Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Oi, Rio!;  More inclement weather; Sizzla now featuring all-you-can-eat shrimp.

Lapa District, Rio

I’m backstage at the massive Fundicao Progresso theater in Lapa, Rio’s equivallent of Bourbon Street, New Orleans.  Most nights, Rio makes New Orleans look pretty tame, though a string of beads will only get you a kiss here in Brazil.  The Carnaval floats are in storage now, but this town never loses its taste for a party.  Ponto de Equilibrio is onstage right now, their hundreds of fans singing along with every lyric.  Ponto is probably Brazil’s most popular reggae group, and I can vouch for their talent.  It’s a packed house, even though the ticket price is too high for most people in this city.

Brazil has been rainy all week, but fans have been packing the shows drenched and happy.  We had a safe journey from the beach city of Vitoria to Juiz de Fora, nestled in the mountains north of Rio despite the apocalyptic rainstorm that washed over our bus and threatened to collapse the roadway.  As we drove through the deluge our driver struck a light pole which snapped back and shattered the window next to my head.  That was enough to wake me up from my nap.  I don’t have a perfect face, but let’s just say I’m glad I didn’t lose it, thanks to safety glass.  Good morning Minas Gerais!

Sizzla: conscious artist?

I’m not the first to comment on this, but I couldn’t help but express my profound disappointment in Sizzla’s decision to perform for the birthday party of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe.  He was imported along with several thousand pounds of shrimp, lobster and expensive booze.  Many people describe Sizzla as a conscious artist, but his actions cast this in doubt time and again.  Mugabe’s lies are audacious but flimsy, a fact I realized when I was handed an expensively-produced propaganda flyer at the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival several years ago when his nepotistic land redistribution scheme instigated the terrible economic tailspin that transformed Zimbabwe from East Africa’s greatest hope to its greatest disappointment.  Mugabe is a kleptocrat, it’s as simple as that, which makes Sizzla a hypocrite, at least in regards to this issue.

Robert Mugabe: "Let them eat lobster!"

What kind of consciousness is required to celebrate a thief and dictator?  Well, there is always the consciousness of pride and avarice, and the allure of star treatment, which many successful musicians succumb to.  Whatever the case, I was happy to see Bob Marley’s “Zimbabwe” on Groundation’s setlist for tonight, which just sold out.  It should be mentioned that Bob was fooled by Mugabe as well, though this was way back in the eighties, when his true colors had not yet shown, and this fact gives me hope that Sizzla and the world will see the foolishness of supporting this traitor to his own people.

Sorry for those of you who couldn’t get into the concert tonight, but we’ve added a new show, and we’ll be back later this month performing with reggae legends Israel Vibration.  Well, it’s time to hit the stage.  Boa noite, cariocas!

Baltimore, Maryland

 

Maryland: owned by the perfect storm.

We had a great show at the Grey Eagle in Asheville, North Carolina and I stayed up way to late. I slept for three or four hours, but awoke to the first of two deafening hotel-wide fire alarms at four-thirty. Then, after three unnecessary wake-up calls, we were on the RV and headed north into the aftermath of the blizzard of a lifetime. The Central Eastern seaboard was buried nearly four feet of snow this year. Scotty, our driver, who hails from northern Minnesota, just laughed while the Californians and Jamaicans started getting nervous. “I love snow. I can’t wait!” he said. He looked a little crazy.

Scotty: Driver, roadie or Minnesota polar bear?

Scotty got his wish. When we rolled into Towson, Maryland, only a few major thoroughfares were clear. Most streets were completely buried, while a few roads had only a single open lane. Every truck bed was filled with snow. No car left unattended during the blizzard could be cleared without the help of a shovel, and street parking was impossible. Stage assistants set up a ramp to get our heavy gear through the pool of freezing slush at the the back of the club. The few people picking their way through the three and four foot drifts on the street looked shellshocked.

Despite the disaster, more than three hundred people turned out for the show. Groundation’s senior studio engineer Jim Fox drove nearly two hours from Washington D.C. just to say what’s up and bring us a box of t-shirts from his studio. He hadn’t left his house in nearly a week due to the storm. Ex-TM Dave Alima came out with his wife, and brought comic books for the bus.

The Johnstons of New Orleans. Southern hospitality at its finest.

The snowstorm marked the end of our southern run which started in Texas, and passed through New Orleans, Florida, the Carolinas and Virginia. Though we were two weeks early for Mardi Gras, we received a dose of authentic Southern hospitality from Jacob and Antoinette Johnston, who grabbed us after sound check and fed us red beans and rice, jambalaya, green salad and King Cake (I didn’t get the baby)*. If there’s one thing I hate about touring in the States, it’s that almost every meal comes to us cold in a styrofoam container. The American attitude towards cooking and eating is pathological, except, that is, in the deep south, where the relaxed pace, the love of good food and drink, the easy generosity, and social graces signify the most culturally distinct region of the country. The south has its faults, but they’re far outweighed by this richness.

Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil? Can you tell food congealed from a home-cooked meal?

My brief stint as an LSU football fan last year left me cold, but all of us were rooting for the New Orleans Saints as we watched the Super Bowl on the TV over the bar during our sound check in Jacksonville, Florida. Maybe we wanted some kind of karmic payback for the insult Hurricane Katrina paid to the Crescent City. I was rooting on behalf of all my aunts, uncles and cousins who’ve put up with the ‘Aints’ tragicomic saga for forty years. A cheer went up from the crowd when I played a quote from “When The Saints go Marching In” in the middle of Bob’ Marley’s Simmer Down that night, and I could tell that many of us were Saints fans that night.

* King Cake is a traditional New Orleans desert eaten during Mardi Gras. It’s like a giant psychedelic doughnut with a PLASTIC BABY BAKED INSIDE! If you get served the slice with the baby, it’s supposed to bring good luck, but it really means you have to buy the cake next year. People are rumoured to have choked to death on these toys, which isn’t what I’d call good luck.  It’s clearly a hazardous food, but that’s the price you pay for culinary authenticity. 

Finally, the entire band would like to express its deepest sorrow at the unexpected passing of Linda Haereiti, originally of Brigham City, Utah.  We received this sad news at our hotel in Austin, Texas on the first day of this tour. Linda was the mother of Tekanawa Haereiti, the drummer for Groundation, who some of you know by the name Rufus. Our thoughts go out to Rufus and Linda’s surviving family and loved ones. She will be deeply missed.

Orlando, Florida

Backstage at the club...

Second US tour begins; The Big Easy; Lost in the shadow of Disney World; Festivals and headliners.

 Florida is a unique place. Besides Las Vegas, it’s got the fastest growing population in the US, where vast wetlands are drained to make way for golf courses, housing complexes, and strip malls. People here come from all over US and the Caribbean. Our first show in Florida this year is here in Orlando, home of Walt Disney World. Like much of America, it’s a place built largely on fantasies conjured out of an inhospitable wasteland.

Bats: Keeping Austin free of insect pests since five million b.c.

One of the first shows of our 2009 US tour was in Austin, Texas, a real playground for music fans and musicians, with dozens of great clubs. Each night at dusk one and a half million Mexican freetail bats emerge from their home under the Congress Street Bridge and go off to their gigs playing bass in alternative rock bands. Our next stop was New Orleans, whose musical pedigree is known to everyone. Our hotel was directly across the street from Louis Armstrong Park, not far from the Ninth Ward where the great trumpeter grew up.

The story of  American music begins in New Orleans, in places like Congo Square, where African traditions met with European instruments and styles to create the fusion which is the root of it all. Reggae’s origins in colonial Jamaica are similar, and the early Jamaican styles like ska influenced and were influenced by their Northern neighbors.

Katrina-Proof: Trombone Shorty from NewOrleans

New Orleans is no longer the city it was in the days of Storyville, when musicians like Satchmo and Jelly Roll Morton honed their skills elbow to elbow with pimps, prostitutes, and drunken sailors. It’s a still a pretty wild town, and the music scene is thriving, even after the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, but most of the rough edges have been smoothed out. Children still tapdance and play trombone and clarinet on the street for spare change, and the locals, when you can actually find them, still have a lot to teach the rest of the country about hospitality and enjoying life.

 

Ghosts of Mardi Gras' past.

When I say it’s no longer the city it once was, what I mean is this: the charms of the city have been packaged like the other commercial products that drive the American economy. What is that nonsense about? It’s about advertising. It’s about marketing, capital investment, structures of business integration. It’s about money, risk analysis and the selling of culture. I’m not talking just about t-shirts and beads, I’m talking about a whole industry designed to sell our own culture back to us at a profit. I’m talking about the fact that there’s no real difference between the Vegas Strip, Bourbon Street and Disney World anymore.

The Life of Ignacius Reilly: an enduring New Orleans tradition.

This commercialization doesn’t just affect the culture, the commercialization becomes the culture. Everyone knows this, and many people just accept it: The Grammies, Billboard sales charts, platinum records, America’s Got Talent, MTV and the Eurovision Song Contest. This is music for many people, so lost from its social origins it’s barely recognizable anymore. Sales figures repace poetry, and tabloid soap operas receive more attention than the music itself. Soul, passion, innovation, creativity: these have become secondary.

