Alex Band UK

BRAZIL TOUR 2008 Part 3:
June 30th.

Today was a press day, just Globo TV, the biggest network in Brazil. We were supposed to go by there for an hour or so to play a couple songs on some show…but of course it turned into a day long excursion. Globo TV is this massive empire in the middle of nowhere….like a Brazilian i”Universal Studios”. You get on golf carts and get driven around, there’s a huge food court, and it’s all bustling with people and multiple studios of shows. I had been here a couple times before. We made it to our dressing room and that was were we stayed…for over 4 hours. We were all so dead from the previous 6 shows in a row, so everyone passed out sprawled out on the couches. It was finally show time and we all got img srwoken up. Everyone was in a zombie haze. We walked though the backstage corridors of the TV show and into a brightly lit room full of young screaming girls and half naked dancing women. Odd mix, no? We stood there, ready to go, for another 20 minutes or so and finally it was show time….or should I say, fake show time. Yes, as usual, this was the band playing to track, no live performance. The only person who would actually be doing something live was me, singing. And my voice was pretty shot. They announced the band and I and we walked on set. They announced us each by our full names, but Arms was announced as “Daniel ARMS!”. That was awesome.

I yapped with the host for a few minutes and took in the 360-degree view of girls, all stacked up on risers. And it was hard not to take glances at the half naked Brazilian women shaking their asses! The band took their places on a very small stage stuffed in the corner of the sound stage as I continued talking to the host. He asked if I wanted to play a song, and like right as I said “sure”, Wherever You Will Go started playing. I ran over to the stage to start singing. There were no monitors, so I couldn’t hear myself whatsoever. The speakers playing the track of the song were on the other side of the sound stage and were barely audible. It was so quiet that I could actually here Arms strumming the electric guitar that was not even plugged in. And then, it was time for the second song. Here’s where it got funny. I once again talked to the host for a minute or so over by where he was standing and he once again asked if I wanted to play another song and bam! Only One started playing. Now mind you that this song begins with a piano part, which I play. Clearly I wasn’t paying it as I stood 50 feet away from the keyboard setup on stage! Doh. I ran back over to the stage and sat at the keyboard, just in time to sing the first line. But wait, what’s this? Ah…the mic doesn’t work. Nice. I grabbed the handheld mic instead and caught the second line of the first verse. I only had one hand now to pretend like I was playing piano, but by this point I knew this whole song would look ridiculous on TV, which it did. I wanted to re-shoot it as we weren’t going live…but it didn’t seem like they gave a shit. So, it was what it was. We packed up our crap and got out of there as the sun was setting. It was back to our Rio hotel for sleeeeeeeeep. Yay. And the next two days were our days off finally. Yay. We had all these plans; rent scooters, wave runners, hang glide, shop, explore the city…but could this really come together? Would something needing such organization be possible to plan on this insane tour? Hmmmm….

July 1st.

Although there was a plan to meet in the lobby at 11am to go rent scooters, everyone was surfacing from the nice dark holes of their hotel rooms at different times. Once we were finally all accounted for, we asked our Brazilian counterparts to take us to the scooters! We were really excited about the freedom of driving around the city or Rio, each on our own little scooter, exploring and having fun. But no. We were told there is not 1 single place in all of Rio that rents scooters!? How could this be? And why hadn’t we been told earlier? Major letdown. Major! We had missed the window for hang gliding today by now and we also found out the only place to rent wave runners was very very far away. What gives?! This sucks. We decided to just rent a van and get driven around to some of the most popular tourist spots of Rio; Corcovado and Sugar Loaf Mountain. The drive up to Corcovado was beautiful. Way way up in the mountains, our ears popped as we went screeching around the bends in the road. You can only go up to a certain point where you pay a fee and then get into another van to take you to the top top. And that’s when you see him clear as day…the 125ft statue of Jesus, with his arms stretched wide open, welcoming all. You can see him standing up here from all over the city of Rio, but it’s not until your 10 feet in front of him that you understand his massive size. Check out the picture of Daniel James and Jesus:

And here’s a shot of us all looking out at the view from up there:

After Corcovado, we grabbed some tasty food at a cool restaurant and headed over to Sugar Loaf Mountain on the other side of the city. The only way to get to Sugar Loaf is to take two different cable cars, hanging precariously about 2,000 feet in the air…niice! I must say I was a little creeped out once we stepped on the first one…they cram like 50 people into those little hanging cars of death! We made our slow incline up to the first mountain. The sun was starting to set and the view even from the lower first mountain was incredible…you could see Jesus miles away sitting on top of Corcovado where we just were. There was even a helicopter pad way up here for scenic tours! I want to land up here! That would be sweet. Here’s a shot of Arms, Daniel and I at the first mountain….can you see Jesus sitting on top of his mountain waaaaay in the background?

