One Train Later: A Memoir
Page 3
Somewhere in the middle of these chaotic days of inky pages and military-style school thrashings, I get the faint idea that I have a thing for music, an ear for it maybe, but no way in which to express it other than enthusiastic talk and humming the day's idiotic songs-the piano lessons now having faded because of my getting a pair of roller skates. But shortly after my thirteenth birthday things change when I am given a guitar by my uncle Jim.
Jim has recently returned to England after years of living in Africa. Because of his exploits he has a somewhat legendary status in our family, having lived with actual Africans, shot at lions, and been down the diamond mines. When I was six he sent me a present of a book called The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, a story of some wild lions that attack a camp in Kenya. Thrilled by the vision of flesh being ripped by wild cats, I love it and wonder if Uncle Jim has ever seen one, a lion.
One day he comes over and says, "Come 'ere a minute, I've got something for you." He stares down at me, his face brown and furrowed by years under the African sun, and from a battered case he pulls out an old and beaten Spanish guitar and says, "What do you think about this-I had it in Africa-would you like it?" My heart almost stops because to me it is complicated and exotic-a fabulous machine. He passes it to me and I feel a rush of blood as I whisper, "Thank you, Uncle," and carry it into my bedroom as if trying not to drop an egg. Scratched and dented with a string missing, it isn't much of an instrument, but I love it instantly and sit on the edge of the bed with it cradled in my arms, holding it in the position that I have seen used by guitarists on TV. I study it and gaze at its dents and scratches, its evidence of a long life, and wonder how many songs have been played on it, where it's been. It is an immediate bond, and possibly in that moment there is a shift in the universe because this is the moment, the point from which my life unfolds. I strike the remaining strings, which make a sound like slack elastic. It's horribly out of tune and I don't know even the simplest chord, but to me it is the sound of love.
It may be the sound of love, but with no idea of how to tune it and even less idea of how to play it, I don't know how to put one foot or finger in front of another. But Providence is at hand in the shape of a six-foot-seven ex-RAF serviceman by the name of David Ellis, a lodger my parents have recently taken into the house. We call him Cloudy because he literally towers over the rest of us, and we like to ask him how the weather is up there, but he's a genial personality and luckily for me a musician: a pianist. He immediately sees my plight and remedies the situation by returning one day with a new set of strings and a chord book with instructions on how to tune the guitar.
I watch, fascinated, as he wrestles the strings onto the guitar and proceeds to tune it to the Family piano. He then hands me the guitar and asks me to try out a D7 chord as shown on page one of the book, a simple triangle shape. With the guitar now in tune, the chord comes out sounding like heaven and I laugh in amazement as if I have received a surprise kiss at a party. I try some of the other shapes, like E, A, and B7. At first it's slow and painful-this being the last moment in my life when my fingers will be without calluses-hut I become obsessed and manfully struggle on into the night as the guitar gradually detunes itself and slides from the sound of an angel's harp to the moan of hell. Cloudy comes to the rescue and brings the strings up to pitch again. We go on like this for a couple of weeks until I slowly get my fingers around the open-position chords and learn to tune to the piano. I'm shaky and nervous but, taking a deep breath, decide to make an appearance at school with my guitar.
A few years earlier you would never have seen something as exotic as a guitar, but now it's beginning to establish its iconic presence as the trenchant symbol of youth. I notice a few other kids in the playground showing off to small groups during the morning or afternoon break and I start by joining these little throngs and looking over shoulders at the hands of the other boys as they form strange little triangles and parallelograms on the necks of their guitars. After school as I stumble home through the woods past the familiar trees, rotting logs, and spirals of pussy willow, I try to memorize these con figurations, holding my left hand in the air, fingers clustered in three points against the dark wet greenness.
At first I am shy because I now have a new identity and have to grow into it like a new skin. I expect a certain amount of snideness from the playground yobs, but because I have given myself time to get at least the first few chords down, it goes smoothly, with a minimum of jeering, and I become one of the kids with a guitar. The instrument is a badge of power: it makes me different and also helps me overcome feelings of physical inadequacy that I have in comparison to some of the tall blond superathletes who seem to abound in my form. I pick up more chords from other kids who have been playing longer than me, for at this time there is no other way to learn-no videos, no DVDs, no CD-ROMs, few books. You get information-chord by chord-only if another kid takes pity on you, so I get it wherever I can and practice into the night.
