ALL OUT, ALLIED OBSERVERS, UN-ALIEN SHORES
Check out this website with some great, live-with-no-audience acoustic Posies performances, filmed in Paris last year.
www.iformusic.comThis theme of this week was in many ways one of travel-related debacle after debacle. I should mention that for me, to cancel a show, because I can’t make it there, is like shooting a dog. It’s such a distasteful affront to my commitment to professionalism, perhaps the most defeating and demoralizing experience I can have in music. It is with extreme sorrow that I had to face the fact that my show in Barcelona this week became impossible for me to attend, due to matters far beyond my control.
Now, by way of compensation for my own battered psyche, I can happily report that The Disciplines’ shows this weekend in Norway were extraordinary, we’ve taken yet another huge leap as a well oiled fighting unit, combat hardened and simply furious rock machine. And, our audiences here in Norway now know our songs, it was a bit too soon in Haugesund last month, but these shows had plenty of people singing along—and while a show between us and strangers can be a great meeting of two open minded sides, there’s a beautiful thing about playing to people actually looking forward to hearing you play, and being able to build on a ground that’s gone past the opening stages of familiarization.
Most of the week I was working hard in my newly reimagined home studio, mixing A Life A Song A Cigarette. I would work til about midnight—quietly, after 10 p.m., mind you—and either send a mix off via email that night or in the morning after giving things a quick listen and working on some details. The band would listen at their various homes or what have you, discuss amongst themselves, and get back to me with either an approval or small things they’d like changed. To keep on pace I had to work hard, moving on to a new song each day. To do a proper mix, with the level of detail I like to pursue, takes a good 8-12 hours, for me. Best scenario is when I have a light schedule, am at home, and can pick at a mix over the course of a couple of days, coming back to it every few hours; this allows me perspective, and lessens ear fatigue. But in this case, I had to crank it out. I felt like in a way this kind of trial by fire was really good for my skills, and the mixes seem to be turning out great---the band is happy, that’s the important part. I haven’t time to really review my work—as soon as they say aye, I move on to the next song. Remember, in these days I have to have a life—I still have to eat, sleep, shop for supplies for my travels, pack, go to Pilates, see my therapist, check emails, stay on top of managing/tour managing Ken Stringfellow/Big Star/the Disciplines/the Posies, and in theory, be a part of my family. The nice thing about working from home is that I can choose when any of the above needs to be a priority, and do it. I did manage to get out with Aden and Dom and go the park one morning, now that school is done, and we had a brief patch of dry weather. While I was there, as often happens I ran into my neighbor and friend Xavier, of Tahiti 80/Axe Riverboy reknown, there with his daughter who is about Aden’s age. Xavier, Dom, Axe Riverboy drummer Julien had a quick apero one evening as well, across the street, while I took a breather from mixing.
I was also profiled, followed, filmed and gave a private tour of my Parisian life for an upcoming feaurette for time.com, the online version of Time Magazine. Writer Grant Rosenberg is doing a series of featurettes on American expats living in Paris, and how the change in scenery has affected their work, personal life/lifestyle, etc.
Dom photographed me for an ad for Lauten Audio microphones…
These items to run in the coming months, tba.
On Thursday, after having croissants and café in the sunshine near the park we where Aden plays (Aden has gone with the grandparents for the summer, and is now stationed on Ile de Re, much to her delight), I headed up to Bastille to get a taxi to the airport. Usually there’s a few waiting, but this time, there were none, and 3 or 4 people waiting. Now, I had extra time, but…20 minutes later, no cabs had come, and no free cabs passed us. One came, and then another 10 minutes, during which time I ordered a cab. There was a wait, but then, during the wait four cabs arrived and I got in, sharing the cab with the woman behind me in line who was also going to Orly. From there, we made almost zero progress—after 45 minutes we hadn’t even made it to the edge of Paris. The trip normally takes 20 minutes, and this time it took almost two hours. They closed the flight and turned me and another similarly delayed guy away. I was furious, but, what could I do? No more flights to Barcelona from Orly that day. The only other flight leaving that day left in under two hours—from Charles De Gaulle, meaning, about 3 times further than I just traveled, and I thought, there’s no way I could make it in the current traffic conditions.
