from the mundane to the mundane and back again

Eindhoven, Holland 12/8/12
Speedfest and the last show of the tour. A giant clusterfuck of festival workout and end of tour packing panic. On the plus side, Graveyard and Orange Goblin are playing and it was good to see Walter from Roadburn, on the minus side, almost everything else. It’s actually not that bad, but when yr this close to going home, every mole hill is a mountain. The festival here has perfected the thinnest sandwiches ever. Normal slices of bread cut even thinner and a slice of ham, then squished so its even thinner. Almost, but not as thick as a business card. Yeah, I don’t got much else today

I don’t know what this means in German, but I found it childishly humorous in English.

Krefeld, Germany 12/5/12
Well coming down to the home stretch here, three shows left. We’ve had a lot of rainy days on this tour, the best that could be said about it is “at least it ain’t fuckin’ snow” but we’ve gotten through them so far (knock on wood) because of our bus driver Freddie, who can drive the shit out of the bus and says he’s sold his sold to the devil. I just hope the devil doesn’t want to collect on our watch. He’s a character, but with the way he drives he could wear a suit made from human skin and it wouldn’t bother me (unless it was my skin). We’ve had other bus driver characters but their eccentricities outweighed their abilities. There was one from a couple of years ago who was dubbed “the sensual Santa” (after a Dan Clowes character). He was a very large bearded man, who after waking up for the overnight drive would often walk thru the bus in nothing but a pair of old grey tighty whiteys and getting way too close, turning the bus into some horrifying frottage cottage. But I digress, Freddie is a great driver and hopefully he will deliver us to the airport Sunday in one piece. With the end of tour coming up quickly, now is the time for both shedding and gathering. Shedding stuff that was just for tour and had served its purpose and gathering/packing stuff that was acquired on tour. It’s a delicate balance and there is some “lifeboat” type situations “mmm..I can’t take all of you socks,underwear and t-shirts back with me…I’m sorry, but I bought some records and books.. I know, I know, records and books aren’t practical..but Christ, I found that Motards single I was looking for. Look, going into this tour you all knew some of you wouldn’t make it back…again I’m sorry.”

Now the way I’m reading this photo it looks like The Statue of Liberty as Hitler giving a Christmas speech.

Erfurt, Germany 12/1/12
Erfurt (pronounced either F-Word or Ear Fart) is in the former East Germany ( it’s still in the east of Germany but…). We are playing at a club that’s right off of Karl Marx Platz. The way from the stage to the dressing room is Spinal Tap-ian in its route with an added East German kicker. Two of the rooms along the way are equipped with a lightbulb saving device that shuts off the light after a certain amount of time. Its a common device, the difference here is that they are so sensitive that if you stop in the room even for a second the lights go out, hilarity ensues. The lighting guy is a nice enough guy, whose English is pretty good, we got most everything sorted out with a minimum of difficulty. Now I know that drum checks are important and Anders (drum/guitar tech) and Danny (soundman) are two of most solid guys I’ve ever toured with. But fuckin’ shit, I know there’s a special ring of hell just reserved for drum checks. Slow, repetitive, and annoying, I try to avoid the building whenever drum check starts. I lost the refocusing race by a couple of lights and the lighting guy was on the ladder finishing up the focus when the drum check started. When he had a successful focus on the last light I have him the OK sign, which I thought was universal. Either it isn’t or the way I do it is faulty, so he kept moving the light which was now out of focus and I had to redirect the focus. He got it right and I gave him the thumbs up, which he took to mean raise the light. No! The drum check was going so it was tough to talk over the noise. He once again got the focus correct and I did my best German yes, “Yah!” But I yelled it so loud that I sounded like a pirate “YAARRRR!”. I ended doing my patented “waving at a plane while stuck on a desert island“. That he understood. And another not completely terrible focus was completed.

Cool poster for something

Prattlen, Switzerland 11/29/12
I don’t really buy a lot of stuff out here. I already have a lot of stuff I don’t want. This tour all I bought was a giant book on the artist Neo Rauch that was on sale and of course records (but not as much as I used to buy). Anyhow, my headphones started to go south a few days ago and I went and bought a new pair at Media Markt, Europe’s version of Best Buy. I found a pair of fairly inexpensive Sennheiser’s. Got back, I tried them out out. They sounded amazing, even to my tired, shot old ears. The only problem being that when I was taking them out of the box, I noticed that one headphone wire was a lot shorter than the other one. I had never seen this before. Not that I keep up with headphone advances (I let my subscription to Modern Headphone run out a few years ago.) so maybe it was a new style designed to cut down on the drag and co-efficient of modern hairstyles. Who knows, I didn’t. But maybe just maybe Sennheiser messed up and i got a fucked pair. So this morning I trudged back to Media Markt in the rain. I went at 9am, Switzerland is a hardworking country, they should be at work by 9. Fuck you, we open at 10am. 10!?, what are you America? I expect, demand an almost ruthless efficiency in Switzerland and opening at 10am isn’t gonna cut it. No sir. So I trudge back, have a cup of shitty hotel coffee, have another cup of shitty hotel coffee. It’s now a wintry mix of rain and snow. I’m running failure scenarios in my head of an unsuccessful headphone return, I have a third cup of shitty hotel coffee and trudge back. They’re open and I go to the info desk. The woman behind the counter is nice, but I have no idea what language they speak in this part of Switzerland, I’m guessing German but the guy at the hotel sounded distinctly French. So I start with ” hi, I don’t speak….uh…whatever you guys speak here…so please bear with me” and I bring out the headphones and the receipt. She sizes me up and does a chin stroke, “downstairs…parking lot…bring” and points at the headphones. I mimed “downstairs” which consisted of me pointing down and arching my eyebrow. Yes. I got to the parking lot and found the customer service department. I went in I explained my problem showed the receipt, all the packing and the headphones, which were a tangled mess by this point. I was trying to figure out this Gordon knot of wires and the guy just took it away from me and, zip zap it was untangled. “Now what is the problem?”, I showed him that one side was much longer than the other. He looked at me with the same look that PeeWee Herman got when he asked about “The basement in the Alamo“, kind of a stunned pause. “..yessss….they go behind the head, there’s nothing wrong with them” and he showed me, and it still didn’t really make a lot of sense.
Me: so they’re not defective?
Guy: no
Me: kind of a dumb design, no?
Guy: (did the shoulder shrug with an eye roll, that says “what do you want me to say”)
I went back to the hotel and had another cup of shitty coffee.

Graffiti from Paris

Stuttgart, Germany 11/26/12 (Later that day)
Backstage at The Longhorn in Stuttgart there are hundreds of old posters for shows. The standard large size posters that are mass produced by the promoter for all the shows in Germany for that tour. There’s a few Monster Magnet ones and out of all the posters here, the only one that seems to have been vandalized is the Magnet poster from the Superjudge tour

[it reads from the top: Fags From N.J., then Assholes over the logo and then Wyndorf The Wanker at the bottom]

although it’s funny I am kind of surprised by the vitriol of it. Of course any band that’s been around this long is bound to have enemies but as a band they’ve always treated opening acts pretty well, they’ve never gone full Rob Zombie on them (Rob Zombie the band, not the man treated us probably the worst out of any major tour we’ve been on. Petty and mean spirited, it was rough). There’s been a couple of messy job endings (both band and crew), but again I don’t think anyone who’d been fired had come back to The Longhorn. It’s been here for years and I’ve always wondered who did it.