12/03/09 Osnabruck

One day melded into another as I found myself driving all through the night until we hit Osnabruck. Making it through 5 countries in a day ain’t bad by my count (UK, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany).

For breakfast I decide to have a drink in celebration of my completed driving marathon. I don’t know why, but apple juice and rum reminds me of Bundaburg Rum from Australia. Perhaps it’s the sticky, sweet taste. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been awake for 27 hours and I’m having lucid memory dreams.

The hotel we're staying at let's us check in early and they have swanky toilet paper.

We have all afternoon to catch a nap and go guitar shopping.

Then we drive around a bit looking for the club, which turns out to not be where the GPS tells us it is, and I chase down some guys who I decide in my mind are the people dropping off our backline for the tour. I speed them down all Grand Theft Auto style, but they turn out to just be some random guys that now think I’m a lunatic.

Well that was short lived- we were all fired up about how much space we had in our Volkswagon T5. We could stretch out, someone could take a nap in the back, you know, the real perks of touring in a van. But then we show up at the club and meet our back line: instrument after instrument stares us down in steroid bursting cases. Ironic change of circumstance, this time the awesome backline company brought us too much gear. With kindness in their hearts, they left us an extra guitar amp and bass amp just in case we have problems with the ones we ordered. Unfortunately, thanks to the beefed up flight cases, we can’t fit the spare amps in the car. The heavens have a funny sense of humor. Last night our emaciated backline left James playing drums whilst sitting on a bucket and now this. But I rock some mad geometry with T’Nealle and vacuum-pack the back of the van full of gear. So much for being all excited to use the rear view mirror for the German leg of the tour.

The club is volleyball-tastic. You have to walk through a party bus to get to the front door, and the building is surrounded with sand, shade structures, and coconut oil dispensers. RADICAL! There is another party bus in the parking lot that sells drunk food. Charlie of course has to get a pizza-stuck.

After the show, I thought a girl was complimenting me on my beard, but it turns out she was really just totally into my belt. Later she told me that she missed my band but heard we were super awesome and wanted me to sign her dress. Well, I guess that’s what happens when you miss a band- you end up asking their tour manager to sign your dress. I’m sure she’ll still cherish it forever.

12/02/09 SWEET PARIS!

I had plans last night to wake up early and go to the Tate for an hour. And although I still woke up early, it seemed like a bad idea to fit one more thing in. We already have to get a taxi, get to the Eurostar, get on a train to Paris, go rent a van in Paris, reacquaint myself with driving on the right side of the road, and get to soundcheck on time, and then leave after BBE’s set to start our 8 hour drive to the next day’s show in Germany. So yeah, 34 minutes at the Tate seemed like a bad idea. I’m sad, but it just wasn’t meant to be this time through.

I eat my last English Breakfast (tear) and we sardine into the taxi. I can’t even see James in the back seat, can you?

The train ride to Paris goes even smoother than I could have ever hoped, other than I get a lil sick on the train. I can’t even remember the last time I got motion sickness, but I persevere and make it without perfuming the train car with my English Breakfast.

Charlie goes on the quest for the rental van with me. We almost get the nice Scandinavian rental car desk attendant to come on tour with us. And so now it’s 6:30 and the firs thing I get to do is drive in Parisian rush hour traffic. Holy shit, it’s like driving in a massive, scared school of fish. Two of my immediate thoughts are:

-Great Britian, I miss your yellow light flashing before turning green

-Paris I like your little eye-level green light, but I don’t like that you don’t have a signal light across the road.

The club is super swank , a little underground deal that just keeps going and going as you walk down the stairs. The dressing rooms and actually caverns cut into the ground. Our backline, alas, suffered a bit of mistranslation. So we have no kick drum and four guitar stands. Interesting.

Micky is our Artist Liaison, and he takes care of us like battle champs. We hit up a quaint mood-lit French/Italian Bistro and proceed to sophisticatedly inhale beef tenderloin, tuna steaks, gnocchi, and pesto penne with a couple bottle of Valepeccio wine. If they feed me like this every night, then fine, if you twist my arm, I will do this forever.

We take shots with Micky and effervesce at each other “you the best”, “no you the best”, “no you the best”, “no YOU the best” etc. Micky is totally into Rush Hour.

Holy shit I left GB and I’m in a country now that doesn’t have English as it’s first language, and the dj STILL plays Parklife, Smells like Teen Spirit, and Song 2. WTF?!?

