+++ Hello, it’s Robin from The Ocean. This diary starts in the middle of our world tour in support of our latest album, Precambrian (Metal Blade). We have already been on tour in Europe for over a month now, but I only recently started bothering to write down some of our adventures as The Ocean tours the States for the very first time. Anyway, here we go… +++

5/24 - Boston, MA, Church

We have had about 5 days off before this tour to recover from the fatigue that came with the extended tour of Eastern Europe we had just finished - just enough to get ready for our first US tour ever, and hell yeah we were stoked as we got on the plane at 6 AM that morning, direction Logan international airport, Boston.

Checking in our luggage proved to be much smoother than we expected - we were allowed 10 bags of luggage at 23 kg each, and we had spent a day putting all our guitars and LED lights together in all different kinds of combinations, weighing them and duct-taping everything together… in the end we had 10 bags of 24-25 kg each, and my Diezel amp at 32 kg. I was really worried that my amp might have to stay here, but in the end we didn’t even have to pay any extra fees. We decided to celebrate all this and start drinking immediately, so we made friends with one of the stewardesses, a generous older lady who realized we were a broke rock band that wouldn’t be able to pay for their beer as soon as we got on the plane, thus showing a lot of sympathy for us and getting us free beers all the way until Boston.

Mike’s shoes after two-and-a-half months of touring:

I still don’t understand how we managed to get all this gear AND ourselves into one single taxi, but we did. Jona and I were sitting on the front seat next to the driver and Jona had my foot in his mouth while I had his ass cheeks spread over my right thigh. We went straight into town to buy guitars at Guitar Center…the dollar is so cheap for us. You buy a new guitar, use it for a tour and sell it when you get back to Europe and you get more money for it then you paid for it in the first place.

The next morning we went to pick up the RV that was going to be our home for the next 4 weeks. I couldn’t believe how big this house on wheels really was. There’s a shower inside, a kitchen, a toilet and enough comfy beds for 6 people, fucking great! We would find out about the downside very soon though: this beast drinks gas like we drink Jack Daniel’s. A full tank comes at 180 bucks, and it doesn’t last very long.

The RV:

Inside:

I’m going to skip our 3-day Canadian run here. We had a great time there, even got to see the impressive Niagara Falls! Especially Montreal was awesome, despite us having to cut our set short and despite Opeth playing the same night… Hardly ever before have I been to a city with such a vast abundance of beautiful women out in the streets at night! I made plans to come back here soon.

The Ocean Live in Montreal:

The Ocean in front of the mighty “Niagra Falls”

…Or was it this one?

We got back to Boston and arrived at the venue early but the other bands with the backline didn’t get there until 7 so there was no time for a sound check. The church started filling up after the first 2 local bands played and in the end there was a decent crowd of more than 100 kids. I didn’t check out the other bands tonight because the sound in the venue was so fucking terrible that it was just no fun and we all thought it fucking sucks that we didn’t bring our sound guy over. There were some delays throughout the night and in the end we started so close to the curfew that we had to cut our set short 2 songs. This is what you get for not bringing a tour manager.

After the show we had shots at the bar and then ended up hanging out with Kylesa at the promoter’s band’s rehearsal space. There was more whiskey there and these huge plastic bottles of tequila and in the end I was so shitfaced that I didn’t remember how I got back to the RV. When I woke up the next morning, my head felt as if 2 freight trains had been driving into it from both sides. Not only the alcohol; the RV was parked in some garden, fuck knows how it got there, and the surface there was so uneven that I was literally hanging upside down in the bed compartment above the driver seat… my feet were numb and all the blood had shot into my head, making it red like a tomato. Good that my Mom didn’t see me this morning…

5/25 - Wallingford, CT, Cherry Street Station

The Connecticut show was fucked up. The tiny place was packed and it could have been an awesome show, but literally every cable in that goddamn venue was broken. Nico’s voice and our samples kept cutting out and the show didn’t start in time to end before the curfew, so both Kylesa and we had to cut our sets short.

5/26 - New York City, NY, Knitting Factory

We left to NYC that same night to avoid traffic and slept in the RV right in front of the Knitting Factory. It was stinking hot the next morning when Jona and me walked down Broadway to the First Act Guitars showroom, where we met up with Jimmy and ended up getting free guitars and shit…awesome guy.

