CHAPTER 16:
MEXICO – MACHETES, MARIACHI, METHS
Libertad! Libertad! Libertad!
Lake Chapalá begins just south of Guadalajara in the state of Jalisco. In case there’s any doubt we’re in Mexico, a mariachi band are propositioning the families who stroll along the waterfront and doing good business in their silver tunics and red cummerbunds. A shoeshine boy with his box and brush is pointing hopefully at dusty footwear, and another boy is selling hammocks. Couples are sweetly holding hands on their Sunday-morning paseo. It’s a tranquil scene.
Glittering dark birds skim the surface of the water and waterfowl wallow in the reeds. Swallows swoop and elegant white egrets perch among the water hyacinths. I’m told there are ten kinds of fish in the lake. But it’s drying up. The jetty and the lighthouse are further from the water’s edge than they used to be.
We’ve come here to have lunch before the sound check for tonight’s concert. The view prompts Manu to mention his mother’s prediction that the wars of the twenty-first century will be about water. He talks about an article on the Amazon which he saw in the French international affairs periodical Le Monde Diplomatique that suggests the multinationals are already positioning themselves for the Water Wars. We talk, too, about Lehman Brothers, the banks and the vertiginous collapse of the stock markets and about the abstract nature of money, its zeros and ones zipping across continents. We talk about the fact that only a handful of clever nerds understand the financial vehicles dreamed up in the fantasy world of a profit machine in perpetual motion. The dream, at least, is over. Not that Manu’s surprised. ‘Now the party’s finished and everyone has a hangover,’ he says, and goes on to quote the famous Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano: ‘The yachts and ocean liners are rising in response to new opportunities, but many rafts and lifeboats are taking to the water – and some are sinking.’
I’m observing the watery scene and tuning out. Lake Chapalá was the place where that other nomadic artist D.H. Lawrence lived for a while at the end of a ‘savage pilgrimage’ that took him to Australia, Sicily and New Mexico. Like Manu, Lawrence had an aversion to the coldness of the mechanised world and, also like Manu, he was a prophet of the instinct, claiming that Europeans thought too much, though in Lawrence’s case his ‘thinking with the blood’ strayed into proto-fascism. He wrote most of his strange late-period book The Plumed Serpent in a villa in Calle Zaragoza, just by the lake. The book’s two Mexican protagonists are revolutionary leaders, but they’re also resurrected incarnations of the Aztec deities Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli, who revive the ancient tradition of human sacrifice.
In my head, Aztecs blood sacrifice mixes with narco gangs. La Familia, one of the main drug cartels, are based in the neighbouring city of Michoacán. They’re the fastest-growing drug gang, founded by Nazario Moreno González, whose nickname was El Más Loco (The Craziest). Twenty men had recently burst into a low-rent disco called the Sol y Sombre in Uruapan and bowled five decapitated heads across the disco floor. They left a message behind that read: ‘Know that this is divine justice.’ For a modern drug boss, a reputation for being the craziest is a distinct advantage.
Contemplating water wars and financial meltdowns – Manu at Lake Chapalá.
The gang has set-up super-labs that manufacture methamphetamine, an operation familiar to fans of the TV series Breaking Bad, and they function like a parallel state, extorting ‘taxes’ and paying for community projects. They’ve also branched out into pirate DVDs, people-smuggling and a debt-collecting service which involves the kidnapping of defaulters. Meanwhile, in Guadalajara, there have been regular outrages, like the murder of twenty-six young men who were found stuffed inside three vehicles with the words ‘Millennia Zetas’ and ‘Millennium’ painted in oil on their bodies. Both are references to allied drug cartels. All the men had been asphyxiated.
This is enough to make anyone feel nervous, and the fact that several tourists had also been kidnapped recently didn’t help. The brother of Francina Islas, the journalist we had met in the Sahara, was one kidnap victim. The drug godfathers were asking a quarter of a million dollars ransom for his freedom. It was all a bit too close to home.
I decide to ask Manu whether I can travel in the tour bus to Querétaro for the next gig and then on to Mexico City. The alternative is to catch a public bus in Tlaquepaque, which is a forty-minute taxi ride from Guadalajara. The journey would take many hours longer, cost 400 pesos and have at least an element of danger. The tourists had been kidnapped on just such a bus. There’s also the fact that I’m experiencing a credit crunch of my own. I’m flat broke.
