With the Black Crowes at the Paradiso

Dedicated to Isaac Sinclair Henson, born on Wednesday, March 22, 2006

At the Paradiso with the Crowes Wednesday night

Allison Borders & Chad Henson in Oxford, Mississippi

It's been a very busy week and I'm running a little bit behind on my reports, so I'll try to catch up tonight before the next week starts in the morning. I have to fake the actual dates and times of my writings for these posts in order to register any travel on the day and date it was undertaken. It's Sunday night and I've already been to Rotterdam and Nijmegen and back, but that post [#17] will follow this one to keep the travel dates straight, you dig. Readers of my works may have noted a certain obsessiveness with places and dates of writing, but hey-one's mental patience is quite likely to manifest itself in all sorts of imaginative activities, as most of us certainly know, and isn't that a really big part of what makes life worth living and so rewarding in so many different ways?

Friday night at the Paradiso

OK. And speaking of rewarding, a series of individual acts of amazing grace by several of my friends who responded to the Golden Bard Travel Fund cry for help with generosity and alacrity actually turned my life around and removed the mallet of poverty temporarily from my worried and well-beaten brow. I sent out the appeal at a point when my available funds had literally dwindled to one euro and 55 cents and I was casting about in my head inventorying my dubious vernacular resources to see who might possibly front me a 20 for a few days and how I could track them down.

I hadn't been able to make the proper connections with PayPal through the TravelPod site to be able to suggest that donations be made by my correspondents and processed to my immediate benefit. But necessity plus the expert advice of Adam Brook got the thing to work, I sent out the plea for instant assistance, and the next morning there were 350 US Dollars credited to my new PayPal account courtesy of six of my friends, and all of a sudden everything was different. What a relief! It's rough running around out here without the appropriate funds until I can get my earnings up to a proper level and/or secure the kind of patronage I'm looking for over here, and right now I need all the help I can get.

On stage at the Paradiso

So thanks a million to everybody whose hearts went out to me in my utter penury, and eternal appreciation to my beloved contributors who have just brightened my life. I know it's not in good taste to list everybody's names, but my most soulful thanks goes out to Eric, Neti, John-Juan, Mark, Walden and Al for saving the day.

The next three days were considerably enlivened by the presence of the Black Crowes, who treated Amsterdam to shows at the Paradiso on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights. I'm old friends with the band's keyboard player, Eddie Harsch, a citizen of Detroit who contributed his piano and organ to my current Blues Scholars release, Country Blues, produced by Jeff "Baby" Grand for No Cover Records. Jeff and Eddie are best pals, Jeff's been playing guitar and making music for my poems for about 20 years now, and I've known Eddie ever since he left the James Cotton Band to join Albert Collins and the Icebreakers way back in the game.

Paradiso Embrace

When Eddie started playing with the Black Crowes in the '90s, he would make sure that Jeff and I got together with him and Chris Robinson to talk plenty shit and have some fun when they came to Detroit and I was up there from New Orleans. I ran into Chris in New York City when my old comrade Don Was was making a new album with the Black Crowes, and again at the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle where I got to introduce Chris & Eddie to my pal Frenchy the 'live' music painter. Chris and I got to be pretty good friends in our own right-I liked his music, and it was always kicks to rant and rave with him all night about great music, psychedelic exploration and the troubles of the world.

On Tuesday evening I stopped by the Sensi Museum Coffeeshop and ended up sitting for a while smoking joints with my friend Wild Bill and talking with Sensi big chief Ben Dronkers and his son Ravi, who runs the coffeeshop and other Sensi Seeds operations in Amsterdam which include the Hash Marihuana Hemp Museum. Ben and Ravi invited us out to dinner to continue our conversation, and Billy and I joined them and Ravi's consort at the Chinese restaurant across the street for a sumptuous meal indeed. Ben Dronkers is one of the pioneers and leaders of the cannabis movement in Holland, starting with a tiny defiant coffeeshop in Rotterdam years ago and branching out into seed production and distribution, seed stores, cffeeshops and bars, the Hash Marihuana Hemp Museum, and the industrial hemp movement, in which Ben's son Alan is a leading figure.

