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Alex writes in from Brazil...We’re back in action!!!!!!! It’s been too long and we’ve missed that amazing rush of being on tour. And what a better place to start it all up again than BRAZIL!!! Before I get into what has happened in the last two weeks, I’ve got to fill you all in on what we’ve been doing all year. First we had to take some time off after the whole Daredevil garbage and almost two years of touring and just be normal people for a second. You know, sleep in the same bed every night, wake up in the same city every day, see movies, buy houses, and just feel grounded for a while. Aaron and I did a few side project type things in the meantime…I did the whole Santana thing which is going really great and Aaron produced some songs for an amazing artist on A&M. After all that we started writing every day for weeks and weeks at Aaron’s place and have created some amazing new music that we’re really, really proud of. We’ve grown up a lot as people and as musicians in the last three years since Camino Palmero was recorded. After touring the world I’ve learned so much and made so many great friends and fans…thank you guys so much for sticking around and waiting with us all these months. Your continued support never ceases to amaze Aaron and I. It’s so exciting to finally have a whole records worth of new material and we really can’t wait for you guys to hear the new songs.
So after the writing process, we did some rehearsing with some new really great studio musicians and then it was into the studio. This Brazil tour happened to fall right in the middle of the recording process so we had to stop after completing 7 songs, mix them all, and then find new touring musicians and rehearse for the tour. Our new drummer for this tour is a long time friend of Aaron’s named Justin. They were actually in elementary school together. We played with him a long time ago when I was 15 and we always wanted to jam with him again, but it just never worked out until now. He really did an amazing job on this tour and totally blew me away. The bass player we found is named Kaveh and he is huge! 6’ 6” tall with size 15 shoes! We actually played with him a few months back when we did this private gig for Nintendo execs in Hollywood. He lays down the groove great and has been a lot of fun on this tour. We rushed to get ready in time and headed out on our first tour in almost one year. With mixed feelings of excitement, anticipation, and anxiety, we left Los Angeles on Monday the 11th of August to embark on what was to be by far the craziest and most intense two weeks of my life…in the last two weeks…uh, yah…
Well, you can’t start a tour outside of America with The Calling without having a scary plane flight….and of course we did! Yay! Our second flight from Miami to Panama, the first stop on the tour, had something wrong with it seconds before take off (been there, done that). Honestly, by now, I’m like “whatever”, I’ve been through this before, but it doesn’t change the nervousness you feel when they have to turn back right before takeoff and fix some electric problem. After waiting an hour or so we tried again and although the problem was “fixed”, I couldn’t help wondering the rest of the flight if it really was;) Flying through a giant lightening storm in Panama as we were landing didn’t help things, free falls and all, but we touched down as always and breathed in a breath of hot sticky air, man it’s good to be alive.
It was 2 AM, so fans were non-existent at the airport. We were, however, greeted by our insanely huge Panamanian bodyguard, “KING”, who spoke Italian as well as Spanish, so I had fun telling him all the dirty things I know in Italian during the car ride home while he played the God Father soundtrack as background music….very weird.
The next day we had a show, but we also had a little time to kill in the morning. So naturally we all wanted to see the Panama Canal and we did. It was quite an incredible thing to witness. A ship the size of a giant 10 story building, lowering and raising, as it made it’s way through giant metal locks with doors the size of football fields. We did the tourist thing and listened to the history and all. I had no idea that is costs each ship so much money just to go through the canal. The one ship we saw had to pay a toll of $67,000! That sucks! But I guess it’s better than going around the long way. So anyway, after our little outing it was off to the gig.
We were warned ahead of time that this particular show would not be sold out due to the fact that it was scheduled at midnight, on a Tuesday, during exam week, and all our fans are around 15 years old. So I was expecting a small show, but it was still pretty packed and a perfect first show to get us ready for the mass hysteria in Brazil. It was hard to hear each other that night though, since we were playing in what seemed to be an airplane hanger with a metal ceiling and tile floors…not so good for loud live rock music. We got off stage and everyone had a huge smile on their face especially Justin who had only played for two hundred people in his past gigs, and that night we played for over two thousand. I went out after and signed a little, but had to go back to the hotel to sleep since we were waking up early the next morning to fly to Rio.
On the way to the airport the next day, everyone was talking about has scary it was waking up at 4 in the morning to a huge earthquake, saying it was a 5.5 or something….and I was like, “what earthquake?” Apparently Justin and I were the only ones in Panama who just slept right through it! Hey, I’m use to sleeping in a coffin on a tour bus while the driver is crazily swerving to miss hitting deer all night…a little earthquake wasn’t enough to even get me to turn over and mumble. So, we got to the airport, signed a little and headed off to Rio, Brazil.
We arrived at 1AM after about another long 7-hour flight. No major problem other than everyone on the plane was a fan. We hadn’t even gotten to Brazil yet and I was spending the whole plane flight taking pictures with all the stewardesses and the pilots. It was cool.
