I'm on the plane back to CA from Brighton England. I've got some catching up to do on the tour diary, so here goes.

Molmo-Sweden Kajplatz w/ Ska Gal and the Bustups.

We stayed at Jens' house, and I slept under is kitchen table and had really weird dreams that night. The next day we drove to Oslo, Norway and stayed with the promoter of the Oslo show Markos, who was absolutely amazing. He's a German chef for the fancy Raddison hotel in downtown Oslo. None of us had ever met him before outside of matt e-mailing him a bunch about the shows, and when we showed up at his house, he had this amazing dinner prepared for us, and it seemed like he just kept cooking and cooking the whole 2 and a half days we stayed with him. It was unbelievable!

The day of the show drove into Oslo and walked across a giant, frozen Fjord. It was crazy. I accidently deleted the pictures from my camera. Shoots. Anyway, we walked across the Fjord and we went to a Museum on the other side where they had this exibitioun on Ska and Reggae and the evolution of Jamaican music. It was a really great exhibit. I think it was from Seattle. They had an original sound system, an original mixing console from Studio 1, and Don Drummond's trombone! Weird to see so much Jamaican music in Norway.

The show in Oslo was super packed and it went really well. I remember the sound being very good and my guitar sounded really nice. I love playing so much when I can hear my guitar and I know it sounds good. It really just lets me play and not think about it.

We had a day off to hang out in Oslo the following day, so we went to this bizarre park where they had hundreds of sculptures of naked people. Here's a couple of my favorites.

We also wend sledding, or as ska gal called it, "sledging," at the same park. We found a few plastic sleds just laying around, and it was super fun.

The next day we played in Gothemburg Sweden at a place called the "skaunted house." There were over 200 people at the show, and a group of about 15 with bald heads that were not very happy that I wasn't playing traditional ska. They heckled me throughout the set, and I felt like something was about to explode all night. The promoters of the show were really nice guys though, and we stayed at their house. I hope someday that the promoters and the more intelligent people who were at the show can work to eliminate that element from their scene. It's hard for me to believe that there are actually still idiots that will come to shows and raise their right hands for high 5's and wear the wrong kinds of patches on their bomber jackets. Please, people. Ska was born in Jamaica.

We flew out of Coppenhagen the next day, and drove to Coventry where I played a house party with Ska gal and Steve from Skull Disco. Steve cracks me up. He put on a great show. He's a FREAK! I loved it. Cheers to Tom and Jerry for putting on a great house show. It was kind of Santa Cruz style, only in Coventry. Very cool night. We drove back to Brighton after the show, and I tried desperately to stay awake and keep talking to Steve so he wouldn't fall asleep and drive off the road. We got in at about 6 in the morning I think, and didn't drive off the road... which is a good thing, because Brighton Punk Rocks the next day was totally amazing... but I've already talked about that in the "news" section. I guess I'm all caught up. Going to try to get some sleep on the plane now. Goodnight. Oh, one more thing... I managed to not lose my gloves the entire tour. unbelievable!

I'm at the show in Molmo Sweden, sitting at the t-shirt table. The venue is called Kajplatz, and it's a really cool community center with a great soundsystem. We've soundchecked and eaten delicious sandwiches for dinner, and now we're waiting for doors to open. I'm excited to play on a good sound system tonight. the other night in Denmark at Loppen, I had some technical problems with my acoustic guitar pickup, and it was a real drag. I couldn't plug into the board because i wasn't getting any signal, so the soundguy set up a mic for the acoustic. I hate playing through a mic. You have to stand right up on the mic so that it feels like your right hand is going to hit the mic at any minute, and if you move at all too close, it starts to feed back, and if you move away an inch, it doesn't come through the PA at all. Anyway, the whole set I was really stiff and couldn't move, and I kept making it feedback by accident, not to mention the fact that I hadn't gotten any sleep since 2:00 in the afternoon the day before the day before the day of the show... I think that makes sense.

I wish it could have been a better show for me, but I played some songs in the hallway after my set for about 8 people, and that went a whole lot better. It was freezing in the hallway, but a lot of fun and most of the people knew the words and were singing along, which felt really good. Today i think I figured out what was wrong with my pickup. I think I just put one of the batteries in backwards. Funny! Everything worked at soundcheck today, so hopefully tonight will be smooth sailing.

Once again, Kristiania proved to be one of the strangest places on earth. It's this old military complex in the middle of Coppenhagen that was abandoned and squatted by hippies back in the 60's, and now it's this crazy place where for years the police were afraid to go into, but it's actually really peacefull and a whole car-less community has developed in this one section of town. There is a street right in the center where they sell drugs in the middle of the street out of these booths in the middle of the day. No hard drugs are allowed though, so it's really just marijuana and hash.

