The Eau Rouge corner is the most wicked, steepest, craziest corner in Formula One auto racing. It is the corner that separates the men from the boys, to use a cliché. Or at least it was until they made a few modifications to it that made it so that pretty much all the Formula One cars go flat out up through this wall of a hill in the Ardennes Forest where the Belgian Grand Prix takes place.
So it was that because the corner no longer is entirely what it was in a Formula One car – not so long ago only fools like Jacques Villeneuve attempted it flat out, and ended up in the tire barrier off the side in a mess – I decided that I would measure myself against the drivers by attempting to take Eau Rouge on a real man’s machine: My unicycle. (It just turns out that there was a story in the New York Times today about unicycling, too, so you can get the background for unicycling on that.)
As a teenager for a brief period I worked in a circus in Canada called Puck’s Canadian Travelling Circus, and also for that circus’s predecessor company called Puck’s Rent-a-Fool. So I guess once a fool always a fool.
Eau Rouge has hung there for me as a temptation for years now but it was only yesterday that I finally got my courage up to attempt to ride my unicycle up the legendary hill.
The day before I did so, I sent off an email to a media contact at the McLaren Mercedes team to invite Lewis Hamilton, the team’s world champion driver, to join me if he cared to. For Hamilton too knows that Formula One cars are not entirely a man’s machine anymore, and he too rides a unicycle. I never heard back on that one, and I have assumed that Hamilton was too scared.
But he is certainly not afraid of unicycles. In fact, you could say he is part of a trend, and it all started off with an Irish former F1 driver named David Kennedy, who now runs a team in a lower series. Kennedy, in the 70s – when I first started unicycling – rode a unicycle. Then Mika Hakkinen, the Finnish driver who also became world champion at McLaren – like Hamilton – in 1998 and 1999 also rode a unicycle. (He went to circus school and, like me, occasionally rode his unicycle to high school.) And today there is Hamilton’s friend and competitor, Nico Rosberg, who drives as Michael Schumacher’s teammate at the Mercedes team, who also rides a unicycle. (He’d be better off here this weekend on the unicycle than in the Mercedes, where he qualified only 12th and then got a five spot grid penalty for having to change the gearbox.)
To quote from my story today from my Belgian Grand Prix Special Report about the Spa circuit, Eau Rouge “is end of a back straight where the cars run at 300 kilometers an hour, during a 23-second period at full throttle from La Source hairpin to Les Combes, at the end of the straight after Eau Rouge. Eau Rouge is the only corner in the series where the drivers have negative G-forces, here measured at up to -3.5g.”
So the challenge was there and I had to take it. I was warned by many colleagues in advance that the corner was like a wall, that it was difficult to walk up, almost impossible to ride up on a bicycle, and that I had no chance on a unicycle. What’s more, it could be dangerous for me.
Yeah, but I had to do it. I took a video of the feat, and yes, I made it!!! Not without looking like a fool and like a man on the verge of a heart attack, however. The second video, of me going DOWN Eau Rouge, was much simpler as a feat and I even managed to have the time to make a telephone call.
Yet again the lesson gets learned: Never give up hope. As my post from yesterday indicated, I thought I had no chance in Liege to find a place to sing during this end of summer break. Wrong!
I had found the Art Café last year, and I remembered that the place had a Wednesday jam session every week. But when I turned up last year on the Friday, I was told that exceptionally they would have a jam on the Sunday after the F1 race. So I went and had a wonderful evening of music in this dynamic little bar. They called it a café, but it is a bar (that’s Belgian).
So I drove directly from the race track yesterday to the Art Café, and I walked in to find a live, bubbly crowd. In fact, not quite true. I looked at the posters on the window facing the street and learned that there would be live music with a band or two last night.
So I went in, saw the drum set on the stage, and asked if there would be live music.
“No,” said the man behind the bar, whose name is Raph, and who has a band of his own.
I asked if there was a jam over the weekend, and he said, “No, only on Wednesdays.”
I looked disappointed, of course. And he said, “But if you want to go up and play now, you can. But we have no amp or mic set up so you’ll just have to play up there on the stage just like that.”
I happily accepted. The Art Café has a great atmosphere with a lot of young people, lots of musicians passing through – in fact there was a guy with a guitar sitting in the back when I arrived, although he did not play. It is fairly narrow, dark, and has a wonderful little stage and generally has a hip and cool feel to it.