We stayed at a secret hotel in Rio away from the city, so we weren’t too easy to find. It was a nice hotel, but they were doing construction all night and the fire alarm in the hotel kept going off every ten minutes…I was like “NO! JESUS! let me sleep!” Needless to say I was tired and a little cranky the next dayJ
Everyone except me walked up to some cliff 5,000 feet high and went hang gliding all day…Flying over the rain forest and landing on the beach. I’m bummed I missed it but I don’t know if I would have the balls to do that again. Aaron did it though and I was shocked to hear he loved it…I mean if you can jump off a cliff 5,000 feet high with some cloth wings connected to you and fly down for 30 minutes and land on the beach…you shouldn’t be scared to fly in an airplane. But alas, that fear never goes away.
We went to sound check at the venue in Brazil and I was like, wow, this place is f*cking huge! I could run back and forth on the stage a few times and it would be like running a marathon. After sound check, I went into our dressing room and it was huge too! And it actually had a bathroom that worked without cockroaches and even a Jacuzzi. I noticed everyone was watching CNN on the TV with a look of horror and I immediately new something was wrong. The first thing I saw on the screen was a shot of millions of New Yorkers walking in mobs right on the highways and bridges, and then more people everywhere, in Toronto and Cleveland, all over the place. My heart sank assuming the worst with terrorism or something. It sounded pretty fishy to me and I continued to worry the whole way to dinner about all those people without power and how your everyday life just shuts down and how if it was terrorism, that those guys are pretty powerful to pull of something that grandiose. And if it wasn’t terrorist, I’m sure they were watching CNN too, saying to each other, “Why didn’t we think of that!?” I just kept hoping it was nothing more than an accident.
We went to dinner at a typical barbeque sort of Brazilian restaurant where all these guys come around with giant pieces of every kind of meat you can imagine on big metal sticks. I do eat meat, but this was intense. Just as I was starting to calm down over the power outage thing the f*cking power went out in the restaurant and everything went dark! It was almost funny for a moment cause I knew it was just coincidence, nonetheless very bizarre. They got it back on and everyone went back to what they were doing…Eating meat, big giant slabs of meat. One guy came around with like 50 little brown circular things all skewered together on a metal stick. So Kaveh and I took a few of these things. After eating one and being quite disappointed in its chewy texture, we were notified that they were chicken heartsL NO!!! ::gag::gag::: After that we stayed to foods we recognized the rest of dinner and it was pretty good…..but come one, little poor chicken hearts? That’s not right…..
It was almost time to go on and I was feeling a little nervous since there were about 8,000 people out there screaming for us. The biggest crowed we’ve ever played for as a headlining band. Right before we walked on stage, we were told that the whole power outage thing in America was not terrorism and just a freak occurrence that will be fixed shortly. That really made me feel a lot better and I was hyped and ready to rock. That show was insane. Girls passing out left and right, masses of people jumping all over each other, this is what I had been waiting for the last 12 months of sitting on my ass at home. There were moments of the show when every single person in the audience was singing the songs so loudly that I couldn’t even hear myself anymore…and it was a beautiful thing.
The set we had put together for this tour was really fun and we got to play songs that we’ve never played live before. Like opening each show with “For You”, which was always one of the songs the crowd sang the loudest and we played a new song too…Yes, only one new song…I don’t want our whole new record all over the internet before it’s put out. That would suck. We also played 2 cover songs, “Alive” by Pearl Jam and “With or Without You” by U2…my favorite song ever written.
I couldn’t sign that night in Rio too much cause we had to fly again the next morning very early to Recife. So I went to sleep for a few hours. It was sad to leave Rio the next morning after only staying there for 24 hours...It’s such a beautiful city. I would have loved to have a day off there. Maybe next time?
The flight from Rio to Recife was painless, but we arrived early morning instead of late at night, so there were…ah, just a few fans there;) Every single airport employee down to the security guys and their kid’s kids were waiting for us at the baggage claim for autographs along with a live news TV crew. While everyone started rushing at us with security holding them back, the live TV moved there way into our circle as we waited for all our millions of bags (hey, I only took two bags this trip!). By that time we were seen through the doors from the outside of the front of the airport and that’s when we started to hear the screams…There were a shi*t load of fans out there! We tried to do an interview the best we could with the TV crew over the screams and pounding on the glass of the baggage claim walls. Aaron and I kept plugging the fact that our drummer, Justin, doesn’t have a girlfriend and is looking for a Brazilian brideJ Security decided it wasn’t safe to run through the front of the airport, so we got a car to pull up on the runway and we escaped by driving under the planes full rock and roll style. It was cool.
We got to the hotel and it had fans all around it and inside the lobby too. We had to do the human security wall thing to make our way to the elevator as I kept getting my favorite Clash shirt ripped off me. Once we got in the elevator we had to push every floor 1-20 to throw the fans off down in the lobby who were probably looking to see where we’d stop.
