Road Report: One for the Team Overcome Technical Difficulties

Minneapolis rockers One for the Team are touring Europe and keeping track of their travels for Spinner. In the second installment, frontman Ian Anderson recounts how the band overcomes technical difficulties and culture shock to win over Berlin.

Friday, July 3, 2009, Berlin

Yesterday in Berlin was a bit of a comedy of errors at first. We played two shows. The first of which was an outdoor performance on Dunckerstrabe on the East Side of Berlin, which was lovely. However, we discovered then that, in the process of getting to Europe, Grace's keyboard stopped working. A scramble of phone calls and wandering aimlessly through the streets of East Berlin in search of a European equivalent of Radio Shack began. And continued for several hours. We couldn't find the piece we needed, sadly, and we played both of our shows without Grace's keyboard. Fortunately, our saint-like booking agent will be lending us his own electric piano for the remainder of the tour, which is fantastic, but nothing will truly replace Grace's Nord Lead 2 in our hearts.

The late show at the Duncker Club was our first "real" show of the tour and the excitement had been building all day -- and Berlin certainly delivered. It was an inspiring experience. It seemed like we were playing a show in our hometown. It's always a strange and wonderful experience to go to a town I've never been to and see a large crowd singing the words to our songs, even more so here since I've never been to this country.



After the show, I spoke at length with the head of our agency who advised me to ham up the fact that although we are American and really know nothing about Germany, especially the language, we are trying to learn about the local culture. Even though I most certainly would butcher the language, he insisted that it would still be charming for us to try to speak the language onstage. Be prepared, at the next Germany show, I'll proudly say "Ein wasser bitte," which means, "One water please." I think.

We then stayed up until 5AM talking to and learning about the people who stayed late after the show and bought us more beer than we could handle.