Just back from organizing a successful trip with the band to the New Music Seminar in New York I get the call to supervise my client Herman co-headlining a festival with Willie ‘Mink’ Deville at the future site of the Barcelona Olympics. I book the flights, arrange the hotels, liaise with the local organization. Make up a list with demands for the dressing room, the so-called ‘rider’. I ask everybody, the band, the roadies, what they think they’ll want before and after the gig. I hear beer, beer, beer. I don’t ask Herman, the singer: hard to put amphetamines and clean needles in writing. I arrange for some sweet liquor instead. Drambuie, Cointreau, something with calories. And I think it to be a brilliant idea to add two bottles of whiskey to the list. A brand that I like. More specifically: Jack Daniels.
We arrive in the morning of the 24th of September 1988 at what’s called today El Sot del Migdia. A quarry at the side of Montjuïc, that majestic mountain that rules over Barcelona. It’s been presiding over the city for so long that nobody remembers whether Montjuïc means Mountain of the Jews or Mountain of Jupiter or whether the name dates from even older days. It’s dusty, very dusty. And today it’s hot, very hot. Twenty-five degrees Celsius, but ‘it feels like a hundred’ in the burning sun. Other than my beer drinking pals I keep washing away the dust in my mouth with swallows of Jack.
Enter Koos. Nick-named Coach. The ever-enthusiastic manager of Herman. He is to my client what Colonel Parker was to Elvis Presley. Decision maker, manager, career builder. Koos is even more than that to Herman: nanny, mother, lifesaver, emergency nurse. He taps me on the shoulder around three that afternoon. I offer him the bottle. I seem to forget that he used to own a pub but never drank a drop in his life. ‘No more Jack, you’re running the show here: don’t forget!’.
Just before showtime Koos hits me up again. He sees me with a Heineken in hand. ‘You hate beer, let me smell…’ I’ve swapped my hate of the heat, detesting the dust, for the embrace of the number one Tennessee Whiskey, this time anonymously held in a beer can. The third encounter with Coach, halfway through the night, is a humiliating one. He pulls a stiletto with white powder on the tip and yells ‘Snort, you motherfucker!’. In a haze I hear Mink de Ville sing his greatest hit ‘Spanish Stroll’, drowned in waves of appreciation from a loving audience. And I wonder why I passed out in the wrong limo. Once one passes out it’s hard for anyone to carry out your deadweight. Hence Koos the nurse, the nanny, with the built-in experience of at least three times bringing Herman back to life, must resort to the power of the powder and... it works.
I think that’s when he gave up on me. I was no longer in control of the event. I was no longer in control of any events. Somebody asked my name, and I couldn’t remember. My glasses disappeared in the garbage of the festival grounds. I didn’t notice: somehow the alcohol affected my eyes more positively than my brain.
How I got back to the hotel is a mystery to me. Wim, our sound guy, is far from happy with my behavior during the show, wakes me up and scolds me for climbing in the highest light pole behind the mixing console. Which I find very hard to believe, these days I already get dizzy standing on the Sunday edition of the New York Times. But his story gets worse, much, much worse. I wish that what followed would be as easy to forget as it was forgetting my name last night.
And once again a deep dark blanket drops over me, only to lift on board KLM flight KL1670 from Barcelona back to Amsterdam. Herman, who never sleeps, is the most awake of us. He smiles at me while charming the pants off a classy lady, forty years his senior. She offers him the cheese roll he’s ogling. When he takes a bite it’s the first time I see him consume anything else than sweet liquor or sweet desserts. He takes a bite, hands her back the roll and she asks: ‘Herman, did you like it?’.
In hindsight I think his answer was hilarious: ‘Hmm, interesting’. I didn’t get it, though. Nauseated by the look of food I was still pushing the cobwebs of my mind aside, trying to grab reality back at the lapels. I started missing my glasses but got lucky and found my name back. Courtesy of KLM Airlines, who printed it on my boarding pass. Slowly I tried to digest the feelings of the morning after. Discovered that the mess I got myself in did no longer feel like my happy comfort zone. And, flying some 33,000 feet over Paris, one thing became more than obvious: never go for two bottles of Jack!
One is enough!
Evert Wilbrink
Barcelona, 36 years later.