If you were a fan of live, alternative rock in Nashville in the early nineties, you knew of the band Chagall Guevara. Yes, the name is a conscious conjuring of an aesthetic and an ethic that fuses the painter Marc Chagall and the revolutionary, military theorist Che Guevara together. Think surrealist guerilla artfare. Chagall Guevara was big in Nashville, because Nashville hosted, as it often has, myriad forms of high weirdness. Opryland still existed. Bongo Java did not. But we had Lucy’s Record Shop. Yes, Nashville had country music and the ever present Prayer Trade, but in Chagall Guevara, we had a homegrown local band whose debut single, “Tale of the Twister”—with prescient lyrics involving a shape-shifting temptress promising power and riches “up on the roof of Trump Tower”—appeared on 1990’s “Pump Up the Volume” soundtrack alongside the Pixies, Soundgarden, and Concrete Blonde. If you were a Nashville native like me, this made you feel way more cool. More real even.
Writing for Rolling Stone, here’s what Parke Puterbaugh said about Chagall Guevara’s 1991 self-titled debut: “Not since the Clash has a group so effectively turned militant discontent into passionate rock & roll and still maintained a sense of perspective and humor, however black.” Too right. We all knew this. Their hit single, “Violent Blue,” came with a video of the band playing to drunken revelers in the Volcano Room of Cumberland Caverns. They opened for Squeeze. They brought their dark energy, their sardonic wit, and their outcast anthems to every performance, and then, on account of a bad record deal, shut the whole thing down.
Plot twist: They’re back. Really back. Even in Nashville, a 30-year wait for a sophomore album is unusual. But alas, they’re a persistent bunch with a lot of wisdom and a lot of culture—politics, religion, the music business—upon which to reflect. Since their debut, singer Steve Taylor has made films and his own albums, and signed Sixpence None the Richer and Chevelle. Dave Perkins’ recorded his own projects, produced for Over The Rhine, and earned a PhD in Religion. The work that Lynn Nichols, a seasoned guitarist, producer, and A&R man, has done with other artists—Switchfoot and Phil Keaggy included—spans two centuries. As of this past July, they’ve also played the Ryman, promoting their latest effort Halcyon Days.
Before the internet, it was already the case that Chagall Guevara provided a soundtrack for doom scrolling, for finding hope, humor, and resilience amid an escalating sense of impending catastrophe. Halcyon Days delivers the same and then some. They’re a wizened bunch of show business veterans who’ve seen and experienced way too much to keep it hid. The opening track, “Resurrection #9,” places their pre-grunge sound in America’s twenty-first century crime scene with tear gas, idolatry, disputed public spaces, and the fact that a hot button word like “resurrection” rhymes suspiciously with insurrection. As they’ve always done, they moralize without being moralistic. There’s judgment and rage, but there’s also a wearily astute assessment of how power works in board rooms, churches, and government offices. There are no lanes. Chagall Guevara understands this and says so loudly.
Always ones for good-humored self-deprecation, the songwriting partners in the band populated the track “Surrender” with “pirates, punks, and priests” juggling and negotiating their own treasure troves of memories, experiences, and insights. Penned and recorded during COVID-19, it seems to draw on a determined but artful weariness unique to a city like Nashville, where drummer Mike Mead and bassist Wade Jaynes—like Taylor, Perkins, and Nichols—know good and well what hyper saturation can do to a heart. “We’re all getting kind of bored,” Taylor sings, “of trying to hoard our attitudes and monetize them.” You don’t have to be a songwriter to know this drill, of trying to maximize your own currency of cool without losing your soul. So there’s lyricized frustration, but there’s also a lovely determination to try to create again, to lift a voice, to bust a righteous groove. Chagall Guevara waves a white flag and announces, “When they check for weapons, they’ll find nothing but a Paper Mate pen.” Who puts a Paper Mate pen in a song? Chagall Guevara, that’s who. They voice a righteous indignation with an affectionately open heart for improvisation, long-forgotten pop culture artifacts and a door kept ajar for new insights.
Taylor voiced this attitude at the Ryman show as they played in front of the new album’s cover image, a painting of a crowd of faces stricken with horror, amusement, and dizziness, reminiscent of the crowd in the Volcano Room in their “Violent Blue” video: “[The album] is thirty years in the making, but you don’t want to rush these things…The vinyl will hopefully be coming out before any of us die.”
