By Anne
Of course touring is incredibly glamorous: The accolades, the fans storming the clubs, the heaps of money that the big record companies are throwing at us … oh, sorry, I was just snoozing in the car on the way to the airport.
All in all we have had a good trip through the blumen park show. We have repacked the car with the p.a. just in case
and are ready, if a little reluctant, to drive back and forth over the same route from Austria to Germany for the next four days. Sometimes that is how a tour gets routed: according to which shows are available. We have all toured before, and are aware of this reality. They are also not the best-paying shows, which is okay as they seem like clubs that have a good attitude toward the kind of music we play.
The first of these great clubs is an actual folk club that has been around for 25 years in the city of Villingen.
Michael and Erbse were our hosts with the most at the Scheuer Folk Club.
They treated us to a great meal (Andy says it was the best meal of the tour: beef steak with herbed butter, potato croquettes, broccoli, noodles, a salad, wine and beer and coffee, yeah, it was pretty darn good) with great hospitality.
The next day we wandered about the coolest city market that we’ve ever seen before heading back across Switzerland to
Scharnitz, a tiny skiing town up in the mountains north of Innsbruck. Ritschi, our host at the Alte Muhle, fed us great pizza and showed us great hospitality.
There was even a parade after church the next day, though I don’t think it was for us. And our friend Doug who makes his home now in Prague showed up.
Then we went back across Switzerland along the same route to Villingen to the very fancy town of Schaffhausen, CH.
Technically we played in Feuerthalen, which is just across the Rhine and like a part of Schaffhausen except that they are in different states of CH. The club there is a place where One Fell Swoop played—the Dolder 2. It was a perfect place to end the trip. Our host Tom showed us great hospitality, and we got to do my favorite: play downstairs and sleep upstairs.
I got to stay up late, hanging out with the regulars, drinking a little of this and a little of that, which is always a fun thing to do at the end of a tour. The day after we walked around Schaffhausen and saw the castle, and then went to the Rheinfall, which is the largest waterfall in Europe and it was really pretty and neat.
So, all these clubs were great places run by wonderful people and we had accommodations and a great time, but … in Villingen, there were maybe 15 people, in Scharnitz less than 10 and at the Dolder 2 there were 9 — I know because I counted them as they came in.
The thing about each of these crowds was that they didn’t know what they were getting into with the show but trusted the judgment of their promoter and came anyway and they really enjoyed it and let us know. They were small but mighty, the audiences, and along with the nice folks putting on the shows, these great appreciators totally made the hassle of zigzagging worth it.
They liked being called “small but mighty,” too. We were all in the situation together, not knowing each other at the beginning of the evening and getting to know each other as it went along. I think a lot of them felt bad that there weren’t more folks there, but they really threw themselves into the experience; one woman summed it up by saying that it was like a private concert.
So, I hope that shatters the illusion that touring in Europe is all fancy and stuff. It is just as real as touring in the states. You have to worry about money, about where your next meal is coming from, about where you are going to sleep, about is anyone going to show up, about are they going to like it or not, about how you make the best of it even if you don’t agree with someone’s politics, and so on. It can be a challenge to not get demoralized by the kind of shows we had there at the end, but that is where a little experience can come in handy.