsure, we'll also hit Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Yeah, Russia. The Former Members will be rocking The Former Republics.
Here's the basic deal: Ten cities in two-and-a-half weeks, mostly theaters in the thousand to twenty-five-hundred range, plus a couple club dates. Transportation by bus and plane. We'll be joined by an English-speaking Russian backline/monitor guy named Misha. Our main promoter is Ulyana, an ambitious 20-year-old who speaks excellent English and began promoting shows when she was sixteen. We'll bring my Gibson SG, my effects pedals, our in-ear monitors, some cymbals and a laptop full of keyboard sounds. Everything else-keyboards, amps, drum kit, bass guitar, backup guitar and so on will be supplied by Russian backline companies.
So, how'd it go?
Gig-wise, things went great.
In Moscow, the club was jam-packed with urbane Muscovites and western ex-pats. Great crowd. The roar after the encore easily went on for a solid ten minutes. We were showered and changed before it stopped.
In St. Petersburg we played to about three thousand fans at an ice-hockey rink. For the last six or seven songs we were joined by a thirty-piece string section.
Even in remote cities east of the Ural Mountains (which divide Euro and Asian Russia) the rooms were pretty much sold out and ready to rock. Tyumen and Yekaterinburg were joyous. In Chelyabinsk we heard requests shouted out in perfect English. It made a little more sense the next day when I learned there were quite a few Americans in town working on a construction project-a facility for destroying all of Russia's old bombs.
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In Yekaterinburg, Kelly told the people in back that there was room up front if they wanted to come down. About a hundred punters surged to the front of the stage and the customers in the first few rows didn't like it. One lady in the second row swung her purse and smacked a dancing fan upside the head. But that was about as ugly as it got and we all had a lovely time.
And then there was Ufa. The capital of Bashkortostan (great name for a republic or what?), Ufa was a tough nut to crack. We're used to making crowds really happy at our shows, and Russia in general was no different. But the Ufa audience was an oil painting and it was driving us nuts. It wasn't completely hopeless -- a small handful of women danced in the side aisles -- but the couples in the front row were fucking statues. They wouldn't even smile. I'd look back at Eric or over to Mik and shake my head to say, "What the fuck can we do?"
And yet, after every song the statues applauded like crazy. It was weird.
After the show, we ran into some Canadian ex-pats. They explained that the men in the expensive seats in front were important guys in the local society. They weren't about to make fools of themselves by acting silly at a rock show. Everyone else at the show was having a great time and wishing the fat cats weren't hogging the best seats.
Oh, like the Grammys.
Everywhere we went, even in Ufa, the audience knew the material, old and new. Songs like "Showdown" and "Ma-Ma-Ma Belle" brought the house down. Some fans shouted out requests for songs from No Rewind.
But far and away the most popular song in the set was…"Do Ya"? "Mr. Blue Sky"? Sweet Talkin' Woman"?
Nope. Try "Ticket To The Moon." It's a track from the Time album that never did much in the States. In Russia it may as well be "Hey Jude." We even closed our show with it. Does it rock? Nope. It's a sad ballad. In fact, apropos to the land of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy… "Ticket To The Moon" is in D minor, the saddest of all keys. As soon as Eric sang the first line, out would come the lighters and cell phones.
So, the gigs were generally pretty good. How about everything else?
An hour after landing in St. Petersburg, I scribbled some first impressions: "Russia looks like a mix of imperial Rome (architecture), the movie Brazil (infrastructure), "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." (bowl haircuts and pretty girls) and Terminator (landscaping).
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Those first impressions held up pretty well.
Architecturally speaking, the three most common buildings in Russia are
1) a pale yellow Greek Revival number with columns and pediments 2) a ten story apartment building that's seen better days, and 3) a single-story hand-hewn wooden country house with blue and white decorative shutters and lace curtains.
All the cities we visited had their own vibe, but every city had some of the above.
In the infrastructure category, our runaway favorite was the above-ground utility pipe. We saw mile after mile of insulated pipe running alongside major roads or snaking through residential neighborhoods. We couldn't tell if the pipe carried gas, water, heat or what. Since everything in the States is buried except telephone wires, to our eyes it was wonderfully strange. Our soundman John would announce new sightings on the bus: "Got some good pipe over here!"
Did I mention pretty girls? Speaking entirely from an objective sociological perspective, we were impressed: doll-like faces, insane knee-high boots, appropriate diet. It's easy to imagine God forging an agreement with Russia's ancient tribal leaders.
GOD: Things are gonna be rough, guys. It's gonna be cold and your history will be filled with tragedy and sadness- but no matter what -- you'll have beautiful wom…
RUSSIANS: We'll take it!
Landscaping hasn't really caught on in Russia just yet. There's some evidence of it, but not much. Kazan was a particularly tidy place. The streets were clean and neat and reminiscent of what we're used to in the West. Moscow and Yekaterinburg also had some handsome areas. But for the most part, there's a bit of the village in a typical Russian city. And the villages have mud streets. It'll be a while before Samara's mistaken for Amsterdam.
If exploring a new country is akin to meeting a new girlfriend, Russia's that girl you'd like to love -- but there are some obvious problems. For instance:
The hotel in Moscow was nice…but we couldn't get room keys until reception ran our passports through a police check. It took two-and-a-half hours to determine we weren't terrorists or prostitutes. If there hadn't been a bar in the lobby, surely Mik and Lou would've perished.
We traveled on a pretty nice bus…but the roads in Russia are worse than the worst you've ever seen.
Our hosts worked really hard to please us…but getting straight answers on any subject-such as flight times and availability--seemed next to impossible. We'd make plans to catch a 10am flight only to be told the next day that all the flights were full and they didn't leave until 4pm anyway. Huh?
On the positive side, we consistently ate good food. I don't eat meat but I had some of the most incredible salmon I've ever had as well as some seriously great vegetable soup. Hot and tasty.
(continued ...)
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