I begin taking the guitar to school almost every day, slogging through the woods weighed down by the satchel on my back and the guitar in my hand. I am a fanatic now, and if I don't have it with me at school, I race home at night to get back on it. One of the first side effects I notice is that it attracts girls. The guitar, like the gun, sticks out from the body phallic and hard; even in the pubescent stage of consciousness, the boy with the guitarunless he is impossibly ugly-becomes a more sexually desirable being, has the aura of a gunslinger.
Those of us who play the guitar in school tend to group together, and it's not long before we are strumming away in the front rooms of various mums' and dads' houses. Five of us decide to call ourselves the Midnighters, although none of us has ever been allowed to stay up past eleven. We fancy ourselves a skiffle group. Skiffle is a new movement and a new word that has recently entered the English vocabulary with the emergence of Lonnie Donegan, a former singer with the Chris Barber Jazz Band. Lonnie is very popular with his guitar and vocal style. He sings songs like "Rock Island Line" and "John Henry," and skiffle seems like a music that even we lowly schoolboys might achieve.
Mostly we just have guitars, but one day Graham White, our number three guitarist, brings along a tea chest bass. A primitive musical device made out of a box with a broom handle sticking out of it, a string is attached be tween the box and the handle so that when plucked, it gives a thudding atonal boom. Graham's homemade bass is bigger than he is, and after various sarcastic suggestions that maybe he should stand on it rather than play it, he gives up and uses it as a hutch for his pet rabbit, Sneaky. Another poor sod suggests that he play piano along with our strumming guitars, but that idea is greeted with hoots of derision: we are men with guitars, skifflers, and we stare with a steely-eyed gaze down railroad tracks that disappear into infinity.
Our repertoire is limited but we learn American folk songs like "Midnight Special," "John Henry," "Worried Man Blues," and "Tom Dooley," all of which we play with a grim enthusiasm as if battling our way out of hell. There is no concept of parts or dynamics other than just banging away like maniacs at E, A, and B7, and we probably resemble a bad Salvation Army band or an outtake of the Shaggs. The song lyrics are all about trains driving across the Deep South on errant time schedules and men who drive steel into the Missouri dirt or "wimin who dun me wrong," and the lace curtains and overstuffed couches of Graham White's mum are assaulted with the gutbucket feeling of black poverty squawked out by spotty-faced boys whose balls haven't dropped yet.
My guitarist profile takes a sharp turn upward when I not only get the leading role in the school Christmas play but then reappear afterward onstage to sing "Tom Dooley" and "Worried Man Blues" with our skiffle group. When I finish there's an audible gasp from the audience, but whether it's in disbelief at the gross ineptitude of the performance or the ghastly Americanized row that has sullied the assembly hall, one will never know. But the result is that my status at school goes up several notches, and from this moment on I often have a small group of girls trailing behind
me through the woods as I walk home. This is followed in the evenings by anonymous giggling phone calls. My career as a rock star has begun.
My friends are now mostly other boys who have guitars, and I start to spend a lot of time with a kid named Eddie Evans because, older than I, he knows about players like Merle Travis, Chet Atkins, and Buddy Holly and he has records I have never seen or heard before. He plays me "Saturday Night Shuffle" by Merle Travis, and it knocks me to the floor. I have never heard playing like this before, with two parts going at once, and I am fascinated. Eddie has some EPs and we sit on the linoleum floor of his bedroom, leaning against his bed, guitars in position with a couple of Woodbines dangling from our lips, the windows open so his mum won't notice the smell. Eddie has a slight clue about how it's done, something about playing on the bass string at the same time as you play the melody on the treble strings. It's bloody difficult, and as we listen to the record above the din of the trolley buses that go droning by his mum's upstairs flat, Merle's fingerpicking pierces the blue smoke of our Woodies like a shamanistic spell.
