It's always a good feeling getting ready for a concert tour. Working with your band, strategic planning with your tour manager, making last minute travel plans. I especially enjoy the part where I leave an outgoing on the answering machine saying something like, "I'm not here right now. I'm playing the Afghanistan Jazz Festival for the week. Call you if I get back."
I've definitely played some weird gigs in my career. I've done the diarrea tour of Thailand, the hangover tour of Korea, the rare fish ripoff tour of Hong Kong, and the mistaken as a porn movie producer tour of Japan. But the strangest by far is and continues to be the standard issue record company tour of Taiwan.
My first record company tour happened just a few months after my arrival. I had just released my first album, It Takes A Long Time To Remember My Name, (honest that was what they called the album) and was enjoying pre-IFPI chart success. Several record companies organized a tour to the south, and the next thing I knew I was thrown on a bus with twelve singers, and I couldn't speak a word of Chinese. I was the brother from another planet. Plus I didn't sing, which made me even more alien. And to top it off I played a alien pipe-like instrument which confirmed my alien-ness.
Because of this I always got to go up on stage first. I was the crowd warmer. In Chia-yi they surrounded the stage with cartons of pop bottle rockets, and when my set started, the rockets started firing. They kept firing for about forty minutes. Nobody heard a thing, and strangest of all, no one seemed to mind. Then a guy in the first row started bleeding from the nose. Both nostrils. And rather than miss the show, he plugged up both his nostrils with wads of toilet paper. I spotted him there staring up at me, a foot of toilet paper sticking out of his nose, and I lost it. I started laughing so hard that I couldn't play anymore. End of the set.
Then in Miao-li I was playing my third song when people started walking across the stage in front of me. They would just climb up one side, then climb down the other. One after another like ants. It took a while for me to figure out that this was the fastest way to the porta-toilet which was behind the stage. I didn't say anything because no one seemed to mind.
When we got to Nan-to, it was raining so hard that the water from the road started seeping into the bus. No problem. Just take off our shoes. When we got to the auditorium, they said that there was a little problem with the stage, so the show would have to be moved outside. That's when we noticed there was a river of water pouring down the stairs through the auditorium. So we played outside under a tarp while the wind kept snapping the power lines. Still there were about two hundred fans willing to stick it out, so the show went on in the dark.
In Tainan I actually found myself asking the singer I was paired up with, "What the hell are we doing?" while standing on a mini-platform erected in the vegetable section of a giant grocery store. An MC in a striped pink suit jumped up to join us, and a crowd of shoppers gathered around. They were giving away free Pink Lady cocktails and we were supposed to shake them up and perform a few songs ala "piano bar." Anyway, we ended up drinking more Pink Ladies than we gave away, and by the time our set was over, we could barely get off the stage.
For the next week we went from baseball stadium to concert hall to school auditorium until we finally rolled into Ping-dong. The bus broke down in front of an eyeglass store, and the owner came out and offered to help, maybe, in exchange for a free mini-concert in front of his store. I figured that this was a good time to go take a long walk, and found a nice shady spot in a traffic circle under a big banyan tree. Old men were sitting around playing chess, and I could finally unwind a bit, enjoying some relative calm after two weeks of constant weird experiences.
Just then three red Alfa Romeos screamed past sending up a huge cloud of dust. When the dust finally settled, I saw an old man on a rusty bicycle pedaling towards me. He had something large on the back. As he passed, I realized it was a dog. The dog was hanging upside down, skinned, except for the tail, and strapped down with bungee cords. The dog gave me a dead desparate look. It said, "Are you really ready for this?"
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