12 September 2010

We face a ten hour trip from Trondheim,
Norway to Eindhoven, Holland (2 planes, a train, and cars). We get to
the venue at 7:30pm, which is inside a huge, formerly abandoned Philips
building, and contains a number of art installations, and chaos ensues.
We carry all our luggage and equipment up 3 long flights of …stairs,
told there isn’t an elevator (only to find out later that they had
one); none of the mics are in place for the PA or for the radio
recording that’s supposed to happen, so everything needs to be set up
for both bands’ soundchecks in a very limited amount of time; no coffee,
no food, no WATER, until it’s requested; we’re told that dinner was
supposed to be at 7pm even though the organizers knew in advance we
wouldn’t be to the venue until 7:30, they still want us to eat somehow
before the shows starts and after our soundchecks even though the
concert is supposed to start at 9:30pm, we have to request to eat
afterwards (thankfully they were able to finally drag a bag of snacks up
the flights of stairs, with some coffee and a couple boxes of water);
the radio engineer and sound buy celebrex overnight techs won’t take care of mic’ing the V5
correctly while we try and soundcheck in 10 minutes, no one is willing
to take responsibility who’s in charge of this, so we do it ourselves;
we have to keep changing the set list because the organizers keep
changing how long we’re supposed to play; the room has a five and a half
second delay- if you ever wondered with the Vandermark 5 would sound
like if Phil Spector produced us you needed to be in Eindhoven on the
12th… Thankfully, the audience was great and supportive. The situation
was so absurd it became humorous, until we headed to the hotel after
dinner and it turned out that our reservations were made for the
previous date so they had been canceled because we were “a day late.”
So, at 1:30am, about 16 hours after leaving Trondheim, we were still
searching for rooms. Well, the music was excellent; and we had a day off
following. Some of us celebrated by going to hear Ab Baars solo and the
Ex in Tilburg- absolutely great! This will give you a sense of the
“acoustics” in Eindhoven, an excerpt from “Leap Revisited,”