The title track, “Halcyon Days,” strikes a similar, self-reflective pose:
I could have been a lawyer
I could have been a priest
I could have been a musician
But I chose to do this…
The world is dancing faster,
Faster all the time
I’m proud to make the muzak that covers up the crime
This Oscar Wildean posture meets a counterbalance in the closing track, “Treasure of the Broken Land,” written by their friend, the late, great songwriter Mark Heard. It manages to stare down death and offer a vision of long-haul hope, love, and beauty in the face of uncertainty, catastrophe, and loss: “I see you now and then in dreams/Your voice sounds just like it used to.”
In this sense, Halcyon Days is both a return to form and an extended field study of the band mates’ own creative lives, their determined, long-haul effort to make and share meaning in a beautiful but often heartbreaking world. Chagall Guevara’s decision to get called back into existence, to keep at it and to successfully serve and bless their audience across generations is also a vindication.
On the Record: A Q&A with Chagall Guevara’s Dave Perkins and Steve Taylor
David Dark: I’d like you to talk to us about how you formed, how you met each other, and how you each came to realize that you were going to be a band going all the way back to 1989. At some point, I’d like you to tell the tale of how the name Chagall Guevara arose.
Dave Perkins: Okay. All right. So, Dave here. I don’t know how we found each other, but we found ourselves together working on the creation of a [1987] Steve Taylor record that was very spookily titled, I Predict 1990. Steve already had that title for his record, but little did either of us know at the time that we would be in a band together at that point in time. So the record started off with a prophetic tilt we weren’t really conscious of at the time.
And in the course of [working on] the record, we got into some deep conversations about what we liked about our musical professional lives at the time and what we didn’t. And there were areas in which we shared a sense that the ceiling of expression and creativity was very low. I think we both wanted to find a place where there wasn’t any ceiling at all, really; where we could do what we darn well pleased and that would be okay. So, this was just a conversation. And someplace along the line—I don’t know—I guess it was me that said something like, “What if we thought about doing it together? You know, let’s conceive of a band where we would do it together.” Because we had some definite points of overlap in terms of our musical likes and tastes.
So that started a conversation that was really more a testing ground for ideas and for concepts. And that quickly led to the question, “Well, who else would be in it?” We both had many, many musical friends, but one that we had in common at the time was our co-guitarist Lynn Nichols, who was actually working for a record company. I’d done a record for them [1987’s The Innocence]. And Steve’s record that started out on another label was drifting into Lynn’s sphere. A conversation with Lynn over dinner just found him in the same spot we were in. He was frustrated.
I knew he was a darn good guitar player, so I said, “Hey, what would you think about digging out your guitar again and maybe throwing in with us and see if we could write a couple of songs together, see what they sound like?” So that was the spark. And then Mike, our drummer. He had played on my record. I went out and did a string of dates with him and Mike just blew my mind from the very beginning. In the early draft, we had a bass player in L.A. that we really liked named Tim Chandler, sadly now deceased. So we worked on cobbling songs together. And then Lynne and Steve came to Nashville. We worked here for a while. We started putting down some demos in a little studio at my house, and they were weird. I mean, they were so weird. I think that it sort of caught us off guard, but in a good way.
DD: If I can before I go over to Steve, I want to situate this within Nashville. And am I right to believe that you had collaborated with, at this stage, Jerry Jeff Walker and Russ Taff, and maybe he had a song on a Willie Nelson album.
DP: By the time Chagall Guevara started, I had done albums with Jerry Jeff Walker, who died recently, Guy Clark, who died not long before—two masters of American song for me—and Carole King, Vassar Clements, Papa John Creech, a whole list of people. And I guess we all were dragging our pasts into this mix. I think all those guys were sort of standing in the shadows. And Willie, no. I have a song that it’s my understanding that Willie cut on a record that inevitably suffered from a hostile relationship between Willie and the gentleman who was producing.
Steve Taylor: Before we move on, Dave, you need to tell him about where the name came from, right?
DP: So, look, it was never intended to be a name. It was intended to be a placeholder for a name.To two uber cultural brands that each meant something dramatically different, but you put them together. We’re asking ourselves, “What’s our philosophy? What’s our lyrical bent?”
I was camping out at Steve’s place in Glendale and Steve’s wife Deb was at the time—and I imagine she still is—a massive Marc Chagall fan. And there was a lovely coffee table book there. I was really enjoying that book. There was something about the book and sort of the lack of shame [concerning] and massive creativity around religion. It seems that we were both there to one degree or another and working through those things. Chagall was one and then where do you find the badass for the equation because we both like the Clash. There’s no getting around that. So how do you get that in? I was a huge Che [Guevara] fan, the guy that gives it all up for the ideal, and then takes it on the road.
