The Road Bends

Sami Yaffa, Tommi Liimatta

• Publisher: Rare Bird Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781644282892
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito musicale

Sami Yaffa is a bass guitar legend, an icon of the rock world, and an uncompromising walker of his own way, who rose to prominence as the bassist of the mythical Hanoi Rocks. A man of lights and shadows, and the embodiment of street credibility, Yaffa has recorded with Bruce Springsteen and Slash, played with the New York Dolls and Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, crawled across Helsinki pubs and restaurants with Anthony Bourdain, and performed at Carnegie Hall. This is his story.

1983

Back to Mystery City

Our January tour started in the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, we hung out with the tattoo artist, Hanky Panky, and his wife, Patricia. There was a lot of blow around, and that’s why I played like an asshole when we played the Paradiso Club. The backstage at Paradiso was something of a maze, room after room, a winding hallway after winding hallway, or at least that’s how it seemed at the time. Some guy flashed me a big bag of coke, we found an empty room, shut the door, put a six-foot-long mirror on the table, and commenced with hoovering. I had completely lost track of time. I heard our manager Seppo’s voice in the distance, or it seemed like in a distance. “Goddammit, Sami, where the fuck are you, we’re late to the show!”

I jumped up, tore through the hallways, found the green room, and ran through it to the stage. It was like wading in the mud; my fingers just wouldn’t do the job. The rest of the band were shooting daggers. My playing was a complete mess. I was fucking embarrassed. That whole day we’d gone through the trouble of setting up the gear and doing the soundcheck. After all that, there’s just that one hour in the day when I should be on the top of my game, and I wasn’t, I fucked it up. My nose stuffing ruined the gig for everyone and made the trip a waste. Although it was forgotten in an instant by the band, it taught me a lesson.

The first tour of Japan was all set when Seppo came up with the idea to tack on a couple of stops to the trip. “How’d you like to go to India, Hong Kong, and Thailand?” Seppo let us know that we wouldn’t be playing those shows for the money, it’d just be for fun, the expenses would be covered. No one said no.

When the contracts for the tour started to come in, the Mumbai show was scheduled to last for six hours. We were flummoxed. But it wasn’t a typo. We were able to talk the set time down to three hours. That was still way too long of a set, so we started to practice a bunch of Chuck Berry songs. We stretched out “I Feel Alright” into something like a twenty-minute jam. That was new kinda for us. We’d never played a lot of covers. “I Feel All right (1970),” “Train Kept A Rollin’,” “Lightnin’ Bar Blues,” “Under My Wheels,” and “Pipeline,” that was about it.

I’ve always played in bands that performed their own music. I never really saw the point in learning endless amounts of cover songs. A lot of my New York muso buddies came up in bar bands, they know every fucking classic rock song. I know very few, the ones mentioned above and a couple more.

No rock bands from the Western Hemisphere had come to Delhi before us. Boomtown Rats, the Police, and the Clash had been to Mumbai. Sounds magazine sent a journalist, Garry Bushell, and a photographer, Justin Thomas, along with us. Mick Staplehurst came as the front of house and Spede as our guitar tech and stagehand. The Indian Airlines plane looked like a flying tent from the inside, and the crew was nice enough to let us know that all the drinks were free. Big mistake. After a while of tanking up on free booze, Nasty got into a fight, which ended with the captain threatening detainment and an emergency landing to kick us off the plane.

When the plane doors opened in Mumbai, we were greeted with the smell of damp heat and raw sewage. It took hours to get our luggage and go through customs. When Razzle complained, “Jesus, what a stink,” the local promoter standing next to him said, “Don’t worry, we’ll soon get used to you.”

We drove to the hotel in the morning dusk through the endless cardboard shanties, junk, and poverty. It was miserable to realize that there are people who are born, live, and die in those slums without ever getting the chance to leave.

Those thoughts were pushed to the back of my mind once we got to the hotel. Michael wanted his own room, Andy and I shared one, Nasty and Razzle were together in the last one down the hall. Jet lag made the thought of sleeping impossible. We’d gotten our hands on some tax-free booze, and once our things made it up to our rooms, we headed out to sit on the beach wall across the street from the hotel. We passed the bottle around while we watched the sun come up over Mumbai.

There were huge piles of trash on the roadside every hundred feet or so. People with missing arms, legs, someone dragging their body on a piece of a board with wheels on it started to emerge from the garbage like zombies. The whole thing became completely surreal fueled by the jet lag and booze. They surrounded us and started begging. This was a whole other level of human suffering. I shut down; my head started spinning. When I got back to my room, I kept thinking about this fucked-up world we live in while trying to get some sleep.