Being allowed on a tour bus is a rock’n’roll privilege granted only to those who are part of the inner circle. Journalists, along with groupies, are considered to belong to a category of person liable to cramp the star’s style. But when I put the question to Manu, he says he doesn’t have a problem. Nonetheless he suggests I should check with Paget Williams, the affable tour manager I’d met in Boston, just in case. Paget says he doesn’t have a problem, but that, as it’s Manu’s tour, it’s up to him to decide. I can see this one going round and round in annoying circles.
In the taxi back to Guadalajara we talk about lucha libre, the Mexican wrestling tradition that has become hugely popular, even in Europe, without necessarily losing its popular roots. In Barcelona free wrestling is ‘trendy’, a word Manu hates because it reminds him of the chic, expensive bars in Barcelona that he thinks are killing the spirit of his local barrio. The taxi driver has tuned into a local radio station that is playing Manu tunes. He becomes visibly embarrassed. A girl calls in to ask what kind of footwear she should wear for the concert – heels or sandals. The DJ recommends zapatos sevillanos, which are more sensible shoes with only a small heel.
Manu remains uncomfortable; it’s as though he doesn’t know how to react. To be pleased would be arrogant, perhaps, but to ignore the attention might also be construed in the same way. I try to break the mood when “Bongo Bong” comes on, saying I prefer the Robbie Williams version, which, in truth, was terrible. Silence from Manu. He only brightens when we go past the plastic statue of a cow. Perhaps the night will go well, after all.
Later that evening, we’re at a venue just outside Guadalajara, the Arena VFG, named after the singer Vicente Fernández (Gómez) who lives nearby. He’s a huge star in Mexico who sings ranchero music with its torrid tales of the old Mexico: revolution, rural ranches and philandering caballeros. Arena VFG is a 15,000-seater indoor arena that has played host to bands like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden as well as top boxing matches. When the Mexican boxer Sal ‘El Canelo’ Álvarez beat a top Argentine, Vicente Fernández offered him a horse.
The venue is almost sold out, which is exactly how Manu likes it. If it’s completely full, the scalpers and touts out front make a fortune and the fans get ripped off. If it’s only half full, the atmosphere isn’t great. Most big bands announce their shows months in advance, but this gig was only scheduled a couple of weeks ago, which Manu sees as yet another example of his strategy of organising everything at the last minute paying dividends (though it means huge inconvenience for the people who work around him).
The band is due on at 9pm. Around 5pm, Manu throws a minor tantrum backstage. He ordered a steak about an hour ago and it hasn’t turned up yet. A Manu show is like a sporting event involving an intense workout onstage that last up to three hours. In order to do that, he needs fuel. Too near show time and there’s no chance of digesting the food, especially as the adrenaline starts flowing as the minutes tick down to liftoff. In a way, I’m relieved: Manu is normally totally cool and I had been wondering when I’d see him lose his equilibrium.
As ever, before the show, he becomes introverted and thoughtful. He might have a whisky or a beer to take off the edge, but a certain terror seems to be a necessary part of the ritual. Like some actors before they go onstage, or some journalists sitting in front of a blank screen, the dreaded thought is always there: maybe this ti
me it really will be a total screwup. People who turn up to pay Manu a visit in the hour or two before one of his shows, like Damon Albarn did in London, sometimes come away with the impression that Manu is aloof, even arrogant. But it’s only nerves. He’s using all his available energy to compose and prepare himself.
Roxanne Haynes, a photographer friend of the band, is backstage. She had bought a bead necklace in Greece and it had travelled with her back to LA, where she lives. She had then given the necklace to Manu in Austin, Texas, and now he’s wearing it in Guadalajara. They are globalised beads. Also backstage is Tania Ramírez of La Jornada, a liberal left-leaning newspaper based in Mexico City. It’s the only paper in the country that Manu talks to. And there’s Ana, a vivacious, eccentric woman who must be in her seventies. She saw the band in Austin and has become a camp follower.
