The Patronaat, where we played in Haarlem Friday night, has three stages. We played in the smaller of the three and were not nearly as popular a draw as the teenage disco happening in the main arena. Outside was packed with teenagers, young teenagers, like 14 and 15 year olds, all of whom had arrived at the venue by bicycle.
Mad viper is a full rock and roll band, and while we waited for them to finish their sound check I so wanted to grab their spare electric guitar and get on stage with them and SHRED.
Instead, after our sound check Dreamboat aka Joseph and I made the short journey to the nearest coffee shop, which is the confusing Dutch name for weed stores. Not just weed though- they also sell hash. Ordinarily we've been a bit on the more relaxing indica side, but thought we'd smoke a pre rolled sativa joint to get us up and pumped for the show. Got us more like up and wired and definitely not relaxed. Well, to quote Todd (as in Snider), seemed like the right thing at the time...
Whoah. We were mightily stoned and got back in time for Jeroen Sloof, the spoken word poet who opened the show. And then Joshua (pictured) gave what is arguably one of the greatest introductions of all time, certainly best I've ever had given for me, about how he was driving a jalopy on a road trip across America and happened to stop in Bloomington and all these people were coming out of a show and were so happy and he went in to check it out and it was me and that's how we met. Then he said some other super complimentary things about what the audience could expect from our set and me and Dreamboat were still way too high and we were like how the fuck are we going to live up to that?
But apparently we did, and I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say a good time was had by all. People came down close to the stage and stayed. The venue was amazing, not only was there a sound engineer but there was a lighting tech as well! As soon as I started talking about psilocybin/ mushrooms the lighting went very psychedelic. My biggest challenge was not cracking up, especially when he started up the fog machine. When I thanked him after, he said 'no, thank you! I laughed my ass off'.
'Indiana' was the highlight, in part because of Joshua's introduction. Whatever the reason, the audience really got into singing/ shouting 'hoo hoo, hoo hoo, hoo hoo hoosiers'. And we ended on a high note with Rat Turd. It's hard enough for people whose first language is English to get the play on words of rapture vs rat turd. But regardless, folks sure did seem to enjoy singing along to 'jesus is coming, jesus is coming, he's coming in a rat turd'.
Viper Mad were great, as was the delicious high alcohol content Dutch beers we drank compliments of the venue; the Patronaat also started out as a squat back in the day. We got back to Joshua's after 2.
