Los Angeles

Alexa here. The vwan has now driven EIGHT days without breaking down. This is a tour record. We think it's because it has reached VW Nirvana (California) and its restless little german soul is totally stoked to be chilling out here by the pacific.

We made it through the desert, and arrived in Riverside near Los Angeles, where Will (aka "toast" aka "Wyatt") let us sleep on the floor of the room he's not supposed to use. We played an impromtu show at a great coffee house, Back to the Grind, on June 26th:





While we were in Riverside we met some really love folks, Sarah Gautier, who writes beautiful songs on Ukulele and accordion... and the Norse horse, who also makes lovely music. We wandered into a strange little white house with action movies playing in the front room and made our way through to the basement room, where the light was orange and there was a lovely milieu of sound... accordion, bass, glockenspiel, organ, ukulele, toy piano... it was like Alice in wonderland with whiskey.

The next morning we headed into the crazy metropolis that is LA... (one very, very big highway between beaches), and met up with the illustrious Warren and Rachel, who showed us the best sushi, beaches, and $1.50 ice cream sandwiches LA had to offer. We played at Genghis Cohen that night with the Effects of Cable Television. Genghis Cohen only pays you if you bring twenty people, but they didn't begin counting until our set started, and never counted the huge group Warren and Rachel brought. So we didn't get paid despite the number of people we brought in that night... basically, it's a glorified Chinese restaurant. And it looks like a vampire lair... as you can see:







Thinking we might make more money working the streets, we decided to take our act out to Hollywood and set up in front of a skimpy bathing suit/S&M shop:







Wanting us to exeprience more of LA than cracked out Venice beach at night, cheating Chinese Restaurants, and S&M shops, Warren (who was Mr. Hermitage at my high school, btw), and who is currently using his masterful networking skills as our pro bono manager, hooked us up with a last minute show at the Hotel Cafe, which is a beautiful artist friendly venue in Hollywood:






And after the show, we decided to venture into the Michael Jackson mourned streets in our wolf hats to sing a few songs into the night before leaving the vampire city:




Tomorrow we are headed to San Francisco, the only city I like as much as New York or Copenhagen... and the adventure continues...