#still flyin

Day 14: 7 August 2009 – Munich

After another day off in Berlin, in which we eat ice cream and wander around and I am terrified by trying to ride a bike all over the city, we head out for Munich. At the rental car place, we realize that we’ve accidentally packed up the other band’s cymbals along with ours. This creates a major logistical glitch that puts us very far behind schedule. We have a long drive ahead, and a radio interview we’d really like not to miss.

But soon, we’re on the autobahn. We’re all very sleepy, but Michael is navigating through the speeding traffic like an expert. Nick is talking a mile a minute, making him laugh to stay awake. But his charm doesn’t reach the back seat; Yoshi and I fall asleep.

The scenery is beautiful, and wherever there’s a retaining wall, the kind that in the States would obstruct a breathtaking view, it is instead constructed of a clear material, to preserve the aesthetics. Ahh, german engineering.

We pull over at a gigantic rest stop. Yoshi hits the Burger King. He tells us about a controversial incident on the Still Flyin tour in which he was forced to abort a mission to Burger King. He takes a photo of his meal and emails it to members of SF, just to let them know that Yoshi has not forgotten.

Finally, we reach the radio station in Munich–which is clean and very perfect-seeming. The more polished cousin of boho-Berlin.

We go inside and record an acoustic mini-set in their performance studio, then do a radio interview. The acoustic set sounds great, really different than normal (duh), and the interview questions are really thoughtful. For example, we’re asked why we named ourselves Them Others; do we feel like outsiders in the world?

The show is at the Atomic Cafe, an extremely cute place. It seems like noone is showing up, and then just as we start to play, it starts to fill in plenty. The mics are feeding back insanely, but the crowd stays with us, and we soldier through.

We take a cab back to our hotel. We ask the driver how long it would take to get to Dresden, where we’ll be driving tomorrow. He seems to have no idea what we’re talking about. “DREZ-din,” we keep saying. Finally, he understands: “Oh, you mean DREEZ-din?” We’ve never heard it called DREEZ-din, not by Germans even. (The next day we will ask someone in the city of Dresden why this man was calling it DREEZ-din, and she will be just as baffled as us.)

After we check into our hotel, we go out in search of a nightcap. We wander into a bar called Mr. B’s. It is a jazz club, and it turns out that the proprietor grew up less than a mile from where I live in Brooklyn. He proceeds to tell us a lot about America. Michael is fully engaged, but the rest of us drop out of the conversation and stare tiredly into our drinks.

Then, a very drunk young couple comes in, asking loudly for a cold ­we mean COLD–drink, preferably beer. The other two patrons in the bar, obviously so regular as to be part of the furniture, get completely furious, insisting that ALL of the beer is cold, and what do you mean anyway asking that kind of question?! Much screaming and table pounding ensue. Mr. B evicts the couple. We finish our whiskeys and head back to the hotel, where we’re sleeping four to a room. All tucked into our twin beds, we get the terrible giggles. Things have taken a turn for the ridiculous.

Day 8 – 1 August 2009 – Malmo

We sleep like the dead, having stayed awake for 40+ hours. But we wake up much later than we hoped, and it’s stress from the get-go. I have to figure out how we’re going to get to our next show, I have no idea when the trains or buses leave, and I realize that it’s possible we have made a serious error by not taking care of this sooner. We also are supposed to get to the club by 11AM, which is when we’re meeting everyone to liberate the equipment that we left there overnight. Leaving stuff at clubs makes me nervous. There’s the obvious question of theft, but I find that “club time” is extremely nebulous time. 11 AM could mean 2 PM, which would make us miss sound check for tonight’s show.

We get lucky and everyone’s there. We load up, schlep all of our shit to the train station, find a train, and depart for the fair city of Malmo.

We somehow also don’t know where we’re staying in Malmo, but Love is All has told us that when ever they play the Debaser club, they stay at the same hotel. We’re going to just show up at this hotel and hope that we have reservations there. Otherwise, we’ll have to go to the club, find someone who knows what’s going on, blah blah. I just want a shower.

Yoshi and Heather with bags

This is our second day of traveling without a car, and lugging all of our stuff around is getting to all of us. On the walk from the train station to the hotel that we may or may not be staying at, we have to keep stopping to rest. Luckily, Yoshi has played Debaser before, and has also stayed at the hotel that we may or may not be staying at, so Nick and I can just go on auto-pilot and focus on putting one foot in front of the other while Yoshi navigates. When you’re never, ever alone, auto-pilot is the closest you can get to solitude.

Miraculously, the beautiful woman at the front desk has a reservation for 2 rooms in Yoshi’s name. We haven’t slept more than a foot away from each other for a week. Now, Yoshi gets his own room. We’re high rollers here in Malmo!

Nick and I go to our room and watch a terrifying movie called Quarantine while we wait for sound check.

At the club we meet friends that we hung out with last night in G-burg–Ake and Marcus, who is one of those people whose every facial expression throws me into fits of laughter. Like many great characters, Marcus has a catchphrase: “Dude, come ON!” This isn’t some affected bit of personal branding but rather a spontaneous expression of his joie de vivre, an interjection affirming that, indeed, the world is fucking awesome. Yoshi’s bandmate Jamie has also come to the show from Copenhagen, where he’s decompressing from what sounded like a very crazy Still Flyin tour (are there any other kinds of Still Flyin tours?). The presence of these people is a perfect testament to the incredible small-worldness that accompanies band-dom. I’ve never been to Malmo, Sweden, yet we have a little gang of friends to hang out with backstage. Who’d have thought?