It was a great experience for me to get to sit and talk at length with Ben and Ravi about old times, the marijuana movement and the issues of today, and it pained me to learn of the unrelenting prosecution of the Dronkers' operations by local and national authorities enforcing the country's ill-founded, idiotic and criminally contradictory cannabis laws. You may not know, for example, that while it's acceptable to sell marijuana over the counter in the coffeeshops, it's strictly illegal to grow, transport, distribute and sell the cannabis to the coffeeshops for resale. That ridiculous contradiction is at the heart of the matter, and it goes down from there.

We were just finishing up our feast when Chris Robinson came walking up to our table to say hello. He and his wife and party from the Black Crowes had been dining across the room, and he spotted me on the way out. The Crowes were in town to do a three-night stand at the Paradiso Wednesday through Friday, and Chris invited me to come to the Paradiso as his guest, suggesting that he might want me to do something with the band. We'd talked about this before, and Eddie had played with me on many occasions as a member of the Motor City Blues Scholars, but this would be something new, and it sounded mighty good to me. The three shows had sold out in about 10 minutes flat, people were coming from all over to see the Crowes, and the band was in a mood to get down and rip out some rock & roll for their audience in Amsterdam.

Adam Brook and I went to the Paradiso and talked our way through the side door, where we learned that not only was I expected but would be extended every courtesy as a guest of the band, and it was really a big blast of fresh energy from the homeland to hang backstage at the Paradiso for three nights. The Crowes were fresh from a three-night stand in London and just starting to hit their stride when they took the stage in Amsterdam on Wednesday night, and Chris called me up to do a number with them on the first song of the second set, "right after the freak-out." We had been talking backstage about Chris' ayahusca experiences and my encounter with iboga last fall, and it seemed like a perfect time to offer my poem "monk in orbit" from the book of monk, as printed below.

We came back to the Paradiso Thursday night with Henk Botwinik and Thomas Moore to produce an episode of the John Sinclair Radio Show from backstage like we had done at the Balloon Party in December 2004. That show is being podcast now; I'll paste in a link to the show and the program description and playlist in my post #18 dated Monday, March 27th.

By Friday night the band was really roaring, and I enjoyed the blessing of being called up again to do another poem on the second song of the second set. I wanted to offer "Fat Boy" in this context, and I did. Adam Brook took some terrific pictures both nights, and I've posted some of them with this episode. It was a thrill to get to perform my works with this hard-swinging ensemble for a packed house of raving fans gathered just down the street and around the corner from my residence at The Dolphins.

On Saturday I had a gig in Nijmegen on the other side of the Netherlands, and that trip will be in the next post (#17). I'll end this one here and send it off with the two poems printed below:

from thelonious: a book of monk

#91

"monk in orbit"

for allen ginsberg

they say one night

in the early '60s

after tim leary

turned him on to LSD

allen ginsberg went up

to monk's place in the west 60s

to introduce the great master

to the wonders of modern chemistry

& left monk with a dose

of the excellent product

of the sandoz laboratories

all the way from switzerland-

& when he went back

to check up on thelonious

monk opened the door

as far as the chain would allow,

peered out at ginsberg,

& asked with a slight frown:

"man, have you got any

more of this stuff? so far

it don't seem to be makin' too

much of a difference to me . . . ."

--greektown, detroit

september 17, 1987/

alvin's detroit bar

april 11, 1991

"Fat Boy"

for Charles Moore

There is something

about the American

mind

set on de-

struction, re-

lent-

less, un-

penitent,

eager to bomb.

There is the hatred

that fuels the A-

merican mind,

the shriveled-up

heart

the heartless

always ready

to kill

& maim

brutal

with the urge

to crush & destroy

This is where

they built Fat Man, Mr. U-

235

& they sent

Fat Man

& Little Boy

to Japan

to level Hiroshima

& Nagasaki -

They love Fat Boy

They feed him the sweets

of their hearts

singing their filthy songs

into Fat Boy's u-

ranium ears

& let the rest of us

eat the shit

of their hatred

of anything

or anyone

that is not them -

Ah! Fat Boy

so round & ugly

so full of hate

stuffed

with the dead spirits

of the Americans

blinded

& lost

in the deserts of Iraq

--Detroit

April 9/June 1, 1982 /

Flint, MI

April 4, 2003 /

Detroit

June 9, 2003