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The first tour?
Somewhere in 2007...
I don't know how did I get in touch with that Italian guy, (Davide Straccione, Zippo)
he had a band that was to play in Zagreb.
He invited us to play in Pescara.
We figured we could add another date because of the long drive.
We never played that far from home.
He offered us a fixed fee, us and the Cojones.
The first gig was in Postojna, the second in Pescara.
Tonci borrowed a fire department van, a Caravelle.
The eight of us crammed into this little van, with everything, drums...
People were sitting on amps or having them under their legs.
We managed to get to Postojna, where we played in a little club.
And Pescara was another 1000 km drive from Postojna.
After that, we saw we could travel and play all around.
We saw it wasn't all that complicated.
As long as it's not that far away.
The return was a 15 hour drive and we didn't want to repeat that.
Even if we actually did that too later.
We saw that an American band plays 20 days in Europe,
a Swedish band too, and we figured it must be a system to do that.
Unfortunately, or half-fortunately for us,
the music style of our band and Cojones is easily defined,
and Cojones were also interesed in touring,
so in late 2007 I started booking the tour for March 2008. It was simple.
Back then there was a portal stonerrock.com.
And they had sub-forums: German, French, etc.
I visited the German forum and learned about an American band
whom I've never heard of, I looked them up on MySpace
and saw they were unsigned, some *** band of unknowns
playing a list of gigs, 10 in Germany, 3 in France etc.
I figured if this unknown band plays in those venues, I'll contact them
and try to make the tour of it. So I started.
I've made a list of that band's gigs,
googled the clubs and started sending e-mails to clubs.
And so I managed to book 11 gigs for 12-13 touring days.
That was about it.
We shared the garage with them. -And how did we find the garage?
We found it while searching for rehearsal space.
And then Branimir called us. -We knew him from the forum. -Yes.
And from concerts. We hung out.
Didn't we meet him in Mocvara? He was the sound man at our concert.
He was our sound engineer for Kontraefekt.
He managed... -Monitors.
Right.
It is a small world.
We hooked up with him, he invited us to share the garage.
We recorded our first EP together actually.
We were recording one day, and them the next.
Sanjin always brought coffee in thermos, we hung out, it was cool.
It was the end of that kind of an incestuous story,
because Giunio with whom I played in Amygdala was also part
of that Sonic Doom collective.
He designed the first cover. -And the logo of Sonic Doom.
He designed the first T-shirts... -Everything! Badges too. -Yup.
Stickers. -How did we go on tour? -Well...
No, first it was those two days... -Pescara!
We wanted to test it first. -Test tour.
The famous 13 hour drive home.
And the police stopping us. -Police from two states.
Waiting endlessly... On border.
It was really great.
When we managed to pull that off, we decided we could...
Prolong the whole thing.
Mr. Executive! -We're on our way... To hell!
Who says there's no room in the van!?
Tears and honey!
Good morning, good night! -Croatia!
Remember the first day drama? -Of course! -It was a disaster!
Like, five people in the audience.
The first drama: the club was in the basement.
Oh, no! We have to drag all our equipment down.
The first disappointment.
Sorry, but the first day was a story in itself.
We came there and the food...
Nasty! -Really. -Toast with ketchup and onions.
Yeah, I remember! Toast. With ketchup and onions!
Everybody got two pieces!
You drive for 10 hours and you get two pieces of toast.
You simply do not know how to react to that. It's a snack.
He microwaved it.
Everybody started eating, but I was mad, ready to choke him.
When he came with 28 servings of that.
Because it was simply inedible.
I said there's no chance they'd go on stage before we eat something.
So they fixed some proper food and they went and played the gig.
Afterwards I called him aside, made him show me the cash register.
And I simply took all the money from the cash register.
Because he was not OK.
He didn't say a thing. That was it. It wouldn't have helped him anyway.
Where are we? -On highway, on our way to Mother Germany.
Our recon men report that we'll be soon on site. Roger!
Miro, what are you drinking? -If we'll have enough anti-matter.
How much did we earn yesterday? -1630 krunas. And we spent it all.
Remember the Zittau audience? No applause.
You finish the song, sweat all around, yeah!
And the audience is silent. Noone reacts.
We play harder the next song, but there's no applause, no yelling,
no reaction, nobody yelled play Motörhead...
Both our bands do their gigs with no response.
