I got home to Paris and found copies of "Far Too Honest" by This is Benji; an album I produced for this Tulsa OK based artist. Hearing it back on CD made me feel great, it's an ambitious, lovely, dark album from this talented songwriter. Check out more at
http://thisisbenji.com/CADIZ, 10/8
Although we were pretty burnt, and you have to save gas at some points, we still rocked this one, in a kind of ragged glory sort of way. And lo and behold, we were taken to a lovely dinner at an actual restaurant—as opposed to being given €15 and fending for ourselves, which for me usually means eating the jamon in our dressing room—not a bad thing, but it’s a huge difference to sit down at a table with white linen, have a glass of wine that you’ve chosen, and order off a menu.
The show, in the same university auditorium we played in 2001, was jam packed…we delivered, and I can say that even tho we were broken and tired, we gave 200% and made any band half our age look like slugs. Mr. and Ms. Paco Loco were in the house, which was a pleasure. This show was filmed for local TV, expect boots soon.
I didn’t really have a chance to appreciate our hotel, Las Cortes de Cadiz, til the next morning. I awoke at 7.45 to a call from my daughter, before she went to school, which meant stumbling around in the dark trying tog et some clothes on, to run out to the central atrium of the place to get decent cell reception. Then it was time to get up, anyway.
LLOSETA, 10/9
So, Las Cortes de Cadiz is a stately old building with a very dramatic central courtyard and elegant rooms. And delicious breakfast supplies: they pack a lot of quality into a small breakfast chamber. We exited and walked to where the van was waiting for us, and remarked on the crystal beauty of the morning. We had a long look at gorgeous Cadiz, a pile of ancient influences—sometimes Greek, sometimes Roman, sometimes Turkish…I had remarked on the way in the day before that Cadiz is a city whose identity crisis suits it very well.
Sergio dropped us off at Seville airport and we flew to Palma, checking in amongst a hoard of preteens who had been part of some exchange program, they were all, about 40 of them, going thru teary goodbyes. It made for a strange scene.
When we landed in Mallorca, it was actually raining, the first inclement weather we’d seen the whole trip…after our 6 mile hike to the baggage claim, our man Carlos picked us up and shuttled us to the hotel. True to tradition, the appearance of rain had produced bumper to bumper traffic—sometimes a little too literally for the comfort of certain drivers—we saw a four-car pile up; hard to arrange when everyone’s going 20 miles an hour, but somehow they managed.
We had some chill time at the hotel, and then we were shuttled into the heart of Mallorca, to the small town of Lloseta, where pesetas had been scrimped to produce a rather stunning public theater of modern sleekness. Our show here had been sold out for over a week and the organizers were a bit nervous about how to accommodate all the will call tickets, etc.
During the Cadiz show my trusty Gretsch had started to exhibit permanent fatal errors—actually they started to become apparent towards the end of the Madrid show, but by Cadiz it was starting to affect the whole deal—my neck had become somehow warped or out of whack, and being as I had no guitar chiropracticioner handy, I had to surrender to the inevitable and start calling for backup. So, in Lloseta I was provided with a black telecaster, and new strings, and Jon had an extra set of straplocks and an extra strap so I was sorted.
Before the show I had complained about availability of food so they made sure to send Matt & I to the local grill, where I was served up a splayed rabbit, head and all, which suited me just fine…came back to the show, and there were 600 more people there than there were at soundcheck, and we got right down to business.
A lot of people didn’t know who we were exactly, they just got swept up in the hype, but they were all fans by the end—we beat ‘em down with licks and fury.
After the show, I made a sweeping gesture to clear the merch table of drinks, heheh I get a kind of enjoyment of that…just dump it right over and put our stuff on it. We sold tons of CDs, and I evaded some particularly bossy fans, or non fans, actually—when you find yourself popular, you start to attract weirdos. There’s a certain kind of ‘fan’ that loves you so much they seem to hate you. I can’t explain it, but if you’ve been in a band with any kind of popularity you know about this kind of oversensitive, attention-seeking type that complains about everything you didn’t and did do for them. It’s a drag.
We drove back to Palma, rain softly pinging the windshield, and got a decent sleep.
