Episode 50: Louis Inglis

Louis Inglis: I thought, well, that'll be cool. I'll go to this weird convention with all these libertarians in Las Vegas, and then I'll go to Portland, Oregon, and presumably hang out with sort of weird hippies or something. I didn't actually know much about Portland at the time. I hadn't seen like Portlandia or anything. I didn't know what that was.

Josh Caldwell: Hello, my atypical daydreamers. Welcome to the podcast. Here we share road stories. I think everybody's got one, and I want to hear them all. So this episode is pretty exciting, episode fifty. I made it this far. I started recording friends of mine during the pandemic, just their stories, their road stories, tour stories, and I didn't even know exactly what I was making. Eventually in 2022 I released my first episodes, and then it's just been this crazy journey ever since then. As I've gone deeper into this process, the spectrum of stories has just grown way beyond anything I could have ever imagined. I want to keep making this show. I'll go all the way to episode 500 if I can. And everybody who's been listening, whether it's from the very beginning or people who just discovered the podcast, I want to say thanks. And for my dedicated Patreon supporters, huge thank you. Now on to the show.

My guest is Louis Inglis. He's a songwriter and musician from Perth, Australia. Today, Louis takes us on a trip he took to the US back in 2012. What I love about his story is that in some ways, not a lot happens. There's no dramatic twist, no danger, no big loss or redemption arc. It's kind of just normal. But Louis has a way of telling a story that I find engaging, playful, funny. It's not about what happens so much as how he sees it. And that is where the magic is.

Louis Inglis: This is the story of my journey to America from Perth. Perth is often cited as one of the most isolated cities in the world. This was like probably my first international trip, pretty much the only trip I've taken on my own. Kind of a big deal. It was precipitated by the fact that I used to release some music on this very small independent label, just run by this guy who I'll call Sean. Which is confusing because there is another Sean in this story. He was at the time living in Portland, Oregon, and was putting on a small music festival with some of the bands from his tiny label. He sort of emailed me about this. At first I wasn't sure I could justify the expense. But it happened around the same time as a big annual skeptics meeting called TAM, The Amazing Meeting. There's this guy called James Randi, who's been this debunker of things on television. I'm kinda interested in this stuff. I've already figured out at this point that most of them are like weird libertarians, but it did seem like an interesting thing to go to.

I thought, well, that'll be cool. I'll go to this weird convention with all these libertarians in Las Vegas, and then I'll go to Portland, Oregon, and presumably hang out with sort of weird hippies or something. I didn't actually know much about Portland at the time. I hadn't seen like Portlandia or anything. So I packed up my guitar and my backpack and I had my visa, which had taken about three months to get. Had to say that I wasn't working. Even though I kinda thought I was. Kinda. Debatable maybe. A little bit scary to lie.

Louis Inglis: Got on the plane, went over. It's like eleven or twelve hours, I think. It's very uncomfortable. I'm quite tall, like six two. So I'm always very uncomfortable in planes anyway. Got off. They take you aside into the little room and ask what you're doing. He was nice enough. It was a little bit intimidating. I stuck with my lie. I didn't crack under the pressure and tell him I was playing a tiny music festival.

These are the observations that everyone makes, but I got my first view of an American toilet. The toilets with lots of water and the stalls with very high gaps underneath that you could sort of crawl under if you needed to. I don't know what I was expecting. For the record, never been interested in my life in visiting Las Vegas. I've seen it in movies obviously. I wasn't quite prepared for how cheap it all looked. I knew it had a penchant for being tacky, but I didn't realise it was so just plonked in the middle of the desert. It felt very cardboardy and like propped up. You see it in movies too much. You feel like it's gonna have more gravitas.

So I got there, went to this place. They give you a t-shirt for part of the admission price. I didn't realise a 2XL in America was like the size of a parachute. So I got a parachute-size t-shirt. But it was fun. They'd have talks during the day in a big convention room. Some of it was interesting science stuff. Some was a bit more like, here's why Bigfoot isn't real. Which, I think I was pretty sure of that anyway. But it's always fun when you go somewhere and you see all these people that you've seen on the computer just walking around. Lawrence Krauss was one of the speakers. He's a physicist who had ties to Jeffrey Epstein. It does feel a little bit like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The sort of weird lizard-like creatures going around. But there are a lot of nice people there too. Biggest hotel I've ever seen. Not on the strip. It was a lower rent place. But enormous. I don't think I've ever seen the inside of a building that big. And the smell of stale cigarette smoke, because smoking indoors had only recently been banned in Australia. I actually don't mind that smell. Really acrid, but in a sort of interesting way.

