Saturday, October 6, 2012

Uppdelning

"Uppdelning" is the Swedish word Google Translate tells me best fits the English word for "breakdown".

I mentioned in my last post that if the tour can only go up from our first show, we were in a really great place. I should've checked myself.

Last night, after an absolutely killer show here in Göteborg, the drive to our hotel was interrupted when our GPS unit guided us to a narrow, dead-end road, perhaps blocked off in the time since the last update of our nav unit's software (the fact that it was dead-end not revealed to us by street signage). By the time we realized that our route was blocked, we were at least 50 yards down this one-way drive and staring a straight uphill reversal with a van-load of people and a trailer-load of band gear and merchandise right in the face.

Let me reiterate for emphasis: a Sprinter van, reversing uphill, with 8 band members, all of their luggage, and a trailer full of guitars, amps, drums, hardware, and close to 30 boxes of tour merch. And, oh yes, the clutch had already started to give off that familiar burning rubber aroma.

Long-story-short, by the time the next 15 or 20 minutes had gone by and we had finally managed to reverse ourselves out of our dead-end predicament, the clutch was all kinds of good & dead.

There we sat, in Göteborg, Sweden, with no idea as to how far away we were from our hotel or how long it would take someone to come and bail us out of our vehicular troubles.

After about an hour of our tour manager wheelin' and dealin' to try and get something, anything, figured out regarding either repair for the current van or just a good ol' fashioned replacement, a few of the members of the band decided to take matters into their own hands and go adventuring in search of shelter at about 1:30 in the AM. After a surreal, video game-like experience that included consulting maps, reading building numbers, using codes to unlock doors, getting hotel room keys from mailboxes (the hotel staff having both given us a code to gain entry and stashing our room keys for us due to the late hour), and snacking on mysterious, untouched pizza in the lobby, the task force from our band revealed to the rest of us that the hotel we had booked was only about a 10-minute walk away from where the van had finally come to rest.

So those of us who stayed at the van loaded up and headed on down the road and finally got to bed at around 2:30 in the morning. Our tour manager worked all night to try to procure a replacement or an overnight repair, but to no avail. As it stands right now, at the writing of this blog post, the mechanics, who at one point this morning told us it might take as little as two hours to fix our van's ailments, are now informing us that they can't even find the proper part required for the repair. Where once we were hoping to possibly be wheels-up and rollin' by around 3:00 or 4:00, aiming for a late soundcheck and possibly delayed doors but still a full band performance, it's now looking like tonight's show in Malmö will be a T-Ward acoustic performance, as our fearless leader will most likely rent a car and drive, while the rest of us wait for the van to be fixed.

Welcome to touring. I guess. Always a something.

But, it could be worse. Much, much worse. We might have been too far away from our hotel to ever reach it by foot. We all might have been unable to get to our luggage after the breakdown and be stuck without any of our stuff. No one's hurt. No one's lost. Just exhausted.

But, the show must go on, folks. And go on, it will. Throw up some prayers for us and we'll see you all soon. Well, some of us, anyway. The rest of us will get there eventually.

In the meantime, here's something cool.

This tour's arsenal.
 

2 comments:

  1. Oh my... shit happens! Did ypu make it to Malmö in time?
    See you in Zürich! And Bern... and Lausanne... and Bremen... and Hamburg... :o)

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  2. Haha, I wouldn't say Uppdelning is the best translation of Breakdown, Uppdelning is more like if you basicly break down something into pieces, like to scrutinize it. A more correct word would be "kollaps" as in collapse. :D Anyway we say Breakdown here in sweden to, because we don't have a better word for it!

    Thanks so much for the concert in Malmö! I totally loved it and you all were great! It didn't seem as if you were tired, you were totally awesome!! Thank you so much it was a great, great, great evening and so nice to see your live!

    Love what you do!! <3 <3

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