LONDON CALLING, and final thoughts.

I write now from my girlfriend's couch in Brooklyn Heights. I am officially home. In trying to think about this final installment of my blog, I haven't been able to decide between trying to find some ultimate meaning and lesson from the experience, and summing up the whole shabang-bang from top to bottom. It kind of feels like writing a final paper for some whacky class where the professor never sticks to the curriculum and hands out homework assignments like "write a 10 page paper on your happy place" all semester.

I guess to start I will say that the past month has been one of the most interesting experiences of my life. I use the word interesting because the trip was beyond characterizations like good or bad, fun or boring, easy or hard. It was, above all else, the first time that playing music felt like my job. Now, I know there are a lot of hangups that come with the word job: issues of authority, conformity, boredom, and general ambivalence are abound. Most of my friends get home from work and land on the couch with a sigh of dejection and feelings of futility, and I can relate to this feeling only in so far as my rigorous high school education goes. College was a breeze for me, and I never had to work too hard to do well. With my "job," however, I have no boss; I have no time cards; I have no workspace or desk. I did get a work visa, however, which made me feel great. It even listed my occupation as "Bassist...." SWEEEET!!! When all is said and done, my job essentially pays me to revert to my childhood, which is extremely easy for me to do. The feeling I get playing music feels just like how i used to feel when I would put legos together or play tag. Perhaps the better comparison would be to playing sports, since the team aspect is certainly prevalent in the concept of a band.

Even though the tour lasted just short of a month, starting on february 5th and ending with our final show on february 28th, there were moments when I thought it would never end. I guess it was probably around the time when I grew ill in Amsterdam on the 13th. Something about the way time functions in these circumstances is very odd, though. It's almost as if time expands and contracts without warning. On some days, 5 hours seems more like 12. On others, 6 hours will pass in what seems like fifteen minutes. I don't really understand this phenomenon, because the nature of each day essentially never changes. You wake up for van call, brush your teeth and shower, make a final check of your stuff, and walk downstairs. You then pack your stuff into the van, choose which seat you'll be occupying for the duration of the travel, and pile in. Then you drive and drive and drive until you get to the venue, unload all of the stuff with the help of the always quirky and friendly stage hands, and begin sound check, which can last anywhere from 1 to 3 hours depending on if there is new material to be worked out. After sound check, the only challenge is to successfully kill time before the show, usually by fiddling around on a laptop, drinking some beer, taking a nap, calling home, or just twiddling the thumbs (my favorite). Then it's showtime, followed by load-out, and the drive back to the hotel. And then you go to sleep and the whole things starts up again the next day. With this type of day-to-day consistency, I am puzzled as to the reason for the expansion and compression of time thing. Even on days off, which proved few and far between, some would pass too soon and some would last forever.

Aside from the issues of time, I got to observe firsthand the inner business workings of a tour on the independent artist scale. When I say independent, I mean that the label to which MBD belongs, Asthmatic Kitty, does not have the major label funding to provide monetary assistance to its artists while they are on tour. The result of this is that MBD basically pays for its own costs on tour. Hotels, food, and Brian and my fees are all straight out of pocket. This doesn't mean that there isn't a profit involved, especially considering the number of cds we ended up moving. In the end i think our best night in terms of cd sales and t-shirt dollars was in Amsterdam, where the crowd was both extremely enthusiastic and grand in scale. They ended up buying upwards of 80 cds, at a cost of either 10 or 15 euros. I can't remember the figure exactly, as the prices changed depending on the currency. The money side of this tour was all new to me, though, coming from the background of making around 20-30 dollars (if that) after every show, without the benefit of merchandise or cd sales. One of Nuno's final tasks at the end of the evening would be to count the money and enter it into his laptop records, thus providing a receipt of our profits. Now, I must clarify here that I do not get a cut on the merch or cd sales, given that I am somewhere in between an official member of the band and a highered gun. This puts me in a funny position to be a cheerleader on the monetary front, because of course I want the best for MBD, and the concept of actually making profits from live shows is extremely exciting to me.