Dave Matthews at Outside Lands

The first show of Groundation’s 2009 US tour was at OutsideLands, the largest festival in my hometown of San Francisco. The headliners on Saturday were the Dave Matthews Band and the Black Eyed Peas. After Groundation’s performance I enjoyed Dave Matthews’ show from out in the crowd with my wife Gillian and some new friends. From that distance Matthews himself was tiny, dwarfed by the high-definition digital projection of his own image which loomed behind him. While few musicians match the heights of his success, I think Matthews’ career is fairly typical in some ways. He started at the bottom, practicing and playing in small bars and clubs, paying dues, working his way slowly up the ladder to increasing rewards. I think the measured pace of his ascent has allowed him to keep his head level.

Earlier this year Groundation opened for another icon of the current pop music scene, Kanye West. In Europe, it’s not uncommon for independent bands like Groundation to be treated equally with corporate-backed giants like the Chicago rapper, who is almost as famous for his egotism as for his music. We were all looking forward to hearing whether he had the talent to back it up.

The backstage in Belfort, France was fairly lavish, and we were all enjoying ourselves: eating, drinking and socializing with Kanye’s band and crew as well as Dublin rockers The Answer and Olivia Ruiz and her group. A few minutes before schedule, amid an air of hushed expectancy, a fleet of white SUV’s pulled up, and Mr. West stepped out, wrapped safely in a cloak of security guards. He never actually entered the backstage area, but was brought directly to the stage, apparently so he wouldn’t have to meet or talk to anyone. During most of his time on stage he perched atop a sort of pillar, while his half-band (most of the music was prerecorded) toiled in the shadows behind him. At a certain point four dancers, stark naked and covered in gold paint, emerged. This should be interesting, I thought, but I was to be disappointed. The dancers struck poses of worship at West’s feet and stood motionless for the duration of the song, after which they had a brief stretch before resuming their function as stage props, finally exiting the stage somberly after ten minutes’ work as living mannequins.

Kanye West’s music is popular for a reason, it’s very catchy, and his self-confidence inspires respect, even when there seems to be little substance behind it. Many of the young people in the audience probably didn’t realize that a large proportion of the music West ‘performed’ was written by other people. One of the most recognizable samples was PYT (Pretty Young Thing) by Quincy Jones and James Ingram. Who? You might not know their names of the cats who wrote the song which was made famous by Michael Jackson.

The members of the band were shocked by Jackson’s recent death. Musicians all around the world were performing his music as tribute, and Groundation was no exception. I worked passages from “Off the Wall” into the live introduction to our song “Jah-Jah Know”. Once, the whole band spontaneously started playing Billie Jean. We call like to call this ‘quoting’. Jazz musicians often insert meaningful (or just whimsical) melodies into their solos: pieces of Christmas carols in the holiday season, for example. I remember working ye olde melody “Yankee Doodle Dandy” into a solo on July 4^th during our US tour in 2008. Kelsey and Ryan often quote reggae classics in their improvisation. It’s different from playing a version or a cover, and it’s definitely different from sampling. It’s just something that jazz players have always done. It’s a sort of playful thing, a challenge, part of the fun of improvised music.

I have to wonder whether music was much fun for Michael Jackson in the years before his death. He was a talented artist who clearly suffered a great deal, and he left a mixed legacy, but one of the things that we will remember is his failure to cope with fame.  It’s like being lost in a hall of mirrors, where all you can see are distorted reflections of yourself.  The connections of love and commitment between individuals vanish and become a one way ticket to isolation and vanity. This can happen to almost anyone, and I think people who find sudden fame are especially vulnerable, because they haven’t had the time to build up the inner strength to resist fame’s pitfalls. The result can be traumatic: breakdowns, burnout, drug addiction and alcoholism, all of which are prevalent in the music business.

Elvis, Michael, Britney Spears, all of them were deceived by the modern music business. It’s really no different from the fantasy that’s sold today as the American Dream: getting rich quick without having to earn it. Its a fantasy designed to insure our complicity in the mechanisms of our economy, and one that serves to keep people in line, isolating them, turning everyone into competitors rather than collaborators, keeping space limited on the top, making sure there are always plenty of vacancies on the bottom. For myself, I tend to think that anything worth having requires hard work, plus talent and a bit of luck.  For me, many of the guys up there on the big screen are little more than figureheads, no different from the corporate logos that permeate our cultural landscape.

At the end of Kanye West’s performance, the backstage was momentarily cordoned off by a platoon of security personnel while the diva was swept away to his hotel room, or wherever. Harrison said something very poignant to me at that moment, something like this: if Kanye isn’t careful, he’s going to end up just like Michael: isolated, lonely, a monster, an outcast.

Meanwhile the corporate machine chugs on, trotting out one new star after another and letting those that aren’t strong enough fall by the wayside to be trampled by the tabloids. Perhaps it will happen to Kanye West, who knows?

But what did corporate sellouts ever do to you, Diesel Dave, to deserve your derision? That’s a pretty good question, but you’ll have to wait about a week for the answer.