Tour Stories part 6

Now we come to the final chapter of Adulterous Woman's last tour in January 1993. Our meeting with Bar None Records had only just wrapped up mere hours before we packed up our rented minivan and left Hoboken for Boston. We could have stayed around NYC if we had wanted, but thanks to our cancelled CBGB gig we decided to clear out and have an extra night in Boston instead. We had scored a friend's apartment in Cambridge for accomodations, another living room takeover. We arrived, unloaded, settled, and went out for an evening of much needed decompression from the stresses under which we'd all been.

Our final gig the next night was at the Rathskeller, the famous Kenmore Square club. We were all excited and nervous, hoping that this gig would make up for the rest of the gigs being so awful. As we drove around to the stage entrance in the back parking lot, there were literally dozens of dead rats on the roads, and dozens more of live ones, which i thought must be how the club got it's name. But apparently the name is German for "council cellar".

We opened for a metal band called Heretix. We had to endure their soundcheck, which the band did quickly, but their vocalist did not. I kid you not, this guy stood on that stage screaming in to the microphone for 45 minutes and asking the soundman to tweak this and tweak that, and in the end it sounded the same as when he first stepped up there. It was agonizing. The fallout of his indulgence was that we didn't get a soundcheck at all. We set up and had a quick vocal check before launching right in to our set. Our set up time, performance, and take down time combined only took about 40 minutes.

The gig went pretty well otherwise. The sound quality on stage was decent, allowing us to proceed with some real confidence in our performance. Our friend Bob recorded it with his Sony Walkman, and the cringe factor is pretty low, the performances outshining the rough sound quality of the tape. We managed to sell a couple of copies of our tape release, a four song ep called Camping In Anger. And we made $40 for the gig. We were pretty happy with that, all things considered. It could have been worse.

That night while we slept, it got worse. We returned to our accomodations and loaded everything in, and then we all sacked out knowing that we'd need an early start in the morning. But the driver (me) forgot to move the minivan from the restricted parking lot next to the apartment building and (what do you know?) the minivan got towed. Oddly enough several of us heard the tow truck outside in the wee hours and didn't even make the connection that it was our vehicle being towed.

So the next morning we all were surprised to find it gone, and then we remembered the noises from mere hours before and it all made sense. Our host drove us to where we could pick up the van and it cost us exactly $50 to get it back. The tour was officially a complete bust. Not much went right, and so much went wrong. The very long drive home to Tempe was done straight through, just like the Tempe to Washington DC leg had been at the beginning. Luckily there were no accidents or even near accidents, and no ghosts. There was just 40 something hours of passing scenery broken up occasionally by rest stops and meals at Waffle Houses.

We returned as a band defeated. We never quite recovered. Despite Heather's and my commitment to staying with it, and despite recording some of our best material ever after the failed tour, Adulterous Woman split when Natalie announced she was leaving in October 1993.