Lean and Mean

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This isn’t an advertisement as much as a call to arms for anyone wanting to join my soul and groove army. I love my blog posts and have been a little reluctant to send them out in order not to bombard you and clutter your inbox. This time, if you’re still reading I want to share with you and yours a short story, a few pics and some long lost but not forgotten music that I hope to keep alive. That’s right, here comes the plug. Friday the 21st of July we will be continuing our monthly gigs at Foundry 616. Doors open at 6:45 so you may catch part of the sound check :) in the meantime time I hope you enjoy hearing about my musical origins and listening to a few vintage tracks. These songs will eventually lead you to my YouTube channel where I hope to gain your support as a subscriber. Remember, if you want to hear the real deal make it down to the Foundry 616 on Friday 21st of July. Click the poster for tix. Hope to see you there. One love y’all!

Lean and Mean

From the start the idea was to go over to Europe with the six of us, Oliver on percussion, Michael on guitar, Lorenzo as lead singer, Panama on drums, Joe on bass and me on Rhodes and vocals. It didn’t end up that way.

I started this campaign based on the trip I'd made the previous year, that was 1966. It was supposed to be quick, three months max and follow in Hendrix’s footsteps. It all started two years back when I'd snorted some speed for the first time, just the tiniest bit as I was deathly afraid of getting hooked on anything and slowly challenging my tolerance for excess, I was just getting used to smoking pot on a daily basis. While all my other high school buddies were drinking beer, I was learning to smoke cigarettes. I somehow always identified the inhalation of anything as superior to ingesting great volumes of liquid. It tasted nasty to me and made you act very uncool, which is something I was trying desperately to avoid.

On one of these warm California nights John, George, Bolwer and I were looking for some new adventure and this little tinfoil package of white powder was going to provide it. They were all acid veterans and white, so I was particularly careful not to let them lead me astray. I did trust John more than anyone, I suppose because he looked just like Jesus and was regarded as the most spiritual of all of us. He was aptly known as the “wizard of the attic”. And the wizard had this little tinfoil package. He promised it wasn't a trip and would just keep me awake to counteract the pot. At this point I'd never taken acid, that was way past my idea of acceptable drug use so when he offered a couple of small lines, I halved that and snorted it up. It was the tiniest of lines. I figured that minuscule amount couldn't do anything to anyone.

We took the car on a ride out to The Valley. The combination of the pot and the speed converted a routine run on the freeway out towards San Fernando into a classic road trip. We weren't going anywhere much physically but we were going to outer space mentally. Someone mentioned Europe and what a trip it would be to go there, check out the exotic babes and backpack around and meet all the European versions of us, “Hippies” after all we were everywhere, why limit ourselves to California when the world was our playground? This was a first for me. This was the single biggest idea I had ever had in my life. There is a world out there, something beyond Los Robles Street and Orange Grove. This was going to be my holy grail, my doorway to the future for the next 40 years.

Torremolinos was a small fishing village at the time. Much has been written about that unique picturesque little village. I remember a James Michener novel ages ago. I recall thinking this guy has never really been to Torremolinos. For me, Torremolinos was the ideal location for my second epiphany, sitting on the roof top of Tony the pusher’s house. Now I know after bagging out James Michener’s unrealistic depiction of Torremolinos you’re going to laugh in my face for calling one of my (characters) “Tony the pusher”, but I swear to God that was what everyone called him. He was from England and had been in Torremolinos dealing for some years. How he got away with this in Franco’s Spain is beyond me, but he managed. Sitting at his little villa on the roof top with him and his extraordinarily gorgeous Finish girlfriend and looking out over the Mediterranean, I was hit with this sledgehammer of an idea. Why not go back home start a band with all my boys, pack our bags and come to Europe and play, lean and mean, no wives, no babies, no chitlin circuit, just an endless stream of fat joints, voluptuous Scandinavian chicks and European fame and fortune. There was only the small matter of talking everyone into this big idea. But for now, it was time for reconnaissance. Checking out the new world was incredible.

I suppose one of the other colourful characters that needs mentioning is Jonny Cairo. Jonny was a gypsy, and like Tony the pusher, I had no idea if his name was real or not. Being from Granada I imagine it was something like Ignacio, but everyone had a sort of sixties alias that they used, and this was his. Jonny had a dog, a black lab affectionately called “black nigger motherfucker”, which they called “nigger” for short, that is, until I showed up; a 21-year-old, six foot five, black man from LA. Most of the expats that lived there were of English background, a few Swedes and one or two Americans including Ted Jones, a beat poet from New York. I remember there was only one bar girl that had the nerve to call that dog ‘nigger’ in front of me but when she saw the look on my face, she changed it to negro and tried to say it with this posh English accent, somehow assuming this was going to be less offensive. And what the fuck was I supposed to say, change the dog’s name? Jonny himself had no qualms about calling that dog ‘nigger’ with a short clipped Spanish accent. It was the strangest dilemma. For the most part, Jonny was cool and considered himself a tough half-mafia gypsy heartbreaker. He would have fit well with one of these modern reality shows, Survivor, or Man Versus Wild.

Jonny was many things, our personal Google, our dealer, and historian about the whole area of the south of Spain. Dark skinned, you could see the African in him and the mongrel mix of Moroccan and Spanish. He would sometimes take us into Málaga to score from his other gypsy brothers. They were the only Spaniards you could trust, otherwise you could score from the locals, but after you did, they would turn you in, keep the money, take back the dope and smoke it themselves, and you would wind up with six years and a day in Prison Provincial de Malaga, which is exactly where I was eventually going to end up.

The gypsy ghetto was near the harbour Calle Port of Malaga. This was a small shanty town of one room cement and clay composite structures with corrugated metal roofs and little dirt pathways that connected them together. The four of us went there that day. Jonny, George, Jonny, and I were all bunched up in this one room dwelling that I could barely stand in. We were all huddled in this little space with the dealer, his wife and baby, with only enough room for an old, beat-up dining room table and a few chairs. There was a hot plate in a small alcove that angled off to the left. That’s where his wife sat with their child. He popped out three or four Caramelos which were small, compressed blocks of “kieff” about the size of a cough drop. All you needed was a small wooden cutting board and a sharp knife.

Our host manicured the first couple of Caramelos and levelled off a good size bowl into one of the gypsy clay pipes. The pipe was about the size of a small tea pot. Instead of a handle there was a bamboo tube a few centimetres in diameter. There was a small red clay bowl half a fingernail deep where the top would have normally been. The pot was filled with water. This was no sophisticated filtering system. It was just there to cool the smoke as it glided past. Once it hit your lungs you could expect your head to be blown off. They could light it, and draw it all in one hit. These were the Mount Everests of hits. Your lungs could never survive this sort of attack, at least not the type of smoking we were used to. This dope was good. No hydro-caloric bullshit, it was pure old school organic weed from the Moroccan presses of Tangiers and Marrakech. They both insisted that we take what they were obviously telling us were man-sized hits. I must say for three Californian hippies we did our best. I remember after about two hits I noticed the walls were turning electric blue and all the flies in the place were paralysed, stuck to the walls as if it was fly paper, not moving a centimetre. That day, on our way out, we had to stop in his doorway and wait for a goat to give birth right there in the dirt. This was tantamount to walking on the moon. The afternoon sunshine filtering down through this narrow pathway, stoned out of my mind, I watched a goat give birth in a gypsy ghetto, Unreal!