"Peggy Sue" is a lot easier. I get it quickly and we strum through it a couple of hundred times with great enthusiasm until Eddie's mum starts banging on the wall with a broom and yells out that it's setting the parrot off and she can't hear the telly. Chastened, because we think we sound so great, we turn to another Buddy Holly item: the opening lick to "That'll Be the Day." A thing of beauty, this lick in the key of E major starts on an A on the third string, immediately slurs to a b flat note, which is then played as a triplet across the open B natural and E strings and then descends on down and into the open E major chord. This is pure rock-and-roll genius, a stunning piece of guitar devised by someone who is probably only seven or eight years older than we are.
To our thirteen-year-old minds almost everything about the guitar seems to come from or be over there, in America, at least everything we are interested in. All the best guitars are American, all the great players and the styles: rock and roll, jazz, and country music. We don't have a Buddy Holly, an Eddie Cochran, a Gene Vincent; we live in rural England, and the USA might as well be another planet, to go there would be like trying to book a flight to the moon.
The guitar and its players appear to us as if shrouded in a heavenly mist; we are utterly seduced by the glamour of the photographs on the sleeves of LPs that we stare at in the racks of the local record stores. The faces in these black-and-white photographs stare back at us from under greased and coiffed hair and turned-up collars as if to say, "Hey, baby, wanna little rock and roll?" We do, and it never occurs to us for an instant that they are human beings struggling with drugs, broken marriages, and lousy managers-for to us they are gods. We gaze at their glossy images, the glint in their eye as if they know something we don't, and hear them call with the scream of the blues, rock and roll, bent strings, and a yeah baby yeah that is about a million miles from a tea dance at the Bournemouth Pavilion.
As I get back on the twentynine bus to go home at the end of the afternoon, my head is swimming with guitar licks. I wanted to stay at Eddie's and play on through the night, but it's getting late; I have homework and my mum will be getting anxious. The conductor arrives at my seat and asks me where to. "Nashville," I reply dreamily, staring out the window into the rainy English night and the sputtering neon of Brown's fish-andchip shop.
Sometimes I go over to Carl Hollings's house. Carl is an Elvis fan, and that is the only music he will play or listen to, anyone who doesn't like Presley getting a bloody nose for lack of respect. I prefer to stay on Carl's good side, and we sprawl on a fake fur rug in front of his mum's imitation coal fire-which features actual flickering flames-and croak along with the El, singing "Teddy Bear" or "Heartbreak Hotel." Other times, in a more pensive mood or depressed by homework, we get serious and play his EP Peace in the Valley, El's spiritual side coming through in the old-style hymns he sings with such sincerity. When we're not listening to the King, Carl and I sometimes go into the town center and try to nick sweets from Woolworth's while we hum along with Neil Sedaka in the background singing "Oh Carol."
There's a boy a year ahead of me named Peter Jones who some of the kids say is the best guitar player in school. He has this reputation because apparently he can play the intro to "Move It," which is a hit by Cliff Richard and the Shadows, but he won't show it to anybody, so I get friendly with him with the ulterior motive of capturing this lick. We get chummy and one afternoon after school he invites me to his house to have a session in his mum's front room. We play for half an hour, strumming along in unison on the simple chords that we know, and then I ask him if by any chance he knows the intro to "Move It." Oh yeah, comes the nonchalant and unsuspecting re ply. He quickly rips it out, a very simple double stopping in fourths on the E and B strings ending on the E major chord. It's a knockout, this simple lick that seems to contain everything for which I lust: the blues, sex, glamour, electric guitar, and the far-off shores of America. But casually, as if I already vaguely know it, I say, "Oh, I get it, yeah-now I remember," for now that I have seen it, I possess it, and a new guitar door opens with the light of heaven pouring through.