What caused those conditions? There were much greater numbers of cars on the road, with holiday travelers getting out of town in advance of the Bastille Day long weekend; as luck would have it, two accidents took place along the only routes from Paris to Orly airport, and traffic ended up being backed up all the way back into the city, for dozens of miles.
With much regret, the promoter and I decided to postpone the show, we are looking at dates in September and will announce a new date soon.
I had a sad and sorry lunch in the airport and cabbed back home, defeated. I went into my personal lemonade factory and did what any sensible person would do—got back to work, and mixed another song for ALASAC, and did revisions to a previous mix. This occupied me until midnight, and I got some sleep.
STAVERN, 7/11
I headed, with three hours of extra time factored in, to Orly, at the crack of dawn to catch my 9.50 flight to Oslo. Yes, I originally had purchased that day travel from Barcelona to Sandefjord, but that ticket had to be chucked out the window, a write off. I purchased from the airport the day before a ticket on Norwegian, which was more expensive than usual, but, really, in light our fee for a festival, not all that much, more in line with a typical flight on a major carrier.
Of course, the same traffic problems weren’t happening at 7am when I left the house, so maybe it was overkill on my part but I wasn’t going to take any chances. In fact, a rare event happened—an available taxi, who do their best in Paris to avoid picking up passengers at all costs—you’ll find a theme in France that most business find your patronage a huge inconvenience, and will do anything they can to avoid selling you what you need, taking your order, answering your question, etc. Recall the bank employee with a pained expression when I enquired about opening an account who told me in broken and hesitant English “We don’t…touch…the monies”. In other words, as a bank, they do exactly what? Exist, pay salaries, and pray for rain, evidently.
So, it was a pleasant surprise when a cab, seeing me laden with computer bag, small travel bag, and a guitar, trudging in the direction of Bastille and, my arms busy with the conveyance of objects, doing my best eyebrow semaphore, actually pulled over and took me in.
Everything comes with its price, however, and my cabbie was not an ordinary cabbie. Spotting a colleague in his midst, he told me he was a singer, and proceeded to sing for the journey to Orly. It was actually pretty fun. His side job was a company making a kind of audio greeting card—a CD with a booklet in which you can write your personal message; the CD has, usually three tracks—the same song in French, English and as an instrumental so you could sing your own version, live, like he was doing. The themes were of course, birthday, ‘maman’, etc. He also had a number of tracks of rock and roll numbers, done with, you know, very obvious drum machine sounds, sung by children. Not R&R standards, but, I got the impression these were his compositions. The lyrics were a little hard for me to follow, and the CDs kept skipping, but it was, you know…fun, but, also when we pulled up to Orly, he insisted I listen to about 4 more songs! My life was flashing before my eyes. He made sure to tip himself the with my change, for ‘a little café’ and at last I was released.
Flight: uneventful. Phew.
Arrival to airport: smooth. I picked up some snus and whiskey for Baard, and got my bags and headed to take the train to Larvik. I knew the timetable and was in good reach of making the 13.08 to Larvik. I announced my intention to buy a one way ticket to the guy at the counter, and he told me there was a problem, and that trains headed south were stopping in Lillestrom, where the passengers would board a bus, be driven to another city, and we would resume the train journey from there. I see. Furthermore, because of system demand (guess what—I had just barely escaped the biggest travel weekend of the year in France to arrive at the biggest travel weekend in Norway’s commencement), the buses were over capacity and there was no way to tell how long we would be waiting for one in Lillestrom. Uh oh. I had come *this* far, only to miss ANOTHER show? Screw that. I would ride a fucking bike if I had to. My bandmates, assuming all was normal, were almost in Stavern already by car—they had to leave early, knowing how awful the traffic would be (they weren’t wrong). I investigated buses, taxis ($500 to Stavern), mixture of any of the above. Bus seemed reasonable, and there was one leaving in just a few minutes. I went out to the place where that particular bus was to depart from, running into other bewildered former Flytoget customers. Well, it was soon obvious that the hundreds of defrayed train passengers had the same idea—and we as a group turned and saw down the way about 600 people waiting for buses at another spot, and realized our bus was surely requisitioned for emergency duty. Thus, screw this, also. I got in a cab. I knew no trains were able to head south from Oslo, so I had the cab take me to the bus terminal, I would take my chances.
