SKA - HIT THE CITY?

The street was quiet; there was only one bouncer at the door. It looked like the suburbs not a music hall, but the address was right, the bouncer looked right, “this must be the place,” I said.

My girlfriend Fernanda and I flashed our tickets and were patted down by the remarkably clean shaven bouncer as we entered the quiet restaurant. “This looks like an old-timey speak easy,” I said to Fernanda, “do you hear any music?”

We were pointed down a long hallway, passing several empty rooms along the way; a smiling lady pointed us even further towards the back of the restaurant. Entering a dark passageway we heard the first faint sounds of Latin rock coming from the distance.

“This is it” said Fernanda, “we made it.”

The passage opened up into a medium-sized concert hall, stage at the far end, a semi circle balcony for the VIP amongst us, a clapboard bar built into the back of the room. It didn’t look altogether different than the downtown music halls in Raleigh, North Carolina where I have spent many a happy night listening to the sweet sounds of Ska, Reggae, Blues, and Bluegrass.

We were at “Ska - Golpea la Ciudad” (Hit the City), a five-band all night Ska festival in Quinta Normal, just west of the center of Santiago. I had seen the posters all over the city for weeks, heard my Chilean friends talking about it and, as I really like Ska, was pumped to check out this music scene here in Chile. I can honestly say I was surprised.

Ska, according to our friends at Wikipedia.org, is a form of Jamaican music which began in the late 1950s. Combining elements of traditional mento and calypso with an American jazz and rhythm and blues sound, it was a precursor in Jamaica to rocksteady and later reggae.

The concert started at 9 p.m. so we arrived fashionably late around 11:30 p.m. The first band was already packed up when we arrived and the “Revolutionarios” were set to go on.

Uno, dos. Dos, dos, dos. I walked over to get us a couple of beers as the sound guys checked the equipment. “Where are all the Rastas?” I wondered. The sea of Goth-garbed spiky haired teenage punks was endless. Mohawks, black leather, chains, facial piercings; it looked like a Marilyn Manson concert, not the granddaddy of Reggae.

Granted, I am sure I looked out of place myself, but where were all the skirts and dredlocks? Where were the barefoot stoners, the smell of petchuly and incense that always wafts through these types of shows?

I got the beers and we went to find a place to sit while we waited for the stagehands to finish up. We found a little table back in one of the empty rooms we had passed on the way in and sat down. As soon as we did, we were joined by a Don Edward Scissor-hands and his girlfriend at the next table. The pair looked around and started cutting out lines of coke.

“Where did I bring us?” I thought, as Fernanda’s eyes got wide. We sat, sipping our beers, watching the couple snorting lines of cocaine as people passed by in the hallway finding nothing out of the ordinary with the scene in front of us.

“Do you want to go back in?” I said after awhile.

As we wandered back into the concert hall the first sounds of music reached our ears. The crowd started to form, the ranks filled in, and the band began to play.

“This is a cover,” Fernanda shouted. “Who?” I yelled back. “Los Fabulosos Cadillacs.” The Cadillacs are a Latin rock band from Argentina, not exactly what you would expect, but they did a good job of covering the song.

The sound of music was an instant call for every spike haired guy in the crowd to shove their way forward and start shoving. I couldn’t believe my eyes, there was a mosh pit at the at a Ska concert. It was violent too. Fists flying, I saw one guy go down hard, he jumped right back up and kept moshing.

The next song they played was a cover, and the next was a Juan Es piece guaranteed to get all the 13 year old girls in the crowd screaming, except there were no 13 year old girls, just black leather.

We listened to the band play for about two hours until Fernanda turned to me and said, “this is the theme song from El Chavo del Ocho.” El Chavo del Ocho was a 1970s Mexican TV show that became the staple of every young Latinos childhood. It was the last straw. We had had enough pop rock, covers, and violent Chileans colliding into us.

We slipped past the combat boots and four-part spiked hairdos and headed for the door. After all, there’s always something else to do in Santiago.