Three Days in Prison

It must have sounded like a spaceship landing in the next room, Paul says to no one in particular, and I wake from the sort of light sleep that comes 10 minutes at a time in the back seat of a van. The van is a 15-year-old Toyota Sienna with a front bumper held together by zip ties and a busted back door handle. To close it after getting out, you have to reach inside and give one big pull on the heavy sliding door from there, then quickly clear your forearm from the opening before it gets crushed. I do it tentatively at first, without enough force to make the door actually close, but by the end of my three-day stint in Prison, I’ve got the necessary balance of power and finesse figured out.

We’re on our way home from tour when Paul makes his remark about the spaceship, hauling seven hours through heavy rain from Pittsburgh back to New York City. Matt, the drummer and driver in Prison, is playing back a recording of the show from three nights before, at an Indianapolis dive bar with linoleum floors and $3 Coors drafts, my first gig with the band. I had gotten a call a while back about hitting the road for a long weekend at the end of tour to fill in for their regular bassist, also named Matt, who had to head home for some family stuff. (Intra-band conversations must be confusing: You could identify them by their last names, except that both are Matt L.) 

Prison’s music is largely improvised, though there are some structural elements that come up repeatedly. If you heard only a few isolated seconds, you might take them for bluesy hard rockers. A different few seconds and you might think about the sorts of Sonic Youth songs that involve stream-of-consciousness poetry muttered or declaimed over the sound of a punk band crashing into itself. No matter where you drop the needle, it’s loud and loose, prioritizing raw energy over such sophisticated concerns as “chord changes” or “keeping a steady tempo.” If you were a guest musician inclined toward snooty art-critic verbiage that the band members would not use themselves, you might describe the Prison experience as durational. They generally play for 40 minutes or so at a time without stopping, and something may happen at minute 15 or 20 that could never happen at minute one, even if the notes played were exactly the same. The music’s truest character emerges in the long stretch, deep in the illusion of a jam that may never find its final bar. It has this quality in common with Paul’s best-known work, in a band that does exactly what its name says: Endless Boogie.

At 70, Paul Major is several decades older than anyone else in Prison. He plays guitar in lyrical slashes, his tone equally reminiscent of a singing voice and a blade. Wiry, with waist-length graying hair that somehow suggests a leather jacket even when he isn’t wearing one, he looks like a tough motherfucker. And he is tough, rolling around the country in a shitty van in the name of rock’n’roll when he could be at home looking at his iPad and collecting social security. But he’s also one of the gentlest people I’ve ever met: like Mr. Rogers, if Mr. Rogers had stories about crossing paths with Johnny Thunders in the mid ‘70s and buying the first Led Zeppelin album at K-Mart when it came out. At gas station breaks, I bum him cigarettes and he shares tales like these, memories that he says are coming at him slantwise these days, when he doesn’t expect them. He does most of the singing on this tour, coming up with lyrics on the spot. Though I can’t always make them all out, I get the sense that he’s working through memories onstage, too. I try to call up the words and all I have are fragments about looking out a window or ascending into an attic. We’ve been friends for a while, but I never thought I’d be on the road with him. It’s an honor. 

Matt Lilly is something like 40, closer to my own age. He hadn’t used the internet for about a decade until recently. (He gave it a very brief go at some point last year, hoping it might help him with steady employment, but soon bailed again.) Often, when I tell people this, they assume I’m exaggerating, that I only mean he doesn’t have a smartphone, and I have to clarify: He has no email account, no computer, no smartphone, no GPS, no streaming movies or music, and only a secondhand understanding of contemporary social media. He’s a skateboarder and a teetotaler and a vegan and a Grateful Dead fanatic and he hadn’t played drums much before starting Prison. He hits them like a zealous convert, like his salvation and ours depend on it. To help him navigate on tour, he keeps layers and layers of directions written in Sharpie on scraps of paper taped to the center of the van’s steering wheel. For finer points, he occasionally consults our fourth passenger, Doug Shaw, a guitarist, songwriter, and dear friend of mine who I’ve written about in these pages before. Doug’s on tour playing his own sets as well as filling in with Prison on second guitar, lending the music a sunlit openness that it doesn't always have without him.

I used to live with Matt and Paul in the preposterously cheap oceanside apartment they still share in Rockaway Beach, Queens, the boardwalk neighborhood at the surreal southeastern edge of New York City. Guitar amps are stacked in the kitchen. Records, VHS tapes, and old skate magazines occupy most available surfaces in the living room. In under 15 minutes, you can walk out the front door and into the Atlantic Ocean, catch a majestically unfettered view of the downtown skyline on your way out of the water, then settle back into the couch for a viewing of some rare P-Funk or Bob Dylan concert footage that isn’t on the internet, but Matt has it on tape. I like to think there is something of this fantastical terroir in Prison’s music, which is both rigidly bounded—in three days of tour, we never deviate far from E major—and radically open. Like the sweeping expanse of the beach and the grinding close quarters of the subway just behind it, or the way Matt’s vast-but-not-infinite library of music and movies feels so full of possibility precisely because of its limits. Prison, too, turns out to be a pretty apt name for a band so driven to find freedom in constraint. 

