Hollerado Tour China, Meet Hippies, Film Travel TV Pilot

Forget the Great Wall and the Yangtze River. When small-town Ontario-born indie rockers Hollerado toured China earlier this year, the trip's most unexpected highlight was the hour-long massage session administered to the band by visually-impaired masters of the art.

"It was the best massage I ever had in my life, and it cost, like, five dollars," enthuses Menno Versteeg, singer and guitarist of the hard-working band headlining the Arts&Crafts & Friends CMJ showcase in New York, Thursday, Oct 22. "I had an itch on my back at one point, and [the almost-blind masseuse] just reached out and scratched it without me saying anything! I told the guys after and didn't expect them to believe me, but they were all like, 'Yeah, it happened to me too!"

Handpicked this past summer by Jack White to open for the Dead Weather in Toronto, Hollerado were introduced to these magical caresses by China's little-known hippies. Seriously.

"We stayed at a hippie commune -- it was best food I ever had in my life -- and hippies usually know where the good massages are in any city," Versteeg says. And how did they meet these hippies? "We had a Chinese tour manager who had heard of this hippie house about an hour outside Cheng Du, where lots of people make their living growing flowers and selling them at markets. As we were driving around, we saw this white dude with dreads on a bicycle and he took us to the hippie house."

Their concerts went well, too. "They're just so hungry for rock music in China," says Versteeg, comparing the taboo of rocking out in older parts of the country to what North America might have been like during the 1950s. "Some kids at the shows had to tell their parents they were going to a friend's birthday -- no mention of a rock show."

Their China trip was recorded for posterity and for a TV pilot they call 'Holleradoland.' If picked up, it will also include their upcoming "Half World Tour!" through Argentina, Brazil and back to China where they're booked on the TV show 'Asia Uncut' (which has an audience of 120 million in 53 countries) and will be hawking a pair of new singles sung entirely in Mandarin.

"We're all big into traveling and experiencing new stuff and people, so we wanna make a show about our travels," says Versteeg, explaining the footage so far was shot by a former Iraq war correspondent who somehow ended up in China. "Our goal is to show people how you can travel the world on a budget. It's not about, 'Look at us, we're a band, look how famous we are and now we're gonna all argue.'"