The Confluence of Memories

Guest post by Andrés Romero

Greetings from Santiago, Chile! I arrived late Sunday night and don’t have much to say yet so I’m going to pass the mic to my friend Andrés Romero, who photographed Bad Religion when the band played here earlier this month. Some announcements and programming notes at the end of Andrés’s post…

Although I was keenly aware of exactly what time it was, I glanced at my Fitbit just to have something to do, and to distract myself from the odd, though not altogether unfamiliar, feeling that my balls were trying to scramble northward into the pit of my stomach. Christ, my heart rate was clocking 120bpm, even though I’d been glued to the same spot for the last seven minutes obsessively checking and rechecking my camera settings. In the true spirit of “once an addict, always an addict,” I had downed three Red Bulls in the last two hours, which explained the palpitations, as well as the imagined testicular migration. At 9:08 precisely the lights dimmed and I felt the breath catch in my windpipe as the roar of 4,000 rabid Chilean Bad Religion fans drowned out the pre-recorded intro of “The Defense,” the players shuffling across the stage into position. As I turned to glance at the mass of swirling bodies behind me, protected as I was by a barrier and a dozen security personnel, I had a total David Byrne moment: “How did I get here?”

Exactly 50 years prior, in the same city and mere blocks away, my father sat in a prison cell, beaten and tortured...another victim plucked off the streets by the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, which gripped Chile for the 17 years between 1973 and 1990. Certainly my father had suffered both physically and psychologically, and at 20 years of age had already witnessed more death and violence than anyone should in a lifetime. The fear must have absolutely consumed him, for at that point he did not know that he would somehow be a free man in just a few months’ time. He would use his press credentials to cross the border into Argentina, where eventually the specter of repression and forced disappearance once again loomed large. A chance meeting with the woman who would become my mother, a Berkely hippie doing research for her dissertation, would take him to Bloomington, Indiana, where I was born in the fall of 1981.

My father’s story, and the exact timeline of these events, are things that I will never fully know, and many of the details have come to me as fragmented asides or comments from other family members. What I do know for certain is that my knowledge of the events that unfolded in Chile in the 1970s has always contributed to my skepticism of “the official story,” as presented by the textbooks I had in school. I will never forget taking my first world history class in high school and finding that detention, torture, and murder of thousands of Chileans had been reduced to a mere paragraph, ostensibly justified under the pretext of stopping the spread of socialism in Latin America. It was an eye-opening moment wherein I realized that if the only reason I KNEW this to be bullshit was because I just HAPPENED to be the son of a Chilean expat, I could never trust anything I read in school again.

That was 1994, and I was already hopelessly in love with Punk Rock, an inevitability so overwhelmingly obvious that I cannot imagine ever having followed a different path. I was living in a very small Colorado town with no record store other than Wal-Mart, obsessed with skateboarding, and steadily making my way down the “banned books” list that my only worthwhile high-school teacher had provided me.

We now know that trauma can be passed down throughout successive generations, but can the same be true for the spirit of rebellion? I think that even at a young age the knowledge of having descended from intransigent stock only pushed me to ensure this prophecy would be self-fulfilling. I had a relatively easy upbringing, but for some reason I felt the need to resist, allowing the pieces to simply fall into place. The moment I discovered Bad Religion, trapped as I felt in a dead-end po-dunk town, I finally felt as though there were others out there sharing in this struggle.

This is by no means a unique situation, and in fact the connection that most Bad Religion fans feel toward the band’s lyrics seems to create a particularly profound level of fandom. In my experience, no other punk band has as intense or devoted a following, and this has been true for over four decades and counting, in every corner of the world that I have visited. As Vonnegut said in Cat’s Cradle: “I don’t know what it is about Hoosiers, but wherever you go there is always a Hoosier doing something important there,” and this holds true for Bad Religion fans as well... even those of us who also HAPPEN to be Hoosiers, through no fault of our own. Between 1996 and last week, I had seen this band live 19 times, and every time felt like hitting the reset button on something deep within my soul, a high that never came from any drug or drink.

Earlier this year, my wife and I made the decision to move to Chile for a year from our home in Colorado, and January through July was a whirlwind of paperwork, junk purging, logistical nightmares, bureaucratic bullshit, and fucking STRESS! It is, we quickly found, not that easy to move a family of four (and a dog), 5,000 miles away to a completely new country, even while holding dual-citizenship. We all had to make a personal sacrifice of some sort, and mine was live music, as I had been a hobby photographer for the Denver punk and ska scene and was going to five or six shows a month. The importance of realizing my damn-near lifelong goal of living in Chile and reconnecting with my roots greatly outweighed my need to go to concerts.

That said, I was a bit gutted when shortly after arriving, Bad Religion announced their US tour with a Denver stop. It would be the first time I missed them in years. The Universe, not to be outdone, gifted me with the announcement of a South American tour about two weeks later. “Are you fucking KIDDING me!?” I remember yelling to nobody in particular, quickly contacting my metalhead cousin to ask if we could go together. Tickets procured, the countdown began. “I don’t think this band is very well known in Chile” said my cousin, but the next day it had sold out, and a second night was added. Bad Religion had not played a show in Chile since 2016, and the fanatics were eagerly chomping at the bit.

