The Jakarta Post | Thu, 10/15/2009 10:50 AM | Surfing Bali
If you are the owner of Keith Richard’s — yeah of the Rolling Stones — guitar, you’d imagine you could live just about anywhere in the world you chose.
Former tour manager for Stones, Sam Cutler, is the owner of one of Richard’s guitars, along with a collection of other guitar-greats that would make a sane R and B enthusiast sob with envy.
And Cutler would give them all up in a heartbeat to grow veggies on a wide, mountain ringed valley in Bali.
Cutler, best known for his management of The Rolling Stones American tour in 1969 that climaxed in the murder of gun wielding Meredith Hunter by Hell’s Angels at the 1969 Altamont tour, has lived all over the world and his discovery of Bali a week ago has left him gob-smacked.
“Look at that, ooh it’s so beautiful,” says Cutler on a drive through Klungkung Regency in Bali’s southeast. “It’s all so rich. You can feel it. Over that hill there, on the other side, I can feel the ridge to the valley below. It’s so, so beautiful. I will live here — give me 18 months and I’ll be sorted,”
Cutler left his British home at 15 years of age and headed to India. You can already guess his character, “How did my mother feel about it; well she only rented me,” says Cutler of the woman he admires, most probably, the most of anyone in his — to date 65 years span.
The run from England’s grizzling-grey post war rationing to Cutler’s imagined sunny, hashish loaded freshly post-Colonial India was a good several thousand plus or minus kilometers across seas and unknown lands.
“You must remember, England had a long history with India and drugs like hashish. I first mucked around with the drugs tobacco and hashish at 13. Well, it was that, really, in that awful grey post-war England, or child suicide,” says Cutler matter-of-factly during an Ubud Writers and Readers Festival ‘In Conversation’ with authors session.
Bali dreaming: Author and Rolling Stones 1969 tour manager Sam Cutler calls Bali “home”.
He stopped his run in Turkey instead. Not a bad performance for a 15 year-old Brit.
From there Cutler has moved to many a country. One of his favorites, before he discovered Bali this week, was Spain.
“I had a 400 year-old home there. No electricity, well it was 400 years old. I used a 12 volt car battery and set up a car’s headlight to read by and then we had what they called in Europe, Aladdin’s Lamps.
They give off such a mellow color — a warm yellow light. And we had a gas fridge [refrigerator]. I really think that’s the way to go – gas for fridges are marvelous — it’s all over Spain now.”
Cutler has, momentarily, ceased his inter-continental wanderings, wandering instead across the world’s largest island and smallest continent, Australia, by bus.
“At the moment I’m living in a bus near Byron Bay. But give me 18 months and I will have found my place in Bali. It really is all so beautiful and I’m now 65 and writing, so growing veggies and living in a simple house, solar power and warm rain — not the cold rain of England — will do me nicely,” says the world traveler that played a bass note in rock and roll history, and a brave English lad to boot.
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