I went up on stage and played somewhere close to 10 songs, and with several of them I found the crowd clapping and singing along – like with “Mad World,” “Baby Blue,” and “Father and Son,” and maybe one or two others. I played only one of my own songs, “Since You Left Me.”
But I was encouraged to continue by Raph, and by members of the audience. That does not mean they were quiet the whole time, they were enjoying themselves – and so was I! Can’t play in my crappy hotel facing the train station, the walls are too thin between rooms, so this was a fabulous release and relief just to be able to go up and sing my heart out.
I stopped in order not to overstay my welcome. But little by little as I spoke to people and the night dragged on and I was invited to play some more, I decided to run across the street to buy a pizza to eat a meal playing more.
As it turned out, the evening would develop into a full-fledged jam. A man named Luc showed up with his acoustic guitar and we did a few songs together – he was a much better guitar player than me, and knew all the rock standards, Beatles, Clapton, you name it. When I began singing “Cat’s in the Cradle,” we were joined by a young musician named Sofiane, who has his own band to be found on myspace as Niagarasound, and he played my guitar and sang a few good songs, like the Nirvana one and others.
Then Raph came along and he joined in with some rock songs, and finally near midnight, with his first love: Jacques Brel. So here I was in Belgium with two Belgians – and then an Algerian/Moroccan woman singer – singing Brel. And that was one of the high moments of the evening for me. So high, in fact, that I decided it was time to pack up the guitar and leave.
I had lost all hope, and found a jackpot. The Art Café renewed my faith in Liege, and Belgium in general….
I’ve been complaining throughout the month of August about how Paris closes down for the summer and there were very few musical open mic or jam session opportunities as a result. Guess what? Last night in Liege, Belgium, where I am staying during my visit to the Belgian Grand Prix, I discovered that two of the places I could have played at do not run their musical jams during August. They start again next week in one of the places, and the week after that in the other.
Those places are the musical bar called Bouldou, where I played last year in a fabulous jam – the race was a week later last year, I think – and a bar called Take Off. So much for swinging Liege!!! Well, on the other hand, seeing my disappointment at missing an opportunity to jam, the guys at Take Off offered me a free beer in consolation. I will now check out another place I played last year, but I fear I may find the same result….
Just a quick item before I travel on to explore musical Liege over the weekend as I attend the Belgian Grand Prix for my IHT and NYT coverage. I just wanted to wrap up the Paris August blues with a note about last Monday when I went back to the Tennessee Bar and The Galway, the fabulous venues that dared stay open all month.
I made a fool of myself at the Tennessee by singing my new song that was not yet finished and which I had not memorized – so read from a piece of paper that fell from my knee just before the bridge. But then went on to the Galway and sang four songs in what felt like an inspired manner, and that was confirmed by friendly comments afterwards. One of those comments came from Stephen “Danger” Prescott, formerly of the Salvation Army punk band, and now the MC of the Galway. This is the same Stephen “Danger” Prescott” that I mentioned who had turned up at the Highlander the previous week or so before in order to perform just like any member of the public, which I found extraordinary for this Australian from Melbourne who has lived in Paris for the last three or more years, playing every week at the Galway as the MC. But there was something very different about his act at the Highlander, and I was greatly amused at how he told me from behind the mic NOT to use the video, given his state of…. well, you’ll see. He gave me permission on Monday, noting that it was all in good fun and not a typical night for him. And it really wasn’t his fault, either, as a client bought him that huge jug of beer…..
I said yesterday that I would make the rounds of the bars and clubs re-opening after the summer break. I will not go into the details of where I went, in fact, but I did find a lively scene going on, and the night was hot and with clear skies and this helped make it sublime.
I will focus on the place where I ended up spending most of the evening, though, and it was not re-opening – it had not closed. And in fact, it was hosting a special evening of pop music from the year 1983 as presented by the acting DJ Caroline Harleaux, a journalist at the magazine called Voxpop, which focuses on the youth scene, particularly musical, in France.
This was at a bar called Le Motel. I arrived around 10:30 PM or so after making the rounds of the other nearby clubs, and I sat and had a beer and transcribed a song I was writing into my iPhone from the original paper on which I had begun to write it. (It is called borderline, song-in-progress written and played and sung by brad spurgeon today.)
