Those who cannot afford the price of the concert surround our hotel for the next three days and scream a lot. I make a photograph of a toilet roll unfurled from a bedroom door with the word help scrawled on it in black ink and then, under armed guard and behind heavy black sunglasses, leave by the hotel kitchen to look at the pyramids of the moon, the jaguar murals, and the Temple of Quetzalcoatl in the ancient city of Teotihuacan.
Mexico is a country where surrealism is normal. Andre Breton arrived in Mexico City in 1939 to escape the rigors of Paris. He set up house in the city and decided to have some furniture made for his house. He wanted a table for his dining room, so he hired a carpenter and drew up the design in perspective, with the front end of the table naturally appearing wider in the drawing than the far end. Two weeks later the table arrived as per the drawing, with one end wide and the other end narrowing down to a few inches. "I have nothing to teach these people," sighed Breton hopelessly, and immediately returned to Paris.
After the rain god Tlaloc, coyotes with feathered headdresses, and the thrill of playing in Mexican semiconstruction, we reenter the touring mindset and head north to play Chicago, Madison, Minneapolis, Detroit; up to Canada; back to the Midwest; and then down to the southern states. Now we fly by commercial airlines, which most of the time means that we slump around, half asleep, and play callous tricks on one another whenever possible. Flying is about half a degree better than traveling by road.
We emerge from the Sunset Theatre in Fort Lauderdale one night to hear the gut-wrenching news that John Lennon has been murdered. It is sickening and beyond belief. Lennon gone? It feels like a deep wound and yet another nail in the coffin of the fading sixties dream. John: the Beatle we all loved the most, with his acid humor and rebel persona-an anarchist from the inside. We get interviewed many times over the next few days about this, and it is difficult to talk about our new album or say anything about our group in the shadow of this tragedy.
We arrive in Argentina; it is the time of the dirty war, the time of the generals. People are disappearing, abducted in green falcon cars on the side streets of Buenos Aires, los Desaparecidos: the disappeared. Mothers are marching in the Avenida de Mayo and holding up pictures of their missing children. There is fear in the city and silent outrage about what is happening in Argentina; people are afraid to speak out, because to do so means that you too will "disappear."
Military gangs called la patota operate at night, arriving at their victims' homes to abduct, torture, and finally execute them. Victims are buried in unmarked graves; thrown into the sea, weighed down with concrete blocks; or burned in collective graves. Some human rights organizations estimate that thirty thousand people disappeared between 1976 and 1978. Not only have all the country's political institutions disappeared, but in authoritarian fashion so has all the free exchange of ideas or their expression. Like the final echo of fascist Germany, Argentina is under the rule of the last of the believers.
With only a very vague notion of what is really going on, we are incarcerated-for reasons that later appear obvious-in a Hilton on the outskirts of the city. This gives us no ability to walk out of the hotel and into Buenos Aires itself, the reason being that there is too much tension on the streets and the promoters don't want trouble. So, rather than taking in the culture, we lie around by the stupid pool, trapped in a "little piece of the U.S.A. in Argentina." By the end of the day as showtime approaches, we are all feeling somewhat pent up and need to let off steam.
Around seven-thirty, we start drifting into the lobby to go over to the venue. Somehow the locals have found out that we are in this hotel, which results in a large group of fans also being in the lobby. We sign autographs as we assemble there to leave. I notice one young girl who is very emotional and has tears running down her face while we sign her photographs; it's hard not to empathize with her and the others who crowd around. Something is coming from these kids that is different from England or the U.S., a reaching out, a desire for flight; with our guitars like weapons in our hands, we are men who run wild, and it cuts the air like an electric current.
