Day 10​—May 31. ​Breakfast on tour is a hit-it-now or forever hold your tongue. Scrambled eggs make my heart leap. I rate ours **** this morning at the bumfuck Mitteleuropa Radisson. At the music mega store, we emergence Connor's power supply - his many pedals sucked dry the previous. Oh, how I wished we'd stayed put on that retail floor until proven the new power was key-turn easy and ready to pounce that rack of slugs and sloop benders, wheeze tuners and tone coughers that Connor nicknamed "my pedal board." 
Springing life back onto the daisy-chained checker board will occupy most of our sound check time allowance in Frankfurt that evening and I try not to blow a fuse, not to beat myself too hard for letting it happen. Sound check is an ace-it-now or forever bite your tongue. But the show goes on and what a show! Again, we rock - the boat, yes truly as we are playing on a barge on the sleek and ducks river. A storied reunion of sort, with old friends and bookers from Das Bett, and a bright-eyed sound man with a full sleeve of scorpios black as midnight ink. Hotel that night sucks bad. Trip Advisor reviews warned us: "worst hotel in Europe." I love this life.



Day ​11—May 31. Frankfurt: Yep. That hotel sucked. But there was a bathtub. Hot water. Electricity. Wifi. It's 1 a.m. and I'm taking a bath, at last a bath. The phone rings. Connor forgot an adapter at the venue. I scream. Must drive back there now. Gas. Power. Frankfurt. Our hotel a block from the European Central Bank building. Power.​ And machines adding lanes on kilometers after kilometers of highways. Reconstruction. Autobahns. Snail-pacing through Germany, Europa, trucks a wall of metal and money. We make it at last to Nuremberg, a two-hour trip turned into a five hours acid wash. In town too, the traffic is insane. Our show? I drag myself on stage, muscles tense, mind a blank, with little force or consciousness. Power? From that pit of fear - to suck, to have nothing to give—come a shower of surprises. Here, a new way of singing, more meaning, there better fun, surprises between instruments, hilarious turn of syllables, notes bouncing on vocal walls. What do I fear most? I live in dread of never being able to be on stage again. Our venue tonight? Used to be a military caserne during the war. Our war today? We are our own worst enemy. Hot water. Electricity. Gas. Food. Power. We are so blind. You ask, why such tension on stage, why the rage—and the sweetness too? Aren't you enraged, aren't you? We are such fools, suckers, such needy monsters.

Read previous Tour Diary entries by Marianne Dissard here.