Arrived in Copenhagen: the toilets weren’t far, the driver revealed that he may or may not have been awake for 70 some hours at that point, and out we stumbled for day 1.
Notable is that Galo´s suitcase was destroyed on the first day of a 3 week road trip. Are any of us prepared? Prepared for what? Doesn´t matter, here we are. 15 Big Geezers on a bus, travelling around Europe and leaving our traces.
Girls on bikes. The color of Copenhagen is brick red. Strong, sad and certainly sexy.
And then, you know how the joke goes: 15 Big Geezers walked into a Carhartt shop … an appropriate punchline would take us back to Ghostbusters, which may be what is actually happening on this tour, but the point is: they came, they saw and in a really peaceful way, they kicked some ass.
Could we call it invited vandalism? It took around 3 hours and was pretty amazing to watch, sort of serious and totally non chalant. All these Big Geezers, adding layers, all this chaos and in only 3 hours it looked like a common language, like it had been designed or at least discussed. People around were excited. One guy excited enough to grab a marker and start hooting on the wall: The lessons of the Owl Boy will be remembered.
Monday, and none of us were going to any office. It was a free day; bikes were rented, a football was bought, and the weather was lovely … more girls on bikes, more bricks and bricking … and 24 hours later off to paint Copenhagen’s indoor skatepark, which was conveniently parked about 100 meters from our bus, The Alfredo.
Jeremy Fish arrived from San Francisco. Airport to bus to work, second wind, professional ethic, donno, don’t matter, he sucked it up, got in there and joined the others. This is surely part of the biological make up of a Big Geezer.
The large collaborative wall took about 5 hours (as people wandered in and out and strayed to other walls) at mixed pace. It was rocking, and it is hard to imagine that the crew will be able to keep pumping out such quality work, while living on a bus, sleeping little and chalking up all sorts of kilometers. It is also hard to imagine they won’t. There is a lot of a lot of things on the bus, and will is certainly one of these items. Besides this large wall at the front of the halfpipe, work went up on at least 5 other walls and the whole place was lovingly bombed before we took off.
When we did split, it was nearly 2 in the morning, the last drunk and friendly Danes had kicked their cans, broken a bottle and handed us some skate magazines to show us the Danish scene circuit 1980’s. On the bus, everybody sat exhausted, burning trees, cracking bottles, zoning out as the Alfredo purred and the rain of Oslo got closer by the minute.
Morning! SkinUp and Don’t Be Shy.
Read the Big Geezers Tour Diary Part 2: Oslo
Read the Big Geezers Tour Diary Part 3: Warsaw
Read the Big Geezers Tour Diary Part 4: Budapest
Read the Big Geezers Tour Diary Part 5: Budapest
Read the Big Geezers Tour Diary Part 6: Bratislava
Fotos: Landry A.
Words: Harlan Levey
