The Ponderosa

The Ponderosa was just a fragment of the chaos yet to come. As we took up residence in The Room there was a certain cycle that started that at first seemed like an adventure. We slowly chipped away at normalizing things like washing your clothes or taking a bath. The kitchen area in that middle section had no cook top or fridge. We had to go out for everything or bring it in and hope it would last the few days we had to consume it before it went bad and started smelling up the communal space. We needed to wash the baby, that was a toddler now. Oliver’s wife went back home with his young son and god knows it was the right decision. Oliver stayed in Spain and missed the whole Amsterdam chapter.

We were told there were public baths near the station down the block so desperate for showers we tramped down there to wash whenever we could. Washing clothes became an obstacle course to find a local laundry in our new neighbourhood. For a bunch of California musicians, Amsterdam felt less like Europe and more like a fractured, short-circuited version of New York. It seemed everyone in the red-light district knew everyone else. Pimps, drug dealers and sex workers as well as all the local mom and pop stores, sex shops, and hole in the wall restaurants were part of our everyday life now. It was still a surreal novelty to us but that was all about to change.

We were still living our dream. We were playing every night and getting paid. Four sets on the weeknights and five sets on the weekends. We had Mondays off and I’d escape the room just to wander the streets of the red-light district and stare in wonder. There was a change coming, one so unexpected and unpredictable that you hardly noticed. Something was missing, something I always took for granted was slowly disappearing. The mornings were grey ambiguous blank spaces. For a Californian the word afternoon implies a lazy relaxed time of day, in Amsterdam it was already dark. It seemed impossible, I waited for relief. It didn’t come. The physical world around me as I understood it was changing right before my eyes. I’d try to distract myself with something material, food or another joint but that didn’t help. What the fuck, where did the SUN GO? The days were going to get shorter and shorter until we lived almost permanently in darkness.

We’d lay on the thin mattresses on a cold linoleum floor, try to go to sleep at 5:00 or 6:00 am and wake around 3:00 pm with the kid crying or noise coming from the office on the other end of the hall. I’d head to the bathroom which may or may not have been cleaned up yet by Carlos. Carlos was the eccentric cleaning guy that would sometimes wake us with stories of things that he’d found the night before between the seats in the bleachers. There were always some significant finds he’d want to share with us. The Gypsys as we were becoming known were getting some street cred because from their perspective we must have looked pretty crazy. We never practiced, we played so much and the band was so tight we didn’t even have to count the songs in. There was never a set list. It would be just a look or a nod and bang, the song took off.

The combination of playing every night, lack of sleep, no real privacy, the ever-present darkness and now a new element was introducing itself. Wind, rain and snow. Our first winter in Northern Europe living in one room with 13 people playing every night for one solid year.

We were about two months into our auspicious new residency and were simultaneously getting accustomed to the environment and the upside down vampire-like living conditions. Some nights the upstairs toilet, our “private toilet” would be filled with a combination of blood, syringes and other unidentified biohazards. This was one of the micro elements of the nightmare we dealt with on the daily. We were all becoming hash chess masters, smoking and playing each other every free moment we had. Chess and smoking were taking the place of band practice and the JB’s and Curtis Mayfield’s Pusher Man was the soundtrack to our new reality.

From the front door of the Ponderosa to the partition that separated the bar from the DJ booth was a distance of about 15 meters, then the clear open entrance to the dance floor and the few steps leading up to the bleachers. The stage was between the bleachers and the DJ booth. You would rarely see any violence in this place but one night things came to a head. The dance floor was packed and out of nowhere in the middle of a song I saw the punch and one of the dancers just fell straight back without bending or collapsing, unconscious before he hit the hardwood floor. We glanced at one another to make a decision to stop, keep playing or help because he hit the floor hard. The consensus was keep playing no matter what. The words from those first few nights coming from the bleachers when we tried to interrupt the music with a witty introduction to one of the songs: “Just play the music, no showtime bullshit.”

We kept playing.

They hauled him off without much commotion and the space where he had fallen refilled just as quickly as replacing a spilled glass of water. Mind your own business and the rest would take care of itself.

Another night, it must have been a weeknight because the club was half full and sometimes we would jam something we hadn’t played before because there were fewer dancers. Without dancers we could get a clear view of the wall opposite the stage and there were a few guys standing attentively checking us out. For us it was an average night, just jamming. We did notice they were dressed a bit different than our usual clientele. They were Black but obviously not from Amsterdam. The difference was subtle and we were curious. When we ended the song they started clapping. We all looked at each other with a little panic like, HEY no, no no, don’t do that, you’ll fuck up the vibe, but at the same time it was a little refreshing to get a little old-school appreciation. We knew from that moment that they had to be American and most likely musicians.

