Spain, First Time

The thing with Gerry was, he was a property guy. Started off investing in some land on the Costa; when that went well, he took a stake in one of the golf course developments; then a small-scale timeshare, then a bigger one, and then another, moving along the coast, away from the Sixties high rises, inland from Fuengirola or Benalmadena.

He helped build the rookeries of retired Brits, salting away their money in the Spanish sun for the grandchildren, or so they thought. This was 1995: long before the property market tanked.

“I only go down to the Costa for business, these days,” he said, when we first met. “Totally overdeveloped, now.”

Apart from having no obvious sense of irony, he seemed a nice guy, and the best looking at that party by a country mile. A big, bluff bloke you really would buy a timeshare from.

“I have to go back there on Tuesday,” he said, looking out at the sleet trying to turn into snow. “You could come out with me, and see what it's like – no obligation, of course.”

The party was in a big flat in the New Town. Inside, the air was heavy with women's perfume and low quality weed. Outside, the rain was beginning to pick up.

“Are you trying to sell me a holiday villa, or yourself?” I said. “Either way, you're a little fast.”

That seemed to amuse him. “You decide, when you've seen the whole package,” he said. “Either way, you get the tour for free.”
I told him I was an old fashioned girl, but I let him take me home in his hired 4 x 4. "We'll see," was what I left him with that night.

We flew to Malaga after all on the Tuesday, and he installed me in one of his newest, finest, apartments. There was a pool, a mini-mart beside the faux-Moorish arch, and cranes just beyond it, building the next phase. Blue sky and sun loungers at the poolside; dust and grinding cement when you took a left turn. And lots and lots of old people. I mean, I was 45 then, but I was still bringing down the average age a long way.

“They migrate here for the winter,” he said. “Like the starlings.” Ornithology wasn't his strongest suit either; but he was kind, and took his time with me. I was feeling fragile that year: I felt like I needed looked after.

Gerry's own house was up in one of the pueblos blancos, the white villages up in the hills. It had me digging out my old sketch pad and doing some drawings, that place: the tiny lizards splayed like missing jigsaw pieces on the whitewashed walls, the mosaic of clay-tiled roofs, stretching away below the balcony.

By the end of my third week there, I'd moved in. I phoned Farrago Man, back in Edinburgh, and told him to look after the Dormobile.

“How long for?” he said.

“I don't know,” I said. “We'll see.”

It was too soon. Gerry was away a lot, working. Besides, he was the lord of the manor, in the village. Half of the locals worked for him – something he was proud of. He'd even started buying up any of the old properties that came up, to house his workers. "Keep the tourists at bay," he said, his eyes twinkling.

It was different for me, though. If I went down to the local bar and asked to play a few songs, I felt like the boss's wife. And when I was done, some kid of a flamenco guitarist would appear out of the woodwork and start tearing the place up, and the clapping and stamping of feet would start.

It wasn't that the people weren't friendly. It was the language barrier, mainly: I tried to learn Spanish, but the local accent kept confounding me, the way the ends of words would be chopped off, the letter 's' disappearing like it was some special treasure they couldn't share.

So most days I slept late, pottered about, painted a little, played guitar on the verandah. I wrote songs, some of which have stood the test of time.

I didn't write All I Can Think Of Is You until much later, long after I got that letter, and took Gerry's car to Malaga airport.

I did come back to Spain, not long after, but not to the Costa del Sol. Fifteen months I was with him, almost, but I still didn't look back once, gunning the Alfa along that little dirt track running east.

The letter was from Sumner, of course. No idea how he found out where I was. Farrago Man, I suppose: I guess he must have tracked him down first. Come to think of it, maybe Sumner had kept the Polaroid of the shop all these years. Maybe that's what happened to it. I never asked.

So I sat there, reading the letter, while the sun shone off the sea, like the song says. It was fiesta day, one of those celebrations they have in Andalucia where they stage mock battles to commemorate Spain being liberated from the Moors. It's all very Spanish, and they have a big barbecue in the town square. I could smell the meat cooking through the open window.

