I’ve already forgotten most of 2011, so it can’t have been that good.
Big Plus : I’ve somehow acquired three new friends, all great guys.
I’ll probably remember the year for my nephew Derek’s graduation in Colorado and the 800-mile round road trip to Santa Fe with my brother Neil.
And for my first visit to Italy, where Nigel and I had a whole day off after he commentated on Italy v Northern Ireland.
Boulder is a college town of 100,000 at 5,000 feet and our weekend in Santa Fe revealed a tourist town of 60,000 at 7,000 feet with a lot of art galleries and painters.
Santa Fe is OK for a weekend but not more.
On Saturday night we went out to a Thai restaurant but never got there because we went to an Italian. On the way back, in the town square, we saw Equal Cut, a big funk band with three singers and they played three Kool & the Gang numbers.
In our hotel bar we saw a white R&B quartet, The Pleasure Pilots, who did Domino, Caldonia and 6345789 and I chatted to them in the interval. Lovely guys with nice friends. Keyboard player-singer Dave Phillips said they’d be doing These Dreams of You in the second set and they did and it was funky, hip and swinging, just how I like it. On the way home to Boulder our big green touring car zoomed along a plateau on a big wide open highway and at one point Neil gunned it to 90 and 100 and 110 to give the engine a chance to do what the Bavarian Motor Works designed it to do.There was nobody but us on the road, just a pick-up truck coming in the opposite direction every ten minutes. A while later I saw three deer on the road and Neil hit the brakes and I shouted, “Slow down even more!” because I’d seen two other deer to our right, grazing by the roadside, and didn’t know if Neil had seen them. When we got closer, I thought the three deer would decide to go back into their field, ducking under the wire, and the other two would panic and want to follow and run right in front of the car. Which is exactly what they did. But by then we were doing 10 mph.
Turned out they were farmed deer owned by former CNN mogul Ted Turner, who was the biggest private landowner in the USA at that time. He had 2 million acres. Denver”s John Malone now owns more, Turner is second and Stan Kroenke is the 10th biggest landowner in Amerika.
In Pescara, an hour south of Rome on the Adriatic coast, Nigel Bidmead and I started a sublimely relaxing October day in cafes and walking around the prosperous small town, taking a few silly photos of each other. Then we chilled out in a big restaurant that was empty apart from us and sixteen people who had gathered to celebrate a child’s birthday. Having watched, from a distance, how the three generations behaved with each other, I now understand a little bit about Italian family life. What a luxury for us to spend a whole day like that. Two friends, just walking and talking – no phone calls, no emails, no deadlines, no interruptions, nobody chasing us.
My big thing in December was that I re-shelved my records. I took them down from the racks in Michael’s room and put them on the floor in Caroline’s room, looked at all them one by one, and handed them to Jan five or six at a time. Of course, I would never shelve my albums alphabetically. Only a librarian or a nerd would do that. Not in a million years would I arrange books or records or CDs alphabetically. Even if it means not being able to find things, or not knowing which records, books or CDs you own.
It’s a big job for a disorganised old beatnik to sort out 2,000 albums, so I kept putting it off.
And putting it off again and again and again for 35 years. Early in the sorting process, when I was gathering together all the Dylans, all the Stones and Stevie Wonders and Little Feats and Traffics and all the funk, Jan said, “Where do I put Ray Charles?”
“Don’t put him in jazz,” I replied.
That’s the most unhelpful remark I’ve made in my entire life. There’s no excuse for a remark as stupid as that, even at 10.30 on a Saturday morning. “Put Richie Havens next to Blind Faith,”I said.
“Why?” asked Jan. “Because I saw them on the same day.”
I was amazed to find that I own seven Gato Barbieri albums. Mainly, I decided to put my favourite groups and singers on the shelf at eye level, the jazz albums went on the shelf below, and the soundtracks and Greatest Hits and assorted junk went on the two shelves below the jazz. That left a fat pile of oddments on the armchair : cardboard sleeves, inner sleeves, test pressings, albums without sleeves. There were four sleeves for four different Crusaders albums with no LPs in them, and in that pile of odds & sods there was a lyric sheet for The River, a Bruce album I no longer own. Test pressings are white labels that record companies gave to DJs and journalists. In some cases, like Them and Frankie Miller, I’d done some work for the record company. My friend Nick Blackburn had worked at Chrysalis but was at Decca when he asked me to write sleeve notes for a double album of Them Featuring Van Morrison. I already owned an American copy of the same album with sleeve notes by Lester Bangs, with whom I corresponded. We both loved Alice Cooper and The Faces.
Most of my test pressings were identified by words written on the white label by me. But one was unmarked, so I took it downstairs and played it and it was entirely instrumental and the saxophonist sounded like Wayne Shorter, so I think it’s Weather Report album. I have all their records up to Heavy Weather and once interviewed Joe and Wayne.
Often, when I got the finished album, I gave away the pre-release white labels to friends.
But I found that I have Rod Stewart’s Never A Dull Moment finished album in gatefold sleeve with the test pressing tucked inside the gatefold sleeve, which proves I’m not entirely shambolic. Best of all, I found Rod’s Every Picture Tells A Story after having mislaid it for about seven years. That album was made at Morgan Studios, Willesden and I was there and we gave Rod the cover of Time Out three months before Maggie May hit No 1 and the details of that story are in my still-unfinished rock memoir.
I knew that I still own six Sutherland Brothers & Quiver albums. I spent a week in the USA with SB&Q when they supported Elton John on a big tour. And I knew their first manager, Wayne Bardell, very well, and also their next manager, the afore-mentioned Nick, who later became a director of QPR, the club that Wayne supports.
But enough of all that.
Many thanks for your seasonal best wishes to Ian, Myles and our families.
The Palmers have had a low-key but lovely time over the last 10 days and Christmas Day was different, memorable, perhaps legendary.
On Boxing Day I went into the kitchen and Caroline was cooking.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Christmas dinner in a frying pan! What’s not to love?”
We had that with cold turkey and Prince Charles’s hand-stirred Organic Harvest Chutney from a posh hamper Michael gave us.
“It’s the ginger that makes it,” she declared.
“What else is in it?”
Reading the tiny print on the label, Caroline said, “Cane sugar, onions, parsnip, cider vinegar, apricot, bramley apple, carrot, tomato puree, sultanas, sea salt, tamarind paste, chilli and ground black pepper.”
Maybe the hand-stirring is the secret.
I don’t know how old Charlie finds the time, bless him. Maybe Camilla rolls her sleeves up.
To me Christmas is zonal. It’s a warm fuzzy family zone that I vanish into and then, after some socialising, and consuming decadent foods that I don’t eat at any other time, like mince pies with M&S Extra Thick Channel Island Brandy Cream containing Courvoisier, I emerge into a brand New Year clutching a To Do list.
My To Do list for 2012 is one line : Finish memoir.
Advice for tonight : drive carefully.