Then we got on the longer, higher, more steep cable car to get to Sugar Loaf. It really does look like a giant loaf of bread made out of rock. Once on top of it, you could see 360-degrees around you at Rio, in all it’s glory…it was really beautiful. It was starting to get really dark, but I managed to lighten up this shot Arms took of me with the harbor below in the distance…. Yah, I was trying to be creepy. Everyone was making fun of my long creepy hand! And there’s some weird tree branch behind me but it actually looks like I have little bats flying out of my head. Nice. Check it out:

Everyone was pretty exhausted by the time we got back down and we all went back to the hotel and ate and slept. It was a good day.

July 2nd.

Today was hang gliding day! We had to start driving to the next city for tomorrow’s show this afternoon, so we scheduled hang gliding for everyone at 11am this morning. We were all super super pumped to jump off a cliff with nothing attached to us but canvas wings! But alas, once we got to the beach to meet up with the hang gliding professionals, they told us “the wind is not good yet”. Sucky! We ended up sitting on that beach waiting for the wind to “get good” for like 4 hours. No luck. Why are we being robbed of all the fun!? One of the hang gliding guys felt bad for us, so he took us on a ride in the back of his truck all over the city, which was pretty cool. But it wasn’t hang gliding! Damn you wind! Damn you!!! Anyway, our days off were over now and it was back to work…we had to jump back on the super stink bus and drive to Juiz De Fora to do late night press for tomorrow’s show. We all said goodbye to Rio and the fans and started the multiple hour journey. It was pouring rain when I woke up on the bus some time later. We were parked at some kind of bus stop/eatery. I was starved, as was the rest of the band, so we headed in to see what kind of gruel we could find that wouldn’t kill us. All they had were something called “croquets”. Chicken or fish. It’s like a fried stick with the meat inside. Seemed harmless, maybe even tasty? We ordered up a whole lot of chicken ones and went back to the bus. When I bit into the crunchy fried outside, it seemed promising….but then came a liquid explosion of heat and salty chicken flavored crap. Ew! It was like a liquid chicken filled concoction! Everyone was spitting theirs out and retching. I dubbed them, “Chickuid Sticks”. The worse thing about it, (now this is really gross but I feel like sharing), is that hours later when we finally arrived at our hotel in Juiz De Fora, the Chickuid came back to haunt me…to attack again. See, before we left for Brazil, I had the lovely experience of getting all my wisdom teeth taken out, and left in their place were a bunch of giant holes that took some time to heal themselves. So, after I eat, I have to flush them out (lovely right?). But of course that isn’t always an option when you’re on the road. So, the bus pulls up to our hotel hours later and I awake from my somewhat peaceful slumber…and all of the sudden, out pops some leftover Chiquid for my taste buds to enjoy. YUCK! Attack of the killer Chiquid! (P.S. I’m happy to say that my wisdom teeth holes are healed now).

We checked in to our hotel rooms, ate some real food, did a quick turnaround, then went down to do TV and press. Tomorrow was going to be our second to last show…the madness was coming to an end. I had to wake up early for a morning TV show and a full day of work. Sleep time.

July 3rd.

I had set my alarm on my iPhone as I always do the night before. Two alarms actually. I don’t like to be late and I pride myself on being a pretty punctual person. But this morning I was awoken not by my iPhone and its calming church bells, but by my tour manager saying “Where the fuck are you? We have to be on live TV in 5 minutes!” I look at my phone and it clearly states that it’s a full 30 minutes earlier than he thinks it is. I trust my iPhone’s time, since it’s getting it directly from the cell tower via some giant satellite floating in space, so I argued with my tour manager about this, but he said to trust him…that my iPhone was WRONG! How dare he?! Anyway, I decided to play his game and get ready really quick and go downstairs. Sure enough, everyone else’s clocks confirmed HIS time. What was going on here? Surely my iPhone was correct. Surely it was just every other clock in the world that was 30 minutes ahead. Arms was supposed to meet us downstairs, but he still wasn’t there and no one could reach him, so we had to just leave. We made it to the TV station just in the nick of time. I don’t know if I would call it a “TV station” actually…more like a beat up half empty building. The people on this morning news station were really nice though and it was a good interview. I would actually love to see the recording of that interview…I was pretty out of it since I had just woken up like 5 minutes before. On our drive back to the hotel I got a text from Arms, “Where the hell are you guys? I’ve been waiting in the lobby for ten minutes to go to morning TV!” So it wasn’t just my iPhone! Arms’ iPhone thought it was 30 minutes ago too! Weird, it’s like the iPhone Twilight Zone. When we got back to the hotel, Arms and I changed to another cell carrier and reset our phones, and sure enough the time was right. Guess I can’t trust my iPhone alarm anymore!