At the concert there is a heavy police presence (no pun intended); the fans are not allowed to stand up or get out of their seats, and the hall is filled with fat, ugly cops who walk around prodding people with truncheons. The fans express their enthusiasm but with reservation because there is a tension that burns like a slow fuse. It seems as if the cops are just looking for the slightest excuse to get heavy. Our appearance here at this time is like the collision of two worlds: their thick wooden clubs versus our shining guitars and drums. As the concert heats up and we do our best to give the audience a good time, things begin to unravel. A few fans have the guts to leave their seats and come to the stage, including the young girl who was in the hotel lobby. She stands right in front of me, swaying to the music. This isn't to the cops' liking and within seconds there's a big fat 'n' ugly at her side, prodding her with his heavy stick and motioning her to sit down. I feel rage flood through me. Lost in the moment with a face full of rapture, my teenage Madonna doesn't move. The cop keeps prodding and it's me that's being prodded, and I feel anger rising like a bat into my throat. I come to the edge of the stage, put my foot on his shoulder, and give him a heavy shove. This gets a huge cheer from the audience, who clearly hate these oppressors. We continue on, but a few minutes later I think, Oh, Christ, because now, at the side of the hall, there is a huddle of cops looking at me, pointing at me. I nervously bang out the intro to Roxanne," gm, din, Eb, Sting bounces across the stage with a big grin on his face and says, "They're gonna arrest you...."
Roxanne, what the fuck are they going to do to me? Roxanne, victim 06732. Roxanne, what are prisons like in Argentina? Roxanne, how will I explain this to Kate? We hit the last chord and run to the side of the stage, where we usually wait a couple of minutes before returning for the encore. Miles is standing there, looking stricken. "Start thinking fast" he says. "They are going to arrest you; we've sent for a lawyer and an interpreter." Jesus! I think. We go back out onstage as I reset my Echoplex, grin at the audience, and begin the churning sixteenth-note rhythm of "Can't Stand Losing You." I have a deep sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I know that I've blown it-it will be Christmas in prison in fascist Argentina-and the sour metal taste of fear fills my mouth.
We come offstage and go into the dressing room. Sting and Stewart make ribald remarks about getting Henri Padovani back in the band, or maybe they will continue on as a duo. Would I send them a postcard? I am nervous; what the hell am I going to say to these brutes? Miles comes in with two Argentines, the lawyer and the interpreter. With a nice sense of occasion, Stewart climbs onto the top of a cupboard with his super 8 to film the whole event. After a few minutes there is a sharp rap on the door and in stride the cop and a couple of plainclothes guys. With the needle of the bullshit meter firmly in the red, I go straight over to macho man and shake his hand vigorously, smiling and asking him if he's okay. Phew! Did that fan hurt you? I gaze with a beseeching look into his bovine almond colored eyes. "Wow, it was crazy out there, but I guess we made it through-you and me, yep-we're alright now. What a beautiful country this is. Thank God you officers were there to protect us from those brutal fans-how is your mother?"
The interpreter keeps up with me in rapid-fire Argentinian Spanish, the yo becoming the hard-edged Argentinean jo. A look of confusion passes across his face as I hold on to his pudgy meat cleaver of a hand, but then a faint smile-as if he had just farted in his sleep-creeps onto his mug. He says something to the other two heavies, and they all grunt like the pigs in Animal Farm. It seems that honor had been satisfied: they remain strong and powerful, and I the mewing kitten ready to be crushed under the jackboot of fascism. The door closes and I am bathed in a gentle sea of piss-taking sarcasm, courtesy of my friends and colleagues.
But while we are on the subject of Argentina, let us take a digression to the side-which is where most of the action takes place anyway-away from the relentless p
ush forward to the tail end of this story. The Falkland Islands debacle, Galtieri's little tactical diversion to take the country's mind off what is has just been through, unfortunately proves to be a further humbling experience for Argentina.
I will return to Argentina a few years later, this time to play some acoustic guitar concerts with my friend John Etheridge, another British guitarist. We arrive in Buenos Aires after playing some shows in Brazil, and on the first afternoon there is a press conference in the hotel. I am being interviewed by several newspapers and magazines. One thing I notice is that at the end of each interview all the writers ask me about the cop-kicking incident; I am amazed by this, as it is now quite a few years later, but it seems that this incident has been recorded as a great rock moment in the annals of Argentina's history. At that moment in time, when the country was so repressed, any gesture of rebellion was seen as a waving flag. So, after this has been brought up several times I tell them that I now want a statue on Avenida Julio to mark my greatness, which they all think is pretty funny.
