+++ 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. Here’s the second installment… +++

5/30 Charlotte, NC, Tremont Music Hall

After another long drive we arrived at the huge Tremont Music Hall in the late afternoon. We set up our lights and hung out outside, while Mike was getting some free ink by the guys from Liberty Tattoo, who had offered their services prior to the show via MySpace… awesome people! There was a good crowd and the show was fun. We slept in the RV in the backyard of the venue until about 8 AM, when it got too hot.

Mike getting ink in front of our RV in Charlotte:

5/31 Atlanta, GA, Masquerade

Christian emo fans getting corrupted by members of The Ocean:

When we got to the place, there was a bunch of young girls waiting outside in front of the venue. Our faces lit up… had we finally made it? Had we progressed from a filthy rock band that draws filthy buffalo-hip chicks and long-haired metal dudes into…something else…that draws hot teens? Someone eventually told us that there was another show happening upstairs, some bands we had never heard of before were playing in a large room, and that someone described the style of music as “Christian emo.” So we embarked on a mission to try to convert as many of these lost teens to the cult of the Ocean, and won a good handful over, by offering them free guest list spots. These poor Christian emo girls didn’t really seem to understand what was happening to them when Withered unleashed their black metal thunderstorm.

Chris from Withered playing bike guitar:

Tonight was gonna be the last show with these guys who had become brothers in a matter of a few days, and we were all rocking out to their awesome set. Luckily, we were allowed upstairs, so we could eat all that Christian emo food and drink their Christian emo whiskey. The first band sounded like a terribly corrupted version of Mars Volta. But hey, these guys drew some 500 kids; there’s gotta be something to them.

Atlanta street party:

We drank a lot of J.D. and had a cool show. Afterwards we went out with Kylesa, Withered and Lair of the Minotaur to eat and party one last time. It was impossible to sleep in the RV tonight, the moist heat was unbearable. I took my sleeping bag and laid down outside in the parking lot, but even with the sleeping bag it was just too fucking hot. I took off my shirt and used my sleeping bag as a mattress, and still sweat was pouring from my forehead. It didn’t get any better. In the end I found peace sleeping in underwear in the parking lot, worried only that rats would come after my genitals.

Our drummer Luc, who doubles as the Venus de Milo:

6/1 Orlando, FL, Back Booth

We woke up completely beat and left really early to be at the venue at 5PM, as we were told, and when we got there no one was there. On the way we had passed Jacksonville, the city where I had my first real-life encounter with America in 1996. As a 16-year-old, I spent about one year of my life in this city as an exchange student, going to high school and living with an American host family, made up of a dude and his daughter. The dude was a nice but boring character, whose life can be summed up in a few words: work, Burger King, Seinfeld, weed and football on the weekends. His daughter was a much more interesting type: a diehard Christian who had devoted herself to an enlightened life serving God, and trying to baptize all eclipsed existences around her with a passion: her Dad appeared to be the only lost soul she had given up on.

She was engaged in aggressive agitation endeavors, including visitations at random people’s homes several days a week, missionary trips to the Philippines, etc. Me, getting big-time into Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy at that time, and her, completely denying the theory of evolution and conceiving of evidence of the dinosaurs as a coup of mad scientists possessed by the devil, were certainly not the best match. But somehow I felt sympathy for her, and I had the feeling I needed to save her just as much, or maybe even more, than she needed to save me. I sent her a copy of our recent album Precambrian the other day, as a reminder that the earth is more than 2000 years old…

Orlando:

The Orlando show was awesome. A good crowd turned up and celebrated all the bands that were playing, and everyone had a big smile on his face that night. I jumped off Luc’s kick-drum at the end of “Queen of the Food-Chain” and slammed my guitar a little harder on the floor than intended, and the headstock broke off. My new Les Paul. I couldn’t believe it. This is the 5fth time I broke a guitar, it’s just getting too expensive.

RV aftershow party:

It was the first night that we met our agent Dan Rozenblum, the coolest guy in all of Florida; a bright, exhilarating character with a permanent smile on his face and a strong Argentinean temper. He was going to spend the next two days away from his wife and with us, and must have transformed into a steaming party-machine already on the way down to the venue before we even met. That guy taught us a lesson and woke us up from the stupor that comes with tours that drag on for too long.

We have gotten used to playing shows every night for more than 2 months now, with all the drinking, partying and meeting new people it involves. He, on the contrary, enjoyed every single minute like a kid on his first day of summer vacation, infecting everyone around him with his joy and passion. I had to think of my host-sister again: this guy had everything she was missing in her feeble attempts to convert people to what she believed to be righteousness and truth: the fire, the passion, the joy, the power to win people for a cause. This man was a true preacher, only that the object of his sermons was carpe diem, rather than sacrifice your life here and now for an afterlife! I fell for his teachings.

Lair of the Ocean’s Kylesa, feat. Scott from Bloodlet and Dan Rozenblum, the perpetuum-mobile party machine:

As the night unfolded, our RV, parked right in front of the venue, had eventually turned into a drug laboratory on wheels, and it took way too long to get everyone ready to go, but we eventually had to leave around 2 AM to go to Tampa for an early-morning radio show. We were speeding all the way, but missed the show by about 20 minutes. However, the girl who was running the following show acknowledged that we had come all the way from Europe to make it to her show and gave us a good half hour of her time to do the interview.

At the radio studio with Arielle:

She didn’t know much about the band so we could pretty much just talk bullshit all the time, creating myths and legends, and playing Melvins songs in between the talks. It was fun.

Dan, who had followed us in his car, took us to the Tampa promoter’s place where we arrived around 6.30 AM. After the sleepless night in the Atlanta parking lot, a night in an air-conditioned house was the most luxurious cream dream.

6/2 Tampa, FL, Brass Mug

We woke up around 1 and Dan took us to the beach in Clearwater. The water wasn’t so clear, but the glistering white color of the sand was truly amazing. After a gorgeous lunch at the beach and some Jägermeister shots that made us feel like home, we decided to sacrifice the sound check for a little more beach-time. Dan kept supplying us with all the good things that make life fun, and then everyone jumped into the water and we took some silly band pictures. The sea was full of fish, seagulls were chasing after the fish and we were chasing after the seagulls… almost got to catch one in mid-air!

The Ocean in the ocean:

We got to the venue just in time to set up our lights, before the first band was about to play. There were a bunch of people hanging out outside and more kept showing up; in the end it was a good 150 kids by the time Lair was up. Kylesa played the best show I have seen them play on this tour so far, they were on fire tonight and completely destroyed the place. It was hard to play after them.

Some kids were practicing their moron dances while we were playing, which eventually ended up in a fight over a spilled cup of beer or something…funny. The last time I was at a show in Tampa, there was a huge fight as well. That was 12 years ago. I went to see Earth Crisis, and during their performance some kids were yelling at them from the back of the room, provoking them about their vegan lifestyles. Karl Büchner jumped headfirst into the crowd to hunt these kids down, and the rest of the band followed only seconds later. Turmoil broke out, there were screams and flying fist everywhere and then Büchner jumped back up on the stage, screaming “Show me your face! Show me your face!” over and over again.

After more than 30 hours of non-stop partying, powered by the perpetuum mobile party-machine and Dan Rozenblum, I was so exhausted that I just fell asleep in the RV after the show.

6/3 Tallahassee, FL, Beta Bar

Jona’s beard had been growing for weeks and it had gotten to the point now where he looked like Abraham Lincoln. He had made a vow to himself a while ago that he would not shave until he got laid. Apparently, the denser the forest of facial pubes became, the more difficult it would be to achieve that goal, so it was kind of a vicious circle he had gotten himself into here. However, the next morning, he was shaved clean like a baby, and a black bra was hanging in our RV above his bunk, like a hunter’s trophy…

Lair of the Minotaur, Kylesa, The Ocean:

We woke up around 1 and got to Tallahassee late. We weren’t expecting much from this show, Tallahassee is a college town and school was out, but in the end it turned out to be an amazing show. A lot of kids knew the lyrics and despite there being no more than 60 or 70 kids, there was a high energy level from the beginning to the end of the show. We drank 2 huge bottles of this nice Whiskey that I can’t remember the brand anymore to celebrate the last night with Kylesa, Took some group shots with the whole tour party and said farewell to everyone… too many goodbyes on this tour! We crashed in the RV again, until the heat woke us up at about 8 AM.

6/4 Metairie, LA, The High Ground

After crossing from the tip of the panhandle of Florida into Alabama, from Alabama into Mississippi and from Mississippi into Louisiana, we were approaching New Orleans in the late afternoon. The sun was hanging low above the horizon as we crossed a few huge bridges over the brown-colored water of the Mississippi delta. Plenty of topless trees on the road sides reminded us of the fact that Katrina had devastated this area only two short years ago. The show was in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans. We played basketball in the parking lot as the first band played and had some typical New Orleans style sandwiches for dinner. It was an all-ages show tonight, and clearly a totally different audience from the last couple of nights. It’s always fun playing to teens though, and we had a really good show.

We loaded out quickly after the show and headed into downtown New Orleans. I was more than excited to get there. I had an idea of this city as being a unique place in America, shaped by Creole and French culture, a melting-pot of different races, flavors, odors, colors, music and languages, with a touch of voodoo and awesome blues-bands playing in cozy bars.

New Orleans street team:

What we found in the heart of New Orleans, the French quarter, reminded me more of the infamous ‘Ballermann’ beach strip on the Spanish island of Mallorca - a place where thousands of mentally retarded German football hooligans flock to escape from the misery and boredom of their daily lives for two weeks in the summer, to get mad drunk and do, well, basically nothing else than what they normally do at home, only in a setting that involves palm trees and beaches: eat, drink, fight and fuck.

“In late capitalism, culture-industrial amusement is nothing but the elongation of everyday life,” Adorno stated in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and nowhere does it become more evident than in places like the ‘Ballermann’, or New Orleans. Strip clubs, daiquiri bars, pizza places and a drunken party crowd dominate the French quarter. The most exciting thing here seems to be the fact that you can openly drink in the streets, without having to fear getting arrested. This is nothing special for us at all, since you can drink in the streets almost anywhere in Europe, so we were quite disappointed. It’s not that we didn’t have a good time, trying out all the daiquiris and these crazy drinks called ‘hand grenades’ that get you shitfaced in no-time—it’s just that I had expected more from this city than a commercial party mall…more exciting things, more authenticity, more blues, more voodoo. We went to Hustler’s and Mike and Nico got a deal on private dances. Happy faces.

Hand grenades:

Some time in the early morning hours we left Sin City to go to Baton Rouge, where we would stay with Nico’s cousin Belinda. It was light when we got to the huge house, and Belinda started making waffles for us. This place fulfilled every cliché that Europeans have about America: everything here was not only oversized, but super-oversized. The fridge was a building by itself; you could probably sleep in there. The kitchen stove was enormous, with six massive burners. The double beds could easily sleep four people. I fell asleep in the kitchen while eating my second waffle.

6/5 Baton Rouge, LA - Day Off

We woke up around 2 and Belinda took us on the back of her truck to her sister’s place, where we spent the afternoon in the pool, playing water volleyball with kids and taking silly pictures. Jeffrey, Belinda’s husband, had an obsession with trucks. In his garage and yard, there was a huge monster truck, a jeep with giant wheels, three or four quads, a golf-cart, a couple of bikes and about 10 other cars and trucks.

Hillie-Billie truck rednecks:

In the late afternoon sun, we raced with the quads through the yard and garden, and later Jeffrey took us out to a field where we took some hillbilly redneck pictures with his monster truck. As the sun was about to set, we went in his jeep to the levee, from where you had awesome views of the labyrinth of tributaries of the Mississippi river. We drove slowly along the top of the levee and spotted for alligators. It was getting very dark and all we saw were bubbles in the water, but it was beautiful nonetheless.

Face-lifted by the wind

Watching out for alligators in the Mississippi river:

I cooked a huge pan of veggies in peanut-sauce for dinner, and we were all pretty tired after a day in the sun and wanted to go to sleep, but we had to keep our promise and go out with Jeffrey to the local strip club. His wife not only approved of it, but seemed to be quite happy that he had finally found some company to do what a man’s gotta do.

The most disgraceful strip club on earth:

Unfortunately we didn’t know that the strip club was in the middle of nowhere, more than an hour away from the house. We crossed the Mississippi on a ferry, under an amazing sky full of stars, and another half hour later we got to the strip club. The place was an utter disgrace. Three terribly bored chicks were stripping for a bunch of truckers. They had the sex appeal of mules (the strippers, not the truckers), and supported that impression by occasionally clapping their shoes against one another, like hoofs.

Golden shower:

One girl fell off the pole while pursuing what was meant to be an erotic dance, it would have been hilarious if it weren’t such a disgrace. Jeffrey was happy though, and after half an hour of trying to look away as much as possible, we finally went back to the house for some well-earned rest…