Jucifer
- Story by J. Bennett
Jucifer's amplifier queen loves being homeless
It helps if you’re wearing black sweatbands and holding a Gibson Explorer, but in lieu of either (or both), just clench your ass cheeks together a bit, slam a shot of vodka or five and sing it like Hetfield would: “Rovah, wandrah, nomad, vagabond, call me what you wiiillll…” But keep this in mind, fancy pants: For Jimmy and Lars and the boys, the statement “Where I lay my head is home” was arena code for “sleeping in a different five-star hotel room every night for almost two years before returning to our seaside manses.” For Jucifer, the thunder-rock duo formerly of Athens, GA, the concept behind Metallica’s immortal touring lament is considerably more, uh, tactile. As in: Amber Valentine (vocals/guitar/wall of amplifiers) and Ed Livengood (drums) have literally been living in their RV for the last seven years. As in: sleeping on campgrounds and in random parking lots. With no heat. And a roadie. And two dogs. For seven years. Did we mention they’re married? As in, somehow not divorced? It’s pretty incredible, really. The longest they’ve stayed in one place was the month they spent in an undisclosed location recording their latest full-length, L’autrichienne (Relapse), a concept album (a double concept album, actually, with all 21 songs crammed onto one disc to keep the price down for fans) about the French Revolution. Valentine says she’s had the idea for years, but didn’t actually follow through until she found a book on the subject in an RV-park lending library. We shit you not. When we called her up, Jucifer’s house on wheels was parked in the middle of a Nor’easter somewhere in Connecticut.
How did you end up living in an RV?
Essentially, we were renting a house—we’ve never owned a house—and the landlord sold the house. We were on tour at the time, and they really did try to give us some warning, but considering that we were booked throughout the year, the three months’ warning they gave us wasn’t really sufficient for us to go back and move out. Fortunately, our tour had been routed near enough to that rental house that we were able to salvage our most important things, which were our musical instruments and our vinyl collection. Everything else ended up in a giant dumpster. Even today, when we go back to Athens to play, we’ll see someone riding down the street on one of our old bicycles or notice a piece of our old furniture is now on someone’s front porch.
Isn’t your vinyl collection kind of useless in an RV?
We were actually recently able to get the right kind of turntable. We don’t use it while we’re going down the road, but we do have one. We’ve worn out a utility trailer—we’re actually on our way to wearing out a second one—but the worn- out one is at my folks’ place out in the country under a shade tree, and that’s where we keep the vinyl, stacked horizontally in such a way that it’s weighing itself down so hopefully it doesn’t warp.
Your lifestyle precludes accumulating a lot of the stuff that tends to take up space in people’s houses or apartments. That’s pretty awesome, actually.
Yeah, we accidentally found that living like this is the perfect tool for us to focus on the better tendencies of our natures.
You and Ed are a couple as well. How do you not drive each other insane being on top of each other all the time?
I guess it comes down to the old adage, “If you want to see if your relationship with your girlfriend or boyfriend is worth pursuing, go on a long road trip together.” This is the ultimate version of that. We play in a band together, which is essentially running a business together, and we’re also on a permanent road trip. [Laughs] It’s the test of your mettle, you know? And for us, it’s proven strong.
You guys also have a roadie with you—and, uh, dogs, I hear?
[Laughs] I love your incredulous tone. Yeah, we have two dogs—one large dog and one very, very small dog. And a roadie. [Laughs]
Does your roadie ever suffer from third-wheel syndrome, because he’s traveling with a couple?
You know, I think it works out pretty well. We’ve had three long-term roadies, each of whom has stayed with us for two to three years. Because we play shows all year, it would be hard for us to work with a bunch of different people throughout the year. So we’ve managed to find people who are willing to take off and be a gypsy for a couple of years before they go back into reality. [Laughs] That being the case, the way we ended up with the particular vehicle that we have is because of the way the floor plan is laid out: It essentially allows our roadie to have his own room. It’s a bunk, but it’s a lot bigger than what most tour buses allow—it’s not a coffin, you know? So there’s a place for him to get away. And if Edgar and I need to have a serious conversation about something, we tend to do it on a walk. So that helps, too, I guess—we’re not thrusting our roadie into the middle of every decision we make.
You obviously have to stay in one place long enough to make a record, and you’ve done that a couple of times since you’ve been living in an RV… is that pretty much the longest you’ve ever stayed in one place?
Yeah. The longest we’ve stayed in one place is probably a month, and it was to make an album. But we take time off every year at Christmas and send our roadie home to his family. It’s a great time to be off the road, too, because nobody’s going out. Other than that, we’re traveling. We don’t play every single night because we don’t have to, but we try and play as many different places as we can. On our off days, we end up in some pretty strange places. We were just in a parking lot in a snowstorm for a couple of days.
What do you do in that situation, when you’re stranded in the vehicle? Do you always make sure you’re stocked up on water and canned goods?
