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Station To Station

We're Running Out of Clean Clothes in Los Angeles

After ten days in the desert, the train crept into Los Angeles Union Station for the penultimate event. Everyone's pretty tired at this stage. At one point the train came to a dead stop en route and you could hear the groans. Train travel is glamorous...

After ten days in the desert, the train crept into Los Angeles Union Station for the penultimate event. Everyone's pretty tired at this stage. At one point the train came to a dead stop en route and you could hear the groans. Train travel is glamorous. The panorama cars, the fully-working dining car, the long couches in the Levis® car and the small viewing deck where Doug Aitken holds court are all very comfortable. But if you want to travel across America in a hurry, you fly, you drive, you peddle your little legs off but you never take a train.

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Los Angeles Union Station is a beautiful art deco building from 1939 and unlike a lot of the venues we've been to along the route, this one is not just a passing post for freight and railway men, this station is the heart of L.A.s public transport grid and it's packed with people. The homeless too. Los Angeles has one of the highest vagrancy rates in the U.S. They estimate about a quarter of them are mentally ill. You see them occupying the huge leather seats in the waiting area. They became a backdrop to the show. As did all the commuters, travelers and train workers who just happened to be passing through as a tall gentleman in a snow white shirt passed through the hallway beating whips against the tiled surface. The Station to Station show had begun.

As it's L.A. there's a notable difference in the crowd. It's no longer the gentle country folk out in the desert. It's entitled kids in labels and big sunglasses who've seen everything twice. It makes you pine a little for the passersby you'd meet out in the desert who'd come up and say something like, "Are you guys in a circus?" We were, kind of. A group of kids sneak onto the train during the show. All they were after was some of the booze in the fridges but they got it. Funny, we've travelled through meth towns and redneck encampments but it took a city like L.A. to finally steal from us.

The next morning at 8am sharp we went back to the platform again. A few crust punks were waiting by the train. They wanted to get on with us and ride up to San Francisco. But the train was full. Dan Deacon, the Congos as well as Jack Pearson are all on board for the twelve hour trip that'll hug the Pacific Coast.

The Levis® car gets busy pretty early on in the morning. The schedule's been tough. Laundry isn't something you ever really have time to get around to when you're arriving into a town at midnight and then setting up a show for the following afternoon. So all the artists and Station to Station crew come down to bum jeans, shirts and jackets. There's so much denim rubbing shoulders in the tight passageways that knot the cars that you wonder if it might constitute a fire hazard.

To check out the rest of the collaborations and contributors, go to http://levi.com/makeourmark