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| Meeting Felipe Toscano, who later founded Abraxas booking agency - Berlin, 2013 |
While writing this from somewhere in the middle of Brasil ;) anyone can easily imagine that the two Latin America-tours in 2017 & 2018 have been a life changing experience for me in particular. It all began after the gig in Berlin at Desertfest 2013 when after our show a more or less random fan from Brasil talked me up on the idea of playing there. While still knowing basically nothing about South America I replied sth like "Sure, just organise some gigs, provide a backline, and we'll come to play there." and we stayed in loose contact from there on.
At that moment I had never been anywhere farther south than Italy, had not even been to Spain yet - which at that time was like "the father country" to anything South American (silly, I know - now!). So in November 2013 we went on a long tour, covering pretty much every Western European country from Norway down to Portugal and back to Germany with everything in between, pretty much the whole month of November and I got horribly sick from sth that I ate while the first time in Spain. Until this day not sure what that was, and in my head I really kind of build up a sort of paranoia towards Southern countries. And, I know how silly this may sound.
So no joke and no exaggeration, suddenly I was really sort of afraid of going to South America - while anyways after that Nov 2013-tour the Samsara-band had almost fallen apart. It was a very stressful experience for all of us to say the least. This was the time when the band was really more about discussing internal things than making any music at all. Subsequently our bass player Richard left, basically because he wanted to pursue his career as a sound guy and travel North America with another band.
But back to topic ... Sometime in 2016 that guy from Brasil, Felipe Toscano, had build up a respectable booking organisation under the name Abraxas, not just in Brasil but many other Latin American countries. Remember three years before he really was just a random fan like every other, suddenly he had brought quite a few international bands there and build up an impressive network. Everyone there wore his company shirts with pride, everyone spoke about him as "a great friend". Very impressive, I have to say.
But then of course things in South America work very different than in Europe or anywhere else. So after all my hesitation, and also because I saw that this had worked for other bands in the meantime, we started to seriously talk again in 2016 and put this first South America tour together. From our first gig in Santiago de Chile we all could see how special this was. There was not a lot of money involved for us to earn, it was basically just paying the transportation costs but then that's really not what matters.
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| Before the gig in Sao Paulo 2017 - some of the venues were impressive too, to say the least. |
We played a full house in Santiago and people seemed to know every line of every song, singing (!) even the guitar riffs ... Complete 'insanity', in a good sense. And most of the rest of this first South America was very similar. A highlight of all these highlights was also the show in Belo Horizonte, after which I met my future wife and now am even living here on this 'crazy' continent. On a funny side mark: Before our first tour I took any possible vaccination and bought medicine for around 80 EURO just to be sure not to get any illness while - pretty much nothing - of that was necessary at all.
So this first South America tour in my opinion was nothing but a big success, not much in a monetarily sense, but I came back to Berlin a different person, listened to Tim Maia and Secos & Molhados every day, having Caipirinhas pretty much every evening, and suddenly really seemed to have understood that there is a lot more in life than just being successful in your kind of job. I have to say I guess I have a tendency to be a workaholic and never really learned to relax, or even just do nothing for some hours.
And then of course I wanted to return to South America as soon as possible ... for someone who lives in any Central European city, just try to imagine that there is a place on Earth where in a way it's always Summer, and people in general seem much friendlier - the whole opposite to Berlin, especially in all these grey months from November to May. So 2018 saw a second tour, this time even including Mexico, but a lot of the things were different. Not sure why, it seemed our agent Felipe had put a bit too much on his shoulders.
We co-headlined some of this shows with a US-american band, so ticket prices were probably significantly higher, while also we had just been there one year ago, so some of the shows were not what we had been "used to" from our first visit. None of the shows was really bad or sth, just more a kind of "business as usual". We played some good shows in Brasil again and Buenos Aires too, and then Mexico City brought back these intense 2017 flashbacks, when people really freaked out as hard that there was sweat running from the ceiling.
But to be honest, this second tour was very exhausting with often not even four hours of sleep in between the shows. And I began to seriously question myself for how long I would want to continue like that, also with a growing tension among the band members. Not to blame anyone, touring like that is just a lot of stress and you have to remind yourself that the other two guys in SBE still pursued a day job after all this madness, and one even had two small kids at home. In a way for that kind of "advanced hobby band" that we were we really tested the boundaries of what is possible. It's an exciting life, but maybe at one point you have to decide what you really want.
