MANIFESTO JUKEBOX/WASTED TOUR DIARY 9.-26.3.00
by Jani under the influence of Get In The Van...

9.3.
I’m sick. Again. First time since the Endstand tour. Haven’t been able to get up from the bed for two days now. That’s it for preparing the distro and whatever. The first gig is in Helsinki, the Semifinal club, just like exactly 6 months before. Almost the same bands, except Janne screams with Mika, Joel and Jantte so they’re called Endstand instead of SpeedWheels.
It goes well, as expected. No advertising at all and the club is packed, about 150 people. Why bother. We need a decent gig place in Helsinki but there seems to be no hope. We rock out first, it’s OK, i’m not able to feel that much. Endstand destroy the place once again. Wasted suck, i wonder if people notice or are they as drunk as the band.

10.3.
We wake up at Jonte’s, go to some record shops are head for Turku for a photo shoot. It goes better than expected. Get to the club, bring the backline in… the back door of the van is fucked, we have to tie it with a rope and when it’s time to unload it’s pretty hard to open. The front door window on the driver’s side is fucked too, it won’t stay shut – bear in mind, in Finland a winter’s a Winter.
We’re hanging out backstage, Jenni the photographer rushes in. She too was ethustiastic about how the shooting went so she decided to delevop the films straight away. And… someone had mixed the liquids wrong at the place where she does her stuff. Result: Every single film ruined. So much for that. I fucking powdered my nose for nothing!
The show is OK, Wasted are way better than yesterday. We are last, OK again. Just OK. Not that many people really get what we’re about…

11.3.
We wake up at Janne’s about 7am, some have been drinking pretty late, not me cos i’m sick. Feeling better though. Janne was supposed to be the driver/distro guy but now he says he’s sick too. Whatever.
The ferry ride sucks as always. We have to start drinking, i feel way better. We hang out, nothing much. Not even karaoke.
In Stockholm we meet our Finnish friends and go for a falafel before the hellish drive ahead of us. Stupid – we are in Stockholm on a Saturday night and we can’t play anywhere, this sucks. We desperately tried to get any gig but no-one wanted us. And now we hear people at one club, where we had also asked, had talked like "Yeah the Finns are in Stockholm but they don’t want to play here, what’s up with them blah blah…"

12.3.
Sunday morning at the German border. We’re wearing spikes on our tires cos it’s impossible and illegal in Finland otherwise. But no, here it’s the other way around. We’re not allowed in. We drive to the parking lot next to the customs booth, take a knife and dig out the spikes one by none. Fine.
We arrive to Husum early and find the place quite easily, it’s a small town. I like it. Miikka walks in:"Hi, we’re Wasted, we’re hung over but soon we will be very drunk". Nice introduction.
Friendly atmosphere plus we get free beer straight away. It’s not even noon yet, don’t know if this is any good. Well the show starts early, it’s a Sunday matinee with a people’s kitchen kind thing. The food kicks ass!
We play with a band called Morbid Rage – what a name! They’re very young and have very little direction. Not that many people but what can you expect? OK gig for both of us. Over about 9pm. Very strange. I don’t know what time it is or even what day it is, i can’t sleep in the packed van so overnight drives really fuck me up. Nice evening though, the seven of us drank 125 bottles of beer. So we got paid quite well i think. And we got money too of course, more than they made i guess…

13.3.
Day off. The Seein Red guys said they’d try to get us a gig in Holland but i guess it didn’t work out. In the end this turned out to be a 15 hour drive, the 3 last of them were spent in Gent looking for the squat we were to stay at. Fucked up city for cars. Only Kalle and Jukka were awake, the rest of us, we had passed out after drinking a bottle of Mummelmann, a German hunting liquor each.

14.3.
The sight when i woke up was bit of a culture shock, the first night in a squat always is. It was colder than outside and there were 5 of us on one mattress.
It turned out to be a nice day after all, we went to a For Mother Earth restaurant, Miikka’s twin sister works there! We also had to take the van to a repair shop – it ate so much oil and when we start it, the whole neighborhood is covered in a cloud of black smoke. Didn’t help at all, lost plenty of money.
The venue Frontline looked a bit Metal but turned out to be nice, we slept upstairs. Not too many people, again. But a good gig, let out all the anguish that was building up inside. Or at least some of it. Easy evening, not that drunk. Ville was vomiting blood as a result of the Mummelmann session.

15.3.
Went to visit Bruno Genet in his record store nearby Frontline but he didn’t have time for us. Drove to Kortrijk. The venue, Pit’s, is so cool. So small. And everyone has played there. Today… 9 people came! 9 people… and again we drank as much as we possibly could. I can’t believe how nice these people are.

16.3.
Drove to Liege to hang out and meet our record label guy Alain for the first time. We mostly sat in our own table drinking, looking at the cans and occasionally speaking Finnish. This is what we normally do. Antisocial. The Finnish way. It was nice though, and the people were friendly. Sleeping sucked but what can you do.

17.3.
La Zone in Liege is such a cool place! Quite big venue but still run in a collective way. And we got to play with Unhinged, one of my favorite European bands. Did they rock or what?! One of the best gigs i’ve ever been on. This includes our set too – we played every song we could and some we couldn’t. One of the best nights in my life.

