Andrew's Blues

My most outlandish journey begins in the spring of 2019. 

I hadn't thought about Mick or the Rolling Stones in years. The last time I saw them perform was in Leipzig in June 2003, a few weeks before I ended up in Greece where I met Themis, with whom I've shared a life ever since.

In the fall of 2003  I learned that Mick had fallen in love with L'Wren Scott, a tall American model and fashion designer. I decided it was time to abandon my fantasy of one day meeting and getting to the bottom of that peculiar chain of events that had brought me to his island in April of 1992, the 80th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. And a bunch of other mysteries in my wandering life.

After Leipzig for the next 16 years I paid only passing attention to the Stones and Mick's slolo album Goddess in the Doorway which I listened to once or twice. I was beyond hearing messages in the lyrics whereas back in the mid 90s I had imagined some could even be about me: an indefensible notion that could only get me labeled crazy if I spoke about it - so I kept it to myself, which in itself can be crazy-making but I was tired of following that trail of breadcrumbs, compelling in a way but also a waste of time. Mick didn't seem interested in meeting me, just using me for songwriting. That was one way of interpreting all this. 

"You probably think this song is about you/ You're so vain." 

Or was it just in vain that I pondered the sense of a missed connection going back years yet totally blank. No concrete memories of him whatsoever. Nothing predating the moment on Mustique when I saw him coming down the steps of the Cottonhouse Hotel, looking annoyed and limping slightly. April 15 1992.

Nothing but dreams, and songs, and some weird intuitions that we had once been close. Somewhere, sometime. Maybe not in this lifetime. Maybe not on this earth.

But then came April 2019 and one morning I said to my Greek boyfriend: "I think Mick Jagger is having health problems." The thought popped into my head a second before it came out my mouth in Greek. 

The next day it was international headlines in my News feed. "Mick Jagger in hospital for heart surgery." A valve replacement. And suddenly I was very concerned.

The Stones had recently announced their 2019 No Filter tour and all of a sudden I was interested. After all, this could be the last time in this lifetime. It shocked me that 13 years had gone by since i'd bumped into Mick at the Jazz Festival and walked home thinking "well, that was that."

Themis reminded me of the morning I had sat up in bed and told him about Mick coming to my house around my 14th birthday and asking for my hand in marriage. I had related this vivid dream, and then dismissed it as totally implausible. But now I wondered if it was a dream at all, or a detailed flashback. But say it really happened - how could I have forgotten it? Throughout my life I had had absolutely no conscious memory of this incident which would probably have turned my life upside down, or even in some ways ended it at 14. Due to the fact that in the dream, I had laughed at him and he ran from our house and afterward I was stunned or catatonic...

Wasn't it also eerie, that now in 2019 I had somehow known Mick was going into hospital a whole day before the actual announcement? Even though I hadn't thought of him in years... not since that other time, in 2006, when I had run into him at the Montreal Jazz Festival after dreaming the night before that he would be there? 

"Are you Mick?" I asked. "I'm Ann Diamond. Do you know me?"

The slight blonde next to him grabbed his arm "Oh no! Let's get out of here!"

He paused regally to respond to me. "No, actually - I'm Keith."

Big smile. A ball of light had blasted me in the forehead as he and his party walked away. I was stunned, 95% certain it had really been him...

Scrambling for a ticket on line, by mistake on line I bought two, separate concerts a week apart. With many hours of traveling to the venues.

At the first show in Burls Creek Ontario I met up with an old friend, Thom Hochman, dancing by himself in a field among 60k other people. When the show started I managed to get close to the stage and while Mick was singing "Angie" a weird emotion came over me -- I felt pulled into the hole in his damaged heart.

A week later in Boston at the stadium I sat in the nosebleeds feeling a little cynical. It was only in the Uber afterwards that a strange inner movie rolled over me: I was the girl on a losing streak in the song Satisfaction. There was a connection between the flashback of Mick visiting my house in April 1965, and the writing of the first big Stones hit 3 weeks later in a Florida motel. Once this realization formed in my mind, I couldn't stop thinking I had been on a losing streak for my entire life. 

On the bus back to Montreal I made a voice recording which I sent to an email address I thought might be Mick's.

Two weeks later I got what appeared to be an answer. I was devastated at the thought that in 1965 Mick might really have rung our doorbell. And that I had forgotten the entire incident for 55 years.