I spent most of the night at the merch place talking to Martin Kvamme, the guy who designed the ‘Precambrian’ and ‘Aeolian’ cd. I also had a chat with Seldon Hunt about the MySpace generation and the future of graphic design and artwork in music. We came to the conclusion that us, those who still believe in the album as a synthesis of music and art and packaging and lyrics and eventually concept, as something that can and should be more than the sum of its tracks, are a dying generation.

Seldon told me a story of some record store where they did a giveaway of 2000 CDs, all you had to do was go there and grab whatever you wanted, and it was not shitty lo-price records from the 80s but the kinda shit we listen to - still, at the end of the day, of those 2000 CDs, 1700 were still there. Young kids just don’t care about music as a physical product anymore, so the CD will eventually extinct, and with it, the job of the artwork designer. We flushed the grim outlook down with Whiskey.

When you forget to bring guitar stands, the best place to put them is… in the trash!:

Tonight everything went really well for the first time, the show was on time, we had a lengthy sound check and sold shitloads of merch. 280 people showed up and every band that played tonight had a blast. NYC rules! Mike banged his head into my guitar during “Legions of Winged Octopi,” and got a laceration above his right eye. True Rock N’ Roll!

After the NY show we decided to drive out of the city to avoid morning traffic. We followed the Withered guys and when they stopped at a truck stop, we realized that one of our luggage compartments was open and a box with 2 LED floor spots was missing. How fucking stupid! Did it fall out? Did we ever load it in? We decided to go back to the Knitting Factory to check, chances were dim but that shit is expensive so we had to give it a try. And believe it or not, when we were back at the venue an hour later, everything was closed and everybody had left, but the box with our spots was still sitting there, on the curb, right in front of the venue! That’s New York City!

America. There are certain aspects and qualities of life here that are awesome. Free refills, huge meals, real Mexican food, no highway tolls on most highways, the fact that you’re allowed to drive ridiculously huge trucks, like our 30 feet RV, without a special license… The nowadays seemingly peaceful coexistence of people from all over the world in a cultural melting-pot like NYC is fascinating. America may not have the same history as Europe, yet some of the most interesting contemporary art and music are coming from this country and have had a significant and lasting impact on the European scene - to the degree that nowadays, in a lot of ways Europe seems to follow everything that is happening in the US with a 6-12 months delay. This is also true for metal. Bands like Mastodon or Gojira have been big in the US before anyone took serious notice of them in our home country, Germany. I have picked these 2 because one is a European and the other an American band. But it doesn’t make a difference. If a band breaks, it happens in the US, not in Europe. And then there is the nasty side of the story… The whole metalcore trend originated in the US and washed over Europe like a giant radioactive tidal wave coming from the west, contaminating every Swiss mountain village with more cheesiness than the motherland of cheese had ever seen before…

5/28 - Chicago, IL, Reggie’s - 5/29 Nashville, TN - The End

After a detour via Cleveland we got to Chicago just in time for a photo shoot with Gene Ambo. This guy’s got his shit together; it took him 5 minutes to shoot some of the best band pics we’ve ever had. Did a lengthy interview before the show that should be up on TheGauntlet.com soon. The show was awesome, we were on fire and it spilled over to the audience easily. The stage sound was huge and it must have been similar out in the FOH. We played 2 encores and it was the first time we ever played Nazca in the States. Merch sales were even better than in NYC and the venue was great, with a nice backstage area, showers and great food. We have only been out for a few days but it’s been really great so far, it’s an awesome package musically, and on a person-to-person level it feels like we’ve been touring with the guys from Withered, Lair and Kylesa for months, when it’s only been days; great fucking guys.

As a European in America, you sometimes feel alienated. I have been here many times before and have actually lived in the States for a year, and still I don’t get used to certain aspects of life here. No drinking in the streets! That’s ridiculous… walking out of the venue with a beer in my hands, I had bouncers chase me every night since I got here, I just keep forgetting it cause it’s so unreal for me. If anyone tried to make that a law in Germany there would be riots in the streets! In a city like Berlin you will see flocks of people just sitting out on the streets at night drinking and talking and partying until the early morning hours. In Madrid they call it botellones, meeting up with your friends in a park with a stereo or a guitar and a few bottles of red wine. It’s a part of culture; it’s unimaginable to do without. And despite all this, I don’t get the impression that there are fewer alcoholics in America than in Spain or Germany.

