I’m relaxing in Fabien’s apartment while the guys are having a Wii tournament with our buddy and his girlfriend Stef. Their flat is very nice and its in a great part of Bordeaux. We went out tonight and splurged on a fancy French meal, which included Foie Gras, Salmon, and some of the biggest steaks I’ve ever seen. Great wine as well. A fabulous recommendation from Fab!
When I left off last I was telling you about our first few days in France, so we’ll go back in time a bit to Fredo (of Spudgun) and Muriel’s home. These are two of the nicest people on Earth, so it is no surprise that we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. They cooked a great meal for us and we were able to return the favor the next night. Our second show, it turned out, had been canceled. This was a bit sad, but these things happen. Enter Eddie, our driver…
Eddie showed up and found out that the show in Nantes had been canceled, and spoke quite a bit of French to our buddy Fredo. I guess the gist of it was that Eddie “doesn’t like to have a night off.” This spirit was very evident with Eddie right away. He got on the phone to all of his contacts and tried to get a show going for us on Monday night. After literally hours of phone calls to old contacts and cold calls to clubs, Eddie was forced to give up. Nobody would pick up their phone after 2am anyway. He resumed his efforts in the morning. It is rare to have someone do that much work for your band, let alone someone who had never met you before. No show was secured, however we became fast friends with Eddie.
The next night, our show in Rennes looked like it was going to suffer the same fate. The opening band had to cancel because of a family emergency and we were left without a PA. Eddie pulled up to the club and began shaking hands with people. This guy seemed to know everybody in France. Within an hour he had rented us a PA system and we experienced our first show away from Bordeaux. It started off a bit shaky. Whenever someone tells us that we can’t play too loud it usually means that we’re going to sound like shit. Somehow, with the help of Eddie, we were able to make it work. The room filled up with people throughout our 2 hour set (which included mostly originals and a couple of Police tunes that we had saved from past performances). Jim crushed Silent Treatment and Roxanne despite his cold (he spent the first week or so under the weather). King Eddie took care of all food/money/beer affairs while we met some cool people in Rennes. We stayed at our friends from Pleyad’s cool pad, which had robot shades.
After that we were off to Paris. We tried to relate to Eddie in English, and he learned very quickly. In almost no time at all he was telling the same juvenile jokes that we always rely on in the back of the van to keep spirits up. Gross sex stuff and farting are universally funny I guess.
We loaded into the Rocher (The Rock) in Malakoff, just outside of Paris, and met the owners who were very nice but spoke no English. Eddie translated for us and organized the load in and the order of the bands. First Part arrived, and brought some great food which the singer’s sister Lauren had made. Cyril, the singer of First Part had organized the show and we stayed with him for two days. He was a very cool guy, and his band ruled. The turnout was pretty good for the show and people seemed to dig the Harris set. We were still getting used to the equipment but we worked out a lot of kinks that night and over all the set felt like it was starting to come together.