Josh Caldwell: Hey, it's Josh. Hope you're enjoying the podcast. And if so, are you wanting more road stories? Well, good news. I've got you covered. Consider becoming a patron. You'll have access to loads of great bonus stories that there just wasn't time for. And you'll be supporting a truly independent podcast. Find the link in the show notes and thanks. Now back to the show.

Louis Inglis: So now we're getting to Portland. Looks really nice from the sky. I put on Elliott Smith while the plane was landing because I felt that was appropriate. I felt like it was a really good vibe right away. One of the great fun things when you're travelling and skipping off the surface of places a little bit is that you get off somewhere and you immediately sense the vibe of the place. And that's kind of like how it is when you meet a person. You can tell the basic things about them. Portland was pretty relaxed, progressive, all that good stuff. This was 2012, so this is the peak of the hipster thing. Hipsters everywhere. I was going with the flow. I liked the leafiness of it. I liked the moderate weather. It gets very hot in Perth. I like things to be a little milder.

I'd never met this Sean from the record label before, only emailed. The second Sean in the story is also from Perth, who I'd only met briefly here and there. We're still in bands together. This whole trip was a bit of a catalyst for us hanging out more and forming some bands.

Sean the label guy had this tiny label called Metal Postcard. It's his personal taste. Quite eclectic, doesn't necessarily have a sound. He'd sunk a fair bit of money into this enterprise and it wasn't clear he was going to make any of it back. He was also trying to organise a thousand things at once. So I'm just having brief interactions with him and then going off to walk around and check out the city. He'd rented a caravan on someone's property for me. Other Sean from Perth was set to stay there too. There was a house as well. They had the kombucha going, a big kombucha tank with a massive SCOBY in there.

Louis Inglis: The festival was happening in a day or two. We didn't really understand exactly what it was. Quite an ambitious three-day thing. The ticket price was relatively high, perhaps just to recoup a little bit. Not necessarily something someone with a casual interest would fork out for. Resulting in the fact that there weren't really very many people there at all.

First night there was an art show. Some fashion thing. A lot of people doing a catwalk-ish sort of thing. I think they were all wearing dresses or something made out of twigs. They had exposed breasts and twigs. I played on this first night. Not too many people there, which was good because I didn't play very well. My whole performance was a bit fragmented. I was trying to do too many things. That was fine. I had no expectations of anything going any particular way. I just thought it would be an interesting adventure.

I played again in the daytime the next day. That was nice. A few people were listening. The festival felt a little bit like it was still being set up for the whole time it was running. Maybe it just got a little bigger than it could really be, or should have been, for it to be successful as that sort of event. Everyone involved had a good time, but money may have been lost. I did get to know someone from my own city a little bit better, such that we went on to form several bands which then pulled in more people and became a whole thing, good and bad in some ways, but interesting, and set the course for at least the next five or ten years of what I was doing.

Louis Inglis: This is not an observation about anything else, but I got back to Australia and the birds here are insane. And I didn't even know that they were that insane. Like constant squawking. It was like you're in a zoo just walking around. And I didn't even realise that was going on all the time. And the people sound the same. And I don't know if the accent comes from the birds, because the birds are going and all the people are kinda as well. So I don't know if there's a relationship there. You'd talk like this to get over the sound of the birds.

Josh Caldwell: I want to thank Louis for sharing his experience. Be sure to check out his latest album, Tasty Delights. It's like a beautiful lo-fi art folk dream. All the links in the show notes. This podcast is created and produced by me, Josh Caldwell. Music by Visual Aid, my side music project. General support and copywriting by Miranda Caldwell. And if you know someone who you think might enjoy this show, send them this episode. The support really helps. Thank you for listening, and I hope you come back next time.