So [Chagall Guevara] was not intended to be a band name originally but was so damn weird. …We knew it was going to be problematic.
DD: But it’s only problematic if you don’t accept it. If you do, you’re in the know. You are going to receive the witness of this band if you are moved by these words [Chagall Guevara]. If you could get past that…
ST: It was just a good gateway. Like, if you could get past that name, we probably wanted to hang out with you guys.
DD: I will mention, there were nights in Murfreesboro when I saw y’all at Main Street. And by this time I think Jane His Wife, maybe opened for you, any number of folks opened up for you. And then by the time you came on, there were people there, but, one very late evening, I was the only one watching. Really, I was your audience of one in those early days as a philosophy major at Middle Tennessee State University. So you tour. You work it. You got a record deal, and it’s out. How was that?
ST: We did shows in the region and worked pretty hard, but it all gelled together pretty quickly. The record deal came in pretty short order. The big question was, “Who’s going to produce this record?” Because both Dave and Lynn had had pretty extensive production experience. Mine was very limited, but we all certainly had our opinions. We talked to some different producers, and this guy, Matt Wallace, was pretty young. He had just finished The Replacements’ Don’t Tell a Soul. And before that, he had just done Faith No More, The Real Thing. Matt, we just liked him. And now in retrospect, we can’t imagine anybody else having done it. Somehow he managed to corral all of our competing ideas, and he was like a fantastic kind of psychologist. I don’t know how he somehow got us all rolling in the same direction.
DP: It was like magic, I’ll tell you. Because we were three intensely independent thinkers. Opinionated. Super opinionated.
DD: So I’m thinking of the appearance of “Tail of the Twister,” which I do think of as your first single. And you opened with that at the Ryman the other night, which was just lovely. It just kind of hit me: It’s like, this is 1989, and this song is a scenario about an ethical, evil temptation. And you’ve got the protagonist being tempted by an evil force. And you put the protagonist on the roof of Trump Tower, and the spirit says, “It’s yours, I’m trading.” But this was freakin Trump Tower in 1991.
ST: Yeah.
DD: So I mean, that was quite the moral forecast for what was to come for where we are now.
I mentioned the “Pump Up The Volume” soundtrack because you had the Pixies on there, too. Two-pronged question: Where did you all fit in 1991, in terms of genre and peers? I know you opened for a Squeeze somewhere back there. Where did you fit and how were you set apart from what was happening, well, in pop music?
ST: We were pre-grunge. Although, “Pump Up The Volume,” it’s got like Henry Rollins and the Pixies, Soundgarden, Concrete Blonde. It was a really great lineup. But at that point, we were in a place in music where there wasn’t any wave to ride. That changed really quickly with grunge. At that point, the Pixies were kind of a new thing and we loved them. We didn’t particularly sound like them. We could kind of do what we wanted to do and make it up, kind of make up our own rules and our own sound. And it was a really kind of liberating time in music, I think.
DD: Was the photo shoot for the album in Savannah? You’re all in a graveyard. Steve, you maybe had a cummerbund kind of thing going on, kind of Oscar Wildean? There’s a kind of mystic decadence where the whole album just goes so far, and yet there’s a sense in which you’re moralizing too, but in you moralize without being moralistic. Like there’s judgment, there’s rage. And there’s just an assessment of how power works. Corporations demanding sweat. A song like “Monkey Grinder” asks, “Who are you? Who are you serving?” It was just so strong and so rare.
ST: Lynne and myself were living in Los Angeles, and Dave was living in Nashville. Eventually, of course, Mike Mead was there as well, too. And we talked about where we’re going to try to launch this band out of. We quickly abandoned the idea of trying to launch it out of Los Angeles, just because there were so few places to play where you could develop before you were kind of seen before your time. Dave convinced us to move out to Nashville. We were working in Nashville and starting to get to know the town. Of course, it was a very different place than it is now. Dave talked a lot about that kind of Southern gothic culture that existed in the South. And in many ways the South was still kind of the last part of the United States that hadn’t become homogeneous, so we tried to really lean into that. And Savannah was a great place to do the video shoot. I got, you know, a full dose of Southern culture just living here and touring around the South. A lot of that came organically just from touring and being here.
