by Paul Rowson
DISPATCHES FROM A DILETTANTE
By
Paul Rowson
Encounters with Rock Stars, Royalty, Religious Leaders and Renegade Kids - From the Caribbean to Cambodia via the toughest estate in Britain
For Elspeth, Joe, Tom, Kate, Flo and Rosie
Big thanks to Chris Nott, Tony Shaw, Jean Rafferty, and Tom Rowson
Copyright Paul Rowson 2011
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
[email protected]
eBooks created by www.ebookconversion.com
DISPATCHES FROM A DILETTANTE - A Memoir of a Dissolute Life
Paul Rowson ([email protected] 07774 128084 / 0113 2323385)
SYNOPSIS
‘Dispatches from a Dilettante’ is a rampage through a chaotic career, encompassing rock music, religion, royalty and renegade kids - stretching from the Caribbean to Cambodia.
It’s a memoir on the absurdity of endeavour and a restless lifestyle spent working exceptionally hard to trying to avoid it.
There are close encounters with Jimi Hendrix, the Prince of Wales, ex footballers and the current Head of the Catholic Church in England, together with bar room brawls and board room bitterness.
Whether it’s the drugs and desperation of life on a Welsh housing estate or discussions in the Gardens of Highgrove it’s a life lived whimsically, from the higher echelons of business to the gutters of Phonm Penh.
It’s about a music loving meanderer who has never quite got over being at Woodstock.
Prelude
Chapter 1. American Virgin 1969
Chapter 2. The Leaving of Liverpool 1972
Chapter 3. Bahamian Idyll 1980-1981
Chapter 4. Radio Gaga 1981-1984
Chapter 5. Building up to Brigadier Gerard 1972
Chapter 6. Living in the City- Leeds 1973-1976
Chapter 7. A Lot to Answer For 1978-1980
Chapter 8. Down in the Riot Zone -Brimingham1984
Chapter 9. Coastal Cruising 1986-1990
Chapter 10. My Life with the Royal Family 1990-2010
Chapter 11. The Other Side of the Coin – South Wales1992-1997
Chapter 12. Trauma and Travel 1990-1992
Chapter 13. Understanding
Chapter 14. A Serious Man 1997-2010
Chapter 15. Rock and Roll - Boston 1972
Chapter 16. Escape to the Desert 2002-2010
Chapter 17. Irma and the Mud Cats – Dallas 1982
Chapter 18. Bar Room Brawls -1965-1992
Chapter 19. Inadequate Insurance 1967
Chapter 20. The Year of Humiliation 1979
Chapter 21. Khymer Chameleon - Phnom Penh, Cambodia 2009
Chapter 22. Slaves of Freedom 2010
DISPATCHES FROM A DILETTANTE
A Memoir of a Dissolute Life
Paul Rowson
PRELUDE
‘My old man used to tell me
Son - never look back
Always move on to the next thing
Fold your clothes and pack’
Warren Zevon
I was in the fast lane of the M62 and the monkey turd was still firmly lodged on the bonnet of the school bus. It had not been a good day at the Safari Park and it was getting worse. The gunmetal grey skies in the high Pennines loomed ominously overhead and the initial downpour had now become a deluge. This was a problem inasmuch as the opening gambit of the chimp, when climbing onto the bonnet, had been to piss on the windscreen. This, in turn, had fused the electrics and now the wipers refused to budge.
Driving blind and at speed with sixteen over excited inner city kids on a crowded motorway was the perfect metaphor for my teaching career to date – ill conceived, poorly planned, dangerous and full of shit. Most of it was of the bull variety and provided by me.
Never one to learn from experience I had only just recovered from a recent trauma which involved sleeping students on a school trip late at night. Unfortunately they were in separate carriages on a train which I failed to notice had decoupled in Manchester. We arrived home to find expectant parents on the station platform in Leeds, and witnessed their benign smiles instantly turn to hysterical anger when their precious offspring failed to appear. Even though they were found safe merely hours later, asleep in a siding near Huddersfield, the suspicion remained that I was an immature loose cannon.