This brings me to one element of my "final conclusion." In order for me and my friends who are similarly trying to crack the lock in this business to succeed, people must come out and watch. Live music represents the essence of the musical profession. Those bands which are on MTV, in movies during montages, and on commercial radio, are backed by labels who are throwing huge amounts of money into making sure that the highest possible number of people in the world get exposed to their product. Not to say there's anything wrong with that, because that sort of money helps to keep the record industry an industry, but all I'm saying is that the percentage of music which exists on that scale is miniscule. And, what's more, as the money poured into a band increases, I believe that the personal integrity, creative expression, and overall artistic validity of that music decreases. That maxim isn't true for all artists, but it certainly is true for many. All I'm saying is that in my line of work, I need people at shows to make money. That's all. Plus, watching music live is one of the last pure, unadulterated forms of entertainment. Whether it's at a tiny little club in Buffalo or in a goddang stadium somewhere, this will still be true. Don't download a concert to your phone instead of bucking up, buying a ticket, and just fucking going. It's more fun that way anyway.

So, onto the subject of London. The trip to this fair city was absolutely heinous on accounts of the space/time continuum topic alluded to earlier. We woke up at 8 to make a ferry at 10am from France to the white cliffs of Dover in England, only to find out that all vessels out of that port were shut down due to rough seas, a development that forced us to drive half-an hour back the way we came to catch another ferry out of the port of Calais. I slept through most of this leg of the journey, awakening only a couple of times to verify our progress. Once at Calais, we were hassled at immigration because of a technicality which I would not do very well to explain. It was sort of over my head. After a delay of about 20 minutes, we boarded the ferry inside our noble van vessel and were on our way. This was a much larger ferry than the one we had ridden to get across the channel previously, so it was a much smoother ride. I ate some not-so-terrible indian food and chatted with Shara, Brian, and James for awhile. Once we were off the ferry, we hit traffic on the M20 to London. It was terrible. We literally encountered 5 different serious accidents on the motorway, each one complete with its own delays. This proved to be the part of the journey which lasted the longest. Even though the drive from Dover to London is usually about a 2 hour process, it took about 3 and a half for us on this day. Shara had to miss a radio interview, and we arrived exhausted, disgruntled, restless, and about an hour late for our scheduled sound check. To our surprise, another band had also been added to the bill, a Brooklyn-based band called Takka-Takka. I was immediately enthused at this, because my room mate is a fan of theirs, and so I had heard of them before. Also on the bill was the band that opened for us in Manchester, Uncle Bob. We made like lightning and zoomed through our load-in and sound check.

The hall itself was spectacular: white walls, chandeliers, carpet, ornate ceiling decoration....the works. For some reason it kind of felt like walking into a high school prom or something similar. Maybe a semi-formal. On the list for the evening was a friend of my lady's, a jewelry designer named Stephen Webster, and my good-luck charm, Vicki Perez. I met VP randomly about 7 months ago, on the one day when I decided to sport an Abe Lincoln beard (this detail is totally superfluous, but picture me with an Abe L beard....classic). When I met her, I was immediately taken with her. Her mother is a brit, her father is a spaniard, and she is cute as a button. I met her with my room mate/partner in crime Michael, and my number one star of the party friend, Kelsey. We drank car bombs at Iggy's in the lower east side until Kelsey was shturblasted, and then went elsewhere. Vicki and i exchanged numbers at the end of the evening not in any awkward, potentially romantic way, just in a way that said let's hang out soon. Nuff said. However, after meeting Vicki I became convinced that she had brought me luck. Lucky shit just started happening left and right. I'm not going to go into specifics, because that might void out the lucky-ness, but trust that it's true.

The show was great, and the audience basically turned into dust when we played No Quarter. Seriously, here it is.... . If that link doesn't work, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR97Ne4ZuGc to watch it. There's also a youtube of the song freak out from london.... . Peep that ish.

After the show, we said our goodbyes to Nuno, packed up the van one last time, and finally retired. The feeling i got when Brian and I got back to Joe's house, who was kind enough to let us crash, was one of the most rewarding feelings i've ever had. There were times when I thought to myself, "this is too hard. I miss home, I'm tired, I'm lonely, I'm sick of sleeping in a foreign bed every night." But in the end, I felt good about it. I felt good about getting through it. Most of all, I felt good about being a P R O, because that's what it's all about.

Thank you to all of my friends who kept up with my blog, and thank you to all who gave me words of support via A I M (you kept me sane a bit...). I will keep writing periodically, so keep on the lookout. And if you haven't already, pick up a My Brightest Diamond cd, because MBD is the bomb. Represent.