BBE finally gets playing around 1AM and the crowd starts a CIRCLE PIT. A very nice, excited circle pit with no slam dancers doing the skankin’ pickle or whatever it’s called.

At the end of the night a girl and her friend are glowing as they ask me to sign their notebook. Well, why not., I do know how to clutch a pen and move it around on paper so that it looks like something. She tells me that she just loves the Junior Boys, and I realize she thinks I’m one of them. COOL. Enjoy your autograph! XOXO, LUV U FOREVA! THX FOR LISTENING!

12/01/09 Day Off

It wasn’t really a day off. At least not in a lazing-around-in-the-steam-room-recouping-while-beautiful-Amazonian-people-in-loincloths-attend-to-your-every-hungover-need kind of day-off (those day’s off are much better). Instead, I spent the day zooming around with T’nealle to pick up my new glasses (saw a fox in the heart of London, yay human encroachment on animal habitats!),

picking up merch in Reading (screw you and your tractor beam, Reading. We must have driven around in circles for another hour trying to escape the under-construction roundabouts that wouldn’t let up exit towards Heathrow), contimplating what was running through Iggy Pop's mind when he agreed to do car insurance ads,

and dropping off the car at the airport.

It took six hours. Definitely not an exciting day. But I totally got through my first two weeks ever driving in the UK without destroying anything on the vehicle, or another vehicle for that matter (okay, I scraped the hub cap on the front parking side a couple times. Have you ever tried parking in London? You need to have those whitewalls kissing the curb. Anyway). When we finally get back to the Walrus, my brain’s just not working quite right. So I go for a walk and check out the London that you see in all the books: Big Ben, Cleopatra’s Needle, Buckingham Palace, Gordon’s Wine bar.

It’s cute, and it’s funny to see all these landmarks while having flashback memories of learning about far-off places like London as a kid and it seeming like such a mystical place that only kings get to visit if they’re lucky. Instead, here I am, watching people piss on the monuments while I try not to get pick-pocketed. Ah, the destruction of such lovely concocted childhood fantasies.

11/30/09 The Garage London

We wake up. We get in car. We drive straight to London. This is our longest drive of the tour, and when we tell peeps from the UK that we are driving ALL THE WAY from Newcastle to London, they go blank as a sheet. They tell us there's no way, that we can't make it, that it's JUST TOO FAR. People reading, fyi, it is a six hour drive. That's it, just six. I can handle it. Now Fargo to Seattle, THAT'S a drive. But I digress.

As far as the drive goes, I see why some English settlers just coming over to the new land hundreds of years ago came to settle in the Midwest- because instead of driving from Newcastle to London, I could have just as well've been making my way from the Twin Cities to Madison. The only differences were that I was on the left side of the road and you couldn’t stop every 50 miles for cheese curds. And there was no Wisconsin Dells to alert me that I was almost at my final destination for the day. Even the bathrooms along the way had a kinda Heartland feel:

So yeah, the drive was full of rolling hills and green. I was all worried earlier this week that the UK’s historic flooding the previous week would make traveling up north hell, but instead we just saw a couple flooded fields (today was actually our first time driving in the sunlight since Stonehenge). Not everything looked like the Midwest though:

London is nowhere near as heart-palpitating to drive through when there's light out. That's right UKers, I made the treacherous drive AND finished by 3 in the afternoon. Hoe bour them apples? And at the venue and it is already a party:

Balloons from the night b'fore still fill the 600 person venue, so we make the most of it. AND we get to hang out with our friends and tour-mates from the US- HarMar Superstar. We were actually so busy hanging out that we forget to take any pictures together. Ashton would be disgusted with us.

At some point BBE does an interview with a subsidiary of the BBC and someone calls in on Charlie's phone. She of course ends up an unwitting part of the interview. Zach loves it.

While HarMar is on stage, BBE dresses up like him and his band.

Then of course we bumrush the stage and sing the chorus of Tallboy with HarMar. T'Nealle ends up high enough on Denver's shoulders that she gets vertigo and falls off into me. Charlie has a seizure of glee. It's awesome. I'm sure there's pictures on the internet somewhere.

We end the night at the Lex. It's great to hang out with friends and get tags of love.

After a couple martinis, Charlie gets all band crushy on a Libertine member at the bar. In true fashion, a sign of affection is misread and Charlie almost gets punched. So, we decide it's time to start making our way back to where we're staying, The Walrus. But not without a pitstop. I got a picture of T'Nealle using her failsafe McLovin id to get booze. She's so happy!