This was even more disconcerting because it was my second attempt at teaching. The first one lasted just six months and ended suddenly. With the self centred and obsessive disregard that only the immature or impossibly talented can muster, and I was self- evidently the former, a plane ticket had been bought and I had flown to Boston one Monday simply because I could.
It did not occur to me that, as I was a member of staff on the Friday, the besieged head teacher could reasonably have expected me to turn up on the following Monday. I served no notice, phoned no one, and only as an afterthought penned a resignation letter of justification posted from the USA. As I recall it contained ludicrously pompous and self serving phrases like “I can only find solace in the growing numbers of young colleagues who feel a similar mounting disenchantment with the demands made on those entering the profession.” Apart from not making sense it was a lie. At this point in my life it was still a major struggle to get up before midday, let alone plan coherent activity for the acid tongued, wickedly perceptive and demanding young people that I was supposedly responsible for. That is how, eventually, I came to work for a Rock Music promoter.
Boston circa 1972 in February was a bit of a shock to the system. After the excitement of quitting and in the adrenalin fuelled few hours immediately after, it only occurred to me in mid Atlantic that I had no job, no visa, very little money, no accommodation and nothing that could reasonably be called a plan.
This was yet another case of the ‘Fuck it’ factor kicking in whenever boredom or disenchantment surfaced. It had been the same when I was a pupil. A spectacular and rapid decline set in when I arrived, aged eleven, at the Catholic grammar school after being one of the so called ‘bright lights’ in my junior days. So meteoric was this decline that it is worth recording. Year one in the ‘A’ form where we had exams every term – seventh out of thirty four, fourteenth and then twenty eighth. Year two thirty first and ‘relegated’ to the B form as we transferred to a newly built and non Jesuit run grammar school. This at least meant a better class of beating by lay men, who lacked the brutality of the Jesuits but maintained the enthusiasm. The decline continued apace but there wasn’t much further to fall as with the small initial entry there were no ‘C’ or ‘D’ forms.
The word ‘hate’ is often used casually without regard to its real meaning and I try to avoid it now. But what I felt then for many of the staff, was in a young teenager’s understanding, the real deal. I was once strapped for objecting to the fact that ‘Mass’ appeared as a subject in the timetable during school hours and we therefore had to attend. To encourage our reasoning abilities and articulacy we had ‘Debate’ added as a taught subject for one year. Unbelievably and with no-one noticing when 3B’s timetable came out at the beginning of term, Wednesday morning read as follows: ‘English - Maths - Mass - Debate’ and so I was strapped again for pointing out the unfortunate juxtaposition of the last two subjects.
A clear majority of the staff should never have been allowed near kids. The casual racism of the woodwork teacher, the sad suppressed homosexuality of the music teacher that manifested itself in bouts of extreme rage and the pompous sarcasm of the Jesuit Head at this supposedly non Jesuit school made for an inconsistency of approach, yet brooked no argument or questioning. There were none of the detailed and constructively useful repor
ts written by teachers today. The brevity of the comments about my abject performance was pretty standard for the era, but even I had to admire their construction.
‘Charming, but indolent’ - Maths.
‘Seeks to incur my wrath on a consistent basis’ - Physics
‘Does not offer his views during class discussions’ - History.
This was at least accurate in that I wasn’t taking History at the time! The report must have got into the wrong pile and the phrase was obviously one of several trotted out by the History teacher secure in the fact that it was bland enough not to raise the ire of parents.
Eventually, I was hauled up after two months of idling in the limbo of the re-sit class of the lower sixth and informed by the Head that ‘The staff no longer want to teach you’. Incredibly I was packed off for a talk with a member of staff, whose name I have long since forgotten, as to what I might do. This lasted about ten minutes after which I left school that same afternoon never to return. Although clueless about what the future might hold I felt only relief, and my mother, still recovering from my father’s death six months previously, never thought to do anything except suggesting I look in the paper for a job.
