Friday, June 29, 2007

i left school early on wednesday, and stopped at caprabo to pick up some apples, crackers, and a bar of chocolate. had i know that my next actual meal was going to be at 2am, i would have stocked up a little more. i got to the airport a little late and was worried about missing my flight. turns out that i was fine, because not only did i board 10 minutes before it was supposed to leave, but it ended up getting delayed. the shuttle bus from the airport in munich to the train station also turned out to be an hour longer than i thought, and then because i got to the train station so late, i missed all of the express rush hour trains and had to take a train to schweinfurt with an hour long layover in some city that starts with "w". i finally got to schweinfurt at 11:30, after 11 hours of travel. i had of course missed the show, but i didnt really care, because im here more for the company than the music. and what a relief the company was/is. being around friends for the first time in a month feels so good. we somehow arranged to be able to sleep upstairs in the backstage area with a carload of swedes. we walked upstairs into the kitchen, where earth crisis' leftover food was sitting out. the walls were covered with tags from mostly US bands that had being touring through there since as early as 98, including madball, agnostic front, the bouncing souls, boysetsfire, and hundreds of others. there were a lot of pictures of penises and really inane things written on the walls. im not sure why, but for some reason i expected a little more maturity from musicians mostly in their late 20s and early 30s. randy tagged "gather attrition invisible tour 2k7" and we decided to play our mp3s through the van stereo outside of the shows.
the next morning we drove to antwerp. it took about 7 hours and i spent most of the ride talking to kelly and randy. it felt good to talk to someone that makes me feel understood, and not just because we have a lot of politics in common. we got to antwerp and mike only had 2 people on the guest list, so we hung outside of the venue for a while while mike went and talked to bands, and eventually we got scott vogel to throw 3 more of us on the guest list because he knows kelly. the rest we just snuck in by reusing wrist bands. terror in europe is pretty insane. there were like 800 people at the show and people went nuts. earth crisis, on the other hand, only managed to motivate about 30 people to sing along and another 20 to dance. a third or maybe even half of the show left after terror. despite the lousy fan reaction (which i guess makes sense, because the broke up 6 years ago which means that anyone that saw them the first time around is probably at least 20 by now, and the majority of hardcore kids are younger than 20) they played really well and i had a good time.

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