That’s The Way Love Goes – Merle Haggard
I’ve been throwing horseshoes over my left shoulder
I’ve spent most all my life searching for that four-leafed clover
Yet you ran with me chasing my rainbows
Honey, I love you too and that’s the way love goes
*
My wife tells me I was born under a lucky star. Because I met her, I assume is the backstory to that fantasy? Well, yes, but there’s more. I literally was born under Balthazar, a star in Gemini near the constellation of Orion. Does this have meaning? What is luck anyway?
“The more I practice the luckier I get” is a quote attributed to golfer Arnold Palmer who also gave his name to a non-alcoholic drink of iced tea & lemonade combined.
Back in schooldays a few of us liked to study the geegees form in the Daily Mirror. What are geegees? They’re horses bred for racing. I cannot tell you why they are called GGs. Gee up horsey! Anyway there are horse races pretty much every day in Britain and Ireland, either flat racing or over the jumps. I probably got this habit from Pete Smurthwaite, whose family I lived with twice due to my dysfunctional family situation which repeated itself on an almost continual basis from the age of seven til right now. I have discussed this before in these pages, but the key entry for Pete and his family involved Jimi Hendrix in My Pop Life #84 All Along The Watchtower. We also did other stuff – played bridge for example as a pair, played football, got stoned, analysed the politics of the day. The horse racing was another challenge, and we had a system. All gamblers have a system. In other words, no gambler really relies on luck, perhaps because, like Arnold Palmer, they don’t really believe in it.
The chairman of my beloved Seagulls, aka Brighton & Hove Albion has a family that has been with the club since the 1970s – been on the board of the club I mean. Tony Bloom made his fortune as a professional gambler – poker mainly as a player, then he was in at the birth of online gambling. I’ve never met Tony but I have been told, indeed it is an open secret, that his system is all based on numbers and probabilities. I cannot reveal his poker system because I don’t know it, but I do know that he doesn’t sign a new player for the football team, spending his own money, without studying the form, the figures, the numbers. Albion fans could argue that this has failed as often as it has succeeded – for every Trossard there’s an Andone, for every Maupay a Locadia. But I have a short memory as far as football is concerned. My brain doesn’t have room for previous football matches in it. So I live totally in the present with the Albion.
I can’t remember exactly what our system was for the horses but it relied on the figures and numbers that the Daily Mirror supplied of that horse’s form – where had it finished in the last ten races? Was it ever a beaten favourite? Who was the jockey? Does it perform in the rain? Points were awarded. Bets were laid. I can only imagine that betting shops in East Sussex weren’t too bothered about schoolkids gambling. I know Phil Wheatley – who famously walked out of a French lesson announcing that he was going for a shit – looked older than us and would often be the layer of bets. But not always. I can remember the betting shop I frequented in Hailsham at that time – I was about 15-16. They took my money.
Traditionally, bookies or betting shops are situated near to scuzzy pubs & frequented by hollow-eyed alcoholics
And yes, I was lucky. I won. Not every bet. But when I checked my weekly outgoings & incomings, winnings and losings, I was up.
This scared me. I was dabbling really, messing about. I felt that a lifetime of gambling would be a spiral down (despite what I now know about Tony Bloom I still feel a little bit Presbyterian about it). So I stopped. Just like that. I had other things to think about – music, girls, football. But it is a little like feeling the inner voice and realising that you are a small step from addiction. And that wouldn’t be lucky, would it? Jenny’s parents like to gamble, and she grew up with horse-racing too. She has also been tempted by the habit and applied massive amounts of self-control (which she has a Phd in) to walk away.
The paddock is on the right, the racetrack far left. In the distance is the sea
I went to the dogs in Hove one night for Mark Williams’ birthday (?), and then the races on Brighton Downs, just a short walk from our house in Kemptown. We went to the paddock before the first race and watched the horses walk around in a slow circle. I remembered the words of Trevor Cooper, an actor who had been to Edinburgh Festival with me twice in the early 80s, my formative years, himself a student of horse form : “Bet on the horse that takes a shit. It means he won’t stop for one on the way round.”
We were with Rula Lenska that day and it was Ladies Day AND Amanda Blanch‘s birthday., Mandy and Lucy were down. Fizz fizz pop. I can’t remember winning anything at all. Maybe I wasn’t even there. Didn’t matter.
The one time Jenny and I flirted most seriously with Being Lucky Punk was our First Visit To Las Vegas Together. We’d moved to Los Angeles after Alien 3 and settled in West Hollywood, King’s Road near the Beverly Center. Of course Las Vegas was a mere four hours by car – but at the time that seemed to us a long drive . Across the desert in the white Lincoln Continental to The Luxor Hotel, later immortalised in Frank Ocean‘s song Pyramids. On the strip.
Any excuse to post a photograph of my Lincoln Continental
People don’t go to Las Vegas to visit the zoo. There are shows, of course, there are shows I wish I’d seen, of course… namely Elvis Presley in 1968, or 1970, or 1971. And Count Basie with Frank Sinatra in 1966.
People go to Vegas to gamble. I remember vividly my first visit to that glittering city of sin in the desert, in 1976 when I was a youth of 19 in my gap year. I’ll write about that on another occasion, but that trip would be filed under LUCKY in the columns of my life, since I could have died that weekend.
Luxor Hotel and Casino on the Strip, Las Vegas
So Jenny and I parked up, checked in and had some food downstairs. Then, couldn’t delay any longer, time to gamble. We’d discussed it over dinner. We had a system. I shall reveal it to you now because what the hell. First we would only play roulette. Second we would only have one bet per table and move on. Third, we would always bet fifteen dollars divided into three $5 bets. Cheap you say? It adds up is all.
