June 19 Stars

The sun may not be able to power itself out from behind the clouds, but we're getting out from the overcast of Munich. We’re on our way to Hof for a festival brandishing the unfortunate name In.Die.Festival. Yes, I suppose it makes sense in German, but it looks ominous to me. Or at least off enough that if someone tries to give me some koolaid at the end of the night, I won't be politely turning it down and danke-ing my way out of the complex . Our friends Adam and Kevin are meeting us up in Hof, and we keep getting excited emails about how we’re opening for this band Ash. I’ve heard the name but can’t pull up any of their songs in my brain. Snails keeps saying they have a song about a girl from Mars, but the only thing that comes to mind is Hum’s stone cold jam Stars.

On the ride up, I start to keep tabs of things that make our Renault Scenic awesome. So far:

1) It fits everything, which is amazing seeing as James brought four bags with him

2) It passed a couple Porches on the Autobahn today

3) It has secret compartments. They would be even more secret if we had floor mats to cover them, but for some reason, we don't. These lil cubbies are starting to come in handy as a traveling bar.

Make that a traveling liquor cabinet, seeing as no one in the band is nice enough to serve each other.

About an hour outside Hof, the sun comes out. In my hotel room, there is a hair drier that looks like a suck-n-cut. How could this day not get incredible?

And we arrive. All my mind can murmur is: Ash, Ash, Ash. I don’t even know who this band is, but their photo is starting to ring some bells. Maybe? I feel like I remember seeing a picture of them opening some festival and there being no one there. The Hof seems to be a bit of a sleepy town, but that apparently hasn't stopped the promoters from plastering the burg all over the place with pictures of past shows. I only really recognize the World/Inferno Friendship Society, who played at the Foxfire with Lifter Puller and The Get Hustle. Maybe that’s when Craig met Franz? Anyway, I remember the set starting with flaming cymbals. I could set this town eating W/IFS up hard.

While we're waiting around for things to get set up, the band get's in a game of kiwi ball. The rules of this game include dribbling poorly, running crooked, and being generally uncoordinated as a whole. You win when you get one person frustrated enough to kick the ball over the fence and down a hill into oncoming traffic. Let me tell you, it was a good game, the teams were evenly matched, and there was a quite a bit of back and forth until Zach got a good toe on the ball and off it sailed.

Things wrapped up over on the stage and we were summoned over. Sound check is awesome, cause there's full stacks for everyone.

The night, is a blast. Adam and Kevin, two of our hosts for the past week, are in fine spirits. Well, at least mentally. Quaffably, they are in terrible spirits. Somewhere on the way to the show, they picked up a 30 shot sample pack of some of the nastiest, sugariest, mind-stabbing concoctions you can imagine, all for the wrong price of 8€ or something. All I know is that James understandably puked after his third crème de menthe pineapple.

And after all that bum poison, this is how the night ended- With my soon to be brother-in-law passed out. That marker was calling out to me "draw some dicks!" but I was in my typical state of sage restraint.