In a tour so heavy that economists predict it will lead to the ultimate collapse of the Eurozone, New York doomers Kings Destroy are currently on tour for three weeks in Europe with Rosetta. Below, the band checks in from the road while playing out new material on their way to and through a slot on Sweden’s Getaway Rock fest. For all the dates, hit up their Thee Facebooks page or simply click the poster below to enlarge. This time out it’s drummer Rob Sefcik and guitarist Carl Porcaro filling us in on the grizzly details. Please enjoy:

Kings Destroy prequel to heavy metal summer camp, Europe 2012
by Rob Sefcik

Oh, the places you’ll go!

Not just when you are on tour, but sometimes even right before you leave. Like to the fucking dentist for a minor issue (or so I believed). Procrastination is not such a good thing but yeah, I waited till the day we were leaving to see Mr. Dentist just to feel good about going on tour with Kings Destroy for three weeks in Europe. It’s 10AM, flight’s at 5PM, fuck it. And you guessed it… you snooze, you lose. My man tells me I have to go see an oral surgeon before I leave, only before I get admonished by his whole crew for waiting so long, and I also have to listen to the dental assistant ask me about how her classically trained teenage daughter can get into some rock ‘n’ roll band camp type thing while she scrapes away at my mouth. This is not going well.

So Mr. Dentist says all I have to do is go get part of my gum cut out with some space-age high tech laser thing. Whatever. My worst fears at this point are a) being late for the flight, b) missing the flight, or the worst of all, c) antibiotics and not being able to sample every Belgian and German beer that comes my way.

I have to wait nearly two hours too see Mr. Oral Surgeon only to have him tell me in a particularly surly tone that surgery is not the necessary course of action, all I have to do is put some strange red liquid on the affected area and bon voyage… and oh yeah, here’s a little prescription for antibiotics.

Lesson number one to all you stoner rock/metal/doom-type dudes/gals – take care of your pearly whites so as not to limit your beer intake for a few days when you are tooling around in exotic locales.

Enough with the lesson BS, there is still time to make this flight, dammit, even with the bitchy CVS clerk who can’t seem to empathize with my plight and expedite the whole prescription/antibiotics exchange. I also have to pick up Chris Skowronski, one of our guitar players, who is also having a bit of a freakout in Manhattan trying to obtain a DVD with our fancy new projection backdrop. I don’t tell him that I’m secretly glad that he’s also having some trouble getting his shit together.

Now it’s off to JFK where surprisingly all of Kings Destroy have made it on time. We shoot the shit for a bit and I say goodbye to my wonderful wife who has driven most of us to the airport… and we still have about 2 hours to go before boarding. What a responsible band – um, not so fast.

I can’t go into great detail about what happened next because I don’t want too much of the negativity to resurface at this point but I guess you can say we were blindsided by a veritable avalanche of incompetence, buffoonery and neglect from employees of a certain airline, the whole thing became a Kafka-esque nightmare that unfortunately reached epic proportions. Two extra hours were whittled down to about 10 minutes to make it through security where of course any dude that looks like he’s in a band or enjoys some of the finer things in life gets the “random” extra security check.

Needless to say, we made it, and hopefully I won’t have to find a dentist with a pair of pliers in Poland.

Tour Diary, Pt. 1
by Carl Porcaro

This is the first entry of the tour diary of the first ever Kings Destroy tour of Europe and east is our bearing. East from NYC to Belgium, further east from Belgium to Western Germany (Wiesbaden) and currently en route to Leipzig in far eastern Germany, after which we’ll continue our oriental progression over the border into Poland. None of us have played in Poland before and our tourmates in Rosetta have told us to expect some of the craziest shows of the tour there. Psyched indeed! As for tonight we’ll be playing in a very familiar place called Conne Island with a long history of great shows and progressive activity. I was first there on tour with Killing Time in 1992 not long after the unification of Germany and I’ll never forget it. The last time I was there in 2006 was also very memorable but for reasons I’d rather not repeat. I ended up in the hospital after a nasty tumble off a high stage a few nights earlier in Chemnitz caught up with me. The hospital seemed to be mostly empty and they left me in a dark hallway for what seemed like an eternity with nothing but the far off sounds of a woman giving birth to distract me from my throbbing chest. It turned out to be nothing more than a couple of busted up ribs but I’ve made a not so secret vow to avoid becoming the “Gurney Man” this go round.

Tonight will be the third show of the tour and was actually supposed to be fourth as our first gig in the Netherlands was cancelled, which was a big bummer as you might imagine. It was frustrating for both bands to land and not have a show to play but all turned out well as we spent the downtime with Rosetta and our drivers Stef and Mike. I generally don’t do “quaint,” but we had a cool time sightseeing in the picturesque town of Brugges and an even cooler (fucking bone numbingly freezing actually) time swimming in the English Channel.

The first gig was in an arts center in the countryside town of Knokke-Heist. We spent our time before the gig hanging in the grass with a pack of black sheep (not kidding) and it was a still totally light out when we hit the stage after 10PM. The set was a ripper and we brought the darkness down on Knokke-Heist. Rosetta was up next and I was up front with Mike screaming in my face and loving it. Davy, who was our host in Belgium and whose band Maudlin did a sick set before KD, turned 31 at midnight and celebration ensued. Special thanks to Astrid and crew for putting on a stellar show.

The next night was at in Wiesbaden at an excellent spot called Kultur Palast. Great crew of people there (shout out to Manus and the sound man). We debuted a new song called “Lunar Scape,” which is one of the many new songs we are playing on

this tour, which we’ll be recording at the end of the summer with Sanford Parker again. We managed to get through it without a trainwreck, so I’ll take that as a win. It was also the first night that we had our new projection which was created by Chris Flam, brother of Stephen Flam from Winter. He just finished it the morning we left, and since we were of course facing the audience, we still haven’t actually seen the whole thing but Chris is a true pro and I’m sure it’s amazing. Pulling into Conne Island now. To be continued…

Tags: Kings Destroy, Kings Destroy European tour, Kings Destroy tour diary

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012 at 10:20 am and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.