TRICKY DICK'S COFFEE HOUSE: 16) SUMMER OF HIJINX & TIM HARDIN RETURNS
A Throwback Thursday Memoir About Growing up in London in the 1970s
Spring 1977
I reported the Bilderberg Conference in Torquay and Steve Weissman wrote a fine piece that got published in Seven Days under our joint bylines.
Another fix of ink. This one had me soaring.
The comedown was a bitch. I was getting antsy with Tricky Dick's; it was taking up too much of my time and I wasn't free to do what I yearned to do: Journalism.
By now a member of the National Union of Journalists, I signed up for Press credentials to cover an economic summit in London, which President Jimmy Carter flew over to attend.
I loved the buzz (Press ID card, hospitality room) but had no platform for my reporting, and I needed another fix. So I went through a bad patch, confused, anxious, unsure, looking for a path. Whenever I got this way in the past, I started thinking about an exit ramp: the States, that was my escape route. But this time I hung tight, cold turkey.
Paul S, one of my earliest boyhood chums, came out to visit for most of the summer and moved onto the Top Floor. His father got him a job as a go-fer with ABC Sports at Wimbledon Tennis, and he quickly grew into the spirit of Tricky Dick's.
Bruce S had taken off to the states (Texas this time, forever) and his replacement as chef de cuisine was Brad L, a Rhodesian with a sunny disposition and a Mister Universe physique. And, darn it, the waitresses swarmed to him like moths to a streetlamp.
Paul and I ran the Top Floor like Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John. Every Monday night was "Gonz Night." But deeper into July, whenever anyone called "Gonz Night!" it was Gonz Night, and the trend was to increase rather than decrease.
We kicked off summer with a trip to Paris. My two brothers plus Paul and Andy L, a law student and ASL alumnus. We hovercrafted over the channel, trained into Gare de Nord, rode the Metro to the Latin Quarter and checked into the Hotel California, one large cheap room for all of us.
After a night's carousing, I jumped up in the middle of the night, raced for the door— and puked all over Paul's sneakers.
Back in London, one morning, round 8:30, prime REM those days, I got a call from an authoritative voice asking for me. I initially thought it was the Imperial Hotel's collections clerk calling yet again from Torquay to demand payment and threaten a lawsuit.
But the voice identified itself as a health inspector. "A patron of yours found rat droppings in their meal last night and brought them to us," the stern voice blasted me awake. "We have launched an inquiry, and we must advise you that your restaurant cannot reopen until our investigation is complete. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?"
The shock of it jolted me upright, and I was going "What? Huh? That's terrible," in a grave voice, numb with panic.
"We're going to inspect your premises in 30 minutes," said the voice.
I was still numb, trying to configure an appropriate response.
"Good morning, Robert," the voice continued. "This is Larry Viner."
My mind was still in high gear as it raced to catch up with my heart, thumping out my mouth.
Larry Viner, the grinning hunchback and consummate practical joker. He'd got me again.
My brother Michael bought a weight-lifting set for Top Floor recreation and I got into the habit of doing a series of bench presses every day, creating arm and chest muscles where little existed before. And then, with pumped up pecs and biceps, I'd race down to Tricky Dick's wearing a tight white tee to hug waitresses and eject whomever required ejection.
I got fanatical about it, pumping seven sets a night… until Dave W, our other chef, said, "Shit, you got bigger tits than my sister."
Tim Hardin pranced in late one afternoon, apologized for the scene he'd caused months earlier and asked if he could play a set that night.
I wasn't deferential anymore. I said, Sure, come on in, leave your sick friends at home.
He did. He jammed with Gideon and everyone present was awed by the power in Tim's resonant voice—and no one needed to tell anyone to quiet down.
That night Tim earned silence. He made up lyrics as he went along, and they were the best damn lyrics I'd ever heard.
After that, Tim came in regularly, hanging out with the wacko regulars.
A long-time heroin junkie, Tim had first come to England for methadone, a kinder, gentler approach than cold turkey.
