Fanx for the Rigz

Well, there’s nothing like spending ten days in your pyjamas to shake off the evil effects of a CC tour. But now I’ve re-watched every movie on my hard-drive and masturbated so much that scientists from the CERN facility have detected a form of dark matter in my pants that they are calling “anti-jiz”, so yeah, maybe it’s time to get up and put some coffee on.

Y’know, touring is a lot like being Bill Murray in that movie, you know the one. But in the “I’m in a semi-unknown band touring Europe” version, all the elements of that endlessly repeated day are constantly changing shape, size and color. The result is crushing repetition and bewildering variation running in parallel, which is one of the reasons why touring fucks with peoples heads so badly and causes the weak to hide themselves in drugs, booze and trying to fuck whoever is still hanging around after the bar closes.

So if Bill Murray was forced to report on a different animal coming out of a different hole in a different hick-town over and over and over again, maybe he would have gotten into it. Or maybe he would still have wasted his time schmoozing that chick with the curly hair. Who can say for sure?

Personally, I get a zang out of the whole kaleidoscopic death-cycle. Let’s walk through it…..

- Wake up confused on the toilet at the suicide hotel.

- Drive.

- Lug.

- Sound-check.

- Eat.

- Drink.

- Play Civil Civic songs to drunk people.

- Drink.

- Sell a Civil Civic t-shirt to a nerd with bad breath.

- Stare at that semi-attractive girl who smiled at you before the show.

- Drink.

- Drink.

- Lug.

- Pass out on the toilet in the suicide hotel.

 My only real problem with the whole thing is having a terrible head for names, because name retention is always a key operational issue.

I’m constantly shuffling over to The Baaron and muttering, “What’s the mixer/promoter/bar-manager/dude from support band’s name again?”

But Cuddles never knows. He is at least as bad as I am in this area, so we have both become experts at avoiding using peoples names in conversation.

But that’s another topic.

All I wanted to do today was to thank all the champions on this tour who fixed me up with an amp. The “amp-champs”, if you will.

Every fucking day at 6pm, when we would schlep the contents of our family car onto the stage in another live-band booze-pit, there’d be something square and black sitting at stage right that I could plug my shitty bass into.

Some were hired, some were in-house and some belonged to the dude from the support act whose name I forget. They ranged from the fucked up little Peavy TKO in Bamberg (which looked like it belonged to a wino and sounded like an angry parrot) to the truly monstrous vintage SVT rig in Eindhoven (which took two strong people to lift the fucking head up onto the cabinet and was louder than two Boeing 747s).

I am truly thankful for each and every one of them, even that stupid little valve stack in London that looked like a prop from Forbidden Planet and farted like a small cow.

In my fuzzy imagination I’d taken a photo of almost every amp I used on this tour. But having gone through my photos I realise I only snapped 11 out of 30, a poor ratio which makes for a much less impressive collage.

Such a crying shame.

Never-the-less, I’d like to take this bloggular opportunity to give hearty thanks to each and every anyone who set me up with a rig this autumn.

S’preciated.