I don't know how long Gerry and me would've lasted if that letter hadn't come. Another thing I'll never know.

The Chicano Moratorium

The guy looked like a fish out of water. Literally. He was drenched from head to foot. He'd walked up into the Canyons from West Hollywood in the rain.

"You gotta come to this, really," he said. Water dripped off his Zapata moustache onto the rug. "This is gonna be huge. The biggest anti-Vietnam march in L.A., period. Entiendes?"

Sumner looked amused. "Really?"

I said, "Why don't you sit down…Bobby, was it you said?"

So Bobby Guttierez sat down, and leaked rainwater on the battered old sofa while he talked to us about the Chicano Moratorium.

"It's the Mexican-American movement for social justice, man. Social justice here, not war in Vietnam, man. I'm surprised you haven't heard about it."

"Yeah, sure, we have," Sumner said, vaguely. "How about a drink? Linda?"

He meant me. I was still Linda Carmichael then. My first album's release was still a month off, and the protest organiser was here to see Sumner.

Bobby smoothed his trousers down, passing his brown beret through his hands. He smelt of rain, of olive oil, and garlic. He smelt exotic, to me.

"No, gracias," he said. "Got to keep moving. But you'll come, yeah? I love your records, man. It would mean a lot to have you there."

"Count us in," Sumner said, as the guy got up to go. As I showed Bobby to the door, I wondered if he could read Sumner's body language.

"We need you guys to support us, man," he said. I told him I knew and gave him vague directions to Joni Mitchell's place. When I went back through to the living room, Sumner was staring at the damp patch on the sofa.

"I just don't know it's our kind of thing, Linda," he said, as if he knew what I was going to ask. "I mean, I'm against the war, and everything, but these guys…they're just so…"

"Mexican?" I said.

"No, it's not that. You know it's not that."

It was our first argument about politics. Sumner was pretty lazy, politically, but I harped on about how important it was to get involved that he agreed just to shut me up.

That first March we went to, some time in Spring, 1971. There was a cold clear light to the day, bouncing off the helmets and visors of the National Guardsmen. We marched under some sort of banner: I think it said something like 'Artists against the Draft.' Just me holding one end of it, Sumner at the other, and a raggle taggle of session men and hangers on in between.

The year before, not long after Julie and I arrived, there had been what turned out to be the biggest of the Chicano demonstrations, and the cops had opened fire. So we were a jittery bunch, that day, marching beside our Mexican-American brothers, Sumner in his army surplus shirt. This was in East L.A., with the housing projects stretching away up the hill ahead of us.

Then something happened. I don't know what the flashpoint was, but up ahead the tear gas canisters started going off, the Brown Berets in front of us began to tunr and scatter, and the other half of the banner went slack. I turned, and Sumner had disappeared in the wheeling, panicking mob of protesters and cops. I didn't know if he had been hit, or just cut and run.

I ran, like everyone else, of course. Didn't want a National Guardsman breaking my arm with a baton any more than the rest of them. The confusion wasn't helped by the joint I'd had before we came out: I remember shouting Sumner's name, main streets turning into side streets, crowds thinning to ones and twos, the adrenalin gradually ebbing away. Eventually there was just me and a couple of locals, who took pity on me and called their brother in law who ran a taxi firm, making me coffee in their ground floor apartment that smelt of bitter oranges.

I found out later that Sumner had experienced a different kind of hospitality with a Cuban girl called Rosa, who turned up at the house two nights later, looking for him.

That kind of killed the Chicano Moratorium for me, although it petered out by itself later that year, if I remember right. I never saw Bobby Guttierez again. Sumner said he'd heard he was a CIA plant, an agent provocateur trying to discredit the organisation. But then, Sumner said a lot of things.

