Rock Am Kabuff

There is no way to put last night into full sentences:  Two human pyramids (the bottom sucks).  River swimming.  Duct tape soccer.  Stealing duct tape back when Ms. Buzzkill takes duct tape away.  Continuing to play duct tape soccer.  Skinny dipping in a random pool at 2am.  Tourmanager trying to jump the fence while naked and falling on his face.  Crashing a party with a bunch of folks over 50 and only agreeing to leave in exchange for a bottle of wine.  Trading a beer for a bracelet and then for exchanging the bracelet for a watch.  Duct taping a drunk guy who got on our nerves.  Picking Tourmanager up and throwing him over a fence.  More two person summersaults (Justin plus Matt = success!).  Girl offering to sew a hole in our pants.  Girl sewing hole in pants.  Tim stagedives and then gets dropped... hard.  Tim asks crowd to do a human centipede (look it up).  Holding off The Situation away from the mic so he can't sing along.   Nice kids booking us on a show and then showing us lots of respect.

The Anal Triangle

The tour is officially underway.  We played Aarschot, Belgium last night at a ridiculously awesome venue.  There were automatic dispensers that sold exclusively the following items: drum sticks, guitar strings, and condoms.  I was flabbergasted.  It's a publicly run youth center named De Klinker that has practice space for bands and two stages and a skate park.  We spent the pre-show period backstage watching Bear Grylls and nursing a bottle of Jameson.  There were also attempts to do a two person summersault, but thats all I'm going to say about that.  Other than the fact that Mark and I were the only successful team.  It left me feeling cheap and used.

We then spent the night in a cheeeeaaaaapp hotel.  Everything seemed to be automated: showers, toilets, breakfast.  I felt like I was living in a machine.  Not that it wasn't nice to have a clean bed and breakfast and coffee ready when I woke up.

The anal triangle refers to three towns in Belgium that seem to have reference to butts.  Few have ever left alive.  It is suspected that they simply never reemerged from the depths.  Luckily we did not suffer the same fate.

And lastly, Tha List (aka El Listo).  Its our bucket list for the tour.  Most of it will remain a tour secret, but I will reveal one goal for the trip: to be accepted into a pack of animals.  We don't fuck around.

Alright, for real this time.

So the last days have been spent in Wegberg, Germany.  We've been practicing, making fun of Bon Jovi and Bear Grylls, getting to know each other, and living it up.  Last night was the first show of the tour in the Tsunami Club in Cologne.  It was fucking amazing to say the least.

I got a really solid reaction to my solo set.  Then the Tim Vantol Band somehow coalesced and became formidable after only a couple days of rehearsals.  To say we rocked would be a serious understatement.

I'd really like to make this more entertaining and have some great stories and shit.  But for now my enthusiasm is the best I can do.

First show

Oh my fucking god.  That is all.

Practice and what not

In a bit of a time crunch.  We've got our first show tonight.  These guys are awesome and we've all hit it off well.  We had our first practice yesterday and it rocked.  Real smooth transition into a band.  I'll write more soon when I get my laptop all sorted out.

Berlin

So I'm getting things started over in Berlin with my old friend Jan.  The trip over included lots of really bad airplane sleep, a couple hours with my friend John Paul in Boston (where a guy kept staring at him while having conversations with a stuffed toy), a couple hours in Zurich, a distinctly average romantic comedy (No Strings Attached), a lost (forgotten) book (the only one I brought), lugging a 50 pound instrument through 4 different cities, and being thrown back into speaking German after 13 years.  Definitely a good start.

The most notable incident involved me taking my pedal steel off the conveyer belt only to find the case OPEN and the whole thing wrapped in about 5 pounds of duct tape.  Granted, they had to ensure that the case wasn't full of illegal stuff, and it was packed pretty full.  But they clearly were opening a really delicate instrument and the case had obviously been closed when they received it.  So obviously it was capable of being closed.  So they took the most expensive thing I own and left the fucking case open and just covered it in duct tape while it travelled in cargo holds across the ocean.  I was pretty fucking pissed needless to say.

I slept 12.5 hours last night I feel tired, sick, and really really really excited for the weeks to come.  (There's also a German rap song on the radio that came out when I lived here in like 95).

Tour: pre-departure

So I'm currently packing in preparation for this tour.  For anyone who doesn't know, I'll be heading across the pond for a European tour.  Its my first tour as a solo artist, but I'll also be playing in Tim Vantol's tour band.  I'll be keeping this blog as I experience all the different types of ridiculousness that will transpire.

My current headspace is conflicted on a few levels.  I've had some recent disappointments in my personal life and I'm definitely looking to the tour as a means to get away from them.  I'm also conflicted about the ethics of it all.  In order to finance the tour, I'll be selling CDs and Tshirts.  But I'm also pretty idealistic about living with a degree of humility and selling Tshirts with my name on them doesn't really appeal to me as a result.  That being said, I probably wouldn't be able to do this if I didn't have a bunch of merch to hawk.  So self-interest trumps ethics I suppose.  Isn't that the way it always is?  Its fine, I'll just blog about it so the world at least knows I'm conflicted about it.  That'll absolve me.

I'm also trying to figure out whether or not I intend to drink on it.  I know what half of you are thinking: "its fuckin tour, idiot!".  But I've really been feeling like alcohol is holding me back in some ways; a recent period of sobriety was one of the best times in my life.  Then a girl wandered into my life and sent my head into turmoil and I got away from that sobriety.  And now the debate rages.  Definitely falling on the side of sobriety at this point.  But who's to say really?  This debate has been a constant in my head for a decade or so.  Sure makes it less fun to drink.

Anyways.  I'm going on tour and its gonna be ridiculous.  Keep up with the shenanigans here.