SAN SEBASTIAN, 10/10
Our first visit to San Sebastian, I was very excited. I had been long overdue to visit Spain’s capital of beauty, food and coolness. Our flight landed, we met up with Sergio, and we drove to the hotel, which was in a small town outside of Donostia—everything in SS had been booked up by the time the promoter sorted our accommodations out. No worries. One thing about the Basque country: it has its own font, a kind of whimsical, 1950s food product that is equal parts Swiss chalet and circus poster. It says rustic and fun in one go. Generally, it’s all caps except for the ‘i’ which you can take to mean whatever existential message you want to interpret from that.
After a short (too short) rest, we wound our way into this lovely city, heading up the avenue that parallels the river, marveling at the perfect arrangement of stately buildings and overlapping trees. And we hadn’t even seen it’s famous crescent of sand, yet.
We pulled up to the club, a massive multi-use cultural center that was outfitted a bit like an aircraft carrier inside, and Sergio ordered us not to do any work but go eat something, bless him. The promoter took us around the corner to a little bar, and we were blindsided by an absolutely fantastic meal—the highlight was a kind of chorizo brochette, placed over a ceramic trough (shaped like a pig in this case), just about 10 inches long, which is filled with a mixture of cognac and herbs and then lit by a match. The flames convert the already succulent sausage into meat candy, oh yes. This was accompanied by local cider (which is very light and refreshing), and we added a few other dishes, all delicious, including grilled prawns that were so juicy and broken down it made more sense to pop the head off and eat the things, shell and all, than to go thru the trouble of trying to clean them. Yes, I made sure to suck the brains out too. Best bits! No need to say, the promoter refused to let us pay for lunch.
After we soundchecked, we went back to our little town of Lasarte and slept. We had been scheduled to make an appearance at the local FNAC, but I had only agreed to it on the condition it take place immediately after soundcheck—i.e., at 17h, and that someone come and meet us at the club, pick us up, take us there, and bring us back right away. No one came, and when we called the place they said we were to come at 7—which meant right in the middle of our rest period—knowing we had a 30 minute drive each way to our hotel. In other words, thanks but no thanks—we weren’t promoting anything new, it was to be a favor to the store, and they knew the deal and broke it. So, no deal.
We went back to the hotel and slept. I know it sounds like we are all lazy dogs but I can tell you, these shows are incredibly demanding physically—and we do one everyday. Plus drive or fly for several hours each day. We are always up early, and always up late. So, we rest when we can, and a week into the tour, with no days off, we were pretty much in survival mode anytime we weren’t onstage (and sometimes even there, tho we didn’t let it show).
In the evening, we met up for dinner at a local rock club/resto called Bukowski, cool trendy place; we ate with the boys from Half Foot Outside, who were supporting us that evening, and our friend Jose from Loreak Mendian clothing, who has given us a number of freebies over the years—you’ve seen me wear a lot of their stuff onstage, especially on the 2005 Posies tour. My Wikipedia portrait shows me in all LM gear.
We walked back to the show, and the place had filled up, and after watching HFO (with Jon guesting on a few numbers) we set up and took the typically slouching Basque cool kids to task—we delivered a ripping, brutal set. People were loving it, we broke the Northern reserve quite handily. I had lots of fun with the little camera on a very long boom, pushing it out of my way like a nasty fly. Matt had been given the gift of Ballantine’s before the show, so he was a bloody mess—and kept standing on all my shit, but he still held it together enough to keep the show from flying off the track. We nailed it. No doubt! We had a lot of young fans here tonight, it was incredible really. I was very proud to make our first appearance in San Sebastian/Donostia one worthy of the history books, and we connected in a delightful way with the locals. And, then we abandoned Matt and drove back to Lasarte!
BILBAO, 10/11
I actually woke up without artificial stimulus this morning. Not since Valencia…and I’m not even sure then. But it felt great. I went down to the bar for a pinxo and a chocolate croissant, and my tea and coffee, and slowly the troops assembled. We spent an hour checking email in the lobby and then drove into town for an epic lunch at a restaurant owned by the family of a friend of Sergio’s. Txoko is a modest looking place, bar on the ground floor and noisy dining room on the first floor, overlooking the harbor in San Sebastian. We had time to stroll around, check the beach, and mostly zone out on park benches like the fucked up old men we are, before heading up and being greeted at Txoko by the owner. And then we went to town. Incredible boquerones, or anchovies swimming in oil; about 40 bottles of Txakolin, the soft white wine of the Basque lands; perhaps the best monkfish I’ve ever come across, and so on. Dessert was mandatory, a slice of chestnut pudding with sorbet…oh my. I prayed for a five hour drive to the next show to sleep it off, but Bilbao was only an hour away.
