Fruit Bats European Tour Diary Pt.5 Rome
By: Eric D. Johnson
Rome is super nuts. I’d never been there, but I’m kind of a junkie when it comes to ancient history so I’ve had my fantasies about coming here forever. If you consider how long it’s been standing as a major world center, it could be considered a candidate for the most futuristic place on earth - in that it has the deepest past to which have sprung from the depths of. Parts of it seem like a dystopian Terry Gilliam designed future - rolling hills and fertile Mediterranean fields quickly giving way to a pulsing mess of cars each jockeying for position, graffiti tagged on literally anything within reach of a human paint can, trashing swirling in the streets, sounds and smells everywhere. In other words, it’s pretty otherworldly and I thought it was utterly intoxicating. The show was fantastic. We’d had a venue change literally hours before show time. Italians are so incredibly laid back that nobody seemed to mind and everybody figured out where we’d gone. It was a packed house again, and people actually had come to see us. Later that night, to add to the allure and intrigue of this place, we took a wee-hours drive to see the Colosseum. About five minutes into the drive, I realized I had to pee so bad that I went in a bottle in the van; something I’m almost always too shy to do. (The other two times I’ve done this were on the Bay Bridge in a traffic jam and driving down a snowy mountain pass in Montana). So anyway - I didn’t want to look at this grand monument of the western world with an uncomfortably bursting bladder. It was a beautiful night and I wanted a perfect little moment. I thought maybe peeing in a bottle in front of the Colosseum was somehow sacrilege... but when you consider that it was a place designed for people to watch men fight crocodiles and hippos and lions, I took comfort in that sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. Those guys would have done the same thing, I’d like to think. Slept well, creeping back into being able to get a handful of hours. Now back to the misty north for one last Italian show.
Artists in this article: Fruit Bats