I woke up to a very familiar sound this morning. At home it would have
been Charlie the rooster, yelling for his breakfast and disturbing the rabbits,
but this was a sound I knew and struggled out of my half-sleep to identify.
And soon I had it…. here I was, thousands of miles from home, deep in the heart
of Serbia….
…….and the pigeons came too!!
There was a lot to do today and it started
out (after a breakfast of highly unusual and completely unidentifiable stuff)
with a TV interview and some photo ops. The guys walked around town and
came back with all kinds of goodies that they found in a local street market.
Brand name sneakers and blue jeans for 15 Euros!! The origin was
questionable but the price was right.
Srdjan and I went to the venue. Being
the boss promoter, he needed to check on stuff and I just wanted to get out of
the hotel for a while. The festival was located at a man-made beach along
the side of the river Timok, in the middle of town and it was really quite
pleasant. Everyone was working hard on rigging the lights etc. and the
atmosphere was busy but upbeat. I was able to relax and try a local beer
and, after 4 or 5 attempts, a decent espresso.
I want to mention the concept of the event
because I think it’s really cool…
There was one headliner each night (tonight
was us) and then 6 Serbian bands played in the first round of a national “battle
of the bands”. Tomorrow will be the same and then on Saturday they will
have the final with the winning band receiving a deal to make a CD. I
really think it’s great that they do this to encourage young musicians and to
give them a glimpse of fame, playing on a big stage in front of a lot of people
and I’d like to see more of this kind of thing. Music as a career is hard
to achieve and highly risky but it’s an excellent hobby under any circumstances.
The average adult salary in Serbia is around $300.00 per month so tickets were
pegged at 5 Euros and sponsors picked up the rest of the costs. Nice!
Anyway, time to eat again, then back to the
hotel where Ken and I did a little rehearsing before we went to the venue for
sound check. All the Serbian bands were sound checking first because they
were playing after us and the press conference was scheduled at the same time
which was a little ludicrous because we had to wait until the bands finished
before we could hear anything in the press tent!! As a result, sound check
was late but not too troublesome! By the way, did I mention how much I
hate press conferences??????
We just about had time to go back to the
hotel, shower and get ready and then it was show-time! As usual, we
blasted through the set and by the end of the show the audience was totally into
it. The reason it took a while to get them going was because the barrier
kept the audience over 5 meters (16 feet) away from the stage! It’s really
hard to “connect” when they are that far away but we did it, rocked them once
more with Gypsy and headed back to our tent to chill.
Sadly, the first Serbian band had a singer
who insisted on treating us all to his best wildebeest impersonations in a
“song” (and I use this word due to the lack of a suitable substitute) in which
the lyrics and melody resembled a large herd of pre-historic mammoths on the
attack!! The band had a somewhat unique approach to dynamics too and this
was very effective in that it sounded like they were each playing a different
song and trying to play louder and faster than each other. These guys were
bad enough to make an army surrender… so they’ll probably win!!
Needless to say we beat a hasty retreat to
the relative calm of our hotel where we had a drink or two, chatted a bit and
then headed off to bed to grab a few hours sleep.
Tomorrow’s going to be a long day too, but at least we’ll be far away from the
mammoths!!