The view from my room of the ocean below was incredible. The water was crystal clear and there were so many people on the beach, not to mention a huge crowd of fans that had made their way to the outside parking lot of the hotel directly straight down from my room, which was on the 18th floor. This hotel room was funny…no hot water, well, actually scratch that, no water at all for me…my ceiling was ripped open hanging towards the ground so that I had to get on my knees and crawl under in to get to the bedroom. There were brooms and trash cans everywhere and dirt all over the floors, the TV didn’t work, I had no towels….basically, I assumed they had just sent me to the wrong room. But no, it was the right room and luckily we were just staying there for one night. The city was really pretty though and it was worth it just to have that view of the ocean. By this time I was really tired from lack of sleep, so I tried to zone out and get some rest. My rest was cut short quickly to the screams of fans below… “ HALEX!!! I LUB YOU!!!! HAAALEEX!” I stuck my head out the window and it was all over, they saw me, and they weren’t going to stop screaming until I left for sound check 3 hours later. So I spent the next few hours throwing them down bracelets and guitar picks and signed pieces of paper folded into little airplanes. It was good fun until the wind started to pick up sending everything flying across the street into bushes and trees. I got some video from the 18th floor of what looked like little specks running in competition, dog piling on top of each other, and crawling to find what was being thrown. It’s time like those I would have loved to sign for them, but it was just to crazy to go down there, so, the window had to do. Sacha, our new tour manager extraordinaire, another life long friend of Aaron’s, was down out side by the fans one his cell phone. Mine rang seconds later in my room and he told me that one of the fans wanted to say hi, so I talked on the phone a little, while waving my hand out the window…man were those screams loud!
After sound checking in another big theater, we drove into the oldest city in all of Brazil for dinner. It was really pretty inside this village and it reminded me a lot of an Italian village with cobblestone streets and stupidly narrow roads. Now I’m not trying to sound like a complainer, but man, none of the cars in Brazil feel like they have shock absorbers. Every ride we had was like being on a roller coaster at Magic Mountain… Granted the cobble stone streets that night didn’t help much. The other funny thing was that all our security guys were slacking big time the whole tour, everyday, like saying some place is 5 minutes away and then after an hour of driving asking where we wanted to go, or getting us lost routinely coming back to our hotel at night, or having nothing arranged security wise ahead of time at places we would go to and then find we had walked into a lion’s den of fans, or bringing fans INTO the hotel or dressing room so that we could sign for them without asking us first...I mean, what if we were changing or something? Never mind;) Don’t get me wrong, I love to meet and sign for fans all day long, but sometimes I’m just too tired or working on something or it’s not a safe environment to sign for fans…people did get hurt on this tour physically because of crazy situations, including me, but I’ll get to that later. Anyway, back to that little city in Recife...
We ate dinner at this really great little restaurant that looked and felt like it had been there for a few hundred years. I felt like being daring that night and ordering one of the native specialties cause come on, I ate a poor little chicken’s heart the night before. So I had shrimp in coconut sauce served inside of a pumpkin. I got to tell you, it was weird to eat out of a pumpkin, I mean, maybe I’m just not a pumpkin kind of guy…but it was good though. Not one meal passed anywhere on this whole tour that we didn’t get asked for our autographs by the waiters and waitresses and cooks and just about everyone eating there. It was exciting, but sometimes you just want to eat your pumpkin in peace right?
So the gig that night went great as well and we just kept having more and more fun each night. I’m pretty sure that that was the night the scrolls began to start making there way onstage and in our dressing rooms. Remember me talking about the scrolls last time we were in Brazil? Hundreds of pages stuck together with “I love the Calling”, “I love Alex”, “I love Aaron” hand written over and over and over again. It’s madness, but when I see how much time these fans put into those things, it just amazes me how lucky we are. That night we got one with “I love you” written in ever language in the world…I gave up reading it after I had unrolled it from one end of our dressing room to the next ten times. After the show we had to rush back to the hotel since we had yet another early 7 AM flight, which means we have to leave the hotel by 5AM and it was 2AM then, so…I debated whether or not I should sleep at all since we had a day off the next day once we got to Fortaleza. Oh hay, I figured out why my TV didn’t work, you’ve got to plug it in and connect the cable box and put batteries in the remote….how silly of me to forget. I ended up sleeping in my clothes that night for like an hour while Beverly Hills 90210 in Portuguese enter my sleeping brain and gave me nightmares about Kelly cheating on David and that was weird that they were even dating cause they were brother and sister, but not like really. Anyway, we all woke up cranky and headed out.
I couldn’t believe there were fans waiting at the airport for us to leave at 6AM, but they were there. It’s hard to stand there and check in your luggage sometimes you know? That flight was only 30 minutes long.…but wait…..what’s this I see at the end of our gate?…uh…..no……it couldn’t be…..A f*ckin’ FOKKER!!!! NO!!!! Luckily not a “PropFokker”, but a Fokker nonetheless (for those of you that have no frikkin clue what I’m talking about, refer back to tour diary #32745682, the first Europe tour). Surprisingly, it was the smoothest flight of the whole tour, so I guess that mother Fokker’s OK after all.
We arrived at the airport at like 7:30 in the morning and I just couldn’t comprehend what 7:30 in the morning felt like, since I had been sleeping in till noon everyday since last year. And in my comatose, lack of sleep, flying everyday, show every night state of mind, I realized that it was really more like 3:30AM in LA which is when I would probably be getting to sleep anyway, but no, that reasoning didn’t help my headache.