But when we arrived we were starting to recover, and a few minutes in our **** hotel chirped us up. The venue tonight: Bilborock, a massive church that is now a cinema/rock palace/dance capital, plus rehearsal rooms.
We had a long a weary soundcheck, wondering why everything sounded so thin until we realized the promoter had to authorize a payment of 60 Euros for the club to turn the subwoofers on!! Arghh.
Dinner was had in Bilbao’s most celebrated café, Iruna (there’s supposed to be a tilde on the N, but blogger doesn’t support that and many other unusual characters—you’d think that supporting weird characters was a bit of their raison d’etre, no?). A beautiful, colorful institution preserved in its 1903 glory, serving up delectable pinxos, old school style—it’s men’s men who work here, in black vests and bow ties, taking the job as seriously as if they were artillery spotters, and I happen to love this attitude. In the corner of the place, we find Ahmed, a young guy with a charcoal grill, who, for €2.20 per unit, grills about a billion and half lamb skewers with his special marinade. Usually the line just for his brochettes is going out the door. The beasties grill away on the wood flames, a fan pushing and an extractor pulling the fumes god knows where, and let me tell you, this stuff is magic. I called it ‘meat crack’. Despite the fact they were totally satisfying, the museum goer in me can’t resist when there are little displays of nature’s variety in edible form, so I attacked some pinxos as well. Pinxos are the original tapas, a piece of bread with something spread on it—could be a sardine, could be jamon. I had one that was some gooey mix of chopped jamon, oil and bacon fat. Oh god, you almost wish you had a hangover when a cure this good comes along.
We recovered back at the stylish Hotel Abando, I watched Jon Stewart comfort a weary nation with his ruthless dissection of our P/VP candidates…feeling good that at least *someone * is seeing thru the industrial-strength chicanery of the McPalin campaign. Wish it were actual voters giving the hallelujah chorus rather than smug CNN Int’l viewers 10,000 miles safely outside the shitstorm.
OK, back to the show. I wish I could say we ended on the highest note, but this show was a bit of an anticlimax for me—the Bilbaoans had their cool on. I had two strings and two batteries go down during the show, so I pretty much was trying to soar with clipped wings. The best moments for me were playing piano—Coming Right Along, Start A Life and my very impassioned election-time reading of That Don’t Fly’ were the personal highlights for me. We were all hurtin’ units but I think we did our best to rise above, but tonight’s crowd was not particularly buoyant. In fact, there were lots of drunk weirdos and hostile psycho girls and all kinds of shit that I just didn’t want to deal with. The nicest people in the room were The Mills’, having flown in from England; the Baldinis, who drove down from Toulouse; Jose from Loreak Mendian; Suz, who flew in from Rome; and a very nice couple from Asturias whose names I didn’t catch but they were very sweet. Some girl had a clown nose that I was happy to employ. I LOVE that someone thinks ahead to bring a clown nose to a rock show.
After the show, we went backstage to a) ditch the psychos and b) split up the cash from thee tour—we all chipped in to give Sergio some extra dough, he earned it—we never would have performed at the level we did without his immense help.
The after tour party was halfheartedly attended by Jon & myself—our friends, band and crew went to the Azkena bar, which is supposed to be a rock club but looks like a yuppie watering hole to me, and I stayed for exactly one drink, before going back to my posh digs and watching ‘Babel’ without subtitles.
The morning after: breakfast at the hotel and BACK to bed. Lunch of pinxos at Iruna. Cab to the airport, not sure by how much my flight is delayed but the plane just pulled up to the gate 10 minutes before we’re supposed to leave. Might have to grab some sweet Basque wine before we get outta here.
All in all, I have to say this was the best tour the Posies have EVER done. Thanks to the fans, friends, and business partners who made this possible. And my bandmates—well fucking done!
Love
KS
BIO Gate 5
