Nurse the Hate: Ruminations On Touring

We are coming back to Europe to do a tour this Fall.  It’s been three years, so in the back of my mind comes the question if anyone will remember who were are and will come to see us play.  The world moves so quickly.  Everything changes and I feel like I’m the same 28 year old I've always been.  Most people’s attention span runs for about 17 seconds.  Venues disappear.  Scenes rise and fall.  Castles melt away into the sea.  The crusty hardcore punk that booked the club last tour is now an accountant with a two year old.  Things just move on.

The first time we did a tour overseas was in Spain. I had received a letter from a small label in Spain, Rock&Roll Inc.  We put out a record and after two more letters back and forth we decided to do a small tour there.  It seems completely insane that four men would climb into an airplane to fly to a country where they didn’t understand the culture or language and essentially just show up and hope everything would be OK because of a couple letters strangers sent you.  We had never met any of these people before flying over.  We just trusted it would work out and it did.

It was harder to tour in foreign countries then.  Spain had the “peseta” for currency, which had an impossible conversion rate of something like 178-1.  Krusty and I could do that type of math in our heads, but I know for a fact that Bob and Leo had no idea if they were paying 14 cents or $1500 for a soda in a gas station.  They just handed over a wad of odd looking money to the cashier and hoped for the best.  None of us spoke the language and English wasn’t nearly as widely spoken as it is now.  There was a lot of pointing and making “OK” signs when trying to wrangle something from a clerk.

I took two years of Spanish in high school.  I had retained two things.  I could say “Donde esta zapatos rojo?”, which is very effective if you want to know where the red shoes are located.  I also remembered the phrase “ciudad de oro” which means “city of gold”.  It was one of the key phrases in a Spanish reading comprehension test I had passed in unlikely fashion with an A+ to limp out of high school Spanish with a “C”.  For our final we had been given a reading comprehension test completely in Spanish, just like one of those standardized tests given in elementary school.  I had a working Spanish vocabulary at the same level as a pony, so I just glommed onto whatever word I recognized.  “OK… something about “pollo” which is chicken and “donde”…  Why and chicken…  Why did the chicken cross the road maybe…  OK… What is Spanish for “the other side”?”  Plainly put, it was a miracle I passed.

Those chickens, or pollo, came home to roost on that tour.  I never knew what anyone was talking about.  I was being whisked around the country like a functional illiterate.  I remember telling Leo “I think I know what’s it like to be you never knowing what is going on” to which he replied “I know!  It’s great, isn’t it Dude?”.  I think he missed my point or maybe I missed his, but we all did the best we could.

We were about eight days into the tour when we stopped to eat a pre-gig meal with our tour manager Javier in a family restaurant.  It was a small town in the northern part of Spain, maybe Vitoria or outside Bilbao somewhere.  The room was a giant rectangle with the toilets in the back of the house in full view of all the patrons.  In these Spanish towns everyone would have drinks and tapas on a little circuit.  Then the entire group moved on from the little bar with the good fish toasts to the one with the octopus over to the one with the jamon.  The circuit ended at the small family restaurant.  At this point, everyone knew that the four strangers were American musicians and they all looked at us as a curiosity.  This is when Little Bobby Marika made two (2) tragic mistakes in front of the entire town.

Bobby had learned that if wine had come from a pitcher, it was acceptable to cut it with water.  I think the custom was a way to cut alcohol intake at lunch and/or change the harshness of cheap jug red wine.  That was to the south however, and Bob was unaware that we had moved into Rioja country, arguably Spain’s finest wine producing area.  We had begun to dig into our entrees when Bob reached over for the bottle on the table, poured himself a glass, and then cut it in half with water.  An audible gasp exhaled from the entire dining room.

Now I don’t know what wine they had poured us as I was just getting into wine at that time.  If I had to guess, I will bet it was a decent reserva or maybe even a gran reserva.  These people were amazingly warm and generous hosts.  It would have been the equivalent of having someone pour you an 18 year old single malt scotch and then you thanked them while simultaneously pouring a Mountain Dew into it.  With the audible gasp, I looked up to see what had happened.  Javier quickly told Bob, “No, not this one!  You don’t do that with this one!” to which the completely unflummoxed Bob just gulped some down after shrugging his lack of concern.

The meal ended and the diners lingered at their tables in that non-stressed way of Europeans.  Bobby got up from the table and walked all the way through the dining room to the toilets.  Everyone glanced at the American boor that had just now begun to fade from outrage as he walked through the tables.  I remember glancing with half interest when I saw him walk confidently into the door marked “senoras”.  The dining room began to buzz again as word began to spread that the American musician had just gone to the women’s room.

Bobby, who also had a couple years of Spanish in high school, plopped back down in his chair upon his return.  “Bob…  Did you notice anything strange about that bathroom?”.  Bob reached for more watered down gran reserva wine and shook his head.  No.  What?  What?  He knew he was in the hot seat, but had no idea why.  Javier leaned in and said “You went to the women’s toilet man”.  Bob’s face suddenly lit up in shock.  “What?  What the fuck are you talking about.  It said “senoras”!”  Javier leaned in again and pointed to Bob’s chest with a long bony finger.  You are a caballero, NOT a senora.  Bob’s eyes grew even larger.  “Oh my God!  I’ve been going to the women’s room all week!”  

Though we all asked a frenzy of questions amidst what must have been one of the absolute hardest laughing fits of my life, I was never able to figure out how he had not picked up on the fact he was always in the women’s room.  I remember asking him why he didn’t notice that there weren’t any urinals in any of the toilets he was going into.  “I don’t know!  I thought it was a Spanish thing!”.  Not once did he casually slide up to any of us and inquire, “Hey… Isn’t it weird that there aren’t any urinals here and occasionally women will walk into the men’s room like they belong?”.  It’s hard to say his reasoning.  We were all just trying to figure it out as best we could I suppose.

Touring was more of an eye opening adventure then.  We are all grizzled enough now for Euro touring sliding into "novelty of new places", but even now we will be coming back to some of our reliably favorite places to see old friends.  It's not really that much different, just a little less surprising.  It's still just a small variation of us climbing onto an airplane and hoping everything is going to be OK when we arrive on distant shores with all kinds of things out of our control.  It's good to maintain some sense of adventure in life.  Without that, there is only tedium.  Things are a bit different at this stage.  I'm a little wiser now, a bit more relaxed, and I also know that "Herren" is German for "men's room".