Gent

Gent – We thought Gent was going to be a small little show in a small little town where we’d finally get some much needed rest. We were way off!

They do something similar to Freshers here too so the streets were packed with people. What they make the kids do here is basically sell useless stuff. For example, a couple came up to us and tried to sell us an apple for one euro. Another girl came up and tried to sell us a flyer for a euro. If they don’t sell the item, they have to do some sort of dare. The dare usually involves some sort of drinking challenge. And if they lose the drinking challenge? SOUPY GARLICY SHIT IN THE HAIR.

We played the show at The Frontline, which is sort of an unmarked club in the middle of town. Pretty fun show, we sold a good amount of merch again. Then it gets nuts….

We played the show with the band Last Minute to Jaffna. They are from Italy. Their sound guy Rocco could open beer bottle with his teeth. Our host, Aimee took all of us out on the town. A 10 person group. We walked the streets, saw the city at night, and found some cool places to duck into.

Corey and the drummer from Last Minute to Jaffna had a 45 minute conversation about food.

Then back at Aimee’s the Italian guys decide to cook everyone spaghetti. They have a travelling kitchen that they bring with them on the road so that they can cook all the time. Stoves, pasta makers, homemade sauce, ingredients, utensils….The whole thing. 5AM pasta dinner in Gent? Corey and Scott on their iPhones?

The next day we woke up and went to the Castle. We toured the city, where there are actually a lot of cool old buildings. Beautiful freakin' place.

And Amadeus....Where they compose a mean set of ribs we hear....

(Here I just picture the scene in Amadeus where he's reading off his top secret bbq sauce recipe on his death bed to Salieri)

La Louvière

This was one of the weirdest shows we've ever played. La Louvière is a small Belgian village. Unemployment is over 25%. We got to the venue and nobody spoke English. Our rudimentary knowledge of French didn't seem to go very far either. There was a table of people sitting around playing cards, and they phoned a friend who spoke very crude English and basically told us to leave for a couple of hours and come back.....Somebody would eventually show up who would know what was going on. So we did...


There were lots of shops, cafes and restaurants around the venue. Bars too. Basically the shell of a once bustling downtown. Definitely a weird vibe going on in the town we couldn't quite put our finger on, but that 25% unemployment rate certainly played a part. Not necessarily sketchy, just... not quite right. There were people chanting things in unison on the streets....We got lots of stares. We got back to the venue and still nobody was there. They ordered some pizza for us and we drank some good Belgian beer. From there the story goes downhill....

This was really our first challenge of a show. I think most of it was a language barrier on our part, part of it was economic, and part was just circumstance. We could not load in until the first band played, minus the gear that they borrowed.

Once we got loaded in we realized that some of our gear (Mark's pedal) wouldn't work in the Belgian power outlets because of some strange grounding issue.

Then we play...

First song, Scott falls down a staircase on the side of the stage. He tries to come back up to the mic and he biffs his eye. Cut wide open....Big shiner.

This looks worse now

The last song, we play "We Make Poor Decisions". The bass sounds like the Seinfeld bass tone. This older woman at the end of the bar gets really excited because she thinks some Parliament/Funkadelic epic space jam is coming up....she is disappointed.

Despite all of this, the turnout is decent. People outside tell us they like it. However, we sell zero merchandise. Zip. Nada. That hasn't happened yet. We all were kind of frustrated.

On top of that the sound guy tells us he won't give us our full guarantee because we only played for "15 minutes". We explain that we played a full 30 minutes actually, 8 songs, longer than our album, and we didn't tune or talk.....We just played. Additionally, Scott cut his eye open and there was some uncertainty whether he needed to go to the hospital for stitches. He says he told us we needed to play 40 minutes to get paid in full. We ask who he told that to, he points in a random direction and says "a guy in your band".

Long story short, we got the cash out of him. On the way back to the hotel, we got pulled over by Belgian police. They checked our papers and let us go. We weren't doing anything wrong, I think it was just weird for them to see a van full of dudes in their town.

The guy who put on the show, Ben, was a great guy. The other band was also very nice. Just a rough night. We were due for one of those.

On the plus side, Corey found some charcuterie. Prosciutto di Parma=happiness

Then we went to bed back at a small Belgian hotel....