Californication

Friday, September 14, 2:15am in the tour bus bunk, back of the venue in Santa Ana, CA, Thin Lizzy in the headphones.

We have a late bus call today. And I mean late. 9am. So we basically would have a perfect opportunity to get wasted and go crawling at the local bars. If there were any. There is nothing around here. Anyway, back to business again = San Francisco.

DNA Lounge is sort of a nice venue. A bit strange perhaps with all the stairs and a drum riser so high that the bass drum is next to your head. Although I have to admit that I am a dwarf. With a normal classification of mine the venue would fall into the category "Shithole" since it has no shower. However, it has a nice toilet with a big sink and warm water, so I can live with it.

I often write that "I didn't really go anywhere" and I still did go somewhere. In San Francisco I seriously didn't go anywhere. Some of our guys were going shopping and I walked with them to the nearest street corner but felt that the shop was too far and returned back to the bus. So the furthest I left the bus/venue combination was 30 metres or so. Don't get me wrong. I love walking around the foreign cities. San Francisco is even one of the more interesting ones. Sometimes I just feel too lazy. And having been there already 3 times before this one sort of makes think "Naah, seen it already."

San Francisco show was one of the really good ones. The audience was amazing. We were good too, but they were crazy. More action than I've seen in a while. Ville did again his now sort of usual appearance during "Happy Little Boozer". He joined the chorus, then stagedived and the audience got him back on the stage in time for the next chorus. Excellent.

Afterparty? I do not know. I sat 2 hours till the bus call in the pizza place next to the venue chatting with a friend. It was a good party.

And this spot right here is where I fell asleep last night

Friday, September 14, 10:45am in the tour bus at the Walmart parking lot, eating self made tofu-cheddar-avocado burger for breakfast.

From San Francisco it was another sort of a long drive to West Hollywood, CA. We've been to West Hollywood/Los Angeles now four times and every time at a different venue. This time we were at one of the legends, Whiskey-a-Go-Go aka The Whiskey. I didn't really know what to expect. I guess I wasn't expecting much nothing and therefore I wasn't really that disappointed either. No showers though.

Every time we've been in the area we've also went to Rainbow Bar & Grill. Never before seen Lemmy there, but always Ron Jeremy. This time they were both there. Anyway, there probably is a lot to see in the area, but the day was mostly spent at Rainbow. Even if it has a such legendary status that probably draws in lot of tourists too they still have really reasonable prices and good food. At least during the day. "Going somewhere" part wasn't much different to San Francisco. Whiskey, Rainbow and the bus parking were all within the radius of 300 metres. Even if I didn't go anywhere I probably still didn't miss much.

The venue wasn't sold out. That was a bit disappointing. The capacity is 450, with all the guests we had 475 people in but you could still buy a ticket from the door so technically it wasn't sold out. Close to at least. Sadly, the show wasn't as good as San Francisco. I guess the audience never really sees it the same way we do. What is "worse than yesterday" for us may be the best they've ever seen. Differences are marginal anyway. Ville was on stage again. No stagediving this time. The sign on the wall said something like "You stagedive and you go home". However, he did a dance with Jonne with both falling on the mic stand. My first thought was "And now there goes a rib or two." Both survived.

Afterparty was at Rainbow. Once again meeting some old friends and making a few new ones. And drinking awfully strong gin & tonics. I am trying to quit drinking beer. An occasional cold beer is always good, but beer as a main liquid for several days really messes up my stomach. So hard liqueur it is. Just bought 3 litres of cranberry juice from Walmart. Perfect mixer for vodka.

Santa Ana, CA is only an hour's drive away from West Hollywood. It is strange to have shows so close to each other, especially when today's show is just 2 hours from Santa Ana in Ramona, CA. We always tend to think that there will be no one to see us. Santa Ana proved us wrong. Really nice venue with two(!) showers and in house catering! Technically it was good too, big stage and all. The place is also quite big so it was definitely not full, but a good crowd anyway. Moonsorrow guys complained after their set that the sound on the stage was terrible, lots of echo and boomy low frequencies. We had none of those problems. We had a nice stage sound. Afterwards we were talking about that with the tour damager... I mean manager, and he said that it is easily understandable since Moonsorrow is awfully loud on stage. I've always thought that we're loud! Well, live and learn.

Afterparty was at a local bar. No wait, it wasn't! Why not? Because there was fucking nothing around there. So we ended up sitting in Moonsorrow/Metsatöll bus. Moonsorries had two female guests, Finns, obviously old friends, and they had brought them for example a bottle of cake flavoured vodka. That was strange. Anyway, as you can see from the beginning of this blog entry, I didn't stay long.

Today we're playing in Ramona, CA. We met the promoter at The Whiskey. We spoke about the venue, "The Main Stage", and I mentioned that it is once again one of the venues that fall into the category "Shithole", since it has no shower. His reply was "We have now!". Nice. Glad that I could insult him anyway.

Other than the venue there's not much in Ramona. One street town. There is a small guitar store though. We'll see what we end up doing there. Probably nothing.