The Sick Bag Song

By Nick Cave

The legendary indie rock star offers a genre-bending chronicle of his 2014 American tour with the Bad Seeds that's part memoir, part epic poem.
The Sick Bag Song began when Nick Cave was struck with inspiration during a flight between tour stops and reached for an airplane sick bag to scribble it down. This improvised diary soon grew into a restless full-length contemporary odyssey. Spurred by encounters with modern-day North America, beset by longing and exhaustion, Cave teases out the significant moments, the people, the books, and the music that have influenced him over the years.
Drawing inspiration from Leonard Cohen, John Berryman, Patti Smith, Sharon Olds, folk ballads and ancient texts, The Sick Bag Song takes the form of a quest, turning over questions of creativity, loss, death, and romance. It is also the perfect companion piece to the Sundance award-winning feature documentary 20,000 Days on Earth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9780544814578

Nick Cave

Nick Cave has been performing music for more than forty years and is best known as the songwriter and lead singer of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, whose 2019 album, Ghosteen, was widely received as their best work ever. Cave’s body of work also covers a wider range of media and modes of expression, including film score composition, ceramic sculpture and writing novels. Over the last few years his Red Hand Files website and “Conversation with” live events have seen Cave exploring deeper and more direct relationships with his fans.

Book preview

title page

Contents

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Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Nashville, Tennessee

Manchester, Tennessee

Louisville, Kentucky

Kansas City, Missouri

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Denver, Colorado

Calgary, Alberta

Edmonton, Alberta

Vancouver, British Columbia

Seattle, Washington

Portland, Oregon

San Francisco, California

Los Angeles, California

Austin, Texas

New Orleans, Louisiana

Washington, D.C.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

New York City, New York

Detroit, Michigan

Toronto, Ontario

Montreal, Québec

The Nine Ways of Undying Gratitude

About the Author

Connect with HMH

First U.S. edition

Copyright © 2015 Nick Cave

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19 th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

First published by Canongate Books Ltd in 2015.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cave, Nick, date, author.

Title: The sick bag song / Nick Cave.

Description: First U.S. edition. | Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016004628 (print) | LCCN 2016005242 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544814653 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780544814578 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Cave, Nick, date—Travel—United States. | Rock musicians—Australia—Biography. | Motion sickness—Humor.

Classification: LCC ML420.C39 A3 2016 (print) | LCC ML420.C39 (ebook) | DDC 782.42166092—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016004628

The Artist by Denise Levertov, from Collected Earlier Poems, 1940–1960, copyright © 1960 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Cover art © Nick Cave

v2.0620

To the boy on the bridge

Nashville

Tennessee

A young boy climbs a riverbank. He steps onto a railway bridge. He is twelve years old.

He kneels down, under a harsh sun, and puts his ear to the track. The track does not vibrate. There is no train approaching around the bend on the other side of the river.

The boy starts to run along the tracks. He arrives in the middle of the bridge. He stands on the edge and looks down at the muddy river below.

On the left side is a concrete pylon that supports the bridge. On the right, a half-felled tree lies across the river, its branches sticking out into the dark water. In between there is a small space about four feet wide.

He has been told that it is possible to jump in at this point, but he cannot be sure, as he has never seen anybody do it.

The stones beneath his feet begin to tremble. He crouches down and again he puts his ear to the track.

The track begins to vibrate. The train is coming.

He stares down at the dark, muddy water, his heart pounding.

•

The boy does not realise that he is not a boy at all, but rather the memory of a boy.

He is the memory of a boy running through the mind of a man in a suite at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, who is being injected in the thigh with a steroid shot that will transform the jet-lagged, flu-ridden singer into a deity.

In three hours he will burst from the hotel room. He will move through the empty city, crossing vast rivers, driving through empty prairies, along tremendous, multi-laned highways, under darkening skies, like a small god, to be with you, tonight.

Manchester

Tennessee

And I will walk on stage at Bonnaroo Festival in Manchester, Tennessee, and become an object of great fascination to almost no one. The dazed crowd will drift back and forth across the fields and the sinking sun will flood the site with orange fire. After the show, I will sit outside on the steps of our trailer and smoke.

On the way back to Nashville, our van will be stalled on the highway for two hours at the scene of a terrible automobile accident. We will watch as ambulances and police cars speed down the slip roads. We will see a helicopter chopping above us, its searchlight cutting through the dark night. For an hour we will sit silently in our van, smoking and drinking. Eventually our tour manager

[cail_judy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Nick Cave's wild, dancing poetry interweaves with his memories of the Bad Seeds 2014 tour. My brother and I saw him in Vancouver and it was a top-three, all-time experience. His sick-bag write-up of Vancouver was good but I wish he'd talked about humping my brother's face during Stagger Lee.

Audacious in its imagery and (surprisingly) lucid in its narrative, this book is a must-read.

[larryking1-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a ride! This short collection of vignettes, ostensibly written on the backs of airline 'vomit' bags, recounts Cave's 22-city 2014 North American tour. It is a work of delirious imagery and his insights tap into an imagination without limits. As his journey gains momentum, the account takes on a fevered reverie of a mentality running wild! Is there anything that this man cannot do?