5-10-07 Thursday Scheinfeld at the Pottrock    

A beautiful ride through the German countryside brings us at last to a club in the middle of nowhere. I drive the last 30K for the first and last time on this trip. The van is much slower and tubbier than I had thought and Paul and Ryan mercilessly criticize all aspects of my driving from the cheap seats. The road is so amazingly winding and narrow that I slow whenever a car comes from the opposite direction.

We get to the club and chat with the third band we are slated to play with this evening. They are called “Emergency Gate” and they are cool dudes. Their sound check makes me excited to hear the rest of their set ..but I never will. Here the gig takes a nasty turn and some business things are discussed. We are not sure at this point if we will even play the show. But eventually things get worked out and we go on stage to play our set. But Emergency Gate has been moved to a slot at the outdoor festival the following day so I never get to see them play. The poor dudes have to repack all of their equipment and run the keyboard player 600k back to his home and then come back the next day. My equipment fails for the first time at this show and  my guitar cuts out completely in the middle of a song. I bypass all but one of my stupid pedals and my guitar works again but the sound guys seem to have it out for us for some odd reason. The mix in my monitor is so terrible that I think the bass guitar cranking in it must have blown the speaker. It is all I can do to turn it completely away from me in between songs just so I can play. The other guys told me of similar things in their monitor mixes. Very sad and unprofessional sound men I am sorry to say. But that doesn’t mean that we have to be schmucks, we play as hard as we can and fight through to the end of the show.

So we pack up and head back to our very cute hotel in the tiny downtown area of Schienfeld. Sleep comes quickly for me as the others stay up to drink and have a good time. Me, I am too tired.

Fresh air and rolling meadows characterize the beautiful countryside of this remote and beautiful place.