The Stones were on the road and I watched video clips from city after city - with a weird sense of participation in the new version of Midnight Rambler which I imagined was about Mick breaking into my house though the "stupid door" I had opened in 1965.

In September I flew to Greece. I spent a month on Syros in a turquoise and Terra cotta room like being inside a seashell.

I think Mick was somewhere in the orient..I got messages from India and Bhutan. I had the impression he had people investigating me.  Two cops moved into the room next door and I found my computer in a different place than I had left it. I spoke to one of them at the bus stop. He said he was going back to London. The other one called me "Princess." I heard Stones tunes coming out of two different restaurants miles apart that day: She's a Rainbow and Angie. I dreamed Mick had died and I wrapped his body in a sheet and carried him up the hill to a Catholic chapel-- I told the cops who tailed me in the dream "He's mine now". In the harbor was a statue of the Little Mermaid cradling her drowned prince. I was the Little Mermaid going back to age 8, which was when I had known Mick, as I now realized.

But Mick didn't trust me. He even sent cops to spy on me. Why?

One night he texted me. He was somewhere far away maybe India. I began flashing back to some scene of horror in a hospital with other children. He tried to comfort me. I started to panic. It seemed I had known him in early childhood when he was a teenager from England. He said not worry if he died he would still be around and I would feel him. He sent me a video of a strong looking woman steering her boat across a river.

He said he wanted me to meet his young son.

But in between these texts I got messages from other men who appeared to be secret police. They would engage and question me. Sometimes I thought they were him. Gradually I began to think none of them were him and I had imagined everything.

Whoever i was texting told me to stay on Syros but i was running out of money and trust. After three weeks I went back to Limnos and called Themis who in my absence had told everyone I had left him for good because he mistreated me. Now I was back again he was contrite. A crazy friend of his crossed the street and pumped my hand vigorously, thanking me for not abandoning Themis. We made love loudly with my phone in the next room - and the next day one of the cops who had been messaging me from India texted to say he had been listening and recorded everything.

I exchanged some more emails with someone calling himself Mick Jagger. I had a dream in which I visited his grave from a past life in which he had been a German officer and saved many lives in the war. His tombstone was covered in ivy, in some Polish forest. I told this dream to "Mick" and it was as if I had passed a test. 

The issue was trust, as he kept repeating. I felt hurt that he didnt trust me as I had no memory of having done anything wrong - in fact no memories at all, just dreams and flashbacks that to me indicated extreme abuse as a child by doctors and occultists.

I would become convinced at times that we were going to be married. Meanwhile Themis was telling me he loved me "more". He taught me to pray in Greek to Jesus Christ, asking for help. I recited the simple prayer 3X - "Lord Jesus Christ, help me!" 

"Κύριε Ιησού Χριστέ βοήθησέ με"

The next day on my news feed I saw an intriguing item. The Rolling Stones' first manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, was coming to Kamloops in British Columbia to teach a 13 week course called "Rock Dreams."

I had to find out why Andrew Loog Oldham was giving a course at the same college where 20 years earlier I had been a writer in residence and had a series of close encounters with Mick over the internet.

But first I flew to Paris thinking someone texting me from there was actually Mick wanting to set up a meeting. I landed at CDG in late morning and took the train but then got lost in the Paris metro. It was a frigid day in late November and I found nowhere to leave my luggage which weighed me down. After finding the address in an office building near Trocadero, there was one there. I bought myself lunch in a bistro across the street, feeling stupid. 

By chance my friend Paul Dunbar was staying in Verneuil sur Seine an hour away by train. He met me at the station and helped me find and check into the cheap hotel I'd booked for 3 nights. Soon after I arrived I got a text from "Mick" whom I had kept waiting while I wandered around Paris with my bags trying to find the address he'd given me, which I suspected fake. Now he said he was in London with his son.

Over dinner I told Paul my misadventures-- how I thought Jagger was texting me but then it would look like someone else. I never was sure what exactly I was dealing with- a chameleon? A group? 

Paul googled what he said was his favorite Jagger video from Goddess in the Doorway:  "God gave me everything"

Watching it for the first time, I recognized my look of 20 years ago- the short hair, the belt-hung Walkman, the nervous laughter ...  I had heard the song but never could bring myself to connect it to "me" -- now it made me feel desperate. I nearly cried at my own stupidity at not having watched it before now, and missing the point of the song.

But then again, it was only a song.

