april 13 – sleep/recovery, hamburg show, adam & carson meet alanis...

slept ‘til noon-ish on the 13th, long enough to recover somewhat from the great gear haul from oslo to hamburg & the endless trains of the previous day. took a taxi to the wrong venue, where we were assessed with a certain degree of consternation.
security: (in german.) you’re opening for ‘night of the jumps?’
allen: yes, we’re the opening band. where’s our dressing room?
20 euro later we arrived at CCH3, where, thankfully, there was no motorcycle show, but rather a labyrinth to find our dressing room. ate some catering at long last, bonded with “boogs” (alanis’ dog).
the hamburg venue was all open, no seats, which was nice. soundcheck featured “eye in the sky” by alan parsons project, and things sounded great. afterwards allen and i went to deal with the merch dude, jeff, and adam and carson ran across alanis in the hall between her various interviews and photo shoots. apparently she was very friendly - all agreed that things were going well and she apologized for not having had time to hang yet. so al & i still haven’t met her, but she’ll come by our room to hang at some point and check out our show somewhere along the line... alanis is kept busy pretty much constantly with interviews, conference calls, photo shoots and stuff like that, so nobody really sees too much of her other than her entourage of assistants/stylist/masseuse/videographer/dog.
allen took a little stroll through hamburg to find cdrs for show recording, then to dinner with sweet new zealand treacle & kiwi for dessert. incredible.
adam and carson then did a 30-minute rendition of “jesus christ superstar” with adam as judas and carson as jesus and orchestra (electric bass sans amp – mostly vocals were audible, with occasional slapping on the bass). spectacular.

hamburg show started without my lead vocal in the monitor, resolved by the end of the first song. somewhere during “ok alone” my wurly cable came unplugged, another near disaster, and magic the monitor engineer came running out to fix it... hamburg crowd pretty tame by all accounts, and a smaller show than previous ones (2000 or so), but judging from the cd signing frenzy things must’ve gone well.
one of allen’s many talents is his ability to find someone from our high school no matter where we are in the world. in hamburg it was robert stefan, a foreign exchange student who’d come to alamo heights high school in san antonio during the year the berlin wall came down (bad timing for him, a german away from home during the most historic event of his lifetime). robert came to the show from berlin, and afterwards took us to “turm,” a bar at the top of an old bunker with a spiral ramp which nearly ended us. off to the hotel after robert took advantage of the band’s chick magnetism, scoring digits from the german barmaid. he liked that phrase, “get the digits.”
hailed a cab back to the hotel, got online and talked to the u.s. via skype and ichat... learning to love internet telephony.