Snake charmers, street urchins, guys that put scorpions in their mouths, and all kinds of beggars gathered out front of the hotel. The promoters had told us that if we gave anyone money, the word would spread and in half an hour the hotel entrance would be chaos.

Andy, Justin, and I got into a taxi and went to check out the city. We jumped onto a boat at Mumbai Harbor next to Gateway of India. We stretched out in the back and because it was a hot day, I thought I’d cool off by dipping my hand in the water. The captain left the helm and came running: “HANDS UP, HANDS UP!” I wondered why I had to put my hands up. Was this a holdup? “SHARKS!” I pulled my arm right out of the water. Five or so shark fins rose out of the water just a few yards away. That could have been the end of my music career.

When we got back to the harbor, we continued our drive with the same driver. He asked if we wanted some drugs. He proceeded to inform us that he could get us opium, heroin, and hashish. Okay, we’ll take five grams of each.

The taxi driver turned onto Falkland Road from the center. Falkland Road is a leftover jail road from English colonial times, with cells on both sides. The jails had been converted into a nearly mile-long bordello, with the prostitutes stuck behind the bars. The driver turned down an alley from this miserable place and asked us to get down. “It’s better if no one saw you, or else…” and he dragged his finger across his neck.

We ducked down in the car. How much money had we given him? Fifteen pounds? The driver would probably come back with a little piece of hash. But he came back with five grams of everything, just like we’d talked about. Looking at all the little bundles in our hands, it made me think to ask how much the driver earned in a day. We paid him double that and asked him to take us around the whole day. That way, we wouldn’t have to hunt down another taxi.

Andy, Nasty, Razzle, and I started in on the opium. It was my first time. The ceiling fan creaked in the hot room, Indian music played softly on the radio, the sun scattered through the wooden blinds onto the dark green walls.

A knocking sound broke through all that fog. Garry Bushell, who had appeared in the room at some point, went to open the door. There was a guy standing at the door with a sign in Hindi around his neck. He opened his mouth wide open; he didn’t have a tongue.

Garry freaked out and slammed the door in the guy’s face. We scolded Garry—how rude—and told him to open the door and ask what he wants.

The guy turned his sign around and it read: “I’m terribly sorry, my parents cut my tongue when I was 2 years old, can you please give me some money or food?” We invited him in and offered him a hit of opium.

In the morning, I woke up to the beautiful sound of a child singing. The sun was shining through the half-open balcony doors. A little maybe four-year-old girl was floating in the air on the other side of the balcony railing. Come on…the opium yesterday was strong, but this hallucination was a little too real. The little girl was singing right to me, and she reached out her little hand. I got up and walked to the balcony. The little girl was tied to a long stick that her mother was balancing on her shoulders from the ground floor. They were panhandling this way from balcony to balcony.

Promoting a record in the West means running from radio stations to TV stations to interviews to photoshoots. Promotion in India was a little different. We got into a four-horse-drawn carriage in front of our hotel. The promoter dropped a huge ghetto blaster into my lap and hit play. Back to Mystery City blasted out. A sheet flew behind the horse-drawn carriage: “Hanoi Rocks Live at Rang Bhavan.” People started to run alongside the carriage. We waved to the crowd like we were fucking royalty and caused a few traffic jams.

Our turbaned driver stopped in front of the University of Mumbai. We told the students about our gig the following day, which started at nine at Rang Bhavan Amphitheater. If all those pretty Indian girls showed up, it would be a pretty good gig.

The outdoor amphitheater had a capacity of three thousand. The equipment was nothing to write home about—some old combo amps, random drum parts, a little PA system. There was not enough juice. No one would hear a bloody thing. We somehow managed to wrangle a halfway decent sound and went to get some food. By the time we got back to Rang Bhavan, it was packed.

Jam-packed: 2,997 dudes and three girls.

We had negotiated our set down from six hours, but three was still a lot to fill. Chuck Berry and some other easy covers, a longtime jam on “Village Girl.” Then the power went out. The promoters asked us to do something, anything, otherwise all hell would break loose.

Razzle! He’d never been one for drum solos, but he rose to the occasion. Two bass drumbeats and then he put his hands up. The crowd caught on: aha! After the two drumbeats, they had to put their hands up and shout. Hands went up like in a Jane Fo...