So I’ve decided not to tell you anymore stories about the Black Diamond tour because they all amount to the same thing: the shows were awesome, our hosts were gracious, we hung out with a ton of awesome folks, and I spent most of the time puking behind the van. So if it’s stories of shenanigans you want, you’ll have to ask someone else. Because the more I think about tour, the more I just kind of never ever want to tour again. We need to play a show during which I’m not nauseous real soon. Otherwise I will associate touring with feeling like roadkill for the rest of my life.
In place of tour stories, have a look at a few of the inspiring places where we played. Things started out normally enough: an intimate little show at a lovely pub called Brückenkopf in Hanau and a very large, complete-with-fog-machines-on-stage show at the Euro Folk Fest in Ingelheim. The food was amazing, the crowd was receptive, and a good time was had by all. In both places. The photo below is from Ingelheim where I laughed every time the fog machine came on. Seriously, a fog machine? Sheesh.
But the third night found us on more familiar ground: playing an early Sunday show at a squatted school in Cologne. Unfortunately, I’m a little foggy on the details, but I do know that it wasn’t squatted very long ago (one year-ish perhaps?), that there was a threatened eviction, and that the group involved in squatting came to some sort of agreement with the city to keep it for another six months. Where they currently are on that time line, I have no idea.
The sheer mass of the building is impressive, especially when you find enormous murals and paintings in almost every room, and contemplate how much work went into putting them there–and all without any certainty that this building will remain in the groups’ hands for much longer.
Pallets. They’re everywhere. In Germany at least, some of them have Pfand on them (that is, a deposit that you get back when you return them), but all the ones not tied up in Pfand end up in the trash. I’ve used them to build sheds, and I especially like to chop them up into kindling, but making really sweet furniture out of them never even occurred to me.
One of our stops on the Black Diamond tour was an absolutely delicious (gorgeous! let me stay here forever!) squatted tennis court. On the edge of the city but completely surrounded by trees and inhabited by birds, the inhabitants have fixed up the old clubhouse and made it into a pretty little home.
We played outside between an old Russian car (see photo above) and a bonfire whose smoke almost caused a calamity during Silver Dagger when I was certain that the pinnacle of my punk rock career had finally come and I would throw up on an audience–which I miraculously managed to avoid, by the way–to folks sitting on pallet furniture. I don’t know how exactly they were built, so I don’t have any specific how-tos for you, but I took a bunch of pictures hoping that, if any of you were interested in creating your own, you’d be able to figure it out from the visuals.
The morning following the show I watched a fellow work on putting together another bench-table set from across my regurgitations, but I admit it: I was too bleary to take in any of the construction details. That turned out to be one of the worst days in recent record (even though the show we played that evening with Blackbird Raum in Recklinghausen was pretty awesome), the day when I finally gave up on wearing a seat belt and rode the highways from the bed in the back of the van, coddling the pot in which I had decided to keep my head. You know, now that I think of it, that pretty much sums up the whole Black Diamond tour for me: shows awesome, Nikki puking behind the van. Maybe I don’t need to tell you any more tour stories after all…
But vomit aside, if any of you end up building something like this (or have already), share the pictures with us, purdy please with a pallet on top. I for one would love to see what else can be done with them.
We’re going on tour! This is going to be Black Diamond Express Train to Hell’s (and my) first full-length tour, and I for one am excited. Touring is fun. Except when it’s uncomfortable and annoying. But that’s more the exception than the rule. The rule is you show up in a new city every afternoon, get fed, sing some songs, are given beer, meet a lot of new people, are told a lot of really nice things by some of those people, and then you’re led off to a comfortable place to sleep. And when you wake up someone makes you breakfast. Fuck yeah, DIY touring in Germany (and Holland), fuck yeah. It’s a pretty sweet way to travel, even if you never really do get to know the cities that you’re in.
There are some blog posts scheduled for my absence, so you won’t be lacking for reading fodder. But if I’m coming round your way and you’d like to exchange words in color and sound, come on by and say hello. Here’s where you can find us:
I’ve never heard anything much about Bochum, except maybe that it’s a pretty industrial, hideous place. And while it may have a corner of beauty and light somewhere, I haven’t seen it. We’d been invited to play at Wageni, a teeny tiny punk-ish venue that only promotes shows by word of mouth. But the curse was upon us. Everything that could go wrong did, and it quickly became one of the strangest, most stressful nights in recent memory. But! Out of sheer spite we managed to deliver one of our best shows yet—which, like all the best things ever to happen, went completely undocumented.
