Last night I dreamt I went to Mississippi.
No run yesterday, but instead, one of those milestone travelling moments. It made me think of Bobo once again.
In the mid-90s we took a cheap flight to Orlando, picked up a car as soon as we arrived and set off. This wasn’t intended to be a survey of American musical history but that’s how it turned out. We didn’t know what it was intended to be until it began to happen. We drove around that long, semi-tropical southern coast to New Orleans, with nights in Tallahassee, Florida and Mobile, Alabama. In New Orleans we had a couple of days of blues and trad jazz, before sinking deeper into Louisiana for some good Cajun music and dancing. And gumbo. A few days later it was up the Mississippi through Clarksdale, home of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and Bessie Smith. In Clarksdale I made the mistake of not buying the liberated Highway 61 sign at the Blues Museum. Instead we carried on driving up it to Memphis for a gawp at Elvis’s Graceland and to party with the electric R’n’B bands on Beale Street. It was here that I realised I’d left my passport under the mattress of the motel in Clarksdale, so we turned round and drove all the way back. A day later, back in Clarksdale, we called into a bar to see some local blues, only to find the place empty. Everyone had gone to Big Willy’s release party in Bobo, we were told.
Big Willy was a young guy, 20 years old. He’d been in the local penitentiary for a year where he’d been put "for his own good", we were later told. He was also a handy electric blues guitar player. Bobo wasn’t much more than a grocery store and a few houses along a dusty unlit country road, about 10 miles from Clarksdale. You have to imagine the darkness, the smells and the chirping of the crickets. The joint was jumpin’. They’d cleared a space in the middle of the shop, enough for a drum kit and a few amps, and for a hundred or so of the locals to dance and whoop the night away. Playing alongside the beaming Willy was another guitar player called Robert "Bilbo" Walker, a well known Mississippi bluesman of the old school. It was one of the best gigs I ever went to.
Curiously, there was a third white face there, and a European too. Some kind of film-maker, Norwegian or Swedish, who spent most of the evening crouched on a shelf in the corner, filming. What wouldn’t I give for a copy of the footage. I searched the web a while ago, and read a couple of snippets about other happenings there, but no mention of the film. This picture was taken at Bobo on another evening. That grocery store seemed to have claimed a small patch of blues mythology, and what a night that was. You can read books about a place and sit on tourist buses listening to the approved script, but just now and then you stumble across some kind of secret back door where the essence is revealed. I’ve been lucky with my travels in the US. Even the business trips have given me some great adventures. But the grocery store in Bobo was the best evening I ever had. Tragically, it burnt down the following year, so it will never be repeated.
But we’re in Cuba now, and our musical evening this time was at the local Casa De La Trova, a kind of folk club found in most big towns. I’d been reluctant to drag myself away from the TV and Euro 2004, but I did, and I’m glad I did. Half a dozen of us went along to watch the salsa band. This was a louder, more aggressive, perhaps more authentic sound than you usually hear. With each passing mojito (rum and lemon with a sprig of mint), the music got better and more hypnotic. At one point late in the evening, with the band reaching a kind of frenzy, M called me over to the terrace that ran alongside the upstairs room. In the street below me, something wild and amazing was taking place. The local youth was out for the night, and dozens of them were dancing in the street to the music we were watching. It was like some corny music video. You have to imagine the heat and humidity, the clouds of cigar smoke, the smell of rum, the monstrous 1950s American saloon cars parked along the road, the frenetic music, and this mass of grinning people writhing in the streets. Amd remember that most Cubans look like film stars and dress in clothes so tight they seem to be painted on. This was the real Cuba, steamy and sensual.
We’d arrived at the Casa Grande hotel late in the afternoon, and spent a while relaxing on the raised terrace where Graham Greene had sat and written much of Our Man In Havana. Here, beneath the balcony where Castro had declared the success of the revolution in 1959, we enjoyed a bourgeois mojito and a great view over the small square, taking in a spectacular scrap between a hooker and a bag-lady. The bag-lady won. (See picture)
I ran this morning at 6am, throught the grid of narrow streets around the cathedral in Santiago. At this time of day the trucks are arriving in the city, emptying their human cargoes onto the streets.
Cuba is undergoing Castro’s euphemistic “Special Period”. It sounds better than “economic crisis”, which would be a truer description of what’s happened since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the ending of their $5 billion annual subsidy. Hitch-hiking has become a national pastime because there isn’t enough diesel to run the buses anymore. On the edge of towns and villages, yellow-clad officials stop every car and truck and force them to pack in as many of the waiting passengers as they can. Many workers have to be up at 3 or 4 in the morning to be sure of getting a lift to their job, though we were assured by a guide that they really don’t mind. “Hitch-hiking is a wonderful way to travel and a great education. I’ve made so many friends and learnt so much”. This may sound like the return of Comical Ali, but actually, I agree. It’s an unfashionable means of transport now, but I spent much of my late teens hitching round Britain and France, and had some of my most memorable travel experiences that way. But it’s nice to do it through choice. I wouldn’t want to have to hitch every day to get to work, especially when everyone else is in the same leaky boat. The thumbing masses did indeed seem happy enough, whether sitting patiently by the roadside or shoe-horned into the back of a bumpy truck, though I suspect this was a kind of defiant Latin “who gives a damn anyway?” attitude rather than genuine contentment.
At six in the morning, the air is already hot but the humidity hasn’t yet kicked in. Running is possible, and even pleasant. The pavements are uneven and full of holes, and packed with pedestrians, so I run down the middle of the road, dodging the creaking bikes and whining mopeds. Even the dogs dance here, but I don’t feel threatened by their delirium. No one else pays me much attention either. The shopping streets fade into a ramshackle residentia. I make it to the top of a hill at last and turn left then left again to come back down, way past my starting point, towards the natural harbour of Santiago Bay and the shimmering, aquamarine Caribbean Sea.
Eventually I’m back in the main square, trotting past the cathedral, my tee-shirt stuck with sweat to my back. A shower, a breakfast of mangoes, pineapple and good local coffee, and I’m ready for anything.