Following her advice I did look in the paper and got a job in insurance - so unsuited to my personality that it merits a longer mention later on in this memoir. It was a catastrophic choice that almost made me yearn for school, and I only lasted for six months before quitting and then scraping minimal qualifications to gain entry into a teacher training college. There followed three years of small time gambling, table football, drinking and general carousing after which I qualified as a teacher. Failing to anticipate that action would be required to obtain employment at the end of this idyll I was interviewed for a post that no one else wanted the day before term started at a tough Liverpool Comprehensive. It was to prove yet another temporary assignment.
I had for all sorts of reasons developed a restless nature for which I blame no-one. It was however proving hard to shake off and meant many decisions to move on were taken prematurely and in haste - although in truth not that many were repented at leisure. The Great West Indian cricketer, writer and polemicist CLR James said ‘What can they know of cricket who only cricket know?’ By garnering experiences, even if many were stumbled into, I always felt better to deal with the challenges thrown up by the next move or job. The ‘Fuck it’ factor may not have been a sound career strategy but it consistently resulted in change, travel, occasional angst and plenty of fun.
1.
AMERICAN VIRGIN 1969
In 1969, which was long before mass jet travel became the norm, I had been to the States for the first time to work in a summer hotel resort complex in the Catskills - “Lake Minnewaska Mountain Houses, for the newlyweds and nearly deads” as I came to know it.
Months prior to the trip I had written to an aging aunt who lived in the Bronx informing her of my impending visit. A response came in an old crone’s shaky handwriting. She wrote that her son, who lived in upstate New York but worked in the city, would meet me at a hotel in midtown. I would then stay with his family prior to starting work.
In those days there was still a stomach churning sense of anticipation to be driven from JFK into Manhattan at night. Disorientated and tired I checked into my fleapit hotel and watched the grainy black and white TV show pictures of the British Open Golf Championships from “the wonderful city of Blackpool.” The air conditioning barely moved the fetid air as I languidly, and it must be said half heartedly, prepared myself for the ‘orientation ’ I was to attend the next morning as part of the condition for my student work visa. I’d got this only days before leaving by going in person to the US Embassy in London. I was thrilled to see English blues group Savoy Brown also standing in the line looking surly and discussing some visa form difficulty that they were encountering. Thrills came cheaply all those years ago but our paths were to cross again.
The orientation was presented to fifty or so wide mouthed, and with hindsight, incredibly naive, English students and contained not a single word of anything that would be remotely useful in three months to come. After two hours we were asked to ‘have a nice day’ and sent off to find America. I got instantly lost and on asking one of New York’s finest for directions was curtly told, “Do me a favour sonny and buy a guide book.” In the steaming humidity of one of the hottest summers on record I eventually arrived, sweat stained and nervous, at the appointed hotel to meet my cousin Bill and his daughter.
At this point I should remind readers under fifty that although this was the summer of Woodstock, which I was later fleetingly to attend, most American males actually had very short if not crew cut hair. I had an enormous Afro hair ‘style’ which I had grown after seeing a poster of rock star Julie Driscoll (ask your parents). Even dampened somewhat with perspiration it looked, with recently added headband, quite arresting as I struggled to take in the scene in the hotel foyer. I spotted male and females of immense size, with girths the circumference of roundabouts. I prayed that they were not my relatives. As I did this I now realize my relatives were looking at a lanky teenage longhair who they were praying was not me.
