Jiggy 2

An e-mail arrives and reminds me that we are supposed to be touring the west coast of the USA this month playing only venues that had a connection with Tom Waits before he was famous (see my previous blog post on Jiggy). We postponed the tour but will get round to it next year.

The email is from Jiggy – erstwhile Hamfatter double-bass player extraordinaire – now oceanographer in San Diego. He has been on tour in Germany with a different band.

The tour is called Roktoberfest and the e-mail contains the following short tour diary:

On the first day: 

I pass out cold in the attic of a Bavarian brewhouse sparking a two hour manhunt across the city of Munich. 

On the second day:

we play a gig in a bar with a miniature train set that runs around the periphery of the room such that the barman can place shots on a train and send it to the band on stage.  When we finish we're drunk.  The crowd is drunk.  Everybody is drunk.

On the third day:

we drive into the Bavarian countryside and in a tiny backwater village we play in a large medieval barn to a crowd of hairy German farmers who smoke a lot of chronic and do a lot of funky old-man dancing.

On the fourth day:

we play in a replica 1950's American diner in the shadow of a nuclear power plant.  I think I am finally learning the songs.  Bavaria it seems is something like the Texas of Germany.  A region fiercely proud of its local culture and quite vocal in the belief that the rest of the country is populated by a bunch of pussies.  When people think of Germany as a land of large men and buxom ladies wearing funny clothes and drinking vast quantities of beer…. that's Bavaria.  And we're in the heart of it.

On the fifth day:

we take a break from gigging and make our way to the Oktoberfest where we drink 8 liters (2 gallons) of beer each and I wind up going home with a 7ft tall Bavarian fraulein.  As I left the festival the drummer shouts,

"It'll be awesome!  Your kids will be 7ft tall and can play in the NBA!".

We awake the next morning in her (very large) bed and go out for coffee and awkward conversation.  Beer is served at the coffee shop and I joke that maybe we should get a beer.  She buys a beer and at 10am in the morning starts showing me Bavarian beer drinking tricks.

We are both pretty drunk again when I re-join the band and the last I see she is still drinking beer on the sidewalk as the van takes off to drive 3 hours to a tiny village near the French border with a few old quaint churches, some horse ranches and one fucking awesome blues club that had been built into an old water-wheel powered grain mill.

A few songs into the set the (by now pretty tight) band start making some uncharacteristic fuck-ups.  I look toward my band and see them all staring wide-eyed at stage-right where a 7ft tall Bavarian fraulein is dancing at the front of the stage.  During the set break I go to say hi (or "what the hell are you doing here?", one or the other) and realize that she has kept on drinking since we left Munich and, while completely blackout drunk, she has bought a plane ticket, made her way to Munich airport, flown for an hour to Freiburg (still drinking) and then showed up at our gig shit-faced.

We squeeze her into our taxi (myself on her lap) back to our hotel during which the band chanted "N-B-A! N-B-A!" for the entire ride.  In the morning she returns to the airport with the demeanor of someone who has just drunkenly spent $500 on a last minute plane ticket to sleep with a guy she barely knows and now has to spend the same just to get home and make the hangover go away.  I love Bavaria.

On the sixth day:

our gig is prefaced by a short lecture and power point presentation on "real American blues" to get the crowd into the mood.

On the seventh day, eighth and ninth days:

we drive 9hrs to Amsterdam.  We go onstage at midnight and play 5 hours of music to a 500-strong crowd fueled by beer, pot and hallucinogenics.  It is beautiful. 

From Amsterdam we drive back to Germany and play our final gig in Braunshweig's premier blues club.  The place is run by a crazy man with two loves - live music and drugs.  Initially this seems very amusing (he does tell a few interesting stories [1] ).  But after 8 hours trapped in a labyrinthine, medieval Grimm's brothers farmhouse full of stuffed animals in the middle of nowhere with the only man who knows how to direct a taxi to the house babbling and hallucinating and responding to all questions about how we are going to catch our flight home by shouting 'Cocaine!'…. it gets a little old. 

It takes us 28 hours to escape the vortex of crazy-old-man-on-a-bender that we fell into.  24 hours after that and we we are back in San Diego older, wiser and (a lot) more hungover than when we left.  

Epilogue:

Since my return, I have been detoxing, catching up on a few weeks of missed sleep and trying to remember what my PhD is all about.  I've figured out that my boss expects me to sit in front of my computer for most of the day and surround myself with pieces of paper covered in mathematical symbols.  Providing I do that he seems happy but I haven't quite remembered what the symbols are supposed to represent nor what I should actually be doing on the computer.  Until I figure that one out, Youtube will just have to suffice.

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[1] The monkey story: When this guy was doing cocaine in Colombia for 8 years he had a pet monkey that doubled as a guard dog - the monkey would bite and wrap his tail around peoples' necks.  One day the monkey escaped and ran off across the roofs of the neighboring apartment buildings.  Our man got on the roof and started chasing him and they jumped from building to building until they landed in big puddle on one roof with a loose wire and both got electrocuted.  They were both frozen in place looking at each other with teeth rattling in their skulls.  The monkey never ran away after that.

For my part, all I can say is: