TheOXBOW.com: OXBOW - Trouble That Will Trouble The World

Tour Diary: 1995 > Page 3

Austria

Great, scary, colossal...everything I expected Germany to be actually. Hitler was Austrian and when we listen to the radio on the way to the show everybody sounds like Hitler to us. Big black eagles and carved sculptures of vultures and mountin castles...it is a wild fucking country.

I want to take some acid but decide this country might want to keep me a permanent pyschic visitor.

We do a radio show and talk about the gig. It is desired on radio shows andin magazines like this one that you display a certain modicum of wit and easy-going personality but the reality of it is that the most coherent expression of who it is that we are comes across in either the live show or the recorded product and while we might actually BE witty and easy-going on occasion that has very little to do with where we really are with our music. Some interviewer said, you seem so normal in real life but onstage you re really different, are you acting onstage? I told him the only acting I was doing was the interview I was doing with him and there we were ACTING like we like being interviewed and his bullshit attempt to find out what we were really like was doomed to fail because we re much bigger assholes than we feel comfortable letting people know we are. Anyway, the interviewed ended and we went to the club.

The show was at this club under the street and looked like Trent Reznor's bedroom (schlafzimmer) and the club slowly filled as we played. No opening bands just us. It was a good show. Nobody got physically hurt and people seemed to groove on what we were doing. After the show this woman, Dagmar came up to me and asked me about my penis...do you view it as a weapon? she asked. We start talking about how my penis is really just a symbol for my penis...the cause and the cure for all of my life's great difficulties and the key to the mysteries of love. Her boyfriend comes up starts yammering at her in German and stalks off. She tells me he doesn't understand her. We try to meet at a bar later on but we get lost in wonderful Vienna, it rains, and then we're lost walking in the rain and looking at the hookers who have chosen a really hard way to make money and don t get to bed until 5 in the morning.

Wels

This band from NY opens for us. They're touring through Europe in a car picking up shows as they go. We leave them huddled around the food tray talking quietly. When we return they're involved in a full blown fistfight, stopping only briefly as we enter. 'Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you...' 'I know you like me but is that all you can say?' 'FUCK YOU!!!' They leave. They play and are not as horrible as their earlier behavior might have indicated. We play and the crowd likes us. Back to Germany.

Berlin

Cool place. Good bands. The promoter who declares we are 'vollgeil' which could mean just about anything to me.

We are interviewed by two or three different magazines and I am asked 2 or 3 times if I like to fuck white women...and only once was this question asked BY a white woman.

I asked them what their grandparents did during the war and this seemed to quiet down their race interrogation down a bit. After the show the promoter takes me and Ivan Manuel to the top of this tower and talks to us for about 20 minutes about life, his favorite bands, his club and grabbing my hand begs us to come back. I tell him we definitely will and wonder briefly if he's going to try and kill me on the way back down.

Hannover

Another great place. We stay with some great people and put on a good show and have a great West Indian meal cooked by their West Indian cook.

Horst

Back in Holland. The show is at this small community center and by the sight of all the spiky mohawks I know they re going to get something they don't expect...and they do...they get us.

Hildesheim

We record a cut for a split 7-inch with the dearly departed H-Oilers. We try to get over to the Scorpions hometown but it's no go. We do get to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and whilst walking through it Tom is waxing philosophical and saying that isn't it good that we actually seem to be beyond this kind of barbarity (strangely optimistic for Tom) and right at that point the US military base starts having artillery and heavy machine gun trials a few hundred yards away. Tom says fuck this world and busies himself with trying to pick up the girls from some youth group on a field trip. I think his mood was ruined by the reminder that we are still fucking animals. Waiting until he finds out that I shit in his lunch bag. We record this song Brujita for the 7 inch with this guy Stefan. It sounds good. We leave.