Even before the band go onstage, the noise in the auditorium is intense and frightening. They haven’t played a note yet, but the audience is already in their grasp. You realise that this really is Manu’s audience, his tribe, much more so than when I’ve seen him play in Europe or the States.
They walk onstage, one by one. Angelo Mancini, the trumpet player strolls on jauntily. Bassist Gambeat lopes on. Madjid Farhem runs to his amp with his arms wheeling like a demented aircraft. Drummer David Bourguignon, keyboard player Julio García Lobos and Philippe ‘Garbancito’ Teboul on percussion follow. Finally, Manu runs to the lip of the stage and the crowd erupt.
The atmosphere is transformed. I get the feeling that, if Manu were to ask the audience to take up arms, overrun the local radio, trash the police station, occupy the army barracks and government buildings right after the gig, he would conscript an instant army. The show is more intense that those in Europe on every level. It’s more playful, as Madjid mimes catching the waves of energy coming and throwing them back to the audience, grinning. Gambeat drops the bassline in a couple of numbers, just for the sheer pleasure of joining the music again after a theatrical pause, like a child who deliberately loses a toy for the joy of finding it again. Everything is hotter – not just the humid Mexican night, but also the music, and somehow, when a couple of girls throw their bras onstage, I’m not in the least surprised.
We are all dissolving into one energy field, a group monster, each of us – Indian, Aztec, Spanish, African, European – all mongrels, delirious in the mix of our blood, tonight, right now, in this moment, at least. The rhythm section is locked in and earthy, the bass below the ground. Madjid’s guitar shimmers electrically through the seven different realms of mythology. Angelo’s trumpet could have brought down the walls of Jericho. And, at the centre of it all, there’s Manu, the little magus of this mayhem, the ringmaster of this circus.
Numbers flow into each other: “Mr Bobby” segues into “Primavera” into “Me Gustas Tú” into “Politik Kills”. “Welcome To Tijuana” is dedicated to all those migrants killed on the border. For “Clandestino”, the band exits the stage, leaving just Madjid and Manu behind. Then they’re back and the line ‘Mexicano illegal!’ from “Desaparecido” is greeted with a roar, before the band ramp the heat up even further with old Mano Negra numbers “King Kong Five” and “Sidi H’Bibi”. A rare cover – José Jiménez’s classic Mexican tune “Volver, Volver” – gets an inflammatory punk-ranchero treatment and goes down a storm.
Then it’s all over. The band are wiped out but exhilarated. ‘It was like a temazcal out there,’ Manu says, referring to a pre-Hispanic sweat lodge that, he explains, was used as a kind of healing sauna. Not many fans have managed to get into the backstage area, but Manu, of course, chats to them for at least an hour, posing for shots taken on their camera phones. There’s a Mexican journalist who has seen Manu and Radio Bemba perform many times. He thinks this was the best, the most intense, Manu show he has ever experienced. And I agree.
The audience empties out of an arena strewn with the detritus of an apocalyptic party, the aftermath of a pleasure storm. The banners in the auditorium, fierce and beautiful after the battle, are still standing. And they’re part of the story. The biggest celebrates the struggle of the striking teachers in Oaxaca, that most atmospheric of Mexican towns. The strikers had been camping out in the main square, demanding better salaries and more investment to build decent buildings and ensure students don’t have to find work to support their studies. They had eventually met with violent repression, when 3,000 police charged in and cleared the square. At least a hundred strikers were injured. The demonstrations expanded to include a wider coalition of unions, churches and universities, united to try and depose the hated governor, Ulises Ruiz, who the opposition believed had rigged the election that brought him to power.
We drive back to the hotel in Guadalajara to get some sleep, as we have an early start the next morning. I nip over the road to a cheap restaurant and order a chicken quesadilla. With drinks and dessert, the bill comes to 130 pesos, about five euros. When I tell Manu, he reminds me that for many people living around here that’s a very expensive meal.
Are you on the bus or off the bus? That was the question posed by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters during his epic road trip around the States with his fellow freaks in 1964. I’m still not sure of my status with Manu and his own pranksters, but I decide just to walk on the bus anyway. Paget Williams grins as I get on. I seem to have passed some obscure test.
