When a scraggly band of folk musicians arrived to tour the UK, residents of a small Welsh town were enamored with the group’s foot-stomping shows of traditional sea shanties. Then they learned that the band’s leader, known as the Captain, ruled with an iron fist.
Issue no. 172, “Master and Commander,” is now live:
The rules in the contract the musicians had signed stated that they could not “take food from the refrigerator outside of the assigned meal times.” As a result, the musicians were constantly hungry. Ordóñez told me that there were times he begged strangers for food. Several musicians fell ill from the exhausting performance schedule. Ordóñez recalled playing a show in Cardiff with a fever of 105 degrees. “It was as if they were testing how far we could go, constantly pushing the limits of the human body,” he said.














