The Herzberg Festival

Scenes from the Herzberg Festival

Herzberg Germany:

I will never forget Herzberg as long as I live. A blond dreadlocked man named Duke gave us an early drive from the Berlin Ibis Hotel. I must say by now after touring with various bands and Rock School for the past several years I'm used to those kinds of keycard hotels with the breakfast buffet! However, our Herzberg hotel must have been frozen in time, like, back to 1971? It's not a bad thing, it was even kind of cool, but it certainly was a culture shock. We soon figured out that there was no food being served so Julie and I decided to go searching for a place to eat. We stumbled upon a supermarket where nobody working there spoke any English (perhaps the funniest moment was when I asked for a plastic knife and the deli owner started air-poking me with her real knife and shouting "Plastica? Plastica?!"). Just like a scene out of David Lynch film. Luckily Julie is our female McGyver and scrounged up enough materials to make delicious tomato and cheese sandwiches in our psychedelic hotel room. This show was going to be a trip, for sure.

We met up in the lobby at 5:00 p.m., and we ran into the members of the seminal UK group The Soft Machine. What a nice bunch of blokes (as they would say). Of course right after that the hotel owner walked out and exclaimed, "We have dinner on the house for the festival artists!". So even though our supermarket trek proved to be unnecessary, it was still an hilarious experience.

Got to the festival at 7:30 p.m. If you think Bonnaroo Festival is the modern Woodstock, think again. I've never seen anything quite like the Herzberg Festival in my life. Not only did we have the 1970's hotel, but we had the 70's concert flashback. Hippie jewelry stands, vegan meals and granola packets, and of course the obligatory bootleg shirt and vinyl stands.

I must say we played a fine show considering the circumstances of no soundcheck and no pre show 80's film warmup (remember Indianapolis?)...and um, I had no monitor for my drums, which is kind of like playing unable to hear myself. Well yeah, that's exactly what it was...it's a surreal experience, but everyone was kind of mellow so I didn't allow myself to get freaked out. The crowd of 10,000 people was also a welcoming and startling surprise. After the show we were treated to an awesome helping of seasoned french fries. A fine way to end a dizzying but successful European tour.

Right now we are back in Philadelphia for two weeks of r&r and practice for the east coast leg of our tour which starts on August 8. I will post here during the next two weeks as events happen or as I remember other funny/entertaining stories from the tour so far but expect things to get lively again during the month of August when we have at least ten more shows up and down the east coast and the south but of course we're looking forward to the Philadelphia show at World Cafe Live on August 14 the most! I hope to meet a lot of you there, and please come up and say Hi.