Sat. in detail

What could I miss?

01 The poster for the event in Delft

Well I guess in the middle of the night Jaimi was up and heard noises coming from the room across the hall. She said she tried to wake me but I was out cold...She said it was quite impressive, went on for quite some time and was pretty graphic and I would have enjoyed it...Welcome to Amsterdam Babe...

Ok, so what happened Sat...We did not get up as early as we thought we would considering we stayed up till past 3 am...I think we went to breakfast at Café Blom...I had a pancake with apples and ham and Jaimi had a pancake with apple...The food there is very good. It's on the shopping street around the corner from the 420 café. After this we .........

Art Car

Then we headed for Centraal Station to get the train to Delft where we then had to find the Public Library or the bibliotek as they call it. They funny thing is that we were assured that Delft is a small town and this should be easy.......The hard part was staying awake on the train and not missing the stop because we had fallen asleep.......I stayed awake and Jaimi slept.....I have photos but I can't release those just yet.....So after getting out of the Delft train station....which looked very modern compared to some of the old buildings in the little town....We did ask a cab driver where the public library was.....He probably gave us the best directions.....cause I had no idea which direction to head...we could not find it on a map or did we....I was quite sure what the map said cause it's in Dutch.... As we wondered in mostly the right direction a woman figured out that we might need some help and she pointed us further in the right direction...until we were standing in front of the building with our backs to it and asked two women who looked at us with that puzzled look because A) the place is closed w, why would you want to go there? And B) It'd behind you ....Welcome to our town YOU TOURIST!

Jaimi at the merch table

That was a funny aspect to finding the bibliotek was that EVERY person we asked for directions told us it was closed.....We knew that there was an event there...we hoped...One person said you looking for the "New" or the "Old"? Now we really wondered if we were headed to the right place.......we find an open door in this building and walk in on a group of Dutch folk one of whom comes over and asks if he can help, I say I'm with John Sinclair and.........that's all I got out of my mouth when this guy gets all excited and says "these people have come all the way from America" and he proceeds to introduce us to all the folks...He then takes us upstairs to the CD room...He says they have over 45,000 cds...He pulls out the two John Sinclair discs they have....They are transforming this room for a party....covering all the CD bins with plastic and then wood top so there were places to put drinks, and they allowed smoking upstairs...Yes I smoked a joint in the Library......Dig It!!!!

Mark Ritsema and the boys

This was stolen from John Sinclair's travel log. He is a much better writer than I and after reading what he wrote I wanted you all to read it so here it is:

Okay, tonight's concert: Herman Brood is described as Holland's last authentic rock and roll star; he came to prominence in the mid-'60s as keyboardist with the hit Dutch band Cuby and the Blizzards and went on to a blazing solo career as a recording artist, bandleader, composer, pianist, singer, painter, poet, public character and dope fiend of intense flamboyance before he ended his short life by leaping from the top of the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel in the summer of 2001. Here's a little more on this character from Wikipedia:

Herman Brood (pronounced "Broat"), born in Zwolle, November 5, 1946; died in Amsterdam, July 11, 2001, was a Dutch musician, painter and media personality. Brood was the Dutch personification of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll. He started his own group, Herman Brood and His Wild Romance, in 1977 and had his first hit single, "Saturday Night," the next year from his best known album "Schpritz" (a play on the German word for injection needle). But even more than his music, it was his outspoken statements in the press about sex and drug use that made Herman Brood famous in the Netherlands. Brood relished the media attention and became the most famous hard drug user of the Netherlands. In the 1990s he took up painting and became as successful as a painter as he was as a musician. Brood swore off most drugs, reducing his drug use to alcohol and a daily shot of speed. When, in 2001, he found out that he had only a few months left to live, Herman took matters into his own hands and, depressed by the failure of his drug rehabilitation program, committed suicide on July 11 by jumping off the Amsterdam Hilton at the age of 54. Now he is primarily known and loved for his contributions to public art, particularly for creating murals in different public places in Amsterdam.

For some reason someone at the Delft Public Library has gotten away with staging a memorial concert for the late artist that will feature Daniel Boissevain, the star of the movie now being shot of Brood's life story, with a Herman Brood cover band; the artist's long-suffering manager, Koos van Dijk, somewhat of a local folk legend in his own right; and Raskolnikov, Mark Ritsema's band from Rotterdam playing a program of Brood compositions with Mark on guitar and vocals, the great Willem van der Wall on slide guitar, Peter Jensen on bass, Ron 'Drumbo' deBruin on drums and your reporter as guest poet. Should be a lot of fun, and they're going to show some film clips of Herman Brood as well.

I came over to Rotterdam on the train yesterday evening, had another fine dinner with Anneke Auer and Ben Schot and their daughter Puck, caught the tram over to Ritsema's and sat up for a while ranting and raving about things in general and modern music in particular while we listened to a bunch of Sonny Rollins recordings for Riverside and Contemporary from 1956-57. That was the shit, and in the morning Mark was working up the music for the show that night and played me some Herman Brood numbers I enjoyed. I've seen Brood's paintings and murals around Amsterdam, and when I was in the AMC hospital in Holendrecht with a foot infection in 2004 I used to look at one of his striking paintings that hung in the hallway every time I came off my ward. By this time Willem, Peter and Drumbo have come over to Ritsema's for the rehearsal and I've listened to them work up the Herman Brood material, so I've got a pretty good feeling about the show tonight and I think we'll have a ball.

We did have a ball and I got some good photos, which will get posted, in the photo album

After the gig John returned with Jaimi and I to Amsterdam by train...It was weird...as we get to the station we see it's all closed up, but the gate around to the track and platform are open so we wonder back to the platform and wait for the train..

The beginning of the tram ride was the only eventful part. A female conductor asked the guy sitting across from Jaimi and I for his ticket; he spoke English so we could understand what was going on for once. He said he didn't have one. She asked why not...He explained that he only had paper money and the ticket machines only take change and the station was all closed and he wanted to buy a ticket but could not. Well, in this situation you get to buy you ticket from the conductor but you also get something like a €30 fine.... Now I think the Dutch have some odd ways of doing thins....like you will always get charged for everything here...every time...but they don't have conductors on the #5 tram and many tourists think they can ride for free. But they DO NOT have change machines so you can get change to buy a ticket, but if the station is open and you go to the counter and purchase a ticket you pay a service fee.... EXCEPT - once in a while the ticket agent will have tickets printed out sitting in front of them and the give you those and don't charge the service fee.... This has happened to me twice...It's very odd...I can only assume that there are tourists that buy the wrong tickets from the machines and then take them to the service counter and they wait for the next guy that needs a ticket to the Airport. So back to the dude and his ticket trouble...The conductor says its too bad you didn't purchase a ticket as it will now cost lots of money...she pulls out the PDA thing I had seen in the past...and puts in the trip and finds out the fare, which ended up being €9 something I think......plus the fine and she announces this number...He says he certainly doesn't have that kind of money €40+, she says" OK, may I see you passport? She takes it and writes up a ticket, she asked for a local address where he was staying, he gave it...she then said "I have to ask again for the record , Why do you not have a ticket?" He repeats his tale of woe and she notes it on the paper she was writing on, and he was given some sort of ticket, but in the end did not actually have to shell out any €'s for that trip....I would assume he will get a notice in the mail if it's not paid....The whole thing was bizarre...The conductor was polite as possible and just didn't seem to understand why the guy did have a ticket...I did learn something....She did say that the conductors can help with change if needed, which is good to know.