The Nashville Rant by C.J. Watson
13 Aug 2001
The China Story: Part 2
Chapter Two; The Journey
When the plane finally lifted off from St. Louis Airport, we breathed a collective sigh of relief. It made me wish that our crew had better dental hygiene.
The crew was composed of 3 individuals whom, for lack of a better word, we shall call men. Lowell was the sound man, our fourth in a years time. Milwaukee Iron underwent nearly twenty personnel changes in the year and change that I spent in the band. Lowell was a drummer with his own band back in the states. He just took the job for the free trip.
Webster was our light man. He was damn good when sober, which was an occasion most rare. He had done lights for the Miss America pageant twice before getting caught drunk on the job and fired. It was a pattern he was to repeat often on the way down. Last I heard, he was in prison, having cleaned out the register at the liquor store where he was working while in plain sight of the video camera. He got 10 years for a couple hundred bucks and a case of vodka. Coulda' got that for ten days work. Oh well, they say crew and roadies are the guys who weren't smart enough to be carnies.
That brings us to Knobber. Knobber was the spotlight operator. It's a job a monkey can do... We should have bought a monkey. I had a feeling he wasn't going to work out when we discovered that he can't hit a toilet with a stream of urine from a foot away, much less a musician with a stream of light from 500 feet. Lowell is funny and talented. Webster has a good heart and is talented. Knobber is the single biggest waste of a double helix I have ever encountered, period. The only reason I think we took him in the first place is that, since Lowell and Webster and just about every other crewman we'd had seemed to have "back trouble", Dave and I had been carrying all the heavy stuff from day one. Knobber did not have a bad back. It may have been the only part of him that wasn't bad. In the end it still didn't do us any good. Knobber was not capable of any form of gentleness. A few broken pieces of equipment and Dave and I were back to doing most of the toting.
Of the many times I was narrowly prevented from thrashing him, one stands above the rest; It was at a gig in Decatur, Illinois. I remember because Decatur is notable for it's absolute lack of notability. There are things I remember about Cleveland and Ottumwa. Decatur? No dice.
Anyway, when the show was over Dave had asked the crew if they could load the equipment for a change. It was, after all, what they were paid to do. Half way through the process, Knobber decided that he didn't like my amp anymore. He threw it in a dumpster. When I went to check the truck before we locked it up, I noticed the amp was missing. I finally got it out of one of the other guys what had happened. I was pissed. I pulled the amp out. It was covered in stale beer. I wiped it down. I put it in the truck. I went inside to get a drink and talk to Dave about it instead of finding and killing Knobber. Halfway through my talk with Dave, I heard a crash outside. I went out to find that the amp was once again in the dumpster, this time having been thrown hard against the thick steel. Knobber was still laughing gleefully as I charged in to end his miserable existence.
Before I could accomplish this service to humanity, Webster and Dave got ahold of me. Rick (ex-soundman #3) and Aaron (pre-breakdown) all helped hold me when the idiot actually had the nerve to taunt me.
I was overjoyed when I learned that, after I was released from my contract several months later, my replacement had thoroughly kicked his ass when he fondled and then attempted to punch her. I didn't know her yet, but I already liked Camille for THAT if no other reason.
We changed planes at Dallas and ate on the way to El Lay. Have you ever been through LAX? It's huge. After picking up the baggage, we had twenty minutes to get what seemed like several thousand miles to the next gate. Also in that time we had to go through customs and re-check the gear and bags. LAX does, thank the Gods, have people movers in graduating speeds. You get on a slow one and from there on to a faster one, et cetera. We had a luggage caddy full for every guy to push while the girls ran interference. You can get up to about 40 mph running full tilt boogie on a fast people mover, When we hit the end of a section, we had to hold on to
the carts and drag our feet and pray. Just this once, customs was easy. The chief tour promoter, a verrrry rich Chinese woman with diplomatic connections, met us
at the customs entrance and smoothed our way through. We checked the gear and carried our guitars onto the plane just as the doors were closing. Big problem. The flight attendants wouldn't let us put our guitars in the coat closets as the last two flights had. They wanted us to check the guitars, paying even more extra luggage fees. Problem is that most cargo holds aren't fully pressurized, no matter what they say. Guitars tend to explode sometimes at about twenty thousand feet. We had reached an impasse. We argued for a good ten minutes as the other passengers waited and watched.
Just as we were starting to get really dirty looks from some of the more impatient businessmen, we arrived at a compromise. We checked the cases (God bless Dave and American Express)and held the guitars in our laps for fifteen hours en route to Seoul, Korea.
When we debarked in Seoul, I first smelled Asia. Writers go on about the looks and sounds of exotic locales, but I learned on this trip that the most telling and sometimes most disconcerting differences can be those of smell. Seoul sounded like any big city: Noise from cars and conversations filled the air. It looked a little shabbier than some places I've been; mostly nondescript concrete buildings of three to five stories. Imagine a warehouse district in New York. Now fill the warehouses with people and you're in Seoul, circa 1990.
The smell told a different story. The smell said that the pollution laws were more lax here and the health codes too. Coal and wood smoke, livestock and raw sewage combined in a fragrant bouquet that was too alien to be repellant. There were other scents mixed in too; the sweat of millions of people who ate differently than we did AND the smell of what they ate. Kim shui is the favored dish of most Koreans I have met. Like cheesesteaks in Philly, chili in Texas or spam in a trailerpark, it is the
dish by which they are known.
Kim shui smells horrible. It is a dish made mostly of pickled, spiced, fermented cabbage, which is canned and buried for varying lengths of time to the makers taste. From three feet away it is the most disgusting thing you can imagine (well, I don't know about that. You do have a pretty good imagination. Anyway it's nasty). It is also delicious. Once it's in your mouth it even smells good until you're done eating it. Kim shui tells a lot about the people of Korea. They can seem nasty until you get closer. They are a very warmhearted people in general and their culture and mythos are rich. The Korean story of genesis says that God came to earth and made it with a bear and that's where they (Koreans) come from. By the time our layover was over, I was almost sober (a fifteen hour flight with free booze after a long, bad day, you figure it out).
It was in Seoul that the whole thing started to become real to me. Suddenly I realized that I was going to be the first at something in the whole world. Even better, it was something good, something musical. Leif Erickson, the Wright brothers or Neil Armstrong couldn't have been more excited than I was at that moment. From Seoul we flew to Taipei, Taiwan. Then to Hong Kong. Landing in Hong Kong was freaky. We came over the mountains, swooped down at a sharp angle, hit the runway fast and stopped a few feet short of the bay. An old buddy of mine who was born there says you never get used to landing in Hong Kong. Royal Guardsmen were everywhere in the airport, their black fatigues and berets, cold Uzi's and colder expressions in sharp contrast to the color and fire that is Hong Kong. We were on the continent. After a days layover we would enter China and do what we had come to do; bring rock and roll to the biggest nation on earth.
Peace, Love and Flowers,
CJ