We met up with the band guys and we all went to the local mall to get lunch. I guess one of the promoters owned one of the restaurants there or something, so lunch was free. We had tons of security guards that walked us through the mall, making more of a scene than if we had just snuck up to the food court alone. Once we sat down to order, it became pretty crazy. We were the animals in the zoo and everyone around was taking pictures and staring. We spent most of lunch signing and taking pictures with people. Everyone was very nice and courteous though. We made the trek back through the mall with our giant security team. They were all walking around me, surrounding me, and it was completely unnecessary at the time…so I had some fun and kept speeding up, then slowing down, then stopping, then running…just to see if they would keep up with me. And they did. I actually got one of the giant guys to laugh.

We all drove to a radio station to go on air for an interview and promote tonight’s show further. Joey and Daniel James actually brought the poker chip set with them so we could play AT the radio station! And play we did! While we sat at the studio table in the radio station waiting to go on, we broke out the cards and started a game. They must have thought we were nuts.

After radio, it was over to the venue for sound check. Ah, the dreaded sound check. This one actually ended up taking the cake as the worse yet. The rental gear we got was unreal garbage, the power generator wasn’t working, what else was new? After a painfully long sound check, we went back to the hotel to eat and get ready for tonight’s show. There was a lot of drama going on before show time cause the local promoter had held up the whole day, so the first band of the night didn’t start playing until 11PM and there were supposed to be 3 bands before us, so this meant we wouldn’t go on until 2:30AM at best! I was not interested in this. We were scheduled to go on at 12AM and that’s what we were sticking to. I assumed this meant that we would just go on after the first band and then the other bands would play after us, but later I found out one, if not two of the other bands just didn’t get to play at all. If any of you guys are reading this, I apologize, that really blows…sorry!

The show went great, this was actually one of my favorites to play so far for some reason. It wasn’t the biggest crowd at all, but there were so many familiar faces that I had seen in the prior shows and it felt good knowing these guys were following us around and couldn’t get enough of the music! Thank you again Brazilian Street Team for everything. And of course for the awesome DVD you made for me! Tonight I also got some other cool gifts…one girl made me a Brazilian flag with my name on it in glitter and another one gave me a mug with my pictures on it! Don’t think I would drink out of a mug with my face all over it, but Jen sure liked it! After the show, we did our normal signing routine and finally left early in the morning. We had a whole lot of traveling to do tomorrow (today) to get to the final city of this tour, Brazilia.

July 4th.

Ah, the Fourth of July…Independence Day. But just another day in Brazil; no fireworks, no BBQ, no fun. We woke up early to get on the stink bus for our final ride. I was sad thinking the tour was over after tomorrow night’s show, but really happy I didn’t have to ride on this bus anymore! It was really pouring rain and we had to drive the 4 hours back to Rio to catch a plane to Brazilia. This ended up being by far the most horrifying drive yet for everyone. The driver didn’t understand that you were supposed to fluctuate speeds depending on the driving conditions. And he didn’t understand that it’s best to drive slower through turny cliffs of death…it’s almost like he just put the bus on cruise control at one speed and went. We were screeching around the turns, rain soaking the front windows to an un-look-through-able state. He did finally put the windshield wipers on eventually…that was a smart idea!

We arrived at the oh-so-familiar Rio airport and checked all our crap in. The flight was delayed of course, probably cause of the weather. And they changed the departure gate like 3 times. We all laughed about it. The flight was 3 hours long once we finally took off. For some reason is felt like it was 300 hours long, I don’t know why. Probably cause I was so tired and hungry and uncomfortable. I heard Brazilia was not the original capital of Brazil…that it was constructed and formulated to be so….in the shape of an airplane. Is that right? Well I was getting the feeling it was right once we landed and started driving to our hotel. This place was like Florida. Flat, with huge wide-open spaces and manicured vegetation. Like a huge golf course, with no golfing. Our hotel was in a massive gated like community with a bunch of other hotels or businesses, I couldn’t tell. The hotel lobby was like the size of a football field with 100 foot ceilings. The weird thing about all this was there really wasn’t anybody around…just the people working there. We ate at the restaurant at the hotel and we were the only people there. The menu was fixed of course, so we were forced to eat the only dish they had and it was naaaaaasty. Rotten chicken poop. Well, at least it seemed like that. For desert they gave us each like a miniature pie that was also gross. Arms stole everyone’s forks for some reason to eat his cause he’s weird, check out his pic:

Tonight was our last chance to play poker since we knew that tomorrow would be crazy since it was our last show and our last night in Brazil. This poker game was going to be serious! The final showdown! I went up to my room to get it ready for the event. Man my room was huge! This was the nicest room of the tour. I even had a balcony the size of the whole room outside! And it was all overlooking a beautiful manmade lake in the shape of a butterfly! All the guys arrived and the game began. Hours later it was just Jethro and Daniel James left, of course, the two best players battling it out. Here’s a shot of their final hand against each other…look at the stress in Jethro’s eyes!:

So who do you think won? It was getting really late and we had a big day tomorrow, so it was off to bed for me. Goodnight.

