Kayte Travels . . .
When we signed Kayte to the label, a friend of hers remarked that she’s “the hardest working person in the industry”. I’ve since learned how true that is. For example, in the week that this was written she will have driven over 1800 miles doing shows. Appearing at festivals in Aspen, Nashville, Detroit, Bismarck, and Boulder has taken up just part of a month. There is a book out about being a musician on the road (Tales From the Rock and Roll Highway). Kayte was asked to relate some of her own experiences in it. Following is a copy of her account in that book. All I can say is, she’s one heck of a trooper. Besides her huge talent, her bigger heart is a major reason why we signed her. 
  
Walter Bryant,
Silver Hill Records

Kayte's chapter "But It Can Be . . ." from the book
Tales From The Rock 'n Roll Highway compiled by Marley Brant
I spent an entire year (or two) reading the autobiographies and biographies of famous performers in a scientific study to determine what universal actions each artist took in order to succeed. I kept reading about singers driving back and forth across the country crammed in old station wagons, sedans, vans, and buses, and singers who were sleeping in trains and airplanes. This is where I got the idea that if I kept in constant motion, I would eventually cause a commotion. It didn't take long though, before I found myself in a situation where I was in way over my head.

I began working with the top agent who booked outdoor street performances, and like every other hungry musician, I trusted in her judgment and guidance and would have done anything, yes anything, she asked me to do just to get in her good graces. I had six festival performances with her under my belt and was beginning to develop a feel for and confidence in the venues. So, when this agent called me with a gig performing on the streets of New York City, I was all-confident and all-knowing, and, unfortunately, all-naive; I was my usual fearless self. I'd been to the Big Apple once before, so I was vaguely familiar with the city. Basking in a false sense of security, I packed my anvil cases complete with one mixing board, one amplifier, one keyboard, a dolly, and lots of CDs to sell. In my purse, I had a single piece of paper with details on where the hotel was and where the gig was. I had a stack of maxed-out credit cards and a couple hundred dollars cash in my wallet.

I boarded the plane at LAX airport. I was immediately shocked by the poor condition the airplane was in (I normally travel on Southwest, so you know where my standards are). Seats were stained, the lights on the aisleways were broken, the doors to some of the bathrooms were taped with x's to keep people out of them, and my seat came with a barf bag that had already performed its function. The coffee machine in the galley was out of order, and the flight began with an irate passenger being escorted against his will off the plane in front of the few others on the plane with me (all the while screaming about how [he] really did pay for the ticket). The one remaining operational lavatory had a nasty habit of not letting you out once you were inside, so that's probably how all of the other doors were broken on the other bathrooms. Okay, so it was a cheap flight. Next time I'd remind the agent not to use this airline. No, I won't state the name of the operation, but let's just say it starts with a t for terrible.

Five long hours later, we landed in Newark, New Jersey. I couldn't get a single cabby who wanted to shove two large 80 pound flight cases in the backseat, let alone help me lift them into the trunk. But there are always those scab cabbies, the illegal ones, hovering around the terminal, and they would do the undoable, so I went with an unlicensed cab driver. This driver drove me all over the place, acting as unfamiliar with the area as I was. The fare was almost 60 bucks plus tips for the heavy luggage. Oh well, I got to the hotel in one piece. It's only money.

The hotel was just outside the Holland Tunnel. A congested, noisy stream of anxious drivers merging into two lanes was the ambient sonic backdrop in the "lobby," where you communicated to the "concierge" through a hole in the sev­eral sheets of bulletproof glass behind which he sat. I looked around to see two old plastic chairs, and a host of very strange and colorful characters that were renting rooms by the hour, not by the night. Some of them were BYOBing in the halls, while others were getting down to some other Serious Business. I checked in, and asked if there was an elevator. First law of the Big City, there are no elevators where you need them. There was no handicap access (aren't there any handicapped pimps and hos?) where I might carry my eighty-pound bags through and down to the basement, where my room was. So I left my equipment unattended in the "lobby" while lugging each heavy box down a flight of stairs and into my tiny room, all the while thinking how fun it would be to drag them all upstairs early the next morning. I closed the door, locked it immediately, and drew in a deep breath of relief. To the gentle sounds of honking horns and blar­ing car radios outside my hotel window, I drifted off into a blissful hotel sleep.

