first off i'd like to say it's good to be back home, but i do really miss the traveling and playing every night. we've been really busy during the month back working our jobs, rehearsing and playing shows. speaking of shows, what an honor it was to open up for the legendary east bay funk machine, the kings of bump city, tower of power! aloha tower was packed and grooving to the kind of funk that gets the knees a jivin', the back writhin' and everything else in-between conspirin' to shake and move. big ups to uncle tom moffatt for throwing another great party and for bringing together some top notch talent for us island folk.

anyways, the point of this email is to inform you all that i've posted pictures for blogs 1 through 6 which account for some twelve days on tour. in the earlier blogs i was playing catch up a lot and wrote about several days of tour within just one blog. nevertheless, the pictures i believe really enhance the entire experience and they really helped jog my memory whilst writing.

click here to see the latest pics and keep scrolling down until you finally get to blog 1. this blog is now complete and serves as a tool to reminisce about the good life and all the places from the other side of the world.

i hope you enjoy the photos and i'd like to hear what you have to say...so comment, will ya?! sorry if you see some spam but those guys are relentless. i clean up the stuff everyday from the comments section but they just keep posting 'em. those guys should get a life and do something worthwhile.

if you have the time find out even more about us at gojimmygo.com and on our myspace site.

thanks for reading the go jimmy go blog and supporting live music whenever and wherever you can!

so, this is it -- the last and final blog. i decided not to write my usual narrative and instead let the pictures tell the story. basically, what happened was the last few days of the tour went so fast and we were back in the states before we knew it.

big ups to the toasters for letting us hitch a ride with them all across europe and a big right on to all the people who came out to all the rocking shows. we'll be back next year, as a headliner this time, and simply can't wait for the opportunity to do it all over again. lastly, thanks to you for reading this humble blog and putting up with my amateur writing and reporting of events. i enjoyed the experience and now am the proud owner of a vitural scrapbook of my time spent in foreign lands. oh yeah, also big thanks to the honolulu advertiser for hosting our travel blog and supporting a hawaii band trying to make a difference. yup, eric

saturday 3/9/07 budapest, hungary

a38 boat -- hands down the coolest venue on tour

bird in flight in the ancient city

another sightseeing expedition in the middle of the night

sunday 3/10/07 prague, czechoslovakia

raddest city of the whole tour

check out them statues way up there

the last show was bittersweet -- we were both happy and sad to see it finally come to an end

tuesday 3/13/07 hollywood, california

founders of ska and reggae -- the skatalites w/ doreen shaffer!!!

of few of the many friends that showed up: dan (gjg's unofficial 7th member) and larry (the founder)

home sweet home -- have a celebratory drink with my pops

friday 3/9/07 beograd, serbia

a shanty town greeted us at the gates of beograd

the result of precision guided ordinance in downtown beograd

one of my favorite shows of the entire tour

lights everywhere in the city after dark

the bucket handles the media

thursday 3/8/07 novi sad, serbia

my pass to the world

the madness in novi sad

wednesday 3/7/07 sofia, bulgaria
a couple of cd’s, a bunch of banana’s, a carton of cigarettes – those were the bribes we observed at the various border stops all along our 16 hour journey from montenegro to bulgaria. so many little countries, so little time: we passed through serbia twice and even crossed into the war-torn country of kosovo on route to our destination, sofia. the journey was a serious test to our collective endurance and patience as checkpoint after checkpoint made us stop, fill out paperwork and get inspected for the hundredth time. apparently, the guards must’ve be looking for guns, refugees or smuggler’s loot. we had none of these and they let us pass on to the next miserable stop, each one making us later and later.

the kosovo border stop was a surprise to us because evidently today was the first day kosovo was an official country. in other words, they told us the border crossing we were currently at did not exist the day before and that simply blew my mind. here we were standing in the midst of history yet i had no want to be apart of it as this stop, just like the many before it, was helping to make us miss our show. in fact, tonight’s gig was now looking pretty dire and we were starting to think we might miss two in a row. in 25 years, the toasters missed only three gigs with the third one being just last night in macedonia. bucket felt so bad about the whole situation but the record speaks for itself: 25 years, 3 bagged shows. the promoter from the last show almost got lynched from 700 irate concert-goers and we didn’t want an encore for tonight.

