Blues Cruise: good for the soul, bad for the liver.

Mexico is nice. Not nice in the sense of cleanliness or ease of navigation once you get away from the touristy part of town near the port, but nice in the sense of....y’know...nice. Pretty, even. Sort of what you’d expect to see in Mexico. This is all a good chance to work on my haggling skills with taxi drivers, find restaurants with menus entirely in Spanish and drink café con leche on street corners. Most of the places the Ryndam will visit the next two months, I hear, are mostly touristy and safe. Understandable; as relaxed as Holland America may be about most things, they do need to watch their backs once in a while. Still, I’m interested in seeing what kind of trouble I can get into, then safely get away from. I’ve heard some good stories from the other guys in the band about this certain café or that certain bar where no one speaks English but you can get a full meal and good drinks for obscenely cheap prices. The other day in Mazatlan the band’s new keyboard player and I got massages at this place called The Aroma Spa for $15. After spending an hour having someone beat the hell out of my back and wrap me in hot towels I was walking much slower and not caring about the mile-long trek back to the port.
This past week was the Legendary Rhythm and Blues Cruise, a charter cruise that brought on a long list of blues acts with head liners like Etta James, Los Lobos and Koko Taylor. Music started everyday by at least 5:30 and kept going, one way or another, until 5 or so in the morning. Almost every place set up for the bands was packed with amplifiers and speakers, sometimes with the soundboard set up dangerously close to the bar.
In short, I don’t really work this week, but I get paid anyway. Which is nice.
The first few days were just killer. Koko Taylor and her band tore everything up, and the Los Lobos show was one of the loudest things I’ve ever heard (according to one of the stage managers our speakers are now, officially, shot). However, after almost an entire week of hearing blues music, I long to hear a ii chord. The energy is still there, but I’m getting a bit run over by how things are starting to run together. There’s been a ton of great shows I’ve seen so far, but I was really tripped up by seeing Etta James. It was just....odd. She really played up the sexuality to her act to the point where it just wasn’t appealing. It’s been, like it is with a lot of festivals, more enjoyable to listen to the smaller-name groups get up there and tear it up. One of the best acts I saw this week was a singer-guitarist named David Jacobs-Strain who sang this deep-down Delta-style blues while looking like an accountant. I don’t know why, but there’s something about a dorky-looking white guy playing guitar that I can relate to.
Still, it’s the passengers who make this cruise totally worth sticking around. The vibe everywhere is awesome; everyone is here for the same reason, and damn if they don’t know how to party. I heard from the beverage manager that their plan was to sell $85,000 worth of liquor on this cruise, and after the first night alone they sold $45,000. Certain hallways completely reek of suntan lotion and weed. The cabin stewards are either thrilled because they’re being tipped very well, or horrified because they’re cleaning up things they just don’t understand.
This week has been unreal.
But I can deal.