No shower? What do you mean "no showers"?

Monday, September 3, on the bus passing Eagleville, Missouri.

Back to Joliet, IL. It was an awfully long day. It either raining or just awfully hot and moist, so I ended up spending an entire day in and around the bus. That definitely makes the days long. I didn't know what to expect audience wise since we've never been to Joliet before. Although as far I understood it is a sort of a suburb of Chicago and there we've been several times. During the afternoon I heard that the pre-sale was 120. Not THAT bad after all I thought. Later I heard that it had gotten up to 260 couple of days before the show and the promoter was expecting 400. Nice.

Side note: Everybody of course knows (or should know!) the city from the Blues Brothers movie where the brothers we're called Joliet-Jake and Elwood Blues. "Joliet" because Jake had been doing some time in Joliet prison. But how many of you knew that 20km south of Joliet is a place called Elwood? And being a big Blues Brothers buff myself I was of course happy to see us passing Rock Island, IL. "So tonight, ladies and gentlemen, while we still can, let us welcome, from Rock Island, Illinois, the blues band of Joliet-Jake and Elwood Blues, the Blues Brothers!"

Back to Joliet. I didn't watch anyone's show. Quite often on tours even simplest of the tasks becomes a Mount Everest to climb. Sometimes it is replying a text message. This time I just couldn't drag my ass out of the bus. Our show was above average, I'd say. Solid set, no mistakes and the venue wasn't so damn hot so it was also quite comfortable. The audience was nice too. At the end of the Jonne did jump on the drum riser and dragged down half of the drum set. There's something for the audience to remember. We still managed to do the encore though. Thanks to a quick crew.

I did mention earlier that there wasn't backstage or shower. That wasn't exactly true. There sort of was. We were using a kitchen as dressing room and that high pressure dish washing hand held hose thing was a decent shower! The bar staff getting the ice every now and then probably didn't appreciate the naked Finns showering in their kitchen that much though. Whatever. See us caring.

Afterparty was interesting. It was just basically hanging out and drinking beer with local people, which is nice if you happen to find someone interesting to talk to. Well, on this tour you'll always find someone like that if you're ready to settle for non-locals too! I have no idea how did it originally happen, but at some point I heard that the other bus is completely packed, like 30 people in. I wasn't even going to go and see that. Later there seemed to some sort of commotion and people were flying out from the bus. Apparently one of the guests had hit Ville. Didn't really damage him or anything, but still. So the idiot was thrown out. Completely drunk. A bit later he was abusing his girlfriend in front of the venue and Mitja called 911. Almost immediately 3 police cars show up. The idiot then attacks the police officers too. You can guess the rest. Yep, he's soon tazed, cuffed and dragged away. Interesting. Gotta love America.

Yesterday was a Sunday show. On every tour the shows from Sunday to Tuesday are always mysteries. Often in strange places and with a possibility of only 35 people showing up. Yesterday we were in St. Paul, MN. The venue is called Station 4. I don't know which one is a bigger shithole, Station 4 or Peabody's. At least Station 4 had a sort of a decent backstage this time, since they had acquired the premises next to them as well. It was a construction site basically but still it was a room! And a big one that is. It even had a huge basement which we of course explored and found for example a lovely old heating system that I first thought said "Eros" on it but then I took a loser look and saw that it was actually "Bros". Anyway, Markus and me found a water hose. Dirty as hell, but water was good. So we first washed a part of the dirty concrete floor and then threw the hose over some pipes and beams in the ceiling and lo and and behold: Station 4 had a shower!

I decided earlier that this time I will not spend an entire day on the bus. I checked online if there's anything to see and decided that the ancient Native American burial mounds were the thing to see. They were only 3.5km from the venue anyway which is a nice walking distance. After our nice breakfast/lunch at the local pub I managed to get Ville and Marko interested in joining me. We started to walk but right around the corner bumped into a bicycle rental station. "Well why the hell not", we thought. Suddenly we were on wheel. MC Hell's Satans. So we rode to the mounds. Not much to see there though, except these grassy hills of course. 6 of them are left. Something like 16 has been destroyed while "developing" the city. Way to go, us!

The day was probably the hottest so far. At least the venue was. It was quite nicely full. Not packed, but a nice crowd. I watched part of the Metsatöll show, mainly because Ville was taking care of their merchandise while they were on stage and I had to smuggle in some cold beers from the bus for him. I also watched the beginning of Moonsorrow's set. For the first few notes bass was earbreakingly loud. Apparently Ville had changed something on stage after the line check and had added something like +20dB to his signal. Definitely sounded like that!

We did a standard set, sans "Tequila" that dehydrated Jonne just simply forgot. It was too hot on stage. But it was a decent show again. "Ievan polkka" was a bit of a hit and miss since Jonne missed some verses or did them in wrong order and at some point no one knew where we were. Meh. You want to hear an album version perfectly performed you'd better listen to the album then! Actually "Wooden Pints" missed one verse as well. Jonne couldn't really breathe or sing anymore and he just mumbled in the mic "Rounakari, vedä soolo."

Afterparty was as usual, on the street next to our buses. Once the party moved in to the bus, I went to bed. And got up once the bus stopped in Eagleville, Missouri. Which is where I started this blog entry, but since this usually takes really long to write with all the pauses for chats, drinks, coffee breaks, etc, we are now actually next to Kansas City, KS. Kensington, says the GPS actually. Will post this now.