As we tour around Argentina, I notice that for the type of gig and the kind of music we were playing, there is an unusual amount of fervor: in La Plata we are given the keys to the city by the mayor in a gentle and touching ceremony backstage, and in Buenos Aires there is a virtual mob scene after the show that, considering we were playing jazz on acoustic guitars, feels a bit unwarranted. During this fervid scene I have the remarkable experience of being asked to bless a baby, and I begin to see what music and free expression mean in this country. The rest of the tour is not without incident either. In La Rosa, a small town deep in the pampas, we are onstage playing in a beautiful old theater when a bat somehow gets in and dive-bombs the audience for several minutes before using its radar to escape out the window. The effect is electrifying; for a moment all attention is on the creature as it whips over the heads of the audience-the bat becomes the show, and John and I merely the accompanists.
Afterward as we sign autographs there are a lot of signs of the cross being made and murmurings about vampires. "Vampira, vampira," they say in shocked whispers as they proffer small floral autograph books and ticket stubs. "Welcome to the pampas," says one slightly less rural journalist type, grinning over the bobbing heads. It occurs to me that we should make the bat a permanent feature, give the show a nice Ozzy Osbourne touch; does it have an agent?
This Nosferatu theme is echoed a couple of years later when I turn up in Slovenia for a gig. In my imagination before going to Slovenia, I see a beautiful old Eastern European town with a lovely old art deco theater, food, wine, and adoring women. We drive over the border from Trieste in Italy. Immediately the sky seems to darken, and the trees, like in a spooky children's story appear to grasp at us with long, sinister claws. We pull over to a building that's like something out of a sixties Hammer film and discover with an inward grimace that this is our hotel. It is Gothic, to say the least, and might be better described as a Transylvanian flophouse. The rooms are dark and tawdry, with filthy sheets on the beds, and I wonder if by morning I will have metamorphosed into a giant cockroach. Should I hang garlic over the door? Wear a crucifix? Michael Shrieve and Jerry Watts leave before I do to check bass and drums, respectively, and then about an hour later I get picked up for the drive to the venue-wherever it is. The two guys who collect me are tall and gaunt with stringy shoulder-length hair and speak almost no English. I climb into the back of what might he a Russian car, and we hit the road like a bat out of hell.
The roads are unlit; the towns are dark menacing shapes with no sign of the living; and the fields are black but probably full of black demonic troglodytes. "Highway to Hell" plays on the car stereo at stomach-wrenching volume, and I think that I will almost certainly go to the grave with the sounds of AC/DC ringing in my ears. I feel very sick. Amazingly, we make it-that is, we pull up in a field that has a small concrete building and a neon sign on the side blinking intermittently with the word KLUB. This is it: gone the beautiful old Transylvanian theater, gone the red wine of the Baltic States, gone the adoring women and the encores between plush red velvet curtains.
I step out of the car into about nine inches of mud and drag myself to the mouth of this hellhole. It is dark and icy with a small stage at one end, no salon des artistes, no genial promoter. Jerry and Michael are on the stage, looking desperate and defeated. I make one or two ironic remarks about showbiz and then spot the bar-there is only one way to put up with this. I order not one but two lemon vodkas and drink them fast. This takes the edge off, and suddenly it seems like just another amusing moment in the ever changing tableau. "As long as we don't get killed," I say encouragingly to the boys, but there seems to be a good chance that we will. The few youths around the place are looking at us in an ugly sort of way; only the blood-heating vodka gives me the strength to smile wanly in their direction. One of the tall-and-gaunts manages to garble out something about food, and we follow him back out into the field and around to the other side of the building, where there is a garishly lit room with a bar. "Sit," we are told. "Food come." The war with Bosnia is just a few miles down the road, and my smiling drunk-and-happy falling about does not go down too well with the locals crowded in the bunker; there is a vibe.
We sit at our table and all eyes are on us as we quaff the red wine that appears-I would like to say brought by the landlord's buxom daughter, but instead it is a brutish-looking thing with a scrappy beard and a mouthful of broken teeth who surely must answer to the name of Igor. The food is a huge pile of red meat on a tray; there is nothing else-no vegetables, no sauce, no condiments, nothing-and it's dumped down before us as if in challenge. But like vampires, we lean forward and suck it up.
