Lungs Face Feet

We flew down to the modern Mexican city of Monterrey. How customs works there is that you walk up to a customs officer with slicked back hair who says slyly "try your luck" and you press a button which randomly either lights a green light or a red light and if you get the red light then you get searched. Everybody got the green light except poor Rebecca. Needless to say we all made it in.

Our first show was at this shopping complex which was essentially a "punk rock mini-mall" with all sorts of vendors selling records and t-shirts. There was of course no sound system or microphone, so of course we had to search out a bullhorn to purchase to remedy the situation. We set up next to the fountain in the center and played away, the sound reverberating off the concrete. Then later that night we played on the street in a busy market area downtown. There were at least a hundred people gathered around watching us and we got a lot of enthusiastic support. We sold all the Cd's we had on us right away. After we played a police officer came up to us and told that we couldn't play there and was angry at first but then calmed down and was more polite and we said were sorry and didn't know (playing the ignorant tourist card) and everything was fine. Got back to the house of the friend's Scott knew there, got blown away in a game of soccer in the park next door, and slept on the concrete roof. We pretty much always slept on concrete roofs the whole tour. Where else do you put nine people?

Then we took the bus to the town of San Luis Potosi. We didn't have a tour van or anything we just used buses and taxis and we had to walk quite a bit. Luckily I put wheels on my sousaphone case but I still needed someone to walk behind me to spot it because it would constantly want to tip over with all the rough cobblestone roads.

In San Luis, we met up with some old Mexican friends, Iram and Leo, from that town who we knew from Pittsburgh (they used to be in a different incarnation of the band before I joined). Our merchandise supply had already dwindled, so we sought out a CD burning kiosk and made more CD's to sell. We’ve been selling them for 30 pesos which is like less than three dollars. We played several outdoor unplanned spontaneous performances in the many plazas of the old colonial town. One of them was supposed to be at this one plaza but there wasn't any power and there weren't many people there, so the band and the ten people that came to see us, decided to march to another plaza instead, playing an old number from the marching band as we surged through the cobblestone streets. Leo's brother Roca was on the bullhorn hyping up the situation and running up into shops yelling into the bullhorn. By the time we made it to our spot my lips were pretty shot. But we played anyway as it started to rain on us (the only time it rained the entire trip). After the show we headed back to Roca's house which is essentially a hallway with a kitchen and hung out with about 20 Mexican punk rockers and had a raucous "jam session" which lasted for hours culminating in us in a kitchen the size of my bedroom blasting our set again with everybody crammed in.

The next day was New Years Eve and we set off for the small mountain town of Xichu for this festival of a style of folk music called Haupango. Our bus took us to a small town where we had to cram nine of the band plus Leo (who joined us for the rest of tour) plus all of our luggage and gear into two taxis. The cab driver seemed very confident that all of our stuff would fit in the trunks. No it didn't but we stacked it in 3ft over the trunk and bungee chord-ed the trunk lid as best as we could. Miles of beautiful twisted mountain roads failed to dislodge the load and we were in one of the most beautiful quaint little towns. Some sweet talking from Leo and some pesos and an elderly lady let us stash our gear in her kitchen for the night. Definitely no hotels open here, thousands of people here lined the center plaza with their white shirts and white cowboy hats.

Starting at midnight there was a stand off between the two rival Huapango bands, each situated in an elevated box on either side of the plaza facing each other with a sea of bouncing white cowboy hats filling the plaza in between. The game was an endurance contest to see who could outlast the other, each four piece (two guitars, two fiddles) taking it's turn screeching out hypnotic repetitions entirely of one dynamic of full on exuberance in a 6/8 time that would repeat and repeat and repeat and were punctuated by periods of everything dropping out except the guitar and the singer would expressively flaunt himself and taunt the other band in Spanish. Then they would start back in, and everybody would dance again.

Back and forth they went all night long, the crowd never waining. We found a spot in the woods to sleep just outside town, had a fire, listened to the majestic wash of organ sound filling the heavens and drifted off to sleep.

