Streetlight-Stories, Teil III

05.05.02 – Berlin

“It’s not so early in the morning, I’m sitting across a table filled with bowls of cornflakes, watching a pasty white Christian Leibfried prepare some medicine to help ease his lungs cause he’s been coughing up blood all nite and morning. He fell off a high stage last nite at Columbia Fritz here in Berlin, during his ill guitar solo in “Broken”. Lucky for him there was no one to catch his fall, so he could feel the full impact of the hardwood floor on his spine.

Let me just say that weeks of no sleep added with very physical performing, post show packing up and reloading of heavy equipment at 2 a.m. every nite, mixed with a healthy tonic of whiskey, beer and absinthe (every nite for a few weeks), can start to make you feel a bit un-flower-like. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining I love every minute of touring here in Europe – it’s just that this particular morning I feel like a rabid rhinoceros has shit a pile of cancer into the base of my skull (thanks again Arne, for the absinthe).

The tour has been amazing! Every show the band has been playing like it’s our last nite on earth (except for me in Frankfurt – when I stupidly drank a gang of whiskey before the show – barely hanging on in a drunken stupor while we played). The energy from the audiences has been unbelievable! It totally feeds the band and pushes us to open up in the songs.

We played for almost two and a half hours in Karlsruhe, ending the set with a jam loosely based on a riff from an old Mother Tongue song called “Sista Sunshine”. We’ve been playing a lot of songs from our first record on this tour. Most of those songs we haven’t played in years. Playing them now on this tour, has brought a freshness and excitement to those song’s that I haven’t felt in a long time. Especially in “Vesper”, “Broken”, “Sheila’s Song” and “Venus Beach”. We’ve even been playing songs that we’ve been working on for our next record; “Alien”, “Junior Got Shot”, “Music For Her” and “Call Me”. That’s been exciting and fun.

Today is going down in the Mother Tongue tour bible as the ‘holiest’ day of the tour – today is laundry day!!! Let me tell you, putting on a pair of jeans that are still sopping wet with sweat from the nite before is – pure nirvana. And of course, everybody knows that the biggest girl magnet is a band of guys that stink of smoke, sweat, booze and blood (mmmmmm, yummy)! Here’s a rock n roll question: What’s the difference between a mummified corpse and our hunky drummer, Kasey Chatilla? Not much, except that one only rises from the dead to play a show. Goddamn that boy can sleep !!! (Note to all girls: shows are not the only thing that raises Kasey from the dead).

When he’s not writing screenplay ideas like,”The Muppets meet the Excorcist”, David Gould spends his time on tour: E-mailing his family, practicing tae kwon do on various doors and furniture (and band members), watching ‘CNN’, laughing at the contorted faces of pain that Christian always seems to have after we play, and plotting with me on ways to secretly cut Christians long hair. I on the other hand, like to spend my offstage time studying the ancient practice of sex majik, listening to DJ Shadow, wrapped in my ouija print robe, enclosed in my black rabbit fur lined coffin in the back of the van, (hey Dirk, thanks again for the CD).

Tonight we play Leipzig – that is if our amazing tour manager Leo Wehling hasn’t died from exhaustion.

Ciao, Bryan Tulao”