On the Road

Sean Daley goes to the Virgin Islands with his band Currently Nameless and lives to tell the tale, so he does. Here it is, in the third installment of our series On the Road. 

The time was about two a.m., January 1, 1998. We had just finished our first New Year's show at the Bolton Valley resort. It was a good show, although a very tiring one: four hours, one break. We had pushed ourselves to the limit that evening. The audience was only a little less tired than we were.

During our tear down and load out, a visibly inebriated man approached us and asked if we would like to go on tour in the Caribbean.

We said "Sure."

This was not the first time that we had been offered a deal we couldn't refuse. We've been on six tours up and down the East coast and had our fair share of million-dollar record deals offered by men that had obviously spent their last dollar on the beer they were spilling on us, and we've always said "Sure." Give them a number and maybe a sticker, but unless they show you a corporate credit card from Sony or Capricorn, do not give them any other merchandise.

Every drunk ass in a bar has a cousin or a brother that works with Janet Jackson or the Allmans, and maybe one out of a million is actually telling the truth. The point is, always give just enough so that you weren't the moron in the band that told the big record executive to piss off.

As it turned out, the man we had said "sure" to this time was a guy named Glenn from the band the Jalapeno Brothers. He was serious. We were going to the Virgin Islands.

Apparently, the Jalapeno Brothers had toured the Islands for the last couple of years and they weren't able to do it this time around. They offered the gig to us and we would have been fools not to accept.

First, a brief history of Currently Nameless:

The band consists of five members: Daemmon Hughes, Josh Keller, John Treybal, Dave Simpson, and myself. Josh and Dave handle the guitar work, while John plays bass guitar, and Daemmon plays the drums. We all sing, but I take most of the lead lines and throw in some harmonica from time to time. Our music takes its influences from funk, rock, blues, jazz, country, and whatever else draws our interest. It's often not the kind of music crowds (and especially critics) take an instant liking to, but it's what we do. Like all new music, it takes an open mind to appreciate it. Before this starts to sound like our press pack, I'll move on.

The tour started in the beautiful island of St. John after a pretty harrowing flight on Tower Airlines (I honestly believe that something as large as a 747 is not supposed to be that high up in the air). The island is about eighty percent protected wildlife, which makes for breathtaking scenery...and crappy accommodations. We had to stash all of our equipment in a bar and sleep on people's couches until we found a place to stay.

The place we found was a little apartment in a place called the Tree House. Whenever we told a local where we were staying, they always offered their condolences. It was one tiny room, mosquito infested, and the first night we stayed there, Dave had to sleep on the love seat where lizards apparently did some of their best hunting. They would climb onto the coffee table, which was located nearby, and jump onto his stomach. Needless to say, Dave didn't get much sleep that night, but he was able to finish a good seventy-five percent of The Pelican Brief .

The largest problem we encountered in St. John was our lack of transportation. We weren't making the kind of money that would validate a rental vehicle (which were primarily Suzuki Sidekicks, an unfriendly band vehicle), and we weren't quite sure we wanted to drive on the island anyway. For one thing, they drive on the left side, and the engineering geniuses that designed the roads there had apparently forgotten how to use a straight-edge: Ninety-degree turns every twenty feet or so are not only common, but apparently required.

In order for us to get around we had to hitch-hike, which down there is done by pointing your index finger in the direction that you want to go. None of the paranoia associated with hitch-hiking in the States is felt down there, so you usually don't have to wait long.

An aside: Whenever you go on tour, it is very important to have an accessible home base, which usually ends up being your van (my kingdom for a tour bus). On this tour, our home base was about a ten minute drive from the town of Cruz Bay, which had all our equipment as well as food and entertainment.

In St. John we discovered snorkeling, john cakes, and happy hour. The wild-life was amazing, the john cakes were edible, and a bottle of Cruz Rum cost about three dollars.

