"Don't Get Out on Eddy"
Kidnapped with The Chemical Brothers in San Francisco. When acid house met Travis Bickle.
Way back in the mists of acid house time the embryonic Chemical Brothers were known as The Dust Brothers. I had the chance to join them on their debut US tour courtesy of my oldest friend the DJ, author and artist Justin Robertson who was to be their tour DJ.
I’ve just checked the internet. It was 1995.
Various record labels were courting the in-demand duo at the time; the pair having released a string of killer 12” singles on the Junior Boys Own label that were rattling bass bins up and down the land. I can’t quite remember the business politics of it all but Deconstruction Records (Kylie, M-People etc) were backing the tour with a view to signing the band, and there was a spare flight for Justin to bring a friend so I got a call.
Oh, for the days when record labels had that kind of budget.
My friend Justin was riding high with his band Lionrock at the time and it felt like things were really happening for a generation of people I loved who were making a career out of what they loved - music. There’s a very 90s Lionrock video here. For some reason I’m juggling steel balls in it. Idle hands do silly things. It also features MC Buzz B who to this day remains one of Manchester’s most talented rapper/poets. Anyway…
The Dust Brothers debut tour took us to Florida, where big raves were all the rage, and the West Coast where we played intimate clubs and venues in Orange County, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The Orlando techno scene was a strange one. We went to a huge warehouse rave that looked like something out of Mad Max - giant rusted metal structures and old oil drums repurposed as fire pits. It was all rather dystopian, particularly the huge line of ambulances that were parked up outside waiting for kids who’d fallen over due to over-egging their minds.
The Brothers, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons, tore the place apart every night of the tour with their unique combination of acid house disorientation and rock n’ roll dynamism; the like of which appealed to Americans in a way homegrown techno and acid house really didn’t at the time.
This was a time when most black American house and techno producers would have to come to the UK and Europe to earn decent money on the DJ circuit. Much like the Afro-American jazz musicians of the 60s I guess.
The Florida rave promoter - a big name regional DJ called ICEE - wore huge baggy shorts and seemed to own a string of fast food restaurants so we ate really unhealthily for the duration of our stay there. He was a nice guy. Enthusiastic.
Our first trip to San Francisco was to prove eventful. It was a strange city in 1995 before the tech bros fully took over. It was the first place I ever saw hippie things ‘in the wild’ like groups of people doing Tai Chi in the park. It was also the first place I ever heard someone ask for an egg white omelette.
You could walk a block into the ‘wrong’ part of town from the ‘right’ part of town and really feel the tension. The Fillmore District was one of those areas at the time and I clearly remember the psychic temperature of the street dropping before I did an about-face and headed back to the more cosmic climate of the Upper Haight.
I was skint at the time, working for a relative pittance in record shops in Manchester, and funded a large part of the trip by selling English punk rock records that I’d collected as a kid in the 80s. Lots of Crass, Flux of Pink Indians as well as other anarcho 7”s that I still kind of regret selling. Still, the second-hand record shops of San Francisco thought these were gold and I got paid enough to eat, drink and be generally irresponsible for a large part of the tour.
I forget what day it was, but a small gang of us decided to do the tourist trail in San Francisco while the others slept in or tracked down British ex-pats who happened to be in town. We’d later try a similar expedition in Los Angeles but quickly realised that in LA, a) you can’t get anywhere without a car and, b) if you do walk anywhere, people think you’re weird. Or on drugs. Or poor. Or a combination of these things.
Either way walking was not the done thing there and also fairly pointless. Which is not that surprising when you realise that nowhere is near anywhere in LA.
San Francisco, therefore, was a much more appealing proposition for a ramble.
This turned out not to be true.
We started our day, like all good tourists, with a trip to Alcatraz penitentiary, just over a mile offshore from San Francisco itself. Myself, Justin and Chemical Brother Tom. Alcatraz was fun - probably not for the inmates, though - and in the 90s it was still populated by the prison’s ex-convicts who would give guided tours of the island, sign books, tell their oft-told stories etc. It was a good way for them to go straight and earn some honest cash.
We met an ex-con called Whitey Thompson who had done time on ‘The Rock’ and had written a book detailing his frankly terrifying life and crimes. It’s in the loft somewhere. It’s called ‘Rock Hard’. Whitey died in 2005 according to the internet. His obituary described him as an old-fashioned 'tough guy', a bank robber and career criminal’. He served twenty-four years in prison, four of them on ‘The Rock'. To me he looked like Willie Nelson with a mean right hook. Apparently he raised wolves in his final years according to the same obituary so here’s to you, Whitey.
With Alcatraz explored, we hopped the boat back across choppy waters and caught a cab up to Haight-Ashbury to go record shopping, pay our respects to The Grateful Dead’s late 60s home and see and feel other sites of hippie lore.
The Haight was all kinds of weird. I’d never been to an outdoor location that had such an ‘otherness’ about it. If you’ve ever been in the back room of a nightclub where everyone is high except you you’ll understand the vibe. That feeling that your take on the world around you isn’t the dominant perception and that you’re the odd one out. It wasn’t so much the people in the hippie shops; more the people hanging out on the street damaged by the drugs they’d taken over the years.
I’d read in Dennis McNally’s Grateful Dead biography how the band had shipped out of The Haight as early as 1968 as the flocks of idealistic kids coming to the area had attracted drug dealers, pimps and other forms of predators keen to take advantage of the new generation of naive waifs and strays. STIs were rampant as were newly formed drug addictions. You could still sense the psychic hangover in the liminal spaces between the hippie shops.
