Speaking of black friends, I also worked in Harrods department store as a storeman and packer one Christmas. I worked down in the bowels of Harrods, a bit like the little slaves in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. My fellow inmates included Thomas, a Nigerian, who was already a graduate in industrial chemistry and was trying to work his way through another university degree. Thomas had one of the highest IQs of anyone I have met, and I’ve met some brilliant people. He was an outstanding academic. We had a dumb fuck white foreman, who delighted in treating us like enslaved rats. I was always at odds with this bastard.
The next few months are all a bit vague. I can’t remember how I came to form a new band with two Californians and a Canadian, and I’m sure Steve Dixon returned to play drums with us at some stage. I do remember that it was such a great band I knew I was going to be a rock musician for life. These guys were into groups like Poco and The Flying Burrito Brothers, the whole country-rock scene. I can’t remember their names, yet these guys changed my life. This became the musical genre that I’d finally settle into, despite an extreme musical detour a short time later in Berlin.
The next part of the story I will never forget.
The American band members, who were nineteen years old, just kids, had been smuggling pot from LA to London in aluminium film canisters, strictly for their own use. I was still firmly anti-drug, and quite frankly scared of anything that may make me lose control.
Lois and I, meanwhile, were still the best of friends, but decided it was better to remain as independent as we could. But we began an absurd situation in Earl’s Court, where I moved after Kensal Green. I was living in the tiniest little bedsit, right next to Lois’s rather more spacious bedsit—this is what we called living apart. One night there was a hell of a commotion from downstairs; I realised it was a police raid. They were busting Danuta, the young Polish landlady, for marijuana.
This was a fairly big block of flats; Lois and I lived on the fourth floor, very high up, while my bandmates were living downstairs. The cops then busted my new band for drug trafficking and started bashing on the door of my place, and also Lois’s. They’d obviously had us under surveillance for quite some time, because they knew Lois and I were an item, that the Americans were in a band with me, and—get this—that Mick and Barry (remember them?) still lived in a rat-infested dump nearby. The cops knew I also had some sort of relationship with them.
There were about half a dozen uniformed Bobbies, sniffer dogs and two drug squad detectives. There was a bad cop and a good cop, naturally. They interrogated Lois and seemed convinced she was innocent, but the bad cop had it in for me. He continued to interrogate me despite my (valid) protestations. It seemed that because I had long hair I must be a drug addict, and that I was asking for trouble.
This bad cop was slapping me around and screaming in my face: ‘Where’s your stash? Where’s your stash?’
I kept denying my guilt; I was most definitely innocent. When he discovered that I was Australian—a secret that Lois and I had kept well hidden—he demanded to see my passport. He didn’t believe I was Australian. This only made him angrier—there were long-haired quiffs like me ‘down under an’ all’? Shocking.
Then he threatened to plant pot in my room. He really didn’t give a fuck—he was going to bust me and have me thrown out of the country, no matter what.
Next thing, bad cop slowly, methodically pushed me towards the window of Lois’s room. I’m talking one hell of a drop to the street, probably 10 or 12 metres. Lois was screaming her head off; I was foolishly calling him a fucking arsehole—good one, Richard. Good cop was warning bad cop that he better haul me in, but by this time he had me hanging out the window by my ankles. I was scared shitless.
Fortunately, so was good cop, who screamed at bad cop to stop. This whole scene probably only lasted a couple of minutes but, as they say, to me it seemed like an eternity.
Good cop hauled bad cop outside for a serious reprimand. But bad cop was relentless and decided to drag me over to Mick and Barry’s flat.
Keep in mind, despite the fact that these two looked like long-haired junkies, they were actually heavy metal dudes who hated hippie ‘poofs’ like me with a vengeance. My heart was full of dread.
Their door was so full of dry rot that when the Bobbies kicked it in the entire flat nearly collapsed. Bad cop charged into the dark like some big hero, shouting, ‘POLICE!’ He shook Mick, still comatose from a big night. Thinking about it now, the next bit is like the funniest slapstick movie, but at the time it was terrifying. Bad cop shook Mick one too many times; Mick sprang out of bed and threatened to beat the ever-loving crap out of him. Barry soon joined in. Bad cop was trying to flash his badge, but Mick and Barry were pushing him up against a wall. Bad cop then shouted fatal words: he called them druggies. Oh dear.
Mick and Barry went berserk. When good cop finally restored some sort of order, he started giving bad cop a screaming reprimand, peppered with the sort of expletives you’d only hear from sailors. Good cop told us we were all free to go. He actually apologised for everything they’d put us through, and told us that bad cop must be a fuckin’ idiot to be accusing Mick and Barry of being drug addicts.
This should have been the end. However, the next day a uniformed constable called in and told me that detective so and so had told him that my visa had long expired and I had until the end of the week to get out of Great Britain—or face arrest and deportation. The slimy bad cop made life almost impossible for me during the rest of my stay in Europe.
