Bent in Gent

We spent quite an evening hanging with Roge the Mayor of Gent. Roge is of course not the official mayor of Gent although he might be if Belgium actually had a government. According to Roge they’re working on it. Gent is a beautiful town with an extremely high church to building ratio. We rolled in to town and enjoyed the sun and beautiful weather having a café and walking around a bit. Then we had an incredible Brazilian steak at the club El Negocito which is actually Chilean. The cook is a volatile little man who works in a tiny kitchen. It’s one of those restaurants that operates with one bartender/server and one person in the kitchen so things take time. When we finished dinner it was getting pretty close to 10pm which I found surprising and a bit unnerving as it was still quite light out. Roge showed up just as we were getting ready to unload the equipment. He suggested we take a walking tour and pick up another cymbal stand nearby. My natural inclination was that we needed to set up as I was responsible for putting together what little sound system they had at the club but as Steve pointed out if the guy who owns the club says it’s ok then it’s ok. We strolled down to the canal past a bunch of churches and theatres with Roge giving us little history lessons. Roge is one of those individuals I like to refer to as a force of nature. He’s a little under average height with fiery red hair flying out in all directions and he has a slight belly which is amplified by his posture which thrusts his little belly forward while his shoulders drag slightly behind him. His arms are constantly bowed and moving as he uses them to paint a picture of the words flying out of his mouth. As we strolled he would walk right out in to the middle of the street and continue to talk not even bothering in the slightest to check for cars. I couldn’t figure out whether he consciously assumed the cars would pause or swerve around him or whether traffic simply just did not exist in his world. At one point we turned down a tiny ally and walked into a crowded club where a trio of bass, drums, and saxophone was furiously belting out some free jazz. The guys playing were on Roge’s label El Negocito Records. Roge got us some deliscous Belgian beer and we drank it and watched the band try and squeeze as many notes out of each second as they possibly could (the free jazz thing but they were very good at it. As far as I could tell everything we drank over the course of the night, and we drank a lot, was brewed by a different group of Belgian monks and came in its own labeled glass. It’s a country very serious about both its beer (there are over 150 kinds of Belgian beers) and its monks. At a certain point I had the gall to ask Roge if we should be getting back to the bar to set up. “Relax,” he told me, “It’s my bar. I’m gonna pay you either way. There’s not going to be many people there but those that come will wait for us to show.”
Eventually we did leave and Roge continued pontificating on a variety of subjects. Roge kept saying the word “Alleiz” in every sentence which I thought at first must be some real word or phrase that the Belgians use. I asked him about it and he told me that it was the sound Justin Hennin made as she hit a tennis ball. For Roge it was one of those multi-purpose words that meant follow me or pay attention or look at this or isn’t this cool etc… Kind of the way someone from New Orleans might use “my man.” For some reason the phrase was extremely contagious and by the end of the night every action or statement included an “Alleiz” or two. We slowly made our way back to El Negocito and we picked up another cymbal stand at a little coffee shop. Roge knew people everywhere we went. Everyone had assumed his bar would fail he told us because it was right by the Red Light district and had been a famous brothel now ghost infested. He opened the place because there was a Chilean gentleman in town who could cook and needed a job. Roge convinced the landlord to let him use the building and opened the restaurant in order to create jobs for the people from Chile who were living in Gent. There are some great music schools in Gent and apparently Chile is renowned for its clarinetists, one of whom moved to Gent to teach at the university and thus there are lots of Chilean clarinetists living in town (this of course all according to Roge who consumed Steve Mackay levels of alcohol over the course of the evening).
Finally we returned to the club and set up and played the show. Surprisingly it was pretty crowded and many of the people who had come to eat didn’t leave in fear as we had initially worried. We’ve been discovering on this tour that we had pull off some quieter stuff and not just blast our way through every situation. After the show we hung out and drank many of the beers the Belgian monks had so diligently labored over. We took another walk and visited one extremely cheesy bar which we immediately left. We ended up at a bar which reminded of a cross between hippy and slow dark death metal. We got the most delicious Irish coffee I think I will every have. Roge dropped his mug on the ground and it shattered all over the place spilling all over Steve’s white converse all stars. “Alleiz,” I said to Steve, ”This way every time you look down at you shoes you’ll have a reminder of the force of nature that is Roge.” It took a while to pry Roge out of that bar as he had a great to deal say to the bar tender. Steve and I felt we had to leave because the slow creepy music was starting to freak us out. We headed nearby to another bar where people were just finishing up dancing to some great music a DJ was playing. According to Francois (our other friend accompanying us on this venture. We met a lot of quality Francois’s on this trip) the DJ wasn’t actually that good and we just had good timing which was backed up by the fact that the next and last tune the DJ played was kinda crappy.
At this point it was 4:30 in the morning and already getting light out. We headed back to El Negocito for more beer. Out the window there we watched groups of dudes and single creepy older men head down the alley into the local red light district. After they finished their business many of them came to the door of El Negocito and stared in hoping to get one last early morning beer. At a certain point Roge became hard to understand either because he was drunk or I was and with a big “Alleiz” I declared it time to crash. The stairs to where we were to sleep were narrow old windy and creaky. The upstairs had a dirty bombed out feel and I tried not to think about all the creepy sex that had gone on there as I drifted off to sleep. When I woke in the late morning/ early afternoon I had a strong compulsion to get the hell out of there. I stumbled down the stairs and got to the door of the bar and quickly realized that we were locked in. Roge didn’t answer his phone and we eventually had to call Francois to come down and bang on Roge’s door (he lived nearby) until he woke up. Finally we loaded our equipment, grabbed a cup of coffee at a sunny café and headed on our way to Brussels where we had a good rock show at Café Central. I kept the Belgian beers at a minimum but we did go to a bar nearby afterwards where a DJ from Brooklyn named Curtis was just finishing up a set. It’s a small world….