Lean & Mean Prt 2
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The idea that this would be the place I’d end up never occurred to me when I was 21 stuck in Torremolinos Spain standing in front of Cafe Central watching the more fortunate toss the cheese, sausage and bread snacks impaled with a tooth pick and tossed to the ground to be eaten by the dogs of the rich and famous. In those days everyone hung out there which is where I met Knute, a guitar player that must have felt sorry for me because he asked if I wanted a café con leche. I was shocked a bit but also desperate so I accepted. He was Norwegian and spoke English well. He told me about the band he was playing in and how they’d just lost their organ player, that was my light bulb moment. I thought, I can play organ or at least I knew I could play keys. I had played piano from the age of 7 and Spencer Davis was all over the radio when I left the US in 66.
Stevie Winwood wasn’t singled out yet as the new blue eyed soul wonder that he would soon become but he was the voice of The Spencer Davis Group “Gimme Some Loving” and I loved that song. I knew I could sing it too although I had never sang and played that much. My lessons were always classical and I was almost always more interested in Big Joe Turner, Fats Domino and Little Richard. Chuck Barry wasn’t something I could imitate on piano but Big Joe Turner was a different he played horn and I always loved tenor or alto.
I remember AM radio was completely white washed. Pop radio was pumping out How Much Is That Doggie In The Window. I can hear it now.
My mother was always shouting at me to “turn that radio down” when Fats Domino came on, “Ain’t That Shame” was killing me. “The wind in the willow played loves sweet melody” and the sax section flipped a switch in my nervous system and created what my mom thought was surely going to be a monster. All those years taking piano lessons and instead of Moonlight Santa I was banging out bam pa ba bam pa ba bam pa ba Bopp pa on the upright in the living room. There must have been something going on when my music teacher Miss Asbury asked me to play a recital at the Lions Club. I think she wanted to show off her new young student to a bigger audience. The Robbins, a popular Doo-wap group at the time were headlining and I was the support. I was 11. I’d studied with her from the age of seven. I quit taking lessons when I was 16 to pursue a more popular pastime, cars, girls and pop music. Ironically, when I would eventually make up my mind to return to music the first person I turned to was Miss Asbury. I remember excitedly running up the stairs to her music studio after not having seen her for five years. Of course I’d grown from a cute kid to a 6 foot 4 young man. I thought she would be elated to see me especially because I wanted to continue my studies.
There’s a microsecond that most people don’t notice when they’re being evaluated, rightly or wrongly. The split second it takes for the first glance to recover and let the carefully curated personality take over. It must be the way women feel when they notice men staring at their chest before snapping back to eye contact. It’s a small, infinitesimal yet noticeable moment that every Black person feels when they encounter the judgment of white people assessing them.
The irony is that they don’t know you know they’ve just been caught.
It’s a painful lesson I would learn over and over again over the next 50 years. But not the “feel sorry for yourself” kind of pain. It’s an accumulation. Layer upon layer until it becomes a callus that you just get used to. It dulls some of the quality of your relationships, especially first encounters. You walk into every new room carrying that weight, and after a while, you don’t even notice you’re doing it.
So a lesson to those who think their motives or their prejudices go unnoticed: I can assure you that they do not.
It took me 26 years to figure out why on that night of all nights when Miss Asbury came to pick me up for the FIRST concert of my young life that my parents innocetly hugged me goodbye and sent me on my way. It was subtle, unspoken but it was there. No one talked about it at least in front of me unless I was riding with my dad and he would pull into his buddy EK’s gas station at closing time and they would curse in whispers and try to keep me from overhearing their conversation. Miss Asbury was from Austria and the Lions Club was a white fraternity that didn’t allow black people to attend their events. I was honestly too protected but at the same time never gave it a second thought. I was more interested in my model cars and banging on that piano at home.
Looking back I do remember my dad’s record collection. There was a record by JJ Johnson and Miles Davis I would hear my dad play but I had already been infected by the Rock n’ Roll pandemic so I had no patience for listening to things that I didn’t understand. But I was so curious about that music I would take my portable record player to bed with me and put that stylus on repeat. It would get to the end and you would hear that little scratching noise and then the arm would pick up and start all over again. It would play all night, looping through my dreams. It would take another 15 years for any of those notes I committed to my subconscious to erupt like a volcano in a little room in Torremolinos Spain, just big enough for the three of us Knut, Stig and me to sleep head to foot. Ole, Train and Wes Montgomery “Bumpin," changed my life profoundly and I suspect many others. It was dope!
