POST 16...Crawdaddy Music Roots Part 3: Rockin' The Khobar

When I left Houston for the deserts of the Middle East at age 22, I sold all my music gear, bought an acoustic guitar just to have something to pick on, and moved to Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia. I ended up staying there for six years, and quite a bunch of musical things happened that even I couldn’t predict.

 

Saudi Arabia is an odd, rough place to live. It took awhile just to get acclimated and meet some people. I had an apartment in town and worked on an Aramco compound several miles away—the Arabian American Oil Company, who was my client. Work was by annual contract. I got paid basically two times my stateside salary, tax free, and it all went straight into the bank because I lived on a per diem they gave me for food, etc. I also had a company truck with free gasoline.

My contract included a paid plane ticket and two weeks paid vacation anywhere in the world, every four months. I could take an additional 30 days unpaid at the end of each year before starting the next contract. This was a sweet set-up for a young man right out of college. It was common for expats to travel all over the world.  I lost count after twenty nations, but I do remember it was six continents.  (Never been to Anarctica).

There were 50,000 Americans working in the oil industry in this part of Arabia, along with a host of other nationalities—Brits, Continental Europeans, Aussies, Filipinos, Koreans, Japanese, Indians and Pakistanis, on and on. Everybody was there for the money, probably like Dubai today. Incidentally, Dubai was only a small fishing port back in 1978, known for its pearl diving industry. We used to go there and charter a dowh (traditional Arabian sailing vessel) to go diving in the Persian Gulf.

Everyone was starving for entertainment because in Saudi Arabia—the site of Holy Mecca and the seat of Islam itself—there was not much to do in the towns and villages. There were some okay restaurants but alcohol was illegal. There were obviously no night clubs, no live music, no movie theaters, no nothing. Furthermore, single males and females were not allowed to interact in public, though we sometimes did.

Although anything fun in the decadent sense was illegal, there was a gentlemen’s agreement between the Saudi Government and all the big American oil companies operating there. You could discretely carry on your American lifestyle within your company compound. These compounds were like luxury military bases, sort of fake Southern California suburbs, with irrigated tree-lined streets, schools and softball fields, shopping centers, theaters, etc. Many Americans and Brits raised entire families in these Disneyland bubble towns, spending twenty or thirty years there. I have a few friends who are still there.

Within these private, gated communities, some right on the Persian Gulf, people made their own moonshine (literally in a still), wine, and beer. They threw wild parties every weekend out of boredom. And the oil companies would bring in celebrity entertainment on a regular basis to perform within the compounds in the theater halls—kind of like how the USO entertains the military when we are at war in a foreign place.

This was also the time when cocaine was just getting big, so recreational drugs were flowing everywhere. I have no idea how all that stuff got into the devout Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but it did. I must admit I partook.  One more thing: Though it was technically illegal for women to work in the Kingdom back then, it was allowed within several company compounds, where women could also drive. There were a few handfuls of female British secretaries, nurses, and teachers, who had their pick of the throngs of single men looking for anyone to take out on a date. Lots of self-esteem boosting for the girls!

And not just the single women, because with that many men sharking around, quite a few married women inevitably fell into illicit love affairs. It made sense: everyone had tons of cash, nothing to do on the weekends, and there was cocaine, hash, and homemade booze flowing everywhere. So there were a lot of folks doggin’ around. Only one element was needed to complete the picture: A damn good live rockin’ band.

Once I got trained and settled into my job and got to know the local routines, I started looking for players to start a band. There were a few existing bands: a good Filipino band doing amazing impressions of American pop music; and a few good country outfits, given all the Texans working there. But there was room for improvement and tons of potential work. I hooked up with an existing soul band soon after I got to Arabia, and was lucky enough to actually do a gig on the Queen of England’s royal yacht--no, it was a ship--the massive SS Britania. Queen Elizabeth was doing her first Gulf States tour. She arrived in Arabia on her yacht, but flew out on her private Concord, and the yacht stayed in port one more day. There was a party on the boat that evening that we played for the Royal Navy and a bunch of diplomats. That was quite a gig.

I knew I would be forming a band, so on a trip back to the States, I bought a new guitar, amp, and some other gear. By the way, since I now had some cash, the guitar I bought was an original ’54 Goldtop Les Paul Standard (bragging). Back in Arabia, I soon found and rehearsed some pretty good players.  Our new band was half Brit, half Yank, with a California girl front singer (the wife of a Northrop employee). We were an interesting hybrid, mixing things up with Nazareth, Supertramp, Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Stones, Linda Ronstadt, Atlanta Rhythm Section, BB King, ZZ Top, Doobie Brothers, and Eddie Money (remember this is 1978-79). The name of the first outfit was Fool’s Goal (a reference to the expatriate life in Arabia), and when the chick singer returned to the States, we recruited a military vet Brother who excelled at all the old soul and R&B stuff. That gave us another dynamic.

Gigs were plentiful and interesting: tons of company parties for British Airways, Northrop, Aramco, Bechtel, Fluor (we often rehearsed on an empty floor in Fluor’s unfinished high-rise building in Al Khobar).  We also did a lot of military base gigs.  Also, people just threw private parties every weekend or something to do.  Some had themes...

