algún día by tomás del real

“ALGÚN DÍA” by Chilean singer songwriter Tomás del Real is easily one of his most accessible and enjoyable songs. Instantly satisfying, the lead single off his forthcoming album Jakobsoni, is three-and-a-half minutes long and finds del Real expressing all his strengths: gentle, playful melodies, deft guitar work, and that almost half-whispered conversational singing style of his, as if he was confiding in you his most important feelings and thoughts on a walk at night.

The image of the typewriter in the video for the single evokes the literary tradition in pop music and is apt. Think of stories about Bob Dylan and The Band’s The Basement Tapes, where the lyrics were composed line by line on a typewriter in the house they shared, or even The Beatles’ “Paperback Writer” or “Eleanor Rigby.” While sounding almost nothing like McCartney, it could be said that del Real has similar sentiments, a fondness for novelistic writing, atmospherics that make a song glow at its edges, finding inspiration in the everyday.

Though the song glides along as easily as a ghost, del Real said that it even challenged him to play it. “It has this very complex fingerpicking that I heard in my head at first, but couldn’t figure out,” he says. “It took months for it to become natural.” The lyrics also emerged over time and the whole composition came together during a week of self-imposed exile in Berlin.

“I was able to take a break and finish up four of the songs on the new album,” del Real recalls.

“Algún día” reflects on existential themes of life and death, the temporary and timeless.

Algún día de erosión / Nuestras almas se evaporarán / Al encontrar otra forma en vez de despertar / Quizá, me han de contar

Which translates in English to something like

One day, through erosion / Our souls will evaporate / Finding another way instead of waking / Perhaps, they will tell me.

Finding another way instead of waking;

“I think time and the ephemerality of things is a topic that’s on my mind quite often,” he says. “I was searching for the most vulnerable aspects of myself while writing this song, the real spots, for something valuable.”

The single was recorded in Viljandi, Estonia, where del Real has lived for the past few years and produced with Javier Barría, who added the synths and other instrumentation. “Algún día” was mixed and mastered by del Real’s long-time collaborator Jorge Fortune in Chile. It is available on all streaming platforms, including Spotify, as of 31 July. The new album Jakobsoni will follow soon. It will be the fourth record del Real has put out in Estonia, following 2022’s collaboration with Lee Taul Don’t Chase the Lizard, 2023’s Principios de Declaración and 2024’s Notas Rotas. Despite this prolific output, del Real says that he battles writer’s block all the time, even with “Algún día”.

“This one has been like cold brew,” he says. “Drip by drip. It took a while, but it came out right.”

drummer

I HAD BEEN SEEING Mai for a few weeks when she abruptly left me for a drummer. And not just any drummer, but Giorgio Marrakesh, the rhythm provider for one of New York’s most enduring indie rock ensembles. Mai was my kind of woman: a few years older, self-accomplished, intoxicatingly neurotic, a spicy summer cocktail of the dangerous and ridiculous, well shaken. She had her own TV show, which was called The Mai Show. She would emerge onto the stage of The Mai Show in her lovely pink tablecloth-looking dress as spellbound fans from everywhere applauded furiously. She would spin and settle onto one hip.

We had met at the Strand Bookstore downtown on a Wednesday afternoon. I had been paging through reproductions of 17th-century Swedish imperial maps; she had been reading a feature article about herself from 1994. She had just finished filming the day’s episode. She was sipping from a coffee cup. She wore those big glasses that famous people wear, to both draw attention to themselves and to avoid being seen. But those pink lips gave her away. It was all going swimmingly and summerly until Giorgio re-entered the picture. She went back to him at once. “He’s a drummer,” she said and shrugged. She related the end in a careless and wonderful way.

A drummer. Drummers sat in the back, surveying all before them. Drummers were steady, reliable. Drummers kept the beat. Drummers had their own philosophy. “But he’s just a drummer,” I wrote Mai. I sent telegrams to her apartment every hour on the hour, relayed by real messenger boys. “He’s just a drummer,” I continued. “He knows about cymbals, he knows about snares and tom-toms, he knows if it’s 4/4 or 6/8. Would a drummer write you a haiku?”

He’s just a drummer / Always playing with his sticks / Can’t write a haiku

A drummer, she was with a drummer, not a writer. But what is a writer? A writer is always writing. A writer is found in bookstores. A writer runs his fingers along old paperbacks by Salinger and Vonnegut, wishing he had written them, but secretly feeling superior to both.

