A Tale of Three Cities: Part 2

“We’ll always have Paris.”  Humphrey Bogart’s immortal line will resonate with anyone recollecting a visit to the French capital.  It was some years after 1969 that I began to recite by heart chunks of dialogue from Casablanca.  Buying a CD of the soundtrack helped.  Bogart continues: “If we didn’t have, we lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.”  Just as I have never been to Marrakesh, I have never been to Casablanca either, but writing the first part of ‘A Tale of Three Cities’ helped even more.  

Experiences make up life as do our memories of them.  One of the premises for this blog is how music can instantly conjure up a memory.  The recordings mentioned in Part 1 have always instantly brought back Paris ’69 to me.  Pulling them off the shelves and playing them again helped me write the blog; writing the blog enabled me to mentally access even more of the detail of those events. 

By 1969, the flower power promise of the hippy movement was already fading.  Dope soaked dreams of peace and love were drowning as the drugs got harder and the slogans of the counter-culture became overtly politicised.  Music was already looking back with misty-eyed nostalgia – ‘Summer ‘67’ from Family Entertainment being but one example.  As ‘the troubles’ flared in Ulster, the need was felt in Britain – as articulated by John and Yoko - to ‘Give Peace a Chance’ which localised the movement that had started in the States with protests against the Vietnam War.  Ironically, perhaps inevitably, such protests led to violence.  The Stones’ ‘Street Fighting Man’, a reflection on the student riots of the previous year, was a favourite on the road that summer.

Against this backdrop, we pick up the story at the entry ramp to the Autoroute du Nord.  My destination, Antwerp, is an inland port connected to the North Sea by a series of waterways.  It is no more than a couple of hundred miles from Paris and this time the hitchhiking was easy.  Antwerp wasn’t a city that was prominently located on the 1969 map of student hang outs, nor was its allure cultural; neither the Rubens House nor the magnificent Steen – and I do like a castle – drew me there.  It was a girl I had met ten days or so earlier in one of the hostels along the Rhine.  We had spent the hours of a fine summer’s evening talking and getting to know each other and it all seemed to be leading somewhere.  At the end of a conversation in which we had shared much about each other, we also exchanged addresses.  Miriam was travelling with a friend and was on her way home.  She suggested that, if I was passing through Belgium, I might like to visit her in Antwerp where she would happily put me up for a few days.  

Building up the invitation in my mind, I imagined that maybe it could amount to something more than it probably would.  I believed then, and still do, that if it wasn’t for life’s ‘maybes’ there would never be any ‘actuals’.  Up until that time, my experience of relationships with girls had been mainly about ‘maybe nots’ and ‘actually noes’.  So it was, some hours after leaving Paris, I found myself outside a house in a narrow lane that was not too far from the centre of Antwerp.  There was no answer to the bell or to my knocking – and subsequent pounding.  The front door was bolted, the windows locked, the curtains drawn and the lawn needing cutting.  Feeling like Le Grand Meaulnes in his quest for the elusive Yvonne de Gallais, I stuck a note through the letter box.  In the vain hope that maybe Miriam would be back later that day – or even the next – I repaired to the local youth hostel.  By the time I got there I was already working hard on Plan B.

When you are travelling alone there is always a Plan B, often a Plan C and even a Plan D not far from the front of your mind.  Shrugging off the what-might-have-been but which clearly never-was-going-to-be with the elusive Miriam, Plan B was Amsterdam.  Deciding that Antwerp itself was worth a look – and still thinking that Miriam might just turn up – I spent the next day checking out the Rubens House and the Steen and even the Modern Art Museum that had a memorable collection of Ensors on display.  That evening, over a plate of youth hostel meat and two veg, I met my companion for the next few days, Larry, a tall, fair-headed nineteen-year-old American from Chicago.

Larry was nearing the end of a three month trip around Europe.  He shared my passion for music.  We had both heard about Amsterdam’s vibrant youth scene and its apparent multitude of clubs that included the fabled Paradiso.  After three months, Larry had also learned much about life on the road and how to make his five dollar a day budget stretch beyond what I perceived to be its relatively generous limits.  Amsterdam would be his last stop before flying home from London where he correctly predicted I would offer him space for his sleeping bag for a night or two.

It was while on our way to Amsterdam that we met a guy of indeterminate Scandinavian origin who had – or at least claimed he had – actually been at Woodstock a couple of weeks earlier.  Regaling us with descriptions of three days of mud and mayhem and music by The Who, Sly and the Family Stone and Jimi Hendrix, he also painted a florid picture of the Amsterdam scene.  The image of groups of stoned hippies playing guitars and singing protest songs in the middle of the Dam Square turned out to be accurate enough.  He didn’t explain that there was a sleazy undercurrent to the scene that made it all rather unpleasant.  

As much as Paris had provided me with a personal awakening, the revelations of Amsterdam in ’69 underlined the fact that on top of every silver lining there was a cloud.  The city was intriguing enough, but its mainstream culture escaped my attention.  The milieu that Larry and I explored made Amsterdam somewhere I was happy to leave as soon as I had seen enough to satisfy my curiosity.  One furtive walk along the street where the admittedly attractive working girls sat in the windows was plenty.  The cafés selling legal dope were of no interest and too many of the travelling youth and Vietnam draft dodgers with whom we came into contact were too stoned to make any sense.  Somewhere the spirit encapsulated by John and Yoko’s bed-in of a few months earlier at the Amsterdam Hilton, recounted in the Beatles’ 'Ballad of John and Yoko’, had evanesced.

We never made it to the Paradiso, nor even to the next place on the list which I think was called the Melkveg.  We did make it to one pretty unprepossessing hole in the ground that churned out rock music at a decibel level that was close to the threshold of pain.  The name of it escapes me – that is if it had one.  I remember tracks from The Doors' first couple of albums, tracks that I liked but which, in their doomy feel, reflected the darker side of that first Amsterdam experience – ‘Strange Days’, ‘When the Music’s Over’ and 'The End’.  The Grateful Dead’s then most recent release, ‘Aoxomoxoa’, was also on the playlist.  It would be another year or so before I embraced the Dead but that album does include the first recordings of classics such as ‘St Stephen’ and ‘China Cat Sunflower’.

I left Larry to it while I headed back to London where he came to stay a few days later.  Following his return to the States, I received a thank you scrawled on the back of a postcard depicting Downtown Chicago.  My response occasioned no reply.  That Christmas I received an apologetic note from the elusive Miriam.  It accompanied a seed cake in a cardboard package that somehow survived the combined vagaries of the Belgian and British postal services.  I never received a reply to my thank you note back to her.

‘Casablanca’ soundtrack is a CD released in 1997 by Sony.  ‘Family Entertainment’ by Family is a vinyl album released in 1969 on the Reprise label.  ‘Give Peace a Chance’ by the Plastic Ono Band is included on the 1997 Parlophone CD ‘Lennon Legend: the Very Best of John Lennon’.  ‘Street Fighting Man’ as with ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ mentioned in Part 1 of this blog was originally on the Stones’ ‘Beggars’ Banquet’ and is also included in ‘The London Years' the 3CD set released by ABCKO in 1989.  ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’ by The Beatles was originally a single released in 1969 and is included on ’67-70’ also known as the ‘Blue Album’, a double vinyl set released by Apple in 1973.  ‘The Doors’ that band’s eponymous first album and ‘Strange Days’ are both on vinyl and were both released by Elektra in 1967.  The Grateful Dead’s ‘Aoxomoxoa’ is on vinyl and was released by Warner Brothers in 1969.