On the road with Gerhardt pt. 1

This is me recovering some of the alcohol-soaked, blurry memories from the past two months of touring...

So, we've been traversing the plains of The Netherlands in a van to bring our gospel to pop venues, dive bars, festivals, theatres, discotheques and what have you. It's the Gerhardt funky soultrain to pop paradise, and it's catching on. Without the funky soul part, that is.

Starting the tour off with new axeman Bernard on the electric sixstring, everything was fresh and new. Over the course of very few rehearsels we quickly established that we were heading in the right direction. More focused and motivated than ever before, we played our first string of dates. Just one gig in, during a hailstorm at Magneetfestival, my bass malfunctioned and I had to find one to borrow. Great. Luckily we had very little technical fuck-ups, just challenges. We had the honour of opening the Popronde festival in Nijmegen in a very nice little coffee place were we did an impromptu, highly improvisational semi-acoustic thingy. It worked out great! We later repeated it in Den Bosch at a promo-gig at a community college. Somehow when we're not too focused on cues and arrangements, things fall into place. In that sense, Gerhardt's songs seem to work best when you just play them without a lot of fuss about it. Simplicity really ís a virtue, I guess.

(this one's shit soundwise, but fun to watch)

Another impressive notion was the fact we were travelling to all these rather quaint towns I hardly ever been before, such as Zwolle, Maastricht and Deventer. I was rather smitten by so many charming historical city centres. We didn't see much of it though, as more often than not we were playing several gigs a day just to cover our costs. So my most vivid memories touring are from the van and the gas stations we frequently visit just to stuff our faces with whatever's available (the big ass meatballs coming back from Rotterdam deserve special mention here). I'm usually not the type for spending any lenght of time with people stuck in the same room. Thankfully thankfully I'm surrounded by hilariously unfunny jack-offs in this band, and we get along quite well.

In the last few weeks we had the pleasure of playing at the NS Tryout Festival, organised by the Dutch railways as a polite thank you to their customers for continuing to keep up with them (at least, I reckon this must be the case). As it turns out, it was incredibly well organised, and they were very keen on the time schedule (oh, the irony...). Despite the sometimes challenging acoustics in the room, we managed to pull it off quite well. Especially our gigs at the trainstation in Arnhem were a joy, selling and signing over 20 cd's on the first day and ending up late for our second gig of the evening because of it (it's a hard knock life, yes it is...). Lastly, I have to mention the fun time we had in Gerhardt's second home of Hoorn playing at the Pop @ Het Park festival in the local theatre. They've got an interesting little scene going on there, with Tim Knol and Beans & Fatback (Gerhardt's 'other band')

my mother made this one... big fan.

(I actually forgot to mention... we were on TV too! Quite a memorable nighttime thing, playing to people who were trying to break the world record watching TV)

As it is, we've had some 20+ gigs under our belts in 7 weeks. Definitely a crazy amount in such a short time, but I must admit we're faring pretty well. People seem to like the energy that we're emanating from the stage, and we're honing the songs with every performance. Now, we're having a short break before returning to the road for our last string of Popronde dates. I'm definitely looking forward to getting back on stage with these guys, and playing some of the new songs we've been working on...