“But can a writer also be worthy of your love?” I penned Mai. She read the letter while she was lounging around in her loft apartment, eating macaroni and cheese and talking to her agent. She never wrote back.

two a.m.

I GOT A TICKET to see a show at the old Main Street Theatre. A former vaudevillian hub that had retained its gilded, art deco elements even though it had been long since upgraded into a modern performing space and hosted all kinds of B-level musicians. These included up-and-coming singer-songwriters who would soon graduate to bigger and better things but miss its cosy intimacy. My seat was on the left. From its plush cushion, I could see everyone come in.

This was how I spotted Mai. To my surprise, her seat was next to mine, and to my double surprise, she was soon in my lap. She was still clutching the program in one hand as she embraced me. It was good to see Mai. She wore a red sweater, the kind J. Geils once sang about, soft and fuzzy, just magical to touch. I soon became lost in its textures, how they rose and fell, rearranging themselves along her abdomen like desert sands. Her chestnut hair was pulled back. Her eyes were blue. “I’ve missed you,” she said. There was a sincerity there. I had sincerely missed her too. My hands soon found their way under her sweater and we sat joined, like frogs. Sometimes you don’t need anything else but to be and be still. Most times, I think.

When I woke up, the shape of my lovely friend was still there but the band leader was shouting down at us from the stage. This was an old soul group, straight out of New Orleans. “If all of y’all is going to sleep, then none of us is going to play!” the band leader said, gesturing with his trumpet. I looked around the theatre and could see that everyone was asleep, not just us. Many blank and groggy faces, old ones, young ones yawning. “Oh, I’m so tired,” Mai whispered.

“If you are going to put on a show at 2 a.m., you shouldn’t expect people not to fall asleep!” I yelled back at the band leader. “You don’t know nothing,” he said. “We always play at night!” “Two a.m. is when most people sleep! It’s the middle of the night. Maybe your band should have its concerts during the day.” “Tell you what, man,” the band leader shouted back. “We are done playing for squares.” The band came off the stage, slowly, sorrowfully. They funeral marched up the aisles past their audience, sullen faces down, sad not to play, horns and all.

‘twilight haze’ by fuzzolini

FUZZOLINI’S NEW RECORD is called Beauty Exists in Everyone. I’ve seen this group perform a few times, and both times they were so loud, I thought I was about to go into cardiac arrest. Which is what makes listening to an actual recording, where I can control the volume, so refreshing. “Ah, so that’s what it’s supposed to sound like.” I wouldn’t blame them for the sonic dissonance. One aspect is that’s how rock clubs do it. It’s supposed to be loud. And I also think the group is going for the wall-of-sound effect. On the song “Twilight Haze” they manage to create that same kind of full noise tapestry without suffering from too much messy distortion.

I’m kind of impressed by Fuzzolini’s guitarist, singer and frontman (I guess you could call him that) Valter Nõmm, who looks like he fell asleep in about 1997 or so and just woke up in the forest somewhere, still wearing the same flannel shirt. He has maintained that kind of sensibility, as if he’s still listening to Soundgarden on his Walkman with his sunglasses on.

He’s not afraid of big, crunchy guitar sounds, but these bold strokes are applied sensitively, with the finesse of an artist. According to Nõmm, “Twilight Haze” was one of those songs that came out of nowhere. “Come out of nowhere” songs are mystical. Think of “Get Back,” which Paul McCartney conjured out of nothing. Better yet, nobody is quite sure of where they come from. They just come. Getting a few words out of this tight-lipped cat Nõmm is always an effort. He is a man who speaks in gestures and prefers to let his guitar do the talking. But he did manage to tell me that the song “was created spontaneously in the studio,” in one take.

The original track was just his guitar and drums, played by Lauri Pajos. Later Margus Voolpriit’s bass and Kristi Jõeste’s synths were added to the mix. “I decide to go for something cosmic,” Jõeste says. ” I started to feel a little bit like Sven Grünberg.” The synths give the track its “beamed in from space” feel. The vocals are performed by Mari-Liis Rebane, an audiovisual artist and producer, who sings with Fuzzolini. This too was improvised, which preserved its “raw emotion and exploratory style,” in her words. Rebane and Nõmm have known each other for 20 years and had collaborated before, but Fuzzolini gave them the opportunity to do more. She sings on several songs, including “Balloons,” for which she created the synth sequence.

