Fall tour 2024 with mold gold part 2

After dancing rabbit, our third stop was in Fairfield, Iowa, home of the Maharishi International University.

Neither of us had been to Fairfield before, so we didn’t quite know what to expect. When we got there, we were surprised at how small of a town it really was. It was a weird mixture culturally of every kind of political ideology. You had pretty far out and hipster types at a coffee shop on the corner, juxtaposed to American flags surrounding the town square and the most super trooper looking state troopers I’ve see with my own eyes.

i kept breaking g strings on this tour, so we made it a mission to find a string. Incidentally, there’s no music stores in Fairfield. We walked to an a/v shop and asked about music stores. The owner was a pretty talkative and kind guy who offered to call his friends asking if they had any extra strings. Between calls, we would fill us in about the town and the University. He told us to visit the “Raj” a “spa” for practitioners of transcendental meditation.

after a while, he connected us to a bag pipe player Tim Britton. I talked to Tim on the phone and he offered to take a string off of his guitar for me! I didn’t take him up on his offer because it seemed like too much trouble. I later found an electric guitar string and used that for my g and it was fine. although I didn’t get a string from Tim, we had a nice conversation about folk and Irish music. Tim specifically plays the Ulliean pipes, bag pipes native to Ireland that use an arm pump and is able to play chords. His music rules.

after the phone call, mere and I headed to the raj to check out the campus. We got to the raj and it was very strange. There was nobody at the front desk, so we walked through the building which seemed empty. It was like walking through the overlook hotel. We eventually ran into an employee and they were more than happy to tell us about the school. We were told to check out the golden domes of excellence.

we went to the domes, or rather walked up to the entrance of one. The domes are separated by sex and are places for members to meditate. You have to call security at the front and make an appointment before hand to visit WITH a member. So we didn’t get in. We walked over to giant pillar called the tower on invincibility. While it looked holy from a distance, the writing on each side of the pillar had write ups about the school’s sponsors. Go figure.

afterwards we drove to the kava bar we were going to play and met up with the owners. That was the beginning of me getting ripped on kava that evening.

we had a ton of time to kill so we went to a park and I walked around for a while by myself. The park had a trail that wrapped around a lake. I saw some white tail deer.

after the park we went to a diner with the worst lighting ever and loitered by ordering only pie. I got the chocolate pie. After seeing the server scowling at us(which I can’t blame her for) we went to the kava bar and continued getting ripped on kava.

one of the employees at the bar had a southern accent so I asked him about it; turns out we had been living in Asheville and had just moved to Fairfield after the flooding. His whole home and his farm were destroyed. It was so wild to meet someone affected by the flooding all of the way in Iowa.

we played to a small crowd and everyone was super kind. Really it was very chill. I wasn’t nervous this time. After we played the bar filled up with people who came for the canceled karaoke night. I played a couple of more songs then gave up because the people there did not seem like they could give any less of a fuck about some dude playing 12 string guitar without singing. I can’t blame them, if I had been gunning to sing “sledgehammer” all week and it was canceled so some folk musicians could play some somber tunes id be a little disappointed too.

the owners of the kava bar were super cool and down to trash on the university, confirming how I felt; it was a dumb pyramid scheme. Seemed expensive. There were mansions everywhere with tiny stupas on top.

that night we stayed in a church parish that was rented out to our host(she said,”my landlord is a council of 12 priests). Got my own bed for the second night in a row.

the next day we drove to Minneapolis