What a great day and show to end this awesome tour! Today started like any other rough tour day, wake up at 5am, drive to the airport, catch a 1.5 hour flight to São Paulo, transfer to another 4 hour flight to Natal. Discover they lost 1 bag (not mine this time), deal with that, then get on a bus. That’s where it all changed.
The bus they sent was a great big full size bus with extra comfortable seats, it was like first class bussing. We then took a 20 minute drive to the beach where our hotel was. We’re staying a beach resort less than 100 from the sand, it’s nice. Check-in was an ordeal as it somehow took us close to 2 hours to get checked in, even though the hotel knew we were coming. Me and Obie ended up on the 17th floor, while Jen is in a room by herself (as always), but scored a 2 story suite on the 20th (and 21st) floor! We’re all jealous.
(I’ll put a couple pictures of the hotel here tomorrow)
We had a little bit of time to relax from the flights and get some (slow/mediocre) room service lunch/dinner before heading off to the show at 8pm. This was by far the biggest and craziest show of the tour. There was about 4,000 people there at this outdoor festival, and they were all crazy.
From the moment we parked (before we even got off the bus), people were taking our pictures and asking us to sign things while we walked to the green room. We only spent about 2 minutes in there before going to setup and sound check and play in the next 15 minutes. The show went well considering everything going on and boy was it hot! Mark sweated through 5 different shirts (he managed 2 shirt changes during the set) and as you can see I did my fair share of sweating, but I didn’t have a break to go change.
Disgusting!
It seemed that everyone at the event was a super-fan. Even the security guards were trying to take pictures with me WHILE I WAS PLAYING, that didn’t sit well with me (because I was busy) and I literally had to shove a guy away so I could keep playing. He kept trying the rest of the night to take a picture with me, but I wouldn’t have it. He apparently wasn’t raised in a world with consequences, so someone has to teach him that lesson.
Throughout the show, various people were trying to crawl onto the 6-foot stage and for some reason there were about 20-30 people standing on stage that had no business being there, they were just watching us play. I had to shoo away several people that were just getting too close for comfort.
But at the end of it all, we played well (and Chris made us sound good) and the crowd loved it. They were even trying to get into the portable shack that was our green room, and it was rather unsettling and didn’t feel safe with all 12 of us in the 8’x8’ room.
It’ll be a night I’ll never forget, and now one of the neighbors to the hotel has roosters…. and they think it’s dawn apparently…
Tomorrow we have some free time in the morning, then at noon we start our long journey home, and I won’t get there until Monday morning (I believe).
Until then.
