hamburg, germany – december 6
but where is the crux of this journal.
where do the crucial particles of involvement lie ?
i don’t see it when i reread it.
there are things that take place between songs in motion. moments that clot between molecules of verse in song deliverance. there is an action that more resolutely describes thes parameters of involvement.
but they are not here in print. these points of procedure rather not make themselves so available in the written word. they live in the perspective of sound and light angles reflecting on all matters of existence during the constant momentum of tourdom and heart throb. they exist in the traffic of memory coming to grips with the new ones being made. they are the essence of this life and lie tucked into the corners of questioning reality at every turn out here.
where is that journal.
i wake up in hamburg now. the first one again up on the bus alone. the captain keeps himself busy with tidying.
out side it is reportedly freezing. i am about to venture forth, always leaving the mother ship like a good alien.
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i have left the warmth of vessel and dipped into the icy atmosphere. it’s a barren wasteland of hangovers assembling sleeping off the saturday night before.
you can just feel it in this town.
there is a deathly quiet carnival next to the bus, well tucked in and wondering how to awake into another day of minimal security and maximum recklessness.
i have no idea what that means.
so i find what might appear to be the venue.
a structure like this has to be an old nazi bunker.
it has the same concrete specs as the u-boat bunker we played in back in britanny, france. except this one is 5 stories high and impossible to dismantle. so they made it into a variety of shops and stuff.
4th floor is the venue, the stanky kind, never getting clean kind with collected haunts of old nazi impulses.
now i am back in the bus. thøger and sarah have just awakened and we have coffee together. they speak of the disco they had here in the bus after i went off to sleep. anders is a very good dancer. he and sarah were going at it to amy winehouse at 120 kilometers an hour. thøger was there too. and peter.
now i stare out the window at the dozens of carnival trailers (caravans) and can feel their envy of us. we are just like them, but way more sleek and mobile. we have only vessel as opposed to their sprawling fleet. and we get in and out in a day while they are sluggishly stuck in one spot for weeks. we cover the same grounds in human gatherings, but we have found a way to do it more stealth like and more efficiently. they need a small army to pull off their particular slant of yippity. we need only a small elite guerilla tactical team to accomplish the same objective.
i wonder if the fence surrounding their conclave is electrified to keep them from escaping.
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the day passes and i never leave the confines of the crumpled club. as the band begins to wake and emerge, back stage gets a little less bleak. the window there over looks at the waking carnival too. opening it now and again to let a frigid blast of dim in.
the folks who work here begin to multiply too, and with their numbers come a transformation into something more homey and cozy. soul is all in the vibe, and it begins to come alive.
the food begins to become magnificent backstage, which seems impossible 4 stories up in a bunker like this. we do some business there between band and crew and then we do some sound check. a new song is born there.
something about a cold mountain in north carolina. i suspect subconsciously it has to do with the monk dvd in the bus when he reveals he was born there.
the piano is happy that it has been all the way up, but teasingly stays just out of tune a bit, all the while thøger struggles with it. but it also reveals a new instrumental tune, monk like and plays as if it always been.
then the darkness outside creeps upon the land suddenly. down below the carnival lights sparkle on and football goers spend their coin and time dangling by the trailers of false hopes and colored blink.
the set time also sneaks up on us. the whole day has been trickled away around us as we hunker in the bunker. but it has a certain fulfilling because of the new material and band interplay all day. they all seem in spirited moods, but this tour has no days off, and that notion seems to hover around too. after dinner half of the band/crew fall asleep where they lie. this stanky backstage bunkered world has become our comfortable hole in the wall. and the showers aren’t so bad either.
before the show, the owner, who say he has been a fan since 17, now 29, shows up to show me around. up we go to the roof top and the view is as you’d expect. he is dress in german black of course, but sleek and bowieish in his older then he looks demeaner. he invites me to do a show here in the summer when things are more bbq encrusted with the proceedings. maybe so. maybe so.
back down the dizzying monster spiral stairs and into the relative warmth. we begin the set. the opening first set festival sounds solid. then we take the stage now staring with a song we have not done on tour yet, nor rehearsed; “well enough alone”. peter was a bit nervous.
funny to see him get that way right before we play. so i told him we would also follow it up with something we also have never done which now i can’t remember. i think it was a way to punish the nerves so they would not stick around. a kind of homeopathic cure for its contagiousness. whatever it was it worked. we smoked on the first track and the crowd was adoring and thickly packed. we continued in a completely different set order this night and i wondered if them pesky recordists hadn’t worked their voo doo on us. no matter, the night unfolded well and maybe the only 2 songs that sounded feeble in comparison were right near the end, which meant we only should have ended the set a little sooner.
then we were done with another work day. the crowd seemed satiated and tickled with our company. i meant to head back out there to mingle, but instead first called home on the computer skype directly, as i did right before we went on calling my sick sister there too.
when i was done, the venue had turned back into a host ship. everyone was gone. poured out of the stack of impossibly thick concrete 4 floors down into the freezing streets of their home town. we lingered above with the men of the club, then took our leave to the nesting confines of the bus patiently waiting and tethered with its power cable like a big ship docked at a giant structure in the middle of the dark sea of night we were about to sail in. something like that.
tea and then bunk for me. but i think a few scurried off to the reeperbahn for good luck. the end.
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