Epic Day
[Note: I could only get to one story this week, but it’s a doozy]
Sometimes you have a busy day. Everything depicted below happened within a 20 hour period between sleeps during my first South American tour with the Secret Chiefs 3 back in 2012.
It all started with a casual morning at our Buenos Aires hotel: eating breakfast, packing, and writing music down on little bits of paper to tape to my keyboard for secret reference. Perhaps we were a bit too casual, suddenly finding ourselves running late for our flight to Santiago.
This was quite stressful. We filled the cabs with our gear and sped to the airport. Every step of the process to check in and then get through security and passport control was some kind of confusing clusterfuck. We ran to our gate, only to find nobody there. It looked like our plane had moved to another gate, but which one?! We then spotted stewards way down the hall frantically waving us over. That must be it. We ran to them.
They practically pushed us out the door and onto the tarmac. Waiting for us there was a bus to take us to our plane. We all jumped on the bus and exhaled a sigh of relief. Phew. We made it!
Or did we? The vehicle just sat there. And sat there. We were supposed to be in the air in about 15 minutes! Nevertheless the driver waited until the bus was full enough to begin delivering passengers to their various planes. More stress. Incredible stress.
Finally the bus moved, and literally just spun around to drop us off 50 feet away from where it started. Let me get this straight: our plane was right fucking there this whole time and we weren't allowed to just walk to it?! We ran up the steps, claimed our seats, and took off within a few minutes.
A few hours later we were on the other side of the Andes and descending into Santiago. Had to go through immigration and pay the $140 reciprocity fee. At the counter they wouldn't accept my used, raggedy US cash. Luckily amongst my bills I happened to have seven crisp-enough twenties they were eventually willing to take. Chileans always give Americans a tough time.
We claimed our bags and met Lelya, our local contact, who then got us all in a van to head to the National Stadium for our afternoon gig - a big open air festival.
Sound check was delayed due to earlier rains, so we had an hour to grab a late lunch at a nearby Peruvian restaurant. Delicious meals and hyper-sugary desserts. Then we headed to the Stadium where the show was already starting. We registered and found our hang out space behind the stage. No working toilets.
As a politically charged festival in the National Stadium which contained fresh ghosts of its storied past, the event was heavily patrolled by countless military police. On the flip side, it was also being patrolled by countless stray dogs, all of which were totes adorbs.
I checked out some of the acts from the performer's corral. We were the only Americans there. Insert here a previously published story about striking conversation up with a completely random Chilean person backstage who, turns out, was a journalist who recently visited the Bay Area to do a story on the SETI Institute, and I told him I worked on SETI@home and this kinda blew his mind.
I wasn't sure anybody knew who we were, nor how well our strange little set will be received. However, our 15 minutes included a tune with a surprise guest singer: Camila Moreno. She's a young, powerful singer-songwriter popular in this part of the world and known for her deeply political (and artful) songs. We learned the parts for one of her hits "Milones" on our own the other day.
When she arrived we greeted face to face for the first time in our green room and then talked through the form of the tune. It was all very fast, but we're pros. So less than an hour after meeting we were going to wing it together in front of 10,000 people.
She did her formal set, just before ours, and then we were rushed on stage. No time to really get a monitor mix so it was kinda crazy sound wise. We launched into our few fan favorites - not that we had any fans in the audience - we must have seemed like complete weirdos in our robes playing that quarter tone-y stuff. But then Camila came out and the crowd exploded as we did her song.
To date that was the biggest crowd I ever played before, but it was like a very fast dream and I couldn't really soak in the moment. Quickly ushered off stage, we then dismantled our gear amidst the backstage chaos and then threw everything into the van and hit the road.
Hit the road? Well, that night we had a gig in the incredible city of Valparaíso. Luckily downbeat was around midnight, so we had time for the two-hour drive and a relaxed sound check.
As we arrived in town we enjoyed the street performers who would jump in front of your vehicle at red lights and do their shtick - dancing, juggling, whatever - for 20 seconds. The stray dogs here were far more aggressive. Whole packs would catch up to your moving car and nip at the spinning tires.
We loaded into the club (called Huevo) which was a bit of an ordeal as there were multiple venues of sorts in this complex, and we had to figure out how to get to our proper floor. There was an impossibly slow and scarily unsafe elevator that took us from the performance level to our green room several stories up. We had to find this one girl on staff every time we needed to use this lift - a process that could take 5-20 minutes.
Once again, the bathroom situation wasn't great in our green room - there was in fact a working toilet (yay!) but no TP. I sneaked around later to some creepy unoccupied sections of the complex to find a working and well supplied john later on. There's something particularly thrilling about utilizing a practically abandoned bathroom on a dark, uninhabited floor of a withered building in an odd city on the other side of the planet.
Sound check was slow due to technical issues. The reverb tank on the guitar amp wasn't working. Toby had a soldering iron though and fussed with that for a bit. Meanwhile our sound guy Felipe sorted out channel issues between the stage and the board.
We eventually got everything sorted well enough but only after doors were open and the early fans were treated to the free sound check. Not much time to relax before actual show, but the exhaustion was almost exhilarating. So much so that once we returned downstairs to play one of our longest sets ever - about 2 hours and 15 minutes including encore. Total insanity. One guy leapt on stage and mock conducted the band for a bit before diving back into the crowd.
Load out was as difficult as load in. At one point Toby and I got sick of waiting for the lift so we explored the maze of other performance spaces in this venue to find our way back three flights down from the green room. We totally crashed a couple large private parties and mini raves, somehow finding the stairs leading us to the next level. One stairwell was hidden behind a false wall. Not sure how we figured that out. Years of playing Doom and Quake probably helped.
We were invited to get post-show super-late dinner at a local friend's house up in the hills. But first we checked into our rooms at the hotel. Our driver shlepped us and our bags over to that part of town, but parked nowhere near the destination. That's because the road up to the hotel was under construction and no automobiles could drive on it. Can't catch a fuckin' break!
San Francisco has nothing on these Valparaíso inclines. (Look it up - you've probably seen some videos of insane extreme urban downhill bicycle races from this town). It was an epic workout lugging our shit up these streets, especially as several were completely carved out and we couldn't wheel our bags over mounds of sand and concrete rubble. I'm destroyed, it's 3am, and I still had enough juice to walk a half mile uphill in piles of dirt and avoid ankle-twisting concrete urbanite while carrying my bag and 50 pound keyboard case. Not fun. Once this errand was done we returned to the car soaked with sweat and headed to this dinner house.
We had to walk a bit as the van couldn't traverse the particular windy, narrow street to our destination. I swear there are zero infrastructure and building codes in this town - everybody just seemed to build however they wanted with whatever materials they could find. It's kind of beautiful and amazing. We got to the place and led up some skinny, steep stairs to this awesome apartment.
The hospitality was incredible - the plating and food was top notch. Too bad it was all fishy, and I hate seafood. Luckily Timba was in the middle of a temporary vegan phase and so I had a partner in crime when asking for a non-fish option. Our hosts were more than happy to whip up a vegetable option for us. We ate, we drank, we hung out on the patio and surveyed the twinkling lights all over the city hills, and the twinkling stars above us.
Jesus it's 5:20am. We called it a night and motivated back to the hotel, once again lugging our tired bodies up the hills and through the blighty construction zone. I shared a room with Toby - I got the top bunk where there wasn't enough space below the ceiling for me to sit upright. No big deal - I slid into bed and crashed right the fuck right out.
We had the next day off. Thank god.