I had a feeling we were about o walk into one of those lion’s dens and we only had our one security guy, “Victor”, with us. Victor was a nice guy, but he was only 18 years old and you can’t really make one of those human wall dealies with one guy…unless he’s really flexible…uh, anyway, that day we chose to just walk through the fans, out the front of the airport, you know, to give Justin his first taste of a mad airport dash…bad idea…
After doing more live TV interviews and on air live radio interviews AT THE BAGGAGE CLAIM….What are these people doing at the baggage claim anyways? Well, we did the “Justin needs a Brazilian wife” add campaign again and slowly made our way to the glass sliding doors that led into the airport, while signing for the cleaning ladies of the nearby bathroom…you know, for her kids and allJ
The doors slid open and it all went pretty quickly really…Kaveh did a running slip and slide on the floor towards the fans in a moment of excitement…I was running through the sea of fans while Victor and Sacha did their best to protect me…but I was being choked cause they were ripping my Clash T shirt from the back neck part and I could hear it tearing while others were grabbing my hair and I was just trying not to fall over….I couldn’t really see any of the other guys, but I was just assuming they went towards the other van since we always had two…I finally made my way to the van and literally dove in along with our promoter and I think Justin, but I don’ remember. What I do remember is in the midst of the chaos, Victor was trying to get the van’s door closed, but all the fans hands were reaching in and pulling at the door and slamming there fists against the windows. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt…and that was the moment when the door got slammed and locked completely closed on all of our bodyguard, Victor’s fingers. He jumped in the van screaming, “They f*cking broke my fingers!”, while holding his left hand, fingers all crushed and bent up in a very unnatural way that made my stomach turn every time I looked at them on the way to the emergency room which is where we were headed…that is if the security driver could find it…
Well he just couldn’t find it, so they dropped us off first at the hotel and we were greeted by a bunch of fans at our hotel lobby. The other van rolled up with the rest of the band and the crew. Our guitar tech was walking shakily and clutching his head. It turned out in their mad dash to their van, he slammed his head on the roof of the car while jumping in and got a concussion….His nickname before was “Wobbly” and I never really understood it….until then. By that time I was dizzy myself from lack of sleep, achy from all the shows, throat dry form all the flying and singing, and most of all HUNGRY….I realized I hadn’t eaten anything since that frikkin pumpkin early the night before. We all just wanted to go to the hotel’s breakfast buffet and get our eat on. So that’s what we did.
I just wanted cereal…ok, check, only corn flakes, put them on the plate, and maybe some pancakes? No, but they’ve got some weird sort of French toast, ok that too, fruit? Not looking so hot. Eggs? Looking a little extra watery…hmmmm.
The corn flakes were chewy and stale and it was a sad thing. The French toast was like a hard solid piece of cinnamon charcoal and made me gag….the eggs would have been fine if I could have brought myself to drink them since they were pretty much liquid. Ok, whatever, I’ll live, just get me a coffee. Ah, yes, coffee…I’ll just open the sugar tin here on the table and…NO! Bugs crawling in the sugar! How about that tin….NO! It’s wrong, WRONG! OK, a little milk then…I’ll just pour it in the coffee like so and…OH GOD NO! Thick chunky rancid milk! OK, black coffee it is with a side of a whole lot of nothing. “Hey can I have your autograph?” Picture?” yes..yes…And then Aaron excitedly pointed out across the room. . .the omelet maker station!
So Aaron and I ran over to the omelet maker and he grudgingly took our orders as if we were putting him out. He made a little snort after I asked for just cheese in mine and then it happened. He heated up the little pan and took a big spoon full of this white powdery stuff that looked like Styrofoam pieces. Within 10 seconds that powder turned into a brilliant white circular foam paddy I guess emulating an omelet likeness and the cook threw in a slice of Kraft cheese, folded it up and handed it to me. He looked at Aaron but for some odd reason, Aaron didn’t want to order his own. While I was walking back to the table I was trying to think of what this stuff was. Was it like dried instant egg whites? No, I felt it. It felt like the rubber on the bottom of my shoe. Was it Styrofoam? I sat down and took a bite…. tasteless…..Hmmmm…like biting into a deflated balloon with the texture of well, Styrofoam. I spit it out and cursed, “DAMN YOU! DAMN YOU ALL!” I passed my bizarre omelet around and everyone took their time to stop and appreciate its weirdness. Some took a bite and immediately spit it out like me, some ripped a piece off and bounced it off the wall, and others just laughed at the omelet….you silly, silly omelet. Was this a joke? A sick, sick, joke? “Sacha”, I said, “It’s time to go to Pizza Hut”.
Pizza at 10:30 in the morning isn’t my first choice, but once I bit into that greasy slice of pepperoni pie I just felt good. We had the rest of the day off and I was really worn out by that time and finally not hungry any more, so we went back to the hotel and slept a while. Later on, Sacha arranged for us all to go to the sand dunes by the beach an hour’s drive away. The rest of the day was so much fun and would end up being our only real day off.
We drove out to this extremely small town with dirt roads and pretty much nothing else but the beach and miles of huge sand dunes. We had two little sand buggy racer cars, so the band and I jumped in one and the crew in the other. They had one seat up front next to the driver and three more where I was, which was sitting on top of the trunk of the car holding onto the roll cage in front of us. Our driver had a beat up stereo in his buggy and he put on some Eminem really loud for the whole ride. I thought we’d just be cruising for a while, maybe I’d pull out the camera and film for some of the time…but no, this was about to be a serious ride.