The tour was originally going to visit the colonial city of Morelia, but there has been a drug gang outrage there. The week before, on Independence Day, grenades were thrown into a crowd of civilians who were innocently celebrating the holiday. Seven people died and over a hundred were injured. Now, everyone is feeling unsafe.
Once on the bus, I decide I had better lie doggo for a while at least, and avoid asking too many questions. There are times, around cool people, when you have to act as if you have been given a shot of elephant tranquilliser, as a friend once observed. I notice Ana, the seventy-something tour mascot who had become a kind of guru, halfway down the bus, as well as Roxanne the photographer.
The landscape is repetitious, like a minimalist piece of music. The bare scrub and grasslands are alleviated only by these giant pink ferns that I keep seeing, even though I haven’t taken any drugs. After an hour or two, Manu comes by and we get involved in a discussion about football. Manu says he found Zidane’s headbutt at the 2006 World Cup Final disgusting, but that Maradona’s Hand of God goal was justified. Pelé was ‘an asshole but a good businessman.’ Rather than Pelé, the real Brazilian deal, according to Manu, was Garrincha, a drunk, womanising, footballing genius. He was also known as Mané (short for Manuel) by his friends, and his other nicknames were ‘Alegria do Povo’ (Joy of the People) and ‘Anjo de Pernas Tortas’ (Angel with Bent Legs). The truth is that Brazil never lost when both Garrincha and Pelé were in the team. In the Estádio do Maracanã in Rio, the home changing room is known as ‘Garrincha’, whereas the away changing room is known as ‘Pelé’. Who was the ‘greatest’ of the two remains an eternal dispute among Brazilian lovers of the beautiful game.
Ana launches into a tale about how she ended up spending a month in jail in Mexico for some minor misdemeanour. Her passport was stolen but the police chief fell in love with her. You have to be charmed by the fact that Manu’s tour bus idea of a good-time girl is the septuagenarian Ana.
Gambeat shows me a few pictures of his child on his phone, with a massive grin on his face. He’s missing his family. He goes on to say that possibly the most incredible concert of his life was when Radio Bemba played that celebrated open-air show in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s main downtown square, in front of over 100,000 people. Then he goes off into a discussion of a book he and Manu have been reading on chiropractic medicine, a treatment that believes in the body’s innate intelligence and in healing with energy. Madjid, Philippe and the others seem less interested in alternative medicine.
Madjid, strumming a Bob Marley tune, declines an interview, claiming he has nothing to say. When I ask Philippe, who’
s been with Manu since those busking days in the Paris metro, for some anecdotes, he says he’ll have to ask Manu if that was OK. Much later, Philippe does agree. Although the atmosphere is perfectly friendly, Manu the shy guy at the back of the bus, is most definitely boss here.
Good-time gal Ana on the tour bus with Manu, Mexico. PHOTO © ROXANNE HAYNES
Soon we’re in Querétaro, and driving straight to the theatre for the soundcheck. This concert, only announced a couple of days earlier, is smaller and less intense than the gig in Guadalajara, with a capacity of perhaps 5,000. But still the audience jump on their plastic chairs and trash them in the process.
Next day, I end up chatting to Manu about Mexican music, specifically the narcocorridos – the drug troubadours – after a Valentin Elizalde song wafts over the sound system in the courtyard of our hotel, where Manu is strumming his guitar. ‘It’s the Mexican equivalent of gangsta rap,’ Manu explains. It’s played polka-style by ageing gents on guitar, bass, accordion and drums. The songs are often paeans to drug lords and tell approvingly of murder, torture, extortion and drug smuggling. The style was developed in the 1930s but has spread in the last couple of decades. The life of a narcocorrido singer is a dangerous one. Valentin Elizalde was shot dead, one of literally dozens of narcocorrido stars that have met the same fate.
Our conversation digresses on to the subject of South American leaders. Manu is more in favour of the pragmatic President Lula than I thought he might be, reasoning that Lula has lifted so many Brazilians out of poverty. He likes Evo Morales, too, the left-wing hero of the indigenous people in Bolivia, and a more obvious candidate for Manu’s approval. Moreover, he was apparently a rather fine trumpet player in his youth.
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