Going The Ron Way

Anyone fancy a rambling discourse with no discernible point?
If not, look away now.
If you do, then brew up a coffee, pull up a chair and listen to me talk bollocks for a bit.

Since last week's startling archæological discovery of hundreds of tapes of Dive's musical prehistory that I was convinced I'd lost decades ago, an hallucinogenic mélange of random memories is assaulting my consciousness in a quite alarming manner.

Chunks of mislaid time, long imprisoned behind decayed synapses have escaped and are running amok in my brain.
Like a thousand unruly two-year-olds, high on illicit food-colourings, the gibbering faces of people I've not seen in many a decade loom at me from the darkness, as scary as clowns; inexplicable and long-forgotten encounters leap suddenly to the front of my mind, rudely elbowing my current train of thought into the gutter … which is a bummer when I'm trying to talk to the boss.

I feel I am watching "Life Of Dive - the Special Edition DVD" with hundreds of hours of "previously unseen footage".
A part of me attempts to acknowledge that I must have been present during the filming, but I honestly don't know which are memories and which are madness.

Lost time is nothing new to me …
My long-time blog-sufferers may recall the tale of a guy named David B. who greeted me in a music shop like a long-lost friend and regaled the staff with tales of when he used to play in my band.
At which point I set the record straight in no uncertain manner and insisted I'd never seen him before (there are always saddoes who feel a need to pretend that they were once "in a band" with "X", although "X" is usually someone famous and not me, but I do get them from time to time).

It was only a few months later - when David turned up at Chris and Jann's studio for a party - that they confirmed he had indeed played with us and Chris dug up a bunch of photos of us on stage together.

Apparently we had played together for around six months, but that was back in the mid-nineties, around the time that my previous life became a high-speed train wreck and I crashed and burned big time.
Several years of memories have been erased from my mind so totally by the trauma of that time that - although we have sat around looking at the pictures and the others have described gigs and sessions and parties and goodness knows what else that we got up to - I still have no recollection whatsoever of any of it and as far as my mind is concerned the first time I met David was in that music shop.

So it has been somewhat strange and not a little alarming viewing all of this "previously unseen footage" as it leaps out of the depths of my subconscious and gatecrashes my mind, where it seems to be enjoying a drunken party in the front room.
Who the fuck ARE all these people?
Sheesh! It's going to take ages to get all the crumbs and beer out of the carpet.

Anyhoo …
Quite a lot of these old film clips feature Ron; someone with a mind so addled that it makes mine look as new as if it's still got the cellophane packaging wrapped round it and the instruction booklet (in every language other than my own) tucked down the side of my cranium.

Parts of Ron can be seen in the accompanying photo to "Let's Make A Racket IV" should you feel the need to visualise him.

Ron was my drummer in one working band, three sanity bands and a strange assortment of recording sessions and it became a given in the band that there was a right way to do something and there was a Ron way.

Ron - bless him - is a bear of little brain … and not just in that special way that all drummers are; Ron went several steps further and actually Destroyed His Own Brain.

Back in the early sixties he was playing the same Hamburg bars and strip-joints as The Beatles and Ringo's band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes.
They would play three or four gigs a night, seven nights a week, staying awake for days at a time, ripped to the tits on amphetamines and who knows what else, playing until six in the morning and then boozing and smoking dope all day to come down.

Ron did this for most of the sixties and then dived enthusiastically into the acid scene.

We found him, years later, wild-eyed, manic and twitchy but an excellent drummer.

On stage, his "Ron-ness" stayed (mercifully) mostly in its box.
Very occasionally he would kick his drum kit all over the stage in the middle of a song, but other than that it manifested itself in small ways, like breaking his heavy oak drumsticks over his head, regularly falling off his stool and subjecting the audience to Tourette's style swearfests and one-man "hakas" when he got excited.

Off stage, he would be happily chatting away in the dressing room and then suddenly tune out, rejoining the conversation twenty minutes later with the end of the sentence he started when his mind switched off and having no recollection of anything we'd said since.

He had also lost any sense of direction. So much so that he wouldn't leave the village unless he was in convoy with my car for fear of not finding his way home.
Many times on the way to gigs I would glance in my rear-view mirror only to see Ron peel off the motorway at some junction, and then to turn up an hour late at the sound-check saying he "just felt it was the right way to go".

And so the "Ron Way" was born.

He would dress the Ron way, too.
Having to be prepared to play anything with anybody at an hour's notice, our "band wardrobes" were huge (and fortunately tax-deductible).
A typical Ron night would see the band turn up at a fifties weekender to back a load of one-hit wonders from the rock and roll era.
We would hit the stage in powder blue jackets, black shirts and skinny ties, only to find Ron had come dressed in trad jazz drag of butcher-striped waistcoat, straw boater and bow tie, looking at us innocently and saying "What? … What?"

This morning on the train I was assailed with memories of Saturday afternoons at Ron's house, which is what started this bizarre rambling post off.
We lived in the same village - Martham - a lovely place between the Norfolk Broads and the Sea.
I didn't have a TV and Ron had just got a huge satellite dish, so I wandered round to his house to see what the fuss was all about and somewhat inexplicably got drawn in to what became a Saturday afternoon, pre-gig ritual of watching utter crap, while flaked out on his sofa eating junk food.

If you ever need an argument for throwing your TV out the window, try watching what we watched every Saturday for a whole summer.
It horrifies me now just thinking of it, but our afternoons consisted of a diet of Airwolf (remember that crappy theme tune?), Knight Rider (The Hoff!), Baywatch (Eek!) and WWF wrestling (WTF, more like).
It seems that having destroyed his brain with drugs, Ron was administering a coup de grace with his TV.

My favourite Ron memories are of him falling off his stool and continuing to play drums with his feet, and of his turning up to a gig with a massive gong, which he proudly placed behind him on stage.
His drum solos often saw him leaving his drum kit behind and playing his way across our amps and the dancefloor, jumping up on the bar and soloing on the pumps, glasses and bottles, but this time he had a gong!
At the climax of his solo (having abandoned his drumstool) he executed a lovely pirouette, sweeping up a massive "Rank Cinema" style mallet and taking an elegant swing at the gong …
… only for the leather straps holding it to its frame to snap and the thing to drop to the floor with a dull "DUNGGGGGGGGG" and roll slowly off the stage to massive applause.

I still bump into him from time to time.
The last time I saw him he was playing percussion in a North African Rai band.
He seemed as confused and happy as ever.

So … That was Ron.
My head this week has been filled with people like him, some of whom I remember and some of whom I don't.
Life, eh?
It's been a long, strange trip.