Sometimes, if I'm totally desperate I have been known to pee in an alley or behind a hedge. And not just when I'm drunk. Once I was driving to see a Dodgers game in LA and drank a grande shaken iced tea lemonade on the way. When we arrived in the parking lot I had to pee so badly that I couldn't wait to go inside the stadium. So I peed between two parked cars in full view of arriving Dodgers fans. Not my proudest moment. But when you got to go, you got to go.

At Southside Festival in Nehusen, Germany on Saturday it seemed a lot people had to go and most couldn't be bothered to use an outhouse. Which, if you've been to a festival where its been raining for three days and tens of thousands of people (a lot who are drunk) have used the toilet before you, you might be better off not using the toilet. That being said, watching some guy whip out his dick and piss through a fence in plain view of your bus and thousands of other people is gross and a reminder that it only takes three days in "nature" to lose all social graces. Scary. Some festival sites here in Europe just set up troughs next to the stage so men can pee and watch the concert at the same time. Makes sense I guess. Better to have them walk a few feet rather than just peeing on the people standing in front of them while they watch the concert. Apparently that tends to happen as the night wears on. Yuck.

The night before Southside we played its sister festival, Hurricane. Its in Northern Germany and like Southside was experiencing a lot of rain and cold. On our way to Hurricane festival around 2 a.m., somewhere on the Autobahn, Sara had one of our crew ask the bus driver to pull the bus over. Sara then bravely trudged off the bus and into a German gas station where she proceeded to hurl her guts out. Food Poisoning. Bummer. Then she got back on the bus and we finished our drive. For the rest of Friday she divided her time between her bunk on the bus and hugging an outhouse next to the bus. Even though she spent the day hurling and felt rough she still joined us on stage that night to rock zee German crowd! The show was awesome. I am truly impressed with how much Germans seem to enjoy music, even when they are cold and muddy.

As we left Southside around 2 a.m. on Saturday night I was curled up in my bunk shivering with ear plugs in. After two days straight of loud booming rock music beating down on our bus I was ready to get back to the city and to our regular shows. Sometimes festivals are just too rugged and ...too loud for me. I like showering every day and I really like quiet when I wake up. But every once and a while its nice to brave the cold and the mud and the rain and the crowds and take in the beauty of 100,000 people all together in a field somewhere in a foreign country enjoying music together. The only thing that would have made it more enjoyable would have been if I had a proper jacket. This time of year in Germany they call the cold weather "Sheep's Cold". They shear the sheep the first week of June in conjunction with the start of summer and then this cold front comes. The poor German sheep have to shiver through it without their wool. Kind of sad and kind of funny. Kind of like me this weekend.

-Tegan

This story was published on Jun. 21, 2010

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