Seattle June 14th, Neumo’s
Seattle, our final destination. We had an in-studio performance at KEXP before we headed over for an in-store at Sonic Boom Records. The day and the tour ended at Neumo’s.
We had a lovely night at Neumo’s and said goodbye to Constantines and Crystal Antlers. We’ll meet Crystal Antlers again at the Øya festival in Oslo this summer. So long, comrades!
AL
Portland June 13, Doug Fir Lounge
The scenery on our way to Portland was not too different from what you would find in Norway, though the trees in the Redwood Forest were a lot bigger. The water started tasting really good, and it was almost like being home again.
AL
Solvang & San Francisco, June 11th Rickshaw Stop
The return of the original Solvang
There are so many good things about San Francisco. But before we go into details, we’ll have to start with Solvang, a city we passed on our way there:
Solvang, California looks like a German or Danish city. We had to stop in this weird place because of Kristoffer (our drummer), who’s last name is Solvang. He had told us more than one story about his ancestor who was an honored member of this little town. And now he finally found the Solvang merchandise he’s been longing to get for all these years…
We thought we were running late in San Francisco, entering the Rickshaw Stop less than 30 minutes before our show was supposed to start. But Crystal Antlers beat us, they came after their show was supposed to start. But their show was sure worth the wait.
Wonderful Raphi from the Fishermen Three was kind enough to show us some nice parts of San Francisco the next day. And…YES: They had more Kambucha than we could ever dream of. And we met people who were building dog houses for a charity auction. Nice!
AL
Los Angeles June 10th, Echo
First stop: An Internet TV session with livedaily.com where Frode and I did three songs. After we’d finished there was even time to visit a few music instrument shops and see some famous parts of the Sunset Boulevard (Whisky a Go-Go!) before get in at the venue. We really wanted to get a view of Los Angeles from Mulholland Drive, but there was no time.
The Echo was pretty crowded and we had a good night!
LA
San Diego June 9th, Casbah
The Norwegian convention
We had a wonderful time on stage, unaware that Casbah in San Diego would turn out to be something close to the navel of the world: All kinds of Norwegians (as well as other nice people) came to see us. We met a few students from Egersund, Frode’s small hometown (which he for the most of the tour has claimed to be the capital of Norway), Thomas Seltzer from the legendary band Turbonegro and TV host Mona B. Riise. But we met some Americans too: Marty from the great band Blitzen Trapper gave us valuable info on what to see and do in his hometown Portland. He explained that Oregon is the size of Norway and the amount of people living in central Portland is about the same as in Oslo. So we expect it to feel like home when we cross the border in a few days.
When all these unexpected encounters took place there was a continuous chain of planes landing virtually next door to the venue. Crazy. How could this be anything but a great night?
AL
Austin - Phoenix June 8th
Rattlesnake shake
Between Austin and Phoenix is a pretty long ride through Texas, New Mexico and into the heart of Arizona, The Grand Canyon State. On this journey we passed endless open areas of sand, stone formations and cactuses - a lot of them! We had spent 12 hours in the van the day before just to be able to drive the Apache Trail north to Roosevelt Lake and southwest towards Phoenix this day.
On our way we drove through the first Indian reservation so far, the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation. Visiting a reservation was a bigger dream to some of us than others, but with our tight schedule we only got to see the worn-down houses and the litter by the side of the road. Let’s call it an anticipated disappointment.
The Apache Trail’s beautiful, desert landscape with forests of cactuses and weird vegetation in general couldn’t let down anyone. 20 miles of the road was unpaved, and even though we were aware of this, we didn’t predict how many hours of bumpy, steep and curvy passages we were about to go through. But the scenery was wonderful, and when we at the end of the trail met a fairly annoyed rattlesnake we were super-exited and all shook up again - but this time not just because of the struggles of our poor van.
Rhythm Room, Phoenix
It might have been the Apache Trail that exhausted us, but we’ve had troubles with remembering what really happened in Phoenix. Ole Reidar emphasizes the fact that everything was in mono this night. The rest of us have a vivid memory of Frode absently eating most of the paper around his teriyaki wrap. During our show there was a problem with my guitar cable, so Frode had to do a few songs solo, which in turn made the set list turn out a bit weird. But all in all we’re almost certain that Phoenix was good.