Upon arrival, I found there was bus going all the way to Stavern, leaving in 20 minutes. This trip takes about 2.5 hours, normally. It took longer—an hour longer, as we hit horrible, standstill traffic snarls twice during the journey. I made increasingly frantic calls to the festival, but I did make it, finally, at about 18.30. I found out that luck was on our side in that the festival was running about 30 minutes late, and that would give me time to have a barbecued steak, chat with Norwegian dance pop star Bertine Setlitz, floss the roasted corn out of my teeth, and walk over to our stage; meanwhile Danish music legend Kim Larsen (author of ‘This is My Life’ by his band Gasoline, as covered by White Flag) was revving up. I turned a corner and saw our magnificent stage set up—Claus’ super mod, black metal flake, double bass drum kit, totally worthy of Keith Moon (check out the ‘!’ on each kick drum head), and our absolutely enormous SMOKING KILLS backdrop. Wow! I was really excited. We did a little line check, and there were fans already getting in position.
As I mentioned above, what made this show special was that for the first time, a good portion of the audience knew our songs and were singing along with many of them…a very amazing feeling, let me tell you. People were jumping, spilling their beers, getting super into it. And we played perfectly well, just as natural as could be.
After the show, I drank free champagne in the VIP bar, which gave a perfect vantage point from which to view the stage we just played, and took in the next band,
Animal Alpha, who are really quite incredible. More or less modern heavy metal, or whatever you want to call it, with an unbelievable female vocalist, relentlessly delivering screams that sound like your eardrums are being torn like cheese cloth; she also can delicately whisper and coo. Intense! I got so scared from their intensity, I stopped counting my glasses and got a wee bit tipsy.
LAKSELV, 7/12
Oh, how it hurt to get up at 4 a.m. Did I even sleep? It’s hard to tell. We drove to Oslo airport, the band had all crashed at Claus’ lovely home, parked and checked in. I had suggested getting there earlier than the normal one hour margin, and it’s true that even at 6 a.m. the place was a madhouse. However, most Norwegians are not going on vacation in Norway, so when we headed out to the domestic terminal, the place was empty. We had quite a bit of downtime before we boarded the two hour flight to Alta, followed by a 3 hour bus ride to Lakselv, about as far north as you can go and still be in Norway, some 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Animal Alpha was on our flight, and the two bands were the only passengers on the tourist coach that had been hired to take us to the festival. Lakselv does have an airport, but the flights going there were either ill timed or full.
Everybody was really tired, but our first order of business was to go to the festival site and soundcheck. Seriously. At noon. However, when we arrived there, and found that what skeletal staff was at the site was basically still drunk from the ‘night’ before—there is no actual night in Lakselv from May until August—we realized that the day would be somewhat improvised, and we were all cool with that.
Lakselv is a very small town, about 2000 people live there. You pass the center in an eyeblink, and there’s not much around: scattered houses, rocky hillsides, tundra, some pine trees. The land changes so much in the drive between Alta and Lakselv—sometimes it looks like rainforest, with ferns and birch trees growing in standing water; sometimes it’s just tundra; sometimes it’s naked rock; sometimes it’s pine forest; sometimes it’s New Hampshire; sometimes it’s Siberia. Lakselv had some trees around, and also some open fields of alpine (tiny, mossy) plants. The roads in the town, are completely straight for miles. They installed a roundabout at the crossing of the two main roads on the edge of town to keep people from routinely swooping down them at a hundred mph.