kosovo was very much like most of bosnia: trash strewn everywhere, lots of blown up buildings, and people living in poverty, or damn close to it. it was a sad sight to see, especially the kids. we came upon a french nato military base that was beefed up with barbed wire fencing, sandbag gunnery nests and lookout towers that showed they meant business. this particular country is policed by nato forces divided up by the u.s., the french, the italians, and the british. we found out we were in the french sector as we drove past three heavily-armed french sentries standing guard in the middle of an intersection. strangely enough two of them waved at us and one took a picture of our bus hung a right. thinking of it now, they probably thought us a nato transport just like the border guard going into bosnia.

tired, hungry, yet resilient, we made it to the show in sofia 5.5 hours late. the first show was a sell-out and the second show right after it was close to being one. the promoter had one hell of night trying to sort that mess out but was relieved to see us pull up to the club near 1 am! we all hustled out of the bus and with equipment in hand walked into the venue to a standing ovation from the entire crowd from the outside of the venue all the way through the club to the stage in the back. we parted the crowd of hundreds in front of us as they cheered and patted us on our backs on route to the stage. what an entrance! what a feeling that was! i’ve never had that kind of appreciation and gratitude as a musician anywhere else in the world we’ve played and i know that this one was unique and one of the very reasons why we came all this way to the other side of the world.

bucket & rupert scheming at the montenegro border

french nato base somewhere in kosovo

dusk in kosovo...eerie, yet strangely serene

the best reception ever!

i don't what this is but i rocked it!

dinner at 6 am, sofia -- mmmm...so good

tuesday 3/6/07 montenegro - albania

special foreign correspondent, bucket, front man for the toasters and the manager for the tour, wrote about our balkan debacle. basically, we missed the show in skopje, macedonia because of our gps malfuncitioning, took a wrong turn in albuquerque and ended up in a most dangerous sitation.

It’s A Small World

The odyssey from Montenegro and the debacle at the Albanian border town of Shkoder begins. Fighting our way up the impossible roads the bus hauls us up through the excruciating switchbacks of the black mountains. I cast my mind back to Hannibal bringing his elephants through the Pyrennes to surprise the Romans during the Punic wars. Rupert, our uncomplaining driver succeeds in passing the camel thru the eye of the needle and we careen downhill onto the highway to Belgrade. The border crossings are like mushrooms - some so new that they didn’t exist yesterday –the death throes of Yugoslavia.

Then Kosovo – and Armageddon. Bored French and Danish KFOR UN squaddies watch us pass from the safety of their armoured vehicles and sand-bagged bunkers. Miles of concertina wire and electric fences. Ugly new raw brick houses on bare earth, all paid for by UAE and Kuwait – or should I say the American motorist – stand out incongruously against the background of shattered dwellings. Smashed timbers and the crow-picked eyes of sightless windows, and everywhere emaciated dogs picking through the heaping mounds of garbage and rubble that are the new hallmark of the Balkans. River beds are choked with rotting vehicles and rubbish, tipping down the hillsides like obscene waterfalls. Trees and fences festooned with plastic streamers. Fires burn everywhere on the haunting mountainsides. Postcards from hell. At the same time there seems plenty of money to gild the minarets.

Dirty kids with no shoes wave and chase the big white bus. The ubiquitous cops are curious. They think at first that we are UN or NATO - one asks for our S4, a UN travel document. He is confused by the camo pants and the short hair. I shred some air guitar - Amerikanski musiscisti! He laughs and asks why we want to come to Kosovo? He points at the map and shows the road through the Christian areas. Go this way, it’s safer.

At the Drago checkpoint self-important UN officials hold their noses at the pitiful belongings of the busload of repatriating Roma refugees ahead of us. An old lady stares through me from the back seat. She’s seen it all and doesn’t care any more. The fussing UN cadres are a band-aid on a broken leg. We chew the fat with the American cops. One of them knows who we are. We give them a CD and tell them to keep their heads down. They come from the same part of Tennessee but didn’t know each other before shipping out to Kosovo.

It’s A Small World

the cow who greeted us into shkoder, albania

by any means necessary

guy selling bags of onions

lost in albania and nobody can read the map

a good road in shkoder

a bad road in shkoder

lady digging dirt in a clean spot in the trash heap