Casbah Café Confidential

Greetings once more from Los Angeles. Shark just walked out the door and I am left alone with the typing pool in the Casbah Café. All there’s left for me to do, after contemplating this most beautiful of afternoons, is to unzip my laptop and up the 5 :1 Mac to PC ratio to 5.5 : 1.

That’s right. There are eleven white apples, lit up between these walls, and Sunset Boulevard sunlight coming in through high windows. The PC couple sit defiantly at a back table, frowning. Gaming. The café is painted in Mexican colours and has second-hand clothes and pretty trinkets for sale as well as coffees, sandwiches, and an enormous pile of bananas for $1 apiece.

On my right is a guy with a beard who looks to me like a Metallica roadie until he takes a portfolio out of his steel roadie case and starts showing the man next to him his photos. I can see the pictures as he flicks through the pages - fashion shots, CD covers, portraits of actors and politicians. Black and white, colour, big arty magazine covers. His friend nods and he quickly put the shots away and goes back to sipping his coke. Real slow. Roadie slow.

On his right, also on the bench against the wall, looking into the bright room, is a grey-haired woman wearing black. I have already met her outside the café - in fact I know her name.

I was waiting outside the café in the bright lunchtime sunshine for Shark to arrive when she spotted my Beatles T shirt. She came up and started talking to me. Well, I say that she talked, but to be truthful she really only said one word. I am wearing a T shirt which has a magnified black and white photo of the Beatles from around the time of ‘Rubber Soul’ on the front. The grey-haired lady dressed in black just took one look and let out a long sigh. “Paul…”

Anne Elizabeth (I can’t decide if she has a surname or simply two first names) told me she’d been at the last concert the Beatles ever played. That’s right, she brought up the subject right there on that corner of Sunset Boulevard. With the lunchtime sun blazing down and the line to get into the Casbah spilling people out onto the sidewalk.

“It was at Candlestick Park, San Francisco, August 29, 1966. They played for fifteen minutes. It was wonderful.” I asked her how she could remember the exact date, “How could I ever forget it?” “Did you scream?” “Of course I screamed!” “Did you scream because you thought you should scream, or because you really wanted to scream?” Anne Elizabeth looked serious for a moment - thoughtful, reverend. Then back to joyous, “Those four guys just had it all. They made you want to scream. Frank Sinatra had it… Elvis I guess… so we had seen the screaming before, but those four guys just had it all.”

“Really, was the show only fifteen minutes long?” “It might have been twenty. It was short, but they could have done whatever they liked and I guess they got frustrated with us screaming.” “Did you hear anything?” “No, we were screaming too loud.” “Was there anyone else playing that day?” “Otis Redding sang ‘The Dock Of The Bay’ and the Ronettes were on too.”

Here I am talking Candlestick Park. And they said no one would understand the title of my song.

A car screech up to the kerbside, with another one close behind. Two guys get out, looking lost. That’s because they are lost, and looking for Santa Monica. The ocean. Anne Elizabeth goes into the café to get a pencil and paper so as she can tell them exactly how to get there. All the passengers pile out of the two cars and start smoking. They are parked crazily and one of them tells me that they’ve just arrived from Poland.

Anne Elizabeth comes out with pen and paper and starts drawing a map on the roof of their rental car.

By now the Casbah queue has diminished somewhat. There’s a chance for me to go in and hold a table. I order a coffee and sit down, excited amongst the cyber-surfers after my encounter with history. I’m thinking that the Casbah in Liverpool was where the Beatles started. Maybe it’s even where they first played as a group, since it was owned by Pete Best’s mum.

And I’m thinking that the chances of being greeted outside the LA Casbah this morning by a grey-haired woman wearing black called Anne Elizabeth who had gone to the last ever Beatles concert at Candlestick Park which is the name of a song on my latest album which I am launching in LA tonight are slim indeed on any kind of scale you’d care to mention. Apart, that is, from that of a 21st Century Troubadour.

I love this life, and you know I do. Because things just happen this way. You put yourself out there on the corner of the lights at Sunset and Maltman and things will happen. We both know that by now.

The tour has its own logic, its own narrative. Its own crazy characters spinning inside this world but starring in their own personal movies, who nonetheless want to reach out and touch and share or say hello, on this fine Los Angeles afternoon, to the lost-looking tour-knackered Irish guy wearing a black and white print of the Beatles in 1965.

