The plane landed and I get out and catch a taxi. The driver quotes an outrageous sum for the ride from the airport to my hotel. Ahhh, I'm feeling at home already. I'm in town to cover the Rock in Rio Festival, a two-weekend-long extravaganza (January 12–14, January 18–21) featuring a wide array of international acts (Beck, Sting, Papa Roach, Dave Matthews Band, Britney Spears) as well as Brazilian acts (Gilberto Gil, Daniela Mercury, Carlinhos Brown, Tom Ze, Nacao Zumbi). The organizers have billed it as one of the largest concerts in history, with five stages, more than 150 acts scheduled and more than one million attendees expected. One report boasted that the megaconcert would be "roughly the equivalent of five Woodstocks." I just hoped that meant they weren't going to charge five times as much as they did at Woodstock '99 for bottled water.
As I arrive at my hotel in Rio de Janeiro, the first person I see in the lobby is Michael Stipe, the lead singer of R.E.M. He's standing near the concierge desk at the Copacabana Palace wearing a green T-shirt and white bath slippers with blue straps. He's got stubble going on his chin and cheeks that's somewhere between I-haven't-gotten-around-to-grooming-myself-lately and I'm-growing-a-beard-as-part-of-a-midlife-change. As he leaves the hotel I think, wow, alternative rock has gotten a little old. Stipe's not-grooming/sort-of-beard thing is brown and gray, more on the gray side. And of course everyone knows that R.E.M.'s drummer has retired from touring, leaving the longtime foursome to go on as a threesome. I've always liked and admired R.E.M., but you know a musical genre's aging when your band is losing members for ailments that aren't self-inflicted. Still, if U2 can have a big hit comeback album, so can R.E.M. I'm rooting for them.
Seeing Stipe and thinking about the aging of alternative/progressive rock made me think that, in a way, Rock in Rio may be about music finding itself again. OK, maybe it's not about something that big, but, between you and me, I have to come up with some sort of big idea to justify the expense of my editors' sending me down here. I was going to use the concept that Rock in Rio was about saving the soul of rock 'n' roll, but I think I used that one a few months back when I went to Glasgow to interview Radiohead.
So after a club sandwich and a swig of coconut milk by the pool, I book a tour of the city, all in the name of finding some sort of guiding theme for my travels. The tour guide, a fortyish woman named Yeda (which she pronounced "Ee-ill-da") stands at the front of the bus telling us about the city as it rushes by us. She repeats her tour guide observations in English, Portuguese and Spanish. Her English is pretty good (and I'm sure her Portuguese is first-rate too) but I seem to understand her Spanish spiel the best, which is probably a sign I'm not getting everything out of this tour that I should, given the fact that I don't speak Spanish.
One of the first places we pass by is the site of the old Garota de Ipanema, the Brazilian bar that was named in honor of the famous song "The Girl from Ipanema," which Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes wrote in 1962. From my seat on the bus, I can't actually see the sign for the bar, but I recognize the outside from pictures. It turns out there actually was a "girl from Ipanema," Heloisa Eneida Pinto, and she used to stroll "like a samba" past the bar every so often on her way to Ipanema Beach, and her "tall and tan/and young and lovely" looks inspired Jobim and Moraes. Now, with Rock in Rio in town, the guys from Papa Roach could be at the Garota de Ipanema right now, getting inspired to write a song about kicking some guy's ass. That's progress.
At one point in the tour the bus stops at Catedral de Sao Sabastiao do Rio de Janeiro, a modern cathedral built in 1960 that looks like a huge brown traffic cone. Inside, the pews are semicircular in shape, radiating from the center like wooden ripples from a stone thrown in a pond. In the 1800s, despite the supression of Afro-Brazilian religions, followers of such faiths would secretly worship West African deities during Roman Catholic rites. For example, someone might act as if they were praying to the Virgin Mary when they were really praying to Iemanja, the goddess of the sea. The tour guide doesn't tell us any of this. She does point out that Sao Sabastiao translates as "Saint Sebastian."
Next, the bus heads off to a mountain area called Sugar Loaf (the tour guide helpfully informs us that it's so named because early explorers thought it "looked like a loaf of sugar"). I gradually tune her out and I try to use what I've seen to come up with a deep think. When Jobim helped launch the bossa nova boom in 1956, it was considered a radical new style, upsetting to the samba-ruled old order. The "new way" (one translation of "bossa nova") was smooth, stripped-down music, but full of strange harmonies and unusual syncopation. While other musical acts of the period were singing and performing in more overtly expressive ways, the vocals and guitar playing in Jobim's work were intimate and quiet, and commanded attention like the whisper of a secret. It was a music proud of its nonconformist nature (one of Jobim's hits, "Desafinado" (or "off-key") celebrates the genre's subtly unsettling sound). Of course, today, decades later, people in the States listen to "The Girl From Ipanema" and, to unschooled ears, it sounds like a novelty song, kind of the way "Livin' La Vida Loca" sounded five minutes after I first heard it. But if you listen to the original version of "Ipanema," it's really an elegant, intelligent song. Now people hear the title and, sadly, think Muzak. The music industry has a way, maybe like history itself, of turning mountainous achievements into sugar loaves.