We eventually connected and drove in near silence to their modest home in Westchester County. Bill was taciturn and his daughter, who was going through the early teenage monosyllabic period, failed to crank out a sentence during the entire ninety minute journey. On arrival I learned that I was to share a bed with their son Bill Jr. who was eighteen and clearly had, what we would now call, special needs. This proved not to be a problem in that I was so drunk after the welcoming barbeque that, on touching the mattress, I instantly fell into a deep and noisy sleep that not even the increasingly violent kicks from Bill Jr. could disturb. In the unfamiliar heat of the first afternoon out of the city I had taken no precautions against the sun. Then, as now, this planet only appeared fleetingly in northern English summers. As exotic beer followed gigantic burger and incoherent and increasingly slurred drivel spewed from my mouth I was unknowingly roasting to a painful medium rare.
On the two other evenings of my stay Bill Sr. downed beer followed by whisky chasers as I, in recovery and glowing red with a luminescence that would have lit up a substantial art of New York State, stuck to soft drinks and still fought to understand his increasingly eccentric views on life. During the day he had gallantly lent me his car to pick his daughter from school. Given that my entire driving experience to date in the UK had been three trips to town in my mother’s Morris Minor this was a significant leap of faith on his part. Although as a cultural coming together this had been an underwhelming experience for them and a painful one for me, the rest of the stay passed off without incident.
On reflection over the years I realised that this had been an occasion where my emotional immaturity resulted in an opportunity missed. My father had died when I was fifteen and I knew very little about his family. His sister Celia Rossiter, who by 1969 was in her early seventies, arrived as an immigrant to the US in the nineteen twenties. She had always lived in the same apartment in the Bronx and had slaved away at the same menial job since her arrival. For almost half a century she had been a room cleaner at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City. Her son Bill in Westchester County, who had hosted me, was looking forward to catching up on family news and reconnecting. He had even suggested a phone hook up, which was just about possible back then. Having dragged himself to a middle management position in a New York bank Bill had started to think about family origins and had long anticipated my visit. What he got in me probably increased his propensity for melancholia and introspection.
After that I never did see Bill or his family again. Bizarrely twenty three years later when I was the UK Director for BUNAC who sent English students to work in American summer camps, I found myself driving in Yorktown Heights which is where they had lived. Without thinking I had dredged up the address from the depths of my memory, driven into a cul-de-sac I remembered as their road, turned the radio off and parke
d the car. The house looked smaller than I recalled, empty and uncared for. A teenager shooting some hoops next door observed me sulkily. I noticed the name ‘Rossiter’ was still on the post box and I could hear the yelping of a small dog inside. Drops of rain started to splatter on the driveway and I felt a strange nervous foreboding. I reversed slowly, turned around and drove away.
Lake Minnewaska Mountain Houses stood in beautiful and substantial grounds in the Catskill Mountains some sixty miles north of New York City. The land and resort area was owned by Kenneth B. Phillips Junior. The clientele were mainly, but not exclusively, Jewish citizens of New York who paid their hard earned cash to come on vacation for a week or two to escape the heat and pollution of the city. There were two slightly down at heel hotels at either end of a picturesque lake and my job was to work with the laundry truck driver shuttling between the two. What could be easier? After a perfunctory greeting from the owner I was shown my room and told to report to ‘Howie’ the next morning. I lasted three weeks and emerged much wiser about the world of work and drug abuse.
As I strolled across from the staff quarters at 7.30am on a crisp Catskill morning the azure skies were cloudless and a summer of unknown possibilities lay ahead. Howie was leaning on the door of the truck rolling his first joint of the day. The conversation went as follows:
“ Hi, I’m Paul pleased… to meet you”
“Yup”
“Looking forward to working with you”
“Ah ha…(long pause)……I’m probably the third greatest guitar player in the United States today”
There were, of course so many things that I wanted to say at that stage and having mulled it over for forty two years the best retort would still have been ‘Tosser’. I did consider briefly who the top two might have been and with Jimi Hendrix clearly number one there was obviously fierce competition for the number two slot. Sickeningly I was later to find out that, although Howie certainly was an odious human being, he was also an excellent guitar player. Even worse this allowed him to seduce members of the female staff and at least one guest, while I spent my brief sojourn at Lake Minnewaska quietly seething with jealousy and resentment.