|
PASSPORT, PLEASE
Antofagasta, Chile
April 2007
By PARTHENON HUXLEY
 'm happy.
It's February 1999. I'm in Punta del Este, Uruguay, on my first tour as the new guitarist and singer with Electric Light Orchestra Part II. I've flown from L.A. to Santiago, Chile, where I joined the rest of the guys who'd come in from England and New York. Then we flew eastward over the snow-covered Andes Mountains, swung over Buenos Aires and the very wide, very brown River Plate to Montevideo, Uruguay. From Montevideo we were driven about eighty miles past humble roadside abodes until we reached the much more upscale and international resort of Punta, a once sleepy coastal town that has made way for large hotels, fancy restaurants, a thriving nightlife and wealthy visitors from Brazil and Argentina. If I was 26, better looking, rich and carrying drugs I bet I could make some special new friends here in Punta. Instead, I'll wind up befriending two young kids and their Dad at an ice cream cafe. They'll tell me they're from Tierra del Fuego, which I'll find exciting because it means Land of Fire and also because it was comically referenced on a Firesign Theater album. But I digress.
We're in the midst of a three night run at the showroom of the Conrad Hilton, my ELOP2 debut. I was asked to join the band a few months earlier after passing an audition in Birmingham, England. I then spent five weeks married to a tape player in my Echo Park living room memorizing thirty-eight songs. I had moments when I didn't know my "Evil Woman" from a "Sweet Talkin' Woman," but I've got the repertoire pretty much sorted now.
Last night was my first performance. I was pretty excited. Most of the other guys in the band are English--stiff upper lip and all that--and if they were nervous about me I didn't know it.
Fortunately, the show went fine. I goofed up a few times, but nothing serious enough to derail the Symphonic Rock. Afterwards, our soundman Dennis, also English, was nearly doing cartwheels in the dressing room as he congratulated me. In other words, he gave me a firm handshake and said, "Well done, Hux! Well done!"
So. I'm liking this ELOP2 thing. Yessirree. It's my first time in the Southern Hemisphere. It's sunny, breezy and warm...in February. My room has a beachfront view. To reach the showroom I only have to descend in an elevator and walk down a hall. I've rented a scooter to putter around the town and discovered some cool stuff like the sculpture of a giant hand buried in the sand and a bizarre undulating bridge over a creek. Punta's cool.
And, perhaps best of all, here I am once again at the bountiful Conrad Hilton lunch buffet, a veritable cornucopia of beautifully presented fresh food. I'm seated at an elegant table ready to enjoy my umpteenth plate of fresh salmon, crab cakes, shrimp, scallops, salad, bread, wine, dessert, coffee, maybe another dessert...you get the picture.
Bev Bevan, ELO founder and drummer, drifts into the restaurant and sizes up the happy new band member. He sits next to me with his own heaping plate of food and says, "So, Hux…alright?"
"Yeah, Bev. I'm trying to limit myself to forty prawns this time, but I'll get by."
Bev laughs and takes a bite of something good. He then leans slightly toward me and says, "It's not always like this, you know..."
I stop mid-shrimp.
"What do you mean, Bev?"
"I just mean it's not always like this," comes the cryptic reply coupled with a baritone chuckle.
I think to myself, "Is there something about this band that no one's told me?"
I shrug and dig into my feast.
Fine. So sometimes the hotel buffet won't have seven kinds of fish. I decide not to worry. I'll just see what happens....
It happened. Bev's remark came to life on the very next stop of our South American tour. Rock and roll reality check, thy name is Antofagasta, Chile.
Antofagasta: it's a name you can't make up. Appropriately, it sounds like an arcane method of torture. ("Mr. Bond, rest assured...you will return safely to your beloved casino. But first: ANTOFAGASTA!") Antofagasta is a port city an hour and a half flight north from Santiago. If California falls into the sea and the armpit of Nevada acquires a coast it will look like this. The palette of the place is overwhelmingly tan--with a touch of beige. There has been no measurable rainfall in Antofagasta for four hundred years. There is a golf course that is all sand. The reason Antofagasta exists is simple: there's a huge copper mine nearby. Yep. Sexy.
