European Tour Diary 2018: Day 2 Gent

"I´m sorry I peed on all your stuff."  So begins the ride to Gent.  I feel much more human after a decent night of sleep.  The key to these tours is to not fall behind on sleep.  If you cannot maintain a bare minimum of rest, you will break down and 14 cities in 14 days becomes a Bataan Death March.  Nobody wants to be moving around Europe in the van like a cholera victim.  We wind our way through back roads until finally getting on a Dutch highway.  Our pace is relaxed today after we all take turns arguing on the phone with a WOW Airlines representative about Leo`s lost luggage.  The woman appears to be unable to understand that we will have a new address each day and has a remarkably relaxed attitude about Leo missing most of his clothes and key equipment.  I listen to Leo getting bossed around for a couple minutes and have him pass the phone to me.  The woman spends most of her time telling me her process in trying to get his bag from Frankfurt to where we will be in Belgium for the next few days.  "Listen.  I need you to stop telling me how you are going to do this and just do it.  The only thing we care about is getting the bag in our hands by Monday.  It is Saturday.  Is there any reason you cannot get a bag to Gent by Monday?"  The representative continues to tell me about what process she will use, none of which has any bearing on the bag arriving.  I can see why Christoph had descended into angry German profanity with the woman in about 36 seconds.  I have no belief that he will see this bag in 2018.

We make a stop in a Dutch gas station.  They have a different gas station situation than the Germans, the most noteworthy of which is their "Wall of Deep Fried Delights".  An entire wall of the gas station is an automat with tiny little windows.  Patrons can place a 2€ coin in a slot and pull out whatever brown deep fried rectangle they desire.  I can't be sure but it appears to me that all the rectangles are made of the same meat spread which have been breaded in different shapes.  Person after person gets out of their cars armed with 2€ coins and a taste for culinary adventure.  There are about a dozen folks munching on deep fried brown sticks standing around a counter.  

The show is at a place called Jan Van Gent.  It is a small cafe with dark wood interior and tasteful candles at back room tables.  The club has provided us an apartment about 50 meters away and even gives us a nice quality bottle of iced cava as a welcome.  This offers stark contrast to most American clubs that want bands to "put your shit over there".  Hector is in culture shock.  Christoph and I take a corner bedroom upstairs which offers a quiet corner but also forces us to use the "straight edge stairs" to gain access.  The people of Belgium and Holland are full believers in creating staircases that have stairs thinner than a normal man's foot and angles roughly that of ladders.  Trying to navigate these stairs in cowboy boots hauling up a roller bag is a death defying feat.  There must be dozens of deaths weekly as senior citizens plunge to their doom on these staircases.  Come to think of it, I can't recall seeing anyone older than the age of 65 in days.  If I have more than one Belgian beer, this will be my final resting place.

There is great difficulty getting the sound dialed in.  We appear to have two options.  Either the system can squeal horribly forcing anyone within a mile to seek shelter, or I can have no vocals.  It is one or the other.  That's it.  At one point we get it close to something that seems workable, but the second I give the "OK", the man running sound immediately makes an adjustment that puts the vocal back to howling pain or silence.  Oh well.  We will see what happens.

The set is well received.  I have no idea if I am in key or even close to the band.  I just try to move around a little bit in my Two by two foot stage area.  My favorite person in the crowd is a balding thin man that would have been described in a 1973 movie set in Times Square as "an old fruit".  He is having the best time perhaps anyone has ever had at any public event.  He is dancing and moving around the club running his hands on everyone.  When we take a set break he starts tickling his hands up this English rock writer's back and neck.  He must pull this type of behavior so often and is so obviously harmless that everyone ignores him.  So as I am talking about the Drive By Truckers with this writer guy, in the background I see the smiling "old fruit" playing around with his hair.  The English writer guy keeps apologizing for him saying "we ran into him on the street, and he´s my friend and I knew he was drunk as shit.  I´m sorry.  He does this."  When we start up a second set I have my own personal #metoo moment as he runs his hand way up my thigh as I am singing.  He’s harmless, so I ignore him like everyone else.  When we kick into some high energy material, another man runs through the crowd, picks up a strange girl and then falls into the stage sprawling them both at Sugar and my feet.  It reminds me of when I was at an out of control Belgian Biker party years ago and a man said to me "there is much freedom here".  We are in Belgium, it is Saturday and there is a lot of freedom in this room.

After the show a DJ takes over which leads to Sugar launching her second consecutive "dance party", which as far as I can tell is her dancing by herself with a hazy smile unless some other people wander over to join in.  I see Leo and Chanda join in and then some locals get involved including a woman with black severe bangs that Sugar claims "tried to jam her tongue down my throat".  She is code named “Eva the Tramp”.  Leo falls in with some locals and gets intense.  I slink down the street to the band apartment hoping to high hell that I don't have to take a leak in the middle of the night and have to go down the straight edge stairs.