“Twilight Haze” was the second track they recorded for the record. It seems they’re happy with it. “It carries within it the fluid feeling of moving through the night,” says Rebane. “I like it’s hypnotic quality,” Nõmm agrees. Cosmic synths, heavy guitars, smart vocals, big drums. What’s not to like?

Photos by Nicolas Bouvy

‘i guess i’m falling in love’ by the velvet underground

EVENTUALLY ONE ENCOUNTERS the Velvet Underground. They are the godfathers of punk, the remakers of rock, the anti-Beatles, or something along those lines. Much has been written about them, much has been attributed to them. In reality, they were a creative New York rock group that enjoyed limited commercial success in the late 1960s. They are probably best known as Andy Warhol’s house band, and the Velvets toured to support something called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a multimedia experience, for lack of a better term, that included loud rock and roll. These events included film showings, light shows, and noise experiments. The Velvets played one of these EPI shows at a venue called The Gymnasium on East 71st Street in New York on April 30, 1967, during which their set was recorded. This has to be some of the best rock of its era captured on tape and the standout is “I Guess I’m Falling in Love.”

Authorship of this song is attributed to the whole band, which at that time included Lou Reed (guitar, vocals), Sterling Morrison (guitar), John Cale (bass), and Maureen Tucker (drums). I’m guessing that it was the scholarly Morrison who ripped the amazingly fluid guitar solo, which sounds fantastic with The Gymnasium’s acoustics. This live version later surfaced on the Velvet’s boxed set, Peel Slowly and See, which yours truly acquired as a teenager. I honestly was contending with the winter doldrums when I was in my Velvets phase, and probably some hormonal stuff, I think I was having periods of mania followed by collapse and depression. High school started early too, and I believe I suffered from sleep deprivation, which happens when you wake up at 6 am every day. And which made this the perfect band to listen to. While they have their dark mood music, “I Guess I’m Falling in Love” was a rare splash of sunshine.

Yes, even Lou Reed had his up moments. Otherwise, it was mostly down. There were tensions with Nico (“You’re out of the band!”). There were tensions with Cale (“You are also out of the band!”). And there were tensions with Warhol (“You’re not the boss of me!”). There was just a lot of Lou-related tension and probably the greatest tension he had was with himself (hint, his future involved a lot more heroin and some transexuals). But he was from Long Island — Freeport, to be exact — and as a moody teenager I could relate to his desire to blow the whole place to smithereens with some infectious rock and roll and set it ablaze with the help of Morrison, Cale, and Tucker. Especially Cale seemed dangerous, with his greasy dark hair and undertaker’s countenance. A few people have told me that I look like this brooding Welshman, which I take as the greatest compliment. Before forming the Velvets, Reed was a songsmith for a record company called Pickwick Records, by the way, where he imitated a lot of bestselling 60s pop and produced knockoff hits. A little Ronettes over here, some Beach Boys there, an inverted Four Seasons progression to serve as the foundation. One can appreciate Lou Reed’s taste for memorable changes, propulsive rhythm, and great hooks on this recording from ’67.

lost stones

WHEN I MOVED out of the apartment, I discovered the extent of my hoarding over the years. No matter how many boxes of books I moved, no matter how many armfuls of coats and shirts I extracted, the task was endless. I worked day and night and still got nowhere with the thing.

The apartment was in some up-and-coming residential area in Tallinn, like Noblessner maybe, but farther inland, though no place is very far inland in Tallinn. I had outgrown the neighborhood though, it being taken over by hipsters 20 years my junior with tech jobs.

While doing the move, I stopped and helped myself to some refreshing water flavored with effervescent mint at a café bar in the building’s food court. Some kid in a flannel shirt called me an old man for sitting there. ‘Next you’re going to start talking about the Eighties,’ he said.

Outside, I paused in the courtyard to breathe beneath the palatial, intergalactic, honeycomb looking apartment terraces and balconies, made of brick, glass and iron. And that’s when I heard it, the unmistakable sound of the early Stones. The fuzz of the guitar, that stark beat.

But something was strange about this song, for I had never heard it before. It was a bit like ‘Tell Me’ crossed with ‘The Last Time.’ How could it be that I had never heard it? Surely it had popped up in some anthology. But no. Looking up at the brick work, I could see the band, projected high in black and white. Mick Jagger was up there singing, holding the microphone.

Then it occurred to me. This must have been one of Brian’s songs. Andrew Loog Oldham had said that Brian Jones had written a few songs that Jagger and Richards, the primary songwriting team, had snubbed. By Oldham’s telling, Jones’s output had been worthless junk. But girlfriend Linda Lawrence recalled otherwise. She said that Brian’s songs were brilliant.

