We had an evening at a YES concert in Barcelona. Never have you seen such an old audience doing the head-banging move in Polo shirts. “Rock on, Dude!!” and “Far out, Man!!” were phrases that kept popping into my psyche as the music (played at a reasonable level) raged out into the dark club. We were privvy to the Soccer opening and closing chants to get the band initially on and, of course, back-on stage, and, of course, back-on-yet-again, and, of course, back-on-just-for-that-one-final-song.
[For the record, this time round features: Anderson, Wakeman, White, Squire, and Howe -- the lineup from "Fragile", "The Yes Album," and "Yessongs" days...]
About 1/3 of the concert was good. The band was playing a bit slow and as Derrell commented, “I think they need new batteries.” Every once in awhile they hit a song really well (”Niiiiiiice, Duuuude!”) and the music just flew off the stage, but neither of us was sure that it made up for the 100+ degree, smoky, dusty, cram packed venue. We weren’t sure if we were in a Finnish sauna with chain smokers or in just pure non-smoker’s hell, we finally decided that it probably was the latter. Also, Barceloneses haven’t discovered pot, but they have discovered cigars, so the smoke was putrid to top it all off.
After a 3+ hour concert, heading out of the sweat soaked pack of 50 year olds, some toting the 48 Euro tie-dye Yes 2003 concert t-shirts that were for sale… (okay, there were a number of younger converts of Yes music present.. about 1/4 of the crowd.. many toting the 20 Euro non-tie-dye shirts)… anyhow, the Metro system was up, functioning and full of traffic at 1 am. Just the time as the party crowd of Barcelona gets ramped up to go out in the evening.
The weather still felt 90 degrees out when we hit the streets. Seems Europe is having a long heat wave this summer. The Matterhorn cracked due to the heat, Italy is considering a national emergency due to not having high enough water in the northern rivers to cool their power plants, Germany has a half full river making the barges travel with half full loads… and well, we are just sweating. You sort of get used to it, but changing from dry to humid to dry regions throws a kink into your climastat. Sounds like we have another week of extremely hot weather to look forward to…
Hmm…. Where is that bottle of Perrier? By the way, Spain bottled water sucks. The mineral water has 1000 mg of salt per liter. Dang, you should be aiming for only 1500 mg of salt per day. Okay, so we try water without gas… now we have a huge amount of bicarbonates in the water. It sort of gives you the impression of gargling with baking soda. We finally searched out the Evian and Perrier labels in the grocery stores and started checking all the mineral contents on the bottles. And you would have thought water was just water? Italy and France - yea, sure; Spain - nope, it is an herbal medicine. Go figure.