Tonight is a club night, meaning we’re the only band. This may mean that a good chunk of the crowd is just waiting for us to finish so that they get on with dancing to the DJ. However, once we start playing, it’s clear that the crowd is in the mood to dance to us as well. They’re actually going a bit apeshit, screaming and jumping around. Nick and I can’t stop laughing. Hey, come to think of it, Nick seems kind of drunk. Plus Yoshi’s kick drum pedal broke 20 seconds into the first song and he keeps stopping the set to duct tape it, forcing Nick to tell jokes. And then there’s the smoke machine at the rear of the stage–it’s relentlessly pumping out humungous clouds that envelop us; it’s like being stuck in a Cheech and Chong movie. After our last song, the crowd chants, “Ex ah-TRAYS! Ex ah-TRAYS!” The whole thing is a glorious mess. So fucking fun.

We dance and drink and laugh, and soak up the Swedish lust for life. Finally, we retire to our Palace of Separate Rooms. About an hour later, I’m awakened by a gang of gleefully-singing drunks on the street. I can hear Nick laughing on the other side of the room. “They know how to have fun here,” I say. “Yep,” Nick says, and we fall back asleep.

Day 1: 25 July 2009 – NYC-London-Derbyshire

Over the next week or so, I’ll be posting the tour diary entries from our tour — the ones i couldn’t get enough stable internet access to post at the time.

Day 1 7/25/09

Before Nick and I head out to the airport, I make him wait for me to get my nails done, which he finds mildly annoying. On the subway ride to the airport, a woman is taking up an enormous amount of space with all of her bags. My bag gets snagged on hers, but she won’t bother to move it. She just stares at me, like i’m a gnat buzzing around. She then opens a packet of heat-and-serve lentils and proceeds to eat it right there on the filthy subway, licking each finger many times as she eats. She is all dressed up, which is hard to reconcile with the lentils from a packet. I’m still mad about the bags, so i start to send telepathic messages, willing her to spill on the lap of her white satin floral dress. I send the messages very strongly, chanting “spill, spill” in y head. Soon, a big dollop of lentils falls on her lap. She swipes it up with a finger and sucks the finger clean.

I lean into Nick and say, “I made her do that.”

We’re booked on the red eye to London and we get to Newark airport too late for any restaurants to be open. We get Jamba Juice, knowing that this will be the first of many meals skipped over the next few weeks.

The flight is fairly uneventful. I sleep most of the way, but every time i open my eyes, Nick is staring straight ahead. Not sleeping, not watching TV. Just staring. I worry that he knows something I don’t.

At Heathrow, we clear customs and then look for our label gentleman, John, who will be picking us up. We find him and he’s with another gentleman, Lawrence, who John says will be driving us. It should be noted here that I let Nick make most of the tour preparations. I have remained blissfully, perhaps stupidly unaware of much of our situation. This means that most of the details of our tour will be total surprises. Like the wondrous fact that someone will be driving us around for a week in England.

We pile into the Jetta wagon they’ve rented and they show me my keyboard for the week, an ancient looking contraption called the Bunny One. I can’t wait to hear how this thing sounds. IT will either be brilliant or ungodly. But beggars can’t be choosers.

We drive for a couple of hours to the site of the festival that will be only our second show ever with this line up, the trio. Oh, and since Yoshi has been touring with Still Flyin’, we haven’t practiced in 2 months. To say i am nervous is a gross understatement.

Indietracks day 1

The festival, Indietracks, is held at a defunct train depot in the English countryside. There are tons of indiekids wandering around, and a terrific line-up to fill the day. We wander around drinking beers and watching bands. Nick and I worry about how Yoshi is going to find us — he’s coming separately, and we suddenly realize that none of us have cellphones that work. It seems totally hopeless, but as Nick is napping in the Jetta, listening to the distant strains of Camera Obscura from the big stage, he hears a voice yelling his name. He pops his head up and spot Yoshi, along with his band mates Wyatt and Maria, striding towards the car.

As the sun goes down, we watch the music and feels so lucky to be at this festival, reunited, among all of these great people who love music so much.

I go sleep in the car while everyone else parties. About 2 AM they converge on the car. They’re all a little loopy, and we head back to the hotel.

As Nick and I are falling asleep, we hear a knock on the door. Wyatt and Maria need a place to sleep. We offer up our room, and we settle in, all five of us in a tiny hotel room. Another knock comes. It’s the desk person. She says she knows that there are too many people in the room, and that she will give us ten minutes to get the extra people out or she’ll call the police. This is literally a foreign concept to us — that someone would call the police for such an offense. Wyatt and Maria go sleep in the parking lot, and I sleep like crap on the floor, knowing that tomorrow is the moment of truth, when we play the festival and either make our label guy proud or very sorry indeed.

Learning to Fly

Nicholas worked a little photoshop magic on some of the lomography photos…


The new fellows you are looking at are Yoshi and Nevada. It’s great to have four people in our band photo for the first time. Now Nick and I won’t argue so much about who looks stupid in what photo. Because now, everyone looks stupid. Kidding.

I bought a rad keyboard last week, and I’m very excited to play out soon–soon as in May, that is.

Speaking of Yoshi, his band Still Flyin’ destroyed SXSW and will be coming my way this weekend (Friday in Brooklyn@Union Hall, Sunday @Cake Shop). If you’re reading this and live in NYC, you should go.

I’m not sure my delicate constitution can handle two Still Flyin’ shows in a row, but I’m looking forward to finding out. I have my Emergen-C packets at the ready. Bring it on, Still Flyin’.