Two weeks later, on a beautiful late October day, I arrange to meet a girl in the local park. Wanting to impress her, I decide to take the 175 along and show off with a few chords. We sit on the bench together like Romeo and Juliet. The wind is sending a cascade of red and brown leaves down from the trees across the grass and around the bench where we sit, me holding the guitar. The girl, Natasha, has long blond hair, a face with a hint of Russia, and the promise of a heartbreaking woman. She sits close to me and I feel her heat. I am desperate to kiss her and I try to play something for her on the 175 and am so overcome that I play badly, but she pulls a leaf from her hair and murmurs as if in assent. On an impulse I put my arm around her and pull her toward me with closed eyes. "No," she says, and lets out a loud laugh and takes off across the park. I put the guitar down and take off after her into the streets that lead to her house. She runs like a deer, and in the twilight I lose her. I run back to the park to get my guitar and go home. But when I reach the bench, there is nothing there except a few more leaves. She's gone. My ES 175-disappeared. In hallucination I run my hands over the wood of the bench. I feel sick, the guitar of my dreams lost forever. I walk home numb and shocked and go through a tearful and wrenching scene as I explain to my parents what happened. My dad immediately calls the local police station, and they agree to go out and look for it.
Days pass and nothing turns up. I become very quiet, stay in my room, and experience a black depression. I stare into space and strum listlessly on the Uncle Jim Spanish, but it brings me down even more. I lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. Maybe it's a first lesson: a rite of passage, a convergence of guitars and desire-the fatal mix of frets and femme fatale-a marker of the future. Or maybe I should just pay more attention.
Meanwhile, the local constabulary-good lads-scour field and hedgerow for the stealer of my dreams and come up with nothing except a blank expression. But the universe turns and one day, as if a double six has fallen on the roulette wheel, I hear my dad in the hallway talking into the huge black rotary thing that he calls a telephone. "Yes, I see ... oh, well, hmm ... yes, of course, I'll tell him." It doesn't sound too good. There's a knock on my bedroom door as I morosely play. My dad frowns and does his best Captain Bligh imitation, but he can't keep it up-he starts grinning and says, "The bastards are going to cough up." I let out a moan and roll off the bed in a mock epileptic fit. He smiles and quietly closes the door; whether it's relief or madness, I don't know, but I stand in front of my small pile of LPs, touch them, and then begin laughing as tears roll down my cheeks.
With the insurance company money safely deposited, I return to London and get my second Gibson. This time, now under the influence of ultrahip New York guitarist Grant Green, I buy an ES 335. The 335 is an innovative guitar that Gibson designed in 1958 and is slowly being accepted as a pretty cool instrument. They have come up with the concept of a semi-solid: a slimmed down version of an archtop jazz, maybe in answer to Fender's highly successful line of solid-body guitars. Not much more than two inches deep, it features a double cutaway that allows the player access to the highest frets and is a slick, fast guitar with two double humbuckers. In fact, the 335 turns out to be one of the best guitar designs ever, and from its humble beginnings in Michigan it begins its inexorable diaspora. How was I to know in this breathless moment as the first 335 passes into my hands that in the distant and magical future, Gibson will one day manufacture one of them as the Andy Summers Signature model? If the spirit had whispered into the sixteen-year-old's ear at that point, it would have been a cosmic joke.
Four
Right after I get my 335, Thelonius Monk arrives in England to play a concert at Fairfield Hall in Croydon, and I travel up to London by train to see him. After fifteen or sixteen hours of marvelous food and luxury travel with British Rail and several tricky station changes, I finally make it to the concert hall. On the bill are not only Monk but Dizzy Gillespie and Roy Eldridge. I am thrilled by all of it and love the jubilant sound of Dizzy and Roy playing "Groovin' High." But when Monk comes on and plays a solo rendition of "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You," it's as if the sun rises in my head. Monk plays from another place, pulling the order of notes and the sequence of chords from some private cookbook. With odd syncopation, minor seconds, and upside-downness, he creates a cracked perfection that hits me as the essence of jazz-the central message-and he does all this with big flat hands splayed out on the black and white keys to create a music that is beyond anything I have heard from a guitarist (or any other instrument, for that matter). Monk's playing cuts to the core experience of American life. After this I collect more Monk albums and become a lifelong fan, eventually recording my own album of Monk music, Green Chimneys.
