Last night I had a tour nightmare. A tour nightmare is a kind of panic dream that most people probably have; mine just happens to pertain to tragic tour mishaps. Usually, it entails showing up late to a show, completely unprepared and embarrassing yourself horribly. They are pretty funny once you wake up, at least for me, especially since they are over. Last night’s episode was a good one. We were playing in a fancy nice club, let’s say le Botanique in Brussels, since I just played there. We were somewhere, I don’t know where, when it was announced that we were supposed to be on stage and we were already 5 minutes late. We went to the stage and the stage manager looked at us disdainfully but I wasn’t that worried. I got onto stage, assuming that I had already gotten the drum stuff together and soundchecked but alas, I had not. The drums were there but not completely set up correctly. No big deal, I thought, just move this here and that there and I’m ready to go. Upon closer inspection, I noticed the the cymbals weren’t really set up on the right stands, so I quickly rearranged them and Scott turned to me and said, “ready?” I said, “yep, no problem…” They opened the curtain as I was putting the hi hat cymbals on the hi hat stand instead of whatever weird way they were arranged… Since this is a dream there is no explanation as to how everything could be so screwed up. Anyway, getting ready to start the song I noticed that the bass pedal wasn’t on the bass drum… oh, wait, the floor tom was using the bass pedal as a leg… oh and all of the drums were set up in front of the carpet which meant that the drum set was going to slide all around. Pardon me, non drummers, for this boring story. There is actually an intricate magic to making drums work and it can all go horribly wrong if it’s done incorrectly. Then I noticed that there was a wooden clothes dresser right next to the floor tom. Wait, there was also a stack of chairs between me and the left crash cymbal. Wait, there’s a ton of dusty old furniture piled high all around me on stage and the bass drum just fell over. I have to stop the song we are playing and frantically grab drum pieces and furniture and move them all around. Scott looks at me in total desperation and I say, “no, no, it’s fine…” but it is not fine… I’m surrounded by piled high dusty furniture that seems to be moving in on me. They close the curtain and the crowd starts booing and nothing is working right. Then I open my eyes in panic. Hang on, I’m not even on tour! Bizarre. Bizarre especially since I was essentially attacked by a bunch of old furniture on stage – where was the outrage at that, Scott? Not, “oh my buddy is being attacked by 19th century antiques” but “dude, what are you doing? You are always screwing up!” Thanks. Sheesh.