That’s basically it. Something that occurred to us over this last holiday break we took was how absolutely normal it is for the majority of Americans to have heat. Most people essentially go from a heated home to a heated car to a heated job, and you’re only in the elements for a half an hour a day, total, unless you purposely go for a walk or shoot hoops or something. In our world, it’s not practical to keep our vehicle heated constantly. It’s not insulated properly to really do that in an efficient manner. So we just put on a whole lot of clothes and it’s basically like sleeping outside. [Laughs] The other night after a show in Northampton [MA], we took our dogs for a walk and it was freezing cold out. I thought to myself, “My god, I hope anyone who’s homeless is not outside in this.” And then I kinda caught myself and it was almost funny—I mean, I don’t sleep outside; I have a shelter—but I thought about how close to that level of homelessness our lifestyle actually kinda is, but how completely joyful it is for us in a weird way.
What do you do when your RV needs repairs and is out of commission for a few days? Get a hotel room?
Well, of all the times that’s happened, there’s only one time that we weren’t in our RV the whole time. Most people who get their car repaired drop it off at the shop and get rides or take a cab or something to get to work, but we don’t have anywhere else to go. And even other bands that tour in RVs only have a couple of combo amps and a drum kit that they keep in the RV, so they can tow a car as a second vehicle. But we have this ridiculous wall of amplifiers that we’re hauling around, and that takes up every bit of towing capacity that we have. [Laughs] So we’re either driving a 50-foot long vehicle or we’re on foot. We just walked a mile in the snow the other day to mail some bills. It made me think of someone’s grandfather saying, “When I was your age, I used to have to walk a mile in the snow…” [Laughs] Well, I’ve done that now, and it’s not so bad.
Do you ever get a room just to get out of the RV for a day?
We haven’t done that for a while, but we were actually just talking about this. You may or may not know this, depending on whether you’ve tried to go camping in New England in the winter, but everything’s closed. Nobody’s expecting you to want to camp at this time of year. And what that means is that if we can’t find a parking lot to stay in, where can we go? People hassle us about this, but they don’t realize that a lot of times we can’t go to a hotel. If you call a hotel and say, “We have an RV and we want to rent a room. Can we park the RV in your lot?” They’ll usually say no unless you’re gonna rent 10 rooms, because you’re gonna take up all these extra spaces. When you see a bus in a hotel parking lot, it’s only allowed to be there because it’s carrying 50 passengers and they’re renting 50 rooms. So it’s kind of an interesting rock and a hard place. But at the same time, you know, we were staying at people’s houses when we took time off over the holidays and when we got back to the RV it was like, “Thank god—I can sleep again!” [Laughs] So it may seem like a reprieve to go somewhere else, but the actuality of it is that we’ve made that vehicle our home.
Sleeping in parking lots also seems like a risky proposition. Are you guys armed?
Um, sort of. We carry legal weapons—we have a BB gun that’s technically legal, but it would affect a victim pretty much like a .22. And we also make our own mace. The spray-canister kind isn’t legal to cross into Canada with.
What’s your recipe?
It’s a secret. [Laughs] We basically put a bunch of stuff in it that would be very painful to get in your eyes, but won’t explode when you mix it.
Gas prices must be making your entire lifestyle a more expensive proposition every year.
Pretty much everything that supports musicians touring is becoming less supportive. There’s less money going into the music business, so the labels have less money to spend and help bands out. At the same time, the audience for live music, although it’s still there, is declining. But it’s constantly refreshing to see how many young kids out there are actively supporting live underground music and trying to find something that’s cool, something that hasn’t been spoon-fed to them by the media—you bastards. [Laughs] But the support for venues isn’t increasing to support the economy, so the guarantees aren’t necessarily going up, and people aren’t necessarily willing to pay a higher ticket price.
Because they have to spend more money on gas…
Exactly. [Laughs] But I have to say that our fans have been heart-renderingly amazing at shows. There’s this one guy in Milwaukee who has come to our last two shows there and given us a hundred-dollar gas card—which is mind-blowing. And there have been hundreds of people who have given an extra five, an extra 10 or 20, saying, “This is for gas.” And that’s beautiful, that people can still feel that much community.
Still, it seems like a stressful way to live.
I’ve analyzed it a lot because I’m extremely analytical by nature, but the best way I can describe it is that it’s equally stressful and enjoyable as having a normal job and living in one place. It just depends on what kind of person you are, whether you would be more suited to this type of stress, which is more based on close quarters and complete unpredictability. I mean, you have plans, but almost any type of factor, from weather to an accident to a promoter screwing up, can forcibly change your plans. But that’s not something you really avoid entirely by being in a quote-unquote “normal” career and living in one place. I guess your predictability factor goes up in that situation, but at the same time, your spontaneity factor goes down. It just depends what people value most in life—security or freedom. I think those are the main things that are polarizing factors. And looking back on my life, Edgar’s life, our band, and the choices we’ve made together, we’re always choosing freedom—at whatever cost.
It seems like fewer and fewer people do these days.
Yeah, and to the extent that we see people saying that we inspire them, I think that’s why. We’re taking that risk; we’re doing that thing that’s not supposed to be done. We’re trying, at least.