The cabby who picked me up in the morning exclaimed loudly how I was not gonna "scratch his leather seats with those cases" (do cabs have leather seats?) and I proceeded to cover the seats with blankets I had brought from the hotel and nurse them gently into the cab, all the while assuring the cabby that he'd get a nice tip for this inconvenience. Once we had arrived at Lincoln Center, the cabby told me how he had to add another fifty bucks to the fare for crossing the state line into New York and six bucks for the tunnel fare, in addition to the regular fare. It was almost a hundred bucks by the time I had tipped him. I was getting the idea that using a taxi in New York City to transport large anvil cases was not only a stupid idea, but also a costly one.
But here I was; I had made it to one of the most important places in the city, Lincoln Center. All my friends back home were so impressed, mainly because they thought I was playing in Lincoln Center, not in front of it. (I was not going to burst their bubble, not just yet. Maybe they still think I played there.)

I was carefully positioned outside the box office in the square where I could look up at the tall building and, framed in a humid blue-and-gray sky, the tall white clouds peeking through the skyscrapers. I set up my keyboard and amplifiers, plugged in to a small electrical socket in the granite stairwell next to me, and at the stroke of twelve noon, I sang out onto the courtyard. The people stopped and turned and gathered around me and my little card table of CDs. I began to take their money without stopping the performance, one hand on the keys and the other giving them change. And then, at exactly 12:10 PM, I felt a single raindrop on my face, and I looked up to see a thunderhead and its trail of rain heading right for me.

But I needed the money! I was going to keep on playing, even if it rained! However, the audience wasn't interested in wet CDs and my solo performance of "Singing in the Rain." They ran away. As I looked down upon my wet electronics and the growing puddle of water I was standing in, I had a vision of my next song being "You Light Up My Life" with me as the light bulb. There was a group of people watching me with obvious concern from the shel­tered box office entryway not ten feet away. And as I started to rip apart my gear and hustle the equipment piece by piece to the entryway, a few blessed souls offered to help me escape the torrential downpour. When all was in a safe place, one man looked at the dripping wet electronics and astutely asked, "Will your equipment be okay?" to which I cheerfully replied, "Oh, yes, I covered it with a blanket as soon as I could" (albeit a blanket wet with rain).

A half an hour later, the squall had passed. The warm, moist pavement was steaming in the humid June summer. The sky was once again a bright blue, with little, puffy, white cotton ball clouds darting behind and above skyscrapers. Was it okay to set up again? I eagerly reconstructed my one-woman street show and switched on the power. A nasty crackling like television static blared out of the speakers, and then the mixer went down with a big pop. Now I'd done it! I had ruined my setup, and worst of all, I didn't have the fare to get back to the hotel. I counted with shaking hands four twenties and several five-dollar bills, and with a flood of tears, grasped the reality of my situation: I had to get a new mixing board, now, or I was in deep, deep trouble. All I had was a checkbook, six over-the-limit credit cards, ninety bucks, and a phone.

First, I called the Musician's Union to ask if they could help me out. No help there. I called several instrument rental companies, all of which declined to rent me anything for use in the out-of-doors (wow, they would have rented gear to me??). I then called a local music store, which didn't have the mixer I needed but recommended that I call the Sam Ash music store next door. They had the very mixer I needed for $320. I didn't have that much money, I didn't know how to get there, but I'd be damned if I wasn't gonna find a way to get that mixer.

So, I asked a security guard what subway to take, begged him to watch my remaining equipment, and minutes later I located the Sam Ash music store. They had the unit, but they would not take my personal check. Nor would any of my credit cards run. That is, until after my pitiful crying in front of the register persuaded the clerk to run small amounts of money on each of my six cards (charges of less than fifty dollars go unverified by Sam Ash as to account status − please don't try this yourself − I love Sam Ash). With some additional cash out of my pocket, I raced out the door with a renewed sense of accomplishment. I was back in business!

But as I watched the unfamiliar numbers and letters whiz by through the sub­way train's windows, no one looked familiar anymore. What had I done? I thought I had retraced my steps − normally I'm pretty good about that − but somehow I was far away from where I'd been and was getting farther by the minute. I was headed towards the Bronx, somewhere on the Upper East Side, totally lost. I can't believe I did this, after all of the effort now I can't find the gig. So I got off the train, started asking for directions, and then headed back the way I came. Three hours after I had purchased the mixer, I returned to my pile of equipment sitting out in the open − unprotected and unwatched but luckily untouched − on the Lincoln Center Plaza and began setting up.