I listened to the music, trying to figure out who was whom and had they really recorded that in 1983??? And then I got up and went to the bar for a re-fill and there I saw a guy I had met at the beginning of the year, and had never really had a good talk with. But he is friends with my ex-girlfriend and I decided it would be good to talk, finally. This was the vastly interesting Eric Débris, who was the lead singer and the guy who played the machines, as he called the synth and rhythm boxes at one of the original French punk bands, called Métal Urbain, which was founded in 1976. (“The first band ever to mix drum machines and synths with guitars back in 1976, Metal Urbain have influenced bands worldwide, generating the whole synth-punk movement in France,” it says on the band’s myspace.)
Eric and I were born in the same year, but at opposite ends of it, with him being born first. That still makes us contemporaries. And as it turns out, my talk with Eric would end up showing us both that we had far more common interests than we might have expected, but more importantly, it was a sort of snapshot of a phenomenon that I have written about here before, and that Eric pointed out frequently happens in life….
Here’s how I might define that: It turned out that there was a web of common interests and people that stretched across decades, areas of interest and into other worlds…. For instance, Eric is a huge fan of Formula One auto racing, which is, of course, my specialty as a journalist. But as we spoke, he said that he had noticed at my ex-girlfriend’s place a copy of my book about Colin Wilson, and he said that Wilson was one of his favorite writers, as he had read and loved when he was living in London in the 1980s, books like The Occult, Beyond the Occult, and the book about Carl Jung. And of course I had just been writing a chapter about The Occult over the last two weeks.
But then the conversation continued and he mentioned Norman Spinrad, the science fiction writer. I told him that I knew Spinrad too – who incidentally, has been fighting cancer recently – and then I said, “Spinrad also played in a band for a while.” To this Eric said, “Yes, I know. I am also friends with Maurice Dantec, who played in that band, and with Richard Pinhas, also in the band.”
To which I replied that I had met Dantec on several occasions and written stories about him, as certainly the first in the English language to do so extensively in the mid-1990s. I knew that Dantec had played in a punk band before he became a writer, but what I did not know was that he had modeled the band on Métal Urbain, Eric’s band, using a beat box. At one point, said Eric, they were the only two French punk bands doing that, in the late 70s.
So I will return to Métal Urbain, to mention that it was indeed one of the first and best French punk bands, but it never really broke out in France, being more accepted elsewhere than here – a typical situation in France, and one that I just read about yesterday in Rock & Folk magazine in a roundtable discussion in the summer issue of the French rock scene. Métal Urbain, in fact, was mentioned in that article.
Another tie-in here was that I mentioned to Eric that in 1977 when I was living in Toronto in the middle of the punk scene – before moving to England in the middle of the punk scene – I had seen one of the first and most famous of the concerts by a band called The Viletones. I mentioned the names of a few other bands from the time, including Teenage Head, and Eric mentioned The Diodes, and he said they continue to play around the world and that he is an old friend of one the band members.
What I did not tell Eric is that at this time, when I was 19 years old, I had begun some of my first disciplined efforts at prose writing – although I was myself trying to make it in show business, including in music – and it turns out that what I consider to be my first ever complete non-fiction or, really, piece of journalism, was a story I wrote about seeing the Viletones. It was never published, and I wrote it the very night I saw the band, upon returning to my rooming house. I never tried to publish it, in fact, as I considered it just an entry in my “Nothing Book,” a kind of diary with hard covers in which I began my first efforts at writing. I was heavily influenced by the prefaces to his plays of George Bernard Shaw, and in some ways I think I tried to imitate that. In any case, I have decided to transcribe my story of The Viletones at the Colonial Underground and put it on this blog in my stories area. For I have not found any other such photographic looks at the Viletones in Toronto in 1977, although I recently saw an old television documentary on the scene. You will see in my story that although I was only 19, and the lead singer of the group, whose name was “Nazi Dog,” was only a year more than me maximum, (IE, same age as Eric), I was far, far from being a punk myself.
Eric’s band was really in some ways the equivalent of this same movement, but in France, and musically and conceptually, Métal Urbain was more advanced than The Viletones. These days Eric has no longer been singing “Crève Salope,” (Die Whore), but he has some musical projects in mind. Instead, Débris is focusing on photography, and has recently launched a line of Eric Débris merchandize with his photos on them.