DD: Do you have a feeling of what kind Chagall Guevara fan was very much there then [in 1991] and has now very much returned? It was really something to be in the Ryman and see people that I really hadn’t seen in 20 to 30 years, except at Chagall Guevara shows. How would you characterize the people who got into you and kept coming back?
DP: This is not really intended to be a pat on the back to us, but I guess in a way it has to be” They’re smart. A lot of the fans get the music. They get the guts of the music. It’s not just a sing-along thing for them. They go deep with it. It’s sort of mind blowing when you get emails or Facebook communications from these people. Somehow they work their way right straight to the heart of the matter without us having announced it. It’s a surprising group of people. A lot of them don’t look like hipsters.
ST: We noticed after the band broke up over the next three or four years, we saw a lot of bands in the area that were named after different songs of ours. And that was always kind of fun.
DD: The music rewards repeated listening. The lyrics reward examination. And upon hearing it again, I realized just how much of my own thinking, my own kind of theory, my thinking about power and culture and soul and all of that was really informed by that album and those performances.
ST: It was great to sing the songs again all these years later and not really be embarrassed by any of the lyrics. They all still felt pretty good.
DD: So it is 30 years, more than 30 years pretty much. How did the reunion come about? I don’t think that there is an equivalent to a 1991 major label band like yours doing their second album 30 years later.
DP: First, let me just talk about the 30 year period, and then Steve can tell you how it happened. The record company completely botched the release of the record. I mean, they’ve got to stand for that. But in their defense, their record company was imploding. People were leaving left and right, important people to us. They wanted us to go back and do another record right away: “Look, here’s some dough. You guys go back in the studio.” No. We just couldn’t let it go, because we knew that it was our best work. And until it had its full moment in the sun, we were not going to be fit for making more music together. We lobbied to get off the label, because we had other interest at other labels. But when they would not let us go, they sort of forced us into the shadows. [And yet] there was still business to be done. Some of that business was reaching back 30 years. We could point back and say, “Maybe we can shine some new light on old work.” So I think I think that was part of the impetus for getting back together was there’s still something left to be done.
ST: And we’d also recorded a live album.
DD: At 328 Performance Hall, right?
ST: Right. And that had just been sitting with our good friend, Russ Long, who went on to become a noted engineer, a record producer. He had actually mixed that live album four or five years ago. And he would periodically ask me, “So is anything ever going to happen to that?” Eventually I started feeling guilty. We decided to come up with some kind of a plan and just see if we could at least release this live album, out of respect for Russ and what he’s done. And we decided maybe the best way to do this would be through a crowdfunding campaign using Kickstarter. When we pushed the start button on the Kickstarter campaign, it just went really bonkers, really fast.
DD: And from there, we have new songs on the new album Halcyon Days. Were they recorded within the last couple of years, most of them?
DP: Five of them were recorded prior.
ST: Like, back when we were trying to sit it out and get out of our deal. Three of them are new songs. And then one of them was a cover of a Mark Heard song we recorded for a tribute album a while back that we liked a lot.
DD: I know that “I Still Know Your Number By Heart” was once a B-side because I found it in Belfast in 1992 on a little CD-Single. I was one of the only people I knew who had it, but now everybody can have it on Halcyon Days. I want to ask about those songs, and I want to start with “Resurrection #9.” Is that a reference to “Love Potion Number Nine?”
ST: There’s so many number nines. Sometimes you just have a phrase and you’ve got a certain number of syllables that have to fit within that phrase. And I think I just started playing with it. I might have thrown a couple of test ideas out that weren’t working or weren’t clicking, and that one felt right. I think the idea of “Leap Year of the Leopard” seemed like an interesting idea and nine lives. You start with a beginning line and a title and you just start filling it in and it all just kind of spills out.
DD: Am I right that “Resurrection #9” was written within the last two or three years?
ST: Yes, definitely.
DP: The music we had for a while. And then Steve and Lynn weigh in on it, and it changes. It becomes itself. And that’s what happened in the last couple of years.
DD: A band that calls itself Chagall Guevara would write “Resurrection #9,” which conjures a riot, a plaza, tear gas, revolution. And it’s lovely because it’s an address. It’s a lamentation. It’s a provocation. It’s rare for a song to provoke and self-implicate all at once. And it’s as contemporary as it gets. We have the free world. We have what passes for civilization and we’ve got “Resurrection #9” addressing the crime scene that is America as well as the possibility of America getting it right in some way..