It was a year or so later that picture came out, the one of the girl in a Vietnamese village after a napalm attack. I reckon that picture, going into millions of homes on the front of a newspaper, did just as much as all the rallies and marches ever did.

They say a picture's worth a thousand words. Well, in my case, it was worth three verses, chorus and a bridge.

Waking Up to Dylan

Bob Dylan at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, it must have been 1966. Julie and I were 16, for goodness' sake. We'd made it down from Arbroath, don't know how. I think we told our folks we were staying with Julie's sister in Edinburgh or something, but instead we blew everything we'd been saving for a year, and got the train to Manchester. It was the first time either of us had been away from home.

First half of the concert was the Sermon on the Mount for us. Just Dylan, his guitar, and a concert hall full of his charisma. I remember him playing 'Visions of Johanna,' and it was like nothing we'd ever heard before. The chords looked simple enough, but the lyrics! How on earth could I remember them? In the interval, I tried writing some of them down on the back of my ticket, with a pencil I'd liberated from school. The ticket wasn't big enough, of course...

Backstage, in the interval, he murdered the corduroy-capped hobo. Then a street punk came out of the chrysalis, toting a Telecaster, making the folkies in the audience howl. It was loud, though! First crack of the snare drum like a gunshot, an assassination of Archduke Ferdinand for the hard core fans, people older than us who'd been brought up on English folk music, all that hey nonny nonny stuff. Julie and I didn't know enough to not love electric Dylan, the wall of noise he was making with these leather-clad dudes.

Then came the clapping, the chanting. It was like this enormous static charge, building and building. Most people around us were against the electric stuff. I remember this big Yorkshire guy next to us, bearded, shouting, 'Get shot of the band,' over and over.

Every Dylan fan knows about the 'Judas' moment, when a fan accused him of selling out. But the song that stuck in my mind most wasn't the final 'Like A Rolling Stone,' it was the one before the Judas shout, 'Ballad of a Thin Man.' It was this funereal bluesy stomp, with Dylan up front, snarling about sword-swallowers and one-eyed midgets. Anyone that didn't get his circus show, he was saying, could go straight to hell as far as he was concerned.

Afterwards, on the long walk to the train station, shivering in the May dawn, waiting for the train, it was that chorus that went through my head: 'You know something's happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you Mr Jones?' And later, when I got home to all the recriminations, that song kept me warm long after. Arbroath in the 60s was full of people related to Mr Jones.

Mind you, when I moved to L.A. I found he had family there, too.

Off the Radar

I still have the Dormobile. Thought of trading it in for a Winnebago but I hired one of those things once and they're a sod to drive. Besides, I know how to keep the D on the road now. Fixed it enough times.

Sometimes I just take off, a day turning into a week, pootling around the back roads. Sometimes I'll just pitch up in some place, some bar, and ask to play a few songs. Those can be good nights, although as often as not people can be switched off to me: tuned into their own internal rhythms. Or just plain plugged into their iPod.

Just once in a while, though, if I hit my stride, heads will turn and you'll see them say, that was pretty good. Wonder what she'll do next? And then I'll start to get better. Ask any performer: we feed off the rest of you.

You never know. It might be your town I pitch up in some day, your neighbourhood bar. If it is, come and speak to me. But don't ask me if I know any Natalie Imbruglia.

L.A. Arrival

Laurel Canyon was the place to be in those days, when I first moved Stateside in 1970. Not that we realised that at first: we were too busy living it. Then some journalist joins the dots and realises for us that, hey, in a few square miles of real estate, you've got Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Jackson Browne, Mama Cass, Joni, Carole King, Frank Zappa, Canned Heat, and hey, who are those country rock boys, what's their name, the Eagles? They're going to be something, aren't they?

Well, not all of them were there at the start, and some of 'em left before the others appeared. And there were lots of other musicians there too, ones that only ever became footnotes in some book somewhere. I should know.

