Spain, Second Time

The second time I lived in Spain was at the other end of the country, in La Coruňa. I’d been recommended to someone who was running a Celtic folk festival there, and I didn’t have the heart to tell them I didn’t see myself as a folkie, or even Celtic, particularly. 

Still, they paid me the cost of my travel and a small fee, and I was in the south of France at the time, so off I went. The Pyrenees just about killed the VW’s engine; and when we got to Galicia in early June, it started raining and just kept right on. It was wet summer, in 2001; at least in La Coruňa.

La Coruňa’s quite something, though. Much bigger than I expected – the Spanish call anything bigger than a village a city, but this place stretches itself tight around miles of the headland, like it’s trying to swallow the Atlantic whole. 

I gave up trying to be a good vegetarian in Spain. There was so much seafood – octopus, of course, but I preferred the fried squid, or the cangrejos, the crabs you could see in the market, their claws tied as they tried to fight each other in the holding tanks.

I was meant to be there for a week, but ended up staying four months. Most of the time I was in a flat on Rúa Cantábrico  that belonged to a friend’s cousin. After things got complicated with the friend’s cousin, I lived in the V for a while, parked up round the headland near the tower they claimed had been built by Hercules.

I really liked that place, especially walking along the beach in the twilight on my own, watching the Atlantic throw clouds at the city as its surf broke on the rocks below. I had lots of time to think things through, and no access to the harmful stuff.

Then, one day, I was sitting in a cafe, reading the local paper over a pitch-thick cafe solo, and the woman behind the counter cried out. I looked up in time to see a plane fly into a building. Then people falling out of the plane, jumping out of the building, leaping for their lives: real human beings, lost souls in a brand new hell that some mad god created for reasons of his own.

I don’t know why that made me want to go back to the States, but it did. I left as soon as they started flying again, heading out of Madrid on a half-empty plane. It was three more years before I got the V back. It was exactly where I'd left it.

Highway Tonight

I wrote that song travelling through the Midwest. After I got clean for the second time, I just lit out on my own for a while. Rescued the Dormobile from a friend's parking lot, fixed her up, and set out from L.A., up through Las Vegas without stopping, then across east, not really knowing where I'd fetch up.

I needed some peace, some space to work out what to do next. I needed away from the big cities, where I could get my hands on junk too easily. And the Midwest has lots of space. Mile after mile, hundreds of miles sometimes, between towns of any size; just cornfields to feed the world, so they say. I still had a bit of money from the first two albums, so I thought hey, why not? I could probably pick up some gigs on the way.

What I did pick up, mid way through Utah, was a bad case of Josie. Scrap of a girl, standing at the roadside, guitar case in hand. That clinched it. 

"Where are you going?"

"Wherever the wind blows me. Away from here, at least." Long, dark hair; ten years younger than me. Running away from home, she said.

"Your folks know you've gone?"

"Like they care." She had a certain attitude. I insisted she phone home at the next truck stop: I gave her the change, and, well, she phoned someone. 

We had a good couple of nights under the stars, Josie and me. Smell of the gas stove guttering in the breeze, a simple meal cleared away, blue smoke of a joint back and forth, just two girls with guitars. She knew my first record, and strummed along. Then she'd do one of her own, although some of them sounded strangely familiar. World-weary, she was. There was one song - but no, that would give it away.

Soon as we reached a bigger town with a Greyhound bus station, Josie disappeared, along with my stash and a roll of bills I kept under my mattress. It could have been my only money.

The next time I saw her face, it was on the cover of a double album. She was the Next Big Thing, for a while. New Wave, that was what she rode in on.

The car mechanic and the waitress, they came later on, in Kansas. A long way from the Yellow Brick Road.

.

The Prediction

My Aberdeenshire grandmother was fey, my Mum used to say. Read people’s tea leaves, in the village she came from; until one day she saw a neighbour’s death in them.

By the time I was old enough to remember anything she said, she restricted herself to a stock of weird catch phrases that seemed to be all her own. One that stuck in my mind was when she used to walk on the beach with us sometimes, screw her face into the wind, and say, ‘We’re a’ naebody’s children, hen.’ Then she’d look down at me and smile, and say, ‘You’ve to find your own song, ye ken? The one only you can sing.’