The Brits definitely partied harder than they Yanks, and one of our wildest regular gigs were the Dhahran Rugby Union Football Club parties. No one can throw down booze like a rugby player (and of course his loyal consort for the evening, typically an Irish or Scottish lass--or perhaps an Essex girl--who worked for Aramco).

I actually had a girlfriend for two years, a really pretty Scottish executive secretary, who worked for an Aramco bigwig. I was twenty-three and she was thirty, and taught me a lot about life. Lizzie was from Glasgow and used to make her own beer in a 33-gallon trash can. It was real stout stuff that took about six weeks to brew and came out 18% alcohol.

She also turned me on to “chip butteys” (French fry sandwich coated in butter), “haggis” (stuffed sheep's pluck), and “black pudding” (dried sheep's blood sausage). I downed everything she put in front of me, and was eventually knighted as an honorary Scott. You can read the lurid details of my Arabian Night escapades in my book, The Education of Adam Speaker, which is actually required reading for my self-discovery program Soul Shaker that is mentioned in some earlier blog posts.


My band also did gigs at the U.S. Consulate in Dhahran and lots of private parties at the enormous private homes of both wealthy oil executives and mega-wealthy Arabs, whose homes were quite James Bond-ish. To snap the following picture of an Arab Sheik friend of mine's "house", I had to back off about a quarter mile to get the whole thing in the photo.

The person who promoted, and managed one of my bands was a Vietnam Vet from the 82nd Airborne named Jack "Tombstone" Johnstone, a real character, who once purposely booked us for two gigs the same evening.  He had a soundstage and backline of equipment set up at both locations, shuttling us back and forth between sets in a '77 Suburban.  One of the gigs that evening was at the US Consulate, and the other was literally on an island water hazard at an Aramco golf course.  It could have been a total disaster but actually worked like a charm, thanks to Jack, who also did real fine job whenever he sat in with the band on the Mississippi saxophone.

Jack and his Scottish girfriend Kathleen were the ones who hooked me up with Lizzie.  Jack and I have a few tales to tell, being associated with such earthy Scottish lasses in the freaking Saudi desert of all places.  Those girls could drink any big burly American roughneck under the table any night of the week.

Another plus about the Saudi music biz was, because everyone was making big bucks, no one flinched when we quoted our standard fee of 5,000 Saudi Riyals, at that time about $1500 US. Now those were 1979 dollars, so that's about $5000 today adjusted for inflation. A thousand bucks per man per night!  That's some sweet action for a Florida Panhandle Cracker.

OK, now here’s the really cool part. I mentioned earlier that Aramco brought big-name acts over to perform for their employees. Well, we opened for some of those acts. These were still-popular groups of the day, like The Fifth Dimension, BJ Thomas, Dolly Parton, The Bellamy Brothers, and Sugarloaf (had the hit “Green Eyed Lady”)...on and on. It was a local band's dream, and we fulfilled it.  The other crazy piece--and this feels karmic--my Uncle Monk Arnold in Atlanta, Georgia, was the actual booking agent who sent a lot of these acts to Saudi Arabia... is that a coincidence?

A few years later after my last group disbanded (people were coming and going all the time in the Kingdom), I became friends with the head of Aramco Recreation, the company department that hired all the big-name acts from America. After each concert, all the performers would head over to my friend’s home within the compound for an after-concert party. So I was constantly meeting all these obscure music legends in an unpretentious setting--that is, a funky pre-fab house, drinking homemade beer and wine with Kenny Rogers, Frankie Vallie, and Dottie West. It was quite surreal.

There was one more piece to my music career overseas.  I traveled a lot for business and pleasure and tended to visit the same places repeatedly: London,  Amsterdam, Munich, Singapore, Sydney, etc.  I got to know local musicians everywhere and always hung out wherever they played. This led to sitting in with a lot of bands all over the world, and I even did gigs with them whenever I was in town.

It turned into a sort of ongoing "world tour" of nightclubs.  All kinds of unpredictable stuff happened that seems like a pipe dream today: One time I won a music contest in Brisbane Australia, and had to delay my flight back to Arabia for a TV interview and a newspaper article.  Another time a band I knew in Singapore was opening for BB King and Tina Turner.  They needed a guitar player for the show and as the Fates would have it, I was in Singapore...so I got to open for one of my heroes and the legend from Nutbush (This was after Tina had left Ike Turner but had not made her big comeback yet.)

When my last group in Saudi Arabia disbanded, I met the lady who later became my wife. Her name was Jolene and she was a South Dakota beauty queen. Jo was an impressive woman, having landed a job in Saudia Arabia as a single American girl.  There were even less of those than the British gals.  She was a singer and doing mostly country and white pop music when I met her, so I turned her onto Aretha Franklin.  She wood-shedded and developed a good grasp of soul music for a midwestern white girl, earning accolades like Jo-Retha and Jo-Mama. We formed a duo, and I bought a TEAC 4-track cassette recorder to create drum and bass tracks for all our songs. We played a ton of gigs our last two years in Arabia with that digital band setup, which also became my introduction to multi-track recording and studio session work.

So with six years in Arabia under my belt and some money in the bank, I married Jo-Mama on a quick trip to Bahrain, left the oil industry, and moved back to the States, eventually ending up in Phoenix, Arizona. Then began Part 4 of The Crawdaddy's whirlwind music journey.

A Crawdaddy Instrumental whose title refers to the road conditions in the Middle East: Bridge Out


Story concludes in the next Post...I promise