We were probably driving through the dunes at 50 to 60 mph as the sand flew into my face, stinging my skin and making me squint my eyes so much that I could only see, well, nothing. I had to spit my gum out after a few seconds cause it started getting crunchy. We went up the first tall peak like climbing the beginning stage of a rollercoaster and then it was all down hill from there. We banked hard right at an angle that felt like we would surely tip over any second….”Kaveh!”, I said, who was sitting on the opposite side of the car as Justin and I, “Lean left! Lean left!”. Because of the guys height and the fact that he almost weighs twice my weight, I was worried about tipping over. We shot straight down getting airborne at times holding on to the roll bar for dear life. �H!!” Up, down, Up, down, eat the sand, close the eyes, “Can I have an autograph, for my wife?” “NO! Just drive fool!!!” We finally pulled up and stopped at the peak of a very wide, steep sandy hill that ended in a lake at the bottom. And that’s when the guy asked us if we wanted go snow boarding…on the sand that is…
They had these snowboards that slide across the sand with little straps for your feet and all these people were really flying down that hill just like they would on snow…it was weird to see that. No chair lift of course, so there was a lot of walking to be done if you wanted to play. Kaveh went first doing a few face plants on the way down and everyone soon got the hang of it. I just watched and filmed. On the last run, our sound guy, Ronnie, and Aaron’s girlfriend, just kept flying down the hill at the bottom and both went crashing right into the lake in all their clothes. Then it was time to get back in the death mobiles and head to the next stop.
After some more free falls and scary moments, we arrived at a huge lake with a restaurant by the water and chairs and tables on the sand. We were going to hang out there for a while and get lunch, but I noticed they had wave runners there for rent and I couldn’t pass that up, even though I was fully dressed, rock and roll bracelets and belt and even the channel sunglasses. Justin and I jumped on one first and I was really careful not to get anything wet. Look, I’ve been on wave runners many times and I’ve never fallen off….
We started out, Justin sitting behind me, flying across the water. All was good. Oh, look over there, a passing ship, lets jump over the waves that the ship leaves behind! Yah! That will be fun! The first few bumps were cool and then WAM! We hit down hard and I banked left…we spun out as the waves carried us up and down while we turned until…stop. Justin told me later at that very moment he was thinking, “Man, Alex, you’re a good driver to control that problem nicely and bring us to a safe stop”…but alas, that’s when we tipped over upside down into the water, head first.
I’m not a fan of swimming. I’m not a fan of swimming with all my clothes on. I’m not a fan of being suddenly plunged head first in a dirty lake. I struggled to turn the wave runner back over and climb on. Justin followed and we made it back up, but the wave runner was dead. I saw the guy who worked there in the distance start making his way out to help us, so I waved him over and that’s when we tipped upside down again. Man, that sucks even more than the first time. While we were wading in the water waiting for the guy, I saw a wave runner going by at like 2 mph blowing clouds of smoke and the back of it was completely underwater while the front was raised high in the air…I wiped my wet and angry channel sunglasses, that managed to stay on somehow, and saw that Kaveh was riding that wave runner with Sacha on the back. Those are two really big guys…about 500 lbs between them and needless to say their wave runner was just not interested in carrying them any farther. So theirs died right next to ours. The guy finally got over and fixed it all and we road back in. By that time it was starting to get dark and cold and my soaking wet clothes squished as I got off the cursed wave runner back onto the beach… “We take picture? Yes. OK, you sign for me…and my uncle? PLEASE MY UNCLE!” So I did. Those should be some funny pictures.
Our food arrived at the tables and we ate linner or dunch or whatever you want to call it. By then it was completely dark and I couldn’t really see the steak that I was eating, but it sure did taste funny. We all started feeling things jumping and biting at our feet, but couldn’t see what. So after we ate, it was time to go. As we rode back to the hotel in our bumpy ass no shock car on the dirt roads, I realized that even though I was soaking wet, I had a lot of fun….but my stomach hurt and my feet were itchy… “ Hey are your guys’ feet itchy too?”
We all woke up the next day with little bites all over our feet and legs. Nice. We went out to eat that morning, since no one was interested in breakfast at the hotel for some reason;) We ate at this Italian restaurant, since all the breakfast places were closed at 1 in the afternoon (hey, sleep in when you can). The food was really good and I was starting to feel alive again. We had an hour or two to spare back at the hotel, so Sacha and I got our Ping Pong on by the pool, or as the Brazilians call it, “Pingy Pongy”. The room with the games in it was surrounded by glass windows, like a fish tank. So all of the fans were around it watching us play and banging on the walls. It made Sacha nervous, so I finally beat someone at Pingy Pongy! Yay! I have yet to ever beat Aaron though…it probably wasn’t a good idea to have gotten him a ping-pong table for his birthday. Now I’m really going to get rocked.