But after the concert - people rushing to the merch stand,
buying T-shirts, posters, badges, CDs, everything.
That night we sold the most merch.
You decide you had too much last night and today we're cool,
we'll not start drinking immediately, and you get there,
meet people for the first time, and they immediately hand you beer.
And you forget your vow.
We always turn down beer. -Of course. Yuck.
And you reset the whole thing. There are no two same gigs.
Even if you return to the same club, it is never the same.
Regarding the atmosphere and the audience...
For me it was at Ferme Massart. -In Tubize. -In Belgium.
It was something else.
They had plenty of goulash for us. And french fries.
They waited for us until 4 a. m. But we arrived the next day.
And with loads of Belgian beer. Maybe 20 kinds of beer,
one better than the other. It was really a royal treatment.
It was like visiting your relatives. -I was speechless.
And if you try to talk, they stuff you with more food and beer.
We're here in Tubize, the craziest place on Earth. Stoner rock forever.
Chaos! Waking up to Khanate.
These guys, in their 50s... -Yes.
Some... I don't know what are they, but they live a punk lifestyle.
Living on that farm, enjoying life.
Some of them even have kids.
But they like listening to bands and they'd rather pay a band to come
and play for them, than to go somewhere to a concert.
Simpler and cheaper. It's Belgium, they can afford it.
I'd like to add that the first tour should be called "The Kebab Tour".
Because the Cojones wanted kebab in every place we went.
There was no kebab in Croatia in 2008, they had to try it everywhere.
This is kebab. -OK. -This is a sabre that cuts meat.
And this is sauce, it corrodes the sabre.
And kebab...
Kebab *** up the sauce, it sucks the sauce up. -Go play now.
Kebab, sabre, sauce. -You *** me up.
Kebab, sabre, sauce. -*** that! 1:0. -Do the third one!
Kebab, sabre, sauce!
*** you! -Another one!
Kebab, sabre, sauce.
You're retarded!
It was lucky that we packed so much for that first tour.
Like Czechs going to the seaside. -We had food for 10 days.
But it was a good thing. We didn't starve! -Yeah, I know.
Our tours were, as I see it, quite moderate.
There was nothing particularly wild going on.
But rarely we went to see the sights.
Only when we stopped for another day somewhere,
or when two cities were not far apart and we came earlier.
There was no time.
When you wake up, you pack everything in the van
if you didn't do it the night before. You get in the van and drive.
You arrive, start drinking, there's some food too, soundcheck,
alcohol, gig, alcohol, sleeping if you can fall asleep and then
all over again. So...
There's not much time for a 3-hour-sightseeing. -Tourism.
There was a little stage where we played.
And the audience stood 5-6 meters from the stage.
But there were two girls in front, jumping around.
I was playing and thinking, oh, great, they like our music!
We found out later they were two junkies who tried to rob us.
But Luka was on the lookout.
You know what's great? To them it's normal. Noone cares.
A guy with a rat on his shoulder, so what? Only the Croatians wonder.
And the beer drinking German guy gives no ***.
The first tour was very tiring to me because I was driving.
We didn't have GPS, so I was stressed all the time.
Also, some of the passengers were little boys who failed to grow up.
We had to be their mums.
Tonci is an excellent van driver.
No, Tonci is... -He's great with the bass-guitar. -He's a machine!
He is, yes. I will never forget one scene. We were all sleeping.
He slept fully clothed: Leather jacket, Martens boots...
It was in Leipzig. -OK.
We had to leave Leipzig at 9 a. m.
We set the alarm for 8.30. Tonci was sleeping like this.
At the sound of alarm he went...
Like Dracula. He gets in the van, no ***.
There was no: Just let me sleep a little more! -Like us, for example!
He's the guy who takes cold showers.
The young is on the beach.
Here we see a typical Croatian
who wishes to experience the foreign pleasures.
Why not take a bath in a lake here in Italy?
True, it is April, and the lake's temperature is around 5 degrees,
but he's not afraid. So now we'll see that. Splash around a little!
Dip him!
Our Croatian fellow has taken a dip, quite successfully.
We'll see if he can repeat that at the Lake Zurich.
See you in Germany in 7 days.
He is simply a human machine. Really. Terminator.
Atmosphere was good.
Only sometimes the atmosphere can be quite gaseous.
After gigs where vegetarian food is served.
Oh, little lambs!
Hello, kids! Well, here's how it's done, kids!