This must have been one of those lost songs, leaked from the vaults at last, played by Tallinn hipsters from some upper floor pad in the digital future. They were still cool. I was old and in the way, but the Stones were young. Mr. Brian Jones, 57 years dead, still lived on, his music played and played. Some consolation it was to hear the Rolling Stones on that sad day.

fragments

I SAW THEM ALL on stage, a smaller auditorium, standing only, playing just a few feet off the ground. This was the classic line up, and after the show, one of the singers came over. I couldn’t tell if her face was really melting off or if I had been dosed again. She had a doll-like yellow wig, which could have been her real hair, and her features looked sculpted, contorted into a menacing grin, and not quite human, like one of those shamanic masks from the Pacific Northwest. She wore loose, Tibetan-looking robes. She handed a large witches hat, about three feet high, to the woman next to me, and said. “Thank you for coming to the concert.” When the hat was opened, a pomegranate-like fruit protruded, with red flesh between its stiff membranes. The woman beside me said it was delicious. “Like persimmons mixed with honey.”

Next another singer in the band presented me with my own reward, a green hat of about the same size. It was made of unfamiliar textile, smooth and yet fuzzy, a bit course to the touch. The singer’s brown hair was long and he was dressed in Renaissance clothing. “Thanks for coming to the show, man,” he said. I pulled open the hat and devoured its sticky contents.

Later, I found myself on the second floor of a warehouse in New York. My great grandmother was there sitting at a table, dressed in a white youthful dress of the time, something circa 1914. She was sitting there staring off into space and someone was taking her photograph. Everything was black and white, and each time the camera flashed, I could see a dark negative of a child inside her. Not a baby, but a girl of maybe three or four years old, sitting peacefully there, in her own white dress. What even was this? Why was I being shown the past and the future? My great grandmother still didn’t notice me in the warehouse. She sat there quite still.

Downstairs, at a café, I waited in line to place my order. The seller told me that the cake I wanted was too strong for my needs. “If I give you this cake, and you digest it, it will change you, it will make you into a real monster,” he said. “I recommend this cinnamon bun, over here.” I took the cinnamon bun and noticed that Violette was sitting below the window in the sunshine. She was sitting there, watching me, with the sun in her red curls and Lata was by the counter, standing tall and erect, watching me. Lata also looked like she had no idea what she was doing in the café. I looked over at Violette. She smiled at me and winked. Lata’s brown hair was pulled back in a braid, she wore a white jacket and trousers, and her light eyes looked alert and alarmed. “So,” she said while waiting for her matcha latte. “Fancy meeting you here.”

‘canto oscuro’ by araukaaria

Araukaaria on stage. Photo by Kerttu Kruusla.

ONE THING that has always impressed me about resident Viljandi Argentine musician José Manuel Prieto Garay, better known as Pepi, is his sincerity. It can be disarming at first, it can even make you a little suspicious, put you on guard. For how could a modern person be so sincere? At what point does such sincerity become an act? But his façade of sincerity is so durable and resilient that no matter what you throw at it, it just won’t stick. There’s no winking at the camera here, no hidden double meanings, no metamodernism. Everything is what it is.

This is sort of how I approach the new song by his group Araukaaria, too. “Canto Oscuro” is disarmingly sincere. It has a cinematic quality to it — it would make a good backing track to a montage about a religious pilgrimage. Considering the story behind it — the loss of Pepi’s father, a trip to Palestine — that’s not far off the mark. Pepi recounts a roadtrip between Chile and Argentina before his father passed away years ago in telling the story. His father was very ill at that time, and could barely make the trip. This song, “Canto Oscuro” (Dark Chant) is kind of like the soundtrack to that trip composed after the fact. It passes along like a mountain road at night.

Shadowy, lofty, winding, introspective.

“I think it was clear from the beginning of the song that it was some kind of lament or requiem,” says Pepi of the song. “I wanted to visualise the journey I lived with the music and lyrics.”

Supposedly it takes about 16 hours to drive from Santiago to Buenos Aires. “Canto Oscuro” is only about six minutes long, but it feels like it could be 16 hours long. There’s enough packed in, a flute motif by Rauno Vaher at its opening, atmospheric guitar playing by Viljandi virtuoso Norbert de Varenne, backing vocals by his sister María Julia Prieto Garay and keyboardist Lisanna Kuningas, and solid contributions by Fedor Bezrukov on bass and Johannes Eriste on drums, the rhythm section of an earlier incarnation of Araukaaria. Araukaaria is one of those bands like Nine Inch Nails, that revolve around a principal songwriter and musician, but that have a revolving cast of characters, some of whom return after various scrapes and adventures (Rauno Vaher was the original drummer, and the last time I saw them, he was back on drums).