America, the “land of the free” - and yet, here in the US, there are rules and regulations for everything, even the most insignificant aspects of everyday life. You are not free to drink in the streets. You are not free to enter a truck stop without a shirt. You may not be free to see The Ocean play in your town if you are only 20 years old and the show happens to be +21. When you go to a show anywhere in Europe, no one will ever ask for your ID. And when you step behind the counter at Guitar Center to check out the guitars on the wall they treat you like a criminal, cuz you are “too close to the cash”…

It seems like more than any other place on earth, this country is based on a strong confidence in authority, rather than trust in people’s reason and intelligence. And this is exactly why we Europeans sometimes feel alienated here, and offended. “You are welcome to read these books after you have purchased them”, I once read in a book store. When you apply for a working visa, you have to go through a ridiculous procedure of application that is not only humiliating but completely inefficient. And then the fact that all the prices are pre-tax - it doesn’t make any sense at all, it is tricking people to believe that something is cheaper than it actually is! When you have a 5 dollar bill in your pocket and you wanna go grab a sandwich here and it’s $4.80, you have to get your phone out first and calculate to see if you can actually buy it, cause there is tax on top of it…

After leaving Chicago that morning, I turned on the radio to a show called “Truth for Life” and listened to a preacher. It was about raising children according to the bible. That guy was suggesting that parents ask their kids certain questions at an early age and give them the answers straight away; questions like “How did Adam, the first man, come onto this Earth?” - “God created him”; “What did God create him from?” - “The dust of the soil”; “Why did Adam and Eva sin?” - “Because they ate the forbidden fruit that they were not supposed to eat”; “Does Adam’s original sin affect us today?” - “Yes, it does, we are born in a sinful condition”; “What can we do to escape this condition?” - “Nothing at all, but walk humbly on the side of God”; etc.

He pointed out that it was not important that their kids would eventually understand and reflect upon all that, they should rather get accustomed to these answers as truth, they should accept them and approve of them out of habit rather than reason and reflection, for this would be the only way to lead them to God and to keep them from rebellion. For every child, and this is where the sermon became really terrifying, is born under this sinful condition, and every typical expression of adolescence and individuality, every “I want to do what I want to do”, is nothing but an expression of every child’s corrupted nature. “No matter how cute they are”, he said, “they are evil”, and he started giving examples that would illustrate their corrupted nature, even before adolescent rebellion: their merciless crying, their insatiable hunger (greed!), and their insisting expressions of will (”Mom, I want ice cream!”).

At this point it became clear how much he despised children, how much he hated the fact that a baby is pooing and crying. For him, a baby was nothing more than a vegetable, a plant that needed strong guidance in its growth, for otherwise it would turn into weed. The priest was implicating that parents do not and shall not love their children for its own sake, but that they shall love God through their children, and thus put up with all the pooing and crying, because it is God’s will, because having children, and all the depraved physical measures that have to be taken to get pregnant in the first place, are the will of God. So according to his interpretation of the bible, children are just a carrier, just a medium, just a burden we have to put up with because God wants us to do so. We passed by a huge building, and there was a slogan and it read “you don’t need digital cable to tune into God”.

Rules and regulations, and a confidence in authority rather than reason - after listening to this sermon, I had a better understanding of where all this is stemming from. The influence and power of the Christian church and morality, which has declined rapidly since the days of enlightenment almost everywhere in Europe, is still so strong here that people are more used to authority, to abiding by rules and regulations, rather than following reason.

We got to Nashville late, but the sun was still up. It was freezing cold in Chicago and now within a matter of a few hours the heat had become almost unbearable. We watched all these people with crazy self-built bikes out in the streets while dining at a Mexican place across the street from the venue.

Then we went to this second hand clothing shop where they had more ridiculous pre-socialist clothes than in any second hand store in Berlin!

The venue was cool, with a nice courtyard where people could hang out outside and drink. Tonight it was clearly Kylesa’s crowd, and we were expecting that in the South. In the end it is our very first tour ever here and it’s amazing that in some places more than 150 people came out to see us, but it was clear that it would not always be like that. We had fun anyway.

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Main photo by Dennis Dolby