Worst. Show. Ever.

Rock and Roll is full of interesting anecdotes. It’s typical when bands plan something, that something gets fucked up. Thats why successful bands have managers that take care of things. However if we had one, the following would have probably still happened. Hmm, scratch that. If we had a manager, we probably wouldn’t be playing in the celler of a youth center in Winsen, Germany.

On Saturday AMJ had a show at the 30th birthday celebration of the Winsener Jugendzentrum. We were supposed to go on at 10pm but there were all kinds of 15-16 yr old punk bands playing Misfits and Ramones covers getting out their teenage thorn crown pain. And we finally hit the stage at about 11:30pm. At the foot of the stage were a group of punks, not in the condescending sense of the word punks but the diaper pin through the nose, totally wasted, fuck it all, punks. They were saying nonintelligable things, some of which sounded like, “Hey alter, play some shit, we wanna rock, we wanna fuck, where are the drugs, pass the spoon, blah, blah, blah.” So in other words the usual. So we get up there and set up rather quickly and get ready to bust it out and we aren’t even a whole bar into the song when the power goes out. Na ja, it happens. Usually a fuse is blown or someone spills beer on a cable or a they trip over a cable. It took the sound crew about 20 minutes to figure out what the problem was. I don’t think they ever figured it out. The power was back on and then out again, on again, out again. Meanwhile the punks were living up to their namesake and two of them, a guy and a girl, totally wasted, had jumped up on the stage and were trying to sing Desperado into the dead mic. Interestingly enough, they didn’t notice that the mic was dead and kept singing, screaming rather, to overcompensate for the lack of volume and amplification. You still with me? Oh it gets better. Finally the power is back on in a stable state but we have no power to the stage monitors, which means the audience can hear us, but we can’t hear shit except for the drums which are right behind us, but since the drummer can’t hear himself, imagine that, he’s playing at twice the normal volume simultaneously blowing out our eardrums. So we bust out into the first song again but there is still the annoying problem of the two punks on the stage that seemed to have moved onto their own brand of stand-up. I couldn’t understand what they were saying but they were killing ’em. When they noticed we were playing again, they tried to take Marco’s guitar and bumped into me effectivly bringing the song to an end. My polite request for them to leave the stage was promptly ignored and one of them tried to grab my guitar.

Allright. That does it. Pulling my guitar’s where I draw the line.

The “security” was nowhere to be found so I pushed them both towards edge of the stage. This was met with “Hey fucker, what the fuck, stop the violence, what the shit?, blah, blah,blah.” The Hausmeister came and tried to pull them off the stage and I kicked them both right in their asses, which sent them off the stage. (Yeah, thats right. I kicked a girl. Don’t worry. It wasn’t hard) Punks gone, Rock on!! By then we had little time left and it would have been totally arrogant to just say fuck it and leave so we said fuck it and rocked out. The whole thing was shot to hell anyway so what the fuck? We turned all the amps up to 11 and let loose. Me and Florian were playing on the foot of the stage total rock guitar god style with wailing distortion. I had my foot up on the dead floor monitor and wailed out some solos, did a little Jimi behind the head, laying the guitar on the amp getting crazzy feedback. To paraphrase Tom Sanders of Sidekick Kato, “My Guitar is my rock and roll machine and I use it to shoot people with rock and roll.” The whole time we couldn’t hear a thing. I have no idea how we sound but I sure had fun.

Sometimes the Internet is smarter than you think. Go to google and do a search on “miserable failure”. C’mon, just do it. Here I’ll help you out. For more information on this phenomenon known as “Google-bombing”, read this article in the New York Times (free reg required).

WTF?? Farookie.com – Bouncing Bear

A long hard slog? Unfortunately, yes:Doonesbury

Since living in Germany I’ve developed an appreciation for whisk(e)y. This has more to do with my girlfriend than German drinking culture. Here’s a link with some interesting tidbits via the Guardian

What everyone is talking about over here.

