MAKING WATCH THE RED By Darryl Mason In the early 1980s, Rick Brewster was walking down New York Citys Fifth Avenue when he noticed a small crowd gathered on the sidewalk. He carried with him a brand new cassette player, and he recorded the street sounds of NYC as he walked along, soaking up the city. Curious, Rick approached the crowd to see what was happening. Some moved aside so could get closer. A gypsy lady was hosting a game of 3-Card-Monte on an upturned cardboard box. As Rick watched on, he saw people playing her were winning big money. How easy was this? Was the gypsy lady crazy? Rick was then invited to put money down on the card he thought would be the red card at the end of her shuffle. “Remember, two black, one red, check it out, the gypsy lady said. The red card, the red card the winner, the black card the loser. Remember, watcha the red, watcha the red, watcha the red. You got it. Anybody see it? Which ones the red? Red the winner, black the loser. Twenty get you forty. Forty get you eighty. Now watcha the red.” It was simple. If Rick put down twenty dollars and picked the red card before she turned it over, hed walk away with $40. Hypnotised by her remarkable broken English and sales pitch, Rick Brewster got well and truly caught up in the action, as his tape recorder kept running. Before he knew it, hed lost $160 trying to get back the first $20 he lost. And all too late, Rick realised that half of the crowd, and the previous winners, were all part of the gypsy ladys scam. They were all there to make the card game look real, authentic. “They were there to suck you in,” Rick said. Rick Brewster was well and truly sucked in. He walked away, $160 poorer (his weeks pay), but with a tape recording of the encounter. Back in Australia, during recording sessions at Rhinoceros Studios in late 1982, Rick Brewster gave his tape of the gypsy lady to Doc Neeson, who took the tape, along with a notebook, to his car parked down the street. Neeson sat in his car, listening to the gypsy lady over and over, writing down her words, and turning Ricks story into song lyrics. Four hours later, Neeson returned to the studio and after a bit of a polish of the lyrics with Rick Brewster, he laid down the vocals for the raw, kinetic song that would become known as Watch The Red. Rick Brewster lost $160 to the gypsy lady scamming tourists in New York City, but she had a cameo role on one of The Angels most successful albums. Did she, or anyone who knew her, ever learn of the role she played in the history of The Angels? No-one knows. Follow the hand, give me a chance, listen to what she said, watch the red! (thanks to Gary Young-Youngy for the Angels radio interview from which some details of this story were taken) https://youtube/watch?v=VGD2w33PWV0
Posted on: Sun, 12 Oct 2014 05:25:21 +0000
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