Around 3 am we were catapulted to a crumbling villa-turned-punk-house by taxi at terrifying speeds where we fell into dusty guest beds and were labeled as weirdos by the man who’d accompanied us back, shocked that we preferred sleep to another bottle of beer. In the morning we saw our quarters for the first time in the light (pictured above). It was a haunted house, horror film nightmare (dream?) of intricate crumbling plasterwork, high ceilings, and dusty stairwells. After another brief fight with the curse, we made it out of the city in five pieces.
On the car ride back to Mainz I thought more about the alcohol debate that had surrounded the Appelscha show. I don’t like to romanticize alcohol consumption, yet as a band we tend to celebrate alcohol: drinking whiskey has become a part of the set, many of our songs reference alcohol, and for the love of blasphemy I’ll occasionally pass out whiskey shots in the communion wine distributer thing I found in the trash across the street. Yet if you listen closely to our (my) texts, you’ll find that hints of criticism tucked into every song mentioning it.
A song that relates the tale of the Beard and I’s journey through America last fall via a mention of the alcohol we drank in each place titled “No Borders But Whiskey” is the newest of the bunch. Sure, we are free, sure we travel, sure we are against state-created borders, and yeah we really like alcohol. But the title is there to remind us all that at the end of a drunken day, it’s the alcohol we choose to drink that often builds other, perhaps equally sinister borders in our own lives.
I got carsick in the van on the way to Düsseldorf, and when we arrived at the venue where we’d be playing that evening, I could barely choke down a bottle neck of beer. So I chugged malt “beer” on a sofa in the corner, spooning a chick-pea-based chili and stuffing photocopied lyric sheets into the plastic covers of cassette tapes. It was the first time since high school that I’d been stone sober on stage, and it was awesome. Dependence has always irritated me, and I think I might have tried to punch myself in the eye if it turned out that I couldn’t handle performing without a buzz. No black eye, and no hangover to worry about the next morning. Divine.
That was the start of a three day Black Diamond Express Train to Hell mini tour. At the Linkes Zentrum Hinterhof in Düsseldorf that night I met a Click Clack Gorilla reader (yohoo! *waves at screen*) and after our set we played a few acoustic songs and passed around instruments. People really like to try out the musical saw. It’s hard to get the hang of at first, but it’s less technically intimidating than any other instrument I know. And the evening won the weekend’s award for “most comfortable place to sleep.” Hells yeah.
On Saturday morning we drove to Appelscha, Holland for an anarchist festival called Pinksterlanddagen. Heaven! Woods, fields, like-minded people, and table after table of English-language books I’ve been eyeballing on the internet for ages and could finally buy without paying shipping. I only made it to part of one lecture, but workshops and lectures and other similar events filled each of the festival’s three days.
We’d spent all morning arguing about the fact that the entire festival would be sans alcohol. Sounded like a neat idea, I thought. Why not take the focal point away from alcohol, where it tends to land as soon as the word “festival” gets mixed up with an event? Why not create an atmosphere where more is getting done because nobody is wasted or hungover? Why not discourage people for whom alcohol is the only reason to come from showing up? And why not offer one of the few events in a sea of alcohol-infused happenings where people who really cannot handle being around the stuff can feel comfortable? Isn’t anarchism also about making communities where everyone feels welcome?
But a few of the other Black Diamonds were pissed. We hadn’t been informed of the event’s alcohol-free status until long after we’d committed to playing. (It was probably written loud and clear on the event website, but as none of us speaks Dutch, we hadn’t seen it.) A few folks were pissed at being bossed around, told what to do. They made jokes about having such a strong set of rules at an anarchist gathering (though I’d also argue that anarchism isn’t about having no rules as many people assume, but in having community- and consensus-created rules, but that’s another can of worms). Some argued that they could drink a beer or two and without being assholes or disrupting the workings of the event.
“But would you actually have said you didn’t want to play if we had known beforehand?” I asked over breakfast. One person said that yes, they would never have accepted the engagement. I was surprised. I like to drink quite a lot, but refusing to participate in events without alcohol struck me as being pretty poor. Either way, I was glad we’d agreed to play, and that we would spend the night camping in tiny, middle-of-nowhere Appelscha, Holland.
