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Santana @ GM Place
Vancouver
October 31, 2000
Back in 1996, when I was putting in my writer's prerequisite service at Starbucks, one of my legions of "colourful" regulars informed me that I "even swept the floor bourgeois." At the time, I took it as an insult, an affront to my imagined working-class solidarity and a stab at my actual middle-class upbringing. Nowadays, when the starving artist's lifestyle is very much part of my reality, there is a part of me that misses being bourgeois, a part that would throw away all my impoverished integrity for just one night in the custom made beds of Shaugnessy.
You can imagine how privileged I felt then, when courtesy of a media pass I ended up in the club seats at GM Place, front and centre for the man currently soundtracking Yaletown, Carlos Santana. Sitting amongst a sea of pleather-clad 30somethings, I take it upon myself to maintain an air of haughty indignation at the man beside me, who has paid and astounding $170 for his ticket. Casting glares at him, and a certain poofy-haired local news anchor who shall remain nameless, I begin to resent not only the audience, but Santana himself, who's phenomenally successful album, "Supernatural", is a star-studded cash-cow.
The lights go down on the mighty Garage, and after an uninspired performance by opening act Everlast, it is time for the big act to hit the stage. $170 per ticket man begins smoking what proves to be the first in a seemingly endless string of giant joints. I brace myself for a long night.
And then something happens. The ten men on stage somehow manage to turn the stuffy arena into a giant street party. Santana the man becomes just another member of Santana the band, and for once, I finally understand what my stoner friends in high school were talking about. Even Maria, Maria, a song that I previously would have described as putrid, is irresistible, getting me, and what must be the extremely loaded man beside me, up and dancing. Let me repeat: I'm dancing in my seat. And I'm British.
During what is arguably Santana's biggest hit, Smooth, all of the house lights go up on the crowd, revealing 10,000 normally reserved Vancouverites dancing in the aisles. We're loving it.
It could possibly be the second hand smoke talking, but Santana's brand of joyful revelry managed to break down the barriers between the haves and the have-nots. For once, it was apparent that the term "privileged" didn't just describe the first three rows.
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