Alexander from Germany – the lucky competition winner – wrote us a short diary of his trip to L.A.. Thanks for that Alexander! good to meet up…

December 9th
We headed for the Troubadour around 6pm to meet up with Volbeat and se the concert afterwards. After some negotiating with the venue security (They didn’t listen to us at all) the tour manager Daniel showed up and settled everything. Daniel took us to the tour bus and we had pictures taken and had a talk with Anders, Jon, Thomas and Michael. It was fantastic and the band hung out with us for a long time – Thanks for that and thanks for the autographs – we’re really grateful!

When Danko Jones went on stage Volbeat wanted to see their show and we all left the bus and went into the Troubadour. After that Volbeat entered the stage and played a fantastic show for a rocking crowd! Great show! We went home to our hotel and had to sleep immediately after being awake for 35 hours.

December 10th
We woke up way too early due to jet-lag and went for a walk on Hollywood Boulevard. We saw walk of fame and many other interesting sights. In the evening the Anaheim show was up. We took a cab in good time (4.45 pm) – we should be there at 7pm. The traffic was heavy and we arrived just before 7pm. The biggest indoor arena I’ve been to in Germany  is the Color-Line-Arena (16.000 capacity) and the biggest stadium is Dortmunds’ Signal-Iduna-Park (82.000 capacity). The Honda arena seemed way bigger than the Color-Line-Arena, so we rushed to the nearest guest-list entrance. The staff was extremely cool and after Daniel helped us clearing the guest list we entered the arena just in time to see all 3 bands (Volbeat, Machine Head and Metallica) perform. Once again the show was fantastic! THANKS!
Alexander

Hello!

We’re about to wrap up yet another busy year for us. It’s been a great pleasure to tour the Guitar Gangsters & Cadillac Blood album. We’ve never played for so many dedicated fans. It took us to almost every good festival and venue in Europe and to USA for 2 tours. The first part of 2010 are planned for continuing writing songs for our next album. We’ll hit the studio in April and album release is planned for the fall. During the summer we’ll play a handful of festivals i Europe and will tour full throttle in the fall. Stay tuned on the website for more updates.

Thanks for the support – it means the world to us!

Cheers

Volbeat

The 3 latest shows with Metallica in Boise, Sacramento and Anaheim were great, though the shows start to feel more and more similar. The response has been good at every single show and we’ve left the stage with a smile every time. James Hetfield gave me a nice present. He came into our dressing room with a painting of Elvis and said: Here little e, here’s big E, ha ha ha. James had written a little letter on the flipside of the painting for me. Nice present, I’m really happy abut that one. We did our own headliner show at The Troubadour in L.A. Our good friends in Danko Jones opened and kicked ass as always and played an excellent set. It was a sold out club show with something like a 450 capacity. We’re never going to forget this show, because the response was a killer! It was like in Europe a few years ago, before we could sell out big venues. We were thrilled to get such an amazing response at our first L.A. headliner show ever. And we ended up playing a 115 minutes set, a lot more than we were asked, so quite a few encores. THANKS for the support, it means everything to us!!!

Prior to the show we said hello to the two competition winners who had won a trip to L.A. for the Volbeat show. So we invited them onto the tour bus, hung out for a while and made sure they had a few items to bring home. A couple of hours before that we visited the Rainbow Club, who’s Lemmy’s (of Motörhead) regular spot, to get some beer and food and check out where the mighty father orders his whiskey from , we ended up there again after the show, hung out with fans and had a blast.

Michael

After being home for a few days we flew to Zurich, Switzerland, to kick off our own, tight European tour. Originally the tour was planned to last for 6 weeks, but when Metallica asked us to join the US tour, we had to minimize the amount of dates. So we put together a tight schedule through Switzerland, Belgium, Germany and Holland. We’ll continue the European tour in early 2010 going to Austria, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia by the way. But it was good to be back on common grounds and with all you European fans. Unfortunately the last show in Holland ended with Michael collapsing on stage due to exhaustion from a serious flu.

When the chock from that was over, we had a couple of nights at home. We flew from Copenhagen again, via London to Las Vegas. We landed the night before the show and even though we were pretty jetlagged, we went out for dinner and some Las Vegas nightlife. We were invited to a local metal bar, owned by Scott Ian (Anthrax) and Vinnie Paul (Pantera), where the Metallica fan club held a party, but we politely passed on that one, as it was getting past midday Danish time and we had to get some sleep.

We woke up early Saturday and spent the morning in downtown Las Vegas before going to the venue for sound check. This time we were a lot more used to the stage in comparison to the tour start in Toronto a month earlier. We played a good show and some fans had brought Volbeat banners and the response from the crowd was great.

After the show, some of us stayed at the venue to watch Machine Head (who had taken over the main support slot from Lamb of God) and Metallica. Others went to see the Pinball Hall Of Fame. Anders and I squeezed a Willie Nelson show before the bus headed off to Salt Lake City.

Right now we’re in Boise Idaho, its freezing and we hide inside the bus all day, figuring out how to get back at James Hetfield and win our ongoing dressing room fight…

Thomas

Volbeat plays a substitution show at the 013 on February 24th. Fans who can’t attend this show, can return their ticket until January 24th. Tickets from the November 29th show will still be valid on the February 24th show. If any tickets are returned, these will be made available for sale…

Cheers!