With this lick under my fingers, it seems like a godlike coincidence when it's announced that they-Cliff Richard and the Shadows-are coming to town. All of us aspiring young guitarists go because Cliff and his group are about the nearest thing we have in England to Elvis or anything from the United States. They are on at the Winter Gardens, where previously I have been only on school outings to hear Sir Charles Groves conduct the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. The show, about an hour and a half in duration, is divided into two parts, with an intermission halfway through so that the proprietors can flog ice cream, chocolate, and orangeade. During the first half, naturally enough, the guitarist wannabes in the audience never take their eyes off of Hank Marvin with his red Stratocaster. Hank is already a guitar hero, although that phrase hasn't yet been coined. Black horn-rimmed glasses a la Buddy Holly make him cool, an interesting prototype nerd and the perfect nonthreatening foil to Cliff, who is a good-looking Elvis clone. We all think that Hank is a great guitarist, and to a man we all want to be him. But he's a long way in front of us, and the Shadows are already having hits on their own with instrumental pieces like "Apache." They play a pleasant English variant of surf music, pretty melodies played with a nice, clean twangy sound, like Dick Dale or the Ventures, but somehow lacking the grit of the original. Another thing about the Shadows that impresses us all is a little dance step they have worked out when backing Cliff. It's a neat backward two-step that makes a circle and can be repeated infinitely. Of course, we all ape it and try it when we practice; sometimes we even practice it with tennis rackets or a cricket bat, and it still looks cool.
During the intermission we pile out of the theater for a breather, and I separate myself from the mob for a moment to cogitate on what Hank is doing up there. I wander toward the back of the theater, and to my amazement standing there like Zeus is the man himself. "Hank, my G-G-God," I stutter, and I scream out, "H-a-a-a-a-n-k," and propel myself toward the skinny guitarist like an F-16. What Hank sees coming toward him is hard to be sure of, but while it is actually a slight fourteen-year-old with an ear-toear grin, I think for Hank the boy has morphed into a thousand-pound rhino or the Incredible Hulk because a look of cold white terror passes across the lead guitarist's face and he takes off like a reebok.
I zoom after him like a heat-seeking missile, the word autograph strobing across my brain like a red alert. Hank tears down into Bournemouth Square, shoots around it and back again toward the Winter Gardens. It's peculiar, to say the least, because it's only the two of us running, there are no other fans in sight, just the two of us, a bespectacled guitarist being pursued by a small boy at full tilt past bus stops, queues of bored-looking people, the upper pleasure gardens, and various assorted litter bins stuffed with ice-cream wrappers, old newspapers, cigarette stubs, and the shit of seagulls. Hank runs and I run. It becomes dreamlike, a fil
m in slow motion-the world falls away, and I am pursuing not only Hank Marvin but the guitar itself, which seems far away and suspended in amber.
"Hank," I yell-my voice blending with the screech of the overhead gulls that wheel above us like rats with wings-"pleeeeeeeease." We shoot back toward the theater and my hero finally pulls over near a large rhododendron bush, panting like a racehorse at the end of eight furlongs. "Oh, alright," he gasps. I proffer my grubby little program, and Hank smiles in a dazed way and scribbles his name. I thank him, and he disappears back into the theater. Several years later when I sit down in a music shop in the West End with Hank one afternoon and exchange pleasantries, somehow I don't have the heart to mention our Keystone Kops chase a few years earlier, as it might have sullied the moment when I finally met one of my heroes on not quite, but almost, equal terms.
Two
BRIDGEHAMPTON, AUGUST 18, 1983
I get up from the piano and stretch-what bloody time is it anyway? I remember that there is a clock in the hallway and I go to discover with a nasty jolt that it's barely nine A.M. This is horribly early; I don't have to be at the gig for fifteen hours, but it's only fucking Shea Stadium tonight (only the biggest gig) and I have to go back to bed. I climb back up the stairs and return to my room, pick up my guitar, and get into bed with it. The guitar lies next to me with its head on the pillow. I run a hand over its scarred surface, caressing the warm wood. There's the metaphor, I think dozily, there's the marriage. It's to this, this bloody thing. I lean back on the pillow with the guitar across my chest, and strum a few gentle chords that make me dreamy. Big one tonight-you'd better practice.... Lying hack in the sheets, I run through some chord passages that are as familiar as old friends, always there when you want them.