I flew back to Montreal then Illinois to see a dying friend with a brain tumor that made her almost unrecognizable. A massive flock of blackbirds engulfed the house as I sat at the picture window the day before we took her to hospital, like a Hitchcock scene predicting doom. After she passed I took a Greyhound to New York and spent Christmas in Harlem. I think Mick may also have been there at that time with his girlfriend Melanie and their 3 year old son. I got more odd texts bordering on harassment or surveillance from people I didn't know who seemed obsessed with my whereabouts.

I visited Strawberry Fields and John Lennon's old building the Dakota on Central Park. All that week my eyes and sinuses seemed to be weeping continuously. I may have had Covid, as yet unnamed, as I wandered around Manhattan which seemed more peaceful and liveable than on other NY visits, always fraught with anxiety.

I was back in Montreal over New Years seeing friends and gathering my belongings for the trip out west to Rock Dreams.

On January 4 i took a bus then boarded a train in Toronto. It took 3 days to cross Canada, through dark forests, sunny prairies and kids singing "Hallelujah" in the dining car. It was just after New Years and the weather held til we entered the Rockies which were filling up with snow.

I got off in Kamloops after dark on the night of January 7, met at the station by crystalline mountains shimmering in frigid cold. Rock Dreams began the following evening in the First Nations auditorium at TRU.

I had enrolled hoping to pick up the trail that led back to childhood and find out the truth behind my memory erasure. Had I known Mick Jagger in my childhood  - as I now suspected? 

I had been in touch with Mick on and off since 1992 when I had visited his island in the Caribbean. But I had grown up with the Stones music in the 60s - they were the soundtrack for my early teens and also university days.

Surely I deserved answers. But the first night was disappointing- dominated by academic business. Andrew Loog Oldham, star of the show, came out near the end, got a standing ovation, and said very little.

The second week was better. Andrew rambled, telling anecdotes, dropping names of people in the London music world. He played a few clips and made wry remarks, speaking as an insider. I was on the edge of my seat. The songs triggered memories and emotions connected to growing up. His stories of postwar England obsessed with American rock and roll brought back my Detroit cousins and put the 1950s in a new and meaningful light as I could travel back into my Canadian childhood at a time when England was digging itself out of war.

For the first time I grasped the hunger driving the British invasion and why those scraggly London boys looked so gaunt in their sharp clothes- they were driven by hope and desperation. How could we refuse to let them in?

I taped all of Andrew's lectures and have listened to some of them recently. They're more layered than I thought.mHis choice of songs, like the Four Seasons' Rag Doll, and James Taylor's Handy Man, seems a little strange in retrospect- and suggests an undercurrent dialogue I was having in my subconscious.

Music is magic. Music is programming.

While the class was meeting weekly over the winter of 2020, the pandemic bore down on us. It was the reason Rock Dreams was cut short in late March when the university shut down and I took refuge in the Alpine Motel at the top of Kamloops.

The world which had seemed on the verge of a major expansion instantly collapsed around us all. Shops and restaurants closed- we were living in Outer Mongolia- we stayed in our rooms and put on masks to go for a walk.

Andrew vanished, saved from having to complete the syllabus. We'd just left the Who smashing their instruments in the Seventies and were about to enter the Eighties. In a way I was relieved that we'd quit while ahead - I doubted Andrew's heart was really in New Wave or whether he'd planned that far ahead. Now he could fly home to Colombia and I would never get to have that conversation I had been postponing until the last class, when I would approach him shyly and inquire "Do you know me?"

Of course he would have said no, sorry, I don't.

*****
Questions I still have: 

Who came up with the idea for Rock Dreams and how did it come about?

How long did it take to develop the course? Did Thompson Rivers U contact ALO or was it the other way around?

Why Kamloops? What brought Oldham there for the first time in March 2003, just as I left for California then Leipzig and finally Limnos, Greece?

Were any of the other Stones involved behind the scenes in setting up the Rock Dreams course? 

The Stones No Filter tour had ended September 1 2019. The course was announced at the end of November 2019. I was back in touch with Mick in the months preceding the first lecture. 

Was all this just coincidence?

Why, on the first evening, when Andrew stepped up to the podium, did he scan the whole circular amphitheater of 250 students and stop at the white haired lady dead centre in the middle row, addressing his opening remarks directly to me?

Andrew the shrewd observer - but what else was he?