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TOUR DIARY
hi!!! my name is warn defever and i play in a groop called his name is alive. his name is alive is playing five small acoustic concerts to celebrate the release of our album, "last night" and the release of our groop from its contract with 4ad/beggars banquet. we all love when we get to read someone else's diary!!! some of this is personal and maybe offensive. sorry!!! i tried to edit out the horrible parts!!!
PARIS october 19 la guinguette pirate (its a boat!!!)
LONDON october 18 the spitz
NEW YORK november 22 fez
CHICAGO november 29 schubas
LOS ANGELES december 7 spaceland
LONDON 10-18-02
we (me, lovetta, and elliot) left detroit at 9 pm thursday and arrived in london at 11 am friday. on the airplane i ate salty cashews, a key lime pie Luna bar(made for especially for women), and a spinach and hummous sandwich from LA SHISH. mmmm. we tried to check in our fancy hotel at noon. no rooms available till 2 pm. oh well. its not like we bin up all night or anything. i go for a walk and find a cool book store and buy a stevie wonder book from 1975!!! elliot and lovetta ate french fries.
i'm not going to go into too many details regarding this show since its quite possibly our WORST SHOW EVER. not that anything truly terrible happened. i didn't fall off the stage because i was wearing dark sunglasses, nobody got electrocuted, the drummer didn't throw a maraca into the audience and poke anybody's eye out. it wasn't that kind of WORST SHOW EVER, it was more like nothing good happened and i played really bad, and a guy from the NME will probably write a review about how boring and quiet we are and how it would have bin more cool if we would have dumped buckets of blue paint on everyone in the audience or something..... when the fact checker for the NME calls up and asks for a copy of the set list to verify the song titles i'll make up some fake ones. that'll make everything okay. justin spear dj'd a superset including pharoah sanders and dorothy ashby (harp magic). what a long day. i feel like its still yesterday but it forgot to end. its like 4am now they showed american "buffy the vampire slayer" and "angel" on late tv tonight. everything is okay again although i bet i never get asked to play in england again. oh well. i hope i can wake up in time for paris tommorrow.
PARIS 10-19-02
wake up calls at 6 am are never a good idea. sleep deprivation aside, we arrived safely and early. his name is alive has never played in france before. i am super excited!!! phone calls to the promoter's house and his co-promoter's cell phone proved fruitless. we decided to go to the top of the eiffel tower (colleen's suggestion), but the lines were way too long (saturday at noon) so we settled on visiting the bottom of the eiffel tower. (its giant!!!!). by 3 pm we had reached anthony, (whom we no longer refer to as a "promoter") and went out for baguettes before going to soundcheck. paris is super cool!!!! we stopped at a cool french-african flea market and bought beads and bootleg tapes. the venue (henceforth referred to as the pirate ship) was a great wooden oldtime boat docked in a sort of industrial area on the Seine river. it rocked back and forth quite a bit during soundcheck which did not suggest optimum conditions for performing. later that evening we were to learn that the pirate ship also had no heat. the pirate ship also appeared smaller than what i imagined a 300 person capacity venue to be. the ship staff (not dressed as pirates, to my disappointment) served us a traditional french dinner consisiting of baguettes, wine, lettuce, tomatoes, and non-vegan pasta. by 7 pm it was clear that this pirate ship had no heat, one super small dirty bathroom, and no dressing room. the groop was expected to mingle with the guests before and after the concert. i think its a french thing. the support groop was actually great!!!! a nice man with three looping guitar effect pedals, a toy xylophone and a vocal mic. he was nice, pretty, and i fell asleep two times during his set. he played very quietly and the audience listened attentively (a good sign). at 10 pm, we played a much more "together" and fun set than in london. it was super great. various audience members received many dedications!!! "this song is dedicated to all the french guys" "this song is dedicated to everyone who drove in from belgium....." "has anyone ever been to detroit??? its sort of like the cambodia of the midwest. there is only hope for those yet unborn" our friend julie from kentucky showed up too!!!!! you probably remember her from the popular time stereo movie, "THE MAN-MACHINE" she's great and she speaks perfect french!!!!! at the end of the night, we squared up with anthony. there had been one hundred and seventy paid admissions. i did not believe him. maybe he said 117 or 107 or 17 or 70. i thought it looked more like 50 or 60. the boat was very long & not very wide so i guess the 120 people standing at the opposite end near the bar (the stern? the bow?) talking were far enough away to go unnoticed. we got paid three hundred euros as promised, although i suspect if less people had showed up, our "guarantee" would not have materialized. i heard from some people at the show that it hadn't been properly promoted but anthony is just a guy who has a band who likes his name is alive (and who helped LOW play their first show in paris and later had an album dedicated to him) so i guess i'm okay with it. ((edited out comments about "hot" french girls)) so at midnight we found the hotel where anthony had reserved two cheap hotel rooms "le hotel baguette" i'm not really sure if that was the name but my french isn't what it was back in the 7th grade (sorry mrs hendrien) the rooms were smaller than the "anne frank" style room i stayed in in amsterdam one time. they also had no heat. they smelled like paint thinner but i was already too freezing to consider opening the window. the rooms had showers (not hot water merely warm) but no toilet. the community toilet was found in a super small closet at the far end of the hallway. each room cost approximately 50 euros. i can't wait to go back to paris!!! there was some confusion over whether our not our album had been released there yet. 4ad london said that it had not been, and everyone we talked to at the show had only seen the expensive import version. the french beggers groop office claim it was released weeks ago and it was selling great. i didn't actually ever meet any representatives from our french label , and they in fact did nothing whatsoever to contribute in even the smallest way to this concert. oh well.
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