Tour Diary חדש ../images/Emo13.gif
Tour Diary June 13th - June 27th 13th-I left Florida for Sweden to meet up with the new band on our first European experience together…4 countries, 6 days, no sleep, rock and roll. 14th-I arrived in Sweden after a very long flight. I got picked up at the airport by our new European tour bus. The tour buses in Europe are very different than the ones in the States, so it got some getting use to. See, they have to be skinnier in Europe width wise, but they can be much taller…So they’re all two floors. Up the winding stares on the top floor you’ll find another TV room with all the same stuff in the back and then 12 bunks that lead all the way back to the very front of the bus…That way you can sit at the front on the second story and watch the road in front of you through giant glass windows and it feels like you should be driving. Very strange indeed. I found out shortly after getting on the bus from the airport, on the way to the hotel, that Air France had lost Arms’s bag and our guitar tech’s bag again! Poor arms…he will not see his bag for a very long time… 15th-This day started with a very, very early morning trip to the NRJ radio station in Sweden. Chops and I met some fans there that had won the chance to meet us. We got some cool presents including a Kokopelli necklace. Chops had his sunglasses on and stank of alcohol…I guess the boys partied hard the night before…I told Chops he smelled like a bum! We moved on after NRJ to go to another radio station that had 2 really crazy women hosts…they reminded me of witches for some reason…they kept cackling in Swedish as they spoke to one another, man were we lost. As we started to play “Our Lives” acoustically on air, the two women got up and were dancing with each other something like a “grab your partner round and round” thing…very strange. Chops and I kept laughing while we were playing, we couldn’t help it. I mean, on top of the singing cackling dancing Swedish witches, the room we were in had a fully decorated Christmas tree on my left and a giant stuffed lion on my right wearing a blue sparkly cowboy hat. After the song was done Chops started playing the theme song to “The Twilight Zone”…”do do do do, do do do do”…I was like, “Shut up dude! I’m scared!” It was fun. After that I went back to the hotel and did a bunch of press interviews. I met this one girl who won a contest to meet and interview me for a magazine. Man, she couldn’t get it together…when she was waiting to come in and see me, she was screaming and crying while convulsing in her father’s arms. She was SO loud that people started coming out of their hotel rooms all shaken up saying, “What’s wrong!? What happened?!” Sacha simply replied, “Oh, just a little meet and greet.” The girl finally got it together and came in the room, I guess she realized I wasn’t an evil monster. After that I met up with the band at sound check for our show that night. None of the band had ever been to Europe before, so they were all suffering from jetlag…Arms kept walking around like a zombie, “What day is it? Where are we?” I decided to introduce them to the fine Swedish delicacy that I like to call “fish paste in a tube”. I made them smell it, that woke them up alright. Sound check went well and the club was really cool, kind of like a big ballroom with huge chandeliers…it was sold out for that night’s show and the band was excited to play our first headlining show together. No word yet on where Arms’s bag was that the airline lost…they thought it was still in America! By that point he’d been wearing the same thing for two days. Stockholm is a great city… it stayed light out there until like 2AM! It was really confusing. After the gig that night the band got on the tour bus to start there 24 hour drive to Germany. Chops and I went back to the hotel because we were going to fly out the next morning to Germany and do press all day while the rest of the guys drive. Honestly, at that point, my jetlagged brain would have liked sleeping in that little dark coffin bunk on the tour bus for 20+ hours instead of waking up at 5AM and getting on plane flight number 3,478,384…but oh well. 16th Chops, Sacha, and I flew to Frankfurt early in the morning. Once we arrived we drove to Cologne to start our day of TV stuff. First we did Viva TV where Chops and I played acoustically and then we drove to Dussoldorf to do Giga TV as well. In between all that I had to call a few hundred radio stations back in America to tell them how much I appreciate them playing our new song…that’ll be a big phone bill. We drove back to Cologne as the rest of the band just arrived at the hotel…sleep was needed and that we did.