The last of the lost and the damaged playing out their forever-altered days in the shadows of a dream.
We bought records. We wandered. We ate. We had a beer or two. We took our picture at the Haight-Ashbury sign. It was a fun afternoon. The sun was out.
The Haight completed, Tom, Justin and I hailed a cab to take us back to our hotel downtown which at the time was a slightly sketchy part of The Tenderloin neighbourhood known historically for its gang history, drug dealing, sex workers and rather charmingly being the place where serial killer Richard Ramirez had committed his first murder.
The taxi driver who picked us up seemed nice enough as the three of us scooched into the back of his cab. The loose suspension of cars in the city meant driving felt like you were riding on a space hopper. It was all very San Fran. I was happy. We were happy. It had been a great day so far.
“Where are you guys from?” says our driver detecting our English accents.
“Manchester and London,” comes the reply.
“Limeys, huh?” says the driver. “You guys on holiday?”
“Yeah, kind of,” we reply.
The driver muses on this for a bit. And then things start to turn weird.
“I imagine I’d get a big write-up in your English newspapers if you were to die in the back of my cab.”
Nervous laughter all round.
“I recently got released after a night in the cells, you know,” he continues starting to get on a roll. “I got caught doing 20mph in a 30mph zone the other day and got arrested when I argued with the cop. Anyway, after I got out of the cells I went back to check the signs to see if the cop was right.
“Problem is while I was there I decided to paint over the 20 sign with the number 30 so I could get out of the fine and prove him wrong. Then another cop caught me doing that, arrested me, and took me back to the cells again. I got into a fight there and lost a couple of teeth.”
He tried to show us the new raw gap in his mouth in the rear view mirror. It didn’t look nice.
Having met weird people and being British I’m no stranger to smiling politely whilst things escalate and this is another one of those times. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when you realise that smiling politely isn’t going to get you out of a bad situation but that moment is fast approaching right now.
“I’ve got a load of explosives in the trunk,” our new friend continues whilst flooring it to a worrying speed. “It would definitely make your English papers if I was to blow up some English fa**ots in downtown San Francisco, wouldn’t it?”
I think we stopped laughing around this point.
Speed limit signs are flashing past us faster and faster and it’s clear that our friend has not learnt his lesson about sticking to the limit. Any limit. He’s starting to jump the lights now which adds to the tension. Meanwhile we three are sitting in the back wondering what the fuck is going on. How did that nice afternoon on the Haight turn to this in a matter of minutes?
Our friend is in full flow now. There’s talk of an ex-wife, talk of previous hassle with the cops and a long history of arrests and battles with authority. Looks like we’ve found our very own West Coast Travis Bickle which is just fucking great, thanks. I bet The Dead’s Jerry Garcia would have been able to talk the man down a bit. But Jerry’s not here. Just us Limeys.
We’re driving really fast by now. Careening even.
It’s interesting what goes through your head at moments like this. Apart from the potential explosion option - which to be fair was unlikely to be true - I’m thinking about how you let the world know the predicament you’re in. Do you wind a window down and start shouting ‘Help!’ at passersby? Do you try and talk the nutter down whilst his mania increases? Or do you try something cool from films and tackle him physically and become a hero in your own movie. Turns out what you actually do is continue to sit there. Which is a little concerning when you think about it. Being passive about your own potential death isn’t terribly edifying.
There’s a life lesson here. Something about saying ‘no’ more often.
I have no idea how long this journey took. According to Google Maps it’s only a couple of miles which I find remarkable to this day. It seemed like an age. Maybe he took the scenic route.
By the time we make it downtown it looks like our friend has now attracted the attention of the police by cutting up cars, pedestrians, jumping lights and hurtling through the city at speed with a trunkful of explosives.
A flashing police car - complete with sirens - is in pursuit of us by this point too and once again we have this feeling that this is really happening. Just fifteen minutes ago it wasn’t happening. Right here and right now it is happening. It’s a strange world and it’s turning on a hairpin. We’ve also turned a hairpin at least a couple of times in the last few minutes.
Suddenly in front of us two wailing cop cars lurch out of a four-way junction across Eddy Street. They span the road in a diagonal position meaning our friend has nowhere to go other than through them or to stop. He chooses to screech to a halt across the centre of the road and suddenly all four of us are sitting there in silence while our cab is surrounded by cops with guns drawn.
The driver door is pulled open and our friend is hauled out of his cab and manhandled across the bonnet face down looking towards his own windshield, through us and out the other side.
Meanwhile we just sit in the back of the cab having a moment, not quite knowing our next move. On the bright side, we’re just a stone’s throw from our hotel now which is the silver lining we need.
The spell is broken when a gruff cop finally pulls open the back passenger door, leans in and says, “You guys OK? You can go now.”
And then one of us, and I genuinely can’t remember who, says the most British thing anyone has ever said.
“But, we haven’t paid yet.”
______
‘Don’t get out on Eddy’ became a catchphrase for the rest of the tour to describe things going south fast. I still think it would be a terrific name for a Chemical Brothers album if anyone’s reading.
Interesting, I worked for Virgin records and then Virgin Music Publishing in the 70's, so much to talk about but I better not say too much 🥹 great Substack and I've subscribed
Fabulous