Max Cavalera was expecting sun, sea, sand and maybe a bit of reggae from his vacation to Jamaica... what he got instead was the holiday from hell.
This is one of the weirdest things that ever happened to me. It was a vacation that went really, really wrong.
It was 2002 or 2003, and we had a friend in Jamaica; he has a house in the hills, where the Rastas live. Through him we arranged to meet one of his friends to take us around and be our guide.
The day that we were flying, the guy we were meeting’s son got hit by a car, so he had to go to the hospital and couldn’t pick us up. But there were these really shady fellas who heard him on the phone telling my friend Mark he couldn’t pick us up. We were on the plane, so there was no way to contact us, but these guys took it upon themselves to pick us up – these two shady motherfuckers. And we’d never met the guy, so we didn’t know what he looked like.
We arrived there, and they had our names on a sign, misspelled, so that was the first warning that something wasn’t quite right. They had a white van, and the first thing my wife Gloria says is, ‘We need to get some weed,’ so they take us to this horrible place in the ghetto, downtown Trench Town, and it was sketchy as fuck. There’s shady motherfuckers everywhere, but I’m thinking, ‘We’re with these guys, we’re good, they’re Mark’s friends.’ So, they buy some weed and we drive around for a while, it’s like a two-hour drive, and they’re not talking much, but we’re totally unaware that these are not the guys.
We get to the hotel, and the hotel doesn’t allow outside people to come in, so Gloria and I get in a huge fight with the manager, like, 'Listen motherfucker, we paid a huge amount of money to stay here. These guys are our friends and they’re coming with us or we’re going somewhere else.' It’s late and they don’t want to drive all the way back to Kingston, so we fight with the manager and let them stay in our room.
We go to the room and the first thing I notice that’s wrong is he’s asking me the prices of everything. I pull out my boombox and he’s like, ‘How much is that?’ ‘I don’t know, maybe $200.’ And I have a CD book with like, 500 CDs, and he’s like ‘How much is that?’ ‘I don’t know... $500?’ Then they’re trying to get us to rent a car, and I think the plan was to rent a car, kidnap us and kill us, or something really crazy like that. Another warning sign was that I gave him the remote for the TV and he had no idea what to do with it. It was like I gave him a spaceship controller! He acted like he’d never seen one, which was a little bit weird.
Anyway, we set up beds for them in the living room and we got to sleep, then the phone rings at like, five in the morning, and it’s my friend. The shit just hits the fan, right there. He’s like, ‘You guys are in great danger right now! Those guys are not my friends. He’s at the hospital with his kid and those guys are thieves! You’ve got to get rid of them, and you’ve got to do it in a way that doesn’t piss them off, because they might hurt you!’
I’m looking at Gloria like, ‘What the fuck are we gonna do? We’ve got two thieves sleeping in the living room!’ So, I go and check them out, and one guy has this big hunting knife by his head. I’m like ‘Oh shit! This is bad!’ And they’re starting to wake up, so Gloria goes, ‘Go hang out with them and don’t act different.’ So, I’m asking, ‘Hey, what’s the knife for?’ And he came up with this bullshit story about cutting sugar cane, but I’m thinking, ‘That’s not what the knife is for! I know what it’s for!’ That was really scary.
In the meantime, there’s a silent alarm in the bedroom so you can call security, Gloria hit it while these guys are going, ‘Now we get the car, right? So we can visit all these places. Bob Marley!’ And the next thing you know, security shows up and there’s all this commotion. They’re arguing, and they’re speaking patois, not even speaking English any more. The security guys had guns, and finally the jig is up, as they say. The plan didn’t work.
But it wasn’t over yet, because we had to go to the police station with them to make the accusation. And that was the most uncomfortable part, because we had to ride with them in the car to the police station, and they’re just giving us all these really bad looks, like, ‘We should have killed you assholes last night!' So, we ride to the police station together and then the police captain comes to us, like, ‘You need to keep this under wraps. We know you’re musicians, but you can’t make a big deal out of this. Please, don’t mention this, because we want to keep our tourism alive.’ They just took the guys to jail, and it’s a ghetto-ass jail, it’s not a place you want to be. It’s fucked up. I’m like, ‘Why are we in a police station in Kingston on the first day of our vacation?!’ They never confessed that they wanted to kill us, but they definitely wanted our gear, and they were shady, shady guys. I’m looking at Gloria like, we dodged a bullet here!
After that, it’s hard to get back into vacation mode. Like, how do you go and relax on the beach? But we finally got to meet the real guy and he was totally different, real nice, and he was like, ‘You got really lucky!’ But I relate to Jamaica because it’s similar to Brazil in a lot of ways: there’s a lot of poverty and people will do anything for a buck. People try to sell you shit the minute you get out of the airport, like, ‘I’m Bob Marley’s cousin, I’ll take you to his house!’ But we did end up visiting his resting place and where he was born, also Peter Tosh... his grave is very simple and there’s a GRAMMY on top of it, but nobody steals it. That’s how much they respect him.
I ended up going back there two more times after that, but I remember this one being the fun one! I mean, it made me a bit more apprehensive about meeting people, and I don’t know how long those guys went to jail, but shit happens. Their plan didn’t work out the way they thought, but they almost did it and it was a pretty genius plan! I don’t think they would have killed us, but you never know. We can laugh about it now, but I wasn’t laughing then!
Go Ahead And Die's new self-titled album is out now via Nuclear Blast.
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