Doc had a good eight track player in his van. We used to go spooking around Paris listening to Disraeli Gears and Jimi Hendrix Cry of Love. After the Paradisio gig we all piled into the vehicle for the trip back to Paris. We stopped for gas on the Autoroute and Julio saw a Shaft tape there in the rack that he just had to have, so he bootlegged it out.
When we got off the autoroute at the Paris exit we were told to pull over to the gendarmerie at the exit. The guy from the gas station realised that we had stolen the tape and called ahead. Doc still had Ohio plates – the exit attendant said “oh ee yo” par la, (Doc used to say Ohio – round on both ends and high in the middle) indicating where to pull over.
We were surrounded on four sides by cops with machine guns. The Paris cops were a bit twitchy in those days – it wasn’t long after the 1968 riots and general strike. Bloody students.. So I got out and stood next to the van eyeballing the diminutive gendarme with the Uzi and all the guys inside suddenly started passing me drugs out the window .” Here Eddie get rid of this.” I inconspicuously dumped it under the glare of the searchlights thinking that any minute we’d all be thrown into some black hole. But Julio said,“I got this.” He put the tape in his pants and stashed it in the toilet cistern at the police station and came out ten minutes later asking for donations which we scraped up between us.
50 Francs I think was the agreed upon “gift” to the Gendarmerie. I don’t know how he did it – he was a silver tongued devil if ever there was one. Long story short we got back to Paris two hours late for our gig at the American Center. We debated about whether we should do the gig or not but in the end being true pros we did manage to entertain the paltry crowd that was still there. The end.