The venue that night was a smaller size club with a really high stage. It was sold out, so the show kicked ass once again. It was cool to have big screens on either side of the stage at each one of these shows like a proper rock concert. I kept looking over at them to see what Justin and Kaveh looked like playing since I really never saw them too much behind me. I tried to sign for everybody that night over this high wall between the club and the dressing rooms. It was total chaos and we had to stop cause people were getting squashed under each other. For the first time on this trip Aaron and I had personalized picks with our signature on them that we could give out to the fans, which was pretty cool. I would have stayed there all-night and signed for every single one of them, but it was just too crazy. Our flight the next day to Sao Paulo wasn’t until 3 PM, so we decided to go out for the first time to a club or something that night after the show. The drivers said that there was a club 5 minutes away that was great and had a VIP section we could sit in that would be safe. So after driving for an hour in the middle of nowhere and starting to wonder if we were just getting driven in circles on the Brazilian “ring”…we decided to turn back. Most people got out once we were back at the hotel since we had just sat in a car for like two hours. But me and some of the other guys continued on to some other club that was truly 5 minutes away. I’m glad we went, cause it was so fun. We “gotsted our drank on” in this roped off VIP section while all the people at the club were coming up to security trying to get in and take pictures. There were randomly places girls dancing on tables and on the bar like Coyote Ugly and I started feeling like Hugh Hefner, minus the 6 playboy playmates...and the robe….and the pipe…but anyways, there was this cover band there that was really good, playing all these songs we knew. The owner of the club asked me if I wanted to go up there and sing with them. I’m usually way to shy to do that sort of thing, but I was feeling a little “funny”, so I went for it. All the security guys took me to the stage while people were trying to grab at me and stuff. What’s up with that huh? Why don’t I just send you all a piece of my Clash shirt? Just kidding;) The band played the crap out of Wherever You Will Go, even though it was about 5 clicks too fast, and I sang while Kaveh played the bass. It was good fun.
We left the next morning to Sao Paulo and flew most of the day, arriving at around 8PM. There weren’t any fans at the airport that late, so we got out of there quickly and made our way to the hotel. The hotel in Sao Paulo was great and the staff there was super cool. We spent the rest of the trip, about 7 days there, and had a lot of fun. We went to dinner the night we arrived at this Italian place called Ecco. We hadn’t eaten all day so that dinner was one of the best of the whole trip. They had Louie Vuttont place mats and some of the best pizza I’ve had since we were in Italy doing Music In High Places. We spent most of the afternoon of the next day doing press in the hotel and phoners to places like Mexico and Argentina. Somehow a bread roll throwing fight broke out in the press room and I got slammed with a few rolls pretty hard in the you know what…but I guess that’s better than having fans grab you there. We had that night off and I was in a random bowling mood, so we went bowling.
The bowling alley was pretty nice, but I just couldn’t get use to people drinking and smoking while they bowled. It’s just not something you see in California. A little kid was having his birthday there and he had like 50 friends, so I spent most of the time signing for them in between bowling. They were really cute. I got whooped by everybody, but whatever, it was fun. I kind of threw my wrist out doing some over hand style throws…I guess that’s why people don’t bowl that way. When we got back to the hotel, I had the idea of playing poker, but we didn’t have any chips or cards. So Sacha had one of the fans hanging outside our hotel, a really sweet girl named Renata, go get us cards at 1 in the morning. We ended up using guitar picks as chips and you guessed it, I lost a sh*t load of money due to some stupid bluffing hands. But it was fun.
By the next morning I was dieing to play a show again since we hadn’t played in like two days. So I was looking forward to that night. I killed a little time in the morning with Sacha by playing tennis at the hotel. We had no clue how to keep score and I pretty much suck, so instead we just played pingy pongy on the tennis court and dubbed it “Biggy Pingy Pongy”. Man is that game tiring. It was so funny cause our body guards in Brazil were always in black suits, even when we were on the beach that one day, and they would go wherever I would go…uh, no pun intended…anyway, so they all stood guard on the sidelines while we were playing our intense game of “Biggy Pingy Pongy” and they were running to get the stray balls for us every other second! I mean it’s hard enough to get use to having a big group of giant guys in suits follow you around all the time…but standing watch at your “Biggy Pingy Pongy” match while being ball boys too? That was just too funny. Oh yah, and I got whooped, but what else is new?
The next three night were all at the same venue in Sao Paulo, which was really weird cause we’ve never headlined multiple nights like that at such a big place. The first night was mostly VIPs and press and there were chairs laid out and stuff, so the show didn’t have the same kind of energy as the rest of them…but there were still screaming fans out there and they made the show more fun for us. Man, the fans in Brazil are awesome. They sing every word to every song (which helps when I forget the words cause I just look at anyone one of them for the answer:), they throw the best gifts on stage (even though I was hit hard by a few of them, but I’ll get to that later), and most of all, they’re all feeling the same energy we are on stage and that just makes us play even better and have even more fun. Thanks guys. I went out after that show and signed since I didn’t have to be up the next day too early. It took like an hour and a half to sign for everyone. There were these few girls that kept begging me to give them the gum out of my own mouth! I was like, “You don’t want my stinky already been chewed gum!”, “Yes we do! Give! Give!” Silliness. Justin was telling me that when he and the other guys went back to the hotel that night, while I was signing at the venue, there were a whole bunch of fans in front of the hotel waiting. He told me that when they saw the van they started screaming, “HALEX! HALEX! HALEX!” and then Justin opened the door and got out and this one fan took one look at him and screamed at the top of her lungs right in his face, “NOOOOOOOOOOO!” I felt bad, but come on, that’s pretty funny.