“I like to work with different people and in particular here in Estonia most of the musicians are involved in three or four projects which makes it hard to schedule and coordinate,” says Pepi. “As the project is quite a live band project, having different people always brings a new flavor.”

One of these players is Lee Taul, also of Don’t Chase the Lizard, Black Bread Gone Mad, and the Songs and Stories from Ruhnu Island project, who provides epic sweep with her violin. And another is — surprise, surprise — Tomás del Real, another Viljandi Latin American musician, this time from Chile, who helps out on something called the charango, a “small Andean stringed instrument of the lute family,” as Wikipedia informs me. He hadn’t played it in years, he says. But here it is, filling out “Canto Oscuro,” fusing Estonian and Latin elements.

“One day I was working on some other stuff and Pepi rang me up and asked, ‘Do you have time today to help me with something? I need you to record a charango in two hours,” recalls del Real. “I hadn’t played in a while but I went over there and we locked in the studio for a little bit and I made what I could,” he says. “I knew that the song was important to him and that Chile in a way plays a part, this connection between his life here and there, so I guess I was one of the pieces he needed for that track.”

As a person who also lives a life bridging continents, I know that sentiment well. At times, in the air between Europe and the Americas, I have often thought of myself as pulling thread with a needle, trying to sew two lives, one here, one there, together. It’s this sense of disorientation, of displacement that lurks in the obscured background of “Canto Oscuro.”

It is felt, even if not expressed.

“Pepi has an ability to put images in music that the listener can understand without even understanding the lyrics,” says Kuningas. “A lot of his lyrics are very visual, and he is able to put these pictures in your mind.”

Most of the song was recorded in one live take, though a few elements — the backing vocals, the charango, classical guitar — were added later. Martin Mänd of Kopi Luwak recorded “Canto Oscuro.” It was mixed and mastered by Mattias Pärt. Animation to accompany the video was created by Pepi’s sister Camila. Pepi decided to release it on February 12, his father’s birthday. “This song is connected directly to my life, my story,” he says. “It’s a snapshot of that period of my life and has helped me to heal and to let go of a very big emotional burden.”

‘charge of the light brigade’ by kula shaker

SOMEHOW, SOMEWAY this track crossed my desk and ears. I’ve never really known what to make of Kula Shaker. I think I heard their cover of “Hush” here and there when it came out way back when, and I had a promo copy of 1999’s Peasants, Pigs, and Astronauts that was in heavy rotation in my car when I was about 20 years old. These were the Britpop days, and Kula Shaker is an unmistakeably British band, with their raga influences about as ubiquitous as a curry shop in East London. So in a way, they are eternally linked to Oasis and Blur, even if they sound nothing like them. They arose during a creative, memorable period in British music.

Those were also the grim Radiohead days, the “Karma Police” days. For me, Peasants, Pigs, and Astronauts was a reprieve from all that seriousness and foreboding. It’s linked in my mind with the first Austin Powers film, and I do think some fembots make an appearance in the “Mystical Machine Gun” video. They were a fun band and the lyrics were just a part of the vibe. That’s nice that guitarist and singer Crispian Mills had something spiritual to say, but after could he please play that tasty guitar part again? In a way, they were a nice follow-on to Primal Scream in the “Rocks” era. Badly needed groove music penetrating the merciless Yorkean gloom.

My understanding is that Crispian caught some flak for being what we would call a nepo baby because his mother was in The Parent Trap (and I am old enough to have seen the original without having to look it up). For me, this only helped sell the band more. What better fate for the son of Hayley Mills than to become a psychedelic bard? While his name recalled Henry V’s speech at Agincourt, the rest of the band — Jay Darlington (organ), Alonza Bevan (bass), and Paul Winter-Hart (percussion) sounded like characters from an Evelyn Waugh novel. There was very little not to like about this group, and yet they remained a cultural outlier.

Which brings me to this track, “Charge of the Light Brigade,” the third on their new album Wormslayer, released at the end of January. The production is thick, dense, yet shimmering, lively. The sound comes up at you from every angle. According to the band, the whole album — which sounds like a D&D character, but is a spiritual reference to conquering negative energy — was recorded on two-inch tape. They laid this song down “Street Fighting Man” style, with just acoustic guitar and drums at first, with bleed over between both, the rest added later.

