Sleeping in the bunk of a van barreling down the highway at seventy miles an hour isn’t easy. You have to train yourself, mentally and physically, repeating in your mind that this is the only time you’ll have during the day to catch a little nap, so you have to sleep, even if the van is rocking back and forth, bumping up and down over bits of rough road, filling you with terror every time you go around a sharp curve (“Is this where I die?”). It took close to a year, at the beginning of my career, of zen mind control, but I have taught my body and mind that vertical equals awake, horizontal equals asleep. It just goes to show you that the human body can adapt to almost anything.
There’s a scene in the excellent Merle Haggard documentary that my friend Gandulf Hennig directed. In this particular scene, Merle is in the back of his tour bus, looking out the small window. He talks about the time that he spent in prison, and the time that he has spent in that particular small enclosed space on his tour bus, and how they were about the same size. He had just resigned himself that that was what his life offered to him, these small enclosed spaces that he couldn’t really leave, followed by brief moments on stage, receiving adulation from people who loved his music. I never did prison time, but I’ve certainly spent thousands of hours in this particular van bunk prison cell.
I remember another good quote about becoming a professional musician that my friend and mentor Forrest Rose used to say to me (and he even started a band named after this catchphrase): “It Beats Workin’.”
Yes it does, Forrest. And now, horizontal equals asleep.
