Hello, Hello, and welcome to another glorious episode of the 2006 summer atheist tour diary, this leg of the trip of course takes us all the way north to Bergen, Norway to the Hole in the Sky festival. Many cool bands were playing at this years event including Celtic Frost, Necrophagist, Morbid Angel, Destruction(Yeah!) and many many others. My journey started with a pre flight, flight from my home in florida to Altanta to meet up with the rest of the guys, tony had to fly solo from Miami this trip, so anyways i arrive on tuesday at around 2, now our flight for Norway does not begin leaving till around 5:30 p.m. so right off the bat, i get to hang at the airport JOY! I See steve and we proceed to the check in to find our partners in crime Chris Baker and Sonny Carson, who by now have streamlined there traveling skills to an art form, you remember chris has the big fancy double road case for his guitars , and he had it all painted up...seemed like such a cool concept till they lost that shit in England hahaha, now he has a fucking backpack, and a soft guitar case and traveled with only one guitar which never left his grasp, ahh i am so proud of my new metal soldiers...with a glance to the past you see they have GROWN!
Our flight to norway is interupted by a connecting flight in amsterdam, but unfortunatley we have no time to zip off to the local cafe for some smoking, we just get to run from one gate to another as fast as we can, oh well, mental note to self, "We must book a few gigs in holland". We get seated and thats always a crap shoot,you always hope you will get lucky and get maybe a window, maybe an aisle, maybe even 3 seats empty so you can stretch out, cause people this is a LONG flight, but NOOOOO!!!, While i do score a window, i also scored an annoying seat partner, who enjoys yoga, walks in the park, small dogs.....kidding, actually this woman said not one word to me for 9 hours, thats an amazing thing to do you know? sit 6 inches from someone for 9 hours and say nothing to them, she did however find solace in crossing her fucking legs so her knee was invading my space....FUCK! So 8 hours 45 minutes, and no sleep later we arrive in amsterdam, i proceed to the nearest place to catch a cig break, steve stands by patiently as i kill myslef in slow motion right before his eyes, we grab our next flight from amsterdam and as we board we run into our new friends and legends Destruction! Schmier is not hard to miss, towering above all the others on this smaller plane, which will take us all to bergen, Mike and the rest of there merryman soon followed ,and we were just about to take off when the pilot comes on and says he is having a problem....., and we will have to de-plane, and take another flight.....another flight??? Shit! here we go again, but then within 5 minutes he comes back on and says the very non- comforting phrase of, "WELL folks , everything SEEMS to be ok for our take off , sorry for the delay, so me and schmier sort of look around like... hmmm that does not sound like a confident statement now does it?, but before we could piss, and moan about it we were in the air, and on our way. We fortunately survive our flight, and and we have arrived at Bergen. A couple of vans are there to greet us all, including a writer named Bjorn, did not catch his last name , but he was a really cool guy, very knowledgable, and we chatted it up along with steve, tony choy and the boys on our way to the hotel. Bergen is one of the most expensive cities we have ever been to, its also very beautiful as well, and right off the bat we were charmed with the locals (dig deep for the cleverness) and the scenery, and the best part the weather, cause wherewe
come from it's a very hot time of year right now, but in bergen a chilling 70 degrees, very nice weather for metal. So as with each city, and the heat we have faced and of the lack of air conditioning in any of the other hotel room across the globe, i was not expecting to find one this time either. We all got our keys and the showered up, and headed out to check it out, get some food etc, so me and stece and tony choy meet up in the lobby, but before they arrived, i run in to this guy named....??? dark something or ther, shit sorry bro i cannot remember your name, anyways we head up to his room so i can sign his rare atheist vinyl. We chat for a bit and i remeber i have to meet those guys , and so i head out to the lobby and off we go in search of food. We quickly realise that in order to fucking eat in this country, you will need to apply for a fucking loan!!! We each had burgers, fries and a drik and it was literally almost 70 bucks! That is crazy! people must make a lot of money, cause eveything was like that, way higher than it should be, but the town seemed to thrive so , i guess they are used to it. We walk around and check out some the old buildings,and kind of mull around the town a bit killing time cause we will be going to see tonights festivals bands atthe garage, where Morbid Angel will be playing this really small place, i have not seen them i n a club this small since 1986, also necrophagist is playing, so we want to see them as well. Around 7 o clock we head over to the club and we meet the promoter who was very cool