All I did know back then was that there were cheap places to stay up in the Canyons beyond L.A., and it was out of the seething, smoggy city itself, and it was near the Troubador. And anyone who was anyone played at the Troubador. Even I knew that, and I was still living in Arbroath.

So we arrived, me and my friend Julie, at LAX one broiling, dusty, summer's day, took a bus into the city, choked on the fumes, and found another bus that took us to West Hollywood.

Yes, two buses, a suitcase and a guitar each, and no more than two hundred bucks to our name once we'd been fleeced at the bureau de change by a sad-eyed woman who pretended not to understand our accents. No chauffeur driven limo for us: I might have sung in a hit single back home, that bloody clown song, but the management had the money all tied up in some management thing. It wasn't in my pocket, that was all I knew: I'd had to borrow the money for the airline tickets from Stan, Lickety Split's drummer.

Anyway, there Julie and I were, standing at a bus stop on Santa Monica Boulevard with our heads going round like lighthouse beacons taking it all in. We had a map, and a contact in Lookout Mountain Avenue, so we started walking. Even then, the locals looked at us like we were from another planet for walking. Uphill all the way.

Our contact was a guy called Charlie, from Glasgow. He was a session musician: keyboards, mainly. When we called at the address we'd been given, we were told he was at a party three doors down. A party, in the afternoon! We thought that was pretty rock and roll.

When we got there, the party consisted of three guys sitting on the floor smoking joints. We had somehow missed Charlie, so back we went in the late afternoon heat, our cheesecloth blouses sticking to our backs, and our shoes full of grit from the roadside.

Charlie was a wee Glaswegian guy with black hair plastered down over his forehead. When he opened the door he recognised us from passing us ten minutes earlier. "Thought it might be you," he said, grinning, as if two pale skinned girls with suitcases and guitars were a common sight in the Canyons. Come to think of it, probably were.

"Guitarists are ten a penny," he told us, as he made tea (we'd been hoping for something stronger). "So are singers, come to think of it."

"I've been writing some songs," I said.

"Oh aye?" he said, looking me up and down. I noticed his mid-Atlantic accent disappeared after he'd spoken to us for a bit.

When we'd finished our tea, he suggested we all go to bed together. When we knocked him back, he shrugged, said, "Worth asking," and took us two doors up the hill to a neat little three bedroom house, white painted, shuttered against the sun.

"Looking after it for a pal," he said. "He's no' due back from tour for another month."

Inside, the place was like the Marie Celeste: unmade beds, dirty plates and glasses in the kitchen, attracting the flies' attention.

Charlie sniffed. "Probably do with a bit of a tidy up right enough."

As it turned out, the owner never made it back from tour. Died in a hotel room in Pennsylvania. So we ended up staying there for three months, until Julie went home, and I moved in with Sumner and Katy.

We never realised how good we had it. Right in the heart of the Canyons; neat little place nestled in among the trees, up off the road, so that you woke every morning to the scent of pine and oak breathing out after the night, stretching themselves awake in the sun.

Charlie was good to us, though. Made some introductions: even got me some work as a backing singer in the early days. After that first knockback he was the perfect gentleman. Always treated me with respect, which is more than some did.

I think Julie went with him, once, before she went back. I made it my rule never to lay the landlord. Pretty much stuck to it, too. Pretty much.

Farrago Man

The shop was still there, on Candlemaker Row. Its contents, too, crowding round him like a circle of old friends who hadn't what it took to get up and leave.

Farrago. I remember when he opened it, he sent me a picture: it must have been oh, 1971 or so. A Polaroid, with him standing in front of the door below the sign. FARRAGO, in pink letters on a purple background, with a green snake curling around the G. Him looking slightly stunned.

I remember sticking the Polaroid up on my fridge door in the house I shared in the Canyon with Tania and Sumner.

“Looks...nice,” Sumner said. There was a gap between the two words.