*

Back amongst the Apples, a Goth girl at the table beside me is on the phone. She’s simultaneously reading through a script called ‘Cassowary Part II’ and talking to a girlfriend. She’s got one of those up and down could-be-Australian-or-Californian accents in which the pitch of her voice glides up at the end of every sentence making it sound like a question when in fact it’s no-ot?

One half of the conversation, the one I can hear, goes like this:

“You’re going out with a rockstar. What do you expect - you’re going out with a ROCKSTAR.”

“OK… he’s going to teach you synthesizer. It’ll be alright.”

[Question to self: when is anything OK while learning the synthesizer?]

“How long is your brief?”

[How green is my valley – wasn’t that a TV series?]

“Is this your lunch hour? … I said you’re with A ROCKSTAR. How bad can it get?”

[Don’t ask. Pretty bad.]

She looks at another call coming in on her phone, while her girlfriend’s voice squeaks on for a bit. She puts the phone to her ear again,

“What do you expect. HE’S A ROCKSTAR!”

By now her computer is signalling that someone is trying to Skype her. There’s a chime and a whooshing sound effect. Obviously the girlfriend overhears this, as her mouse-like squeaking amplifies to something more like a large gerbil or a guinea pig.

“No, it’s not HIM. He doesn’t make phone calls. He’s a ROCKSTAR.”

The rising tone at the end of the sentence is coming in useful. I can sense the reason why call centre girls and dental receptionists are trained in the art of making every sentence like a pleasant question, when in fact the news is probably grim or at least foreboding.

“No. He DOESN’T know my number. He’s a ROCKSTAR. Get over it, dude.”

[small beep]

If she could have slammed the phone down, she would have.

In the old days it was much more satisfying to slam a receiver down than to fiendishly stab at the ‘end call’ button on a mobile phone, invariably stubbing a finger or not knowing exactly which button to stab at.

The bad-tempered phone jab has none of the physical force or audible crack of a receiver banging against its cradle. The lingering ring of the metal bell inside the phone you’ve just half-crucified. The fact that you can walk away from the phone, glancing black at the implacable dial, telling yourself you’re finished.

Nowadays - unless you’re Russell or Naomi, accustomed to launching your mobile at will - you’re a slave to it, and you have to sheepishly put it back on the table or in your pocket after a phone fracas. Half-hoping it’ll ring again so as you can have another go at the slamming thing. Or merely to remind you that you are still wanted – somehow, somewhere, by somebody. The pathos is excruciating.

The Goth girl checks she has pressed the correct button and goes back to ‘Cassowary Part II’.

All this time I’ve been thinking ‘zombie movie’, not ‘large flightless bird’.

*

On my left, a girl in a willowy dress is reading lines quietly while the guy sitting opposite her at the same table writes in a block of yellow legal lined paper. I try to work out if they are a couple - there are no tell-tale signs, but they look good together. The sun is streaming in through the high windows, and I can feel the tour slipping away.

Last night was the final show of the tour. Totally different from every other show in every other state. I lean back and savour the welcome I got from the staff at the club.

This welcome has been scientifically proven as imperceptible to any of the five human senses. Perhaps men in white coats have invented a machine which is positioned somewhere inside the Hubble telescope, focused on the infinitesimal shifts of particles millions of light years and trillions of centuries away from us here on Earth. Perhaps this machine could be realigned on central Los Angeles in order to try to detect some warmth in the welcome from the staff at this particular club. If it can find any, I would like to check the data.

I arrive on time and introduce myself to a barman who has napkin holders in his earlobes and sideburns cut to within an inch of his ears. He grunts in return, eyes staring straight ahead of him, his massive face wholly impassive. However, in comparison to the soundman, he is a blubbering idiot full of wet kisses and Stephen Fry style luvvie hugs.

Perhaps the machine in the Hubble is too crude an instrument to bring to bear upon the soundman. Perhaps in central Germany someone has invented a more soulful instrument of gradation. A facial movement detector, which can measure emotion by registering the slightest change in the molecules which go to make up a person’s facial expression. In this case, maybe they can send over one of these machines to run tests on our man on sound – JD - to see whether he feels any emotion whatsoever when talking to a fellow member of the human race.

To measure his welcome in terms of nano-microns would be to overstate the emotion in his greeting tonight. However, later in the evening I swear I see the corner of JD’s mouth curl ever so slightly as I effusively thank him for doing such a good job – or perhaps it was just the memory of an annoying fly which had landed there, only to be exterminated by thought transference.

