"To convince oneself that one has the right
to live decently takes time."
Eva Perón
Nick Cave once said something to the effect that he chose his band members based on how well they got along. Playing ability is secondary. Being able to live on a bus together, all day and night, and to hang out and be friends, is more important.
He's right.
Booking The Poor Man's Nick Cave Tour was a full-time job for a month. 6 days a week, anywhere from 4 to 12 hours a day, just to get the shows. I had originally planned to bring a band. And so I pitched "Nathan Payne & The Sad Beads," a psychedelic rockabilly band following Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds from Mexico City to Las Vegas, by way of South America. It took a month, but I got it together.
The fundraising was another matter, and eventually it became clear that I wasn't going to be able to actually afford to bring a band. The show in Buenos Aires was the only one I warned in advance that I'd be playing solo acoustic, and the guy there actually offered to help me find a local pick-up band. He put me in contact with a bassist and drummer. I watched their live videos from other projects, sent them some links and chord changes (if necessary), and hoped it would work out.
It's always a gamble. I ran the American chapters of the band like a motorcycle gang, with different rhythm sections in different parts of the country. The chapters would rotate a lot, and I played many shows where I met the band at the venue.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
What Nick Cave understands is that for the performance to be worthy of the admission price, the people onstage have to be right for each other. There can't be any wrongness, of any kind. A lesser player with a good vibe is better than a virtuoso without one. The "rightness factors" are all tenuous, and subtle. What looks great on the surface might be a trainwreck, due to a hundred unseen factors, hiding in the mist.
It turned out to be the case in Buenos Aires. The bassist and drummer were both great musicians, friendly guys, and eager and willing to do the show. But we never achieved liftoff. The vibe was wrong. I was even surprised myself. I met them several hours beforehand, and was actually impressed by how good they were. But the band, and the sound, and the vibe, just didn't work.
We weren't right for each other.
Like most Latin American bar owners, the guy in Buenos Aires was above and beyond friendly and accommodating. Most bar owners in the States have an attitude of "doing you a favor," and have what appears to be real contempt for the world around them. The ones that hide behind the word "community" are no different. They're all "doing you a favor." You'd think their cool little alcohol bunker was El Dorado, and the fact that they deigned to let you walk in the door is the highest honor imaginable. It has nothing to do with the fact that they booked you. I'm always grateful for that fact. It's the attitude behind the fact, that is unbearable. I don't care who or where they are. If it's an American establishment, chances are they have a haughty attitude of doing you a favor.
I say "most," not all.
Latin America is different. The bar owners aren't "doing you a favor." They're not arrogant overlords who mask their misanthropy behind the faux-libertine position of running "an establishment of vice" that is actually a stuffy church full of Puritanical drunks who are among the most miserable people in the history of the world. In Latin America, they're glad to have you. The bar owners in Santiago were actually concerned that I wouldn't like the French Fries. The guy asked me if I wanted some Pisco at least a hundred times. They smoked me out like Cheech & Chong.
Bar owners in the States would spit in your drink if they could. The cheapest one on the shelf.
I say "most," not all.
While I was eating the pizza the guy gave me, after the radio spot he'd put me on to promote the show (video above), the bar owner and I were talking, and he pointed at the bottles behind the bar. "Tomorrow," he said, "I have no idea if the prices of those bottles with either double, or be reduced by half." This instability is no doubt the reason for the friendly, non-officious attitude. The guy in Buenos Aires, while a prosperous person by all outward appearances, was happy just to be there. His attitude was joyful, friendly, and humble. It was a privilege and a pleasure to play there.
Unfortunately, most of the pictures I have of the show in Buenos Aires itself have a slightly uncomfortable feel to them (I took exactly NO photos of the show in Santiago, which perhaps is why the show was good?). I don't like it because it makes me look like a gothic beach ball, but the only pic that doesn't make me feel weird is this one from the radio booth (that's the owner on the right),
And this one of me standing under the banner they made for my Wednesday night show. Imagine a bar in the U.S. going out of their way like that. Not only putting you on the radio, but making a substantial banner for every night of the week. It would never occur to them, because you're supposed to be obsequiously grateful just to be there. The extent of their interest in fostering a "local music community" goes as far as writing your name on the calendar. They treat musicians like sluts. "Do it for exposure," they say. Spread your legs, so more people can see you.
Even whores have higher professional standards than that.
Whores have limits, things they will or won't do. And they get paid.
Sluts work for exposure.
They're opposites.
Surely it's not everybody, everywhere, all the time. It's not. But it is a recurring theme in the U.S. The reason American bar owners who perpetuate the stereotype of being misanthropic, self-important overlords tell you it's your job to do everything, while never lifting a finger to promote anything, is because they couldn't care less about the "local music community," and only care about selling alcohol. They talk about "community" for one reason: So they can sell more alcohol.
That's it.
Anyway, Mr. Jones Pub in Buenos Aires is an exception to that rule. Perhaps because it's in Buenos Aires. The owner even got me an Uber to take me back to my hotel, which you could tell he didn't want to do. The gig wasn't a smashing success, though not a total failure either. The other band was good, at least. But the show was far from the hotel, and I didn't have the money for another cab (I took a cab to the show, since my health was beginning to fail, and I didn't have the energy to figure out the Buenos Aires public transport system on show day. I was lucky just to have a room).