Newcastle 11/29/09

Some mornings, you wake up all excited to go exploring- you’re in a new town, the sun is out, and the birds are whistling the melody to "Young Folks". I love these days- they're the kind of days I find a new thrift store with every knick knack and slide guitar you'd ever want ever for a nickel.

Some mornings, you don’t wake up at all. Instead, you wake up in the afternoon with the power out, the toilet not working, and the heat off. I don't know about you, but when I can't figure out how to make the toilet flush, I don't feel quite right. It turned out that Walter had just run out of money on his pre-paid utility card (I don't know, don't ask) and all the electricity and water turned off in his flat. We made it out of Walter's before anyone started peeing in bottles. At least, b'fore I did.

The day was about as bleary as could be, so it wasn't really a bad thing that we didn't wake up til three or so. It was dreary and overcast and drizzling and there were probably werewolves out there, so the less we were outside, the better.

During tonight's interview, the truth behind BBE becoming a four piece was revealed. See, BBE went on a bear hunt. Over the mountain, around the river, through the Goonies cave, the whole nine yards. And when they finally found a bear in the cave at the end of their trek, they lost their nerve when the Grizzly charged them, so they hightailed it back. Josh was unfortunately the slowest of the five of them.

For some reason, these machines made me feel like we were playing at a 7-Eleven:

And today is the third time in as many nights that I’ve hear the DJ play Parklife, Smells like Teen Spirit, Song 2 and/or Killing in the Name Of. I mean, seriously?

This is the only picture I have of Jenny from the Block's house. We stayed there and she treated up super awesome, again. Her roommates on the other hand, were not so awesome. She lives with her landlord's girlfriend, so when he came out of her room and told us that the bathroom was now off limits and that if anyone else used it they'd get their head ripped off, we couldn't do much about it. Except pee in bottles.

11.30.09 favorite joke of the day:

Me: “Charlie, scare T’nealle, she’s got the hiccups."

Charlie"T'nealle, I'm your brother. And you're pregnant."

Carlisle 11/28/09

We woke up in Manchester and found this really cute breakfast joint. They even had mugs to help us cope with the rigors of touring.

We got on the road and made our way to Carlisle. The weather here has been a bit horrid, and the News keeps warning of massive flooding in the northern UK, but we got to the club without any problems. Hopefully our US tour mates/BFFs don't have any problems when they come through a week later.

The venue BBE is playing is called the Brickyard. Inside, it looks and feels like a wide open, damp cavern. Or a really big pizza oven.

The dressing room has an old stone fireplace shrine-ized with multiple thrift store mirrors and naked white hanging bulbs.

Someone from NZ might use the words “Super rad vibes” to describe the accommodations. On top of all this architectural/interior design greatness, everyone we meet is super nice and outgoing to boot. We meet Jenny from the Block, who is playing in one of the bands tonight, and we find out she'll be our host and promoter t’morrow night. But b’fore her band plays, The Sun Explodes slays things. They're like a live-action Dethklok, including arpeggiated keyboards, 5/4 half-time breakdowns, and leg-up-on-the-monitor-wedge-finger-tapping guitar solos. It gets me in a hedonistic mood and I go gorge myself on the way-to-much Indian food I got around the corner.

After the show some really enthusiastic fans insist we come down to the dance club CONCRETE. Just the name of the place makes my filling hurt, but whatever. So I hopped in the car to drive all our gear to a safer locale before heading to the club. At one point there was a strange intersection with an Ambulance trying to merge in, so I held back to let the ambulance in front of me, which it never decided to do. Instead we just sat there. And sat there. The light wouldn't change. A couple minutes later a cop knocked at my window and said I had to pull up another ten feet to trigger the sensor. Waa waa. I still don't understand why the ambulance didn't take the right of way I was giving it. So we ditched the car somewhere safe and made it to the club. It's in the basement and they have a sheet of 20 or so fruity shots that each cost 1 quid. I watch Charlie go hog wild in an attempt to try one of each He gets sidetracked from his mission though when he orders a Bananarama martini. True story. James and Zach did not get Bananarama martini's, but that didn't stop them from humping on the dance floor. I stood sagely by and told dudes I was the caddy from Happy Gilmore, and if I they bought me a drink, I'd take my picture with them. This actually happened. Twice.