Below is a photo of an Eric Débris skateboard with a photo of the model “Poison” on it – it’s part of his merchandize line.
But the point of this story was also really how a universe of common interests and affinities often surrounds people and they eventually link up for such reasons – as an example, Eric mentioned that one of his favorite writers turned out to be a fan of Métal Urbain – and it can be as far wide as from punk music to Formula One auto racing, or the writings of Colin Wilson or Maurice Dantec. But somehow it all fits together – I’m sure everyone reading this has their own examples of such Elective Affinities.
In newspaper newsroom jargon a “space holder” is an article that sits in a spot on the page in earlier editions to hold the space for a more important article that will take that same space in later editions. You might say this blog item is a space holder, as I sit tight and make yet another mention of The Highlander Pub where I went to play last night, before making the rounds of a few other bars and pubs that are just beginning to open after their summer breaks.
But it is tomorrow, Friday, 20 August, that marks the real surfacing of the opening of the bars and pubs after their summer breaks as they obviously decide to make use of the penultimate weekend of the month to try to drum up a bit of business in an otherwise dead month. I have a list of no fewer than eight bars and clubs I will be able to – and probably will – go to tomorrow night as they open up for business with inaugural re-opening evenings. Only one of these is a place where I can play music. But it just shows how desperately bad Paris has been until now and why I have multiple, absolutely multiple posts on the few places that have stayed open during this traditionally down month in the French capital.
Next week, I will return to my world travels and will add a little more variety to the blog as I hit such cities as Liege, Milan, Singapore, Nagoya and many others (at least that’s what I think will be happening….).
But for the moment, hold onto this space with a couple of brief videos from last night. The open mic at the Highlander was run by Rudy – since Thomas Brun went on holidays – and also with help from Etienne doing the sound. The two opened the evening playing a duette of bass guitar and acoustic guitar and with Etienne on the vocals. It was nice. There was another local duo group that sang in perfect American English but seemed to speak perfect French too, and the guitar player had a strat backing the acoustic. Nice.
I myself sang “Mad World,” announcing that I might sound really mad singing the song since I was in the habit of singing it with someone else, who was not there, and then I sang “Cat’s in the Cradle” and then my own song, “Since You Left Me.” It all went well, and I left in a sweat to seek out a little more nightlife on my vacation, which I did not really find, as Paris is half dead. May it come back to life, and live on strong again – like, tomorrow, for instance….
On Monday I said thank goodness both the Tennessee Bar and the Galway Pub were holding their usual open mics despite the August holiday in Paris where the French disappear. Another of the stalwart open mics continued on Wednesday, with the Highlander Pub remaining open and entertaining with its open mic.
It was a usual evening at the Highlander, with a good mixture of crap and great stuff. One of the problems with the Highlander open mic is that it is so popular that you really have to get there at close after 8 PM to be among the first performers on the list and not have to wait until after midnight to play. I dragged my feet so badly last night at home that I ended up not getting to the Highlander until around 10 PM. I thought I was doomed in terms of when I might get a chance to play. Then, much to my amazement, Thomas Brun, the organizer, came up to me within minutes of my arrival, and he said, “I’ve had someone pulling out at the last minute, so you can go up next if you want.”
Wow! I had just bought a pint of beer and the shot of adrenaline was so strong that I said “yes” very quickly and then drank as much of the beer as I could as quickly as I could, since I knew that I had only about one more song to listen to of the performer who was singing, before I would have to go up and sing. It was so rushed that I was not mentally prepared. Needed the beer to calm the nerves. But I’d rather that than wait until nearly 1 AM to play.
I then spent until midnight or afterwards listening to most of the other performers, so in a way I didn’t really save myself much time after all. But I enjoyed it, and there was a kind of a feeling of a theme here. For while Etienne was the first, he was far from the last of the performers that I saw at the Galway, again playing here. For example, there was the Dutch (and French) woman I have mentioned – and showed a video of – in my Galway post recently (which she asked to be removed years later). And after her, by the time I got near the end of my stay there, it turned out that even the MC of the Galway, the Australian from Melbourne, Stephen Prescott, decided he would go up and play a few songs for fun. In fact, his fun was so much fun – carousing fun – that while I was recording it on video in stealth behind a pillar near the door so neither he nor anyone else would really notice the candid camera, Stephen stopped singing for a moment and turned my way and said, “Brad, don’t put this up on your blog, I’m….”