I was in the home stretch. I powered up the P.A. and began to sing. And the people reappeared, gathered around me and my little display of CDs. I began taking money, and just as I finished the second song, looked up into a huge black thunderhead that greeted me with a few fat raindrops. I grabbed the mixing board and ripped the cables from it, and with Herculean speed and Amazonian strength threw the various pieces of electronics into the shelter beneath the awnings in front of the Lincoln Center. And it was here I sat, until one of the employees of the Lincoln Center came out to inform me that I could not store my belongings there. That is when I started bawling. The employee went away.

The rain was so heavy and the wind so strong that some of the rain found its way to me, huddled under the large awning with forty or fifty other New Yorkers waiting out the storm. If I could have located an electrical outlet, I would have considered playing a few songs for the poor people trapped with me. I continued to cry to myself. The rain hid my tears. It was around six PM when the rain stopped. I moved back out on the plaza, set up again, and by seven o'clock I was making music again. There were few people passing by, as the festival was over in one hour. I was getting a few people to lis­ten, mostly those on their way to a show somewhere in the Center's complex of theaters. So, when it came to closing time, I just kept on singing, loudly and des­perately trying to make the taxi fare I would need to go to and from the hotel.

All of a sudden the festival promoter yelled out to me: "The festival's over! Go home! They can hear clear inside the halls of the Lincoln Center where there is a show going on!" Just as my friends believed back home, I was entertaining (at least some) of the audience in the Lincoln Center. In fact, it was intermission and many of the patrons were out on the balcony one story up listening to me; watching, I waved, and some of them waved back. "Thank you and goodnight!" I called out to them.

Reaching in my pockets, I counted several hundred dollars, enough to return tomorrow. The next day I was back, it was five minutes before noon, and I was seated in front of my keyboard, adjusting the microphone, checking my sound. Curious people stood around me waiting to see what kind of strange thing I was to do. The weather forecast had not changed in the past 24 hours; the prediction had been for more of the same unpredictable, humid summer sun, wind, and rain. I saw ominous cloud shapes in the distance and was filled with dread. So, with all of my heart and faith, I said a prayer that I might be able to get home from this impossible gig in this unforgiving city. Please God, don't let me go home broke. Please, no more. I began to sing.

A large monarch butterfly circled just above me, then landed gently on the upper right corner of my keyboard. His wings slowly unfolded, folded, then unfolded again. I kept playing and singing, exchanging CDs for cash. The line of people grew and grew until it must have been sixty people deep. I was so busy I was unable to perform, and just played my music on a Walkman while selling CD after CD. All the time, the butterfly flexed his fiery black, yellow, and orange wings in a lazy rhythm to the music. He was unafraid of me. And my fear of the city and what might have happened today left me. Amazingly, the bank of thunder clouds went from left to right across the sky, circling the city but never coming close.

The frenzied people were buying an album that I had never sold, or sung before the public. That album to this day is one of my best sellers: "Four Roses." I couldn't believe the reaction; everyone loved it. How fortunate I was to debut this album here, and now. I have never seen a butterfly stay in one place so close to me for so long. He stayed all afternoon, amid the crowds. When it was time to leave the show, the butterfly left, taking the crowd with him.

I zipped up my pockets, which were full of twenty-dollar bills. I was too afraid to sort and count the money out on the street, so I went to a booth in a ladies' room in the lobby of a four-star hotel across from the Center. I counted over twenty-five hundred dollars. I had never seen this much money come to me from performing, and all in a matter of hours. Even though the little monarch but­terfly had flown away, a butterfly went back to the Lincoln Center Plaza to pack up the music equipment, hail a taxi, having learned a lesson or two about the road.
What I learned:

• Always carry adequate cash.
• Always have a credit card with lots of room on it.
• Bring two of everything. Two mixers, two keyboards, etc.
• Bring a tent in case of rain.
• Always have a "Plan B" for every "Plan A."
• Expect to get lost. That's how you get to know each city. You are never alone. Murphy loves to join you on the road. Anticipate the worst, but enjoy and expect miracles, too.
• And never, never give up.

Kayte Strong