18.3.
Drove to Lille, France. This was the low point of the tour for me. Everyone and i don’t mean us now – yet - was so fucked up on drugs, booze, whatever. Spoke nothing but French. Something just was so wrong.
We pleyed first, some people had followed us all the way from Liege and were a bit diappointed. Wasted was second, during their set my bass amp died. That’s it.
Then a third band, Dirty Scums. We heard this was their 18th year anniversary gig. I’m out of words. Nothing has ever sucked so bad, so total bullshit, i couldn’t ever have imagined anything like this could continue for so long. At least two hours. The worst part is someone shouted to them, "Go back to Finland!" Fuck if someone thought that’s MJ i’ll… either shoot that guy or myself. Or, what would be the right thing to do, the Dirty Scums. I drank as much booze and smoked as much dope as i possibly could in shortest time i could and went to sleep.

19.3.
My body is fucked up from last night…and it’s not nice to shit in the toilets they have around here, they’re mostly broken. I guess all these people are well adjusted but we can’t help it, we’re not. Liege was the funniest – we went for a walk and tried to find a street with some cafes and pubs and soon as we could. When someone saw one, he ran inside and the others had to curse and wait cos we didn’t know where the fuck we were… and then running for the next one… Not funny.

We drive to Paris, i expect it to be a high point of the tour. We find the place easier than i thought. A really nice squat, nice closed inner yard. The gig is great too, though it gets a bit rough in the crowd, that’s actually unusual for us, we have to play some country music to calm them down. I like country, maybe this should happen more often. Afterwards we drive around Paris in some hippie van trying to find a pub. A great evening.

20.3.
Yes! It’s full on summer and we go to the Eiffel tower with Boris La Fraction, most of us are suckers for this kind of things, we have fun. We go to a cafe where Magalie from L.F. works. We’d like to just hang out, lay in the sun, eat baguette and cheese, drink red wine… all this stuff you’re supposed to do when in France. Somehow we end up driving around Paris at the rush hour and spending the rest of the day looking for i don’t know what. Fuck. That’s how it goes.

21.3.
There’s a hen in the squat. It’s been sitting in the same chair since we got there, she ate some dope. Not good. Now she moves around a bit.
We drive to Liege. I hear from Janne that the new Wasted LP’s are due to some misunderstanding now in Husum, Germany instead of Finland. 1000 LPs at some place that has nothing to do with them. I don’t know how to handle this at all.
When we get to Liege we see the people drinking outside the squat. Well it was a nice day indeed so… but that’s not the reason as it turns out, the house is full of smoke. They run for Alain who lives nearby. Something’s wrong with the stove or something. We go to Alain’s place to cook some pasta and then to sleep.

22.3.
Hamburg. Not exactly a short drive but we make it well in time. The venue Onkel Otto is near Reeperbahn so we have to check that out, not very thoroughly though. I couldn’t believe how aggressive the girls were, i guess they have to in order to survive but anyway.
The gig was OK for us, best of the tour for Wasted. The opening band was almost as bad as Dirty Scums, they are the second worst band i’ve seen. I won’t give them any publicity here. We met many Finnish people, so many it was really weird. We even met a girl that Antti Wasted used to keep swimming lessons with as a kid in a little village in East Finland!

23.3.
Last chance to buy cheap booze so we load up. The van was painfully packed already, but when the unbelieveable amounts of alcoholic beverages were in, there seemed to be more space than before. Is this stuff the only way to motivate us to arrange anything?
Undomshuset in Copenhagen is in my opinion one of the coolest places on earth. And nothing has changed. The place, the people, the food, the stage, the sound, everything rules. It’s funny, for some reason it read on the poster that we are from San Francisco, US?!
Well, despite this not so many people show up but we’re used to it. Good feeling though and the distro does well for change.
At around midnight we almost lose it. A German guy who came here with us lost the car keys when he was stoned and wanted to go to the van to pick up some food. No sign of them. Good night.

24.3.
It’s about noon when the keys are finally found somewhere. So we’re off to Sweden, for the last gig. We can’t believe our eyes when we arrive, we heard it’s a small village… and it literally is! Very young people, no alcohol allowed… bit of a culture shock after the decadent squat life! Can’t there be anything in between? All the squatters seem to be so drunk and stoned all the time, i couldn’t take that for longer periods of time, i but can’t take this swedish way either. Well actually i think Copenhagen just might be the ideal combination!
Despite this the show is good, very enthustiastic people. The gig ends early and they all go home, leaving us to the gigplace all by ourselves. We go to sleep early too. Now it’s over, why do we have to be so far from home?

25.3.
The drive to Stockholm always sucks, this is no exception. We get there early enough to go for some falafels. The night ferry rules, at least when compared to the day ferry. We go to sauna and all, then some heavy drinking til very early hours. This is it.

26.3.
The ferry arrives very early. We’re still asleep but luckily someone wakes us up. So, to Janne’s for a cup of coffee to survive the drive home. It’s freezing. Please let me go back, i was just getting warmed up. I wish we could tour more.

<-BACK TO THE TEXT