Sunday, March 01, 2009
by Ahrue Luster
For example, one of the last times I was in Paris, France, I visited the Catacombs for the first time. It was awesome! Miles and miles of skulls and bones neatly stacked against the dimly lit walls of subterranean tunnels and caverns underneath the city streets of Paris. I even learned a little bit about the history of the Catacombs. It had never really occurred to me that a city as large and as old as Paris would have the problem of where to put many, many centuries of their dead. In the seventeenth century it became such a problem that the dead began to overwhelm the city. The living people of Paris were suffering from disease, due to contamination caused by improper burials, open mass graves, and earth charged with decomposing organic matter. This was creating even more dead, so finally they decided to move all the bones of the dead into mass underground tombs and thus creating the Catacombs. It’s a funny thought to think of what lies beneath the city of romance, but at the same time it seems to complete it. Paris encompasses the whole cycle of life because romance usually leads to birth and birth leads to death.
Sometimes days off are travel days. A few European tours ago, we ended the tour playing a huge festival called Viña Rock in Valencia, Spain. It took me almost 48 hours of travel between two vans, one bus, three cabs, three planes and one car to get home. I’m a light sleeper, so I didn’t even really sleep much during that whole excursion.
There are different kinds of travel days. Some are long intercontinental airplane trips. One time we did an Australian tour directly after a European tour. To get to Australia, we flew over what I like to call the back of the Earth since it’s as if you go around the backside of the map. We already had return tickets from London, Heathrow, to get back to the States so we got round-trip tickets to Australia from London. So, in order to get back to the States we had to use our return tickets from Sidney to London, then our other return tickets from London back to New York. So we ended up flying three quarters of the way around “the back of the Earth” to get home. We ended up doing over 30 hours of flying.
Some travel days are just days waiting for a flight. Some are days spent riding in vans, and some are long bus rides, which are known by people in the touring circuit as submarine rides because you’re basically trapped inside the bus for a whole day or two, kinda like being in a submarine.
Sometimes, the way a tour is routed, you may have to play in Stockholm, Sweden, on a Wednesday night and then have to play a festival in Madrid, Spain, on a Friday night, in which case you would have to fly in a second bus driver to drive in shifts with your regular driver. In a case like this, the bus moving for about 36 hours straight with maybe two stops for bathroom breaks and food along the way. You can’t go ”number two” on the bus toilet, so if you have to go, you had better go at one of the stops since the bus can’t make many stops due to time constraints.
There is however, an emergency procedure if you absolutely can’t wait for the bus to stop. Although somewhat risky, this procedure usually only has to be done a few times in a touring professional’s entire career. The official name for it is “bagging it.” The way that it’s done is you take a plastic garbage bag and line the inside of the toilet. Then you do your business in the bag and close it up as quickly as you can. Then, you have to carry this bag out of the bathroom with everyone on the bus watching, and throw it out the window. Usually there’s an eerie silence as you’re walking out of the bathroom holding your bag in your hand, followed by an enormous burst of laughter and razzing from everyone on the bus as you throw your bag out of the window. The laughter and jokes can last anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes after launching your bag.
Some bands take it to another level and try to hit targets with the bag as the bus is driving down the highway. This was the case when I was in Machine Head. It was referred to as “Joe Montana-ing it.” Joe Montana’s name was used because Machine Head is from the San Francisco Bay Area. If Machine Head had come from Denver, it would have probably been known as “John Elway-ing it.”
My favorite days off are spent on a beach. We’ve ended a few tours in Puerto Rico and negotiated with the promoter to spring for a few extra days in the beachfront hotels that they provided for us. The few times we’ve done that, a lot of the guys would fly their girlfriends or wives out. My wife, Xylia, loves when we end tours in Puerto Rico.
Another time, we had a few days off right on the beach in Perth, Australia, when we toured there with Static-X. Perth is located on the southwestern part of Australia, on the coast of the Indian Ocean and it’s absolutely beautiful. Most of us spent a lot of time on the beach and in the water since it was January, right in the middle Australia’s summer. But, none of us took into consideration how harsh the sun was due to the hole in the ozone layer above the Australian continent. None of us bought sunblock 'til the second day, but by then it was too late. By the day of the first show, a lot of us had the worst sunburns that you can imagine. It really sucked, but I look back at it now and laugh.
I’ve been lucky enough to have seen some really cool things on days off. A few years ago, we had a day off in Athens, Greece, where I was able to visit The Acropolis of Athens and the Parthenon. A few years later, we had a day off in Rome. My wife happened to be out with me at that time and we saw the Coliseum, as well as the inside of the Vatican. While we were in Rome that day, Xylia also felt our baby, Amara, kick for the first time inside her womb.
