Grumpy Old Rock Star: and Other Wondrous Stories (22 page)

Some months later, as the plane touched down in Cuba, I was like a little boy in a sweet shop, literally salivating at the prospect of hearing all this amazing music. I was there for ten days and
went to forty-one concerts. Some of these concerts had been specially arranged for us to see, which was wonderful; others were just tiny local venues that we found and joined in. The music that I heard in those ten days . . . wow. Some of the players were indescribably good. I saw the best acoustic guitar player I have ever had the pleasure to witness, for example . . . brilliant.

The people were simply fabulous and nothing was too much trouble for them: we were treated magnificently. The most high-profile events were the two shows we were doing at the Karl Marx Theatre, which holds 6,000 people, and an open-air gig in Havana itself. It was quite daunting in a way, because although we had our own gear we had no idea what sort of PAs or house equipment we might find. Yet we were delighted to find everything was first class: my crew were ecstatic because they were given absolutely super stuff to work with.

Of course, this was Cuba, so it wasn’t all plain sailing. A lovely lady called Yvette and a gentleman called Harrison – both very senior government officials – were assigned to ‘accompany’ us everywhere, just like in Poland, Moscow and in Paraguay; pretty soon I realised that they were actually just keeping an eye on my missus Rachel and me. At first Yvette and Harrison were a little apprehensive, but within a couple of days it obviously became clear that all our entourage were there because we wanted to sample Cuban culture and life, that our motives were pure. Then they relaxed and we got on famously.

One night Yvette came to our hotel and said, ‘Rick, Fidel Castro is speaking tonight and you and Rachel will be our special guests.’ We headed off to the Karl Marx Theatre and sat down in the front row of the balcony among thousands of people. It was exactly like you’d imagine, a real-life snippet from a movie: Castro walked onstage, flanked by rows of military men, war heroes and senior soldiers everywhere. The atmosphere was absolutely electric as Castro rose to approach the microphone.

He spoke for four hours.

With no notes.

Yvette translated for Rachel and myself as he spoke. He was impassioned, intellectual, compelling – it was a truly amazing experience. Interestingly, it wasn’t what I thought I was going to hear, either. It wasn’t some huge anti-Western rhetoric or rant. It was all about how we need to look after the world and how we need to understand how we are wasting energy and wasting food and, understandably, he asked why the American government didn’t seem to be aware of this. He even said he thought American people understood the problem: that Cuba liked American people, but the US government was a different matter.

You would think that four hours of a speech would be boring, tiring, dull, but I have to tell you that it was incredible.

But it was about to get far more incredible.

After Castro finished, the people were chanting his name and there was still a phenomenal atmosphere in the huge theatre, almost like that of a rock concert which has the audience baying for more. Yvette was approached by some government officials and then she turned to talk to me.

‘Fidel would like to meet you, Rick.’

We were then escorted down a side aisle in the opposite direction to the now-departing audience, and through a door which led into the back of the venue. It was interesting to note that there was little or no security. No armed guards or anything like that. I naturally thought I’d just line up with several hundred other people, shake Castro’s hand as he walked past and, if I was lucky, say ‘Hello.’

How wrong could I be? There was just myself and Rachel, my tour manager Paul Silveira and Riki Braga. We spoke for almost forty minutes, face to face, through his translator.

I will always remember him looking me straight in the eye while the translator said, ‘Fidel knows you are a humanitarian
and wants you to know that that is what he is too. It is important to care about each other. Always remember that.’ He spoke about how he worried about people starving and how he had heard I was a good man who cared about such things. It was really the most remarkable situation to find myself in, not just meeting him but talking to him and, even more fantastic, he knew certain things about me. When our chat came to a close, I said what a privilege it had been to meet him and, by way of a closing comment, asked him when he was next doing a speech. He was known for just deciding to hold public speeches spontaneously, unplanned, sometimes at very short notice.

‘Tomorrow night, here.’

Oh bugger
.

I was supposed to be playing two shows here tomorrow night.