The festival is a couple of miles outside of town on a spit of land isolated from the mainland by a lagoon. The coast around here is complex and curves back on itself, so it’s never clear which direction the open ocean is from your position, or how far it is. There’s a big stage, a few booths for food and drink and a kind of tent with a bar in it, and then the backstage—which is a grouping of what Americans would identify as teepees but actually are a kind of Lavvu, the teepee of the
Sami people. The Sami people are the indigenous people of the far north of Scandinavia. They speak a distant relation of the Finnish language, and in addition to participating in the modern world (i.e. working for Norway’s oil industry) many Sami herd reindeer and travel with them to the various stages of grazing during the year. No, Sami people don’t look like, say, Inuit. They look like Norwegians, really, and the populations have been mixing for centuries. So, Sami is a kind of lifestyle, and a language, but also an ethnic group deep in the heart of it. Ok, this is a subject of much controversy, and I don't have the expertise to really navigate it, so read more online. I did read that Joni Mitchell is of Sami descent. Also, we used to call them Laplanders, but that is not a term that carries nice connotations with it—it’s certainly not what they call themselves. So, think Sami, not Lapp!
So, anyway, each band playing had their own teepee. Lavvu. Yurt. Wigwam. Thing. With a fire inside, and benches covered with reindeer skins. There was a tent that served as the kitchen, and a big Lavo that would be the VIP bar. And around, the site was a basically flat piece of land, with arctic grass/lichens/moss/flowers etc. growing, giving way to tall grasses at the beach, a strip of gray soft sand about 300 yards behind the festival. So, despite the presence of an enormous stage and professional rigging and what not, it felt a bit like camping, and we all started to get into the spirit of the thing. We had been told to get things in order with the stage manager, and in the meantime the sound engineers were being woken up and delivered to the site. The stage manager was definitely hammered, and said he had no idea, really what was going on. I tried, vainly, to get his impression of what we were supposed to do and he more or less laughed. Since the bus was long gone, and the hotel was about 3 miles away, on the other side of town, and we were all completely exhausted, I asked (since he and the cook were the only people around) if he was giving us a lift back to the hotel. He said, as I already estimated, “I am in no condition to drive” and then, a few minutes later, drove off. Sigh. Well, we discovered a huge slab of smoked salmon in the cook tent (that’s the Laks in Lakselv), and the cook threw some hot dogs on the fire, and we were feeling great, really. The sun was distant but giving a bit of warmth.
Eventually I heard music coming from the tent and we headed over to find the sound guys were there putting everything back in order from the night before. We organized the existing backline, and had a leisurely soundcheck. I organized the usual things—no monitors on my part of the stage when we play, the 100 ft. of cable I like to have, etc. We even, after initially not even trying, managed to hang our backdrop—so enormous a thing is it that it only part of the word ‘SMOKING’ was visible behind Claus. ‘KILLS!’ was below the drum riser.
Ok, we spent the day recovering at the hotel, and had dinner there, and headed back to the site at about 10 p.m. Animal Alpha were on the mainstage, rocking hard. We had, during the campfire cookout, the bus rides, hanging out in the hotel, gotten to know them and they are super friendly and sweet people. Evidently they have no aggression left in them by the time they purge their souls onstage. Good medicine, the heavy rock.
Now, remember—there’s no night, so it’s no darker at 11 when we go on than it was at twelve hours earlier when we were driving to Lakselv from the airport. I made the wise move of taking the barricades away before our set. At the far end of our tent is a bar and some picnic tables, a few folks are way back there. In front of our stage, there’s no one. You have to know also that the difference in scale between our stage and the mainstage is so great as to be comical. “The training stage” as Uriah Heep put it. 5 minutes before we played, just as the last echoes of AA were reverberating, there were three people in front of our stage, sitting in lawn chairs. Well, the the only way to get people over to your festival stage is to start playing, and we had a cluster of people pretty quick. And, since P3 broadcasts throughout Norway, people new the songs—one guy new all of them, and many people were singing along with many of them! There were two absolutely shitfaced bikers in the crowd, one guy was tweaked and kept making shhhh gestures to everyone and sort of barricading them from the stage. I told him in a very friendly way to chill after a song or two, and got the people closer, and then suddenly it was like match to gasoline time—the show went up a big notch and it became one of those furious rock shows, so amazing, you can’t believe it. My shoes came off. The hairiest of the drunk bikers jumped on stage and danced with me. I climbed on the barricade—at the mixing desk! Shirts came off the audience, people groped me…it was absolutely insane and absolutely our best show yet. Each one, in fact, seems better than the last. Lars from AA came to check it out and after a song or two came up to the front and rocked out. It was over so fast…LOTS of singing along on “Oslo”.
