HE KNOWS CHANGES AREN’T PERMANENT, BUT CHANGE IS.
The venue for Big Star’s show in Stockholm this coming Sunday the 19th has been moved to the Södra Teatern. Also, I wasn’t able to get to a computer yesterday to post this but unfortunately due to two very sick band members, Briskeby, and thus I too, had to cancel their show last night in Haugesund, Norway; of course I will definitely be up for my headlining show, 9pm on Friday the 17th at Gloria Flames in Oslo.
LIVORNO 2/7
Every now and then the recalibration of the delicate instruments of one’s beliefs, perceptions, and awareness is in order. A tune-up of that with which we tune in. Toning and tuning the intuition. Making sure your soul-nar is still detecting objects and actions around you.
As it turns out, I’m not a communist. At least not in the way that’s practiced by human beings. All that leveling out of culture stuff makes me incredibly sad. I am reading The Lost Heart of Asia by Colin Thubron, an early 1990s travelogue thru the former Soviet Central Asian Republics, what were then the newly-emerged nations of Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan (by the way, Microsoft Word only recognizes 3 of the 5 names of these countries, and I double-checked the spelling of each). Of course, the suppression of language, of poetry, of religion (however much I may lament the sources of conflict religion provides), the suppression of history and myth and architecture and place names; it’s a cliché of anti-Soviet rhetoric, from those years that ended about when the Posies began, to point out the numbing sameness of Soviet street names, ‘brand’ names, etc. Dominique’s grandparents were communists, and escaped Italy to escape fascism. Fascism, imperialism, kingly and queenly indulgence, serfdom, such things were in full swing in the late 19th early 20th century, and communism certainly provided an interesting intellectual counterweight, and in theory still does the job of pushing the arguments of the right towards the center, and keeping the socialists from getting too soft and cozy. But, as put into practice by large and diverse nations—yikes. Genocide, total repression, and lots of ugly grey apartment blocks. Vietnamese people seem kind of happy, hmm. Maybe in tinier nations, more homogenous than humongous, the dogma can be adapted to the local flora and fauna and everyone gets to keep speaking Spanish or what have you.
OK, I’m a capitalist, I like the idea of working hard, creating something, and then getting a reward for that. I know the ugly side of capitalism is quite ugly, but it’s always those corrupt and fascist elements that don’t have to be there—same thing with communism. Just nasty old human nature mucking up a good thing. But at least in the world as I know it, the portfolio is diversified; the good apples and bad are there to be picked thru. Big-country communism means that if you have a kleptocratic apple in your batch, your state is one big Enron, and you can’t take your business elsewhere. Again, I like the theory, but the practice has been pretty catastrophic. Which is why I sort of wonder about International Noise Conspiracy—are they just bullshitting those kids or what? I think I already wrote about this a couple of years ago, but I went to see them, and I love their sincerity, I love their energy, but I think that they are messing with jargon and sloganeering in a way that is unfair to the more impressionable end of the spectrum of their audience. Again, I really don’t think they get home from tour and split the proceeds with their crew. Then again, in the avg. rock tour, they may not make any money at all and the crew are the only people getting paid. In which case, they are not hypocrites at least.
Dominique’s grandfather, her late father’s father, was the aforementioned refugee of fascism. Unf. he landed rather firmly in the fire when the Germans arrived in his newly adopted France. Note about Germany: it occurred to me the other day that Germany is called everything by most of its neighbors except what it calls itself; Allemania, Tyskland, Germany—maybe only the Dutch call them Deutsch. Weird, huh? Anyway, Grandpa Sassi spent his later years yelling anti-Catholic rants at nuns (a bit harsh, but anyone who visits the Vatican and has a sense of perspective will probably look at the amount of undistributed wealth the CC has and wonder where the charitable distribution and contribution is being Enron’d away to) and picking the flowers from the garden of the Hotel de Ville (as, in his mind, they belonged to him. And I back him up on this one too).
