Sun 1st July

Last day - last gig.

We all got up really late morning. Bones came round to pick me (Bod) up on his Harley Davidson, we were going round to his place to tune his drum kit and hang out for a while and catch up on whats been happening since my last visit. For those of you that don..t know, Bones is an all out American biker who owns and runs the Freedom Tattoo shop on highway 58, he is also an absolutely Top Bloke. We were cruising along for a while then he pulled over and said i could ride the bike myself, i couldn't believe it. Me, on a Harley, in America, with my reputation? :-) What a machine and what a great sound! I loved every minute of it, it's something i will always remember and this was a huge honour as bikers are understandably protective when it comes to people going near their machines. Bones has a house high up which is surrounded by 5 acres of trees and yesterday during the storm, a tornado had hit and you could see a twisting trail that it had carved through his woods. Huge trees had been snapped off completely, and one had landed accross his roof. Lucky he was not in at the time. After a while we headed back to the house as his son DJ wanted to meet the band.

The girls had cooked us another huge dinner (superb), we chilled and watched a movie before moving off to do our last show.

Ziggys is one of the roughest looking places you could imagine. If you saw it while driving through town and had never heard of it before you would roll the windows up, put your foot down and get the hell out of there. But Ziggys is actually one of the coolest and friendliest places you could wish to visit. There is something magical about the joint that makes it really special. At the front there is a bar which is so dark you need night-vision goggles, and out the back where the bands play the air con is so poor that its better to leave the door open to get some air in even though its 90 odd degrees outside! Its like nothing has been maintained since 1972 but this makes it all the more cool.

Three bands on tonight, us, Seven Under Suicide and Reasoning with Kaine. The show was great, some people had followed us over from our last shows which was cool, and we went down really well. Chewys voice was suffering from the punishment but he put in a great performance supported by Garfy and Ian, who filled in the spots that Chewy couldn't quite manage. The crowd loved it, by now we had got used to the American audiences and had developed a fine banter with them, joking about rednecks and their "purdy"accents, it was great fun. We made loads of friends and watched in awe at Seven Under Suicide as they delivered perhaps they're best performance yet, they were magnificent.

Unfortunately we had to leave before the end of the Reasoning with Kaine performance as we had to get up for the flight early the next day, but they sounded really good. We loaded up and went back to the house to party. What a great night!

Bod.