The soundcheck is ends before it has begun. It exists purely in negative time. I remember from my last show here [Dear Reader – this is an important gig] that as soon as you say “Great” or “Sounds fine” or “Thanks” or anything positive, the soundcheck is over. I resolve to say nothing, climb the steps and set one foot on the stage. JD instantly fades up a hair metal anthem on the PA system, and the check is over.

However, despite this, JD is a master of his chosen art. His sound is tremendous, his talent unimpeachable, it’s just that sometimes you need a few minutes to relax, and get the feel of the stage.

Since persistence is often regarded as a virtue - and sometimes can cause an evening to change direction in unexpected ways - I ask the barman for a drink. He grunts in the direction of the soundman, flexing his lobe-based napkin rings in the process. When I turn to the soundman, he lets out an elongated sigh. I ask him if there’d be any chance of possibly having a drink if it isn’t too much trouble. Another sigh, then silence. I wonder if I’m in a workshop production of a long-lost Beckett play.

After this silence, accompanied by the dying last seventeen choruses of ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’, there follows a silence filled with absolutely no sound - the ideal situation for JD. I notice he has personalised earplugs stuck in his designed lugs.

He digs in a drawer and pulls out a micropscopic red ticket. “This entitles you to one drink under the value of $6.” he says in the type of computer voice Radiohead would try to sample. He keeps looking straight ahead, past where I am standing. He tears the tiny ticket in half and I see that he has signed it one one side. He gives one half to the barman and one half to me. It’s like being in the follow up to ‘Raiders Of The Lost Ark’.

I look at the pricelist behind the bar. The cheapest drink costs $8.

*

I know how many tickets have been sold for tonight’s show. I know how many we have to sell in order to get paid. Every other concert on the tour you simply earn money when people show up - or you are promised a fee before you arrive. In this club, getting paid is a fata morgana at the end of a very long and very lonely tightrope walk. It’s the podium you know you can’t reach in your dream, it’s the wall you will never be able to build. You can see the bricks - but the wall you must build with them? It’s too high.

After the show, outside the front door, the man with the book of ticket stubs looks at me as if I have gatecrashed his wedding party branding a machine gun. “Who are you?” “I just played” “Oh, I think I owe you money then.” It’s a special moment, one I would like to prolong just a little. You see, if you sell over a certain number of tickets, you get a percentage of all the money that night, not just the amount you have exceeded the magic number by. If not, you get nothing.

“No,” he says, looking at the door tally, “I pay you nothing. Goodnight.”

*

As I said, playing LA is different from everywhere. - but I love walking working playing and thinking in this crazy inspiring city which everyone all around the world knows something about. Built out of sprinklers in a desert between the ocean and the mountains.

I am delighted that my publishers are here, and good friends too. There’s time to talk afterwards and then to go to eat Mexican in a place opposite the Casbah café where I am sitting now.

This is a place for writers. I don’t want to see the handprints on Hollywood Boulevard, just take me driving down the streets of James Ellroy, Dashiell Hammett, Charles Bukowski, John Fante. Tom… Waits.

Where a thousand scripts are being sweated over this very afternoon. Where typewriters have pounded for generations. Writers constructing the world’s impression of America out of images, fine phrases, fashion and special effects. The emotional mirror the world loves to hold up to itself. All this done constructed and worked upon with the help of strong men and beautiful women, some of whose descendants are in this very café, tapping and thinking and phoning and blogging and continuing to build this Babel out of a parched corner of Spanish desert.

As I leave, the girl with the willowy dress is tidying her things away. The guy opposite her nervously finishes what he’s writing on the yellow legal pad and gives it to her. She stops packing up, takes the sheet of paper and looks at him. Their eyes meet. It’s a moment from a movie.

Walking out of the Casbah I look up and see the HOLLYWOOD sign really is falling down. It says in the paper that Hugh Hefner bought it. At the lights I can see the Griffith Observatory where James Dean and Dennis Hopper ran to in ‘Rebel Without A Cause’.

The half-ounce of live ladybirds bought in a recycled yoghurt tub by a friend of mine to spread on the lettuces in her front garden so as they can eat the aphids are flying away to breathe their one day of freedom in peace, and I am on my journey back to Australia with a squeaking dog toy in my pocket. Changing season for season, springtime for autumn.

Here they call it the Fall. To follow will show you how far I fell on tour.

Stay tuned.

I always did like them American apples.