Yvette knew exactly what I was thinking and hurried and hushed conversations were held in Cuban Spanish. Castro listened intently, then leaned right in by me. I was, not intimidated, but in awe; even though he is a very slight man these days he had such a huge presence and I didn’t know how he was going to react. Up close, his face was very angular and imposing and he is much taller than he looks on TV.

He smiled and then spoke to his translator.

‘Fidel says you will play here tomorrow night. He will find another venue at which to speak.’ The translator continued, on Fidel’s behalf: ‘Because I am making a speech, unfortunately I will not be attending the concert but many of my government officials, especially the cultural minister, are going to be there.’

And, with that, he left.

Do you know, even though I had gone to Cuba to raise funds for a children’s cancer hospital and treatment centre, I was appalled to find out that I got the most abysmal press in America. I didn’t care about what they said on a professional
level, I’m used to that, but it disgusted me that they were so vicious about a trip with such good intentions. Not one single American journalist bothered to ask me about the hospital or the children, not one. All they cared about was making scathing attacks on this musician who had dared to mix with Cubans and Castro. One even wrote I only went there deliberately to support the communist regime. As an ardent Thatcherite, they obviously hadn’t done their homework! I was so disgusted, it was absolutely outrageous and I thought,
I’m not having this
, so I posted a big piece on my rwcc.com website. I explained that the hospital itself was absolutely fantastic – in cancer treatment they seemed light years ahead of anywhere in the Western world. They can cure cancers or slow down cancers that are terminal here – it was quite phenomenal. We met the most wonderful kids and went to their parties and played with them. It was so pure and so enriching; yet all the American writers could do was criticise.

Almost everything the Western world tells us about Cuba is wrong. The general public are fed what they are fed, but it is wrong. The truth of the matter is that Cuba is truly the jewel of the Caribbean, just a stone’s throw from the American coast, and it
pisses
the Western world off that they cannot control it.

However, that does not dilute one bit the amazing time I had in Cuba. After we’d played those shows, we were faced with the seemingly insurmountable problem of getting our gear out of the country. As I mentioned, the planes flying out of Cuba could not accommodate our gear so, remarkably, Castro intervened and had wooden cases custom-made by expert furniture makers to be an exact fit – they looked like the world’s most expensive coffins! He even had a carpet manufacturer make exact wraps for inside the cases and around the instruments. People worked twenty-four hours a day through the night to make them for us, as his gesture of thanks to us for going to Cuba. Remarkable.

And, yes, I’ve got Che Guevara in the shed, you know. Well, not exactly all of him, but a small part. Here’s how.

During my stay there, I’d been taken to the memorial for Che Guevara in the north of the island. His remains had been found in Bolivia where he was killed, brought back to Cuba and put into a casket in this grave. It was so interesting.

Fast-forward to leaving Cuba with all our hand-made wooden cases ready to head for the airport; Yvette came over to me and said, ‘I have a present for you. It’s from Fidel, but you must hide it.’

She quickly gave me a Tupperware box inside which was some white-looking earth. I asked what it was and Yvette told me it was some of the earth that they found Che Guevara’s remains in.

‘Fidel wants you to have it as a reminder. He has the other half.’

I hid the Tupperware container in one of the keyboard trunks they’d made. When I got home, the safest place I could think of to put it initially was in my shed – after all, no one would think twice about some earth in a garden shed (it is now safely locked away in my lawyer’s safe). One day I will get a small sample framed with the picture of myself with Castro and give the rest to a museum.

In the meantime, it’s safe. As long as I don’t tell anyone . . .

‘HELLO, RICK, I’M RONNIE BIGGS’

My love of football is well known. I’ve been a director of Brentford, chairman of Camberley Town, a part-owner of Philadelphia Fury in the US and have also followed Man City avidly for years. So when you get a call to play in Brazil – regardless of how difficult it might be to get bloody visas – you always sit up and listen. I’ve explained how difficult it is to actually handle the paperwork, so let me tell you now about what can actually happen when you finally get through customs.

