The story about the pool always makes me think that whoever called the cops must have been like “There are naked girls in the Holiday Inn pool! The most flat chested girls I’ve ever seen in my life wearing men’s swim trunks! One girl appears to have hair on her chest! Please get here immediately!” The one with chest hair would be Charlie as he seemed to be the only one with body hair in the band for quite some time. Or maybe the only one who didn’t shave his chest, I don’t know.
Keith’s re-telling of that incident, from 2015, is still one of the funniest things I’ve ever read:
“There were many, many incidents like that, and if Phelge remembers it, it must have happened. Usually, that stuff was like water off a duck's back. I had far worse in America when we first arrived. In the Midwest we once got arrested for being girls! (Laughs) We were in a swimming pool in a Holiday Inn on a highway in Georgia somewhere, and suddenly (makes siren noise), "Oh, the cops are coming... and they're turning in here!" The cop gets out and shouts, "Ok, where are the topless women?" Someone had called in saying there was a bunch of girls in the pool. We were like, "Right (Cups non-existent boobs) This is all we got!" Obviously it was some irate person - probably a woman - who called them, thinking we were chicks. She must have had pretty bad eyesight!”
@charlesandkeef I thought something about this photo seemed familiar (not in the sense that I’d seen it before exactly but something similar) and then I realized the Voodoo Lounge bed photo is just a redux of this in a different environment/with a slightly different band configuration:
“I met him [Leonard Cohen] once, when I presented an award to him on behalf of PEN. He was such a sweet man. I even have a photograph of myself being kissed by him. One of my most prized possessions.”-Salman Rushdie (Montreal Gazette, 2017)
"Leonard Cohen kissed me. Actually, this may be the most remarkable photograph I’ve ever been in."-Salman Rushdie (2021)