 When she died, a whole lot of her old tea-reading clients came out of the woodwork to tell me all about what she’d forseen for them. She had healing hands, too, apparently.

 I ran into a lot of New Age types in L.A., of course. Sat cross legged on on floors till my knees ached, and breathed in more incense than the pope. All that chanting! Well, I maybe didn’t inherit Granny’s second sight, but there were a few things I could see coming. Like all those male gurus, who were after something a bit more basic than spiritual enlightenment. Which, depending on the guru, might be just fine by me.

That time in Toronto, though, coming back from backing the boys in ‘75. The airport was open, but only just. There had been a heavy snowfall overnight, and you could smell more was coming. The flight took off, then turned south in a long curve, and half an hour in we were flying through ice clouds. Put down in Newark, which was like the seventh circle of hell, with people sneezing, babies projectile vomiting, and that anxious, sweaty scent you get off too many nervous fliers pressed up too close together.

Cut a long story short, I got another flight late afternoon. It flew direct into another snowstorm, and had to put down in Cleveland, of all places. Took the most expensive taxi ever trying to get a decent hotel for the night, and ended up in a Rodeway Inn that stank of cigarettes and floor polish. I decided I needed a drink, and lit out to see what was on offer.

Down the street there was a disco bar nearest me, and a rough and ready place on the other side of the freeway advertising live music. I crossed the road and went in. Everyone had dragged the slush in on their shoes: there was a steamy, wet clothesy fug of an atmosphere, foaming pitchers of beer, and a band of some sort tuning up in the corner. I got myself a drink, and a vantage point.

The band were kids, really: probably why they’d called themselves Nobody’s Children. The lead singer looked about sixteen. He had a ripped t-shirt, oily jeans, and a Fender Telecaster with a big gouge out of the top. He muttered something to the others, the drummer counted off a breakneck beat, and they were off.

It took me a minute to recognise the tune: they’d thrown a lot of the major chords into minor, it was all at different time signature from the original, and the kid snarled the words rather than sang them. There was no missing the chorus though.

That was the first time I’d really heard punk – I mean, I’d read the reviews of bands like the Ramones, but I’d never listened to them. And here was this band of young punks, ripping So Said the Clown to shreds. The song that gave me my big break, and then hung like a millstone round my neck as I tried to make my own way. I swear the lead singer looked me right in the eye when he hit the final chord.

You had to admit they had energy. The West Coast sound had got flabby, self indulgent by then. You could see the new wave coming, out of the East Coast mainly, but even in places like Cleveland, Ohio. You could smell it, like the snow. You could predict it.

 What could I do though? I didn’t have a band, just borrowed session guys, or friends, for my albums. Just me and my songs and an acoustic Gibson.

So I hit the road, and headed for Europe.

Wheels Come Off

Cocaine. Lots and lots of it.

Mixed in with the smell of what the sports jocks use on their muscles – what’s it called, Wintergreen? That’s what I remember most about supporting the boys on their stadium tour in 1975.

Backstage in the football changing rooms, there were roadies with razor blades, chopping out lines for the guys, before, during and after. Sumner kept his in a little dark wood Peruvian box, like it was snuff or something. In Chicago, someone dropped a mirror, and they all laughed.

We worked our way up the States from L.A. The format was, I went on first, just me and my Gibson, as the warm up. Then the guys would come on and be my backing band – a couple of numbers, then I was done, and they were into their set. If I was really lucky and they remembered, I came back for an encore with them at the end.

San Francisco was great. Of course, it was the guys they mostly came to see, but I always had a real hard core following in San Fran. Someone released balloons with flowers tied to them – still no idea who: it wasn’t planned, but it was great. We sang San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair) as an encore.

Some of the Bible Belt was a little cooler. By the time we reached New Orleans, it was hurricane season. Let me tell you, playing guitar in a rainstorm, with your guitar plugged into the biggest Marshall stack in the history of the world, isn’t my idea of a relaxing evening.

The tour bus was a bone of contention. I mean, the band’s last album had sold in shed loads, but that didn’t mean they knew enough to change their socks. Around about Nashville I got together with Shayla and Cherry, their backing singers, and organised a clean up. Sweaty towels, dirty clothes, food containers – we got the driver to stop, and threw the whole lot into a field somewhere in Davidson County. Might still be there, for all I know. It’d be worth a lot on eBay if it was.

