by Rod Stewart
Anyway, I do recall what happened after the show, which is that I went and sat on the platform at Twickenham Station, waiting for the Waterloo train. And, to pass the time, I took my harmonica out of the pocket of my overcoat and started to play. And what I played was the riff from Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Smokestack Lightnin’’, a blues number that I knew roughly how to blow my way through.
In the version of the story that Long John would later tell, his ears pricked up at the sound of a beautiful wailing blues carried on the wintry night air through the desolate station. Lovely. But that can’t be right, given the state of my harmonica playing. So maybe he was drunk. Or maybe I was drunk, and playing better than I ever had. Either way, he approached me, all wrapped up against the cold – a bundle of rags, as he described me, with a big nose sticking out of it – and introduced himself.
The train came, we travelled back into central London, we talked about how he was taking on the Cyril Davies R&B All Stars in Davies’ absence, and by the time we reached Waterloo he had asked me if I wanted to join the band as backing vocalist. He was proposing renaming the band Long John Baldry and The Hoochie Coochie Men. And what he was also proposing was paying me £35 per week.
Now, at this moment, if I’d still been playing the harmonica, I probably would have swallowed it. Thirty-five quid a week! £20 per week was £1,000 per year, and people with serious jobs were getting £1,000 per year in those days. And he was offering me £35 . . . to sing backing vocals?
How did he even know I could sing? Maybe he had seen me get up with Jimmy Powell. Maybe someone had told him something. Or maybe he just fancied me (though he certainly didn’t say as much). It all seemed peculiarly magical and easy – like something out of a film. One moment you’re at a loose end, waiting for a train; the next you’re being offered drop-dead terms as a professional musician.
So, did I leap at it? No. I did what any good boy of nineteen would have done: I told him I would have to ask my mum first.
I guess, somewhere in my mind, I was already envisaging how this encounter might translate into conversation at home the next day. ‘I met this good-looking man on a train last night and he said he’s going to pay me to drive around the country with him.’ Knowing my mum, she would have a number of things to say about that, and ‘Off you go, then, son – and be sure and have a wild old time’ wouldn’t necessarily be the first of them.
But it was here that Long John played an absolute blinder. He said he perfectly understood – he, too, was still living with his mother at this time – and that he would come round and talk to my mum himself.
And, typically, he was as good as his word. Long John might have been a big name on the British live blues circuit, but my parents, of course, didn’t know him from Adam. Yet through the door of my dad’s sweet shop comes this clean, beautifully turned out, well-spoken man, the perfect parent-calming device, bringing (the clinching touch) a bunch of flowers. My mother had a lot of questions: would I be going outside London? What time would I be back?
‘Don’t you worry, Mrs Stewart. I’ll look after your Roddy.’
All my mum’s motherly fears of showbusiness debauchery and on-the-road seediness melted like butter in a pan.
‘Well, all right, John. You’re a gentleman.’
And, just like that, I had a job in a band.
* * *
There wasn’t time to rehearse. My brother Don took me into the West End and treated me to a white shirt with a high collar and a tie, and off I went. We had a show pretty much straight away at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester. On the way up in the van with the rest of the group Long John said I’d need a song. The idea was that I would come on with the band, sing a number and then introduce Long John. I said I could do ‘The Night Time Is the Right Time’ by Ray Charles. ‘Can you play that?’ I asked the band in general. There were arched eyebrows, as if I’d just asked, ‘Is water wet, or the Pope a Catholic?’
The gig was an all-nighter, which meant I would have to sing twice. A crowd would come in for the evening session, and we’d do a set. Then that crowd would be cleared out and the club would let the all-night crowd in, and we would play again.
The evening session nears, there’s a big audience in, and I’m a bit of a mess. Under-confident. Also shaking quite a lot. And feeling pretty sick. Sick to the pit of my stomach. Noticing my condition, Cliff Barton, the band’s bass player – a brilliant guy – quietly presses something into my hand and utters something along the lines of the classic doctor’s expression: ‘Take this, you’ll feel better.’
I find I am holding a small black pill.
‘What is it?’ I say.
