Spring Compositions Book - NYC
Wednesday, July 20 1988
Posted by brockp

Sitting on the corner of 4th Ave. and 8th St. with Bond, Jonathan, Alex, Tsia. Alex is going to catch the train. We aren't going anywhere. So we are all sitting on the corner. Traffic. New York.

Lost all the other entries as well as all kinds of other things. Our van was broken into last night on Broadway while we were on stage at Kenny's Castaways.

Truth makes a sharp clean cut.

Busses, cabs, buildings, hot wind, people. lights, signs, rumbling subway... Sky is gray. The entire city is waiting for its own end.

We took the Staten Island ferry to Manhattan. From the Hudson, the city looks like Babylon. Blackness and smoke and burning air. The science of corruption. The science of survival amidst corruption.

An Introduction - Spring Compositions Book
Friday, July 15 1988
Posted by brockp

I first posted this intro shortly after launching brocksongs.com a couple of years ago. The Spring Compositions Book is one of the journals I kept while on tour with the Doughboys in the late eighties. The above date of July 15th, 1988 is an arbitrary approximation of when this particular tour began.

After somehow surviving our first East Coast tour with no record out and only a handful of confirmed gigs when we left, I found myself back in Montréal with no place to live and no job, considerably dazed. Within a short time I moved into an NDG appartment with Greg McClements, a high school buddy and our chief roadie at the time, and was just starting to feel sane again when John K came over and announced that we were going back out.

I remember going to Simpsons and buying an electric hotplate and a pressure cooker, which I filled up with packages of chickpeas, mung beans and various other provisions I got from À Votre Santé accross the street. It was kind of like getting ready to go off to war (and I was the mess team).

One other bright idea I had was to avoid arguments in the van by abstaining from talking. We used to get into some pretty good power struggles, particularly when driving into a new city trying to find the venue. So I stopped talking in the van and if someone asked me a question I'd nod or write a note. It seemed to work so well that I just kept it up all the time, even when we were not in the van. Looking back, it seems pretty extreme, but at the time i was kind of desperate for some way to keep my head on.

Anyway, one of the interesting things that happens when you stop talking is that people start to ignore you. Not in the same way as when a couple quarrells and stops talking to each other, but more like when you walk into a room and don't immediately notice someone standing in a shadow. People stop noticing you. This allows a certain space from which it is possible to observe lots of things about people (and yourself).

Another thing that happens when you stop talking is you hear a lot more noise, both outside and in your own head. This is probably what made me start writing—some of the things I heard seemed funny or important, or just plain maddenning.

Oddly enough, by the third tour we all had our own walkmans so as to not argue about what music to listen to (except when Skippy Smooth was driving late at night listening to David Allen Coe). By that point, nobody talked in the van much anymore.