LOOK AT LIFE / COCO HAMES

Life's a drag, er, a gas, when the Ettes are touring Europe...

By Coco Hames

Well, Poni and I stayed up way past our bedtime in Leipzig at a gay bar across the street from our hotel.  Some people think it's amusing, but personally, I feel awful when I exit a bar when the sun is up, it's so disconcerting and no one likes to look back on the night in the light of day.  Well, at least I don't.  This is part of why I tour so much.  I really can't be held responsible.  Also I am a vampire.

The bar was fun, it was one of those with numbered stations and telephones, so if you spotted someone across the bar that struck your fancy, you could pick up the phone and call them for a chat.  The venue we played was a bit square for our taste, so we did what we always do, which is go wandering in search of some like-minded troublemakers.  I mean, I don't know how alike we are, us and drag queens.  But there are some similarities that bind us. 

We dress up and perform, that's one.  We often live on the other side of the clock, and are considered a bit (or a lot, depending on where we're living) strange by the mainstream, which can get lonely, so there's that.  Poni used to be a go-go dancer in Miami, so they can talk about dancing or costumes.  And I remembered, I had a tour revelation once (they're common, lots of sitting time, lots of silence, lots of opportunities to let your mind creep off on its own) that lots of people are another person inside, in their minds. 

In Poni's mind, she is a 7-foot-tall supermodel-cum-fashion designer (non-gender specific, career peaked in the '70s), with a well-appointed studio apartment in the East Village.  She spends her days dashing from meeting to meeting, fueled by New York street coffee, and her nights hopping from gallery to launch party, clinking martini glasses with the who's who of international artists and designers.  Whereas, inside, I am an older, friendly but quite stodgy gay man.

Maybe in his late-'40s, financially established, well-read and generally a private individual, possibly with his party days behind him, possibly he seldom felt inclined to indulge in the wild nights out that his friends were always talking about, the clubs too crowded or the music too loud, maybe.  Maybe he is a professor of literature, or an architect or even a functioning novelist.  Something where he gets a lot of time to himself, where he doesn't have to pretend to be glamorous or sexy or special even.  Just a nice, quiet man, maybe he has a trusty dog (a retriever of some sort, possibly a spaniel) and lives in a small house on a lake, maybe in the mountains of western North Carolina, maybe in upstate New York.  I do know that this man has a secret indulgence, one that his friends chortle about and think is just SO him... he TOTALLY has one of those $2000 hotel-grade Miele linen presses!  In his house!

This is the shit that I spend hours thinking about on drives.  Though I did pick up an English language book on the English language, a linguistic travelogue investigating English dialects.  But I should have thumbed through it a bit more before I bought it, because it was an ENGLISH English linguistic travelogue, and while I realize my English came from the English English, really I am more interested in American English linguistics, because of all of the different languages spoken in America, and how quickly so many different languages and cultures got together and spoke the same language.  Another study for another time, perhaps.

Backstage at a club now in Wolfsburg, Germany, home of the Volkswagen automobile.  We played an in-store today in Braunschweig, which is evidently the enemy town of Wolfsburg, so much so that the promoter threatened to cancel our show HERE if we played THERE.  But we managed to pull it off.  So far.

Blurt "co-co-editor" Coco Hames fronts The Ettes - Hames on guitar, Jem Cohen on bass and Poni Silver on drums - whose latest album Look At Life Again Soon (Take Root) is still a hot item, and they also have a new EP, Danger Is, released by Take Root on April 7 and also available digitally, www.myspace.com/theettes), and a Dan Auerbach-produced limited-edition single. They are currently ruminating upon their next full-length, but meanwhile, overseas fans can spot ‘em right now on their European tour - dates at the MySpace page.