I decided to get out of the United Kingdom. I figured bad cop was going to be waiting for me around every bend. I’d had enough.
During my time in London, I became a passionate traveller. I hitchhiked all over Europe, from the south of France to the top of Denmark, and frequently found myself in West Berlin. Contrary to the popular caricature of the Germans, I met some fine people in Germany. I have fantastic recollections of hitching rides all over the Continent: with a German racing car driver who drove me from Hamburg to Munich in his Porsche at phenomenal speed; and with many wonderful truckies from all over Europe.
I don’t think I have never known such warm hospitality as I found in Germany; perhaps the hippie revolution had made Samaritans of everyone. On one trip, I was on the road with Karl Marx von Schumann, a radical left-wing activist from Berlin. He struck me as very together in his thinking. Everything he told me about his political beliefs seemed very rational and very sound; it had a marked influence on me. It was therefore only natural that I appealed to him for help when I had the spot of bother with the British police.
I bade farewell to all my English friends in 1970, headed for Berlin, keeping only my Gibson electric guitar (a Les Paul Junior) and a rucksack full of essentials. I headed off into the wild blue yonder, barely in my twenties, still young enough to be overwhelmingly elated and excited about this great new adventure. I had very little money, and no idea how I was going to survive.
Karl lived in a commune in Berlin. He was very hospitable at first, and because he lived his entire life by the communist ethos, I respected the rules of communal living. I worked my arse off doing the chores, and shared his disdain for hedonism and decadence (drugs and sex being the staple diet of my generation). We didn’t go to nightclubs—our girlfriends were stern intellectual types who would come around for c
offee and clandestine meetings plotting the overthrow of the decadent capitalist system.
Things began to get rather tense around the commune. I think Karl was conflicted: his political beliefs really urged him to support me as an unemployed foreigner, but his upper-middle-class background was like a devil on his shoulder, whispering: ‘You don’t need this shit—kick the foreign bastard out!’
We had a screaming argument one night, and, just like that, I was out on the street on the cusp of a freezing Berlin winter. I wandered the streets with no money and nowhere to go, sneaking in to bars for the most part, but being hustled back out on the street when they realised I had no money. I decided I would take a trip; people were so much kinder when I hitchhiked. Lois had a friend at Sydney University who had married a German doctor and settled down in the town of Paderborn. Her name was Denise. I had Denise’s address so I thought I’d drop in on her.
Paderborn is probably the most deeply Catholic of all German communities. In fact Paderborners are a bit of a joke all over Germany; they are such caricatures of the perfect German Christian Democrat. Fortunately for me, Denise and her husband were great altruists who gave me shelter while I considered my future.
Quite frankly, I didn’t have too many options. I was estranged from my family, and my best friends were scattered all over the world, so I didn’t have much to look forward to in Australia. I had less hope of getting to North America, and really, Europe was my only home—now, without the option of Britain, Germany was my only home. I had no visas or permits, but at that time it was easy to just move into Germany and start a new life without them. My brief sojourn in Paderborn was a marvellous respite and gave me the chance to get sorted, make a plan.
I hit the road to get out and see more of Germany, especially the south. I wandered all over Hanover, Dusseldorf, Cologne and down into Bavaria. I had no money, yet as miraculous as this sounds, people would walk up to me in the street and give me 50 or 100 deutschmark. Quite often middle-aged hausfrau would thrust the money into my hand, with one instruction: ‘Get a haircut.’
The people who would pick me up hitchhiking usually gave me money, and often they’d insist I stay in their spare bedroom for as long as I wanted. This may sound a bit fantastic, but in the late 1960s in Europe, especially Northern Europe, the hippie movement pervaded every strata of society. There was an unbelievable camaraderie that, sadly, we’ll probably never see again.
Yet it was not all peace and love. One freezing night in a small Bavarian town I went to take shelter in an all-night bar, of which there are plenty in Germany. I met a friendly boy and girl who loaded me up on beer and bratwurst and pommes frites. I thought I was in for a wild night of ménage à trois. They invited me to stay at their place; I enthusiastically accepted. It was just starting to snow and the three of us drunkenly managed to cram onto the guy’s moped and ended up at an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of the town.
Now, drunk as I was, I started to worry. They ran laughing and screaming through the first two darkened floors of the warehouse and I followed them up to the third level. I could see a tiny slat of light way across the other side of the building. We made it into this strange big room, which they shared with another couple of young people, whose look strongly implied ‘junkie’.
They rolled up a joint, claiming it was merely hash. I had by this time had a few tokes on joints, because Germans were drug crazy—smoking was unavoidable and inevitable. I was a little worried about these strange new friends but thought I’d better respect their hospitality. Within minutes I realised we were smoking opium, very common in Germany at the time.
