"London/Falling Down"

The story behind this drawing is as follows:

Miracle Room was on our first tour in Europe, opening (along with the band Bosho) for Sonny Sharrock Group on the first Knitting Factory tour. We played 28 shows in 30 days, covering most of the continent from Stockholm to Barcelona, and Prague to London. It was brilliant.

We played in London at about the end of the third week, booked at Queen Elizabeth Hall in Southbank Center. We had kinda noticed that our drummer, Rock Savage, seemed to be napping a lot, but then again that didn’t seem that out of place at the time. We were told by our manager, Jerry Leibowitz, that there would be a heavy press presence at the show, so we were “stoked” (as it were). We decided to lead off with a piece that was usually saved for an encore, an improvised thing called “Untitled” which we had been doing since Richard Smith had been in the band.

“Untitled” was performed entirely on a 6 foot length of pipe with a mic in one end going to a delay unit. Rock stood at one end and popped his cupped hand rhythmically on the end of the pipe, synchronizing with the echo to get a very tribal, hypnotic percussion sound. Ed Greer stood in the middle and played the pipe with drum sticks, adding “pings” into the echo. And I stood at the other end, cracking the mic out of the end just enough to add mysterious whale noises with my voice (that’s me with the horns).

The show began. We walked out on stage to applause and got going. The room was full, but as we got into the song you could hear a pin drop. That was always a good sign with that piece.

We didn’t really have a plan with the tune. It would always take as long as it needed, and we always seemed to know when it was time to wind it down together, and that night was no different. The rhythms from Rock would start to get gradually chaotic and sparse, and Ed would follow suit with the percussion, leaving me to squeeze out a fairly long wail that would end the piece. As I was in the middle of the wail, I felt the far end of the pipe going down, so i moved my hand to support it. But then i realized Ed was not beside me. I turned to see Rock keeling over and Ed reaching out to grab him. We helped him offstage to find out what had happened. He looked pretty pale, and assured us that he had no energy to play that night. So that was it for London.

We took Rock back to the hotel to rest, and Ed and I went to the only place that our cabbie knew that was open after 9pm in London, a Spanish tapas joint, where we proceeded to almost get into a fight with the locals, who didn’t appreciate our presence.

The next night, Rock somehow made it through our set at Paradiso in Amsterdam, but afterwards he needed to be checked into a hospital, where it was discovered that he had been leaking blood internally via a vein in his stomach. He was operated on and kept for a couple of weeks until he was strong enough to leave. And then he was released. Thanks, Dutch healthcare! And thanks, Jerry, for staying with him.

Ed and I closed out the last week of the tour as a duo, using delay loops to get through most of the set, and finishing with Yuval Gabay, drummer for Bosho, playing the last couple of songs each night with us.