So, when we arrived in Livorno, I was unwittingly walking right into the bear’s den of the Italian left. I don’t know where the Sassis were from originally, at least the modern Sassis (Sassi appears as a surname in Italy, Tunisia, Algeria, France and so on)—somewhere in Emilia-Romagna. Livorno is a port in Tuscany, the region immediately to the south. We boarded a train in Rome and Livorno came a few hours later, about 40 minutes after we started seeing nice beaches and coves. There was some confusion when we arrived about what to do—we had about 2 hours until the scheduled soundcheck. Two vehicles were there to transport us and our gear, but that still wasn’t enough to move us all. So no decision appeared to be in the process of being made, and I stepped up and made rather strong suggestions—we go to the hotel, in a cab with the gear following (the other car had to go to the club). The guy from the club who was going there said we should move soundcheck up to 6.30, instead of 7, and I said sure, as long as everything is ready to go, monitors are rung out, backline is set up, etc. He was offended, but tried to hide it, and said, “I am a kind of famous tour manager throughout Italy, so everything is very professional at our club”. OK, buddy, you just set up my expectations: don’t let me down.
The hotel. There were all kinds of arguments about the hotel and club being too far away from each other for it to be feasible to visit both before showtime. I finally pried it out of the promoter that they were about 7 miles apart. Off we went, in a taxi, the gear and luggage following, and pulled up to a lovely old villa at the end of a long drive. The villa and the approach looked oddly almost exactly like the place I stayed when I played Mallorca in 2003. Hmmm. We thought we were in for a great B&B experience; as it turns out, the villa, whose name I didn’t even retain, was an unusual hotel, and we had rooms in the basement. 7 people, in two rooms, with bunk beds. And one shared bath outside of each. No iron/ironing board on the premises. And their internet connection had a gone dead! Zut alors! Well, there wasn’t much for me to do. I did notice the restaurant (I guess there were some 20 other rooms around, and all were booked by temporary workers for the same company/project; they were up as early as we were the next day in fact). There was a restaurant serving dinner, Italian dinner cooked by a very skinny Japanese chef named Koji. But we weren’t staying that long. The gear had gone ahead to the club, and we got in a taxi van and went the 7 miles to the club, which, like so many Italian venues, is in an industrial park—there were apartments in the building next door, tho-…I really wondered who lived there and what it must be like.
So, we did our soundcheck. And they did have an amazing Vox Corinthian organ for me. Great! The club was just a big bar, no backstage, kind of spare but new, clean and very good from a technical point of view. The Cage Club. No cage in sight. By the time soundcheck was done it was probably almost 9pm which means I hadn’t eaten in 8 hours, and that had been a small panini at the train station. There was nothing to snack on at the club, or the hotel for that matter. So I was starving. Susana had smoked a spliff so her drive to spur anyone into action was somewhat diminished. We were standing in the parking lot, waiting for someone (remember, many of the discussions around us are not in English so often we don’t have a clue what’s going on) to tell us the next step and simply nothing happened. We stood out there in the cold thinking that any second we would be taken to dinner (I had requested that dinner follow soundcheck promptly—this is normal, and, in light of the fact we were starving, necessary). Time passed. Nothing. I asked Susana what was going on, and got no answer. I went in the club and the only guy there, not the famous tour manager, said we had to wait for the other band to finish soundchecking. I said we were hungry and tried and cold. I asked if it was far. He said 5 minutes. Couldn’t he call us a cab? Anyway, I was basically getting the idea that more waiting was to be done. The band played 3-4 songs, and then we finally got into cars and were taken to the restaurant. It was very good, I will admit. In WF our party was 7 people, 5 wine drinkers, so we finished two bottles of wine. And after dinner the opening band suggested I have puncho, a mix of coffee and…was it rum, I think? I had one, and then we went to the club. About 40 people came to the show. I drank a little too much, they had some nice Havana Club Añejo, that being a weakness of mine—I only had one glass but that combo of those diverse beverages made me a little light headed. Incongruously, ‘Spaceballs’ was being projected on the wall of the club all night. We got on stage and did our best to entertain the dwindling Tuesday night crowd. Who wants to spend a freezing Tuesday night in a club in an industrial park, wherein there is one pit toilet and one toilet with no seat? Seeing WF? About 37 people, that’s who. Well, we went a bit wild. I periodically jumped offstage and chased people with the mic in my hand, not threatening them or anything, just trying to bring the show to them, since they were a bit shy and I guess our antics were too much for them (wasn’t this a kind of punk club?). I did stand on the bass drum and rock out, not unusual, I had just watched the bass player in the Avengers do it…I broke a string and the guitar player from the opening band gave me his guitar to use. I sort of forgot I wasn’t playing mine and at one point I did a Jon Auer and poked it into the soft ceiling (one of those suspended ceilings like you find in an office building where soft tiles of asbestos-like material are suspended in an aluminum grid) putting a dent in one. Well, that was it. They shut down the PA **and** the lights!! Show over. And then the drummer (female) came up and chewed me out for jumping on her drums (untrue, but I did stand on them). I told her I didn’t do anything I wouldn’t do to my own gear and that it was perfectly safe. Anyway, I apologized but she was furious. She told me ‘maybe it’s OK for people like you who have all this money” but it wasn’t acceptable for her. Hey—is this a capitalist/communist thing again? Weren’t we all supposed to share? And what kind of money am I making playing for 36 people (€20, it turns out). We left and went back to our subdivided mansion where we weren’t served. I found out (by doing it) that I could break into the kitchen and wine cellar but I don’t have the desire to steal so I came back empty handed. And went to bed for about 3 hours. I will add that the band was ecstatic—they had never had both the sound and light lights pulled on them, so we all agreed we out punked the place.