I could feel hallucinations creeping in. Suddenly I noticed that my strange new friends were indulging in a weird ritual, heating up heroin in tarnished spoons, and I freaked. I went plummeting downstairs, across the pitch-black darkness of the warehouse. I didn’t stop running until I was a safe enough distance away, and found refuge on a park bench. Finally, I slept.
The nightmares I had were like scenes from Rosemary’s Baby. The next thing I knew a couple of highway patrolmen were escorting me to the outskirts of town.
‘Don’t come back,’ they said, and walked away.
I wandered around Europe for some months. If you have read the final chapter of Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell—one of my main influences—you may recall his great description of agonising over his last shilling on a freezing night in Trafalgar Square. He decides to spend it in a doss house, so he can sleep; then he describes the feeling of total elation and liberty—he is finally free of every last penny.
Orwell described that feeling and experience perfectly. These were some of the happiest moments of my life. Not only was I really free, but my relaxed state seemed to bring out the best in everyone around me. I slept in farmers’ barns in the south of France; the railway station at Copenhagen; Dam Square in Amsterdam. Everywhere I went, people were fantastically kind to me. I was invited to stay as long as I wanted in the apartment of a Danish dentist and his wife.
Strange as it must sound, my hosts never wanted me to leave. Not only did I survive but I managed to live out this dream existence without one pfennig—just heaps of human kindness.
I did make a serious attempt to put down some roots in Hamburg. It also made sense professionally because Hamburg had always been the music capital of continental Europe—that’s where the Beatles really got started. I’d met a uni student while hitching; he had this beautiful house on Hamburg Harbour. Obviously from a well-to-do family and studying Chinese philosophy, he was also very ‘hippie’ so we got on well. I stayed at his place but didn’t want to lose my independence. I took my leave and moved on.
I borrowed some money from friends in London and moved in temporarily with this crazy old man who’d been one of the foremost classical conductors in Germany in the 1930s. He was every inch the eccentric genius. Sheet music was stacked up to the ceiling in every room; I made my way around the house like a rabbit in a warren. He was a fascinating individual, but a victim, a survivor of terrible Nazi torture.
I didn’t have much luck finding work in Hamburg and I kept missing Berlin. It felt like a second home to me and has ever since. The old orchestra conductor was very difficult to live with; he’d have fits and nightmares. I was just too young to deal with it. His idea of conversation was to scream at me in guttural German; I could barely understand him. I hit the road again.
I returned to Berlin with much trepidation. I’d had the most wonderful adventure out on the road, but after so many months of vagrancy I was now beginning to wonder if I would ever leave desolation row. Berlin was also a reasonably scary place to be a derelict; there were more psycho cases per capita than other areas of Germany, many of them screwed up World War II victims who drank themselves into oblivion. Then there were American GIs stationed in Germany, fresh out of Vietnam, smacked out on heroin.
Shuffling from bar to bar, I managed to sustain myself reasonably well for a number of days, befriending folk club patrons and playing them a song on my guitar. The hippies, with their sense of solidarity, were eager to help me out; they’d buy me food and beer and more often than not I would meet a girl and end up back at her place being treated to a bath or a shower—plus a free breakfast. It was just heaven, really!
I began making great friends all over Berlin. There were very
few foreign hippies in the city, so I was a novelty. Germans held ‘English’ musicians in the highest esteem, so that helped, too.
I was very down on my luck, ran out of money and started to worry. I met a South American dude, who made fabulous leatherwork, and agreed to sell his work on Kurfürstendamm, Berlin’s main street. I learnt the art of selling to tourists like a duck taking to water, even though I hated doing it. It’s all confidence trickery; I’d set my own price. I’d sell a Berliner a belt for say, 50 deutschmark, but I could ask an American or Australian for 200 marks—and get it!
Consequently, I began making some money and feeling like a bona fide Berliner. I even adopted a slight German accent when I spoke—and I spoke mainly in German.
However, when my South American amigo left town I was broke again. I bit the bullet and went to the Australian Military Mission to ask for financial assistance. This was where I met Gisela, a former fashion model, now in her thirties and working at the Mission. Gisela used her contacts to arrange permanent residency and work papers for me.
Along with Gisela, I went to a left-wing students’ commune in Klausenerplatz. It became my home for a long time. The key figure there was Volker, to this day one of my closest friends. Among the others at the commune was Uwe, a medical student from Linz and a natural born drug addict, and a couple, Georg and Sabine, also still very close friends. The commune may have been Marxist in principle, but these people were fun.
Volker, Uwe, Georgie and I would drink Stolichnaya until dawn, fight in the snow at 4 a.m. and then do wheelies in a little European car on the ice. We were the larrikins of Berlin. We played up at parties and got thrown out of bars and teased the prostitutes on Kurfürstendamm and got up to mischief every night. And there were girls. So many beautiful girls.
The Best Years of Our Lives Page 4