And 4th – these $5 bets would always be exactly the same – on the line between 9 & 12, 17 & 18, and 33 & 36. Payout is 17 to 1.
Most hotels had the same kind of chips as I recall which meant that you could move from casino to casino without constantly going to a cashier. The Luxor Casino Cashier took some cash and handed us chips, small plastic counters, worth absolutely nothing outside this environment. We sighed and dived in. The first place we gambled was the Luxor casino. One bet per table, as described above. There were six tables. We got lucky. On the third table the little white ball span into the number 33, and since we had half of five dollars on that number we got 17 times five. Is it $85? And then on the final table in Luxor we landed on number 9. Another $85, which meant we were eighty dollars UP on the first casino. It was a good start and we left and walked a short way down the road into the warm night and the next place.
The Excalibur. There were more than six tables here, and we were once again successful twice, although I should add that we did get offered some free cocktails and yes, we drank them. We walked down to the MGM. The Waldorf Astoria. Park MGM. The Flamingo. Caesar’s Palace. And we’d been lucky. Or else it was a good system. By now we were over 3000 dollars UP on the night and it was just after 10pm. We were light-headed and happy, gliding through the warm evening air loaded down with cash and chips. Where next? Far too early to go to bed….
Winning is, in the end, a Mirage (unless you go home)
We walked past the Pirates Of The Caribbean exhibit and found ourselves at The Mirage Casino. We went in. We lost at the first table and the second. On the third we made a fatal error and changed the system. We stayed on that third table and played two more rounds. I cannot remember much after that. We were drunk. At least I was. Somehow it all went weird. We carried on. It wasn’t shiny any more. It was grubby and sordid. It stopped glittering and winking and we could see the dirt and the dust. Some croupiers had a look of pity in their eyes as we gambled that $3000 away. Methodically. It slipped rather miserably through our fingers. We tried other numbers. Red. Odd. What about 27? We couldn’t go home until it was all gone. That happened around 1am. Tails between our legs, we took a taxi back, stunned, trying to understand what had happened. Jenny wanted to go downstairs and carry on, win back everything we had lost. She found a credit card. They take credit cards in Las Vegas funnily enough. She was keen. I didn’t think it was such a good idea.
Roger Griffith & Jo Melville in our living room in King’s Road, W. Hollywood
About a year later we travelled to Las Vegas again to see our friends Jo and Roger who were touring the USA in a play. To my shame I cannot remember the play. We must have gambled a bit on that trip too, then gone upstairs. In the middle of the night I woke up with a strange feeling, turned over and Jenny was gone. I knew where she was. It was 3.30am as I pulled my jeans on and a pair of shoes and went along to the lift. In the casino I saw Jenny’s back standing at a roulette table. I approached her gently as she laid some chips on the green baize. The big wheel span & the little white ball went against the spin then jumped and bobbled into number 24. The chips were scraped in by the croupier. Jenny felt me and turned around. “What the hell are you doing?” I said. “Come on”. Roger had been there with her and already slunk back upstairs, so she accepted defeat and came back to the room. I took the room key card off her and placed it under my pillow. “You are gambling away our mortgage” I said. And went to sleep.
We haven’t gambled since then really. Are we lucky though? I feel lucky every day to be honest, even when I’m depressed. I can’t look at the world and feel any other way. I am lucky, lucky star or no. I land on my feet. It’s all a matter of perspective really isn’t it. Choice. Half-full or half-empty. Grateful or bitter. Richard E Grant said to me about ten years ago when he was doing a show in the West End “I don’t want to grow old in bitterness” which was a quote he’d got from Roddy MacDowall – the original chimp in Planet of the Apes. I think its a key idea. To smell the roses a little more as you grow older. To stop comparing yourself to others, stop regretting the past, the decisions, the things that you could have changed. It is what it is. You have to forgive yourself for being you in the end.
None of this would be possible without my boo. I’ve written about her a whole lot, but it’s the truth. She ran with me, chasing my rainbows, and now I’m running with her, chasing hers. That’s the way love goes.
The song was written by Lefty Frizzell and first came out in 1971. For me it is inextricably tied to the moment when I embraced country music in the late 80s/early 90s under the guidance of Ken Cranham. Saw some great gigs and bought some incredible music. Went to Nashville in 1988 (see My Pop Life #83 Country Boy) and remembered I’d bought cowboy boots when I was 18 in Santa Fe. The guy in the shop said I should buy a pair half a size too small and they’d expand into my footshape. They did that, then split along the sole. Bought a few more pairs since that day though. I never cared much about looking cool. Not true of course, but I always walked the line of derision and mockery. Ponced around the LSE in 1976 like a cowboy until punk’s sulphate urgency gripped me. But I’ve always loved country music and style, and simultaneously felt I knew nothing about it. Ken Burns Country doc fixed that.
Merle Haggard was in San Quentin when according to Legend he saw Johnny Cash playing to the prisoners and it turned his life around. From Bakersfield, California he became a huge country star who championed the working man and whose songs are like the man himself – unsentimental perhaps, but truthful and honest. Proper country music. I bought this song as a 45 rpm single in Ernest Tubb’s Record Store in Nashville in 1988. It has a warmth and generosity to the production, and an incredible quality to the vocal that really moves me. And the guitar solo is pretty good too. Merle has written and sung a ton of great songs. This is my favourite.
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