By the time we reached the northern States, what with all the coke, who actually stumbled on to back my last two songs was a matter of conjecture. I remember one gig – was it Portland? – where it was just Mitchell, banging a tambourine he’d borrowed from Shayla. Out of time.

Mitchell was the most paranoid of the lot of them. Maybe it comes with being a lead singer, but he was always worrying about the band’s position in the rock n’ roll universe. “Forget Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young,” he’d say, to any groupie who’d listen. And the groupie would just nod, and smile, and play with Mitchell’s moustache. They were kids, all of them.

Not that Sumner got to get involved in all of that, because he and Shayla were an item at that point in the tour. So there’d be the two of them off in a corner, and me in another, reading a magazine or trying to write a song, and all sorts of madness going on in the middle. Don’t know where Cherry, the other singer, went after gigs. To bed with a good book, very possibly.

Canada was so cold, in more ways than one. Playing ice hockey rinks instead of football stadiums. It seemed a long way from L.A. and the Troubador, and nobody was talking to me. Things came to a head when they tried to set me up with Bill, one of their roadies. I mean, nice guy, but not my type. As Sumner well knew.

So, one freezing morning in Toronto, I got Shayla to help me pack, and drive me to the airport. The flights were all over the place in those days: took me two days to reach California, criss-crossing America, and getting stuck inside of Cleveland with the Memphis blues again. But that’s another story.

Shayla wasn’t too sad to see me go, although she made a big show of hugging me at the airport. Poor girl. I don’t think she lasted as long as the end of the tour, apparently. Thinking back, I should have poached her and Cherry to be my backing singers. We would’ve made a good team.

Mairi's Wedding

Mairi’s not her real name, of course. The same way Sumner Field isn’t really Sumner Field.

She was one of the first generation of supermodels, and Sumner’s second wife. Face of Lancôme to wed Minor Rock Royalty, was how the L. A. Tiimes put it. I loved that ‘minor.’ By then, even Sumner’s star was on the wane.

So there they were, Mairi done up in some sheer silk number that showed off her bony frame, and Sumner, for some reason, in tartan trews. And all of L.A.’s beautiful people. It was the big hair era, and shoulder pads, and all that jazz. I felt like someone’s frumpy aunt. Chilled champagne in the function suite, and bowls of cocaine in the rest rooms. Bad combination.

Why I was even invited, for goodness’ sake, is a mystery.

“You look great, Linda,” Sumner said when I congratulated him. Then, as he kissed my cheek, he whispered, “It could have been you, y’know.”

Still, I got a song out of it. I still have the napkin monogrammed with their initials that I wrote the first couple of verses on.

Katerin

You know, people often think artists only hang out with other artists. All those celebrity pictures they shoot these days: so and so on the arm of such and such, or the guitar player and the drummer smashing up a hotel room together.

In my experience, though, it’s often others you meet while you’re doing the rounds you get really friendly with. Take Katerin, for example. She was my European tour manager, back in, what, ‘73? They’ve always liked me there, right from the get go. It was a great tour, the German gigs especially.

Then, six years later, she probably saved my life.

London, 1979. I was down on my luck big style by then. Singer-songwriters were out of favour, and I had washed up in some awful squat in Hackney, blowing any royalties I had on whatever I could lay my hands on. Heroin, mainly.

I heard the door go, that morning, and one of the commune, Terry I think, mumble directions to my room. I didn’t have the energy to raise myself out of my bed. Terry wouldn’t have cared who it was.

“Hey, look at you,” I said when she appeared at my door. She was a real stunner, then, with this great mane of red hair in a plait half way down her back. She still is striking, even if there’s a bit of pepper and salt in the mix these days. Those cheekbones!

“Venus,” she said quietly. “How good it is to see you.” Hardly a trace of a German accent in her English. I could see what she was thinking, as she took in the room. The squat was just disgusting: even the cockroaches moved on to somewhere better as soon as they could.

“The record company gave me your address,” she said. “They keep an eye on you, you know.”