Here's how you sink a schnapps!
In Luxembourg.
Cheers, kids!
Good, right? -***, it's hot!
***!
Burns, right? So it shoud!
Merry Christmans, guys! -In all religions! -Christ is born!
Wait! -Cheers!
The weirdest was that basement... -In Eisenberg, yes.
Former railway station.
We played in the basement, in the former coal storage.
It was a 20 sq. meters room. Two meters high.
There were some Christmas lights on the ceiling. All the light there is.
Stripped walls, and on the floor...
Concrete floor. -No, those stone cubes. Something like that.
The 10 people audience crammed inside.
And the wood stove. -Yes.
And we got our equipment through the shaft. -The coal shaft.
Imagine the railroad station in Vrbovec.
And someone opens a club in the coal storage.
We were bands who came from some third world country
noone even heard of... OK, they heard of Croatia,
but the point is: there's two obscure, unknown bands,
and people come to see them anyway.
People come to gigs of two complete unknown bands,
they'll listen to the concert, they pay for it, they'll buy our merch.
That's something that is missing in Croatia.
People do not have the concert-going habit.
People go to see bands that they like, or are friends with.
But if a band is not from your hood, you're not interested.
People support bands abroad.
Sanjin is a great drum player. Really, he kills it! And guitar too.
He tells me: Bojan, I'll kill myself.
I cannot play drums. And then he comes and owns it.
I'll kill myself. I'm useless.
Just the fact that we had no fights...
Other than the jokes that sometimes got out of hand.
So you do not believe that man can comprehend his own behavior?
Bees see ultraviolet. -Bat functions differenty, bat sees with his ears.
What's that important difference in DNA?
You think one is more complicated or more valuable than the other?
They were more advanced than all others in the period 1939-1945.
Wait a sec! -Why do you go to church if you think it's not good?
What is the difference between food and premarital sex?
I think that one day humans will...
Humans will transcend into the post-human state.
Humans will become partly robot.
It was in 2006 or 2007.
I started with Sonic Doom nights in Mochvara club.
I was inviting bands to play. More people started coming.
Suddenly there were more bands interested in playing
that kind of music - I don't know if it can be classified or not.
These shows were organized by Luka Ranogajec and me.
And Pecur was always in it too, he contributed also.
We launched the Sonic Doom Records with the idea
to organize and to unite this new emerging stoner scene in Zagreb,
to promote those band through an organized action.
I suggested that we invent a label name for our releases.
Because nobody knows about these things.
We'll call it Sonic Doom Records and we'll release our albums,
of us and Cojones. Our first release was Sampler, vol. 1.
It was a compilation of bands who played our first shows.
Us two or three gathered bands from the scene,
bands that shared the same interests.
We thought nobody except us listened to that.
They had a handful of fans.
Those nights had free entrance.
It was in Mochvara, once a month. Two local bands playing,
and DJing afterwards. Every night was better than the one before.
100 people, then 150, 200 and even 300. Fascinating.
Then we wanted to expand.
We wanted to release a record, for more people to hear it.
We released the Sonic Doom Sampler.
With a mix of band. -Two releases, 150 copies each.
Burnt CD with a booklet. One was red and the other was green.
If you say so.
The bands were: Bastinado, Stonebride, Amygdala, Cojones.
With a couple of songs each. -Umor, too. -Yes.
Before that you had, for example, Ruiz playing in ***,
and Bastinado... The first Zagreb stoner band maybe. They're great!
But Sonic Doom united all those bands in the same place.
Bands of similar affinity for music and sound
got what they wanted and said, this is stoner music.
That was Zagreb's stoner moment.
We had different activities: concerts, promotions...
And we decided to go further than Zagreb, to expand.
Soon we realized that it was quite impossible to organize a gig
in Split or Rijeka or somewhere else.
Maybe we didn't know the business or the right people.
Afterwards we proved we were not incompetent after all.
We decided to try abroad. For them to play abroad. -Go West.
When me and Luka started booking that tour, we decided
we would not say it was a self-release,
that it's better to invent a DIY label, because it sounds better,
it means something, having the common denominator.
Better than to say: I burnt it and printed it myself, at home.
So we got this Sonic Doom Records. It was like self-service.
You take the logo and paste it, we got you a stock number,
000-something and it was a kind of support,
keeping us from going separately.
We were a kind of collective, sharing common interest.
The point was for bands to play and not deal with anyting else.