We pulled into the camping field after a long drive. Red and black flags lined the entrance road, and the field was full of tents and vans- and trucks-turned homes. Kids ran in circles and played on a wooden playground. Book-laden tables flanked the path that led past many of the area’s permanent trailer structures (the rest of the year, the festival grounds are a campground) and into the woods. A mid-sized building housed a coffee counter selling snacks and drinks and a large concert room with a stage where we would play that evening. Other events were held in a gym that I never saw. It was a place where it felt good to be, and soon the skeptics among us were changing their tune. Especially when it became clear that no one was going to throw them out of the festival for quietly drinking a beer in the van.
We played after a crust-punk-ish band in animal costumes (beaver, elephant, and chipmunk!), and the crowd were enthusiastic and fun. Afterward, we stumbled through dark woods to a late-night bonfire and the Beard and Bass Boy played a few Irish folk tunes before we retreated to the tent to shiver ourselves to sleep. When we set out for Bochum, Germany, the next afternoon, I found myself wishing we could have stayed another night. (By the way, the photo at the top of the post is of me sitting outside of our tent in Appelscha, eating a raw onion. Oh do I love raw onions.)
This post is getting out-of-control long. So, in the interest of internet a.d.d., to be continued tomorrow. See you there.
The Hell Train is on the move again. So if you like whiskey, bluegrass, washboards, and stomping, come on over and say hello. Here’s where you’ll be able to find us this weekend (with at least one new song in tow):
As we still haven’t got the mp3 player up and working on our website, here’s a video of one of our newer songs by way of a preview. This time around Banana Box Boy wrote the text, and it’s an ode to how fucked up organized religion can be, especially in large parts of Africa. Feel free to skip over the bits where we ramble on about how we’ve invented our own church in protest. Our only ritual so far being no-pants bowling. Ehem. Here’s the video.
I don’t usually bother telling band tour stories because they’re usually kind of boring. Not boring to be in, but boring to retell. We drove somewhere, we drank beer, we soundchecked, we drank some more beer, we ate a really good/really bad dinner, we played some music, people liked it, people didn’t like it, we drove home/went to sleep. The details may change, people may like it more or less, the mattresses might actually be rock-hard gym matts in a room full of wasps and rotting socks, but the story line is always the same.
But today I thought I’d say a few more words than I usually do because Obenohneunten filmed our concert at der Bock in Mannheim on Saturday, and now it’s on youtube for me to share with you. So far there are three songs online. Here we come eternal youtube glory. Or something. So here are two of our originals for your listening pleasure.
The End Time Ballad
This is a new song that’s not on the demo, written from the point of view of someone who has survived an oil-crisis crash situation and is sitting around telling her grandkids about what it was like before. And oh man, the saw! I love playing the saw, but I’m no Saw Lady, and whoops in my rush to get set up between verse and saw part I put the microphone right in my way so I couldn’t actually play any of the low notes. Ah well, usually what happens with the saw is that no one can frickin’ hear it, so at least that point was in order for once. Now enjoy some post-apocolyptic tunes:
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Two on the Road
This is one of my favorite songs that we’ve written, and the lyrics were something like a present for Katey Sleeveless when she invented friend song present week. You should sing along real loud on the chorus, so let’s practice: “It won’t take long to burn this city down, so let’s rise up, let’s rise up.” Peng peng!
And in case you hadn’t heard Judgement Day is this Saturday. Better get yer knickers ironed, the scorpions are coming. I may not stand by the Bible, but nobody can write apocalypse like Mr. John. See you in hell!
I have been excited about this weekend for months. Excited because tonight (Friday the THIRTEENTH, *insert spooky ghost noises here*) we (Black Diamond Express Train to Hell) are playing a show with the lovely Phoebe Kreutz at Ventil Verlag—Boppstraße 25 in the back courtyard.
Phoebe gets down anti-folk style, usually just her, her guitar, and her hilarious lyrics. Her number one top best hit ever is a song called “Straight Edge Kids Really Freak Me Out,” but I couldn’t find it on youtube, so here another hilarious song that she wrote about her ass. And anyway all her songs are great.
On Saturday you’ll find us in Mannheim on the stage at Bock. We’re the only band of the evening, so we’re going to do a really, really, really long set with all the slow songs we leave out at the punk shows we always seem to end up playing.
And while we’re here, lookie lookie, we have a new website, helltrain.info. On it there are pictures and flyers and longs lists of places where we’ll be appearing in the near future. Tragically, however, we still haven’t gotten the mp3 player up and running, so if you want to sample our tunes, you’ll have to visit the miserable myspace site that we just can’t wait to delete. Speaking of which, anyone out there who can help us with the damn mp3 player? We’ll send you a CD in payment…
