European Tour Diary 2018: Day One Wilhelmshaven

Wilhelmshaven is a small tough little town on the North Sea.  It feels like it could be an off shoot of Toledo.  Our booking agent Jens is based out of here, so we have played The Kling Klang club a number of times.  It is a place that feels vagely like home where working class people let off steam and drink too much.  The comparison is particularily strong today as the weather has turned gray and windy.

We are very late arriving.  In what should have been a five hour drive from the Frankfurt Airport, disappointingly it has turned into a near eight hour slog of stop and start.  This is especially brutal after a redeye flight in.  It is Friday early evening and I last slept Wednesday.  We roll up to the club and unload right into a soundcheck.  Chanda and I take the bags up to the club apartment while the band tries to figure out their rental gear.  The staff seems slightly annoyed but not outright hostile at our unbelievable lateness in arrival time.

The plan is to do one long set.  I write it out sitting on Leo´s drum stool pulling on a crisp Jever beer.  Jens is fully multi tasking, even running sound tonight.  It is a good sounding room.  I like playing here.  It is bizarre to have to play a set at full energy after almost a full day of total inactivity.  It is a challenging switch to flip.  There is a decent crowd assembled though, and they seem to remember us.  I didn´t know how that would go as it has been almost three years since our last tour here.  We kick it off and it feels good.

We are playing well and the crowd is responding in a typical German way of nodding heads and attentively watching.  People here notice small things.  I have been scolded more than once for flubbing lyrics or being flat on a chorus.  Still, I would rather have people engaged and paying attention than being background.  We play a 21 song set, even encoring with an energetic "Shah" after getting a nice ovation for an encore.  I jump off the stage and head back to the merch area to avoid an extended "one more song" situation that will never end.  Chistoph looks at me with his usual malaise to downplay our obviously well received set.  "Eh, it was all right.  I can see you have been working on dynamics."  He is referencing our last set here in which our volume was roughly that of Motorhead in 1982.

I am accosted by two very drunk German girls.  They have decided they want to buy my gig shirt for one of their boyfriends.  They have the drunk repetitious thing going on which is only compounded by a limited vocabulary of what one of the girls says is "schoolhouse German".  It doesn't bother me as I have no language skills to speak of.  I am just glad they aren't jabbing at me in German.  "You give us shirt.  We give you Euros, yes?"  I explain that I am not selling the shirt.  This has no impact.  "We give you twenty Euros, yes?"  They obviously know this is not going to be accepted, but are just having fun.  I then switch over to my one size fits all Eastern European voice and loop Christoph in.  “You take shirt.  We take girl and goat.  We take goat and make party."  The negotiations break down when the band dinner is mercifully served and I can escape the merch area.

I had signed a number of posters and LPs.  While doing so, people asked me where Leo and Sugar were as they could not locate them for their signatures.  I know with concrete certainty that Leo had made a beeline for the band apartment to get into the weed he had secured earlier.  Sugar had been fed Jager shots from the crowd, knocking back four in the set alone.  This seems much too aggressive, like breaking out in a sprint when embarking on a marathon.  Little did I know the chain of events that had just been set in motion thanks to the friendly couple that had decided to befriend Sugar.

After a nice meal of chicken and vegetables, I asked for an Ardberg scotch to help me mellow out so I could sleep.  I was in that overtired phase but still jacked up from the show.  I slunk off soon afterwards taking my mic bag upstairs to try and fall asleep before the inevitible "outside voice" of Leo arrives in the space.  There is no way he is going to let the party stop, especially on the first night of the tour.  Thankfully, I fall asleep in moments.

The band apartment is two rooms with bunk beds.  I take a lower bunk, "my bunk" from previous tours.  One of the challenges of touring is waking up in the middle of the night having no idea where you are.  It can invoke a slight panic until the mind can arrange the setting of the strange room.  I felt very pleased with myself.  I had arranged my luggage in a systematic manner on the floor nearby, ready to go when morning shone through. My world was set up perfectly.

I don´t know what woke me up.  I was in a deep sleep so even now it seems like a dream.  I remember what it thought was a blonde woman standing in the middle of the room near my suitcase.  We talked for a minute but I didn’t know who she was or what she was talking about.  I saw her suddenly squat down, with purpose.  Then I hear liquid hitting the floor.  This woman is peeing. It amuses me that she is so confused.  She must be peeing in the flowerpot housing the plant.  I fall back to sleep, never really waking up or understanding there is no flower pot.  And this is not a stranger in a dream.  And that woman is Sugar.  And she is peeing all over my luggage.

When I wake up in the morning I see a bunch of towels smashed up by my bag.  That is odd.  Then I step in something wet.  It then hits me that the strange dream I had wasn’t a dream at all.  Sugar pissed all over my luggage in a sleepwalking dream state.  Fuck.  A merciful Lord has spared most of my suitcase.  My mic bag wasn´t as lucky.  It is no way to start a morning pulling out pee soaked personal items from your bag.  Sugar wakes up and can't believe it.  She is embarrassed but doing the best she can in what I will call "The Attempted Reconstruction of My World".  At first she is in denial.  It begins to dawn on her that this actually happened.  She vaguely remembers getting towels to clean up what she thought was spilled water last night.  That is definitely not water.  "No!  It can`t be!"  Smell my bag.  "Ewwww".  There is no denying it.  This has happened.

It´s Day One and everything I own has urine on it.