COSENZA 2/8
Up at 6. We had to be ready to go at 7. Ouch. I slept OK, but not for very long. I was second in line for the shower in the one bathroom on our floor. Big disappointment—there was only enough hot water for **one** shower. So I at least put on clean clothes but felt nasty. There was breakfast being served for us and the itinerant workers—coffee, cereal for those who wanted it (I don’t eat it myself) and sort of industrial, individually shrinkwrapped croissants with a nutella-like goo inside. The front desk guy was serving. He also made espresso drinks at the bar. We got in a taxi and found we had grossly overestimated the amount of time we would need to get to the station, plus our train was delayed, so we had like an hour of waiting in the freezing cold station. I bought a Herald Tribune and read. Then we got on the train, and I slept a bit. Got to Roma, and since our train had been late we had to run with all our luggage and gear (in luggage carts, mostly, but I was rolling my suitcase) about 200 yards full speed to the complete opposite end of the station to catch the train to Da Vinci airport. We got on, and checked in, and got on the plane, and got to Lamezia. Once there we had a rented van, and a friend of Susana’s, Simone, was volunteering to be driver for the rest of the tour (this was to be my last date but the band went on to play another show near Cosenza, two shows in Sicily, and another show in Roma). It was an hour drive from Lamezia airport to Cosenza. We went by the club and met up with the various people involved in putting the show on, and then went to the hotel for showers etc. Cosenza is actually two towns, one an ancient village clinging to a mountain, with narrow stairways serving as the streets of the town—there are only a few navigable roads, the rest you have to walk to get around. There are niches with candles and plastic saints everywhere. The other is the modern town with high rises and sprawl that inhabits a flat piece of land adjacent to the hill. The venue, B Side, is a small restaurant/bar on the main floor and then downstairs are two big rooms, one is a venue/bar and one is a kind of beer hall with long tables, bright lighting, and a TV hanging in a corner, for watching football etc. On Wednesday nights there is no cover to get in, they always have a band, and then DJs playing rock & punk til 3am. And cheap beers. So the place is jammed with like 300 kids. And the people running these shows are very cool and friendly. The venue is in the new part of town, it's the ground floor and basement level of an apartment block, actually—I guess it’s a residence for heavy sleepers. The hotel was in the old village, a car drove ahead of us to guide us there, or as close as we could get. We parked in an unbelievably tight space and dragged our stuff up a winding passageway of stairs. Then we came to a door, which opened to more stairs. We emerged on the second floor and entered what must have been an incredible residence when it was built in the 18th century. Dark wood and a winding staircase to the upper and lower floors. Now a kind of hostel/hotel. One bedroom with a bunch of bunk beds again, and a room with two beds, I grabbed the small bed in the small room. Upstairs there 3 bathrooms all next to each other, I finally got cleaned up. The place was freezing, tho—I got the feeling that Calabria was like Granada in Spain: it’s mostly warm and sunny, so when there is a cold snap, there’s no defense for it. The buildings aren’t insulated for cold weather and there are only inefficient electric heaters in some rooms. Soon we headed for soundcheck, and dinner immediately followed, for a change! Some nice wine was had, and then it was really showtime soon after. This show was really fun, well played. It was short—about 50 minutes before they told us it was time for the DJ sets to start, but the place was jammed and the patrons were very happy. We stayed on, I chatted with locals and tried not to drink too much, just one Havana Club and a glass of wine or two. We had to pry Susana out of there, and actually we didn’t get out of there until two, the place was starting to slow down. Susana was hammered. She actually fell out of the van while pantomiming a kind of sex act on Doug, the bass player, as her boyfriend Stefano looked on! She threw the only portion of the merch money she could find in Pat Fear’s face. This was all before we could start driving to the hotel. Finally she got in and just said ‘fuck you’ over and over. I