Some days off are just spent in some obscure town in the middle of a random country. We will usually get two hotel rooms for 12 people to relax, take showers and use the Internet. On these days people usually try to call home to speak to loved ones. Cell phones are ridiculously expensive to use overseas, so most people use Skype.
Skype is a downloadable program that enables you to call anywhere in the world using your computer, for pennies a minute. You need a computer headset in order to use it. Most people that tour a lot carry laptops with them. When you walk into a one of our hotel rooms on these types of days off, it looks like you’re walking into a NASA control center or a telemarketing office. Everyone is staring at their laptop screens while wearing headsets. Some people are talking to family members. Some people are doing band business. Some people are quietly trying to talk romantically to a lover, girlfriend or wife. Some people are talking to children, and some people are arguing.
A few months ago, we had a day off in Berlin and a few of us visited Checkpoint Charlie. Checkpoint Charlie was a crossing point between East Berlin and West Berlin during the Cold War. We also walked down the street in Berlin where Hitler had his big Nazi parades. There are lots of blast marks on the older buildings of Berlin left over from the air raids of 1943 to 1945. You can see this sort of thing throughout a lot of Europe. You may see a structure that is still standing from the days of the Roman Empire, but with bullet holes that had been made in World War I or II.
I would have to say my most memorable day off and a day that changed my life was a day off that we had in Krakow, Poland, while I was in Machine Head. We had just played a packed, sold-out show in Krakow and another in Warsaw the night before that, so we were feeling pretty proud of ourselves. We were on our way out of Poland towards Germany when someone asked our bus driver where Auschwitz was. It had been talked about ever since we arrived in Poland. Our driver was really cool and actually hung out with us sometimes, which is rare for drivers. He informed us that it wasn’t that far from where we were. We figured since we only had 10 hours of driving to get to the next show, and 24 hours to do it, we may as well check it out. Auschwitz is open to the public so people can be reminded of the horrible atrocities that human beings are capable of in hopes that nothing like that will ever happen again, as well as to pay respect to the people who were separated from their families, imprisoned, tortured, experimented on and lost their lives there. It takes about four to six hours to walk the entire camp.
While we were there, I recognized a lot of structures like fences, gun towers, buildings, etc, that I had seen from old pictures, war documentaries and Hollywood movies as well, but seeing it all firsthand and actually being there was totally different. I was very humbled and it completely snapped me out of the whole traveling rockstar, we’re “badass” thing.
I was overwhelmed by emotions, but I wasn’t letting that be known to the group of bandmates and crewmembers that I was walking with. I could see how everyone in my group was affected differently; some people seemed to be really moved by what they were seeing, and some seemed to be a little insensitive. I was embarrassed to be with some of them at times because they were making light of things and I didn’t think it was appropriate.
There were many things that day that really made a profound impact on me, like seeing the wooden beds that were about the size of a king size bed and slept seven people, or seeing the toilets that people had to use, which was basically a long concrete slab with holes in it. The holes were about eight inches from side to side and they were staggered on either side of the concrete slab with about six inches between them. People had to be pressed up against each other while they were going to the bathroom. We saw the cremation ovens and the carts that moved along tracks to deliver the deceased to the ovens. We stood inside the gas chamber and saw the hole in the ceiling where SS soldiers would drop cyanide pellets in the room. We saw what was left of the room where Joseph Mengele did experiments on human subjects, although most of the room had been destroyed by Allied Forces towards the end of World War II.
There was a sign on the entrance of one of three different camps that make up Auschwitz. The entrance has an iron gate crowned with the motto, "Arbeit macht frei," which is a German phrase meaning "work brings freedom" or "work shall set you free.” The slogan is known for being placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps as a kind of mystical declaration that self-sacrifice in the form of endless labor brings a kind of spiritual freedom. The truth, however, was quite the opposite. I think the part of the tour of Auschwitz that hit me the hardest was seeing the children’s quarters. There were still drawings left that imprisoned children had made that reflected the horrors that they were experiencing at the time. Seeing the drawings was probably the most emotionally intense part for me.
After we all got on the back on bus, most of us seemed to be in a somber mood and not talking much. I also had no desire to eat for a while, as well. I think that mood lasted me for a few days after we had left, but I would never be the same after that experience. I would have to say that I grew up a little that day and realized that there are a lot more important things in life than the small victories and satisfaction associated with playing to packed venues and hearing the roar of the crowd. Not that those feelings aren’t valid, I still enjoy that very much. It’s just that I try to keep it in perspective. I also try to be a more responsible artist and role model since I know that what I do influences other people, and to a small degree, the world that we all live in.
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