The party at Concrete came to an end, but our soiree did not. On our way home, we tripped over this guy in the alley. Yes, completely passed out, lying supine on the cobblestone ground in a puddle of water and puke. One of saintly ladies in our crew called an ambulance as the rest of us tried our best to get the guy up without actually having to touch him. This was as hard as it sounds. He eventually staggered to his knees, and then did something amazing. As soon as he saw the lights of the ambulance through his closed eyelids, he found the focus to start RUNNING away. Remember, this guy was unconscious and pickled in a cold, cold alley. We decided he thought it was the cops and his mind was screaming "WEEEEEEEEEEEEEE'RE NEVVVVVVVVER GOING TO JAAAAIIIIIIIIL AGAIN! REMEEEEEEEEEEEMBER!?"

Our host for the night, Walter, found our alley discovery pretty amazing and was pretty happy we didn't bring the guy back to his flat with us.

11/27 Blackburn Fish 'n Chips

I finally got my first taste of fish and chips on this trip. And me getting some fish and chips has been a moment everyone on tour has been highly anticipating. A little background: BBE is from Christchurch, NZ. In 2001, I hitchhiked around NZ for ten weeks, and about the only things I remember about Christchurch are the Wizard and that I ate some Fish and Chips that I got for $3.00 NZ (it was about $1.30 US dollars) and then literally crapped my pants in a park 30 minutes later. The story is much better in person, because I recreate the horizontal walking posture I used to get me from the park all the way to the second floor bathroom of the library down the block. So yes, me and fish and chips, what would happen? The place I found seemed like a real deal Chippery: you could get about 30 things, and 28 them came fried.

The other two were the ubiquitous pizza and doner kebaps, which worried me a little bit. Cause when they start offering additional items that aren't fried, you know they have to cut corners somewhere. I was hoping it wasn't in the fish dept. Just to be safe, I made sure not to eat my meal in a park.

After a hilarious interview, we made our way to the venue and slowly watched the night unfold. I don’t know if I can come up with the words to capture the setting, so I’ll just give you some facts: the opening band played a 12 string guitar that they refused to tune (one of those “too cool to tune, too dumb to know how” situations), the girls in the crowd were all wearing matching black tights and/or hypercolored tops, and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” was the stone cold frat jam that got the crowd all revved up before BBE played.

The dressing room was up above the rest of the club, and there is a big piece of one way glass set in the wall so you can look down on the stage and a wee bit of the dance floor. I think it’s actually just there so the workers can look down girls’ shirts, but I’m usually wrong about these kinds of things.

As cool as Blackburn is, we leave town to stay with friends that have transplanted to Manchester from New Zealand. James and Zach just can't wait to show their gratitude for the hospitality.

11/26 The Royal Derby

Meet BBE’s new bass player: Meat Sandwich.

She will make you a mean meat sandwich. Go ahead, just ask.

So, the next town on our tour is Derby, and apparently it's pronounced Darby. I can't explain why, but since the English language is from England, I'll just talk their word for it on this one.

We made our way to Derby pretty early and got our culture on. The Derby Art Museum and Art Gallery was a pretty amazing conglomeration of everything Derby. And it didn’t just have any old art to enlighten the citizens of Derby- the museum actually only had art about Derby or created by people associated with Derby. As far as I could tell, the curator of the museum was pretty sure Derby was the location of the original primordial pool.

In addition to recreations of the ancient past, it had a room displaying the adornings of a Derby man in the Armed Forces, a contemporary gallery with recent works by the locals, and a natural history section with awesome dioramas of what James is like every night:

There was another gallery with an exhibit of what it's like to get Charlie up in the morning:

By this point in the tour, BBE even has me being sarcastic with interviewers:

"Does the band have a website?"

"Yes, it’s Cakefarts.com."

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BBE plays that night in an old hotel with our friends Polka Party. Carlsberg beer tastes like crap.

The venue has a huge Drum and Bass show the next night that they have to start setting up for right after BBE's show ends, so we sit around playing on the internet while Meat Sandwich helps decorate the dressing room.

We ended up back at the promoter's place eating chips with salad and watching bad TV.

As you might guess, 1000 Ways to Die is a pretty dumb show. There was a re-enactment/re-creation of a goblin strangling a woman, which was the explanation for the cause of her SUNDS. I mean, does Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome really exist? Wikipedia says yes.