The day had been long enough already, and more than anything, I was just glad that it was over. I said my goodbyes, and went back to the hotel, upon whose stairs I did not resemble a rockabilly beach ball.
Several hours earlier, I'd left the Hotel Alcazar, and walked out onto Avenida de Mayo in search of a taxi. I was tired. I'd arrived in town 2 days before the show, but had booked a different hotel in the San Telmo district. It didn't work out. I had a disagreement with the desk about how acceptable it is to let children play loudly outside my door at 9pm, and the guy told me it was really more of a hostel than a hotel. I told him that the sign and online booking info said, "hotel," and that I never would have booked the place if I'd known it was a playground for screaming children. We exchanged some unpleasant words to communicate our contempt for each other, and he told me to leave without paying. Immediately.
So I saved a little money that way. But it wasn't worth it. The room was depressing, a street-level box with high ceilings but no windows, but I wasn't planning on spending a lot of time in the room anyway. The place was cool, other than the children's yard toys scattered outside my door, and the willingness of the local kids to use them to dig a mosh pit in which to bury large quantities of joyful noise at 9pm.
The hour, and the proximity to the door of my room, was my only issue. I love the sound of children playing.
But I had to figure out another hotel on the spot, and it required me to navigate the Buenos Aires subway system with all my stuff, on a show day, a day which I'd hoped to spend conserving my energy, strolling calmly around the beautiful, Parisian streets. Because they say that Buenos Aires is the Paris of South America, and I could see why.
It's an incredibly beautiful place. And while lugging a guitar and bag of clothes around on the subway isn't enjoyable, it isn't the most exhausting chore either. Especially when your new hotel is only a few stops down the line.
But the day started too early, with too much circumstantial turbulence, and I was getting sick. I'd gone wandering around town on my second night in the children's mosh hostel, the night before the show, and got caught in a heavy rainstorm. Not late, but sometime after dark. Argentina is famous for beef, so I went to a restaurant that had an open-air Parisian sidewalk café feel (even though it was indoors), and ordered something I didn't understand, by pointing at some words, scrambled on the menu like a linguistic foreign delicacy. It turned out to be some kind of chicken-fried steak and potatoes. I don't care about food, and like everything except Chapulines (toasted crickets) and the coconut pieces in a box of Valentine's candy, and would have been happy with whatever was set in front of me. I sat next to the street, alone, and took this picture through the window.
The restaurant was empty. No one else was there. I walked outside, and promptly got soaked by the vaporized tsunami that had floated over town while nobody was looking. Giant water balloons splashed down on the city until everything was saturated with pneumonia and drowning mice. It was like someone was bathing horses with a fire hose, somewhere up in Heaven. I kept my phone dry with the $12 piece of Chinese plastic shaped like a "leather coat," I'd bought at a thrift store in Flagstaff, Arizona, but I couldn't keep myself dry.
Getting caught in the rain that night, and having to move unexpectedly the next morning on a small amount of restless sleep, into a place I didn't know I was going until I got there, had a deleterious effect on my health. I started to get sick on the day of the Buenos Aires show.
In spite of this, and the fact that the rest of the tour was an exercise in preserving my voice against the onslaught of pneumoniac exhaustion that crept up the back of my throat like a voice-eating centipede of sickness and decay, getting caught like a wet cat in the rain in Buenos Aires remains among my most cherished memories.
I shot a few seconds of random street footage, after the squall had passed.
Buenos Aires was a short trip. I'd only arrived in town 2 days before the show, and had to leave for the Nazaré Paulista Country Music Festival in Brazil, the day after. I caught a taxi on Avenida 9 de Julio, which is the street with the big obelisk in it, and made it to Jorge Newberry Aeroparque to catch the flight to São Paulo.
But before I left, I was able to check out Plaza de Mayo, and the Casa Rosada (pink house), which is the Argentine White House. Eva Perón delivered speeches to the poor and unsophisticated masses, among whose ranks she considered herself a member, from the balcony there. Her story is interesting. I bought a button from a street vendor which read, “Donde existe una necesidad, nace un derecho.” Where there is a need, a right is born. I couldn't agree less, but the button is cool anyway, and the story is incredibly interesting.
There was a moment of confusion in the cab, when the driver thought I wanted to go to the huge airport in the suburbs, instead of the smaller airport near the center of town, on the coast of the Río de la Plata, or "The River Plate." Which looks more like a bay, than a river, but Buenos Aires isn't my town, and I wasn't around when they were naming things. The driver corrected me by saying "Aeroparque," instead of "Aeropuerto," when he discovered I wanted to go to Jorge Newberry instead of EZE. Indeed, man. Jorge Newberry aero-place, por favor.
The day was cloudy, and the waves of the River were gray, as they raged against the sky. It was as though the river was trying to climb back into the clouds, so that it might unleash its fury once again, on the swarming streets of man.
I walked up to the LATAM Airlines counter, and checked in for my flight.