After the show I sold CDs as usual, and one guy insisted on giving me NOK500 for one, refused to take the change. That’s $100!! We sold a lot of CDs these two days, but less per capita than Haugesund as people actually have the record now in some cases!
After the show, Europe took the mainstage, ‘Final Countdown’ and all; I actually quite enjoyed them, they are certainly pros; basically, they are the Scandinavian Bon Jovi, right down to the keyboard player straddling two rigs in his power coat.
I walked out to the beach, and took in the golden light of the sun, and realized I was seeing the midnight sun, literally. Actually it was more like 1 a.m. You could survey the field and see the crumpled remains of heavy drinkers scattered about. People were pissing in every direction. Making out on the beach. Amazing. The night time sun really hit me in an emotional way, a way I didn’t expect. Your body is trying to reconcile the contradictions of what you feel and what you see, and it hits you.
We spent hours in the Lavvus, drinking wine and eating smoked salmon, with Animal Alpha and other musicians, finally we dragged ourselves out of there—the place was still going full on when we left, and it had to have been 4 a.m., still daylight of course.
When I communicated initially, weeks in advance with the festival people about all the details—the timings, the travel, etc., like I do for every show, I had been told the drive between Alta and Lakselv was about 2.5 hours, and thus we had arranged that we would be driven to Alta at 9 a.m. for our 12.40 flight to Oslo. However, driving in that morning proved the drive was more like three hours. So, when I spoke to the organizers, they preempted my suggestion to tell me that they knew all that and that the bus was going to leave the hotel at 6.30 a.m. I said that seemed a bit excessive, and suggested 8.30. To which they agreed. I was thinking that it was us and AAlpha, who we knew were on the same flight.
I was hungover, and about to get in the shower at 7.40 when the phone in our room rang, and the reception said the bus was leaving. I was confused. But it was apparent this was no drill. Turns out, another band was added to the mix, and they were on another flight leaving at 11.30, and there was only one bus for all of us. No shower, no breakfast. I was furious and implored the driver to wait, but it was clear he would leave us there. Anyone else associated with the festival was dead to the world and not answering phones. We just had to deal.
We sobered up at the airport, and came to accept that which we could not change. And paid something like 40 Euros for two sandwiches and coffee. BTW, people in Finnmark don’t do espresso. Coffee is something you brew in a pot. Old school!
Ok, we got back to Oslo, said our goodbyes to Animal Alpha, and headed to Claus’ car. Claus you might not know sells BMWs for his day job. A feature of BMWs is a kind of keyless entry—you have a key, with an RFID in it, and the car unlocks itself whenever you touch the car door handle, with the key in your pocket; the range is a foot or so from the car. Thus, the keys can be in the car, and you can open the door. It can’t be locked. Claus will demonstrate this to customers when showing the features of the cars. Except, it didn’t work. The key was in his bag, we loaded up the rear, closed the hatch, and…nothing. Locked out, and keys in the car. No problem, Claus says—we have an account with a lock service, part of the roadside assistance package. A couple of calls and they were on their way. 45 minutes later, they called to say the just realized they can’t do anything for electronic locks short of breaking the glass. Uh oh. Sigh. Claus haeded off to take the train to Oslo (they work now), go home, get his spare key, train back…long boring story short, we left the airport 4 hours after we landed. Fun!
But hey, you gotta have stuff to put in your blog.
Love
KS
Oslo
