Glasgow
So sorry it has been such a long time with the updates! I know I must have left things at a very exciting point. So, let me finish up recapping the European promotional tour before I start on America! I believe the last time I posted was just before our show in Glasgow. Wow, what an intimate experience that was! Pretty much the smallest place I could’ve imagined for Moby! About 250 people made it through the doors. Ha! That’s 250 delightfully accented Scottish Mobylovers. And to my delight, there was a 20 minute intermission where people from the audience got to ask Moby questions. Ahhhhh, well, let me rephrase, “ahhh” is what I expected, but I was dismayed to find that I couldn’t understand a single question asked.
Most of the audience members were from the hills and glens of Scotland, who had won the tickets from various radio stations from around the country. So when they asked the questions this is what I heard (and when you read this go slowly and make sure you pronounce the “r”s in the very back of your throat while rolling them and stretch the vowels in that Scottish way): “Ehh Moby, rah-eh bri-eh coo na-eh ragh-erh, sol-eer rah-egh brough-eh rough?” And only when Moby replied could I manage to figure out what the question had been. But it was blissful anyway!
And at one point during the show, Moby introduced the band, and when he got to me the crowd started chanting, “I Love Luci”. Can you imagine anything more beautiful than Scottish accents chanting that they love you? I thought I might have died and gone to heaven.
The BusThat night was the first night with the BUS. We boarded the bus around midnight, and took off for London. LET me tell you about this bus.
It was double-decker, as most buses are in the UK. The bottom floor had a little kitchen, fridges, microwave, and probably more, two tables in booth-like setups, with chairs facing both directions. Then there was a stairway (tiny) going upstairs. The landing was the bathroom, which let me inform you, becomes nasty very quickly with 9 guys aiming at a moving target. At the top of the stairs to the left (front of the bus) were the beds. I think there were 14? Doubly stacked on either side. To the right was a U-shaped lounge with a table in the middle and plush-ish booth-like seats around it, and a TV, stereo, dvd player, play station, various movies and games, etc.
So, after the show that night most of us hung out in this lounge and watched the Blues Brothers. Ahh, great movie to start the bus tour off with. I did not sleep more than a combined hour, because traveling upstairs on a bus is something I’m not used to. I chose the bottom level of the beds towards the front. Didn’t matter. Every time we made a turn I thought the bus was going to fall over. So I envisioned my liklihood of survival. If the bus fell to the left, Scott’s bunk was there so I might fall over onto him and survive. If it fell to the right, I would slam against the wall against the pavement, and probably wouldn’t make it. Then I recalled the story of the bus catching on fire that one of the engineers had told the day before. A bus caught fire and everything inside it including all the musical equipment, 12 laptops, 17 cell phones, and all clothes were burned. I imagined my escape route if the bus caught on fire.
At this point the driver must have made his way to the interstate, and I started analyzing the structure of the roads in Great Britain. There were numerous potholes, though nothing like New York, and in England they stripe the emergency lanes with those “rumble strips” that go “bweeem bweeem bweeem” if you go out of the lane. Considering the size of the bus and the size of the lane, we spent approximately 67% of our time driving over the rumble strips (and I would consider this quite an accomplishment on the driver’s behalf). Oh, Moby was sleeping on top of me – in the bunk above me I should say, and I began to imagine how well he must be sleeping since he was such a veteran at all of this. Then the bus turned. Every single time the bus turned I actually felt a wave of real fear. I considered the height of the bus, and the weight, and deducted that it must be very very easy to tip over. I tried meditation techniques, and finally I felt through my bunk in the dark to find the Benedryl and took one. I must have slept a good 30 minutes before I was awakened!
London, ParisLondon show was amazing. I actually had people I knew in the audience, and that was very fun – let me tell you it makes all the difference somehow.
We got on the bus again to head to Paris. I got smart that night and took 2 Benedryl when I got on the bus, and went to bed 30 minutes later. I woke to Ali telling us we had 15 minutes to be packed and ready for the whole day in Paris – one TV show (dressy clothes) and one concert (casual), because we wouldn’t be seeing the bus until we left that night. WHAT! If you have ever taken 2 Benedryl you know that in the morning things are less than clear when you have time to slowly wake up – but I was jolted from deep sleep into utter wakeful oblivion. I must have spent my whole 15 minutes standing over my suitcase saying to myself, “think, Luci, THINK. It can’t be that hard to think! “ But it just wouldn’t happen. I was the slowest one that morning but we made it to the TV station – where we ran into 50 Cent, HA. It was for a show called the Hit Machine.
The Paris experience was amazing in many ways. After the TV show we had a little time to peruse Paris, so Laura, Daron, Scott and I ate at a French café. Escargot! Yum. And a salad I think. The weather was the nicest since we had arrived in Europe, so we sat outside. Our dayroom in the hotel was out of this world. Everything was plush, walls, floors, the bed had curtains hanging over the headboard, all was red and pink, I mean it was FRENCH!
The windows opened to a street that overlooked the redlight district, how lovely. It was beyond Parisian, and completely wonderful! The concert that night was also out of this world. That day, Wednesday March 16, marked the first autograph I was ever asked to sign. And I certainly did! Yes, many French fans asked me for my autograph and to take a picture with them. That was just TOO much. Haaaaa.
BerlinThursday we shot a music video in Berlin.
We traveled 12 hours from Paris to Berlin overnight, and I slept through almost all of it! Getting better (and with no sleep aids). It was raining and cold, quite a change from the sunny 72 degree weather we had left in Paris. Not until late in the afternoon did I realize that it was in fact St. Patrick’s Day! Ohh, truly a tragic moment when you realize that you weren’t even aware of the date of one of your very favorite holidays! I mean, it was like I had forgotten my own birthday! Sad, sad. And no one in Germany seemed to care.
The video shoot was very cool because it was in an abandoned brewery, but we’re talking caves and filth. The place was so dusty that they didn’t need fog machines. After 30 minutes of standing at the keyboard it was completely covered in brown filth. Woah, and we breathed this in for quite some time. The German extras were very happy, much happier than New Yorkers, and the shoot was pretty much painless except for the 9 hours we did absolutely nothing. But that gave us time to learn every German slang word that exists. And then we practiced using them. Hours of entertainment!
The final show was on Friday in Berlin, right across the street from THE MOBY HOTEL; they took a hotel that was expanding and made them make the new section into the Moby Hotel.
The first floor was the lobby/lounge, the 2nd floor was a disco, and the 3rd floor was almost like an art exhibit, where they had made a room for each song on the album. An artist had put things in the rooms that reflected an interpretation of each song. There were things like a room with a TV that showed lips singing up close, a room with giant blown-up balloons and hanging beads, a room with a bed and open parasols hanging above it, a room with clothes hanging from the ceiling and broken square mirrors below them, etc.
Very artistic, and I loved it. I took a lot of pictures but it was kind of dark and they don’t really reflect the essence of the artistic moment, you know. And the show was hot. I got asked for more autographs that night, HA and we slept well in the Marriott on the executive level top floor. Ahhhhh.
And then we flew back. The worst overseas flight I have ever had. I was crammed in the farthest back corner of the plane, next to an angry German, and I was surrounded by eager Spaniards on all sides who thought it would be fun to buy various perfumes from the duty free cart and spray them all over everyone in their 1000 member group, just so it could be recirculated and digested by the rest of the passengers on the plane. AHH. The in-flight entertainment was also not working so that may have been some of the longest hours on the whole trip. But we made it – and the most exciting thing, there was a driver waiting for me with my name Luci Butler on a card! And let me not forget to mention how much I love my bed!!!
Love,
Luci