ST: When we finished that song, I’m not kidding you, David, I was just thinking, “I cannot wait to hear what they think of this song.”
DD: Well, it’s lovely as can be. And I wanted to bring up “Surrender.” You’ve got a line: “When they check for weapons, they’ll find nothing but a Paper Mate pen.” Do today’s listeners even know what a Paper Mate pen is? And “Surrender” feels exasperated, almost like “I Need Somebody” Part II 30 years later. What can you say about “Surrender?”
ST: Well, it started like so many of our songs, with Dave having a riff and an idea that grew out of that. Just kind of a temporary melody that you had that just was so beautiful and so perfectly fit the song that the big challenge on that one was trying to find a lyric that fit within it. Usually [in the past] we would sit in a circle and just hash out lyrics over hours. In this case, just because we’re all separated and it’s COVID and we just aren’t able to meet together, I would do a little bit more of the lyric writing and then give it to the group, and then they would kind of take it through the gauntlet and process it. But I think this one was even the second or third version. I just submitted the other versions and just never heard anything back. So I thought, “Well, I guess I better try again.” So this one was the one that really stuck.
DP: We were doing the vocals at my house. I was immunocompromised. And so Steve would be down in the trash room of my basement on the other end of the house. I would be up at the other end of the house. He’d come in the door and throw a lyric sheet. I just remember that every time we did a vocal session—we did multiple ones for each of those three brand new songs—every time he brought the lyrics to a new session, he had upped the ante in some really great, clever way that put a smile on my face. Steve did the heavy lifting on those those two songs that you’ve talked about and also I forget…What’s the other?
ST: Oh, “Goldfinger.”
DD: If I can say something about “Surrender” or ask a question about “Surrender.” We’re in Nashville. I’ve lived in Nashville my whole life. You all have been here years and years and years. Nashville, I mean, it’s just such a mixed bag. It is kind of the postmodern Vatican of the Prayer Trade, the God grift, the faith cartel.
ST: That’s awesome.
DD: It’s also country music. It’s publishing. So one line there that seems very unique to people who know people in Nashville who have tried their hand at this is: “Trying to hoard our attitudes and monetize them.” Monetize an attitude, monetize soul. I’m praising your field study of your own lives, of Nashville, of what’s going on among creative types in Nashville. And I wondered if either of you would have anything to say about that mantra.
DP: I don’t know that it’s just Nashville. I guess we have our own special brands of it here.
ST: It’s just so easy to take on an attitude, and that becomes your persona, and you essentially adapt to a persona that you would like to present. And next thing you know, you’ve created a monster.
It’s not specific, certainly, to music, but it’s certainly in music. Now you see a lot of people decide, “This is my persona,” and then they’ve got to live with it.
DP: Yeah, yeah, it’s sell, sell, sell. It goes deep. On the personal side, on the psychological side, the relational side. And at the end of the day, it’s all business.
DD: “Still Know Your Number By Heart,” I know that it’s one of the 30-year-old songs. How did that one come to be? And I want to mention quickly, too, I love that “Stranger Things” has put Kate Bush back on the map for a lot of people, The Hounds of Love, her album with “Running Up That Hill.” You all have the hounds: “The hounds of love are barking through the fence.” You were referencing pop culture in that playful way even then.
DP: Oh, yeah. The idea for doing a song like that, which was really atypical not only for us, but there weren’t a whole lot of bands for whom the backbone of their material would allow in a speed punk, country, bluegrass. I know for me back then, one of the things that irked me was sort of the homogenization of individual artistry. I remember when it really started to happen, when I was living and working in New York City. All of a sudden bands were coming out and artists were coming out and they were all in two or three different silos. I think Lynn was very much in this headspace too: Hey, we used to listen to the Stones and the Beatles and the Stones would have “Wild Horses” and hard country content. And The Beatles would sort of find their way to do that, too. That was part of the greatness of those groups. And that idea vanished on the soundscape of American music production. You didn’t have bands that allowed themselves or were allowed by their keepers to stretch that far.
DD: When you played live, “Still Know You’re Number” was what I was always waiting for. It’s like, “They’re going to break it down, they’re going to transcend genre again.”
DP: I think the Coen brothers stepped into our lives at some point around then. Steve, do you remember the lyrical impetus?
ST: I think there was a little bit of “Raising Arizona” mixed in there. But man, when we sing that song, again, I didn’t have to be embarrassed. We all created those lyrics together and I’m thinking, “These lyrics are really funny.”
