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El Morro has the most energy of any concert I’ve ever done - because of Mother Nature.
This is a dream come true for me. I’ve been wanting to play there for 20 years. It was
the first time I got the nerve to try it. When you’re live, outside, outdoors, on
a cliff, overlooking the ocean, about 100 feet up in the air, Mother Nature is a very
powerful influence.
It’s pretty distracting! It’s like 37 miles an hour sustained winds...
Friday night was the first night in my entire career that actually I got rained on. We had
to actually stop the show for safety reasons. I could feel this cold air that the temperature
just dropped and the cold air’s hitting from the back and I know the rain is coming.
And I thought okay, it may be a drizzle. I was hoping it would be a quick drizzle and
let us go. But then the rain got strong and it gets very dangerous.
Sorry, we’re going to have to stop. It’s very dangerous, safety first. Sorry.
Now you have to understand, what we have on that stage is extremely sensitive acoustic
instruments that do not like even a drop of water on them. Consoles, wires, electricity.
I mean this is, water is our biggest enemy.
Probably is gonna last few seconds. Going to get up? Okay.
We went away, the lights come down, everybody covered the equipment.
Waited. Prayed a lot. The rain stopped.
I looked outside and the audience was holding umbrellas, and they were having a party!
Let’s try this one again. Will the rain begin? I like this song coming up. There is
also a little saying we have in Greece. The wet man is not afraid of the rain! And it’s
not fair, you all got umbrellas! Okay, here we go.
My production engineer called and said, okay, it’s dangerous. We gotta stop.
It’s really bad. I’m looking at Doppler and we’re inside something that’s gonna
last another hour and a half, if not two. No guarantee we’re gonna have rain all the
time, much like the last hour and a half. What I’m not sure is what do you want to
do here? I mean the crowd is three quarters of it gone anyhow. What do you want to do?
I think we should cancel it. Let’s call it. Let’s call it. JD for DAT. JD for DAT.
If you could grab...
It was Russian Roulette when we were up there. It was, it rained for 30 days before the concert
and it rained the day after the concert so we really got 1 day, a Saturday, out of 4
that we had planned. If we hadn’t done it that Saturday night, that show would not have
existed. What we didn’t realize at the time is that Mother Nature was giving us a gift.
It made it difficult for us seemingly, but the fact that we did have the wind, the rain,
the uncertainty of whether we would complete the concert, and just the feeling, just the
feeling of getting pushed by Mother Nature gave us an edge. And you can see it in the
musicians, in all their faces, their performances. They knew they got one shot at really finally
completing the task. Which to me was pretty close to impossible. The impossible became
possible.
Next time on All Access... I’m always impressed when people can do
that! I can’t do that!