From a financial point of view, in the mid-1970s there was little point in going to Brazil at all. My records were sold down there for years, but I had absolutely no idea how many copies were being shifted and I certainly didn’t expect to see a royalty statement. There were stories about smaller bands venturing there and never being paid so it was generally considered a no-go area. Not for me.

One morning, Deal-a-Day Lane got a call from an agent by the name of Albert Koski. He wanted me and the band to go down to Brazil to play ‘some big shows’, performing
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
and
King Arthur
, which were both hugely popular, with a symphony orchestra. Deal-a-Day was dead set against it.

‘Why? Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Copacabana Beach – it sounds great!’

‘You’ll never get paid, Rick, no one does. Plus, they haven’t got any suitable equipment down there and, let’s face it, you aren’t exactly putting on the most simple show, so there’d be massive hidden costs. It’s just all too risky. We can’t do it.’

‘Oh, but I really fancy this.’

‘Absolutely not.’

As soon as Deal-a-Day had left the room, I picked up the phone and called my friend Chris Welch at
Melody Maker
. I told him, ‘Guess what? I’m going to Brazil . . .’

They printed a big news-piece story in the very next issue.

Deal-a-Day was not pleased.

‘Did they print it? I only mentioned it in passing to him over a pint . . .’ I lied, weakly.

Deal-a-Day angrily informed me that since
Melody Maker
had run the piece the phone had been ringing off the hook with enquiries and both the British and Brazilian press were all over it. Eventually, with a large resigned sigh, he said, ‘All right, all right, on your head be it . . . let’s go to Brazil.’

The dates were arranged to follow on from some US shows, to keep the costs to a minimum. As we sat on the plane heading out of New York for Rio, we genuinely had absolutely no idea of what awaited us: how many fans – if any, what sort of press interest, we knew nothing. I’d flown ahead of the band to do a day of press interviews, and the whole series of shows was being sponsored by a company called El Globo, which was an enormous media corporation.

On the plane next to me was Funky Fat Fred, the most wonderful but quite simply the worst tour manager in the world. Let me finally introduce him fully and tell you a few stories, before we get on to the Brazilian trip proper.

I loved Funky Fat Fred – he was just dreadful at his job.
For example, a tour manager’s first job of the day is to get everybody up in the morning and ready to go; the problem was, Fred was always the last man up; he regularly got the ‘golden blanket’ award. Fred never ever heard his early morning call, so we used to take it in turns to put calls into ourselves and then go to Fred’s room with a spare key to wake him up in person. Once we had woken him up, just to keep him happy we’d all go back to bed again so he could then get us up and feel he was doing his job. He would invariably send us to the wrong airports, the wrong hotels, the wrong venues and even on one occasion the wrong country. But I wouldn’t have swapped Fred for the world. He had been a steward on the
Canberra
among many other jobs and he was worldly-wise, even if he didn’t ever really seem to know exactly where in the world he was. Roger Newell, my bass player, often did the actual job of tour managing and when Fred was holding court, telling us upcoming plans, it was nothing short of hilarious.

‘Right, lads, we’ve got a ten o’clock start tomorrow,’ Fred would say.

‘Nine o’clock,’ Roger would interject.

‘Then we’re off to JFK . . .’

‘Newark, Fred . . .’

‘. . . in two cars . . .’

‘Three, Fred.’

‘. . . so the luggage needs to be ready for eight o’clock.’

‘Seven.’

It was quality entertainment for the rest of us. We used to sit there with our drinks listening to it and loving every minute, regardless of the consequences for the tour schedule. It was such fun.

Fred had a very odd line in girlfriends. Without putting too fine a point on it – and I’m not even sure the PC Brigade will let me tell this story but here goes – there was always
something drastically wrong with them. Not their personalities, all of them were very lovely girls. But there was always something wrong with them and I’m not just talking about a minor ailment. Recalling some of his female company over the years, there was one with a leg missing, another who appeared to have an extra ear, there was a bald one who suffered from alopecia which also reminds me of the one who had more facial hair than a member of ZZ Top. I don’t know if these girls were drawn to Funky Fat Fred or if he was drawn to them, but either way we never knew what to expect when he started seeing a new woman.