July 5th.

This is it, the final show, the final day. We had gone to bed the night before at like 4AM, so I didn’t wake up until 1PM and it was already time to go to sound check. We drove out into the middle of nowhere, a huge empty field in the middle of more empty fields. They had erected a huge stage and bar areas and monitors, etc. I guess tonight was just one of many nights of a festival here. I heard Ja Rule played last night….yay. Tonight we were the headliner. They were expecting between 6,000 and 10,000 people, which was cool. The dressing rooms were all thrown together white modern plastic shacks in a line. The whole thing actually reminded me of a mini version of Party In The Park (London). Of course there were issues with sound and power so they weren’t ready for us to sound check yet. There were some fans going nuts there that I signed for and then I went to hang out in the dressing room for a bit…see what kind of snacks were there. Mmmmm, snacks. I could hear Daniel James testing out the kick on his drum set…booming all over the place. And just when I went to grab a water out of the fridge, a huge chunk of the ceiling fell down next to me. Nice. (We actually ended up keeping it down so we could stand on a table in there and poke our heads out of the roof to get a good look at the audience later on). Sound check took FOREVER…but it didn’t seem to bother the hyper fans watching our every move! After we were done, we pilled back in the van and all went to find a restaurant to eat at. We drove by this place called “Texas” that served Mexican food….sounded strange enough so we gave it a go. The food was actually pretty damn tasty. Fast forward a bit and we arrived back at the venue for show time. It was around 1AM now and we were supposed to hit the stage in 30 minutes. We did a whole ton of meet and greets with pretty much everyone backstage….and about an hour into it I wondered what was going on with actually playing a show now that it was 2AM! I soon found out that there was a huge power issue that they were trying to fix and they estimated we would start playing at 2:30AM. This is nuts! I couldn’t believe people were still there…like around 8,000 people. I could barely see straight I was so tired! We finally started the show at 2:45AM. The crowd was awesome and this show was definitely one of the highlights of the tour for me. Just the size of the audience and the huge monitors everywhere, it was sweeeeeet. And cause it was our last show of the tour, the band and I were really playing our best and sucking in every moment. My crew had built me a ghetto staircase down to the crowd out of road gear cases so I could go up to everyone in front of the barricades. There was also this long empty hallway of barricades that led from the stage back to the mixing board through the audience, separating them in half. Look at the picture and you’ll see what I mean:

I decided during the show that it would be a good idea to jump into that area and walk all the way back…get to everyone. But once I was about a tenth of the way in, I realized it was NOT a good idea. People on either side of me were ripping me apart. Trying to get a piece of whatever they could. The security did their best, but it was too nutz. I had to retreat back to the safety of my stage. And as soon as it started…the final show was over. And it went out with a bang! A huge fight broke out on the right section of the audience just as we were finished. To guys were going at it, and there was a girl throwing punches too! Awesome. It was 4AM when we walked off the stage. 4AM! 30 minutes later they were ready for us to do our signing thing, which was a blast, and an hour after that, at 5:30AM, we packed up and ran out of there. It was complete chaos.

July 6th.

The sun started to rise as we pulled up to our hotel. The band guys were on American Airlines back to LA and it was a flight that was leaving soon. I prayed they wouldn’t have such a hard time getting home as they did getting here! There wasn’t like an official end of tour goodbye or party….we were all so destroyed when we got to the hotel that everyone silently crawled up to their rooms…and that was it. Arms and my flight wasn’t until 6PM, so I slept as long as possible. Before we checked out and headed to the airport, I did get to sit out on my giant patio and eat a meal overlooking the beautiful lake and the sunset. It was a nice peaceful goodbye to Brazil. Our flights home were uneventful, other than the fact that the first flight from Brazilia to Sao Paulo was delayed, so we barely made the rest of our connections. But we did make it back home in one piece, as did all the other guys…no delays for them! And amazing all our luggage arrived with us, which is very rare. So…that’s it. Crazy Ass Brazil Tour 2008! Big big thank you to all the Brazilians for giving us such a warm welcome after all these years and continuing to support me and my music! We had a great time and we’ll see you next year:) All the love….

P.S. I’d like to dedicate this tour diary to my friend and manager of 10 years, Stuart Sobol. Rest In Peace.