Well, all right, I left the last word out. And I have decided not to. But I’ve got the evidence, Stephen. So next time I go to the Galway, if you don’t want the world to see it – let me on early there too, no matter what time I show up.
But seriously, I love it when I see an MC from an open mic show up to do another open mic two days later, as a performer. This is devotion, passion, fun.
But this is the story: At the Tennessee bar open mic last night – thank goodness it is still running in August – during the short time that I was there the best guitarist was clearly the guy whose video I have pasted in below. He had a very agreeable tapping style on the guitar, and an agreeable timbre to his voice as well. And to top it off, the guitar was not even his own, but the one most people shared at the open mic.
I got called up suddenly to play after one or two other performers and when another guitarist tapped the strings of the same guitar so hard that he broke two of them…. Since I had my own guitar, it was a good moment for me to go and play. But I had not played on stage for what felt like a million years – was it a full week? Can’t remember…. So I started off a little cold, then built it up with each song and received a resounding applause for the final one – my own, “Let Me Know,” which I played a little differently than I have in the past, as I have now been influenced by my own studio version of the song!!!
Anyway, I left soon after my own performance to go to the Galway Bar, just down the Seine, near the Place St. Michel. Stepping outside of the Tennessee I met up with two friends from the open mic circuit, Lord Prosser and LadiesDi. The former is an Englishman who talks like he comes from Birmingham, and as it turns out, he does. He has lived in Paris for more than a decade, though, and plays at all the open mics. LadiesDi – not sure where he got that name – is from Argentina, and he has been hanging around Paris for a while. Anyway, they told me to tell the man at the Galway that they would soon join me along with a woman from Sweden (I think it was).
So off I went to the Galway. When I arrived out front I found Steven, the Australian MC, had changed his bush hat of the last time I was there for a Mohawk haircut.
“You picked a great night to come back,” he said to me, recognizing me immediately and telling me he had seen the video I did of him on this blog the last time.
I looked inside to see there was practically no one there. Just an American man singing and playing behind the mic and a few people in the bar.
“There are going to be three others coming soon to play, too,” I said, referring to Lord Prosser, LadiesDi and the Swedish woman.
“This guy will play, then I will play, then you can play,” said Steven.
Yes, I had picked the right night. Just the time to tune my guitar and then go and play my four songs, no waiting. And as it turned out, an audience would build up quickly, even during the time I played. And more and more of the musicians from the Tennessee showed up as well, so the even went on quite late after midnight.
So back to the main narrative thrust of this post. The tapping….
I played three songs and by then LadiesDi was there and taking photos of me and he made a request for the last song. He asked for “Cat’s in the Cradle,” the song I do by Harry Chapin. Then I think he said, “Cat Stevens” and it may be he wanted “Father and Son,” but as I had already sung that at the Tennessee, I leapt at the opportunity to do the Chapin song.
I also took this as an opportunity to talk about how I had met Chapin while doing a television show in Ottawa in 1976. And I recounted what a great guy he was. We spoke while waiting for him to be called on stage to play for the TV audience. We learned we were born on the same day, December 7, and that we both wanted to go to acting school. He was, of course, 15 years older than I was – and I was just a teenager. When he was called to play he grabbed his Ovation guitar quickly, dropped it, and broke a rib in the guitar. He laughed uproariously and shrugged it off, running out to play with the broken guitar. It was the way he was, I thought, it best summed up his personality – from the little I had seen.
It was also sad that he had this hit song about growing up and working as a father and never really seeing his son grow up. But in the end, it was even more tragic in Chapin’s life, as he died in a car crash on 16 July 1981 at around 37 years old – so saw even less of his kids’ lives….
I sang the song at the Galway, it went down well. Then right after me, Steven decided to go up to sing a song before the next invited guest. And the song he sang, of all things, was the old 1970s hit, “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” This is really not a very common song these days in open mics. But it woke up my sense of the past, the supernatural, and the tappings of voices from the past…for it was the song on which during that same music program in the 1970s with Chapin that I appeared in a music video of the song. Sorry for that mangled sentence. Too lazy to fix it. In other words, my biggest, starring role on the music show was that of a kid going off on a jet plane and leaving his girlfriend behind. It was a music video, style 1976, and I had the main role, acting out the “Leaving on a Jet Plane” story. (It helped that the woman who played the woman was the TV show’s cute blonde secretary, and I had a crush on her and got to kiss her during the filming….)