“Yeah, they want to protect their investment of nothing at all,” I said. That was unfair. I hadn’t recorded a single thing for them yet, and they were running their whole operation on a shoestring out of a half-derelict warehouse in Shoreditch. I wasn’t exactly on trend.

As if to prove the point, someone put the Sex Pistols on next door. Katerin wrinkled her nose.

“Well, they seemed like good guys,” she said. “Anyway, have you eaten yet?”
I hadn’t eaten for at least a day, so I let her take me to the nearest cafe that served vegetarian food. I must have looked like a ghost to her, while she just looked magnificent, in her combats and black beret. I used to tease her she was Baader-Meinhof, but I don’t know I was that far off.

“I would not use violence like they do,” she’d say.

I remember the sunlight flooding through the grubby window of the cafe, lighting up Katerin’s hair as she lit another cigarette. Around us, posters for CND marches competed with ones for gigs by bands I’d never heard of. Two-tone, reggae, styles a million miles from the music I’d grown up with.

“I need to listen to more music,” I muttered, to myself mostly. The corners of Katerin’s mouth went up a little. “I don’t see you doing a ska version of Wide-Finned Chevrolet,” she said.

Right at that moment, I didn’t see myself recording anything. I was still withdrawing from the night before: not the spectacular symptoms you read about now, they never happened to me, but still. I’d felt better.

“Finish your breakfast,” Katerin told me. “I’ve one or two things to do, then I will come back for you.”

When she reappeared in late afternoon, I was past the worst pains and was staring out the window of my room, thinking, I’d be better off in hospital. Or jail. The meals would be more regular. Terry’s punk band, Snarl If You Wanna Go Faster, was rehearsing downstairs, so there wasn’t even any point in picking up my acoustic.

“I let myself in,” Katerin said. Her mouth was twitching upwards again as she indicated the wall of sound coming from downstairs. “These guys aren’t so bad. Maybe they could be support for your next tour.”

I went to reply, something sarcastic probably, but she went on too quickly. “Anyway. So I’ve changed my ticket and we both have reservations for the Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt tonight. We need to hurry.”

And that was it. Simple as that. Apart from my Gibson, and a few bits and pieces, there wasn’t much to pack. I left Terry and the others my dirty laundry, and went with Katerin to her flat near Munich where, over the next few weeks, she got me clean.

Again, no histrionics. Nothing came out of the walls at me. I slept a lot, I seem to remember, and went for long walks in the hills above the village she stayed in then. At night, we’d allow ourselves a cognac and a joint. Well, everything’s relative, right?

And then I didn’t see her again for another thirteen years, by which time she’d married, had kids, and beaten breast cancer. I don’t know why I didn’t – well, that’s not true, I do know why. After I got clean of hard drugs, I went back to London and recorded the tracks that became Crossed Wires at the Crossroads for the guys in Sea Holly Records.

I was staying with Katerin’s cousin, who’d married a stockbroker and moved to Surbiton. So every morning I got the train in, just like any commuter on their way to the office. Except my office was the warehouse in Shoreditch, with a bunch of musicians I’d never met before.

When the record came out, I went off to Eastern Europe to promote it. Then my agent in L.A. called, I went to do some gigs there, and fell off the wagon again. I’d said to Katerin I’d be back before winter to tour Germany, and she was fixing up dates for me when I left for the States.

I never made it back before winter, of course. Didn’t make it back to Germany until the Berlin Wall came down, and even then I was too embarrassed to look her up. Took until 1992 to get totally clean again, and by then she’d moved to Bavaria. Took some time, that summer, tracking her down. Improved my German no end.

Junk logic, that’s what I call it. When you’re dependent, you make decisions which are really about how easily you can get your hands on the stuff. I should never have gone back to L.A. Who knows what might have happened if I’d have really pushed that record. Sea Holly might still be in business, for one thing. They were good guys: Katerin was right about that.

I stay in touch with her now. When you get older, you tend to work a few things out. If life doesn’t kill you first.