Prison’s unpretentiously open-ended jams make it a relatively easy band to just slide into, provided you have a certain tolerance for chaos. I drove out to Rockaway for one cursory rehearsal and they bought me an $82 one-way ticket to Indianapolis, where I would join them to replace the other Matt L. after they’d been on the road without me for a week and a half. At practice, Paul told me he likes to imagine some grizzled musician finally leaving New York and going, I did everything I wanted in this town, except I never got a chance to play in Prison. The band has a fluid lineup, and is maybe even something like a supergroup. The core consists of Matt and Paul plus bassist Matt Leibowitz and guitarist Sarim Al-Rawi, who’s got credits on albums by Titus Andronicus and Real Estate plus his own band Liquor Store. (Sarim, who usually handles a fair amount of the singing, couldn’t make this tour either.) Other comers and goers include Mike Fellows of Rites of Spring and Silver Jews, Mike Donovan of Sic Alps, TV on the Radio touring trombonist Dave Smoota, and the late Sam Jayne of Love As Laughter and Lync, who had my room in the Rockaway apartment before I moved in. 

There’s a moment in the middle of every Prison set when Matt stops pounding the drums and pulls out hand percussion fashioned from sea shells—collected, I assume, on the beach in front of his apartment. The rhythm loses its primal Stooges-meet-Hawkwind pulse, goes freeform, and the rest of the players make whatever sounds please them. Depending on the night, it can be the most delicate part of the set, or the most chaotic. In Indianapolis, there was so much feedback that I worried about damaging the amps we had borrowed. I could feel the warm air pushing out of the giant bass cabinet, a sultry physical sensation to accompany the overwhelming auditory one. I had my fuzz pedal on, plus a reverb unit that’s pretty much useless for its stated purpose but becomes stupidly and wonderfully unpredictable at extreme settings, making sounds that are less like echoes than shrieking pursuers of whatever it is you’re actually trying to play. Its cursed emissions tangled with the guitars in one big angry, ecstatic, indelicate mess. 

That’s the passage that wakes me up in the van three days later. To the patrons in the adjoining bar, many of whom were not there for the show, just drinks at their local watering hole, it probably did sound like a landing spaceship, just like Paul said. His comment sticks with me because it also captures a broader feeling of being on a tour like this one, cruising one small corner of the galaxy, getting puzzled you’re not from around here type looks from baristas and gas station attendants, though most seem to understand that you come in peace, and some even ask if they can find your music on Spotify or YouTube. I like buying cheap sunglasses whenever I go on tour, the more outlandish the better, because they heighten this sense of being a strange but benevolent outsider, an alien perusing the aisles for seltzer and Cajun snack mix. I found a perfect pair at a gas station in Indiana or Ohio, metallic green and trapezoidally bug-eyed. In Chicago, we met a couple of musicians who I’ve shared multiple festival bills with in the past but had never previously spoken to. One of them told me that she can’t stop herself from buying cheap gas station sunglasses on tour either. I didn’t ask her why. I had a feeling I already knew.

Small-time touring has its indignities: the busted door handles, the shitty pay, the floors to sleep on, or the mattress pad that your bandmate informs you might be carcinogenic only after you’ve already spent the night curled up on it with no sheets. Despite all this, it’s still more good than bad, of course, or else we wouldn’t keep doing it. There is the music—the promise of discovering new angles of articulation within yourself, or in the ineffable synergy between you and your bandmates, night after night—but also this mutual understanding between the people who make it. No matter where in the galaxy you land for the evening, you’re likely to encounter someone who knows something very deep about you, knows it perhaps even better than you know it yourself, because it’s in them too. You ask them if they’ve ever played this venue or that one, in Columbus or Milwaukee or Kalamazoo, if they stopped into the taco place around the corner after soundcheck, if the old-timer who likes to give pot cookies to performers showed up to take care of them. They say of course, that was one of the great burritos of my life, or maybe it was just the cookies talking, and the sound’s pretty good at that place, too. This sort of small talk is the lifeblood of the road. You might not see them again for a long time, but when you do, you’ll greet each other as old friends.

I don’t remember much of what happens in the hours between waking up in the van and arriving back in New York: the last gas stations, bummed cigarettes, and shared stories. We drop Paul off in the West Village, where he’s staying that night, and discover that the bumper is sagging, in need of fresh zip ties. Matt gets to work, insisting that it’ll only take 10 minutes, and Doug suggests we have a quick pint in the bar on the corner while we wait. Doug razzes Matt about his dedication to futile pursuits like the upkeep of this van and Matt razzes Doug about his habit of wandering off whenever it’s time to go. They’ve known each other for longer than I’ve known either. I check for my sunglasses in the cupholder of the sliding door and discover that they’ve been smashed: a shame, but at least it wasn’t my forearm, and it feels cosmically appropriate to shed the bug eyes as tour sputters to a close. Following the implications of this omen, I tell Doug I’ll pass on the pint. I’ve got that weird tour combination of dead tiredness and surging energy, like I’m on the edges of panic and catatonia at once. I need to go home.

I almost do. Then I remember that a friend from New York is playing not too far away, opening for a songwriter from Chicago who probably knows the people we were hanging out with the other night. My girlfriend is there, and lots of other musicians we know: people who understand, who will want to hear stories from the road. Matt’s just finished with tying up the bumper. Real life starts again in the morning. The surging energy can sustain me for a couple of hours, at least. I get back in the van and ask him to take me across town for one more show.