Gradually my local reputation grows and I get invited to play at dances and private functions around town. For me, any chance to play is good enough, and I grab them like a man getting an extra slice of birthday cake. One night, driving back from a party I had played at in a village hall in the New Forest, Lenny (who has undertaken the task of driving me, my guitar, and amp out to the gig) turns to me in the front seat of his Morris Minor and says, "You know, if you keep practicing, you might just ... ," and his words trail off, but I get it-this is benediction from on high. A small sob almost appears in my throat, and as we drive on through the night back to my parents' house, the stars above appear unusually bright and clear.
There are a number of young musicians in the town, and I try to form little groups with anyone who will play with me. My friend Nigel Streeter plays alto sax, and the two of us-both Sonny Rollins fans-spend hours listening to The Bridge, Sonny's latest recording. The word is that Sonny has spent two years away from the public, during which time he sat on New York's Williamsburg Bridge and practiced for hours every day, his horn sending myriad streams of notes out over the East River. He has been searching, trying to take the music to another place, trying to move beyond the conventions, and refusing to come back until he has something to say.
We are inspired by this idea: the search for truth through music, the quest for higher consciousness, the concept of transcendence. Although we are only half aware of them, these ideas are beginning to float in the air like pollen. Kerouac has written On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Esalen has been established, and Timothy Leary is being fired from Harvard for his experiments with LSD. There are murmurings in the pages of Down Beat of Asian spirituality and Eastern philosophies beginning to infiltrate the music scene, and suddenly it seems as if all the hippest cats are embracing Buddhism, Sufism, Islam, and yoga. It all sounds very exotic, and we ponder phrases like avatars of the new consciousness and wonder what that means. Avatar? It sounds like some kind of trombone.
The jazz community, with its long history of pot smoking and heroin, is a natural place for this to start. Altered states may arise from strict spiritual disciplines but are more likely with the imbibing of drugs, things with weird names like horse and tea. We sprawl on Nigel's mum's Axminster among endless cups of Darjeeling and Pontefract cakes and read articles in Down Beat about withdrawal, cold turkey, or monkeys on the back and musicians who have bad colds or are heaped to the gills. Rather than jazz, it sounds like the zoo or the butcher's shop or a visit to the doctor. But it is the quest, the search, that inspires us and we play the new Rollins LP over and over. We don't speak much with our parents about this world; it belongs to us, and our mums and dads, as they busily vacuum, dream about Sunbeam Talbots, and plan next summer at Butlins, are somewhere back in time-lost in a Pathe newsreel. We ignore the fact that they have survived the Second World War and may have spiritual reserves of their own, and in the arrogance of youth and the pebbledash frame of suburbia, we guard our secret code with grunts and snobbery.
Sixteen, and as my skin breaks out and I turn my collar up James Deanstyle, my brain becomes a pastiche of bebop, Kerouac, Down Beat reviews, skyscrapers piercing the New York skyline, girls, women, dolls, chicks-the whole beat scene.
I get a job in the summer as a dec
k-chair-ticket collector on Bournemouth Beach and each afternoon wander through the crush of arms, legs, and perspiring foreheads to collect beachgoers' money, which goes to the Bournemouth Corporation. All day for seven pence. I realize that I have power over these poor begotten lumps trapped in striped canvas-I could turn in those who try to get away with not paying. But standing in the sand in a white corporation attendant coat and a heavy leather satchel around my neck, I punch tickets with a headful of riffing horn solos, foreign films, and the breasts of Brigitte Bardot. The red-faced mums with sticky little kids in the sand at their feet barely make it onto my radar.