It is, apparently, a ‘black bomber’. I have heard of them, but I’ve never taken one, or anything like it.
‘It will just help you along slightly,’ Cliff assures me. ‘A bit like having a cup of coffee.’
Genuinely alarmed, I tell Cliff, ‘But I don’t drink coffee.’
But Cliff is adamant – and, again, somewhat doctor-like. ‘Trust me,’ he says.
I trust him. I swallow the black bomber in a slug of brown ale. For a short while, absolutely nothing happens. Then, very suddenly, absolutely everything happens. I feel as though someone has plugged my forefinger into the mains. Amphetamine courses through my system. My eyes widen until they are the size of dinner plates. And doubtless my hair would have stood up on my head as high as Dusty Springfield’s, had I not already carefully back-combed it into that position.
When I take the stage, I am more awake than I have ever been in my entire life. I feel like my feet are about six inches off the ground. The band drops into ‘The Night Time Is the Right Time’, and I go at it like an attack dog seeing off a burglar. We haven’t rehearsed, remember, so the number is held together by signals between us, and potentially endless. Bad idea. I want another verse, another chorus. I am barking at the band, ‘Again! Keep the jam going!’ The band are looking at each other in a state of mystification. I have no idea what it sounds like. I only know that it feels absolutely fucking brilliant. The crowd certainly seems enthusiastic – or at least for the first six minutes. After that, it’s possible that their attention wanes slightly. But I wouldn’t really know. Eventually, after what may have been the longest version of ‘The Night Time’ in performing history, the band manages to batter the song to an ending and I bring on Long John so that the show proper can begin. An ‘upper’? An ‘over-the-topper’, more like.
I’m wired for the rest of the night. They have to chisel me off the stage.
I don’t think I slept for about four days.
My first gig.
Others quickly followed. The band was busy. I could see why the pay was handsome: Long John’s reputation as a singer went ahead of us, and we were earning big money – out several nights of the week, up and down the country, playing the clubs, doing the universities. At the peak of it, we’d be booked for seven nights a week and sometimes playing as many as three shows per night at the weekends.
Our transport was an old, bright-yellow removals van, for which Long John had paid £40. It was driven by a bloke called Mad Harry, who had flown Lancaster bombers in the RAF in the Second World War and had never really come down. He had the dashboard done out like the cockpit of a plane, with altimeters and clocks and dials and redundant bits of aircraft memorabilia, and he wore a uniform of goggles, a leather jacket and a silk scarf. Mad Harry’s other duty was to announce the band on stage each night, and to milk the audience for their appreciation at the end. For this he changed into a tailcoat with his service medals pinned to its front.
The band would be sat around in the back of the van, on four knackered old sofas which were grouped around a paraffin stove, tied down to the floor with ropes to prevent it upending when the van turned corners. The stove kept us warm. It also filled your throat and eyes with oil fumes. I’m not sure ‘health and safety’ would have been impressed. And God knows what would have become of us all in the event of a crash. Any collision
at speed would have converted the van into a rocket.
The sense of danger was increased by Mad Harry’s driving style, which owed a lot to the accelerator and not much to the brake pedal. For Harry, speed was everything. He drove at all times as though hammering a plane along a runway. Long John – a nervous passenger at the best of times – would permanently be thumping on the dashboard and shouting, ‘For the love of God, man, slow down!’
Mad Harry had a special trick for the last stages of the trek to Eel Pie Island, which was to take the final corner at speed and nearly put the van over the side of the road into the Thames. It was his signature move – his barrel roll, if you like. Long John eventually got tired of being scared and started taking the train to gigs whenever he could. Ian Armitt, the pianist – Scots boy, fabulous player – bought himself a car, specifically because he thought it would increase his chances of staying alive. I probably would have done the same, but I was still saving up.
Of course, it was pretty punishing for the van, too. It eventually decided it had had enough on the way to a gig at Newcastle University, when it ground to a halt and would go no further. We turned up for that show in the back of a tow-truck.