Tour Diary June 13th - June 27th 13th-I left Florida for Sweden to meet up with the new band on our first European experience together…4 countries, 6 days, no sleep, rock and roll. 14th-I arrived in Sweden after a very long flight. I got picked up at the airport by our new European tour bus. The tour buses in Europe are very different than the ones in the States, so it got some getting use to. See, they have to be skinnier in Europe width wise, but they can be much taller…So they’re all two floors. Up the winding stares on the top floor you’ll find another TV room with all the same stuff in the back and then 12 bunks that lead all the way back to the very front of the bus…That way you can sit at the front on the second story and watch the road in front of you through giant glass windows and it feels like you should be driving. Very strange indeed. I found out shortly after getting on the bus from the airport, on the way to the hotel, that Air France had lost Arms’s bag and our guitar tech’s bag again! Poor arms…he will not see his bag for a very long time… 15th-This day started with a very, very early morning trip to the NRJ radio station in Sweden. Chops and I met some fans there that had won the chance to meet us. We got some cool presents including a Kokopelli necklace. Chops had his sunglasses on and stank of alcohol…I guess the boys partied hard the night before…I told Chops he smelled like a bum! We moved on after NRJ to go to another radio station that had 2 really crazy women hosts…they reminded me of witches for some reason…they kept cackling in Swedish as they spoke to one another, man were we lost. As we started to play “Our Lives” acoustically on air, the two women got up and were dancing with each other something like a “grab your partner round and round” thing…very strange. Chops and I kept laughing while we were playing, we couldn’t help it. I mean, on top of the singing cackling dancing Swedish witches, the room we were in had a fully decorated Christmas tree on my left and a giant stuffed lion on my right wearing a blue sparkly cowboy hat. After the song was done Chops started playing the theme song to “The Twilight Zone”…”do do do do, do do do do”…I was like, “Shut up dude! I’m scared!” It was fun. After that I went back to the hotel and did a bunch of press interviews. I met this one girl who won a contest to meet and interview me for a magazine. Man, she couldn’t get it together…when she was waiting to come in and see me, she was screaming and crying while convulsing in her father’s arms. She was SO loud that people started coming out of their hotel rooms all shaken up saying, “What’s wrong!? What happened?!” Sacha simply replied, “Oh, just a little meet and greet.” The girl finally got it together and came in the room, I guess she realized I wasn’t an evil monster. After that I met up with the band at sound check for our show that night. None of the band had ever been to Europe before, so they were all suffering from jetlag…Arms kept walking around like a zombie, “What day is it? Where are we?” I decided to introduce them to the fine Swedish delicacy that I like to call “fish paste in a tube”. I made them smell it, that woke them up alright. Sound check went well and the club was really cool, kind of like a big ballroom with huge chandeliers…it was sold out for that night’s show and the band was excited to play our first headlining show together. No word yet on where Arms’s bag was that the airline lost…they thought it was still in America! By that point he’d been wearing the same thing for two days. Stockholm is a great city… it stayed light out there until like 2AM! It was really confusing. After the gig that night the band got on the tour bus to start there 24 hour drive to Germany. Chops and I went back to the hotel because we were going to fly out the next morning to Germany and do press all day while the rest of the guys drive. Honestly, at that point, my jetlagged brain would have liked sleeping in that little dark coffin bunk on the tour bus for 20+ hours instead of waking up at 5AM and getting on plane flight number 3,478,384…but oh well. 16th Chops, Sacha, and I flew to Frankfurt early in the morning. Once we arrived we drove to Cologne to start our day of TV stuff. First we did Viva TV where Chops and I played acoustically and then we drove to Dussoldorf to do Giga TV as well. In between all that I had to call a few hundred radio stations back in America to tell them how much I appreciate them playing our new song…that’ll be a big phone bill. We drove back to Cologne as the rest of the band just arrived at the hotel…sleep was needed and that we did.
That means by this time he was wearing the same outfit since the day he left New York, 5 days ago. Luckily as we were leaving he finally received his bag and was crying tears of joy to have clean clothes to put on. I said, “man it must be nice to have clean underwear?”, and he said, “I don’t wear underwear”,,,, To be continued....