Living on Food from Ravens

By Peter Nevland - Jan 06 , 2009

Vincent the Van purred with excitement, loaded up with a PA, guitars, way too many CDs, clothes, pillows, and the hopes of two troubadouring musicians. We called it, “The Acoustic Spoken Groove Combo Tour” and asked people to bill us as Peter Nevland and Paul Finley. “It’s like Dr. Seuss took a walk through the ghetto and decided to become the white jive king,” I wrote for all of our publicity materials. Finding a description for the upcoming events would prove much more difficult.

The wind blew in cold from the north on the way from my parents’ house in Dallas up to Oklahoma City. Paul didn’t have a CD player or any other music listening device, so we tried talking and getting to know each other. The non-reclining seats wouldn’t have it any other way.

Pretty soon I learned that Paul gets excited at the sight of unusual birds, his favorite expression being, “ooh, hawker!” upon spotting a hawk. His Wisconsin accented, clichéd expressions reminded me of hanging out with my grandparents’ midwestern friends. Add to that his slower pace of life, punny humor, frequent urination stops and love of all things Wisconsin, and the vision of long hours together enveloped me like our combined gas emissions in a very small space.

Oklahoma City arrived quickly to rescue us. From the time our feet hit the ground, we managed to squeeze in 6 live performances and two radio interviews in 30 hours. Everything seemed to work, and we even found time to eat and sleep a little. No one knew that we were coming until we got there, but the Sunday night show that had been set up a few days before in a Lost-and-Found room in Austin kept about 200 people enthralled and cheering for encores.

That Sunday morning, while waiting to do one of our preview performances for the church, a guy I’d never met was given the microphone.

“Are the poets here?” he asked.

“Uh, I guess that’s me,” I said, warily.

“I felt like God wanted to say that He’s going to provide for you even if He has to send ravens to do it.”

My brain quickly scanned the scriptures, remembering that Elijah had received food from visiting ravens while hiding out next to a secret spring of water from a king who was trying to kill him. That was all the guy said before he sat back down and faded into the memories of people I’ve met and never seen again.

“I don’t think I really like that,” my mother later told me. I wasn’t incredibly excited about it, either. It didn’t do the trick of instantly taking away the fear that had nestled close to my chest only a couple of weeks before. Everything in me wanted lots of money, large crowds, and press coverage to quickly validate my departure from the world of engineering salaries.

In hindsight we probably should have turned around after that show in Oklahoma City. Nothing we did afterward made any money. We drove up to Rolla, Missouri, for an early morning radio interview on a college campus with a cool old DJ named Jim Sigler, who carried all his CDs in a cooler. While huddled in the basement of the gracious family who’d offered to let two guys they’d never met before stay in their house, I got a call from the set of “The Alamo” asking me if I could come work on the movie. Frustrated, I declined the offer every time they called, trading my shot at movie stardom for the road life of a touring musician.

We played in venues such as a Catholic Advent Dinner, Paul’s family’s celebration of Thanksgiving, and the One-2-One Teen Center in his hometown of Waukesha, Wisconsin. It didn’t do wonders for my impending sense of doom when we had to fight with some little hellions to keep them from stealing all our merchandise. Little girls mocked us. A couple of teenage boys listened half-attentively. The emo bands before us had paved the way for the acoustic duo with crashing cymbals and angst ridden lyrics. I had the explosive energy, but Paul and I completely lacked the sense of cool and detached melancholy they sought. Thank God Paul’s parents treated us well in the extra room they had in their “Seniors Living” apartment.

Chicago was worse. We had no gigs and a week to kill, since all our plans for Indiana had fallen into an abyss. We arrived in freezing cold and had to wait a couple hours late at night for Paul’s old bandmate to get home and let us inside. I remember the tiny hide-a-bed we had to share and the Thanksgiving leftovers we mined in the fridge. When we sought out open mics, a couple friends made some “Wow, that was really interesting” responses, all we had to show for our stay. It took me a while to warm up to the Windy City.

In Columbus, Ohio, we played for a business meeting and an unscheduled Sunday morning youth group. When we got to Kentucky, the five shows scheduled by booking wonderchild Mike Davis ended up with me paying him $500 for 5 shows that yielded about $234. We stayed in a tiny bachelor’s pad in Wilmore, Kentucky, with nothing to do during the day but watch the near freezing rain turn the front lawn into a cold, muddy swamp. Paul worked on a new tune inspired by the malaise, playing the same phrase over and over and over again.

“I left Motorola for this?!” kept hammering my head with the notes from Paul’s guitar. People kept treating us well, going out of their way to take care of us and even give us money for playing them a couple tunes, but playing for 3 people here, and 7 people there was killing my dreams with the slow, dull hammer of reality.

We took a day trip out to Fort Boonesborough, Kentucky, to see the only tourist attraction close by. It was all we had to do. After looking over the fence at the closed fort and inspecting the ancient graves of pioneers who had died young, I shuffled over to a red brick building to get out of the rain. It was still cold inside the enclosure that covered the house where Abraham Lincoln’s parents had been married.

I gazed through the rude windows and ill-fitting logs into the tiny space inside. One bed, a firepit, a table and lots of places for the frigid, howling wind to sneak into a young family’s struggle to survive, arrested my heart. Every facet of what it took to be a pioneer had always sounded so glamorous to me. I’d never considered the backbreaking labor and little reward that most of those heroes experienced in their lifetime.

After 3 weeks, 9 states, and 23 performances, we pulled our worn out hearts and Paul’s cleverly named van back into Austin with too many stories for one book to hold. The owner of a “Christian” coffeehouse had thrown us out for doing too much “angry poet stuff.” My girlfriend broke up with me right after a show in Evansville, and I poured my heart out through a microphone the next day on stage. We’d met people begging with wide-eyed wonder for us to play at their college, school or youth group. Possibilities shone like tiny sparks of light in the vast emptiness of uncertainty. I wasn’t sure if I would make it on this incredibly difficult journey. But I was expecting ravens to provide something that would keep me going. I had to keep going.