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Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

I got through the show that night without too much trouble, but as I might have mentioned, doing three nights in a row can really be rough on the body and the band. At least all three of these were in the same venue so it wasn’t quite as tough as having to do the whole haul three nights in a row, but when I woke up Sunday at the crack of noon I was feeling worn out and tired.

Ziggy was there in bed with me, though, and I guess I had let my guard down or something because I was also horny as hell.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

I called Ziggy when I got upstairs. I got his machine. I left the number of the hotel and my room number. Then I opened the minibar wondering if there was any Gatorade in there.

There wasn’t, but there was Coke. And Jack. Which meant there was Jack and Coke.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

My California geography sucks, mostly because I get a lot of the names which are very similar mixed up, but also because some of the dense parts take a long time to cross and some of the empty parts take very little time to cross. Therefore how far apart things are is skewed in my head.

As it turned out, the amphitheater where we were playing the next night was only an hour, hour and a half from the venue in San Diego. In fact, it was in Orange County, not far from Long Beach, which meant it was not far from Los Angeles proper. So the bus trip was fairly short and they put us into hotel beds for the night. Which was nice, although Remo didn’t stay with us. He kept on going up to his place in Laurel Canyon.

I caught up with Flip and Martin on the bus ride and then we crashed right away on getting to the hotel. I was not only still feeling sleep deprived, I think all the stuff with Ziggy had left me really emotionally drained. I mean, I felt good about everything but at the same time I had used up a lot of my usual capacity for dealing with that kind of thing, I guess.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

I’m not sure if Martin and Flip took it on themselves or if they were assigned to talk me down. When we got to the hotel in Indianapolis at four in the morning I was off the bus like a shot, but I didn’t make it to the elevator before they caught up with me.

“Dude, did you have dinner?” Flip was asking.

“For fuck’s sake, Flip, I…” Fuck. “I had some yogurt,” I said weakly.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

We arrived in Worcester, Massachusetts, in the wee hours of the morning after the gig in Syracuse, at a hotel where the night clerk was very unprepared for the entire entourage to descend. As such it took an hour or two to get the rooms sorted out. A couple of members of the crew fell asleep in the lobby. All I can say is if you don’t want scruffy-looking, disreputable rock and rollers passed out in your lobby, have their rooms ready.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

When I got back to the party, the jam session had broken up, the Ovation was in its case. I could tell from the way everything was arranged that Flip had been the one to put it away. Once a guitar tech, always a guitar tech.

I went to find him to say thanks. He was expounding about posture to Martin, who was nodding like he’d heard this one before.

“Hey,” Flip said to me. “I picked up my messages from home. I’ve got two questions for you.”

“Only two?”

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

The next night the stakes went up. It was the first of three nights in a row at Budokan.

You might as well have told me we were playing the White House, Buckingham Palace, and god’s own amphitheater all at once so far as the mythic-and-important factor went. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you probably never heard the Cheap Trick album “Cheap Trick at Budokan,” which was one of the best selling albums of the 1970s, or any number of other major live shows that were recorded there. The phrase “live at Budokan” entered the rock and roll vocabulary in the seventies and never left. Even Bob Dylan did a “Live at Budokan” record.

No pressure.