“He got me into my first band,” I said, and shrugged. And then Sumner opened the fridge door to get the beer he was looking for in the first place, and the moment was gone. The picture of one man and his shop stayed there, though, on the fridge door, for the rest of the time I was in that house, like some sort of hippy gargoyle, protecting me from I don't know what. Farrago Man, Sumner called him.

I lost the Polaroid when I moved from that house. Funny how things just go missing in your life, only to turn up some day.

Twenty years later, Farrago had seen better days, but then we all had. I pushed at the door but it had stuck. Wood swollen up in the damp, probably: Edinburgh was bigger than Arbroath, but the mist still crept in from the sea on late afternoons in December, like this one.

I gave the door one last shove with my shoulder and it gave at last, suddenly, so that I half-fell inside. Above me, there was a metallic ping and then the bell fell past my ear, smashing on the floor with a strangled sound. I suppose it wasn't one of my best entrances.

“It's you, then,” he said. At least he had the grace to look sort of pleased. “How long are you staying this time?”

Turned out to be three months, until I met Gerry.

I have to admit the Spanish weather was a big part in that whole thing.

Tito's General

The translator looked disgusted. Whatever it was the General had said, she took a lot fewer words to say it in English.

“The General would like you to join him for dinner after the concert,” she said.

Belgrade, 1979. Hot July night, with the mosquitoes biting in the dressing room before the gig. I was ready to go on stage. I wasn't ready for this.

“He is most insistent. He says he would be honoured.” I was pretty sure that wasn't how he'd put it.

She was a good-looking woman, the translator. Forty at the most. Strong, high cheekbones, and dark eyes glittering deep in their sockets. Handsome, my Mum would've called her.

I suppose the General was attractive to a lot of women. He had oily hair in a sort of pompadour, and a squint nose. Probably broken in the service of the Glorious Partisans, fighting alongside Josip Tito thirty-five years before.

But he had a sort of...aura, a presence. You could see it in the way our Yugoslav backstage people edged around him, smiling and nodding when he ignored them.

“Tell him politely I'm not interested,” I said. “And I've got a gig to do in five minutes.”

In the hall, the audience were starting to shuffle their feet. It wasn't quite a big enough crowd to start stamping, or maybe it was just they had heard the General was in the building too.

The translator turned back to the General. She spoke softly, hesitantly, knowing he wasn't going to want to hear what she said. His reply was pretty short. His eyes flicked over me again. Then she turned back to me.

“I told him you would be too tired after the concert. He asked if tomorrow was going to be more convenient.”

I smiled. “I have to be in Bulgaria tomorrow. My next concert is there.” I thought that might give me an out, but the translator just looked a little more sour, shrugged, and relayed on what I'd said.

When he replied, the General was smiling and nodding at me. I thought that was a good sign, until she said, “He says he knows people in the central authorities in Sofia. They can rearrange your concert. He says your permit to stay longer in Yugoslavia can be extended at a phone call from him.”

Or my permit to leave revoked, I thought to myself. Through in the auditorium, the crowd had started a timid sort of slow handclap: “Ve-nus, Ve-nus...”

What could I do? The guy obviously wanted a Western pop star as a notch on his bed post. And I was the closest he was going to get.

I studied the translator. Her face was a mask.

“Look,” I said. “Can you help me out here? Sister to sister?”

She was expressionless as she considered this. Eventually she said, “If you want rid of him, the best way would be if you say that you'd sooner sleep with me than him.”

“To say I'm a lesbian?”

She nodded.

“Okay, then.” Actually, I've often wished that were true. Women are so much easier to get along with than men. I'm just not made that way, worse luck.

I watched the translator tell the General, and his face change as she used the word lezbejka. I heard it used a few more times the next day, at the border, but luckily the good old boys on the barrier let me through.

That night, though, I just thanked the translator, turned on my heel, and walked out on stage. It was a good gig, I seem to remember; despite the guitars going out of tune all the time with the heat. They always liked me in Belgrade.

I only found out by chance, much later, that the translator was actually the General's wife.