In the early 1970’s I would sometimes frequent
the Yate’s wine lodge in Corporation St.
Its major attraction was it’s bohemian atmosphere and it’s sweet australian
white wine. I don’t recall what they
charged, but being an innocent abroad, my experience was that I could get
pretty drunk on four schooners. Once its
effect took hold, my tongue would start to fly and my inhibitions somewhat
loosened.
I often drank in the company of Roberto a
Brazilian musician who seemed a reliable sort of guy. I could rely on him never to refuse the offer
of a schooner, but then be even more assiduous in disappearing when it was his
round. Yet Roberto had a Latin charm about
him that made you overlook his shortcomings. He was a mass of dark curls and
his face had a vulpine angularity that made it
difficult to read. He gigged a lot and was able to drop names from
the music scene with ease.
‘ Lennon’s been giving bread to the IRA” he
offered on a Saturday just before closing time.
I was on my 4th australian.
“don’t be ridiculous Lenin’s been dead for
50 years”
“No’ he grimaced, “ John Lennon you know the Beatles”
“ O “ I scratched my head and grasped for an
angle to attack this unusual nugget of information….. “ but when you talk about destruction, don’t you know
that you can count me out”
“what”?
I swayed as
the latest wave of aussie amber took hold. I had just recently read an article
on Antonio Gramsci and felt a moment of dialectic insight approaching.
“ 1968 was a
real moment Roberto, when things could have changed and the fucking Beatles
gave us transcendental meditation and fucked off to Rishikesh !!!
I just about
avoided puking as Roberto offered another nugget
“ Well it’s
what I heard on the street man, maybe he’s stopped meditating”. The barman
shouted last orders and Roberto started for the door, he hesitated and turned
towards me.
“Hey why
doncha come back to my pad and I got sumptin’ to show you.”
Roberto lived
in Balsall Heath with his girlfriend Siobhan.
I had known Siobhan slightly when we had been pupils at the city’s
catholic grammar schools. St Paul’s, the girls school, had been extremely disappointed
with Siobhan as she had dropped out before A levels, after being groomed for
Oxbridge. She had met Roberto in ‘67 at
a Brazilian music event at the Arts Lab in Drury Lane, they had then gone on to
a Pink Floyd gig at the Round House, taken LSD together and emerged as a Mr.
and Mrs. HippyDippy.
They couldn’t
afford to live in Birmingham’s hippy central, Moseley, so they were renting two
rooms in a house owned by a Pakistani family, who seemed to tolerate the smell
of weed that hung around the pair, and whose overworked mom Mrs. Ahmed brought
them the occasional pot of basmati rice and a few chapattis. Siobhan worked at the dole office in Moseley
where she was in charge of the N.F.A.. section. No Fixed Abode claimants were a
rum bunch of the genuinely desperate, alcoholics and junkies, and the flotsam
and jetsam of hippy street life.
Siobhan
handled her charges with a mixture of benign tolerance and official
chivvying. NFA claimants were obliged to
sign on every day, in an attempt to harass them into a more ordered life and
also to keep tabs on them. Siobhan would sit a the counter with her tray of
claims and when things went slack she sneaked a look at Roberto’s copy of “On
the road” or Ginsberg’s “Howl”
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,”
Ginsberg never dropped in on Roberto and Siobhan or Moseley’s
itinerant caravanserai, but sometimes Siobhan felt his aura at the back of the
hall.
As Roberto and I made our way across the dark city
streets we chatted about his life. He hadn’t escaped from some Rio favela, but
was the only son of a wealthy doctor who had encouraged his son’s gift for the
guitar. He had paid for Roberto to study
classical guitar at the Paris conservatoire.
Roberto had been a model student for a while then with
the upheavals of May June 68, Roberto had become involved with a group of
anarchists, and had been forced to leave Paris at short notice. I had never pressed him on the exact details
of his departure and he had never volunteered any.
“ It was a very exciting, but difficult time man, it
really messed with my head, a bad,bad karma” was the closest he came to revelation.
