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| From | moteeko@telerama.com |
| Subject | Cyinics Lead Singer Injured In Spain |
| Date | Mon, 27 Jan 2003 09:34:30 -0500 (EST) |
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Cynics' Spain tour ends with injury to lead singer
Monday, January 27, 2003
By Ed Masley, Post-Gazette Pop Music Critic
The Cynics were nearing the end of a sold-out tour
of Spain last week when lead singer Michael
Kastelic was hospitalized with a torn urethra
after being pulled off stage.
He's still in Spain recovering, but says he's "on
the mend" and may be back in Pittsburgh as early
as Wednesday.
Speaking by phone
from a hospital bed in Madrid, the singer
recounted the story that left him stranded in
Madrid, just like the title of the Cynics' live
recording from one their earlier tours of Spain.
"It was the second
show in Madrid," he says, "and I wish I could say
it was some dramatic thing where I was jumping
off the stage or something, but actually, I was
just kind of standing there. It was near the last
song, on "Love Me Then Go Away," and someone
was grabbing my leg like they wanted me to jump
into the audience, which I probably brought on
myself because I did jump into the audience at the
previous show in Madrid, the week before. So they
were waiting for me to do it again. But I didn't
want to because I knew I would get torn to pieces
down there. It was a pretty far drop. So I tried to
keep one of my legs on the stage to not fall and I
ended up just doing a wishbone split with the edge
of the stage, the very corner of it, landing right
on my unmentionables. So it sort of sliced the
urethra."
He kept singing,
though, and as the song went on, he started
thinking the fall had made him wet his pants. "I
kept looking down and this wet stain was forming
there," he says. "And after we ended the song, I
ran off to the side and stuck my hand down there
and pulled it out and it was just covered in blood.
So then I pulled my pants down and there was just
blood shooting out."
They stopped the show,
and Kastelic was escorted outside. "Thank God," he
says, "this is the first time we had a road manager
who had a clue. He grabbed me and ran me outside
the club, put some newspapers down on his van
seat and had me sit there while they were trying
to get an ambulance. And of course, since
everything here takes a million years, they
couldn't get an ambulance fast enough, so he
grabbed a cab driver who was actually at the show
and, I think, pretty drunk. But he was just a fan
and he offered. His cab was right there."
That got him to the
hospital, but at that point, his troubles were only
beginning. "I'm lying on this freezing cold metal
table bleeding to death, I think," he says. "I told
Pepe, our promoter, 'I'm gonna die in Madrid. I'm
bleeding to death. I'm bleeding to death.' They
didn't even know what to do at the hospital. They
said they didn't have a urologist there, at least not
in the emergency room. So they had to take me
from there in an ambulance, with no suspension
at all, so I'm bouncing around in this little thing
in the back of this rickety ... I remember my dad
and uncle used to call them meat wagons. So I'm
here in this meat wagon still saying 'I'm gonna
die. I'm gonna die, Pepe.' And at this point, he's
looking at me saying 'No you're not,' but I can see
in his eyes, he's thinking 'Maybe he is gonna die.'
"
He spent the next 12
hours in a second emergency room. "They had to
put some tube in my bladder and catheterize me
and blood was still coming out," he says. "So I
spent most of the night there on this hard metal
table, and then they didn't have a room for me, so
they just wheeled me out into this cold hallway
full of gurneys and moaning, groaning dying
people and I spent the rest of the morning there."
He eventually wound
up in a room for six.
"With no one under 80," he says. "The oldest was
94. All dying. And all but one in diapers, which
needed to be changed on a regular basis. So I was
lying there for almost a week surrounded by
diaper changing, standing enemas, smells and
sights no man should see or smell or experience."
He laughs as he tells
the story, but he wasn't laughing all the time.
"Thank God," he says, "my parents were in touch
with the embassy or something and got me
transferred to this place across the street which
is total rock star treatment. It's like a four-star
hotel. They come and bathe you and everything. So
I've been here for, like, the last four or five
days."
At the other hospital,
he says, "I saw eight different people in eight
different days. And the male interns, even though
they probably knew it wasn't something that
serious and you weren't gonna die from it, they
couldn't even look at it without getting sick. So I
thought I was dying because they would look at it
and they would just look horrified. And I thought,
'Oh my God! What is this?' "
Aside from the pain
and the fear of dying, the worst part was lying
there thinking about how well he'd been behaving
on the tour. "I wasn't going out or having fun at all
except for the shows," he says. "And every time
we weren't playing, I would stay in the hotel room
and sleep. I wasn't drinking. I would wear a mask
over my face in the van so I wouldn't catch a cold.
I wanted to do the best shows we could possibly do,
and they were this time. Everyone said it was the
best they'd ever seen us. And then this has to
happen. So that's what you get. I try to be good."
The doctors removed
all the tubes from his body yesterday, and a full
recovery is expected. As for the Cynics and what
this means for them, the singer says he hopes to
be on stage again by late spring, early summer.
After all, he's got a Spanish tour to finish.
"The promoter here,
Pepe, couldn't be happier," he says, with a laugh.
"He said it's the best publicity in the world. He
can't wait for us to come back over. It was on the
radio and on the TV. It's, like, big news. He said,
'This is great. It's a great story. We're putting
that it happened to you and then you continued to
play four songs' ... and all this [nonsense]. 'It's
great publicity,' he says. But I could do without
that kind of publicity."
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