"Hey, man, don't just stand there dreaming." A voice from behind penetrates my sun-bleached hallucination. It's Kit, another corporation employee but a guy who is different from the rest of us. He walks about in a cool, detached way, and it's rumored that he is a poet. He doesn't appear to have a home but carries all his worldly possessions in a small backpack. I work up the courage to talk to him one day and he gives me a small grim lecture about being beat, which he says is a state of mind and that to be cool, to be on the outside, is to be hip and the two things-hip and cool-combine to make you a hip outsider, who is cool, the very essence of beat, cool. The hip don't have regular jobs, don't get mortgages, don't buy bungalows, don't buy into this whole crock we call the straight world, man, they just keep moving.
A 250-pound woman heaves herself out of a deck chair with a struggle, and Kit swiftly slings it on top of the stack he is making. "Burroughs's Naked Lunch-read it," he says, spitting in the sand, stacking another deck chair. The sun sinks behind the pier in a swirl of circling seagulls and I feel a deep sense of insecurity, but I look at Kit and nod in an impassive but knowing way, in fraternity-yeah, brother. This deck-chair thing is just for kicks. But this thing that he's got in spades, I want it too; I desperately hope that playing jazz is cool-it must be, jazz musicians call each other "cats." I am very impressed-how could this guy know all of this? I decide to get a backpack.
I begin grunting in monosyllables, barely parting my lips to speak, and take to wearing sunglasses inside the house, even when sitting on the end of the bed practicing. "lire your eyes hurting again, dear?" my mum asks anxiously-or so I think, although she is probably smirking behind her hand. "Better pop down to the optician's with you, then." I merely grunt back in her general direction as I struggle with C7b9. I read On the Road and The Dharma Bums. I don't really get them-it's another world-but I take in their aroma and realize that my fellow deck-chair stacker is the personification of Japhy Ryder, Kerouac's protagonist from The Dharma Bums.
Rebellion is still worth having a go at because it's not yet an over-thecounter item. In a few years the corporate world will suck up everything from the underground and brand it with a logo; coolness will be obtained by drinking sugary caffeinated confections, wearing prewashed jeans and sneakers made by people in the Third World. But on the beach as I hand five pennies' change back from an ice-cream-covered shilling, the underground is being raised into white consciousness by a few poets in the United States such as Kerouac and Ginsberg and Gary Snyder and William S. Burroughs, who take it from black culture, the jazz scene, and Buddhism. I make my way toward the pier, thinking about what I will practice tonight and that I must wear shades at all, times from now on.
One night I go with Nigel to a club called with a disarming lack of originality the Blue Note. Every Friday night a quintet of ex-London jazz musicians set up and play in a local hotel, and when I hear the quintet roar through a repertoire of Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, the MJQ, Miles Davis, and Monk, my confusion about whether it is beat and hip to play music fly out the window. The music is so inventive and bursting with joy that it wipes out all concerns about being cool-this is what I want. This is it.
Although I am still in the early stages, I can improvise my way through standard chord changes, more by a visual interpretation than with full harmonic knowledge. I begin going to the club every weekend, and with pretty girls in the crowd and the surging solos, it becomes the high point of the week. I pluck up the courage one night to ask their sax player if I can sit in with them. Alan, the group leader, is pleasant but sarcastic and I think rather amazed that one so young could have the balls to propose such a thing. He kindly demurs but asks if I would like to play during their intermission.
I begin a long series of appearances in which I try out all number of trios, duos, and whatever I can cobble together for Friday night. All through the week I wait tremulously for the moment when I will get up and play during the break. This moment will be preceded throughout the evening by Alan Melly's mock solemn announcements that a living legend is to appear later in the evening, to be followed by a fan club meeting afterward in the telephone kiosk across the road. This is usually greeted by a fair amount of hilarity, but the result is that I become a pet feature of the club and taste very minor celebrity. Gradually, instead of heading straight to the bar, people begin stopping to see what I will do this week. As this goes on, Alan takes to including my name in the local ads for the club, and each week it is different: "Tonight Andy Summers plays West Coast blues" or "From New York City-the Andy Summers onetet" or, most winningly, "Andy Summers plays the Mao Tse-tung Songbook."