A couple months before the show, I learned that I had a tenuous connection to someone working with the promotion team of the Teatro Caupolicán, and I spent many sleepless nights wondering how to go about reaching out to ask permission to shoot the show. I had done something similar once before, having been slated to shoot my first ever Bad Religion show in March of 2020, but you can venture a guess as to how that story ended. I caught myself once again daydreaming about the possibility of a photo pass, until one day I just decided to shoot my shot and ask outright. To my absolute shock, I was put in touch with the people within Bad Religion’s camp that handle such requests. The next day I received an email that said: “Hey Andrés! Don’t worry, we won’t bite. Of course I can help you with this.” I died.

So it was settled. I would show up and shoot my requisite three songs, and then happily return to my seat and hope I got at least ONE workable shot. I found myself studying the band’s setlist from the tour, just to calculate exactly how much time I would have, adding song lengths together as if I wouldn’t be shitting myself all the while and working around other photographers with much better setups than my fixed 27mm Fujifilm. The day before the show, I received news that I would now be free to shoot the show in its ENTIRETY, and also the SECOND night if I was so inclined. I slipped into a dream world... it quite literally felt like I was living some alternate timeline. One incredibly sleepless night, a trip to Santiago from the coast where we live, and a day of catching up with my cousin later, and we are right back to the start of this narrative.

Before the show even started, there were folks from the upper balcony hanging off the edge and dropping into the GA section, without a single shit being given by security. I later learned from the band’s sound guy Ron that a previous concert in the same venue featured punks cutting a hole into the roof, scaling the exterior of the building and dropping in like commandos. Chile, in short, does not fuck around.

As soon as the band launched into the set, every single person in the room was screaming the words at the top of their lungs—no shock at a Bad Religion show—but as English was not the primary language spoken, I really got the sense that this was, from a contextual standpoint, different than any Bad Religion show I had ever been a part of.

Chile has its recent history to contend with and we are only one generation removed from the victims of the dictatorship. The room Bad Religion was playing to was filled with children, nieces, nephews, and maybe even grandchildren of the disappeared, the tortured, the abandoned. A generation of fans who, like myself, carry the generational spark of rebellion and have found solace and understanding in the lyrics of this band, lyrics which they have not only learned to sing, but have at times painstakingly translated into Spanish in order to feel a deeper connection, as I heard from several fans I spoke with. I had never felt so connected with an audience at a show, and to be in the no-man’s land of the photo/security pit was to be smack in the middle of the band giving back every last ounce of what was being thrown their way.

At no moment was this symbiosis more apparent than during “Sorrow,” always a late- appearing crowd pleaser. I had been to shows in the US where fans scoffed and dismissed this “radio hit” as pap, but here in the Southern Cone, in an old theater on a dingy Santiago street that in recent history had been a battleground, this was an anthem...a fucking REVELATION. I thought of my father. I looked at the audience and could tell that they too had made the connection between the lyrics and their very own country. This beautiful country that has adopted me with open arms. This country of copper and tears, blood and ocean mist, poetry and pain. This country of joy and sorrow. Bad Religion gifted this song to Santiago, and we accepted it into our hearts as one swirling mass of gratitude, sealing an unspoken pact of solidarity. As Greg says in “You”: “There’s a place where everyone can be happy, it’s the most beautiful place in the whole fucking world...”

This was it.

We were there. Let’s never forget it.

If you are interested in following Andrés’s misadventures in Chile through photography, you can check out his Instagram, and for more musings on life in the Southern Cone, he’s starting up his own Substack.

Upcoming Events

Haz Lo Que Quieras in Santiago: As you can tell, Bad Religion is a big deal in Santiago and I’m going to be doing an event at Esqueleto Libros on Thursday December 21 at 8pm to discuss Do What You Want with Francisco Reinoso with an assist from Jorge Gonzalez Guerra. This event will be in English and Spanish.

Starlite Pulp in Joshua Tree: I’ll be reading at the release party for Starlite Pulp #3 at Space Cowboy in Joshua Tree on December 30 at 4pm.

Razorcake #137 panel discussion in NELA: I’m honored to take part in a discussion with my friends Melissa Cody, Kiyoshi Nakazama & Todd Taylor. (I interviewed Melissa about how her punk rock upbringing informs her art practice as a Navajo weaver for issue #137.) Event will take place at the North Fig Bookshop in Highland Park on Friday January 12 at 7pm in the year 2024. Razorcake por vida!

Sounds & Images

I collaborated with Michael Grodner for the latest installment of Strangled By the Stereo Wire. It’s an exploration of heavy, heavy music by Saint Vitus, Snapcase, and Flock of Seagulls, among others.

I’ll be back next week with a rundown of our trip to Chile and reviews of some books I’ve been reading. Hope you have a merry and mirthful Christmas. Read some poetry. Bake something decadent. Look at the stars while pissing in a puddle. XO

If you’re new-ish here and you liked this newsletter you might also like my new novel Make It Stop, or the paperback edition of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, or my book with Bad Religion, or my book with Keith Morris. Message from the Underworld comes out every Wednesday and is always available for free, but paid subscribers also get Orca Alert! every Sunday. It’s a weekly round-up of links about art, culture, and science you may have missed while trying to avoid the awful news of the day.