Speaking of dope, I wasn’t an avid reader of books at anytime. I had a bad case of dyslexia and in those days it wasn’t a common disorder or lets say it was but no one recognised it as such. Needless to say I didn’t much like reading but the encyclopedia’s that my parents bought to try and encourage me to read were magic. They had pictures. I was drawn in by those images far more than I was by the words. Funny now that I’m now trying to paint pictures with words and music.
So where was I... right, dope.
I was never a big dopehead. Until later.
I watched all my friends in LA smoke weed for a year before I ever tried anything. My cousin was a failed pimp, ironically one of my male role models. He had the heart of a poet but could never bring himself to be ruthless enough to actually take the money his girls made. Trudy, one of his girls, got me high for the first time.
I remember it was nothing like anything I’d ever ingested other than nicotine, which he also encouraged. That, I later found out, was the source of most of my impending addictions.
When Trudy got me high for the first time, we went down to the local chain restaurant and laughed and ate pancakes for hours. It was awesome. So by the time I got to Spain, I was an avid dope smoker with a little acid under my belt.
Spain looked down on weed but sometimes looked the other way for no rhyme or reason. The rule was simple: never buy from Spaniards. After all, this was Franco’s Spain, and as an American you were powerless.
But of course, we didn’t know that.
Stig
We should have never gotten Stig high. Something we would later profoundly regret!
The trip down to Madrid from Paris and then on to Torremolinos was long. John, George and I had no idea what the distances were between countries and cities. After all, we were getting used to crossing borders, not state lines. In some cases, as in between France and Spain, the gauge of the tracks changed and we’d have to get off, change trains, and head off again after a lengthy customs check. I never found this as intrusive as the standard “four brothers in a car” stop that the LAPD would inflict on us.
The three of us commandeered a big first-class compartment and stretched out for the long ride. Armed with four or five ham and cheese baguettes and a Coke or two, we chatted and speculated about the place we were getting ready to live. As we were informed, it was THE place for the freaks (as we affectionately called ourselves), with plenty of expatriates and arts people as well as an abundance of good dope, which, by the way, we had gotten rid of before boarding. We were introduced to hash in Paris because weed was twice the price and the quality was five times worse. Hash was a refreshing change, and we were able to score courtesy of a homely but very cool French girl who spoke pretty good English.
When we reached the South coast of Spain, it was just past sunrise. When we got off the train, we headed to the center of town where the coastline was dotted with small fishing boats used by the villagers, with whitewashed houses bunched together and little alleyways connecting everything.
I guess you might call it love at first sight. Or as Eckhart would say, an awakening.
Standing on that beach in Torremolinos at sunrise, looking out at those multicolored fishing boats and whitewashed houses bunched together with their narrow alleyways connecting everything—something shifted. It was deep.
For the first time in my life, I realized the rest of the world actually existed. Not as some abstract concept or a picture in an encyclopedia, but real. Right there. Peaceful, vibrant, alive.
At that moment, there was no racism. No black people and white people. No CHP pulling over “four brothers in a car.” No LAPD. No sheriff. No USA.
Just the rest of the world as I’d never seen it.
I could breathe.
12 o’clock on the first Monday of every month it would return, a grim reminder that was more terrifying than the most grotesque of horror films, even scarier than that episode of You Asked for It with the clip of the Phantom of the Opera unveiling his facial burns up close and personal to the woman he was trying to seduce. I will admit to letting an involuntary fart when he yanked that mask off. It was terrifying. I slept with the covers over my head for the next ten years. I was eight. How I ever chose the piano as my instrument of choice after that is still a mystery to me.
But the first Monday of every month came to represent the true meaning of powerlessness. I waited for that sound to cut through the quiet morning to help me refocus on living in the moment. After all, why should I study when in an instant we could all be vaporized by the Russians in one swift attack? Why should I take a chance on not having fun instead of doing anything responsible, because my days were numbered? I had no power over my future because they said so, and I believed every word.
I listened for that air raid siren intently for years after, on the off chance that it would fall somewhere outside the allotted time, Monday, 12:00 PM. If it didn’t come, I was worried. If it did, it was slightly reassuring that it was a test. “This is just a test,” they would say, to scare the living shit out of you and ruin the outlook for the rest of your life.
In those days, I don’t think they looked at behavioral disorders in the same way. If you had an emotional problem and couldn’t cope, it was a nervous breakdown. If you couldn’t read properly or got confused in school, you were just slow or stupid. I was an image-oriented student. My spelling was crap, as were my history, grammar, and mathematical skills. I thought in images and was not, until much later in life, capable of assimilating information from just reading alone. I needed pictures to bring it to life for me.
This is why standing on the shore of the Mediterranean, looking out on the multicolored fishing boats and breathing in the fresh morning South coast Spanish air was so extraordinary. This was living history.