As we entered, Siobhan was sitting cross-legged on a
hand knitted rug, at the apex of a triangle. Two Bang Olufson beovox speakers
faced her like an altarpiece, in what struck me as a gesture to her Catholic
upbringing. A joss stick smoldered
slowly, in an earthen jar. The low Celtic
swirl of the Incredible String Band leaked from the stereo and the cover of the
“Hangman’s Beautiful daughter” lay at her side, its innocent photo of the band
and assorted offspring, looking like a cross between a vicarage garden party
and an amateur production of the Wizard of Oz.
As she resumed her trance, Roberto gestured me towards
the bedroom. In the corner next to an
old distressed welsh dresser stood a guitar, the wooden body and distinctive
“horn” shape at the middle marked even to my untutored eyes as a fender
“strat”.
We sat in two odd dining chairs under the big bay
window, and as a delicate moonlight filtered through the Balsall Heath gloom, he told me how he had come by it.
“ You know I was at the Isle of White festival a
couple of years ago’
I nodded in agreement although it was the first time
he had mentioned it to me. Perhaps it
was common knowledge on the street and he thought the fact must have percolated
even as far as my unhip brain.
“ Well you know that Dylan was two hours late coming
on stage”
again I nodded to humour him; I’d given up on all
things Dylan when he went in to hiding, just as the struggle intensified.
“Well”
Roberto pulled forward in his chair and motioned me
closer.
“ He wasn’t late ‘caus of nerves or stage fright,
that’s just the line his people put out”
his voice grew quieter
“ You know the famous cream suit “
Dylan’s garb and appearance had made all the
headlines. Gone was the post apocalyptic bouffant hair of Blonde on Blonde, and in its place a
cherubic, shorn, bespectacled choirboy had appeared.
“ Well at a pre performance walk-about that cream suit
had been splattered with mud by Jane Fonda.”
My eyes went from F32 to F5.6 in a heartbeat, this was
a revelation.
‘She walked straight up to him and shouted that he had
sold out the ‘movement’, told him he was headed straight to hell along with Nixon
and Kissinger.’
The account tallied with what I had read about Hanoi
Jane. I nodded for Roberto to go on.
‘dylan was well freaked out man, and refused to go on
without a clean suit, he kept shouting that he was clean, he was clean, and stuff like my burden is heavy
my dreams are beyond control. Yeah, and this is where it gets deep man. I 'd gone to the festival on my
motorbike and the organizer, a guy called Ray had seen me on it ‘
I knew Roberto
was a biker, he owned a vintage 1939 Norton 500 simply because it was the model
Che Guevara had ridden across South America.
He went on
‘ Ray asked me
to take him into Cowes on the back of my bike, man. He said he knew the manager
at the Villa Rothsay and he could get the suit cleaned there. I got him to the hotel in 23 minutes by
jumping every red light and doing a ton. When we got back to the festival. Dylan
couldn’t have been more grateful. He grasped my hand man and told me I had saved him’
Roberto
stopped and fixed me with his inscrutable foxlike stare.
‘Dylan went
over to his caravan and came back with this’
Roberto
touched the fender as if he was indicating his mother’s ashes.
‘ he
said,…… Bob... said... this guitar was real
important to me man
I want you to
have it’
We both sat
back in our chairs and Roberto glowed with triumph. Was I missing something I thought? My
quizzical look clearly upset Roberto.
‘ You don’t
get it do you man. You just don’t get it.
You don’t understand what this is’
He took the
strat in his hand
‘Man this is
the Turin shroud of Rock. 1965, man, Newport Dylan goes electric, Pete Seeger goes nuts……don’t you see?
After a pause
for me to consider, Roberto put his hand on my arm
‘Listen man
things are getting real heavy between me and my old lady. You know what I mean
man, she dreaming about tying knots. I
just gotta split ya know. I need some wind under my wings man. I aint cut out
for this life.’ His voice pleaded ‘ £500 its yours man.'
So Roberto was
planning to leave Siobham and he saw me as his ticket out.
‘ £500’s a big
slice of potato man let me think about it’
As I left
Siobhan held up a palm to say goodbye, and then most curiously she made the
sign of the cross in my direction.
The Incredible
String Band warbled on.
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