As for the shows in St. John, we played five of them during our stay. Three were at a bar called The Backyard. No walls. It was a regular type of bar gig: really drunk people screaming at us to play "Free Bird."

The other two shows were at a place called Skinny Legs: a self-proclaimed "pretty okay place," where you're guaranteed same day service. The owner of the bar, Doug, was by far the friendliest person I had met on this tour. He gave us rides from where we were staying in Cruz Bay to his bar in Coral Bay, thirty minutes away, fed us, and even gave us a tour. The shows at his bar were like the bar, pretty okay.

By the time our week in St. John was over, we were ready to go. Due to a shortage of rain on the island, a few of us hadn't taken showers in many days, and because we used our clothes as packing material for our equipment, we were a pretty rank bunch.

Our next stop was St. Correct, which is a much larger island, but is reachable only by hydrofoil or seaplane. If the ocean is rough, than it is only accessible by the latter.

Of course, the sea was rough and we had yet another aerial adventure where our equipment was too heavy and we had to leave it sitting in an airport overnight on St. Thomas. I don't think any of us slept all that well that night.

Speaking of sleep, I'm a fourth generation Vermonter. Sleeping in warm weather just doesn't work all that well for me. But I digress.

The exciting thing about St. Correct was that we had a place to stay from the beginning. We had rented an apartment in Christiansted (one of the two major towns on the island) and were able to move in as soon as we got there.

It was heavenly.

There was running water (although even more heavily chlorinated than Burlington water), a running stove, everyone except for John and Dave had their own room, and there was a balcony that overlooked Christians Bay and the historic Fort Christiansvern built by the Dutch. It was beautiful.

However, it was also a little boring. St. Croix is not a protected wildlife area, and while all the beaches are public property, there aren't nearly as many of them as there are on St. John. We spent most of our days sitting in our rooms reading or drinking pina coladas. Thank God for Cruzan rum and Angela Fletcher who sent Dave books.

The economy on St. Croix has also never quite recovered from the devastation it suffered after Hurricane Hugo, and there is some very extreme poverty and tension on the Island. While I was taking a walk one afternoon, I strolled into a part of town where a group of young men suggested I not ever walk through there again, using much harsher language of course.

Most of the people there were very friendly, though, and everyone seemed pleased with the music that we presented them with. They are pretty starved down there in the form of bands, and were excited at the prospect of something a little different.

There is always a problem when playing original music for tourists, however; a lot of them just don't get it. They ignore you. I suppose that's better than having beer bottles thrown at you, but being in such an ego-driven field as music, it still hurts. At many shows, we were up there without the aid of monitors (or our regular equipment), trying desperately to hear ourselves and each other, and some fuck in the background is trying to look down his friend's trophy-wife's shirt, or telling us that we should try and play something he could dance to.

There was one show where we mistakenly invited a man with a conga on-stage to jam with us, and he couldn't go two measures without stopping and yelling out "Santana!!!!" He spent two sets with us before we were finally able to kick him off stage, and of course, he didn't go quietly.

And then, there was the St. Patrick's Day parade where we played on a ferry called the Reef Queen for a little over six hours, and the effect on my middle ear was so traumatic that I felt the world was slowly rocking back and forth for the rest of the evening.

Now I sound like I'm whining. I don't want to do that. The road is a siren. For all the shit that you go through, there are the times when one man comes up to you and says that he likes what you're doing and that you're going to go far. Or there's the pretty young girl that buys your CD and asks if you would sign it for her. And most important, there's the time when your friends, your bandmates, look at you and say, "Man, you just ripped that shit up!" No matter what happens on tour, the music can save you. ~GC~

The fate of Currently Nameless is now in limbo. Upon returning home from this last trip to snow, our beautiful girlfriends, and a good night's sleep, we have only one more show scheduled. We're tired. Perhaps it is the end. Maybe it's just a good, long break. Either way it is a chance to rest. We still respect each other as musicians, and that's really all that matters, but a month in paradise can take a lot out of you.