Still, by then, the mock Lancaster bomber had carried us the length and breadth of Great Britain. It had taken us to Stoke-on-Trent, to a club called the Place, where the audience went nuts, punching the air in delight – to the confusion of Long John, who, misinterpreting the gesture, thought he was witnessing some kind of Nazi gathering and halted the band in order to announce, ‘We’ll have none of that fascist bullshit here!’ It killed the gig stone dead.
And it had taken us to Dundee, where a performance at the university was the setting for my first experiment with tartan clothing onstage. Long John had suggested we go into the city and buy some Scots-themed trousers and waistcoats. He thought this would be a winning gesture with the crowd, which we knew could be tough to please. In the event, the audience took one look at this tall English guy and his mate with the big nose and the Dusty Springfield hairdo, both of them wearing tartan to try and ingratiate themselves, and decided they were having none of it. Beer cans rained down on the stage. It would be a few years before I tried that again.
In some places, of course, I didn’t need to be wearing tartan to attract hecklers. Sometimes the hair was enough. Every now and again you’d get some wag who would ask loudly, between numbers, ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ I had my stock answer ready: ‘Come up here and I’ll show you.’ Not that witty, maybe. But effective.
Mind you, it was John himself who nicknamed me ‘Phyllis’. Hence the graffiti, by unknown hand, which appeared on the wall at Eel Pie Island, and in which ‘Long John Baldry and the Hoochie Coochie Men’ had been amended to become ‘Ada Baldry and the Hoochie Coochie Ladies featuring Phyllis Stewart’. This was the price you paid for taking care of your hair in 1964.
At the Manor House in London, where we had a residency for a while, the stage was made of planks and crates, none of it nailed down. Over the course of a show, cracks would open up into which entire members of the group and their instruments would disappear. Either that or the drummer would disappear off the back of the stage and there would be a short pause while he dusted himself down and the drums were reassembled. I saw Zoot Money at that venue once. Little sharkskin jackets and skinny ties – what a band they were. And could they drink.
My trouble was holding it. One night on stage at Eel Pie Island I was taken short by the urge to empty my bladder, and because the toilets were a fair old hike out to the back of the club, I elected to dash upstairs into the doll’s house dressing room and relieve myself into an empty beer glass instead. This would have been a more sanitary procedure if I hadn’t stood the glass on the floor and then accidentally kicked it over in my haste to return. The liquid soaked its way through the floorboards and later reappeared in the form of a succession of warm drips directly onto Long John’s head and shoulders.
Lesson of this story: never build a dressing room directly over a stage. I had to give Long John the money to get his suit dry-cleaned.
My solo repertoire had begun to expand. As well as ‘The Night Time Is the Right Time’, I started being trusted with Muddy Waters’ ‘Tiger in Your Tank’ and with John Lee Hooker’s ‘Dimple’. Did I think of myself as a blues singer? Not really. I was a folkie at heart. But I have always thought I could turn my voice to most things, and I gave these numbers what I had. No more ‘black bombers’ necessary, by the way. I would have a bottle of Newcastle Brown and, alongside it, a scotch and orange juice – a remarkable combination, probably as bad for the teeth as for the liver – and that would last me all night. If it was a London gig, at the Marquee, say, I would leave home in the early evening, holding on to my hair, and walk up to Archway station, stopping in at the Woodman pub, and have my brown ale and Scotch and orange there. Then back on the Tube at the end of the night, still slightly pissed and pleased with myself.
My presence in the band seemed to be bringing a new contingent into the Hoochie Coochie Men audience – namely figures from the mod scene, who liked a bit of R&B sung by someone in a tailored suit with well-controlled hair. Reflecting this, the billing in some places would be altered to become ‘Long John Baldry and the Hoochie Coochie Men, featuring Rod “The Mod” Stewart’. Long John started introducing me that way from the stage: ‘Ladies and whatever you’ve got with you – here he is . . . Rod “The Mod” Stewart!’