DD: They really are: “I don’t know if it’s love or if I’m smart, but I still know your number by heart.”
DP: I just want to recognize the fact that we’re missing our cohort, Lynn Nichols, who is ill today and who’s very important to all this stuff. He’s part of the trifecta, in terms of the writers. And our drummer and our bass player, Wade [Jaynes], those guys were invaluable. Not having Lynn here, we’re getting two-thirds of the commentary.
ST: Yeah, we’re missing Lynn’s wicked sense of humor.
DD: “Treasure of the Broken Land,” was that only the second time it was performed live, at the Ryman?
DP: Yes.
DD: Your performance has a kind of open heart surgery to it, very personal, but personal in a way that a band called Chagall Guevara would be. Could you say something about its placement at the end of Halcyon Days and what it means to you to have covered it?
ST: Well, I love that song. We recorded it after the band either was in the process or was essentially breaking up. There is just so much pain. I mean, I can hear it in my voice. There is so much pain in that voice. And yet that song is so full of hope. I think Mark [Heard] wrote it after the death of his father. And so it just felt like the perfect song to end the night with. It’s just a beautiful moving song about loss and hope.
DP: The song was unintentionally sleight of hand. What happened was we had said “yes” to contributing a song to the Mark Heard memorial album, which was to benefit his wife and children after he passed. So we had never really talked about it. We went into the studio and just did it. I’m trying to express something really deep that happened. It’s hard for me, because I can’t even focus on it. When I heard when I heard that song for the first time, really since we recorded it, what hit me immediately was this song really has the heart and soul of Chagall Guevara. I mean, it didn’t sound like one of our songs necessarily, but the way that we arranged it, the way it played out, the textures of it were sort of the sum total of our experiential lives together. All the shows that we had played together, they all sonically materialized in that song. So yeah, it was special. We talked about where it should go in the record. And I think at the end of the day…
ST: It’s right where it’s supposed to be.
DD: Chagall Guevara’s first two albums, hey both end beautifully. “If It All Comes True” and “Treasure of the Broken Land” are both, it seems to me, about belief and hope and expectation. But neither is a hard sell. Like, belief is a kind of spectrum. There is even a “Who knows?” at work in both. They don’t insist on certainty.
A quick one on playing the Ryman: How did that feel?
DP: Oh, gosh, it was an important weekend for me. My family—my immediate family—as dropped away in the last few years. My one remaining family member was there, my sister Beth, and that was really dear to me and important to me. All of my children were there. All of their children were there. So many friends, so many neighbors. And the irony was that I had the most difficult time playing physically that I’ve ever had.
I’ve suffered almost complete hearing loss in one ear in the last year and a half, and so I was experimenting with in-ear monitors that went horribly wrong almost from the beginning of the set. My wife asked me, “What did it sound like?” I said, “It sounded like you’re wearing headphones, and there were seven radio stations playing as loud as they could be playing into your ear at the same time.” It was really difficult for me and I was pissed because it was supposed to be a high moment, but it was a struggle. Yet at the end of the day, it was a beautiful thing.
DD: Steve, do you have something?
ST: I am just always thinking about the next thing. And a couple of days before the show, I just decided, “We’re playing the best stage, in my opinion, in the world. We’re going to have a really good crowd and I’m going to enjoy every minute of this and not take anything for granted.” And that’s what I did. I just had the best time of my life. I just loved being up there with my friends. And it was a magical night for me. So I hope it was for the audience.
DD: Did y’all feel vindicated? I felt vindicated as a Chagall Guevara disciple.
DP: Vindication, it wasn’t really on my mind. But fulfillment was. The fulfillment, for me, started when we began the Kickstarter campaign and we started hearing from people and because we had never really, truly toured the U.S. We played every place that could be played in the U.K, or close. But we didn’t get that opportunity in the United States. So we never really knew who our people were, how many of them there were. I think Steve has a much, much better idea than I did. But seeing those people there seeing that that they had come from West Coast Canada, all over the country, Portugal.
DD: There was a fellow from Northern Ireland in line with me. England.
DP: Somebody from Patagonia. So that that was really fulfilling for me. That was a long time coming, really, that the music meant something to somebody. It was a very meaningful weekend despite my issues with sound and hearing.
DD: Well, I’m telling you, it was strong, all the way through. All the way through. Well, I thank you both so much.
DP: Till 2052.
DD: And for the record, “Till 2052” was the last thing that was cried out from the stage by Dave Perkins.