Radio Nowhere

ABOUT THE SONG

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So, a few years ago, I took a road trip with my friend K. from San Francisco to Honduras. Yeah, the one in Central America. We took 30 days to get there, and if you look at a map, you won’t be surprised to learn that we spent most of that time driving through Mexico.

It was not a smooth ride. The purpose of the trip was to carry supplies from California to Honduras for K’s new business – a combination traveller’s hostel and parrot farm, near a national park on Honduras’ northern, Caribbean coast. We had two trucks stuffed with very unusual items, like 1,000 feet of steel cable, and this meant we were the opposite of inconspicuous as we traveled through little towns far off the usual gringo trail in Central Mexico.

Things went wrong right from the start. Due to our odd cargo, we were refused entry at the first two border crossings we tried, in Tijuana and Nogales. Then our driver’s licenses were stolen as we crossed from El Paso over to Ciudad Juarez, leaving us with nothing more than library cards for IDs.

This left us defenseless against corrupt law enforcement officials of all stripes, and so when they demanded bribes in exchange for not locking us up during routine traffic stops (which happened nearly every day, again because we stood out so much with our California license plates and yards of steel cable), we had to comply.

We gave up our cameras, CD players, boombox, and other gear, and lived in terror that they’d discover the laptop we had hidden in the stuffing of the driver’s seat.

We came very close to being carjacked by Zapatistas in Chiapas as well, just barely escaping a stretch of potholed highway notorious for bandit attacks, and reaching the safety of a huge caravan of 18-wheelers before night fell. It all got to be pretty nerve-racking, and we were both suffering from severe paranoia by the time we finally made it to Honduras.

On the plus side, we also got to marinate in Mexican culture a little more than tourists usually do, since we were able to visit many friends K. had made on previous trips to Mexico and get a sense of their lives.

Growing up in California, and studying the history of the American West in college, I’d always been aware of the Hispanic influence on the region. My home state is full of Spanish place names, Spanglish slang is part of everyone’s lexicon, and the names of Spanish explorers and conquistadores are as familiar as those of Revolutionary War heroes back East.

Hanging out with Mexicans in their home towns got me thinking more deeply about some of this history. A narrative of the dark side of conquest is a foundational part of Mexican history and culture, especially as it relates to Hernando Cortez, who deposed the Aztec king who ruled over most of Mexico when the first Spaniards arrived.

I had known that the conquistadores, and Cortez & Pizarro in particular, were cruel, greedy men who spearheaded the European colonial project (a.k.a. genocide), but something about traveling at length through the first land they put to the sword really brought the depth of the damage done by them and their compatriots into sharper focus.

Catchy subject for a song, right?

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On a more musical tip, the sound of Spanish guitar was everywhere in the air. Many of K.’s friends were musicians, and without exception they shredded on nylon-string guitars, a sound which I loved prior to this trip and got even more into during the drive. The beginnings of a song started to take shape in my mind, and I might have written it sooner than I did, had I not had to give up the little travel guitar we’d brought along to a corrupt federale who stopped us along the highway north of Zacatecas.

When I got back home to El Norte, I had the beginnings of the song in my mind. I knew the title was “Cortez & Pizarro”, and had a basic idea of what the verses would be about, but the actual music for the song wasn’t coming. Then something weird happened to my acoustic guitar, my main writing instrument: the glue that held the bridge to the top of the guitar partially dissolved, and the bridge began to come away from the body. Why is this relevant? Because at that point, I couldn’t tighten the guitar strings all the way up to concert pitch (or else the tension would’ve pulled the bridge completely off the guitar), so it was tuned much lower, which gave the guitar a cool, throaty tone.

Suddenly, all my usual, boring chords and riffs were giving me intriguing new sounds and tonalities, which was super-inspiring. It put my head into enough of a new space that the same approaches and patterns that I’d been trying with Cortez & Pizarro, which hadn’t been getting me anywhere, suddenly felt right and appropriate for the song, and after that the music came pretty quickly (along with the remaining words for the verse). Cheap glue FTW.

When I could finally afford to get my guitar fixed, I was a little nervous that the song wouldn’t work with the strings tuned up to normal pitch, but that turned out not to be a problem (phew!). In fact, it might have sounded better at that pitch, and even BETTER on really loud electric guitar – which came as a welcome surprise. In fact, the transition of this song from acoustic to electric was really the catalyst for transforming my music from old-school singer/songwriter to something louder. And more interesting…