And we would deal with all other things they have no interest in.
Branimir did that part of the job for the first tour.
None of us was aware... -It was all set.
We were not aware how demanding that job is.
How much work is in it. -Or how it is done. -Branimir took it over.
Of course, there were other people who helped.
Alen was there, right? -Alen and Luka Ranogajec.
But Branimir was the one who planned the route,
who started booking the dates. -Had the Excel table for money...
That was maybe the most important thing of all:
We realized that we really do not need anybody.
Noone has to book me a concert, or contact a band for me.
I do not need anybody to release an album or promote it.
I really do not need somebody who would do the job mindlessly,
someone who doesn't know the job, or the band members,
who didn't listen to their songs,
who wouldn't choose the best offer for record pressing,
but who would nonetheless take a percentage from us.
None of us needed this and we were clever enough.
Today, if you cannot find what you're looking for on internet...
You're as good as dead.
Turn off that cell. -Get his face while counting. He looks real worried.
Motherly worry on his face.
Why did we split? Well...
I wouldn't know.
Because we had different visions.
We did not have a fight, we still hang out.
The point was...
Maybe I was so eager, that I wasn't ready for compromises.
Except for Petar, nobody else was interested in that part of business.
It was not of primary interest to any of them.
They were, like, content when it was all done,
but none of them wanted to sacrifice anything for it.
While I was quite the opposite.
I was maybe even too eager,
studying how the others mananged to succeed etc.
obsessed with Man's Ruin and Sub Pop
and all the other, especially American labels,
that were, in their initial period, 200 milion years behind us
and the things we nowadays have.
I believe I had definitely more money than them to start with.
So it was pointless for me to start at a lower level.
Certainly, the bands were awesome,
because I wouldn't deal with some *** bands.
The story continued in the background,
they were releasing stuff and they still do.
The new Umor album will surely be released under Sonic Doom Records.
Things are happening and that name is still present.
It is mentioned on concerts.
When they play abroad, there's always a sign Sonic Doom Records.
People are asking about it. It is not dead,
but there was a period of stagnancy.
We continued to use the name because why wouldn't we?
If it exists and its free, and it lasts for 5-6 years now,
even if only in that virtual sense, why not use it?
I figure, it is not so important whether things function or not,
it is important that they last. If they do, their value will increase.
If you repeat a brand name long enough, people will remember it.
If a product is called Sonic Doom, someone will find it interesting.
I was looking into American labels that went under,
but today they have a cult status, because the guy was burning CDs
and recording tapes at home, and nowadays those are cult releases,
but the guy disappeared from the scene. He could have continued,
maybe he'd profit from it later. I'm not saying it's a profitable business,
but it's just an example. Just like that Man's Ruin label.
I think we all can hardly wait...
I get nervous as soon as I start thinking about it.
There's been a while. Two years after the last tour.
And we rarely play gigs now.
Touring is always a kick in the head.
It has a really aggressive impact on your soul.
Here we are in the van
with some Croatians that travel to foreign countries. Let's ask them.
Fellows, where are you heading to?
West! -West?
Here we can see a typical Italian vilage.
There's no vineyards like in the rest of Italy.
Just stones.
It reminds one of Obrovac.
Italy is not just highways.
The sea. In the middle of Italy!
But no, it isn't. It's a lake!
Here we are, here we are!
We did three tours together.
The last was just a few dates.
Because Brane booked a festival.
Why did we go separate ways?
We drove them out of the garage. -That's it.
We went our way, to our garage, and they went and found theirs.
It was better for us all to tour individually.
There were times when there was not enough audience.
Two unknown bands. People come, but not as much as you expect.
We wanted to improve that, so we tried to book separately.
One band would go on tour and book with local bands
in order to have more people.
It was good that I booked, along with Luka and Buco, too...
Booking two bands brings different people.
It is interesting because if people come,
some people come to listen to one band, and some to the other.
It brings variety. One band offers one style.
Two are maybe more interesting to the people organizing gigs,
they get two slightly different things.
And booking just one band...
It was such a moment, I decided we should not go with Cojones
but to go solo instead, to see how it is.
What can we do, how many people can we attract, how many gigs...
When all the *** is added up in the end,
even if there are *** happening,
all the other stuff is so good,
many people do not have a clue and will never experience it,
being on tour, being in a van...
Getting in front of a new people, showing them what you do...
It really is priceless.