to us, we had some 9 dollar pints, and watch Obliteration, a local norwegian band we befriended later in the weekend, they were very young guys , who were very excited to play, we run into some guys who came all the way from australia to see us, they had previously also traveld 3 weeks ago to germany for our Wacken performance, we were just blown away that someone would travel that far just to see us play, thats priceless dedication! Steve flynn has made a hugeo discovery that was some of the best news thus far on the trip, he had located a 7-11 which is notoriously an american type convenience store and lo and behold they have my absolute fav drink on the planet MT. DEW!!! Now anyone who knows me, knows that i bleed this shit, so i made plans to return there after the show to gather some des for the stay....bliss! We get a little antsy and decide to wander around the town a bit, everything is within earshot of the clubs so we enjoyed checking at all out. While standing in front of our hotel , we run into a group of like 7 metal head dudes from all over the world, they are also fans of the band and we strike up a conversation that leads to another of my fav indulgences WEED! And they have some, so off we go to their hotel room, we all pile in and we start shooting the shit about our influences which comes up a lot while talking about the music of atheist, people often wonder...."What the fuck did you guys listen to when you were writing this crazy shit" As the sounds of maiden, priest and oddly enough the Doors permeates the air in the room, a delightful smell of weed finds its way to theair as well, this dude had travels on a plane with weed taped to his person, into a country that does not tolerstae drugs of any kind we are told, man i could never do that, i would be so paranoid about getting busted and going to jail in norway, but i SURE am glad he had the balls to do it, cause withing minutes, we were smoking out with our new friends, this one dude in particular was funny cause he was asking choy something about the band, but he felt the need to be VERY close to your face while talking, he was quickly directed to flynn by tony and the dude grabbed the back of steve's head and sort of pulls him in closer to tell him " there must be something in your sould that makes you play like that, steve, while flattered was ready to go a little quicker than me and tony, we manged to get the guys to roll us a joint w/o the tobacco shit that all europeans put in there joints, as you know from before we dont like to mix tobacco and our weed, its botanically sacriligious hahahah.
After catching a great buzz we singed off from our new friends and headed over to catch the Morbid angel and necrophagist sets, we could not smoke cigs in the club so we were all standing around outside the club half the time , which led us to many atheist fans for some reason thinking it very odd that we would just be hanging outside the club with them, i knew why they were curious, cause almost no other bands EVER hang out with the kids that were there, what the fuck is that about? we LOVE to meet all of the different kids, and hear about there stories of discovering our music, i think its interesting to hear about them being in school and playing it for friends, and being all excited about it, and the upcoming show. it reminded me of me when i was so stoked to play metallica, and slayer, and mercyful fate for people who had never heard metal like that like back in 1984/85 You can never imaigne that you will ever be that lucky to create art that makes people want to share it with there friends, and atheist has always had a very obscure, mystique, that led people to think they would never see us cause we had broken up. We met several people out front who had been listening to us for as longs as 15 years and as little as the day before, and they told us great stories of how it made them listen to metal music differently, we just listened in humbled AWW! One dude was like i am so sorry, but i feel like i am meeting mickey fucking mouse hahaha, i thought that was so funny. Another dude wanted to guess mine and tony choys weight???? so he fucking picked us up off the ground and guessed hahaha. We really enjoyed just talking about metal and where its been, where its going, we also shared with them our knowledge of CYNIC's reunion tour, they had confirmed to us that they were gonna do it, not sure when, but they qill likely see the surface of europe in early 2007. Ok so now it was time to head downstairs to check out Morbid ANgel. the place was small but very crowded, i prefer to see them in this setting, it was way more intense, we had just earlier saw Necrophagist fucking destroy, they were super fast, and technical, with blast beats, a very hard working drummer, very very cool stuff. Morbid hits the stage after them and fires off all of early classics, and the kids are diggin git, david sounds good, the band is loud and proud, and pete the feet sandoval is in fine form. We cath about 5 tunes then head back to get some rest at the hotel, tomorrow promises to be a doozy, we are so looking forward to it. It hit the 7-11 grab me 4 mt. dews and its off to my lil room i go for some shut eye. PART 1(part 2 on the way)