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<img alt=”2.22.02 …NP at the Blue Note in Missouri” src=”/web/20020223062003im_/http://www.misschicky.com/22202BlueNote.jpg” border=”0″>

I think I’m starting to recover from the trip after about 36 hours of sleep in a big comfortable bed. I feel a little guilty about it too. I had a dream last night about NP and their two roadies driving and hauling their equipment all over the country. This band isn’t traveling in any big nice luxurious bus with a driver. NFW! They travel in two big vans with a U- Haul trailer. They haul their stuff into each club, set it up, get it tuned right, do a sound check, play a hard, hard, one hour, 15 song set, break it all down again, pack it up, haul it to the next town, and start all over again. Seems like it would become pretty dull after a while…but the one roadie(the guy with the cool dreads-what is his name..dammit)seemed to love it. His picture is on the NP website and I got his picture too. If I ever get them transferred from the Mac laptop to the Sony PC, I’ll post them here on the Chronicles. In the meantime you can see a lot of pictures on BMF’s site…cause he’s much faster than I’ll ever be. 🙂

NP played at the Granada Theatre in Lawrence, Kansas last night which is a 14 hour drive from Aspen. And that doesn’t take into account there was a huge snowstorm on Wednesday as they were leaving the Rocky Mountains.That would have given them a one night break to gear up for their show which I’m sure was kickass as usual. Tonight they play at The Blue Note in Columbia, MO…a measley three hour drive from Lawrence. It appears they have added a third band , Split Lip Rayfield, a band from Witchita, Kansas to this leg of the tour. They are described as Bluegrass Outlaws. We’ll fire Morpheus up to get a little taste.

Want to know how Nashville Pussy got started?

Blaine started it all off. We’ve done somewhere around 3000 shows as far as I can figure. We are a guitar driven band. I play bass and hold the foundation. Ruyter has been playing for about 23 years and Blaine has been playing for about 19 years. They write the songs and Blaine writes all the lyrics. Blaine was in a band called “Nine Pound Hammer” and I went to see them when I was living in North Carolina. I met with him and we hung out because his band had the next day off. I told him I was in this “All girl cock rock band” and I play bass. He asked if I was any good. The cool thing with Blaine was he talked about his wife (bandmate and lead guitarist Ruyter) all night. Girls can smell bullshit a mile away and the fact that he could talk about his old lady all night long really showed me that he was for real. He even called her up and we talked. We ended up meeting and talked about starting a band called the “Homewreckers” but it sort of just fizzled out. About 6 months later I got a phone call saying that “Hammer” is still together but Me (Blaine), Ruyter and Adam (the old Hammer drummer) are jamming in Kentucky but we need a bass player can you be here this coming weekend. I had no car, my bass was in hock! 🙁 I took a 23 hour bus ride and showed up on the doorstep. And then I also mentioned that I breathe fire. It materialized over a boy. I did it to impress a boy! Anyways, so now the four of us are together, all 500 miles apart! Adam is in Kentucky, Ruyter and Blaine are in Nashville and I’m in North Carolina. We all jammed at Adam’s because his grandmother let us use the attic because she was a nurse and worked the graveyard shift. This let us jam all night long and that’s our hours. We’re usually ready to start jamming at about 1 in the morning, and then take a break at about 6am. We jammed for several times for 3 days at a time. Blaine had 5 songs done. He’d send them to me on a tape. I’d learn them and then come up to the jam session with what I learned and we learned 6 covers so we had about a 30 minute set. We did covers of Elvis, Mitch Ryder, ZZ Top we did all kinds of covers. Soon we started hookin up our own tours. The first one was for 4 days. Then the next was for 10. Then the next was for 4 weeks, then 8 weeks. We never booked gigs with just us playing. We always played with other bands and stole their audiences. It was amazing! We just stayed on the road. After the 6 week tour we all quit our jobs and decided that we all needed to move into the same house. Blaine and Ruyter’s house in Nashville had burned down so we figured we’d continue touring. We would drive 1000 miles out to Phoenix to do a record store show for 14 people on our day off! Blaine had a little 6 cylinder van with one door welded shut and windows that wouldn’t go down. We loaded the van, the four of us hopped in with one other guy that did everything for us….sound, mic’s, tech stuff and we just hit the road. By the end of that 6 week tour Peter Davis had called us up and he kept us on the road. He was impressed because we sold out a place in Minneapolis on a Monday night! His eyes just lit up so we started working together. We did 20 months with only 10 weeks off. The records were never even thought of. Those all came as a result of the touring….and playing those songs thousands of times.

from a Corey Parks interview in June of 2000… 

::: posted by miss chicky @ 12:27 PM:::