John Lennon was a hustler.
Last night I went to dinner with Fernan. He’s a born storyteller. That’s the essence of life. Wanna get ahead? Become a raconteur. All the great performers are. Look at Bruce Springsteen, without the stories his shows wouldn’t be half as good, and he’d have a third the audience. Life is stories, please share them.
And after getting up too early to do a radio interview after staying up too late Andrew Loog Oldham came to my hotel for a day of adventure.
We hired a car to go downtown, but just as we started ascending the hill, we took a detour, we went on the “Mulholland Drive of Bogota.”
Angelenos will know. Actually, everybody in the world knows. Those photos, those scenes in movies where you can see the entire L.A. Basin laid out before you in lights, those are shot from Mulholland Drive, the winding street that separates L.A. from the Valley. Atop a ridge of mountains.
You’re cruising along in your tiny machine, all the taxis/hired cars in Bogota are puny, if you’ve got any luggage, forget it, and on the left is the entire city, laid out like a painting, and on the right there’s a hill whereupon the wealthy reside and send their children to school. But if you keep driving, you go through a toll and it’s like you’re in Switzerland, giant swaths of green climbing mountains, it’s exquisitely beautiful and high in the sky, the air is clear and clean and you feel fully alive.
Eventually we made our way down one of the steepest streets I’ve ever driven on to the Police Museum. We started out alone. Eventually four other people joined our group. How did they all find out? The Lonely Planet! Once upon a time the Lonely Planet was a guidebook competing with Arthur Frommer not so successfully. It was for the adventurous traveler, which is not the majority. But the Web flattens distribution. Now everybody knows. The Lonely Planet is just as powerful as any other tour guide. The word is out. The same way it is for the band that makes phenomenal music that doesn’t sign to the major label but does it all by itself.
And the guide was an eighteen year old spending his year of compulsory military service with the police. He said everybody had to do this, Andrew confided in me that this was not true. That you could buy your way out.
And while you’re pondering that I’ll tell you we saw some of the history of Colombia and the police force and then they took us into the drug war rooms.
Wow.
There’s the mobile phone upon which Pablo Escobar made his last call. The roof tile his head lay upon after he was killed. The Harley of his cousin. Isn’t it funny that the musical acts of the nineties have been completely forgotten, but the legend of Pablo Escobar lives on. Because he lived outside the law, like the acts of the sixties, if only in their minds. When everybody becomes complicit, they’re no longer heroes.
And from there a cab ride all the way across town that cost us…four dollars. Huh?
But I will tell you the cab had no seatbelts. It was frightening. How safe are you really? I had a friend who got broadsided in a limo, she hurt for a year, you are not invulnerable just because someone else is driving.
And in between hearing about Bogota, I heard about the Stones. The Immediate acts.
Andrew says unlike so many performers, the Stones were not boys, but men. It made all the difference. So many of today’s acts are still children. Calling Michael Jackson!
Andrew’s waxing rhapsodic about the recording of “Paint It Black.” Tells me that not long thereafter, Brian Jones no longer wanted to play the guitar, but he got excited about adding new instruments. Tell him you wanted to add a timbale and he’d go home and learn it and come back and nail it.
As for “Satisfaction”… They cut it in Chicago and it didn’t work. But after redoing it, Andrew knew it was a smash.
And I heard about Charlie saying no to some of Keith’s rubbish. And about Bill Wyman leaving the band. And how Jimmy Miller added to Andrew’s royalties, since he had publishing rights into the seventies, the Allen Klein era.
How did Allen Klein end up owning the Stones’ masters?
I’ll let Andrew tell you. Not that he’s sure he knows. But Andrew was smart enough not to sell them to anybody else yet ultimately Klein ended up with them. Amazing.
And while we’re eating lunch thereafter, in a free-flowing conversation all your heroes of the sixties come up, not because Andrew’s boasting, but because he knows them.
The Beatles? Andrew was their press agent for a few months. And in the studio with the Stones he was frustrated about their lack of material and he stepped outside to clear his head and he ran into John and Paul who said they had just the song, “I Wanna Be Your Man”! They walked back to the studio, played it on guitar for the Stones, said they hadn’t worked out certain parts yet, but the truth was they’d already cut it with Ringo the week before.
They were hustlers.
Not that Brian Epstein didn’t help.
The Beatles, the Stones and the Who. No one else came close, they were the top tier, because they had the best management! The Kinks had second-rate management, a second-rate label and a bad publisher. It makes a difference!
But the truth is it all starts with the act. We traded McCartney stories. Paul never checked out, he knows everything about his career, the Eastmans helped, but Paul’s the driver.
As for Lennon… Andrew was always wary of being cut to ribbons in conversation, but it was John who’d confide how to score both cash and drugs making a record. He knew how the game worked.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. And it might be yesterday, but since the classic rock era no one’s come up with music that’s gonna last. You can wipe the nineties from the map. Most of the twenty first century too. Because the originals…were different as people. They were not replicating the formula, but creating it. And they saw music as a game they could conquer. They looked for the edge. And worked it.
And it’s so funny to be talking classic rock in Bogota. But we all come from somewhere. Andrew talked about being an exchange student in Stuttgart in 1957. Germany had lost the war but won the battle. They had the autobahn and skyscrapers, all that American money had rebuilt the country to a level higher than the U.K., the victors.
And music travels everywhere. But place is important. Roots. Where you come from.
We live in a subculture with its own history not covered in the mainstream press, but in conversation. Oh, the newspaper will tell you what went to number one, but it won’t tell you how the money was divided, the personalities of those who created the hits. You learn that stuff in stolen moments. It’s these gems we live for.
P.S. There’s no toilet paper! You get into the stall, you start to make and…you notice, there’s no Charmin! At first you’re flummoxed, rummaging through the cubicle. Then you panic. I thought it was only at Monserrate, where I paid to pee. I found some paper atop a ledge. On the way out I saw a package of…what looked like napkins, inside the booth of the woman who took the change. But it turns out it’s not only there. I’m at the Police Museum and… Let’s just say I ultimately found there was one main dispenser that you had to extract what you needed from on your way in. Who knew?
P.P.S. Pablo Escobar’s gun.