Morning brought the sun and I went to go watch the musicians still in their hypnotic sleep deprived screeching frenzy. Finally, at about 10:30 one of the groups conceited and the other played their victory lap for another 20 minutes. At the end the crowd called for an encore and the group hesitated and finally winced out a rather piercingly bland seemingly children's song that sounded like a broken record player. They were quite spent. Some members of the Victorious band were seventy years old!

After picking up the pieces, we packed onto an overcrowded bus and went back.

The next town was Guanajuato, a tourist town nestled amongst large hills. The entire city was built with elaborate stonework with tunnels and paths and passageways every which way. The main street of town was in the base of a valley so you could keep from getting lost by going downhill. We arrived, ate some tacos, and found a place to set up and play on the street. We paid off the eight year old accordion player up the road and played away to an appreciative crowd of students and tourists. Little did we know that we were across the road from the governors house (like 20 ft away). Oops. Luckily for us, they waited until after the set to tell us we can't play in the plaza.

We found a local youth hostel and brokered a deal to stay on the roof for cheap and also finagled a bar show for the next night at the bar the owner of the hostel also owned. So we made some fliers and the hit the streets to promote the show. The evening of the show we had plans to walk to another plaza to play a few songs to promo the show and as we approached the plaza near where we had played the other night we passed a clown doing his act with two hundred people watching him. The clown stopped us and asked us to play something, so busted into one of our tunes, barreling along. The crowd started clapping and getting into it and we just kept going into the song with the clown trying to signal us to stop a minute into it. We finally cut the song at the breakdown and went up and passed out fliers to the crowd. The crowd kept chanting for more. The clown felt unthrowned. The police officer from the other night was upset that we were playing in the plaza again. But we argued that the clown was asking us to play so we did. Things were worked out and we scrapped the idea of playing the other plaza.

The show was pretty wild. Before it began Ben and Rick had to break up a fight between the bar tender and a drunk patron. I wasn't there to see it they basically had to rescue the bar tender who (though he may have provoked the fight) was losing really badly. I don't think anybody was hurt too bad. The dark red bar ended up being really packed, there were a crew of young rowdy folks who were really reved up for the show. One individual seemed to be yelling the entire show. It was a really fun set. At one point we had to tell the crowd to settle down because we were afraid the floor might collapse.

The next town we went to was Morelia, a nice university town. We spent the entire day waiting in the plaza for this lady to meet us but she never came and so we just hung out all day in the plaza with all our gear. It was a nice restful break. We lucked out that there happened to be a festival there that evening next to the plaza and a city official asked us if we wanted to play there. So after some fanaggling with other city members we got the go ahead to play just as the festival was getting out, and had about a hundred or so people watch us. There were a lot of children running around dancing, which was refreshing. We also were invited to play a bar later that night and had a good show there as well. We slept on the roof of an apartment building that a nice young lady had an apartment at.

After that we had a beautiful bus ride through the pine forested mountains to Cuernavaca which apparently has tap water that you can actually drink. Didn't get sick. We played a show at a bar there and then moved on to our final stop on the tour. Mexico City, the big one. We met up with some friends who are in a band called "Polka Madre" and stayed at one of the band member's parents house which really is a huge giant gated complex. We played a show with members of that band at a bar. It was crowded and lots of people came up to us for autographs and took pictures with us. The other band had a tuba player that put me to shame, who would run in place and yell and act like a maniac. We had some time to kill and tried to play in this fancy plaza but the security was very organized and stopped us right as we were taking the instruments out of our cases. With some down time I got to do some sightseeing and visited a museum with some crazy Aztec art and stonework. We played one last show at a squated building downtown, stayed up real late and then had to make it to the airport the next morning in a very semi-concious state.

So that's pretty much the trip in a nutshell. Ate a lot of tacos. Drank a lot of fruit juice in plastic bags. Rode a lot of buses. Hauled a lot of sousaphone. Met a lot of really nice people. I'm really fortunate to have four very fluent spanish speakers in the band and Leo really hooked things up for us. I picked up a few words here and there.