AL
Austin June 6th, Emo’s
The sweet sound of Austin
In Austin we were to do our first show with the two bands we’ll be joining for the rest of our tour: Crystal Antlers and Constantines. A lot of people showed up this night, we even sold an LP to the sweet lead singer of Girl In a Coma. Unfortunately we didn’t recognize her before her band played on a different stage later.
In Austin they have made an effort to bring the downtown area to life by moving the business area further away from the city centre. And it works. To us the city was most famous for hosting the music business conference South by Southwest, and music surely seems to be a part of everything here. There is a PA and a stage in basically every bar, hotel lobby or café, and you can hear live music wherever you go.
AL
Denton June 5th, Hailey’s
First an instore gig at Good Records in Dallas. We wanted to do it with full band, but there was no time, as we had to do soundcheck in Denton just an hour later. Playing as an “acoustic” duo with two electric guitars rather sucks, but since we didn’t bring any acoustic guitars and have no friends with either 5-string or 6-string guitars in Dallas, we had no choice. Good Records was a cool store, though. Frode was happy to find some albums by The Red Crayola and Woods.
Denton was not exactly crowded this night, apparently it is a student town and holiday season is now. But we met a few nice people and learned how to drink whiskey the American way; no sipping, bottoms up!
AL
Atlanta June 3rd, The Earl
We arrived too late for soundcheck in Atlanta, so we ordered food and ate wile watching Travel By Train’s gig. We tried to surprise ourselves with the set list this night, with unconventional song combinations. Everyone on stage enjoyed it, the audience seemed to like it, but our sound engineer Ole Reidar just shook his head. IWAK’s songs are quite short, so there’s not a lot of time to do adjustments to the sound before the song is over. Our weird set list made it even harder.
Atlanta is the unofficial capital of the South East, and is supposed to be number three on the ranking list of tall skyscrapers in the States. We’re sure that’s correct, but it was kind of hard to tell when we walked around in the almost empty streets of the business district the next morning. Some of us were lucky enough to find new socks and underwear - there’s still been no time for washing clothes …
Atlanta - Greenville June 4th, day off
Day off, you say? Dream on. We had to drive for at least seven hours to get closer to Denton, where we were had a gig the next day. So we chose to abandon the interstate and take the highway to Greenville, a small town situated by the Mississippi, on the border between Mississippi and Arkansas. The most exciting thing that happened there was that the toilet flooded after Frode & Silje had fallen asleep in our room. There was water and maintenance people all over the place, but we managed to keep it fairly quiet. And, speaking of water: Next day we drove across the Mississippi. Greatness!
AL
Chapel Hill June 2nd, Local 506
Cute people, cute dogs and weird behaviour
Chapel Hill is quite small compared to the other places we’ve visited so far, and very cosy. Since it is the home of Merge Records and a thousand churches it was Frode’s favourite town before he’d even seen it. Thanks to a recommendation from the magnificent Nabil we found a place with great Mexican food that made everyone happy. We also went to a coffee house where the following incident took place:
The female barista was the cutest thing we’ve seen this far - and her accent was irresistible. I was a King, including crew, had a collective crush on her, and we wanted her to come to our show, so one of us (no names mentioned) went inside to give her a promo CD. When this anonymous IWAK-member (AIWAKM) returned he said that the pretty girl had left, but that the guy behind the counter actually turned out to be a Pitchfork journalist.
- That’s great!, the rest of IWAK says - It’s even better that he got the CD.
AIWKM answers - No, I told him to give it to the girl.
For some reason (could it be our weird behaviour?) none of the two showed up at Local 506 that night, but a lot of other nice people did. And we enjoyed watching The Pink Flag play, Kristoffer even bought a T-shirt that he’s been wearing proudly.
The show was great; we had such a good time on stage. I blame it partly on the good food. But the best was yet to come: Next to playing music, watching funny dogs is maybe Frode’s favourite diversion. So when the house engineer’s tiny and very entertaining dog William showed up his after the show, the night was close to perfection.
AL