If Antofagasta is not literally the middle of nowhere, it's close enough. When the European Southern Observatory (an organization for astronomical research) built their Very Large Telescope program, they did it in the most remote place they could find on Earth: about one-hundred-fifty miles from Antofagasta.
As we were bussed from the airport into the city the promoter told us that the best hotel in town was full. We would be staying instead at the Hotel Ancla Inn. Well, we thought, second best can't be so bad. And if it's both a Hotel and an Inn...it's gotta be special. We thought differently when we pulled up in front. The Hotel/Inn's humble façade was matched only by its gloomy lobby. I think Ancla may mean Anchor, as in a lead weight with a sinking feeling. The Conrad Hilton was fading fast.
I heaved my bags upstairs to the second floor. I had a corner room overlooking a noisy intersection. Instead of an ocean view in Uruguay my window framed a jerry-rigged constellation of electrical wiring above the street. The noise and dust bled into the room. I closed the windows and decided I'd turn on the AC.
No AC.
Okay. I get it.
So this is what Bev meant!
I had to laugh.
No, Antofagasta wasn't really a nice place; but I had to give it some credit--in the very least it was the most far-flung place I'd ever been. And for that I dug it. It was obvious that if my life hadn't taken this twist...if I hadn't joined this band, there's no way in hell I'd wind up in Antofagasta, Chile. I was happy to be there.
I decided to check the place out.
The photo-copied hotel literature claimed there was a rooftop pool. I climbed four flights of stairs and emerged into bright sunlight. There was a pool but it was empty. It was also kind of brown. Plastic chairs were stacked up and shoved against walls. The coup de grace at the Ancla pool was the stench. I had to wonder, why did an empty pool stink?
But-there was a view! I could see all of Antofagasta. It was…well, I suppose you could write home about it if you were a fan of pedestrian architecture. Construction cranes littered the skyline, so perhaps they were working on that problem. Brown mountains reached for the sky and the blue Pacific stretched to the horizon. A shame they couldn't work out a little rainfall.
Time to hit the town. I employed my usual technique: walk out the hotel door and head in any direction that looks promising.
Here's what downtown Antofagasta had to offer: a pile of panting, underfed dogs littering the sidewalk; dusty billboards with bad color separation; a balloon salesman dressed in a Goofy outfit so bogus it would've made Disney lawyers laugh; shops filled with nameless merchandise that harkened to a pre-branding age.
Antofagasta was basically forlorn, a provincial place twenty years behind the curve. The crass cultural uniformity promulgated by our television/internet/mall culture hadn't yet crept into this South American backwater, and as such, I found Antofagasta to be totally cool. Antofagasta in 1999 was still safely snuggled in the dust in the '70s. It was pretty much off the commercial grid.
I wandered around, delighted by shops filled with tacky, outdated stuff, most of which didn't even rise to the level of kitsch. (I got you a plastic flower! It's from Chile!) But I kept looking. A town like this could surprise. It's exactly the kind of place that might have something completely unexpected.
I was about to call it a day when I drifted into a crafts shop. The couple behind the counter were bright-eyed and welcoming. They spoke a little English, too. The quality of the goods appeared to be a little higher, but most of the stuff was really touristy or clichéd. I was about to head back to the hotel and then, bingo! I couldn't believe my eyes: the perfect gift.
I probably laughed out loud. I instantly knew I would give one to every member of the band and crew; a special little something to commemorate the New Guy's First Tour. Here before me were souvenir coffee mugs like I'd never seen before. They were insane. And they weren't cheaply made, either. These were high-quality penis mugs.
I thought to myself, "Why are these things even here?" Nothing else in the store was even in the same ballpark. The proprietor's wife demonstrated how to drink from the mug. I thanked her. I wanted to ask her to show me again, but her husband was right there. I announced grandly that I would take 'em all. "Give me your entire stock of penis mugs, my good man." He seemed pretty happy to unload them. (Maybe the Dong Ware hadn't been moving that week.)