Now we have to entertain. We go back to the stage, burping and belching, and clamber up onto the wooden boards, where we have to change on a set of stairs at the side of the stage in full view of the audience. It is all pointless but we do it anyway, turning it into a sort of strip show. They are not amused. The crowd in the dark below us is 90 percent male, with a haunted look of extreme discontent, the look of the undead. The music coming over the PA is of the furious death-metal kind and is what they are expecting; this feels like a suicide mission. We get out on the stage and I open with "Hackensack" by Monk. This doesn't go over too well. Someone yells out, "Metal!" and I briefly consider doing "Wade in the Water" but think better of it and carry on with something of my own. It is a grim moment in which I have never felt so unwanted. We churn on for a while, hoping we will break through, but they want metal and that's it. Their country is at war, they are depressed, it's a bleak moment, they need a soundtrack to mirror the rage they are feeling-and I am not providing it. I cut the set short, sign no autographs, and head back through the black night to the inn of misery, which features a very raunchy live porno show until six A.M.
Back in Argentina, the tour ends in the city of Cordoba, somewhere in the middle of the country. After the final concert we have a day to pack up and then catch the evening flight out of there. In the afternoon everyone but me disappears to the airport to check on the flight and make sure that the gear gets on, etc. My passport has been taken to show that we are who we say we are. I decide to walk around the depressing little town and take photographs with my Leica, a habit I have practiced for several years. I spend about two or three hours shooting and am finally returning to the hotel when a window catches my eye: the sunlight is falling on it in an interesting way, illuminating a piece of rolled-up paper with flies all over it. I bend down, raise the Leica, begin photographing from several oblique angles, until I feel a tap on my shoulder.
Thinking it's a fan or something, I ignore it. "Senor,"conies the voice again, this time with more urgency, "identification, por favor. " I turn around and, horror of horrors, it's the bloody cop again-or if it isn't him, it's his twin brother. My gut turns to ice. Now what? 'Identification, identification, "he demands, holding out five sausages and a steak masquerading as his hand. I feel stupid-I have nothing except a driver's
license and a couple of credit cards, which I proffer with a hopeful smile. He is not impressed by American Express and asks again for ID. I gulp and try a few feeble attempts in Spanish, to no avail-he isn't budging. "Viene," he barks, and gripping me by the arm, we march off down the street. Estacion,"he grunts, and grips me tighter. I get the idea that he taking me to the police station and feel the familiar hollow in my stomach again-now bloody what? We pace across a dusty yard off the street and into a set of bleak concrete buildings that apparently constitute the station.
Inside Hermann Goring (or his double) is sitting at a desk. The cop says something in rapid-fire Spanish to Hermann, and I am shuffled off into an adjacent office and motioned to sit down. I desperately think about making a run for it and then also imagine the spray of bullets penetrating my body as I pitch headlong into the hot dust, which no doubt would make for good rock legend. But how am I going to explain it to my building society manager?
I am in the shit again-it doesn't feel very good-the ceiling fan turns like a dying pulse above my head, flies buzz around the room, the temperature pushes over a hundred. A feeling of panic begins to fill me as I realize that this is deadly serious: I have no identification, no one here speaks English, and I am alone. The guys will return from the airport and I will simply have vanished, become one of los desaparecidos. A tall man with cropped hair enters the room, his piercing blue eyes staring at me through steel-rim spectacles. Whoever the costume designer is for this lot is doing a splendid job. He proceeds to interrogate me. "Soy musico, concierto anoche. " I even resort to using "The Police, Sting," in the vain hope that it might bring a vague hint of recognition, but no, it means nothing to him-nada. A butterfly suddenly flutters into view through a small window high up on the wall; its dancing down like an alien creature in this office seems to me a small beacon of hope. It flutters low and in front of Goring's facie; without taking his eyes off me, he lashes out, grabs the butterfly and crushes it with one hand, and then says, "Claro,"picks up the phone, barks into it, and motions for me to get up-I am being moved. I get the idea that I am to be taken somewhere else. I start to write my obituarydead in an Argentinian jail, disappeared in South America, lost to the world, gone-it would be a glamorous ending to a misspent life and would look good on the front page of the Guardian, but I don't feel quite ready for it.
One Train Later: A Memoir Page 31