We reach Sugar Loaf and take a car suspended by cables to a lower peak, called Morro da Urca. It's a pretty exotic name, I decide, for a place that has the cheesy Kathleen Turner/Michael Douglas adventure comedy "Romancing the Stone" playing on the television in the bar next to the gift shop. We take another car to a second, higher peak. I find out that Portuguese explorers thought the peaks looked like the clay molds used to press sugar into conical lumps, so they called the place Sugar Loaf; plus they mispronounced the original Indian name. Whatever the Indian name was it had to be better than Sugar Loaf, which sounds like a something that should be located somewhere in Orlando, equidistant from Space Mountain and The Pirates of the Caribbean. There is a theme park quality to this part of the tour. I've never liked theme parks, never quite understood the need to pay strangers to make you sick and put your life in danger. I'm partial to museums, planetariums and bookstores, which is probably why my grade-school- age nephews consider me the least entertaining uncle in the universe.
Still riding to the top peak, I look around. The cable car is made of steel and glass panels, and I notice some cracks in the panels and try not to think about the safety record of cars suspended from steel cables in Third World countries. The cable car sways a bit in the breeze and I suddenly have a brief vision of George Clooney in "A Perfect Storm" being buffeted by winds, but since that wasn't a very good movie I try hard to think of George Clooney in "Out of Sight" and then I think why in the world am I thinking of George Clooney when I could be thinking of Jennifer Lopez who was in that same movie but I am married so maybe I should play it safe and think of Clooney again and then I realize I'm sort of free-associating but at least I'm not thinking about this cable car swaying in the Third World wind and by now we've reached the top.
From the peak of Sugar Loaf (which is 1,299 feet high) you can see all of Rio, as well as the neighboring peak of Corcovado, the famous mountain with the huge statue at its peak of Christ the Redeemer (Cristo Redentor) with his arms stretched out like he's welcoming you home after a lifetime of really screwing up big time. The statue is visible from pretty much everywhere in Rio. Corcovado inspired Jobim to write the song of the same name (called "Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars" in English), which even today endures as one of the finest songs ever written. I'm not thinking about that just yet, however. I'm thinking that it must be tough for any teenager in Rio to lead a real rock 'n' roll lifestyle with a huge statue of Christ looking down on you all day, every day, for your entire adolescence. It's kind like having a permanent heavenly chaperone. In upstate New York, where I'm from, when high schoolers lost their virginity, at least they didn't have to do it with Christ looking over their shoulders.
As I look at Cristo Redentor I think of Catedral de Sao Sebastiao and then all those Afro-Brazilian worshipers thinking about their own gods during Christian ceremonies. I wonder if it's possible, just possible, to come to Rock in Rio, to worship at the temple of the Gods of Pop, and really be praying to wilder, more radical spirits. Or if this whole Rock in Rio thing is just another big piece of unredeemable commercial crapola and we are all going to hell anyway.
"Quiet nights of Quiet stars/Quiet words from my guitar/floating on the silence that surrounds us..." Anyway, I begin to think about the song "Corcovado" again, the October 1964 live version with Astrud Gilberto singing in English (her voice high and light as mountain mist) and Joao Gilberto answering in Portuguese (gentle and soothing as a priest's voice in a confessional) and Stan Getz's tenor sax sweetly flowing through the song like a warm river. "This is where I want to be/here with you so close to me/until the final flicker of life's ember..." It's a song, I think, that will stand as long as the mountain stands — it's that good. Are there acts at Rock in Rio that are producing musical art that's as worthwhile? I mean, besides Papa Roach?
Just then, a huge thunderbolt strikes the mountain right near Christ's statue. Maybe God is a Papa Roach fan and didn't like my sarcasm. I suddenly realize that I'm standing on top of a mountain in a thunderstorm and my only transportation down is in a steel cable car held up by steel cables. I try to keep my eyes on Cristo Redentor the whole way down.
NEXT: One day before Rock in Rio. Plus, a little less stream of consciousness and useless annoying jokiness and a little more about the bands that will be performing.