OX – CRAZY TOUR STORIES

In this Crazy Tour Stories segment, the hard rock band, OX, shares one of their stories from being on the road. You can check out the story, after the break.

Tour Story…

Intro:
Our first tour as a band took us to the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia. When you go on tour for the first time as a young band, you usually have dreamt about it for a long time, having certain expectations. But what you learn first is that everything comes differently than planned…in every aspect. Therefore, we want to give you a few impressions of our first tour.

Preparation:
Weeks of preparation, workouts, and healthy eating! You do a lot to prepare yourself for touring so you can perform at your best level. When we met early in the morning on the first day of the tour, our singer Simon came last, as per usual. But this time something was different. Simon did not come alone. Due to inflammation in his jaw, his face was swollen to twice its normal size. For a singer, this is understandably anything but advantageous. So after a few minutes, we had to make the first unplanned stop – at the dentist to get some antibiotics.

Plans have changed:
On a tour, you get to know many new places, but often different than expected. This was especially the case on this tour. After the first few hours of driving, we got a message from our booker that the first show had to be moved due to a broken water pipe in the venue…and 300 km further away from the original location, which presented a sporting challenge to our driver. The result was a gig in an aprés-ski club. Off-season…. Nevertheless, various other ‘interesting’ performance locations followed, such as the cellar of a Slovakian’s private house, which the owner had prepared as a “club”. Due to the condition of our singer we even made it to a Czech dental clinic, where there was absolutely no way to talk to and understand the doctor.

Where are all the people:
One of the gigs we remember most was in a rock club in Bratislava. It started with the fact that we had to mix ourselves because the FOH spontaneously went on vacation…..or didn’t like our music and left. After the second support band, it was our turn…..already during the gig we were surprised that the place was strangely empty…also from the staff side. After we had finished playing, the owner of the club came to us and said we had to dismantle quickly because the first guests were coming soon. That made a lot of things clear to us. To make things even worse we put out merchandise cases into a pile of dog poo which then went on the bus with us.

Fear and Loathing in Slovakia:
One of the nicest things about touring is the fact that you get to meet a lot of new people. You are always surprised by the hospitality of the locals. In particular, our guitarist, Nadir, was struck by the hospitality of a Slovakian promoter. After a few glasses of a home-distilled liquor, Nadir suddenly had a strange feeling. This was probably due to the stressful day in the car and little food and sleep. Or maybe it was the secret ingredient in the homemade liquor. When it was time to pack the equipment and load it into the car, Nadir was too busy trying to figure out where who and how many he was rather than worrying about getting his equipment on the bus successfully. Luckily a band on tour always sticks together and the guys loaded Nadir and his equipment into the bus and into bed. The next day was hard for him.

Conclusion:
Despite our singer’s swollen face (which improved only slightly during the tour but resulted in man funny pics) and the strange locations and circumstances we had a blast and were absolutely motivated to tackle our next tour. Just never stop touring and having fun doing it!

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