Not only did Sam Baker survive a terrorist bomb blast at point-blank range, he managed to turn the near-death experience into a source for good. Here the Texan singer tells Nathan Bevan how he’s seizing his second chance to make a difference
THE first thing Sam Baker remembers about the terrorist bomb that exploded above his head was the force of the blast causing his lungs to collapse.
The then 32-year-old Texan singer-songwriter was travelling around Peru with friends in 1986 when they boarded the carriage of a train bound for Machu Pichu – a train on which the Sendero Luminoso or “Shining Path” Maoist group had, just minutes before, planted a red rucksack full of explosives.
“Sitting facing me was a German couple and, next to me, their young son who spoke pretty good English, so we talked a bit,” says Baker, now 57.
“Next thing I know they were all dead.”
Ears blown by the blast – lowering the volume of the chaos around him to a low, throbbing buzz – he recalls being bundled into a cab and raced to the nearby hospital, all the while bleeding heavily from a severed artery in his thigh and top half of his left arm which had been sheared clean off.
“I don’t think the bomb had been very well assembled because a lot of the explosion went straight up, but what I do know is that in one hundred of a second everything changed.”
Suffering a cranial bleed, a badly-mangled hand and brain damage, Baker adds that the Peruvian doctors performed a series of “minor miracles” to help keep him alive.
“They harvested some veins from my right leg and used that to prepare the mess that had been done to my left one,” he recalls.
“However, I did end up getting gangrene in it, but they did the best they could with what they had.”
And, once back in his native Austin, Baker began embarking on the long, slow journey of physical rehabilitation, but the mental scarring would take even longer to heal.
“I found I could remember things in the past but I just couldn’t recall certain words, and it’s the same now,” says Baker, who also suffers from permanent tinnitus as a result.
“For example, I’d see a chair but the name wouldn’t come. I’d end up having to say, ‘I need that thing for sitting on’.
“Also, for the longest time I’d force myself to move obsessively, be it changing my address or not being able to stand in one spot for too long in case there’d be another bomb planted somewhere,” he adds.
“If I walked by a shop window or a car I’d always make sure there was some sort of buttress between me and it in case it suddenly blew up and showered razor-sharp glass everywhere, cutting me to ribbons.
“I know it’s a crazy thing to say, but there’d just be this voice inside my head getting louder and louder until it was screaming, ‘Go, go, go, get away from here!’
“Thinking about it now, maybe I should have gone to some sort of therapist after what happened in Peru, someone who knew about post-traumatic stress, instead of me trying to deal with it all by myself.”
Perhaps even more extraordinary than Baker’s survival story though is the fact that he also managed to pull something positive from the twisted railway wreckage – a set of songs that helped him come to terms with what he’d gone through.
“Up until then I’d always written lyrics. but they’d been pretty bad ‘I love you , you love me’ type stuff,” he shrugs.
“But afterwards I started trying to write more narratively and attempting to explain what had happened and why. It was a real blurting out of a lot things I’d buried deep.”
The end result was Baker’s self-released 2004 debut album, Mercy, which ended up being championed by BBC Radio 2’s Bob Harris, the DJ having fallen in love with the singer’s drawled, half-spoken vocals and affecting tales of everyday love, loss and redemption.
Two more albums were to follow, but it’s the track Broken Fingers from 2007’s Pretty World which is perhaps the most autobiographical – Baker singing about the German boy whose life came to a violent end just inches from where he sat.
“Forget his face?” he sings in his distinct, halting tones, “Of course I don’t, it’s etched like a crystal vase.”
“For the longest time I’d freeze up every time I tried to think about that day, but for some reason I’ve quit trying to work out why it went down like it did,” says Baker.
“These days I see it as my job to tell as many people as I can about it, and in doing that it helps me too.
“A lot of people went all out to keep me going after that bomb blew up, but a lot of people like that little German kid never got the same chance.
“So while I can bitch and moan all day about how awful things can be, that boy is a constant tangible reminder in my head about how lucky I really am.
“I know I’ve got problems, we all do. But we need to start realising that we’re all connected as people rather than looking at our differences. That way we can start making this world a better place for all of us.”
Amazingly, Baker says he’s even forgiven those who planted the explosives on that packed train.
“I had to because for the longest time I carried that grudge around with me like a poison in my blood, it was toxic and it was slowly killing me.
“So yeah, I forgive them for what they did to me – but it’s not for me to forgive what they did to that child, that’s someone higher’s concern.
“I’ve just got to figure out a way to live with that fact.”