More recently though, the police have really been cracking down and doing raids and trying to bust people and smash up the booths. One such raid was going down as we pulled up to the club, and there were probably 50+ police officers in full riot gear blockading certain streets and marching through Kristiania. It was kind of scary.

The whole thing seems ridiculous because people were just hanging out watching them blockade the streets and watching them do their thing. The riot gear seemed like extreme overkill. I couldn't really make out why they were blocking streets and dressed up for a rumble. From what I was told by some locals, there are some politicians who are trying to crack down on the sale of drugs and just kick people out of that part of town so some people with some money can put up some condos. I hope that doesn't really happen. Anyway, I wrote a song about it called "Riot" that I've been playing at the last couple shows. I usually can't write too well on the road, but this one came out pretty easily.

I was driving after the gig, and I got us super lost trying to get out of Kristiania. It was rough. I was so exausted and we kept running into dead ends, and having to back up this big rental van in the dark. Arrrgh! We eventually escaped and found the hotel and loaded all our gear into the rooms. I couldn't believe it when I finally laid down to go to sleep. Probably one of the most physically exausting days I've ever had on tour.

The tour is in full tilt now. Craziness. The first night in Brighton at the Sanctuary was really an amazing way to start out the tour. Buzz always puts on great shows in Brighton, and this one was no exception. It was completely sold out! Whoo hoo! the Sanctuary is a cool little basement place that they pack so many people into, it's kind of sketchy. I was psyched to see that the fabulous Flying Marrows were on the first two shows. They kicked out a couple of amazing sets. It was great to hang out with them and play shows with them again. I also played with POG. He's a really great singer songwriter and a great guitar player too. It was also the first time I've seen Neil from Lightyear play solo too, so it was an all around amazing night, topped off with a late night party at Buzz's house above the punker bunker. I think I actually didn't get to bed until 4 or 4:30, so I don't think I've totally beat my jetlag yet. My internal clock is confused!

The next day I slept till 2 in the afternoon. It was great to get a really long night's sleep, but I'm still pretty jet lagged. After an afternoon breakfast at the Dumb Waiter in brighton, we drove to Littlehampton, wich is an hour or so from Brighton along the southern coast of England. It turned out to be another great show.

I'm psyced to hear people singing along to songs off of Sweets and Meats. It feels great to come all the way across the ocean and realize that people have actually been listening to the CD's. It really makes me want to get the full band over here and rock it. I need to work on making that happen.

After the show, we drove back to Brighton, where I met up with Ska Gal, and we left for Stanstad airport at about 2:30 in the morning, and got to the airport at about 4:30 AM. We're headed to Denmark to play at Loppen, which I'm really psyced about, because I've played there a couple times before with MU330, and it was great. I'm totally exausted right now, but excited to be going to Europe. Our plane leaves at 7:15AM, and I've been up all night. I don't think I'll get to sleep until after the gig tonight. Is that even possible? I guess I will find out. I'm so Fried! My brain is stew. I hope what I've written makes sense!

Somewhere over the Atlantic. I'm on my way to the UK. Sometimes I have to pinch myself and tell myself that this is really happening. It feels pretty surreal to me to be flying by myself to England. It shouldn't. It will be my fourth time touring the UK by myself, but the fact that I'm going to Denmark, Sweden and Norway too just seems crazy to me. I hope the shows are good, but at this point there's not much I can do but enjoy the ride. At least I know for sure that it will be fun to be on tour with Ska Gal again. It's funny to tell my guitar students, "So, no lessons next week, I'll be in Norway." I think some of my students don't really believe that I go on tour.

A couple weeks before I left for this trip it struck me that maybe I made a bad decision to go to Norway and Sweden in Feb. It's going to be cold. Really cold. Colder than Santa Cruz anyway. Part of me is worried that living in California has made me soft. Cold weather shouldn't bother me...I'm from the midwest. Anyway, yesterday I went out and bought some gloves, and I somehow feel a whole lot better about going to Sweden and Norway. I've got gloves. It really doesn't matter how cold it is outside if you've got a good pair of gloves, right? we'll see if i can manage to lose them before I even get to Scandanavia. I'm not so good with keeping track of gloves.

So, I don't know what the heck I was thinking this morning, but I thought my plane left at 10:20 AM this morning, so I woke up early, got ready and Shannon drove me to the airport, and when I went to check in, found out that I didn't leave till 12:15. I had the right time written down, but I just had 10:20 stuck in my head for some reason. Anyway, I caught an early flight to Dallas and wound up having a three and half hour layover in Texas, which sounds like a nightmare, but it turned out to be amazing luck, because my brother and his family live in Dallas, and they picked me up from the airport, and we all went out to eat. We went to a seafood restaurant, and there was a big fake shark hanging from the ceiling, so here's me and my nephews, Gabriel and Noah pretending to be sharks.

And Chris and Tracy doing the same...