[Smashing Pumpkins guitarist Jeff Schroeder continues to chronicle the band’s 20th-anniversary tour:] Chapter 2 (Washington, D.C.): You can subtitle this one “The First Victim, or, Why It Pays To Have a Really Great Guitar Tech.” Right before we began rehearsing for this tour in October, I read Alex James’ autobiography, “Bit of a Blur” (2007).” […]
[Here is guitarist Jeff Schroeder’s first installment from the Smashing Pumpkins tour. Introduction to Schroeder here; a bit about his band the Lassie Foundation, along with a download, here.] Chapter 1 (New York): First of all I’d like to thank Buzz Bands for giving me the opportunity to write this tour diary for the next […]
[Previous segments of Morgan Kibby’s M83 tour diary here.] Chapter 13: Went to sleep at 4 a.m. again — only to be awakened at 6 by a feeble cry from the front of the bus: “Customs time, boys and girls!” In the pissing rain we dashed half-conscious to the Customs desks and then struggled back […]
His close friends call him Shredder, thanks to his talents with a guitar, but two years ago Jeff Schroeder was just a part-time musician — and a full-time graduate student, working toward his Ph.D. in comparative literature at UCLA. Then a mutual friend helped him get an audition with the Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan and […]
[M83’s keyboardist-singer Morgan Kibby continues her tour diary. Previous installments here.] Chapter 12: Somebody stick a fork in me: I’m done. I’m moving to Amsterdam. What a brilliant city! Even the red light district is festooned with swans and canals and bicycles” We covered it all. The amusement square where I bought an obscene amount […]
[M83’s keyboardist-singer Morgan Kibby continues her tour diary. Previous installments here.] Chapter 11: Shaving day. Yep, everyone’s shaving. PM is giving Anthony a haircut and I’m waxing. We were all getting a little hairy.” Seemed like a good day to do it, since we were fed a big fat slice of humble pie this afternoon. […]
[Keyboardist-singer Morgan Kibby continues her M83 tour diary. Read previous installments here.] Chapter 9: Observations from Scandinavia: Always do laundry at the venue before you get drunk. Always load the bus when extremely drunk. Scandinavians love high-tops. Seriously. Haviana flip-flops save me from venue shower rot. Fall has never looked so beautiful. Green and gold […]
Chapter 8: I am in the armpit of the hippie universe right now: Christiania, Copenhagen. Please hear me out before the touchy outcries begin: My father was a hard-core hippie. Sculptor/musician by day, waiter by night, king of the cross-country hitchhike, anti-war activist and frequent mountain man; I was brought up by someone who, to […]
Chapter 7: Sometimes, touring is a test of how you handle being disoriented. In the port city of Arhus, Denmark, we had to spend the night in the bus, and I woke groggy and confused at 2 p.m. in a tangle of socks, jeans, sweatshirts, a hood and fingerless mittens: I was determined to touch […]
[A final note from Paris before the M83 tour begins …] Chapter 5: My friend Emilie is a fantastic photographer. She shoots mainly as a hobby, but personally I think her stuff is just too good to sit in boxes underneath her bed. (She has more on Flickr here.) Last time I was in Paris, […]
