Hola to Portugal! Or whatever the hell you say. Portugese is a weird language. It sounds like one half Spanish and one half Russian. Mostly I just said “Beer!” and made a drinking motion with my hand. They understood me well enough.
The first show was in Corrois. Well, that’s what it says on our tour shirt. It was lovingly pointed out by the owner of a rock shop there, where we took our shirts in to possibly wholesale some, that it was actually spelt Corroios. As you can probably guess, we didn’t make the sale.
Upon arrival, the crew at the club were awesome. They helped us move shit, and then once finding out we were supposed to get lunch as part of a rider they did not receive, they took us out anyway. One of the fellas, one “Bruno” from the band The Firstborn was even nice enough to get me a salad from a separate restaurant. I was just in awe of his chops, which wholly put mine to shame and threatened to eat me with their vast choppiness.
Next to the venue their was a football pitch. Soccer, for you uncultured non-world travelers (looks down nose at you). There was some kind of amateur tournament on the open field. Some of us from Deeds and Impaled took in the game while drinking warm beer along side a wall on the sidelines. We felt very authentic and cultured. Sean felt even more authentic when the ball flew out and missed careening against his face by about an inch.
Some good news is that Monstrosity’s Sam got his guitar fixed. The boys in Corroios really knew how to take care of shit and found him new tuning pegs. The fun part was watching the argument about who was going to have to pay for them.
When the show was scheduled to start, it was grim. There was about 9 people there. Bruno told me that a big football match had started and would be over in an hour and a half, and that we were “fucked.” Oh well, we got on stage and just went for it. It’s always fun playing a huge hall to 1/900th its capacity. Well, as it turned out, our show didn’t go that bad, as Bruno headed down one block to the local cafe to pick something up, and there was a grip of people in there in black metal shirts. “The concert has just started” he said, and they all took off to go. So about half way through our set, it just filled in. So… yay!
There was one big bruiser in the pit. This old guy who was working the club, but decided to get really drunk and bully people. Maybe in his head he thought he was being funny, but he annoyed me. I told Sean, “One hit this guy goes down… he’s so big, no one’s ever tried.” Sure enough, this guy pushing around people, scaring girls, took one accidental smack to his face and he sat there like a kid who’s favorite truck got stolen. I love karma.
I went to bed early this night before the show even ended. When I got up the next morning and headed to the downstairs for a wicked pissah, I noticed two sleeping bodies I had not seen before. At first I was like, “Who the FUCK are these people?!??!” Then I noticed one was a girl, and I was like, “Awww, who are these people?” Then I found out they were a couple and I went back to “Who the FUCK are these people?” Apparently, they’d come on the bus at the invitation of Raul or Brian, drunkenly said they wanted a ride to the next show, and Brovar the tour manager approved. They could not remember doing this the next day.
We got to the third day of a three day fest. I wish we’d gotten their on the first day and seen Driller Killer and Extreme Noise Terror. FUCKERS!!! When we arrived on the scene, we all noticed the camping metalheads and then the crusties emerging out from their squat spot underneath a truck. I ran out. I REALLY couldn’t wait to talk to some people who weren’t just metalheads. I scored some awesome homemade wine, heard about the fest, and found out we all knew a shitload of the same people. Oh, I also lost about 10 cigarettes to the drunken jerks.
At some point during the two openers, some people, you can probably guess who, thought it would be hilarious to give the alcoholic punkers two bottles of whiskey and force them to pound it so they could laugh at them after they had been poisoned and feel better about themselves. Genius. True, true genius. So yeah, this one punker, who had been really nice to talk to early, had to be dragged out of the club after a few really nasty spills. I headed over to see if they needed water for him, fuck, if he was even alive. I also apologized, for Americans in general, though it wasn’t the majority of us who partook in this jock/fratboy behavior. By the end of the night, the guy was up, I spoke to him, made sure he was okay. The perpetrator saw me as I walked by and said “At least he’s alive” and I responded, “Yeah, at least.” Woulda been even MORE hilarious if he’d died of alcohol poisoning, huh?
Another nice moment early on was when some guys were making fun of the “dumb fat broad” who was hanging out with the punkers and playing recorder. I got to tell them that dumb fat broad was a linux programmer and expert in open-source programming, as Jason had found out. Didn’t hear much being said about her after that.
Our show went okay. Afterwards, Sean and I headed down to the creepy little village to see if it got any creepier at night. During the day, we’d headed down the windy, cobblestone roads, gone in some abandoned buildings, played with stray dogs… very, very old world shit. So we head down at night, and in the tiny town square, there’s three old men taking a piss in the street. We walk by, and then they catch up to us and start gabbing at us in English. They want to walk with us. Oooookay. There one friend didn’t want to, but they force him anyway. They say they want to take us to the cafe, and I mumbled to Sean “Is this really the right way?” Turns out it was. We told them we couldn’t stay long, and they said something about “complicados.” Complications? What complications? What the fuck were these guys up to?
In the bar, it was like stepping into a Lucio Fulci movie. This place had stopped moving sometime in the early eighties. Old men in old suits. Out of date haircuts. It would’ve been awesome if Sean and I weren’t so sure these guys wanted to turn us into white slaves and sell us in Istanbul. They bought us beer, chorizo, and olives, despite us telling them not to. The one yelled at me about my bull ring, so I took it out and listened to their argument about me in Portugese. I was looking at Sean and saying “Uh, yeah, you gonna drink any slower, chum?” At the worst moment, Sean couldn’t slam beers. These guys had nothing to talk about with us. It was terribly awkward, with awkward stares in this creepy little bar in the creepy little village. We said, thank you, and tried to leave. The one said he would accompany us. WHY? I went outside to meet up with Sean, and while the guy was distracted, we fucking ran. This WAS a Lucio Fulci movie! We took a wrong turn, a dog started barking, ran as far as we could, and then started laughing balls at ourselves.
God damn cynical Americans. These were just some nice folks in a tiny little town trying to show some hospitality to strangers. They didn’t want to hurt us… or DID they???!!?!?!? Moo HAHAHAHAHA!!!