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.

Huge knockers

8.00 in the bus in a car wash. I stayed up until 3.15 or so last night and today I am up again at 8. Fuck. And the bus is turning into a sauna again. Fuck.

San Francisco last night was a good show. Jonne said that it was his best of the tour, I on the other hand didn't feel that well about the show, so I guess it's safe to say it was ok. The venue was packed and the audience was probably the loudest of the tour. The city is known as the hippie and gay capitol of the world so I was afraid that there really isn't much audience for our kind of music but San Francisco managed to surprise me. The venue was basically decent. A huge backstage area with a toilet is always a plus. It didn't have a shower, so it was a shithole. I didn't really mind that since the toilet was big and clean and had a big sink as well. On this tour I've learned to wash my hair and other parts in the sink and was prepared to do that last night as well. While I was going there with my towel Markus asked me where did I think I was going.
- "I'm going to take a bath in the sink."
- "Good luck. There's no warm water."
No hair washing. Just have to wear the cowboy hat. Which by the way smells like a hay barn now.

My boob picture project was continued last night as well. After the show on the street next to our bus was this woman in a Korpiklaani shirt with a huge rack. She was actually talking with some Primordial guys but I went there and explained her the thing about the pictures for girlfriend and she was totally up to it. So I took a couple of pictures of those huge knockers. I mean like really huge. Definitely not my girlfriend's type but she didn't really complain last night when I sent them to her. I have a brilliant girlfriend by the way.