When I used to live in Chicago I was doing some crazy shit. I lived in the upper level of an old abandoned movie theater that had been converted into apartments for some Polish aristocrat in the 60s. The kitchen used to be the old projection booth, so when you stood at the sink you would look down into the theater. Our land(slum)lord was a car nut and kept about 10 old delapidated antique cars down there which could be seen out of kitchen/projector window.

Next door to us lived this wild-eyed beautiful tattooed girl named Amy. She was always helping me out when I was losing my shit and she is still a really good friend even though I haven’t seen her in years. She has now relocated to San Fransisco after some nomading around the west coast. She is working out there as a tattoo artist. If I ever get a tattoo, she will be doing it. She just sent me a link to her online portfolio at the Sacred Rose. So if your in the Bay area and looking to get some ink done, stop by the Sacred Rose and ask for Amy. Be sure to tell her Nate sent ya.

I was driving back from the studio the other night and I totally got lost on the Autobahn. I was almost halfway to Hannover. I pulled in to a gas station at a reststop to ask the way and I said, “Ich bin falsch abgebiegen.” The guy said with an annoyed look, “Nein sind Sie nicht. Sie sind falsch abgebogen.”

Gee. Thanks Grammar Guy! Seriously, I’ve been saying that for at least a year and nobody has corrected me. I also just found out that Geschmack is der Geschmack and not das Geschmack. I’ve been saying that for at least 2 years until I heard Florian say “Du hast ja guten Geschmack”. Well there you go. Akkusativ, und männlich. This is just an observation. I can’t explain that stuff.

Somebody I work with said that over half of all tax laws in the world are German and apply to those paying taxes to Germany. I don’t know if it is true, but I could believe it.

You don’t know what ya got till its gone…..

The word in German for this is Gleichschaltung.

Two things:

Went into the studio to day to record and we laid down the basic tracks for 5 songs. 3 of them I really like and I think they will turn out well. The other two I’m not so sure about. Its going to need some overdubs and creative mixing. The drums and bass are really good and tight so the overdubs should be easy. It’s interesting how when we are in the rehearsal space and on stage the songs sound totally different than when they come out of two speakers.

When I left my apartment to day I opened up the door and stepped out onto my stoop. I looked up accross the street and saw 5 or 6 neo-nazis standing there in all their glatzköpfige glory with their black bomber jackets, jack boots, flags and banners. Now keep in mind, I don’t live in Illinois. These were the German kind. Me being a foreigner, my first thought was “oh shit, did they find my blog?” but then I remembered that today in Lüneburg, the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD – super rightwing party in Germany, kinda like Republicans without a sense of humor. Oh, wait…:) was having a march for some bullshit about foreigners, education and jobs only for Germans blah, blah, blah. I gave em an evil stare and walked to my car and left. On the way out of town I noticed there were cops all over the place not unlike two weeks ago when the Castor rolled through Lüneburg. In the last couple of weeks there was all kinds of publicity about the NPD march and an anti-NPD march was organized to take place on the same day, today. M. said there were helicopters and polizei all over town on every street and corner keepin the peace. The city council tried to forbid the march but because the party itself is not verboten, they couldn’t deny them the right to assembly and protest. All they, the NPD, had to do was get a permit for their demonstration. The march started in a part of town called Kaltenmoor. I guess you could call it the bad part of town because it is on the wrong side of the tracks and the people that live there are mostly foreigners from Eastern Europe and Turkey. So if they wanted to provoke people and cause trouble they couldn’t have picked a better place to do it. Because of the history here a lot of Germans are flabbergasted that the NPD should be allowed to march and believe they should be forbidden. As an American I see it a little differently. I was brought up with the concept of free speech. They can march up and down the street carrying signs and yelling rascist garbage until they are blue in the face. I don’t care. To me it is like putting idiots on display as an example of how not to be. If enough people confront them and shout them down then they will see that hardly anybody agrees with them and their political views. And that is exactly what happened. The total number of NPD supporters was about 150. The number of people demonstrating against the NPD was about 1500. Click here for a report from the Lüneburg website. In German but with lots of pictures.