The changes are addictive and insistent and the lyrics are a shade darker. “They were all drinking blood in the shadows / drinking your blood and draining away / don’t turn your back on the shadows” and “they’re breaking the law / these masters of war / they come from behind / they don’t knock at the door.”

“The Charge of the Light Brigade was a famous 19th Century poem referring to a famous British military blunder during the Crimean War,” said Crispian Mills of his inspiration. “However, I morphed the meaning of lyrics to make it about rallying the ‘poets of light’, in a hopeless but valiant charge against the forces of darkness.”

This ain’t, “You’re a wizard in a blizzard of mystical machine gun.” This is serious ’26-level stuff. As noted, the band sounds great. The drums are spare, the bass is buoyant, flawless. The organ holds everything together in a warm glow. Mills is an underappreciated guitar player, too. Naturally, the video is recorded in an old castle or church of some kind, maybe that one on the cover of Temples’ Sun Structures. Maybe all the psychedelic cats hang out there these days?

Some friends are not yet sold on the Kula Shaker renaissance. They are skeptical of the band’s output. But with a song like this, it’s just impossible to argue that it’s not good, because it is. It’s just a good song. The best part is this: there is no self-indulgent solo. This song’s tight. Three minutes and five seconds and they’ve said what they’ve come to say and they’re done.

coldplay

COLDPLAY WERE BOOKED to perform at Folk. And not just perform, but to headline, with their concert scheduled for the festival’s last evening. I’m not sure whose brilliant idea this was, but I suppose that after NÖEP performed in the same slot in ’25, the door was open for the likes of Coldplay.

I was in the press office as usual right before they went on, but a blonde woman, whom I understood was my wife, was there with me. She was a supporter of the band and had bought Parachutes after “Yellow” started getting played on MTV. But she wanted more than just to see Coldplay play. She wanted me to make love to her during the concert.

This seemed to be physically impossible: where would we find a proper spot? Her solution was an old ironing board. “See, I’ll just put my elbows here, like this,” she demonstrated to me during a break in their sets. “And then, when they play ‘Yellow’ and it peaks you can take me from behind.” “You’re crazy,” I told her. “I’m not having sex with you during a Coldplay concert!”

While we discussed the matter, Chris Martin led the crowd in a singalong of one of their blasé, forgettable songs. The entire band, including Martin, wore rain ponchos. Martin held up an umbrella and sang. Visually, it was stunning, but the music still didn’t inspire me. Meantime my wife was demanding that I help her to climax during “Yellow.” I felt so alone there standing next to that ironing board. “Please,” she whispered. “Please.”

***

While all of this was happening, Klaudia was waiting for me on a beach. She was wearing a red swimsuit that highlighted her ample bust and the salt from the sea had teased her hair into a bouquet of sunshine. She was wearing sunglasses and saying, “You are going to have to choose, you know. You are going to have to choose between her and me. You must choose between her and me.” I could see myself reflected in Klaudia’s sunglasses, which meant that I was on the beach even though I was at the festival. “Which of us two will you choose now? Which one?” Grains of sand were in my eyes, grains of time, the sky above was pastel blue.

***

I guess I caught the rest of Coldplay’s performance. Before the encore, Martin came over to me on the side of the stage and asked me how they had done. I told him it had been a wonderful show. Later, The Who came on, as a special mystery guest, and began to warm up the crowd.

Keith Moon told me that if I wanted to hear their set better, it would make sense to go up one of the towers on the edge of the stage. “That way your ears won’t bleed,” he said.Up the steps I went. When I got to the third floor of the tower, I found myself in a room full of Estonian women dressed in traditional costume, with red headscarves. One of them was a younger, dark haired woman whose name was Mai. I knew Mai from the streets of Viljandi. We had shopped at the same Konsum.

“What’s wrong with you?” Mai said. Her gray eyes peered out at me from beneath a red scarf. “You look as if you’ve just seen a ghost.” “Two women are after me,” I said. I felt like an outlaw bandit. Always on the run from women and ironing boards. Then, glancing down at her in her red skirt, I asked, “Can I hug you?” “Muidugi!” she said. “Of course, you can!” “You mean you’re not afraid of me?” Mai just embraced me, warmly, softly. “But why should I be afraid of you anyway?” she said. “Besides, it’s not my fault I’m so sexy and young.”