Every week I am forced to put together whatever musicians I can find to pull off this cliff-hanging twenty-five minutes, usually a trio of guitar, bass, and drums, but a couple of times it's just me and a trombonist, which puts an unintended avant-garde edge to the proceedings; I notice some people are on the floor splitting their sides with laughter. The highlight of all this comes one night when Alan suggests that I sit in with them for one song, and what would I like to play? I suggest an old standard called "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" and wait for the moment, trembling like Bambi in a forest glade.
A grandiloquent announcement is made and I get up onto the stage, plug in and look nervously over at Alan, who raises an eyebrow and, grinning, says, "Count us in, then." With a feeling on the inside of a stained-glass window shattering, I count the bastards in. I start playing and state the theme before I take off on a double-chorus solo that is about as good as I have ever played. I pass through it as if in a dream, locked into the notes, the frets, the strings, and no sense of anything other than the accompanying piano chords, the drums behind me, and maybe a far-off voice whispering as if through clouds, "This is what it is really like." I finish my solo and there is wild applause, which is probably the sound of an audience even more relieved than I am that I haven't blown it.
But I am sixteen years old; everyone here knows me, and it's possible that there's a lot of love in the room (even if laced with pity). The club swims in front of my eyes and I come very close to fainting but manage to stand there and keep a grip. I have just been chucked into the deep end. I don't sleep that night-or that week, for that matter-but just keep recycling the solo over and over again in my head. Somehow I have crossed a line, as if I have been shot full of junk.
I realize that my sense of self is in fact defined by the guitar, and that's that, which I suppose makes me a guitarist. I begin to feel worthy or unworthy according to the merit of the last solo I have played. If the last solo was shit, then so am I, but if I have pulled off a good one, then I feel like a king.
I become more confident with my Blue Note intermission sets and continue learning on the job, finally reaching a point where local musicians are actually importuning me to play. I affect a new confidence and swagger that is undermined only by the fact that my eyes are now so weak that I have to wear glasses, which make me look like a misplaced librarian. But without them I can barely see the frets on my guitar. I eventually cover this Achilles' heel by wearing a pair of clip-on sunglasses on top of them, much to the amusement of the quintet.
I survive by the largesse of my parents and whatever gigs I can find on the local scene, so it's a surprise and a relief when Don Hardyman, the brilliant pianist of the quintet, asks nie if I would like to play in his other band, which hol
ds a residency at a local hotel, the WhiteCliffs.
The bandleader, Cyril, is a mean old bastard from Yorkshire; he is supposed to be the bass player, but with a shit-eating grin on his face, he merely leans against it like a dog pissing against a tree. With scant musical ability, he is a networker on the Jewish hotel scene more than anything else, and he rules by fear. He's agreed to have a guitar in the band only because the teenagers at the hotel are asking for one. I don't like him but I have to keep in with him because he is paying me nine pounds a week, a royal sum at the time. He's always telling me to turn down the volume and not get so carried away in the solos. And so I plod on through the endless fox-trots and waltzes, trying to quench the fire within, but it's musical purgatory. The only thing that saves it is my relationship with Don Hardyman, who has taken to showing me hip changes and instructing me generally about jazz. We smile secretly at each other as Don slips a nifty little flat-five substitution into a standard that has been hacked to death while Cyril grins woodenly at the dance floor and thumps like a moron on his bull fiddle.
My electric guitar is an appeasement for the teenagers who stay at the hotel with their parents. So, to give the impression of a band that is fully contemporary, we play a small repertoire of pop songs during which I stand up and do a Hank Marvin or Duane Eddy imitation. This is well received by the cute girls who litter the dance floor. I have lustful thoughts in their direction, but Cyril sees it and warns me with a nasty glint in his eye not to go anywhere near them.
Dominating the proceedings most nights is the proprietor of the hotel, a matriarch of whalelike proportions named Mrs. Goldblatt (or Goldfart, as I call her under my breath). She watches over the dance floor with a laserlike scrutiny and rules with a fist of iron. All behavior has to be kosher, and teenagers are expected to conduct themselves like people in late middle age; snogging and jiving are banned.
One Train Later: A Memoir Page 6