Still in Glasgow, found Wifi

About to leave for Bolton and the City Invasion festival. These crazy Scots kept us up all night. We hope to sleep in the van. Meantime, here's what I got yesterday, when all was calm. I have pictures for all this shit but no time to upload it. Will find the time because I am determined to.

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11.4.08

M6 -- Somewhere between Huddersfield and Glasgow

I figured out the solution to my blogging issue – pre-blogging! I’m typing this from the van on Christina’s laptop and will post when I get wifi. Brilliant. Now I can bring you all up to speed.

So I left off last in London? I should probably start my tale from the airport. I was really mindful to pack very light personal items because of all the merch and equipment I have to lug around. I still got absolutely killed – getting out of the subway into Victoria station with my guitar case full of gear, my backpack loaded with merch, my spare guitar and the travel acoustic, and the stairs – the stairs!!! I used to perform in Boston’s subways and had to lug around my amp and guitar, and I would sweat carrying that stuff up flights of stairs. This actually hurt my whole body. My right arm went numb. It’s two days later and very strange bruises are surfacing on my leg. Thank God for this van.

After we unpacked the merch we took to the streets for food, air and sanity. Ate some pub food, saw some cute buildings, went back to the hotel still in a jetlagged daze and full of brown sauce and potatoes. We started rolling up merch and the next thing we knew we were all passed out on top of our beds. We woke up about 10 hours later and wanted to walk around, but couldn’t because it was 2:30 in the morning. So some of us went downstairs to the kitchen, where we blissed out on white bread and jam and tea. Everyone was wired and I was kind of exhausted from all the sleep. We somehow lasted another three hours to sunrise when we felt it was safe to tackle the streets of London again.

After a few hours of walking around our van driver showed up. Dima is 23 and Czech. He is CUTE. And shy! Which makes him even cuter.

We escaped London to find ourselves in Los Angeles traffic. The drive from the hotel to our gig north in Huddersfield was supposed to take three hours . . . it took six. This was also shortly after we discovered the van was a bit smaller than we had expected and sleeping in it when we couldn’t find a place to stay wasn’t going to be much of an option. We were also all still jetlagged and I had monster cramps, and Patty (our singer) had a headache that made her almost lose it. Christina (our bassist and tour manager) opened a beer and I jumped out to say hello to folks and take pictures, and then things started moving again. We never found out what happened and I don’t think we cared.

We were a little late for load-in, but managed fine. They fed us some very adequate pasta and veggies thing (our rider says they have to feed us at every show, which is good because otherwise we wouldn’t really survive) and then we set ourselves up and did the show. I can’t actually tell you much about it because I was focused on getting through it – first one or two get out the kinks, y’know? And there were quite a few. I discovered I need to buy a power converter for my pedals so I can use these weird foreign outlets or I can’t do the solo for Danzig’s “Mother” – which we use to close every set – with my Moser (the big, really evil-looking guitar). So since there were way more important things I needed to focus on I actually didn’t get any pictures of our first gig, but I did get the after party (i.e. bar mill-about). They will come soon.

We stayed with Pete, who works at the bar. He made us bacon sandwiches and coffee in the morning. “Bacon” is actually salty, kind of shriveled up Canadian bacon, but it’s food and I have a personal budget of about 50 pounds right now. That’s the equivalent of about $1,000, so don’t be scoffing at me because you’d probably be just about as poor as I am. Ha!

Now we’re all in the van and everyone but me, Dima and Caroline our documentary person is sleeping. But it’s blue-gray out and I think it’s hailing so sleep feels like a lovely idea. See you in Glasgow.

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