Notes from the road : : Day 5
I had forgotten how well I eat in Europe, and on tour in particular. We seem pretty fortunate to get great catering and otherwise I’m always fairly conscious about what I eat, since so much of the time is spent on a bus or waiting around for the next move. A good bit of time is spent lugging heavy gear all over the place, so exercise is plentiful enough too.
Sunday marked our first gig. Hellfest, held annually in Clisson, France, celebrated its biggest year to date, with 40,000 attendees over 3 days and headliners including Motorhead, Slayer, Stone Sour, Kiss, Alice Cooper, Fear Factory and Deftones (ahh didn’t get to see Deftones though). There were tons of other great bands around including Dillinger Escape Plan, Queens of the Stoneage bassist Nick Oliveri’s new band Monodo Generator and Behemoth. Met a lot of great people!
The show at Hellfest went really well. The guitar tech and sound guy hadn’t been around for any of the rehearsals and this band’s setup is a little different than the traditional rig, so there were a lot of last-minute issues to solve. Nonetheless, everything went down without a hitch and the first show of the tour, which also happened to be a main stage festival performance, was a big success.
Pictures coming soon!
Sunday night we piled into the tour bus and laid back as we drove towards Switzerland. We stopped short of crossing the border and took up residence in the parking lot of a Novotel in the small town of Dijon. Not a whole lot going on there. We basically walked up and down the highway looking for anything worth checking out and only really found restaurants, a grocery store and a bowling alley. A pretty boring day but we made use of the hotel showers and I got some work done on videos in the works. No internet!
Climbing back on the bus around 2am, we sat in the back lounge and listened to an early mix of Sunday’s Hellfest performance, which was also filmed and will be put towards some promo material in the future. The playback confirmed what the crew had been trying to convince the band of since the set- that it was pretty damn tight and all the ‘micro-mess-ups’ they were dwelling on were not going to come across in the mix the way they remembered them. Rad.
We’ve arrived in Switzerland! A quick trip to the local Media Bin (Future Shop?), obviously right beside an IKEA, and I finally picked up a firewire 9-pin to 6-pin cable we’d been missing for a little too long. Now we can record the shows. Super cool. And picked up the guys a copy of NHL ‘09 for Xbox. Tour bus tournament, commence! It’s been long overdo.
It’s about 7pm. Doors. Opener’s on at 8:15. DTP at 9:45. Should be a pretty good show! Tonight we’re at Z7. It’s our first club date, which for the most part presents an opportunity to iron out any outstanding issues, try some new things, and have a good time.
Hope to get some pics up soon. In the mean time, hope everyone is well.