Australia is definitely in the top 5 for countries to be a citizen of. I always love visiting down under, and as long you survive the long flight you are pretty much guaranteed to have a good time. Mercury Rev starts their longest tour of Oz with a bunch of show opening up for The Finn Brothers. And we start things off with 4, count them, 4, nights at the Sydney Opera House. Two shows, a day off (!), and then 2 more shows. With the venue a short walk from our hotel, and beautiful Sydney Harbor, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Here’s ground control, on the far end the XL-4 for the Finns, then the Midas Verona that Jands sound provided me, and then lightings whole hogs. The Verona is not too shabby. Sounds like a Midas, and who really needs VCA’s anyway?

The Sydney Opera House is not really the optimum place for a live rock show, with acoustics made for unamplified instruments, though while it is quite reverberent, its one of the better reverbs you have ever heard, and for some “psychedelic” rock it works out pretty well. The V-Dosc PA helps out allot too.

The Finns crew is really cool and treats us well. Big Show sets up the PA each night, and I help out by taking care of my own FOH set up, so he can concentrate on the Finns. A very casual tour indeed. We play nice theaters throughout the tour. Very casual tour with tons of time to hang out in Oz.

Here we see Giles mixing the Finn Brothers on the Jands provided XL-4, with the TC Icon remote. High class!

Next we head off to Japan for the Fuji Festival. While not at Mt. Fuji, it is nestled in the mountains of Japan at the bottom of a ski resort. The weather was cloudy and rainy while we were there, but still beautiful none the less (as seen above there was the rare sunny moment).

Everybody stays in the same hotel, bands and audience.

The PA are usually awesome here and our show in the red tent is no exception, Midas yet again, and a Vertec rig I think. And besides a tiny leak in the roof right above the lead singer, the show went off well. And you’ve never seen so many stage hands….

Fellow tour manager and friend Matt Johnson hooks me up with a tour of the US with the UK band Embrace. A great bunch of gentlemen to work, the tour went well overall. The band carried their own in-ear system, which made all of the shows much, much easier in many ways, especially as we were playing the smaller clubs, most with monitors from FOH, which in this case worked out just fine, as the bands mix requirements were fairly simple, and I didn’t need to spend time working on some crap wedges, that would only sound so good anyway.

Embrace at the Troubadour in Los Angeles

Matt, our tour manager, had a vacation scheduled the same time as the last couple of days of the tour. He was going to have another tour manager come out and take care of the last bit, but then convinced me in the end to take care of the tail end of things.

He gave me his US cell phone, and as I got tired of keeping track of the two of them, I taped them together into one SUPER PHONE! Brain cancer twice as fast…

And since I wasn’t necessarily prepared to TM, I didn’t have my printer with me… So back to the old school hand made day sheets.

The 4th of July was spent as a day off in St. Louis. I think I was the only one to go out and see fireworks. Can’t say I blame an English band for giving a rats ass about Independence Day!

After the fireworks we head off to Kansas City for a quick show on the 2nd stage at the Verizon Amphitheater, and then I send them all off to fly home and go right to Live8. Meanwhile Brendan and I ride the bus back to it’s home in Atlanta before flying home to San Francisco.