Blog: Rock is dead
Fernando’s blog post:
Touring has become a haven of prohibition and rules and we are all to blame for it, fellow touring musicians and concert goers. With a scary percentage of musicians trying to replicate their domestic/borgeouis lifestyle on tour, things have become almost scary with the advent of the pisswinklers (yeah, Germans wants the alpha world to sit down while pissing, otherwise we’re anti-social), there are allergies and conditions invented by the minute, whose symptoms strangely becoming afflictions to whatever turns the other guy on.
Everybody that tours likes either one of these two things: to keep on touring, non-stop, jumping from tourbus to tourbus, plane to plane, never letting time catch up. If they are too much at home, they get angry, roadsick, useless and ultimately bored. When time is up, you have to put the beast again inside the rolling cage and in the dressing room dungeons. Like rare flowers, they breed in the dark and in the ugly and smile as they eat miles without blinking. Some of our crew are like this, Goth bless them, always ready for the turmoil. Others, like me, like to tour, tour, tour and then stay at home enjoying the routine of my kid’s breakfast and cartoons, take a walk with him out in the Sun, read from my small but proud library, go to a café where they know your name and what you will have for lunch. I live between the necessary pain of touring (totally balanced by the sheer experience of myself I get to enjoy while performing); and the absolute loving condition of a routine where I can help my family being safe and my son to grow into the perfect being he is. This dilemma, the feet on both side of the shores, the permanent stretching, expansion if you want, is what might make the difference for me and for the person I helped bringing into this sick world.
There is still another thing that I ask from touring: some freedom to have a smoke, to be up all night listening loudly to Morbid Angel, talk shit with my brothers, crack some jokes, do stupid stuff, get butt naked in the back lounge. You know. Clean, innocent, boys will be boys fun. But if we keep on trying to have our home, our way, we will kill that spirit, that secret bound that made us all smile in silence when some mischief was happening in the back. The thick, weedy smoke cloud weighing low, below the lamps, like a sign in the fog for lost travellers. All that is gone, the world got higienic. We killed the germs and with them, our imperfections. We were tamed.
Add that to my stupefacted discovery that red wine could be Vegan, to the keep it quiet and tidy, winter Olimpics on TV instead of sexolyimpics, I start to miss the black metal chaos of WWII, indian limb-eating rituals videos and the general mess of the Marduk tour. I have to say that Texas and the weed cloud hoovering over the now appropriatedly named green room and the Arizona blasé attitude over smoking and drinking were much appreciated. To sum it up: we don’t get away with what we used to get away with. And I do not like it.
I am in Denver, Colorado today so all will be groovy. I just invented a new play that I am dying to test with my wife and kid when i get back home. That made my day. The rest is yet to come.We just hope we can give Rock a beautiful funeral. Every night.