11/25 Shakespeare says "Go to the Flapper"

After our scolding last night, I expected to walk out of the motel, where last night's manager is waiting on the roof to dump hot oil on us, but the new dude on the new shift could give two shits about us. We jumped in the car and headed out to see Shakespeare's birthplace. On the way, there was a ton of signs begging us to stop at the Warwick Castle, so we stopped. It was a bust. They wanted like 18 quid a person so you could hang out with a bunch of high school theatre people that never made it so now they're character actors in a castle. They just looked like extras from Young Frankenstein to me.

They did have peacocks. Then again, the Como Zoo in Saint Paul has peacocks, and it's still free.

About the only thing good about Warwick Castle was that it afforded Zach the first of his many tour attempts to cut off T'nealle's maidenhead.

Down the road, we made it to Stratford-Upon-Avon and checked out the Bard's childhood home. It was cool to see the house, and I guess it was cute that everything in the town was named after characters from the literary world of Shakespeare. But the Subway sandwich store next door and the surrounding shopping centres sprawling as far as you could see kind of ruined the idyllic scene I had created in my mind. Which was of course that the town was going to be quaint homes along a small stream dotted with fawns and fairies.

I kind of wished they had Shakespeare's body embalmed Lenin-style. That'd be cool.

So we made our way to Birmingham. Holy shit, Birmingham has the most looney-tunes drivers I've seen so far on tour. If a road has three lanes, there will be six cars crammed side by side vying to get to I don't know where, cause there's another six cars crammed side by side in front of them. Total free-for-all. But we made it to that night's venue unscathed, and wow, the Flapper is awesome. Micky and George are stellar promoters, and the club is fun. People from Birmingham also love shows it seems. If more UK venues were like the Flapper, well, then the UK would be way cooler. Just sayin'.

The show is a blast and we make a load of new friends before hitting the road. Due to my flagged status, tonight T’nealle and Zack checked into an unsuspecting Travelodge as a statutory legal couple. Then they returned to the car and let the other three of us walk in, with James disguised in all of the clothes that Zach was wearing when he just checked in. It worked just great.

I woke up in the middle of the night to a deep hollow thump rattling over and over inside my head. I sat up and looked around, only to find James on the floor in one of his hyperactive deep sleeping fits banging his head erratically against my bed frame. Cute that one.

Of course, we couldn’t get away without incident, so we got evil-eyed and kicked out the next morning when we weren’t out of our room by 12. I think it’s going to be hilarious when Travelodge sponsors our next tour.

Reading The Oakford Social Club.

Oh Reading, how we have missed you so. It's like this place has some kind of crappy tractor beam honed in on us that won't let us stray from the heart of the town. Our first day in the country we stopped through Reading to quickly drop off some merch and meet our booking agent. Instead we ended up doing u-turn after u-turn and getting sick in roundabouts under construction. This time, we end up going down some bus only lanes and driving in reverse up hills until the clutch smells like a vacuum cleaner on fire. At the centre of town is The Oracle, and I decide that's where this tractor beam is housed. It's big and it's ostentatiously bright, so I make the guess that it's a nüchurch of newage enlightenment or a Stargate to other planets. It turns out to be a giant mall/movie screen complex. Ah, yes, the Church of Lemmings and Consumerism. How could I not guess that with a name like The Oracle?

Tonight’s club is owned by the same people that owned last night’s club, so it's done up in matching decorations, theme, and menus. There’s a slight déjà vu feeling that we're going to be stuck in the same bar until we play a sold out show.

The show was pretty fun, but hey, dude, drunk guy, stop kicking chairs into my legs to get me to move. Just tap me nicely and say I’m in your way. Or get up and watch the band, I know your legs work, I’ve seen you walk to the bar about 47 times. Or go outside and drink some English bum poison and leave me alone.

We drove a bit out of town and did another Travelodge extravaganza. Checked in, chatted up the nice lady at the front desk. But then of course James just had to stop and put his 1 pound coin over and over and over into the broken candy machine, drawing astute attention to all of us as we walked in. So when I came back in from gathering my luggage from the car, the woman was on the phone with her manager to report us for having five people in one room. And now I’m flagged in the system as someone that uses Travelodge rooms for my Coyote operation or something. I’m not going to be able to travel anywhere by the time I’m 30, at least not cheaply. Anyway, look, the place just looks evil. It must be the heated fumes of hell residing below the motel that are distorting the camera shot.