Anyway, so there we are. It was as if the spirit of Harry Chapin and that TV show had come back for moment to animate the Galway Pub in Paris. (Or as if I had nothing better to write about today, especially after finishing the re-reading of The Occult, by Colin Wilson…!)
As I was leaving the Galway I just had to stop and whip out the video recorder to get a few seconds of the act consisting of a reggae kind of guy and a woman from New York. She later told me that she had seen me at the Tennessee, and I had, in fact, noticed her there too – as she was noticeable. But her singing was magnificent, it turned out, and it was too bad I didn’t see her at the Tennessee. I managed to catch a little of the song she did at the Galway, and I’m pasting it in below, although it is far from good enough as an expression of her sound….
Curious mixture last night was. But in Paris, the pickings are slim. (How can I slide into cliché?)
I had two or three choices and went for two of them: One was my friend Baptiste Hamon, who calls himself and his band “Texas in Paris.” And he is original and authentic, despite being a Frenchman with a degree in chemical engineering from a university in Sweden. What? Forget I ever said any of that. Just check out the videos I did of him playing at l’International last night. And if that is not enough, check out the Paris In Texas myspace site.
Baptiste is very, very cool. And I must agree with the summation of one of his co-workers who saw him perform last night for the second time. “Baptiste,” said the friend as we stood outside the International – a cool bar with a concert space in the basement, located near the metro Menilmontant, “When you perform you look like you’re having an orgasm.”
I told the friend not to give Baptiste a complex. But I knew that such a statement never would give Texas in Paris a complex. It is pretty closely true, that statement, and I added that this was possibly what made the act acttractive to women. I’m not sure about that, but Texas in Paris does have its appeal. It’s fuckin’ great, in fact. Check him out – the Frenchman who sings cowboy, country, and his own weird punk country stuff that he has a logo for: “Real punks ride horses.” Riotous!!
Next up at the International was a band called UNCLE MEAT AND THE HIGHWAY CHILDREN. This was of particular interest to me since Uncle Meat is also the name that Frank Zappa gave to Sandy Hurvitz, now known as Essra Mohawk, the former wife of my friend Frazier Mohawk, who ran the circus I worked in as a teenager….
Just as I was getting deep into conversation with Baptiste and other friends and I was offered a drink and a time to hang around at the International, I cut out because I said I had something else planned. I mean, shit, I had paid 34 euros to buy myself a black linen shirt to wear to the Gothic party at the Espace Madeleine, near the Madeleine metro, near the Place de la Madeleine in Paris.
This I did. I’ve only been to about two other such gothic parties, but the phenomenon is extremely interesting, and anyway, I had started the evening by having a date who was supposed to show up to the party. She ended up being very wishy-washy about whether she was going to go or not, and eventually sent me a fake message to the effect that she was there – when in fact she clearly was not. (Don’t bother asking the details on that one, please.) (Oh, yes, not to mention also that I saw at least two other women who looked very much like her; which, this being a gothic party, was certainly of no surprise.)
Suffice it to say that this was the wildest, fullest, most riotous one that I had yet attended. There is something very bizarre, yet interesting, about being amongst a group of people all with similar black clothes, hairstyles, hair color, and musical culture and dance mannerisms. And with this one located in the posh 1st Arrondissement of Paris and only a given number of people allowed out in the street to smoke – or consult telephone messages – and a queue at the doors for the rest wanting to go out – it was a bit of a phenomenon. I took a bit of video of the dancing on my iPhone but it all came out black… not surprising, right?
nightloo gothic night at the place de la madeleine in Paris
A wonderful moment of the evening came when I was outside the locale in the street trying to capt phone messages and a biker with tattoos and a look said to me, “Is it good? The evening? Are there lots of people?”
“Yeah, it’s packed,” I said.
“And people of my age?” he said, and then he smiled and said with the familiar “tu,” in French, “Well, that is to say, of your age?”
Thanks guy, I said to myself, wondering if I really looked as old as he did, and then I said, “Yeah, there’s two or three…. But not many….”