She Sees Round Corners

Man, how I hated that waitressing job. It was in a coffee shop on Mulholland Drive. I mean, looking back now, it doesn't seem so bad, but that doesn't matter, does it? Not when you're there, when you're in the moment.
So, sure, I can laugh at my younger self now, whining to my new-found mentor, Josie.
“Why is it the richest guys give the meanest tips and are most likely to hit on you?” I'd say to her.
“At least they still hit on you, honey,” Josie would say, and laugh that big, wheezy laugh. She didn't own the coffee shop, but she might as well have. The real owner gave her the run of the place.
“Look and learn, listen and learn,” she'd tell me. She was about fifty, a big woman who made the best pancakes I've ever tasted, but it was the way that she picked up things about the customers that fascinated me.
"Those two are having an affair," she told me one day, after a couple left the cafe. "Pure and simple. Both got out of the same car, but two sets of car keys on the table. Why would you bring your own car keys when your husband's drivin' you?"
Sure enough, a few minutes later, the woman drove past in a different car. Josie looked at me sidelong with those eyes of hers. "Dangerous waters, Venus, dangerous waters."
There was no triumph in her voice, just a kind of sadness. Later, she told me about her own times in those waters, and I understood. Two messy divorces, and a whole lot of heartache. You could have written a whole album of songs just about her love life.
I don't know why I gave the coffee shop my stage name when I applied for the job. I guess it was a point of pride, a gesture that meant if I kept using it I'd soon be up and out of this crappy job that was such a cliché, waiting tables in L.A., waiting for the big break.
I mean, didn't they know about So Said The Clown? I hated that song, almost as soon as it became a hit. Every so often it would come on the radio in the coffee shop, and I'd feel myself go tense, maybe drop something. And I'd feel Josie's big brown eyes on me, knowing more than she needed to.
I learnt a lot from Josie, but not very much of it was to do with waitressing. I got flustered if I had more than one customer to deal with at once. I spilt milk over Paul Newman once, and you could have heard a pin drop. And then he laughed, and said it was time he changed that shirt anyway, and fixed me with those baby blues until my knees went weak. He was a perfect gentleman, unlike quite a few I could mention.
Luckily for me the coffee shop wasn't that busy that often. I used to bring my guitar in and sing a song or two to Josie when the shop was empty, or it was just one or two of our regulars.
“Who wrote that one?” Josie would say, then act surprised when I said it was one of my own. “Get away,” she'd say. “It was kinda good, too.”
One day, I came in and sang her one of the songs that ended up on the first album. It was called She Sees Round Corners.
“You know,” she said quietly, when the regulars stopped clapping, “that's the first song I've heard you sing that's not about you.”
She was right, of course. And it wasn't her way to say she knew who it was about.

Stan the Man

Stan the man. I haven't thought of him in a long time. He was Lickety Split's drummer, and also their fixer, a bit older than the rest of them, the guy that held it all together on and off stage. If there had been mobile phones in those days, he'd always have been on one. As it was, he was always in phone boxes, arranging the next gig.
Phone Box Stan, the others called him. No wonder he fell out with the new management regime of bloodsuckers that moved in after the hit single. He was an unpaid manager before then, really. There was some bloke called Billy G, but he was just always pissed.
Anyway. There he was, on my doorstep in L.A., looking off back down the track when I opened the door.
"Hello, Linda. You got my letter, aye?"
"Sure, of course I did," I said. I was still half-asleep. We often slept till noon in those days.
I showed Stan into the living room, where the remains of last night's party were scattered around. Empty bottles, the ends of roaches, and a half-dressed girl called Marianne whom I'd never met before last night. She rubbed her eyes, and looked past Stan to me. "Hey, Venus."
Stan raised an eyebrow at the cannabis residues. "You're all grown up, Linda. "
Marianne was lighting up her first cigarette of the day, that passive hit of sharp smoke making my own cravings stir themselves. She pushed her golden mane of hair out of her eyes, squinting in the light.
"People call her Venus around here. She's gonna be a huge star. You heard her songs?"
Stan looked slightly foxed. Looking back, I guess he must have been totally jet lagged, but that didn't occur to me then. "You doing your own songs now?"
"Yeah," I said. "Grown up ones."
Days passed. Maybe just a day. Memory's hazy about that period. Next thing I can remember clearly is walking along Lookout Mountain Avenue with Sumner. Stan was ahead of us, joking with Marianne, who had never remembered to leave.
Neither of them knew where Carole King lived. But I did.
It was early evening. The roadside bushes were alive with crickets, sawing away at those violin legs of theirs. A motorbike sailed past, adding a smell of two-stroke to the scent of vegetation starting to exhale.
Carole met us at the door herself. "Come in," she said, smiling. "Find a place on the floor, if you can."
You know the picture on the front cover of Tapestry, with Carole King barefoot and a cat in the foreground? Well, it wasn't an official launch party for that album, but it was that time, that Laurel Canyon house, that cat rubbing himself in and out of all the partygoers as Carole took her turn at the piano.
"Oh, that Carole," Stan whispered to me, as she sang Will You Love Me Tomorrow.
You know how she sings that song on the album, right? Slow, her voice a little raw to catch the edge of the emotion? Now imagine that in a little house in Laurel Canyon, and you're sat on the floor with twenty or thirty other people, and she's singing it like she wrote it that morning, instead of in another lifetime. I don't think Joni Mitchell was there that night to sing backing vocals like on the record, but Sweet Baby James, James Taylor, was, with his guitar.
"Yes," I said. "That Carole."

