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tagged: Lagoa Iate Club, Florianopolis
Posted by Charlie in 2001 VCR South America Tour
The good news is that the monitor engineer, Alessandro, is really on the case. He pays attention, knows what to do, and is quick about it.
Not so good news is that we are going to have to play our final trump card, in order to get paid! We have to refuse to play unless the final installment is paid.
After sound check, the matter was resolved, but not before Lane, George and I had started packing up all our gear to take with us (in case we didn’t return!). So we put all our stuff back together, and went off to eat. David took us to a place on the beach. That was the “best seafood in town”. Well, I don’t know what the WORST seafood in town would be like, but this seemed close to that as far as I was concerned.
It was no surprise, therefore, when we found a cockroach, cooked in the rice! After that, curiously enough, my appetite subsided!
We endured the bone shaking 45 minute ride back to the hotel, where we had a couple of hours to kill before heading back to the gig at half past Midnight!
On the road back, we encountered several huge traffic jams, mainly caused by hundreds of partygoers swarming around the various night clubs in the area. As a result, we got back to the gig after our scheduled start time, and the crowd (packed house again) were getting impatient. I like to be able to gather my thoughts after a bone jarring ride in a cramped van, but there wasn’t time. We were hastily hustled onto the stage before a riot broke out. The first time I hit my snare drum, the wire snare (underneath) parted company with it’s restraining mechanism, so I hastily replaced it with the spare snare. Less than 2 minutes into the first song, this drum felt weird, and I looked down to see a tear in the head, getting gradually larger, So I screamed at one of the back line crew to replace the original snare as quickly as possible, and in the meantime, I tried to play ROUND the split! This is not as easy as it sounds, especially with a Rock band of this type!
Somehow, I managed to prevent the head from splitting any further, and within 2 songs we had replaced the snare
with the original one, which sounded infinitely better, anyway! After that, I was able to settle into the gig.
The crowd were crazy, lapping up everything we did. Everyone was on stage working them into a frenzy. We played our asses off. Part of the reason for this might have been that we discovered that this is going to be the last gig. Tomorrow’s concert in Curitiba has been canned (for whatever reasons), and we have a day off. SO we gave it everything we had! I don’t remember sweating quite that much in a long time. With the rain, the humidity is very high here.
At the end of the gig we were all standing in the dressing room, when the drapes that formed one wall ripped open, and hands started clawing at us, our belongings and anything in sight. The crowd had discovered that this was all that separated us from them. So we had to retreat to another room which was more secure. These people are nothing short of animals! Young kids, out of their heads on whatever takes their fancy, I suppose!
We eventually got all our gear together and made it out to the vans in the pouring rain. It was close to 5am when we made it back to the hotel. Straight to bed for ME!
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