guess that was her way of showing her affection! Once we got to the hotel, Simone and one of the promoters—who had incredibly offered to drive me the hour-long drive (so two hours to get there and back) to Lamezia for my flight—went to have breakfast at a bar that serves it all night. I went to sleep for about an hour, then got up, and was so cold that I knew it would be impossible to shower and survive the experience of getting out to dry off, so I slept for another 45 minutes. My driving companions came back, and we worked our way down the indoor and outdoor steps to get to the van, and started to head to Lamezia at about 5am. My flight was at 6.50, and I got there in time to check in and have a croissant and macchiato. I of course slept all the way to Roma, but that was only an hour. As I walked out onto the tarmac in Lamezia I was so tired, everything was shimmering. I had been successful in not drinking very much so felt fine, just in need of a place to lay down. In Roma I had a 5 hour layover so I parked myself on a bench and slept for 3 of those hours. I got up and checked in for my other flights and had lunch. Flew to Copenhagen (slept all the way). Short layover and flight to Oslo (slept thru that one too). Got the train into the city and Claus picked me up. I was hungry by then (it was like 9pm) so we stopped for some dinner and then I went home and went to bed.
TROMSO 2/10
And got up at freaking 6 again! We had to be at the airport at 8.20 and it takes at least 45 minutes to get there, plus we had to load up gear and merch. Destination: Tromso, above the Arctic Circle (Tromso is sometimes called the ‘Paris of the North’). Though it’s further north than Iceland it’s not nearly as cold as it could be. There’s snow on the ground but rather than looking like Ice Station Zebra it pretty much looks like a small Norwegian city. Briskeby and I were playing a special concert as part of the ByLarm music festival/showcase, a kind of SXSW that’s NXN. Almost 200 bands play over the course of 3 days. We played in a big hall to about 1000 people, just 30 minutes each. I had a very good response to my 3 songs, and I played 3 songs with the band and nailed them, and of course, Briskeby brought down the house. After the show while selling CDs in the lobby I met the Artist known as Fugu—I am a fan, but we had never met. He is French and lives between Paris and Nancy. We exchanged contacts and CDs (my neighbor Xavier from Tahiti 80 coproduced the new Fugu release). Unf. Fugu’s show was the next day and we were leaving. Also, I ran into Beezewax, we were on the same flights to and from Tromso, but unf. we were playing at different venues at the same time that night. Anyway, as you can see I have less to say when the shows go smoothly than when they have some unfortunate quirks but I will declare Tromso a success.
Since I arrived back in Oslo I have spent 4 days mixing some songs for the Trondheim-based band Jim Protector—whom I met in Trondheim when the Posies played there last year. While I was there I played and sang on a song of theirs and they asked me to mix that song and some others, so, it happened. I think the stuff sounds great…I also performed two songs on Monday on P2, the most sophisticated of Norway’s state broadcast services. I played ‘Death of A City’ and ‘Je Vous En Prie’ on a lovely old Steinway—the broadcast was live, and I actually made a mistake entering the first chorus of ‘Death of A City’ and had to go back and start the song over! I was mortified; so nervous my vision was swimming and I thought I would faint but it made the performance of both songs very intense. Everybody seemed to love it and thus I am ok with it. Also, for those of you that read Norwegian, I did an interview and photo shoot yesterday for Dagbladet, a big Norwegian daily, that will run on Friday.
I watched two excellent films today—‘Brokeback Mountain’, which I saw in the theatre; and I watched a DVD of ‘Me & You & Everyone We Know’, which was incredibly touching and inspiring. I have been an admirer of Miranda July for some time, and she really has made an affecting story come to life here. Also, the score is wonderful—I am going to pick up the soundtrack as soon as I can.
On Valentine’s Day my 20 month old daughter said ‘je t’aime’ to me for the first time.
And now…to bed…for an hour or so…since working noon-to-5am in the studio I can't sleep anymore! It’s 5.22am, and I have an interview on the phone with an Australian music magazine at 7.
Love
KS
Oslo, NORWAY