We'd feed Tim a burger, pay him 15 quid and a pint of whiskey.
People came just to hear Tim sing.
One night he had some friends with him and he tried to get the tab comped, telling the waitress, "They don't have to pay, they're with me."
I bounded over, told him out loud he was full of shit.
Tim laughed, and his friends paid up.
That was the kind of relationship we grew into. I humbled him, no deference, no BS.
One night he played a rendition of his biggest hit, If I Were a Carpenter, and made up new lyrics extemporaneously. Some youngsters tried to correct him, unaware that the beat-up dude on stage wearing a smelly army jacket had written the damn song so he had every right to rewrite it.
Tim would come with me during the day to pick up supplies, saying, "Hey, what say we cut into that liquor store for a pint of whiskey?"
And I'd say, "What say we don't."
We'd go out to the pubs together at night, and he'd be obnoxious and funny and crazy as hell, leaving my brother and me in stitches with his antics. We were always one Tim Hardin flippant comment away from a fight.
Performing at Tricky Dick's, a guy twice Tim's size was heckling him. Tim put down his guitar, walked over to Mr. Fatso reclining horizontally in a chair and slapped him on the belly. Twice. I thought for sure Tim was going to get whopped, but the big guy just laughed, and Tim sang on.
Tim owned only the clothes he wore and rarely changed. I finally stopped driving him around because his old army jacket smelled so bad. And when autumn turned to winter I gave Tim the down coat I'd bought for 20 bucks in Middletown, Connecticut three years earlier.
Whenever he mustered any cash, Tim ran out and scored a gram of coke and would transform into the most generous guy in the world, cutting lines, laying them out for everyone in a room, beaming with a satisfaction that only sharing and playing music gave him.
And as I sat in my room, rewriting my Bilderberg story, and saying, damn, this was going to get me into journalism, Tim would say, "Sure, sure," then toot two lines of white powder, slap his knee and say, "Shee-it, ain't it good?"
We'd have long talks, Tim and I.
I once asked him how it felt to have had it all—glamorous lifestyle, big bucks and now be broke.
Tim said: "It grabbed me by the nuts, put its thumb up my asshole and scratched my brains from inside." (Too bad he didn’t write a song with those lyrics….)
"I'll tell you what," Tim told me. "My drug experiences were not a drag. I felt so good so much of the time that I will never, ever be sorry. I once shot up with Keith Richard every three or four hours for a couple of weeks."
I asked Tim to explain how other musicians could avoid getting screwed like him, and he said:
"The music business is based, like every other business, on making as much as you can for as little effort and as little time spent.
"There are some people who do not know how to coordinate their lives that way. They find out something they can do that's exciting for them to do, which in my case is singing and playing. It's the only thing I can do enough to make me feel good.
"So, helplessly I go, feeling good and playing, not knowing that when somebody says, 'I want to make you a really fair contract'—not knowing that they don't feel the same way about their gig as I do about mine.
"It's a business where if you can't lie, or if you don't have somebody to tell you that somebody else is lying to you, you're always going to lose it. Just always. You might stack up some bread, but you're gonna feel such a fool by the time you realize you're only getting one percent of what you're supposed to get. You're gonna feel like such a fool.
"My advice would be, first of all, don't go for the first deal someone offers you. Second of all, don't use their lawyer. You know, I said to my first contract people, who fucked me real good, I said, 'Should I have a lawyer look at this contract?' They said, 'Sure, our lawyer's right next door!' Hey man, almost everybody knows better than what I did."
Tim loved to play and sing; he didn't know a damn thing about money. Just give him a burger, a few shots of whiskey, a few lines of coke, a cot, a roof over his head and a guitar and he was the world's happiest man.
That was the Tricky Dick's spirit.
If you wandered in at 1:53 in the morning, you'd half expect to find Tom Waits, drunk, sitting at the piano, gargling about an old flame in Milwaukee.
Instead you'd find Tim Hardin on the old upright, tapping the ivories and ebonies, crooning Misty Roses for "Burned-out" Paul and "Coughing" Abdullah.