It was around five in the morning, a few days after Christmas. I was
sitting on the nubby couch of a rented Florida vacation home while my
children—who had not slept past four-forty-five for days—watched
whatever trash was on the Cartoon Network. My husband walked into the
living room, where we sat surrounded by off-brand Legos and splayed-out
mermaid dolls. He was clutching his phone, a grin on his bleary face. “I
just got a Ticketmaster alert for the Red Hot Chili Peppers! The tickets
are so cheap, I’m buying them.” I probably said, “neat,” or “great,” or
something else vaguely affirming. The subtext of my statement was mild
annoyance: both at the prospect of an extra night of solo childcare and
at the lameness of going to see a frat-rock band that peaked sometime in
the nineteen-nineties, who occasionally play live wearing socks on their
penises, and who have at least two songs with the word “Funky” in the
title.
I then forgot about this exchange, until a month later, when my husband
asked a friend to go with him to see the Peppers. His friend was
surprised that an arena-rock group would be playing such a small venue
in New York—B. B. King Blues Club & Grill—and that the tickets were only
around thirty-five dollars each. So he Googled it.
It turned out that my husband had spent about eighty dollars, including
surcharge and taxes, on two tickets to see the Red Hot Chilli Pipers,
the self-proclaimed “Most Famous Bagpipe Band on the
Planet.” When I found out, I laughed from the pit
of my soul. A few weeks after that, an Englishman named Duncan Robb
tweeted that he had made the same blunder—but Robb had planned an entire
romantic weekend getaway to Belfast around those alleged Chili Peppers
tickets, only to discover that he and his love were going to be
serenaded by bagpipe instead of by “Under the
Bridge.”
At this point, we decided to make salsa out of chili peppers. It would
be a lark to go to see a bagpipe band together on a random Tuesday in
March. As the parents of two children under the age of six, we rarely
get out of soft pants on weekday evenings. (When we met, in our early
twenties, I covered music for a living. To my husband’s chagrin,
however, I basically stopped going to see live music when I hit thirty,
not just because of the kids but also because I hate standing for
prolonged periods of time.) Before we went, I wanted to know a little
more about what we were getting into. So I called Kevin MacDonald, a
founding member of the Red Hot Chilli Pipers, who has been playing
covers of iconic songs such as “Don’t Stop Believing” and “We Will Rock
You” with the band since late 2002. (A bagpipe can play only nine notes,
which puts a limit on the songs the group can arrange.) The band got
its name not because it plays Peppers covers but because a girlfriend of
one of the founding members, Stuart Cassells, mistakenly filed a Red Hot
Chili Peppers CD with his traditional bagpipe albums because she misread
“Peppers” as “Pipers.”
In 2007, the group appeared on a BBC reality show called “When Will I Be
Famous?,” won ten thousand pounds, and blew up. There are now forty or
fifty bagpipers in the group’s rotation, because the Pipers played a
hundred and eighty-seven shows worldwide last year, some of them at
corporate events. (According to MacDonald, Dell once flew the Pipers all
the way from Scotland to Las Vegas for a four-minute performance.)
MacDonald, who is forty, no longer performs in all the shows—he’s a
certified C.P.A., and he does the group’s books.
I asked MacDonald how many people make the same mistake my husband and
Duncan Robb made. “It doesn’t happen that often,” he said. “The reason
being that our price point for a ticket is nowhere near the price point
for a Peppers ticket. No offense, but if you’re daft enough to think you
can get a Peppers ticket for forty dollars …” In the recording of our
interview, the rest of his sentence is drowned out by my laughter. (I
reached out to the actual Red Hot Chili Peppers for comment, but, as of
this writing, no one had got back to me—not even Flea.) “The overriding
thing is that you might come being very skeptical,
you will leave with a smile on your face, and had two hours of
disbelieving fun,” MacDonald said.
Despite MacDonald’s assurances, on our way to the concert on Tuesday
night I still wondered aloud what percentage of attendees would be
there on purpose. This turned out to be snobbery—B. B. King’s was
brimming with genuine fans. I saw at least three people wearing Chilli
Pipers T-shirts, several in traditional kilts, and half the crowd was in
some kind of tartan. David Grooms, who came to New York from Washington,
D.C., just to see the Pipers, said that he got into bagpipe music when
he was in the Marine Corps Silent Drill Platoon. “My wife and I were
just in Scotland recently and saw these guys on a couple different DVDs,
and thought, Yep, this has gotta happen, so here I am,” he told me.
The Pipers, in the opposite of a rock-star move, took the stage at 7:59
for an 8 P.M. show time. The group was made up of three pipers, two
guitarists, a drummer, a bongo player, and a singer. Their repertoire
included the Who’s “Baba O’Riley” and Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls.”
There was a surprisingly moving rendition of “Amazing Grace.” While I
can’t say that I would choose to listen to bagpipes on the regular,
there was something life-affirming about the wholesome joy surrounding
us.
We all have our breaking points, though, and, when the Pipers began a
cover of Coldplay’s “Fix You,” we took our leave. On the way home, my
husband persuaded me to start going to concerts again. If we’d had a
reasonably good time accidentally seeing a novelty bagpipe band, it
seemed worth it to see the Breeders or Spoon or some other old-people
indie rock that I actually liked, even if it meant standing up after
dark. Our commitment to music, and to each other, was reaffirmed, all
thanks to a sleepless blunder and the drone of bagpipes.
Sourse: newyorker.com