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.

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.

Homecoming

One thing I always notice about Arbroath, when I've been away, is the light. The sun, even when it's wearing a mask of cloud, skims in off the waves with the north-easterlies in a particular way. It's what makes it unlike anywhere else I've been. Its USP, like the A & R men would say.

Other seaside places, St Ives, or St Tropez, draw painters like moths to a flame because of their light. Arbroath, not so much. Although that could be the smell from the smokeries.

What the light does, though, is etch in every line, every crow's foot on the people I know. This time, 1991, was no different. It was like the folk had been sandblasted by the wind and weather, and then by that rain-sodden sun.

“You're back, then,” Mum Said. She didn't look surprised, or pleased particularly. “Your room's made up. I'm off to the bingo at seven, mind.”

I walked her to the end of the street. She'd retired the previous year, and seemed to have settled into old wifiedom already. Keeping the house spic and span (who for, I've no idea, since Dad was long gone by then) telly, bingo, tia maria and coke, occasional trips with her cronies to Forfar, or Dundee. I asked her if she ever went to Edinburgh.

“Naw, hen. Too far.”

I spent the evening in the local, being chatted up by a guy who'd been in the year below me at school. He'd got his own building business, he said, although most of the profits seemed to be going into Tennent's lager. I stuck to vodka: less hangover that way.

“Comin hame wi me, then?” he said, at closing time.

“I've got my own home to go to,” I said, and left him propping up the wall. I didn't tell him it was thousands of miles away, and that the bank had probably foreclosed on it by now.

The sea haar had come in with the night. Water droplets settled round my paisley pattern shawl, each with their own salt secret. Back in Mum's, everything was quiet, and dark. My old room smelt of the sea as well.

I lay awake for a long time, thinking of the places I'd seen on tour. Europe, in all its different shades and guises. The States. Even Canada, one biting winter, when I was supporting the boys on their stadium tour.

I hadn't unpacked much of my bag, so it didn't take long in the morning to get ready to go. Mum didn't seem surprised, or pleased.

“I knew you wouldn't stay,” she said. “Where will you go?”

“Edinburgh,” I told her.

It was the last time I saw her alive.

cabin fever

Cabin Fever

If you shut your eyes and forgot why you were there, it was kind of fun. Being back at Mitchell's house in Laurel Canyon, that is, house-sitting. Even after the party moved on and the pretty, creative people moved out, it was still a place to stay.

Just five minutes on the twisty road and I was down at the Troubador, watching young star-struck kids trying out the same way I had, all these years ago (was it ten already?) Punk might've come, but not everyone was a punk in 1980, despite what they might tell you.

Mornings were always my best time. Waking up alone seemed easier than going to bed alone. The log cabin would be quiet: less traffic, then. Birdsong was something I listened out for whenever I woke up, like a lover's voice. If you can't hear birdsong, I used to tell the audiences, you need to get to a place where you can. No birdsong at Belsen.

My audiences were smaller, by then. A select few theatres in California. Just a low key tour, my agent said, loking me over and trying to be unobtrusive about it.

'I'm fine,' I said. Makeup can hide most things, except dilated pupils. 'Ready to get back in the saddle.'