After the set we started a conversation to find out more about how they ended up at The Ponderosa. We took them upstairs to The Room. They were duly impressed that we had created this strange sort of family dorm, and in some way it made sense that we were playing hard and doing it our own way. They were on tour with another artist and we all traded stories and passed joints for a few hours. It was the singer, the guitarist and the bass player who came that night. In passing the bass player told us when he returned to the US he was going to join Sly’s band. We were all a little sceptical but why would he lie. Who in the world could replace Larry Graham? They promised to come back the next night to jam and we all agreed. Albert didn’t have any objections so when they hit the stage they killed it. We were a lot less sceptical about that bass player then. It was Rustee Allen.

Nights started melting into one another. So many people in our lives were coming and going and winter was closing in. Something had to give. I think the lack of vitamin D and the constant ingestion of various hashes, the relentless schedule and no escape from 13 people in one space was starting to take its toll on me. It was well past the manageable stage.

I had reached this point only one other time in my life. Five years earlier, when I was thrown in jail in Prison Provincial de Malaga. The standard sentence for being found guilty of possessing drugs was six years and a day. At the time I fully expected that was going to be my fate. It was Franco’s Spain so there was nothing anyone could do, not the embassy nor the crooked Spanish lawyers who would just take your money and delay the process to earn more. Out of desperation to escape in some way I started reading these cheap English romance novels obviously left there by some previous inmate. That was the first time I learned to appreciate real books. Not just Hot Rod Magazine or Playboy. I was dyslexic and needed images to fully understand what was trying to be conveyed. Simply reading words wasn’t enough.

In the Ponderosa I started thinking I might be going crazy. I had never had these feelings before but I knew I needed to start looking for answers. I started researching books on therapy and psychoanalysis and some of it was making sense to me but there was one major problem. There was no place to turn to in that world that understood the world from my perspective, or so I thought. The more I read the more I saw what was being left out and that in turn made me feel even more desperate.

By that time we had befriended so many people in our long nights chatting between sets and after the gig up in The Room. We had friends from all walks of life, people that would wander into the Ponderosa because they heard music they liked or maybe just buy a casual few grams of hash. We were friends with a doctor from the Caribbean and one night I found myself deep in conversation and shared my dilemma and asked what I should do. He immediately asked if I’d heard of Frantz Fanon, a French West Indian psychiatrist and political philosopher from the French colony of Martinique. I said no I never had but I was fascinated right from the start. Just to know that there were Black psychiatrists was a huge step for me.

I found one of the English book shops in town and found two of his books, The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, which I read first. That was not a clever thing to do.

Black Skin, White Masks felt to me less like a political theory book and more like someone finally putting language to an invisible psychological balancing act many Black people of my generation grew up with, especially those of us raised in respectable middle-class families trying to survive and succeed inside white America without losing ourselves completely. Coming from the West Coast in the 40s and 50s, with Southern discipline and East Coast pride in the household, I recognized that tension immediately, the pressure to speak a certain way, behave a certain way, achieve a certain way, while quietly carrying the weight of race, identity, dignity and belonging all at the same time.

The book hit me like an Ayahuasca like journey that left me temporarily mentally and physically paralyzed. You never suddenly become “crazy.” The systems around you slowly stop making emotional sense.

There’s a golden rule that 99% of all the working bands I know follow and that it’s a cardinal sin to miss the gig. “I can’t play” is not an option. Once, before we left LA when we were doing $50-a-night frat gigs I had the flu of death. I couldn’t move and the phone call came: “Ready to go, be there in 20 min.” I said, “I can’t go, you have to do it without me.” Slamming the phone down I went back to my coma. Twenty minutes later there were five people at my door carrying me in a blanket to the car with me swearing and protesting that I WILL NOT PLAY, getting sicker from the long drive to the gig. When we got there they propped me up on the piano and out of pure instinct I played the first set and then the second set started and miracle of all miracles I felt better after the gig. Lesson: you always play.

Back at the Ponderosa, Bap bop Bap bap bop, those fucking Al Green horns sounded the alarm and they were apparently looking for me. I had disappeared. They found me in Albert’s forbidden office on the bed in a catatonic state that even they were afraid to move me. They never even asked me to play, they knew I was to be left alone.

Amsterdam had cracked us, but not broken us. The real story was only beginning.

“Quick heads up before I go… Bill and I are back at Cardea June 18 celebrating 25 years of making music together. Looking forward to this one.” Clisby $ Risby