And, even as that was happening, I was learning one of the great truths of human chemistry: girls quite like a singer. Indeed, it was clear that, having seen a person sing, girls would happily approach that person directly, open a conversation with him and seek to spend some time in his company. This turned out to be the magic bestowed by singing: pulling power. It was exceptionally good news. My great trick at these times was to head to a venue’s bar a while before I was due onstage, and get into conversation with an attractive girl, without telling her I was part of the evening’s entertainment. Then, when Mad Harry got up and introduced the band, I would be able to say to the girl, ‘Excuse me – got a show to do’ and set off through the audience to the stage. This rarely failed to be an impressive surprise, and when you rejoined the girl after the show, you were usually made.
In March 1964 we got to support Sonny Boy Williamson, the American blues singer and harmonica player and one of the great originators, in a gig to open the Marquee Club at its new premises in Wardour Street, Soho – a huge deal for me, because I was such a fan. Williamson, who was to die of a heart attack only a year later, aged fifty-three, was in an immaculate two-tone suit and seemed almost impossibly charismatic – the real deal.
No alcohol licence at the Marquee at that time, by the way: Coke and coffee only. This was the venue where, one night, a member of the audience at a Hoochie Coochie Men gig had the temerity to stand near the front reading a newspaper – intending to convey, I suppose, his contempt for our faux-American R&B stylings. Long John dealt with him most efficiently. He stepped down off the stage and, using a cigarette lighter, set fire to the paper.
We played a gig with Little Walter, too, another of the formative American bluesmen and still the only person to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame exclusively for services to harmonica playing. He was a little frightening, to be honest, and may have had one or two problems with anger management. At any rate, he asked me backstage to find him some girls and then, when I looked doubtful about it, threatened to pull a knife on me. I spent the rest of the night carefully avoiding him. Great harmonica player, though, obviously.
There is only one stormy patch that I recall in this whole period, and we ran into it in Portsmouth, on the south coast of England. The Beatles had invited Long John to make a guest appearance on one of their television specials – not the sort of invitation you were likely to decline, claiming that your hair needed washing – and he had remained in London for the filming, promising to join us in Portsmouth later, in time for a gig at the R
endezvous Club.
Come show time, though, there was no sign of him and we were obliged to take the stage by the angry club owner, with me filling in. I’d only really got three numbers to offer, and I drew them out for as long as I could, but I was struggling and the audience was getting restless. There was the occasional cry of ‘We want Long John’ and ‘Fuck off, you big queer.’ A couple of numbers in, Long John finally entered through the audience and, in my anger at having been hung out to dry, I made the mistake of greeting him from the stage, with something along the lines of the traditional ‘About fucking time.’ Long John climbed on the stage, completed the show and then, backstage afterwards, very calmly fired me – causing me, I don’t mind admitting, to burst into tears. I didn’t think firing was something that happened to people in bands. I thought it was only something that happened in the real world of work.
My banishment lasted a week and I was readmitted, with no lasting rift, fortunately. In June, Long John, who had a solo record deal with United Artists, asked me to sing backing vocals on a version of ‘Up Above My Head’, the Sister Rosetta Tharpe gospel song, for the B-side of his single ‘You’ll Be Mine’. The resulting recording will not go down as one of my more relaxed performances. In fact, it has all the classic hallmarks of a novice in the studio – bursting to impress and over-singing like a maniac. The song is a ‘call and response’ number, but in this case the response is louder than the call. It sounds like I’m trying to get the upper hand in a shouting match – and mostly succeeding.
My first released recording.
But what an eye-opener this period was altogether – and what an apprenticeship. When I first climbed into the back of that van with the Hoochie Coochie Men, and breathed my first lungful of the paraffin smoke, I was a total musical novice. I could barely get my head around a simple twelve-bar blues at that point. Yet here I was onstage with proper, highly accomplished, much older musicians like Cliff Barton, Ian Armitt, and the guitarist Geoff Bradford, a brilliant jazz player who could also switch effortlessly into blues. Some of these guys were in their thirties and forties. They had all come up through the trad jazz scene and they were properly schooled, hugely experienced, road-tested, tight as a nut. When Geoff Bradford played John Lee Hooker it was perfect. When they did ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’, which John sang, or ‘Got My Mojo Working’, which was the finale, it sounded like the record – it sounded like Muddy’s band. For a singer’s first band to be this good, it was almost unfair. And also not a little scary, because I knew how good they were.