Plan B en Tijuana.

Hace un par de semanas se presentó por primera vez éste excelente trio experimental estadounidense (un contrabajo, un sintetizador y dos laptops) en Tijuana. Fue una noche memorable por varias razones. La primera, la excelente música que ejecutaron. La segunda, que yo fui el único ser que se apersonó ese domingo por la noche en la Bodega de Papel.
Es la primera vez, desde que tenía catorce años y empecé a ir a conciertos, que voy a uno para mi, exclusivamente para mi.

Después del show privado y de mis solitarios aplausos, no pude hacer menos que invitarlos a que conocieran playas de Tijuana a las doce de la noche. Primero fuimos a ver la barda metálica que antipoéticamente divide el mar del primer mundo y del tercero. Después los llevé al Bar La Tapatía para que escucharan a varios mexicanos desafinados cantando kareoke y de allí los traje a mi casa para que probaran la extraordinaria cerveza Tijuana oscura y para que escucharan algunos discos. Terminamos, como habitualmente terminan mis pláticas con músicos, hablando de sintetizadores analógicos, modulares y cajas de ritmos vintage.
Un domingo memorable.

Hoy recibí un mensaje de Leigh Gable, el lider de la banda, en donde cuenta algunos pormenores de la gira de Plan B por Estados Unidos y Tijuana.



Hey People,

This email is about Plan B (James, Leigh, and Michael)
losing a bunch of stuff and a lot of work. I wrote this
for Kathleen at the Stranger, and since people keep on
asking me what happened, here's the story:

Maybe it's just where I am as I write this--courtroom
201 waiting for the municipal court to bend me over a
barrel--but ultimately making music is a doomed
undertaking. In a sea of fool's errands, this last Plan
B tour was more doomed than most. Our tour van came
shuddering out of a wrecking yard the day before we
left, we were all broke, and if it hadn't been for the
SXSW showcase we wouldn't even have had gas money
anyway.

We shouldn't have made it as far as we did without a
disaster. By San Francisco we'd frozen going over
mountain passes at night with no heat in the van,
overheated in Arizona, and slept in a crack hotel in
Tucson, and an even more disturbing hotel in Tijuana.
By San Francisco a weird feeling of invulnerability set
in.
Tired, we let our guard down after a show.

Between 3 a.m. and 8 a.m. on the 3/31/04 some junkies
smashed a random tinted window and found a gold mine.
Matt lost a one-of-a-kind collection of rare soul and
funk 45's he's been collecting for 10 years, I lost all
the raw footage to a short film I'd written and
directed, James lost his new album. Then there's gear:
a bass amp, a mixer, a midi-brain, chords and cables,
headphones, stuff all of us have painstakingly accrued
via 10 years' worth of shitty jobs. (My jobs at least
have been shitty, I don't know about the other guys.)
James and I spent the day combing pawnshops while Matt
cruised the record shops on Haight. At night we skulked
around the Mission posing as prospective buyers of
stolen goods. Futile of course, but it felt good to do
something, to fantasize about seeing someone walking
down the street with a mixer, or a miniDV camera,
anything.

My argument with a heroin dealer on Valencia turned
theological. "NO, I don't belive in god," I told him.
He proved that god exists using Plato's prime mover
argument. I countered that Plato had an antiquated
conception of time. It didn't get any of our stuff back.

We must have passed the patch of broken glass on the
sidewalk 10 times. To borrow a phrase from our friend
Pedro Beas in Tijuana, "It's the most anti-poetic thing
you'll ever see."

Leigh Gable