The Guardia ushered us into a small dingy office and motioned for us to sit on the dark-stained wooden bench. Then they called in a female guard to take Pam away. She had been unfortunate enough to be hanging out with Stig and Knut at the apartment. Pam was Suzy Creamcheese of Frank Zappa fame. Pam had a great smile and an over-the-top personality, was a couple of years older, and had run into me in the hallway of a hostel we were staying in briefly. She heard me singing in the hallway I think I knew she was there and sang a little louder to get her attention. She used to tell me I could sing, which I lapped up like a thirsty bear. She was beautiful and I was hoping to impress her one way or another, but it was headed toward sister ship, a condition younger boys who didn’t know anything often ended up with girls they desperately want to sleep with. Singing in the hallway was the best way I knew to get her attention.
The Guardia came to get me at the bar I was temporarily working in, in a little village outside Torremolinos called Carihuela. I was DJing there after my mom sent me 25 or 30 of the latest records from the States. I would sit back in a little corner and play Donovan, Revolver, some Beach Boys, Love, some Motown, and try to inject that bar with the sound of young America, or more to the point, the sound of lower Pasadena and North Hollywood. I would get two meals a day and drinks for my efforts.
I’d just arrived for my morning set and the Guardia Civil walked in. They are noted for their tricorn three-cornered hat. Those black tricorn hats with the flat backs ment they were willing to die with their backs against the wall. There was always a sort of shadow that followed them because of the Batman capes they wore. This was a serious look, and they kept their weapons underneath, not so well hidden when they opened them to retrieve some paperwork or a weapon. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but they had everyone’s full attention. Bill, the owner, called my name out loud.
For some reason I didn’t panic. I still think I had this feeling it was us and them. They were still cartoon-like characters in a little fantasy I was living in the middle of. They really didn’t seriously exist. Why would they want me anyway? I’d done nothing wrong.
So I was surprised to see that they had my passport. “Why, thank you very much,” I said as I reached for it. “Must have lost it or dropped it somewhere, and how did you find it?” I asked, reaching for it.
They were very polite—this was unexpected, as I was used to “Step out of the car, put your hands over your head.” They however didn’t give it to me and asked if I would follow them. This was a small worry to me because I was going to miss my first meal of the day, an epic inconvenience. We hopped into their jeep and headed off to the police office. The rest of the bar staff stared as I left, and I guess they were wondering what I’d gotten up to. There was nothing I could think of that would get me in serious trouble.
When we arrived at the police office, we had to go downstairs into a little cellar-like office, and there sitting on thermal wooden benches in the waiting area were Stig, Knut, Pam, and her latest boyfriend, John from London. They looked tired, and my first question was, “What the fuck are you doing here, and how did they get my passport?”
Their explanation went something like this: 5 o’clock in the morning, they were all gathered at Stig and Knut’s tiny one-room apartment, the apartment I had just moved out of for this very reason. I’d moved in with a steel band of musicians that played Jazz on steel drums. I was supposed to pick up my things including my passport the next day. Very bad timing if you can call it that. They continued to explain that there was a knock on the door, Stig apparently asked who it was, to which they answered, “Policia.” He didn’t attempt to clean off the table, which had copious amounts of hash from John and kief from Stig’s personal stash.
“Were you all too fucking high to put it somewhere?” I asked. “Or just plain crazy?”
Everyone tried to blame this on the other, and I was calculating in the background how this was going to affect me. They hadn’t found me there, and I didn’t have any dope on me at the moment. This was clearly a problem for everyone else in that room, and they needed someone on the outside to get instructions from the consulate, send home for money, and generally take care of business while they went to jail. That person was going to be me, so I thought.
Everyone sitting in that office was a victim of that purchase Stig made from the Spaniards!
We were soon on our way to two different tribunals, one without an interpreter, and one that explained and assured us this was nothing serious, which we believed. After all, we were AMERICANS and had really done nothing too wrong. In LA this would have been called “visiting” a law they reserved in 1967 for people who were in a room where marijuana was being smoked. Only the person they actually found with the dope on them got the more severe possession charge.
They had us sign what we believed were confessions to a less serious charge and were instructed to get in the small army truck to be taken to get something to eat and dropped off back in the village. After a hour journey and no food we saw two gigantic iorn gates close behind us. Welcome to Prison Provincial de Malaga.
If this chapter resonates, join me at Waterfront Café & General Store on May 3.
The album is included here, and Unheard subscribers get this album free now and first access to tickets before the public release. Limited seating, late afternoon light, jazz, class and soul. Hope to see you there🙏🏾