Bogota! The Rundown

On February 18, 2012 the Adolescents played on their second trip to South America. The first had been 18 months back when the band played in Brazil. On that fateful trip Steve lost part of his thumb in an accident where a window had slammed shut and crushed his left thumb. This current trip to Colombia had begun in the summer of 2011 when Laura had approached the band in London where she was on location for a pulishing company and had seen the band. She and her husband Robert have a booking company and rehearsal studio in Bogota called Alto Voltaje. As we had never been to Colombia, we were very excited and began the planning through our European agent to begin planning our weekend in Bogota. Unfortunately, we had not researched the terrain too well, and approximately ten days before the trip we realized that the altitude of Bogota was close to two times the height of Denver, Colorado, and that posed a health risk for both Steve and myself. 

After consulting with our physicians, it was determined that I could do the trip with medicaton, but it was not advised for Steve to make the trip. We were stuck with a problem that has rarely come up as a possibility- and that was that the band would need to perform without Steve. This problem had surfaced in Brazil on the night that Steve was injured, and once in 1980 when we were kids and Steve's parents had insisted on his attending a church camp retreat. It became necessary to either locate a fill-in, or to cancel the show. We felt that it was too late to cancel the show givent the circustances and the amount of promotion that had been done. To cancel may have caused difficulty for the promoters, and we felt that it wasn't possible to do that. Steve made a couple of phone calls, and we were lucky to find that Joe Harrison, who has been a member of the band for seven years, but who currently attends Berkely College in Boston, would be able to fly in to Colombia to play bass. 


The flight to Bogota was pretty long, and began with leaving to the airport at 4AM PST for an international flight. I began taking medication on Thursday to help with my breathing (I have significant asthma) and outside of my usual insomnia, I was rested and ready to go. After the usual LAX airport monkey business- which usually involves me being randomly screened very closely, emptying my bags, and being x-rayed twice- we finally boarded for Miami International. Now, theoretically, people are chosen at random for screening, but I find that I am randomly chosen about 25% of the time. In any event, we got to Miami and hd to kill a couple of hours. Miami is a wonderful airport as far as killing time, and as far as I know, the only one that openly encourages patrons to take complimentary shots of rum. We passed on the 2PM booze boosterism, but I am still scratching my head about that. We are on our way to Bogota by 5PM SST, and landed in Bogota at about 8PM CST. Mando, Dan, Mike, and I would meet with Joe and the promoters when we arrived at El Dorado Airport.

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