So I stayed at the cabin as much as I could, that summer of 1980. I t was my turn. And it was free. In the mornings, I'd pad round the little place, coffee filling the air, my only drug in the mornings: that and the sun streaming through the windows. When you come from a cold, northern country like me, you need the sun as much as anything.

Sometimes, in the afternoon, I might sit out the back, letting the scent from the pines wash over me as I sang my old songs, maybe trying out some new ones. That's where I wrote Would You Say.

Who was I singing for, back then, at the cabin? Not for the dead man, surely? I never felt his presence there, not even in the dead of night, when the wind sighed through the trees and the log walls shifted from foot to foot.

But there was another presence coming, a flesh and blood one. He just turned up on the doorstep one of those sun-soaked mornings. Sumner.

He looked thin, and tanned, and very blond.

'Hey, babe, what's up? Room for me?'

We sat facing each other, drinking Californian wine. He'd been doing some guest spots on other people's stuff, he said, some guitar, some backing vocals. Now he'd cut a new album.

'All the best guys in the band, Linda,' he siad, eyes twinkling. He was one of the few people who called me by my true name instead of Venus. 'I tried to reach you to get you to sing on it, but I couldn't find you. You're a woman of mystery.'

'Woman between agents, more like,' I said.

'It's going to be good, this album,' he said, not really hearing me. 'It's going to be big.'

He was off next week on the stadium tour to promote it, he said. We toasted his success with the wine warming in the sun through the windows.

It was a cold, heartless bitch of a winter, that one, even in L.A. Remember John Lennon being shot? Oh, of course, you'll be too young. That was that winter. I remember it more than the day Kennedy died. Chapman came up to him outside Dakota Mansions and shot him. His biggest fan.

Sumner told me, before he left, that Stewart had died a few weeks before. The usual rock star death: drug overdose in a hotel room. I hadn't read any papers once I got to the cabin, apart from the local ones, for my reviews.

A lot of things died for me, that winter.

Wall

OK, so here goes, some random recollections from a life misspent in rock n roll...

Wall

If I'd had another gig, I wouldn't have been anywhere near Berlin that day. I was in my Dormobile, a couple of miles out up country, deciding where to go next. Then I picked up enough on the radio to work out that something was going on, so we rattled into the city.

That first day was crazy. Riot police everywhere, crowds scattering like starlings. And then they started to tear the wall down, piece by piece. It was tense, and you didn't know which way it would go, but at the same time your throat choked up and you knew you were seeing something, you were a part of something, the noise and the rubble and the dust pummelling up in clouds from where the guys were tearing down the Iron Curtain, piece by piece.

I didn't know what to do but the next day, so I followed the crowds to Alexanderplatz with my guitar. The place was too full: a solid mass of people, like a single body, breathing out and in. I found a side street that the Wall crossed where there were only a few people at first and I climbed up on its jagged teeth, a crooked grin by then, and parked my bony Scots ass on a piece of history.

And I began to sing. I dare say the video's on YouTube or NewTube or whatever now. But that won't take you there.

I sang a Dylan song first. Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall. More folk started to gather. Some rude boys near the front knew enough English to shout: 'Show us your tits!'

I stuck my tongue out at them and everyone else laughed. Another boy tried to shout something else, and the crowd shushed him as I punched out some chords. Another Dylan song: Times They Are A'Changin'.

That got a big cheer, and there I was, the crowd drifting in my direction. Some of them knew me, shouted my name. I saw a news crew struggling to get past, to set up, and switched to my own songs. I sang Death in Veniceand In the Canyon, hammering them out with my battered old Gibson, no amplifier, just the bits of Wall digging into my ass and me realising all of a sudden how high up I was.

'Sing some more Dylan!' the news guy said, so I half obliged. I sang Chimes of Freedom, the one with the line I loved about lonesome hearted lovers with too personal a tale.

Then back to my own songs, the old stuff, like All About Me, though I stopped short of doing that bloody clown song.

It was a West German film crew: the piece started on a local news programme, then got picked up by CNN. It wasn't as emblematic as the guys pulling the Wall down the day before, but still a nice little follow up piece. Sixties singing star serenades the end of Communism, something like that.

Of course, after the crowds had moved on the made me go back up and redo Times They Are A'Changin',just for the sound quality.

Yeah, right.