We went shopping during the afternoon of the next day, on one of the main clothing store streets in Sao Paulo…hey, I can’t just leave without buying some clothes…maybe even a new red jacket;) They had a Diesel store there, but the stuff was SO expensive. They wanted 800 Reals for a pair of jeans, which is almost 300 American dollars! I don’t think so fool. We went into this one store that had some decent clothes, but the cool thing was that it had this glass stairway down to a second level with water running underneath it and mirrors under the water…as I made my way down the stairs, entranced by the stuff beneath me, I ate sh*t and landed on my shins against the stairs. That sucked and it was quite embarrassing… “Bad Stairs!” I said, “Bad Stairs! Have these removed immediately!” I did find some other cool stuff after that and so did the other guys. Kaveh bought a bowl. I was like, “A bowl huh?” He said, “Yah, it’s a really nice bowl”. OK dude.
The gig that night was frikkin kick ass and there were a lot more people and no more stupid chairs. It reminded me of that gig we played in London at Shepherds Bush…similar venue, girls passing out left and right, and great energy. We just hung after the gig and signed for people and did our thang. The promoter told me that the next night would be the best and sold out…Over 6,000 people, so I was super excited. But I was also beginning to feel pretty run down by this point. Even though I’ve been working out a lot at home for the last few months and running and stuff, nothing can prepare you for the amount of energy you put out each night on stage. My body was beginning to ache and my stupid shins were all swollen from my “shopping accident”. And jumping off the drum riser David Lee Roth style ten times a night wasn’t helping. I needed to rest. So the next day, I got sick.
All I know is I ate some sushi and was in pain for the next 24 hours. F*cking dirty fish, tainted fish, screwed me up. We had to do some press at the hotel, like meet some winners from MTV that were really sweet girls and then we had to do some interview with the Making The Band MTV Brazil winners. Now that was funny stuff. There were five guys all sitting cross-legged looking all GQ boy band style in this room. We sat there next to them on little pillows. I guess they were fans of the band and wanted to meet us and get our advice on important issues like: Vat do ve do ven all the fans chase us? How do jo keep jor hair looking soo gooot? A few of them where holding instruments, like a guitar and bongo drums, which I was assuming was for show. But then in the midst of the interview and the cameras and the lights, these guys played Wherever You Will Go right there and then and they were good. The one guy sitting next me had a deeper voice than I do and was just as skinny, so it totally caught me off guard. They were all really nice guys and I wish them the best.
By the time the show rolled around that night I was totally destroyed. My stomach hurt so bad I could barely stand up and I felt like I was going to yak rancid fish all over the place any second…but there were 6,000 fans out there waiting for us to go on and for the first time in a long time I felt nervous. The crowd was so amazing that they really got me through the show, but I kept getting cold flashes and shivers and I was dizzy and stuff…I almost just gave up at one point when I got smacked in between the eyes by a metal bracelet thrown from the audience and then a few seconds later got hit in the lip by a f*cking bear’s plastic nose. It’s not there fault I got whacked, but man, I now have a black eye and a cut lip…war wounds;) So, I made it through that show, barely, and just dropped dead back stage afterwards for a while. I was really not feeling up to signing or anything that night. I just wanted to curl up and die…but during our exit out of there, shortly after the show, all hell broke lose. Our dodgy ass security guys led us past all the people back stage that I didn’t sign for, down four flights of stairs from the dressing room, and into the underground parking lot to the car...Well, one problem, or actually more like three…The underground parking lot was full of fans somehow and the security let all the fans from upstairs follow us down into this little hallway somehow. So there I am, stuck between all these fans, ready to blow chunks, everyone screaming and yelling and I’m just like…get me to the fucking car please. But that’s when the head security guy in broken English tells me that there are thousands of fans in the street outside blocking our exit and we can’t leave for at least an hour…we have to go back up to the dressing rooms now. At this point the fans behind us are starting to say, “Why you just walk right past us! That’s not nice! Sign my poster! For my daughter!” And this older lady starts trying to pull this giant life size cardboard cut-out of me from this plastic wrap in this tiny hallway with a thousand f*cking people in it…Our security wasn’t doing anything, so we had to yell at everyone to move to let us back up stairs. I hated doing that, but I felt like complete sh*t. So, sorry whoever was down there. I’ll make it up to you next time. So, we hung out in the dressing room for a lot longer and then Aaron and I made our secret escape out of a side garage in this little car. By that point it was almost 2 in the morning and I just wanted to go to sleep and the last thing I needed was for this guy to get us lost going to our hotel while I’m crammed in the back of this little car with all my stuff piled on top of me…But alas, he did. This was the third night in a row that we were returning from the same gig, back to the same hotel, and some how we ended up leaving the city. Once we started going through these series of long tunnels and got to a toll road I was like…. “Look, I don’t know where we are, but I just have this strange feeling we aren’t where we should be.” We got home an hour later and I crashed.
The next day was our final show in Sorocaba, which was an hour’s drive away. We all pilled into the rollercoaster vans and set out early afternoon. We had some fans chasing us all the way who almost got hit by one of our cars on the highway…BE CAREFUL! We arrived at a hotel there, which we were only going to use as day room and there were a lot of fans outside of the hotel and inside the lobby as well. We made a dash for the elevators and went up to the rooms. This hotel was probably the creepiest of them all this trip, but whatever, we were only there for like 30 minutes. I opened the bars on the window and then the window itself to see the view of the pool below. There were some kids in the pool and a table of about 10 big guys in little Speedos playing cards. When they saw me the window they started screaming some sh*t to me in Portuguese that I couldn’t understand. So I asked our promoter lady who was traveling with us to translate. She said, “They say you is a gay boy, a city fag, worthless, etc.” Hmmmm, that’s nice…Just when I was about to throw something large at them, they pulled out a video camera and started filming….It was time to leave.
