ESTASIS: Live in Huigra!

Time is running short, but I wanted to throw something out there once more before my last blog from Tolte. It’s hard to believe that after the time I’ve spent here, and the way I feel abut living here, that there could be any sort of end, but the end comes in just over two weeks, with the end of the school year on July 5. Avanti has decided to end its involvement in Tolte’s school to focus on other projects in Tolte and elsewhere. There was some hope that the community might take over and pay my salary, but that really isn’t a possibility. Keeping me here, even at last year’s lower salary, would cost about $15 a month per school family. While no one is going hungry in Tolte, cash is in short supply. Frankly, although I think I provide pretty good value, I’d feel badly taking $15 a month from any of my neighbors, so, as Avanti withdraws, so must I.

This doesn’t mean that all is gloom and doom. My laughable rock band, Estasis, has a cool event at the beginning of June. Some friend of Freddy’s (our drummer) got us invited to play at the event to choose La Reina 2013 of the high school in Huigra, a pretty down about an hour away by car. Huigra is a lot lower than Tolte, and has a lovely, eternal spring climate. We were told to prepare a minimum of a half hour of material, for which we would be paid the astonishing sum of $200.

An added element in this was that I invited my girlfriend Yadira to this event. She’s from Cuenca, and had never been to Tolte (nor had she heard of it before she met me). I thought she might be OK with Estasis, because we play some of the same songs that she has stored in her telephone, but of course, the way we play is nothing like a professionally recorded, internationally recognized, band.  So inviting Yadira along was more about giving her some insight into the way I’ve lived that past two years than about music.

Because we hadn’t rehearsed with our vocalist for a long time (he’s from Sibambe, and it isn’t easy for him to get to Tolte), we wound up practicing from about 3 in the afternoon until 5:30, an idea I didn’t like much, fearing that we would expend too much emotional energy practicing and not have enough left for the show. The hilarious irony is that the vocalist again had trouble getting to Tolte, and didn’t show up until almost 5. It also turned out that he had a sore throat, and couldn’t afford to waste much energy singing in practice. But, between 3 and 5:30, we did run through everything we know, to make sure that we had half an hour or more of material. Much to my amazement, Yadira said, “You know, this band isn’t at all as horrible as you pretend.” (That’s a translation.) I’m not sure whether or not she’s right, or hasn’t heard enough real rock bands to form a rational opinion. Or maybe love really is deaf, not blind.

We had arranged transportation beforehand (doing anything beforehand is weird for Estasis) with Mecias, but he almost didn’t make it. In case you think only gringos suffer from all sorts of horrible gastrointestinal illnesses in Latin America, I can assure you it isn’t so. Mecias is very strong and tough, but he was almost overwhelmed by how bad he felt. And driving to Huigra wasn’t easy, especially the first half an hour or so in the dense Andean fog. But at least when we got to Huigra there was a health center open, where they gave Mecias an injection for his ailment, and he felt better almost immediately.  Truth be told, I think his injection did more to alleviate our guilt for dragging him out of his house than it did for his stomach, which wasn’t fully better for another three or four days, but he did seem a lot more comfortable in the moment.

The high school was kind enough to feed all of us in a restaurant near the school, and a pretty nice restaurant it was. The beef wouldn’t have passed muster in an American steakhouse, but it was a real luxury by Ecuadorean standards. You could tell because we cut it up with forks and knives, instead of attacking it directly with our teeth.  Normally, there would have been a case of beer involved in this meal, but since we were getting ready to play, we stuck with Coca Cola.

After dinner, we all hiked up to a popular shrine in Huigra, La Virgen de la Gruta, which is a large statue of the Virgin parked in a kind of hollow in the bedrock of the mountain behind the statue. By now it was around 9 o’clock, and I had thought we were supposed to play at 8, but nobody seemed to be in any hurry. Rather than any praying, we all mostly just enjoyed the lovely view of Huigra in the eternal spring-like air, and strolled back down to the high school gym where the event was underway. A guitar and piano duo was playing some sort of pop music with a semi-classical sound, and then the candidates for Reina came out representing various regions and ethnic groups of Ecuador in costume and dance.

As we neared 11, we were finally given the go-ahead to set up and play. We gathered our stuff out of Mecias’ car, and hurried onstage. There was an excellent sound system to plug into, and techie types who were prepared to try to make us sound good. It took a bit of doing, but soon we were all organized onstage and ready to play. That’s when I noticed that the vocalist wasn’t there. After some swapping of cell phones to find someone who had enough credit to make a phone call (Cell phones here are pay as you go. I’m usually the only person I know who has any credit in my account.),  Mario told Javier to get a move on, and he strolled in a few minutes later.

We had organized our set to build toward the stuff we do best (sort of messy punk rock) at the end of the set, so we opened up with the easier-listening, more sensitive stuff. We always open with “A Mi Lindo Ecuador,” a pop tune in praise of Ecuador that is sort of in the style of the national music, and our twist is my high-distortion guitar solo. We went on to play four or five pop songs where our approach is less distinctive, but generally includes a high-distortion guitar solo, because I’ve only got a Tube Screamer and a Wah-Wah pedal.

We had played about 15 minutes when the organizers told us that they were running behind and we had to get off the stage. I was very disappointed, because the really distorted guitar solos were yet to come. I was just getting warmed up. So we shut everything off just as the techies were getting the hang of how to deal with us, and off we went. And they didn’t pay us $200, but only $100, although dinner might have been worth $50. After we paid Mecias $30 for driving, and $10 for his visit to the health center, we each walked away with $10. This should be evidence enough that it is more profitable to be a taxi driver than a musician, and let that be a lesson to us all.

But the show is not really over, because one of Javier’s friends got video of us doing whatever it was that we did, and now it’s on Youtube, where all sorts of things that should never have been recorded go after they die. The sound quality is pretty harsh, because the gym we played in was made out of cinder blocks, and we play loud, so notes are bouncing all over the place. But if you feel the urge, you can actually hear the Estasis experience, you can type ESTASIS (you have to use all capital letters, or Facebook can’t find us) in Facebook for all of the songs in our set. If that seems like more than you can bear, just go to this link for what I think might be the best of what we did, even though I’m hidden behind Javier and Mario: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX0NQuh7Ml0

Frankly, I’m not sure what I’ll do without Estasis. I’m going to leave Tolte, but after a brief trip back to New York, I’ll be moving to Cuenca. I doubt that too many bands would give me the freedom to solo any crazy thing like Estasis does, and the relationship that I have with each of the members of Estasis is also different from what I would have if I just join a band of strangers. But somehow, as hilariously awful as we are, I think I’ve improved as a rock guitar soloist in my time with the band, which just goes to show that if you want to play in a certain style, you have to be in a band that plays in that style.  I wonder what would have happened if I had figured that out 40 years ago…

Two more weeks, and time is winding down quickly. It is going to be so hard to leave here, even though my future in Cuenca does look bright. But the tranquility of being part of a small community of yeoman farmers will be gone. It sort of makes me wonder if the modern world is organized on a completely dysfunctional social model.