Boston Vortex
Despite living relatively close my whole childhood, and even visiting relatives in Cape Cod on several occasions, I hadn't ever been to Boston until Mumble & Peg toured there in 1998. It was the band's first time playing in this part of the world, so we didn't have much leverage when it came to venue options. We settled for a gig at Jacques' Cabaret.
As with all real stories and adventures, this was before cell phones and GPS navigation. Once in town we found a pay phone to advance the show and ask for more explicit directions. Basically all we had was an address and a basic map of surface streets from my road atlas. The call to the club wasn't too helpful - they just said they were just south of the Boston Common, and we found the street on our map. Hey - looks like we're only a few blocks away. Good to go!
We attempted to pull into the particular neighborhood, but the most obvious street according to the map was a one-way going the wrong way. Unfortunately, we didn't realize this until too late and had no choice but to keep going straight.. and ultimately all the way around the entire Boston Public Garden park. Given the Friday night rush hour traffic this forced detour took fifteen minutes.
Back on track, we tried another point of entry to get nearer to the club. This time we hit a different one-way street, and once again got squirted onto a main artery which spun us around the park a second time. Fuck!
Long story short, despite being three blocks away at the beginning of this effort it took us 90 minutes to finally figure out the rather unintuitive sequence of one-way thoroughfares to get to the goddamn club. We were all getting pissed off at Boston and at each other in the process, as you can imagine. And we circled the fucking garden at least four times. So frustrating.
The gig itself wasn't so great. The single mic stand was broken, so we fashioned an alternative out of a cardboard tube. Erik's amp died during the set. Afterward we stayed the night at a local friend's house. They recently moved into a flat with no furniture - we resorted to sleeping on a hard cement floor utilizing unsold band t-shirts to fashion a "mattress" that provided an almost imperceptible smidgen of comfort.
I've been back to Boston for various gigs over the years. It's such a clusterfuck maze of a city I never had any idea exactly where in town I ended up or how the hell I got there. And then after a show in 2017, i.e. nineteen goddamn years after my aforementioned first visit to Beantown, I had the honors of driving the van from the venue to the hotel. Always anxious to get going, I pulled away as bandmates were still dialing in directions on their phones. Before anybody had any advice I found myself kinda ushered down one main road given construction blockages and general lack of turning options and then.. I found myself going the long way around some park.
Wait - was this the Boston Public Garden that I kept orbiting against my will almost two decades ago? Yes. Yes it was. I guess it never ends with this fucking city always forcing you to circumnavigate that dumb ass park.