During our first few hours of tour, we had to wait for our friend Lina while she met with her professor.  

Creaky Boards took a weary but giddy lap near her university. 

Michael and I were snapping lots of photos. 

We came across a strange display in an Apotheke window (a pharmacy). It was a row of small stuffed animals; blobby, cute blue creatures with long noses. He was the mascot of a German medical cream. His name was Lino. 

It was here that Michael and I exercised our first bit of photography restraint. After all, everything looks exciting and new when you first get off the plane, but you can't just go taking photographs of everything. 

When our rental van ended up being a monstrous blue mammoth, it didn't take long for us to affectionately name it Lino. "After that weird blue creature in the Apotheke windows," we explained to inquiring Germans.  

Strangely, Lina had never heard of Lino.  As the tour progressed, we realized that no Germans had heard of Lino. 

"We'll keep looking in all the Apotheke windows in every town and were bound to find him, eventually," we planned. But town after town, Lino was nowhere in sight. 

Our band became mildly obsessed with Lino. His elusiveness magnified his mystique. As our final show in Berlin drew closer, we vowed to return to the now legendary Apotheke window, track down our tour's guardian spirit, buy him, and bring him home.

The band piled into the van along with Lina, Nico and Ann. We drove across Berlin and to the university. Driving, we retraced that same jetlagged path we had walked 17 days earlier on foot. It seemed like a longshot, but with each turn of the corner, to our delight we realized we were right on track, recalling our route exactly. Our anticipation was boiling. Classical music playing on the radio seemed to perfectly mimic our mood. 

Lino The Van pulled up to Lino the Medical Mascot's window. There was no sign of him. Over the 17 days, a new promotional season had began in the Apotheke world. Lino's window display had been replaced. The Apotheke was locked. 

Lino, too, was to remain in our imaginations, in our misty memories. 

As a splendid surprise, our dramatic moment of Lino disappointment was captured on video and posted on youtube today. 

What goes on tour must come back with tour jokes.

On this winter's Europe tour, Creaky Boards focused on quantity humor.

The format for our joke is like so.

PERSON 1: "There's a lot of bikes in this town."

PERSON 2: "Maybe a little...too many bikes." (suspiciously. aversely.)

The joke has a couple different pleasurable contexts. For example, the above joke was good in Utrecht, where there were a lot of aggressive, silently moving bike riders, and the band needed a way to express our fear of being run over.

You can also execute this joke towards something that's mostly positive or neutral, such as looking at the many windmills on the autobahn and saying "Europe sure is alternative energy conscious" ---> "Yeah. Maybe a little...too alternative energy conscious." And there you have a nice absurd moment of interaction.

we've had another quantity humor joke since our 2007 american tour that is sticking around. it's a play on a voicemail i once got from my british poet friend Belowksy, in which he was comparing a West Coast coffee chain with Starbucks. the joke format is along the lines of: "the people here are slightly richer. (pause) the band dinners have slightly less green vegetables..." miniature, precise observations. you can push it weirder. "the faces on the statues here are slightly meaner..." and to the absurd. "the Dans here are slightly Costellier..." An essential element of the joke is it must be spoken in the Belowsky voice. An additional way to wring some humor from the joke is to clarify your earlier statements with a "not much, not much."

our band sometimes found ourselves reflexively putting on accents, usually that of a british gentleman, to ease the burden of communication. accents can make a boring statement a little more stimulating. it can lighten up the mood in a group. it can make a sincere sentiment feel less vulnerable.

when i was 19, i used to get in giant arguements with my roomate, very frequently spoken in a redneck accent. this behavior seems to come from the same place.

this all could either mean that creaky boards is a very nerdy band.

or at least not a very funny band.

or that quantity humor is the wave of the future.

Standing outside of the venue in Utrecht, a guy my age groans at me, "Americans. Yeah, thanks a lot, America. Look at all you've given us. You gave us Bush. The Iraq war. And now you've given us the first black president. Who are you going to elect next, a disabled Jewish woman?"

A few sleep deprived hours into Day One in Berlin, we realize that the van we reserved is a hulking meganaut of Crayola blue. One of the rental workers sweeps me into a grimy, smoky office, where with nervous politeness I inquire if there is a slightly smaller model we can take instead, or if there is another rent-a-car down the street that deals in minivans. The grizzled gray man behind the desk is sharp with me, rattling off the hundreds of euros we will contractually owe him if we back out. We aren't in America anymore, where the car rentals operate harmlessly beneath their safe, familiar logos. We are in some seedy underbelly of making deals. Of intimidation and bluffs and cunning. The colors in the room, the attitudes, everything reminds me of that movie Snatch.

"Ready to jump in the cold water?" one of them dangles the keys and asks me as I cling to the passenger seat in terror. I've never driven a stick shift before. The streets of Berlin are scary enough. My memories of Paris's narrow corridors petrify me.

To our luck, Dan and Darwin know how to drive in manual. Fate has ordained our drivers, and thanks to them, tour is saved.

"When I get back to New York, I'm going to go on craigslist, and I'm going to pay somebody 40 bucks or 60 bucks, have them drive me up to a parking lot in Queens or wherever, and spend an hour or two learning how to drive a stick shift. And then next time we're over here, I'm gonna help you guys drive."

In the dressing room at Tsunami Club in Cologne, there is this poster for The Black Lips bearing this photo.

And this poster for Oxford Collapse. By the JMZ back home.

I think back to a photo Creaky Boards posed for, a few hours earlier at Roman Hill in Frankfurt. This one.



As tour goes on, and as life goes on, band photos feel increasingly ridiculous. An endless parade of twentysomething dudes, thirtysomething dudes (and gals), possessing an artistic sense of fashion to a greater or lesser degree, clustered together, printed on paper and displayed.

- Perhaps the 50+ years of exhaustive efforts by inspired musicians and photographers have nullified new possibilities for the rock band photo

- Maybe technology (cameras, the internet) has increased accessibility and user-friendliness to such great heights that the very act of presenting a photograph of a person has lost some of its romance

- Possibly these images still hold some raw excitement and volatility for, say, the 6th grade nerd who lives in the Applebees suburbs of Iowa and plays clarinet in the school orchestra. Maybe these sorts of peeps are the best equipped to enjoy rock band photos

In Aarhus, Denmark, Creaky Boards had to split up after the show. Michael and Dan went off with a friendly Dane to secure sleeping accommodations. Darwin and I remained at the venue. The minutes ticked by and eventually the club, MusikCafeen, had to lock its doors. Darwin and I continued waiting on the wintry streets.

As the minutes turned into hours, emotions squirmed restlessly from boredom to anxiety to fear to frustration to anger. We paced the street, spackled with clusters of Danish nightlife. We peeked in the bars and into a party, hoping to catch sight of our two American comrades. We went back and hovered in front of the venue some more.

But our chilly night did have one oasis. Darwin and I heard singing down the block. We ran to investigate. A group of rowdy dudes were playing street limbo. They held up a giant pole, under which people, bicycles, and even cars passed by.

You know what they say. When in Denmark...