As he wrapped my bounty the shopkeeper asked, "Tourist?" I told him no, I was in a band playing at the Rock & Soccer arena the next night. He nearly leapt out of his shirt. "EE-LEK-TREEK? You are EE-LEK-TREEK?!!" He fumbled for something under the cash register. "I HAVE MY TEE-KET! I SHOW YOU!" He found his ticket and showed it to me. Yep. There it is. I think the price of the penis mugs went down. Hell, maybe they went up. Either way, I was a happy shopper and he was a happy shopkeeper. Antofagasta, you rock!
I left the store with my bulging sack (OF MUGS! PLEASE!). I was chuckling to myself, imagining the guys' reaction to their souvenir from Antofagasta. I was also imagining the reaction from wives and girlfriends back at home!
(At the end of the tour a few days later I gathered my new mates and crew in a hotel lounge and ceremoniously presented my parting gift to each of them. I don't know if everyone was "pleased" but it's safe to say they were surprised!)
On the morning of our show in Antofagasta we foraged for breakfast at the Ancla. We were guided to a door in the rear of the lobby. It led not to a hotel restaurant, but a restaurant next door to the hotel. Way to save on costs, Ancla! We tentatively ordered breakfast and were served...I'm not really sure what it was...something like omelet soup. Slightly embarrassed we did that rarest of things and walked out without touching it. Antofagasta's charms continued to dazzle.
The Rock & Soccer arena was a large indoor space decorated cleverly with giant inflated beer cans. When Bev hit his drums at sound check a triple shot of standing wave delay bounced back at us from the opposite wall. WOW. This was gonna be noisy! (Bev also happens to be the loudest drummer I've ever heard. His sticks are logs.) My previous shows had been in the comfy confines of a carpeted casino showroom. This was gonna be a big-ass loud-as-hell rock show. Cool!
The show was a riot. The crowd was completely bonkers, really ready to rock. It was obvious to me that ELO Part II coming to Antofagasta was, in fact, a pretty big deal. I felt like I was part of something special. I don't remember the crowd sitting for a second. They broke into football chants, mixing E-L-O into OLAAAAY, OLAY-OLAY-OLAAYYYY and so on. The Antofagastians were frikkin' great.
After the show we slumped into our small concrete dressing room soaked in sweat, ears ringing. Security had to hold people back so we locked the door to get some privacy. On the rear wall of the dressing room were a few small windows to the outside of the building. I opened one up to let in some air. As I did I was spotted by fans leaving the concert and soon the window was jammed with delighted faces and a dozen hands holding tickets and pens. So much for privacy. I signed a few things. The fans laughed and shouted and jostled for position. The other guys in the band weren't impressed but I thought it was hilarious and fun. New guy.
Despite the cramped and insane conditions in the dressing room, we lingered a while, marveling at the enthusiasm of the locals and guzzling a few bottles of the (conveniently Chilean) red wine the promoters had on hand for us. Spirits were high. And no one was in a hurry to get back to the Hotel Ancla Inn.
The next day we flew back to Santiago, Chile's capital. As we headed south Antofagasta's and northern Chile's arid landscape gradually morphed into vineyards. A more comforting vision of civilization spread out below us. The terrain west of the Andes around Santiago reminded me of the Mediterranean and looks very similar to parts of Spain, Greece or Southern California.
We were driven into the city and taken to a beautiful hotel in the colonial center of Santiago. A plaque near reception read " * * * * * One The World's Great Hotels." I dropped my stuff off in a palatial room overlooking a huge plaza. We'd stay here for a few days, do a press conference and then perform a sold out show for five thousand fans.
We'd been told lunch was waiting for us so I headed up the rooftop garden restaurant to find a splendid buffet and waiters anxious to serve us drinks. Ahhhh. The Hotel Ancla Inn was beginning to fade.
I settled into a comfy seat at a splendidly appointed table and took in the view of what would become one of my favorite cities.
It was almost as if...it was always like this.
•
Top
| Back
|
