I'm pretty sure I said "hi" to him backstage at the Queens of the Stone Age gig at St. Andrew's Hall on September 13th, 2002. But that's inconsequential.
August 20th, 2004 the Dirtbombs played the Pukkelpop Festival in Belgium. We took an overnight ferry from Brighton, UK where we'd performed the previous evening. We arrived on the festival grounds pretty early. I set up my drums as soon as I was allowed so I could go and check out Joanna Newsom's even-earlier-than-ours set on the other side of the grounds. Her opening with an a cappella, not even singing through a microphone version of "Yarn and Glue" in the middle of a mostly empty tent in this empty Belgian field still sits with me as one of the most unafraid performances I have ever witnessed.
Anyway, our set time was during a very un-rock and roll daylight, we're not a big draw and there's not too much of a crowd watching us. But the stage was HUGE...maybe the biggest one we'd ever play. With tons of overhead space, room for Troy to stomp around with a festival length cable...I mean, it really felt like we were probably just a little too small to be included in such an affair but we were going to our damnedest to make sure we took full advantage of our inclusion in such reindeer games.
We played hyper fast and found ourselves walking off stage with 10 minutes still left in our allotted time slot. As a total anomaly, bad form even, we say "fuck it" and go back to do an encore. Bands our stature do not garner festival encores. According to my hand-written tour diary "...at the end of By My Side I did a headstand on my bass drum, stood on it, then started tossing shit like it was salad. I noticed Greg Dulli stage right mid-set and was trying to see how close I could get the drums to him. Troy swears the rack tom was twenty feet in the air. I threw the bass drum over my head backwards (not before a quick cursory saftey check" and snapped bits off the rim."
Looking back 18 years later and I still feel the adrenalin rush in my chest reminiscing. It felt unhinged in the best way. Throwing and destroying equipment is 100% patently dumb and played out...but it is so fucking fun and the crowd eats it up every damn time.
I am being completely honest and serious when I say that I must've thrown my bass drum at least twenty-five feet from where I was situated on the drum riser. Never before and never since would I be given an opportunity to so wonderfully transform potential energy into kinetic energy via the destruction of the tools I needed to make money.
When I finally walked off stage, I was hit with an instant wave of feeling like I needed to vomit. I had pushed myself SO hard that it only caught me the second I stopped doing it. Right at that moment, a guy walked past me and said "Good show, I grabbed one of your sticks!" to which I had to awkwardly ask for it back, as I wasn't sure if I'd be able to find the exact ones in Europe and it was still the beginning of the tour.
Soon thereafter Greg Dulli came by and said of the five times he'd seen the Dirtbombs, this had been the best. He then introduced everyone standing around and my mind was blown when it became clear that the guy who'd grabbed my stick, whom I'd assumed was just a rabid fan, was actually Mark Lanegan. He and Dulli were playing later in the day as the Twilight Singers.
We'd see Blanche and the Kills and the MC5 and Franz Ferdinand and the White Stripes the next night at the festival and my overwhelming take away from it all was that I just felt so lucky to even be there. As a fan, this was just about the most fun I could ever ask for. And the fact that, even if only for a second, it seemed like Lanegan was a fan of what I was doing, all these years later, is still humbling.