We made our way to the gig, which was in a considerably bad neighborhood. It looked like a giant mess hall. This was to be the final and biggest night of the tour, almost 10,000 people. But I couldn’t understand how they were going to fit that many people in this place, it just didn’t look possible. I guess they don’t have the same fire codes in Brazil as we do in America. So they cram a lot of people in smaller places than we’re use to. The dressing rooms so far this trip have been pretty cool; Most with Jacuzzi tubs, TV, good food, clean towels…but this one…oh man...like a truck stop in Middle America. After going down into the dungeons and entering what looked like a jail cell, I just had to go use the bathroom and...OH GOD NO!!! What is floating in the toilet!?!? And all over the floor! SWEET LORD! PLEASE! BLIND MINE EYES SO THAT I CANNOT SEE ANYMORE!! And the shower…oooh! Black corroded tiles, ceiling falling down, weeds growing through the floor (free fertilizer)…And what’s this? The wiring from the lighting on the ceiling is dangling down in front of the showerhead…Anyone in the mood to get electrocuted? “Hey Aaron! Feel like taking a shower?” mmmmm…brown water….AAAAH the smell!! The eternal bog of stench! Get me out of here! Needless to say, no one went in there after that.
Putting the dressing rooms aside, the show that night was the most fun of the whole trip and the crowd was beyond words. I didn’t want it to end, but after an hour and 15 minutes it did and we got out of there fast this time. It was either hang out after the show for two hours trapped in the bog of eternal stench until the crowd dispersed enough to drive away, or make a running leap into the cars the second we walked off stage…and that’s what we did.
We were all amped up the first ten minutes of the drive back, talking about our favorite moments of the show and who got hit by what fan gift and who played which part really well…and then it just hit us all at the same time there in the car as it went silent. We were each totally destroyed after 8 shows, 10 plane flight, and well, all the sh*t I’ve been talking about for the last 9,168 words. This has got to be the longest tour diary ever. Anyway, we all were in the zone for the rest of the drive until Aaron had to take a pee. So we pulled over on the side of the highway. The fans that were following us on the way to the gig earlier had just stopped behind us and were wondering what Aaron was doing. NO! Stand back! Don’t look! I wonder if they did? So, we continued on and I went to sleep right when I laid down in my bed.
Our flight home the next day wasn’t until 9PM, so I had the whole day to finish up some work and pack all my stuff up which by that point was all over my room. I told Sacha to buy a suitcase, so I could bring back all of the fan gifts that were piling up like presents under a Christmas tree. I spent the rest of the day reading some of the letters I got and partially unrolling some of those scrolls too…wow, there was this one scroll that was 800 feet long! It took these fans 1 year to make! It’s that kind of stuff that makes me love my job even more and really realize how blessed we are. I will never stop loving and appreciating every moment of this as long as you guys are here. And I will never get use to those damn bodyguards following me in the bathroom when I pee! Anyway, it was time to go to the airport and as I was walking out of my room with all my luggage, I heard Stigmatized being sung really loudly by a large group of fans 15 stories below. I had to go out there and say goodbye to them all, so I did. The rest of the band and crew were waiting in the car for me, poised for a getaway, as I signed and said my goodbyes. Some of those girls slept out there for days! I couldn’t believe it. I hoped in the bump mobile and we were off. As we pulled away, I watched fans jump into their cars to follow us and one of the cars crashed into another and then another, but they just kept on following us anyway…Crazy stuff to see.
We arrived at the airport and it was madness trying to check in with all the fans. So the American Airlines peeps took us back into some special private room. As we were heading over there, with all our security and the chaos we were causing, I saw another mob of security and someone else moving towards the inner airport. I asked the American Airlines guy who it was and he said it’s the most important person in the world….uh, Michael Jackson? No silly, Kofi Anon, the vice president of the UN! Wow! It turned out he was getting on Kaveh’s flight over to New York…I couldn’t believe he traveled on commercial airliners…I guess it’s pretty safe then. So, long story long, we said goodbye to the airport fans, got on our plane, and flew 14 hours back home….Through 6 hours of lightening storms…but whatever, we’re alive and it was fun and I’d do it all over again…and I probably will…sooner than later.
So, I’m sure there’s things I’m forgetting, but that’s the, uh, “quick” sum up of the tour in Brazil. Now it’s right back into the studio for us, to finish the record fast, design the album artwork, do photo shoots, film a video, and get this frikkin music in your CD player by the end of the year. We shall see. All is good though otherwise and we’re looking forward to getting on the ride again….or did we even get off? I don’t know…All I do know is, well, that I don’t know. You guys rock! Thanks to all the Brazilian fans that came to our shows and showered us with love! I’m very tired now and am losing my mind after writing this novel. Just remember…Don’t do school! Stay in milk! Drink your drugs! We’ll see you all soon!
