Ain't Bad for a Pink

by Sandra Gibson

  Brownie also ventured into the popular limelight by appearing in Langston Hughes’ play, Simply Heaven, in films and on TV. The willingness of Sonny and Brownie to be open-minded about the way they earned a living was important in popularising the blues in Europe and the UK, and in linking the blues with the folk boom as well as kindling an interest within the pop genre. They brought what I would call commercial country blues music, doing gigs in all the popular venues and discos, performing cabaret blues effortlessly and brilliantly – almost without thinking about it. They made the blues accessible to a wider, mostly white audience for whom the duo had cleaned up their act. Brownie McGhee had originally been known as the second Blind Boy Fuller – a far cry from the toned down versions of the Reverend Gary Davis and Big Bill Broonzy numbers he was now playing. But you couldn’t condemn the commercial instinct of bluesmen to capitalise on the enthusiasm for their music by touring and appearing at festivals. It was better than picking cotton. Ghettoised as “race music”, acceptance into mainstream music and its financial rewards had been previously denied to their work.

  The Blues Revival

  But for some less worldly than Sonny and Brownie, the glare of publicity in the Sixties at events like Newport must have been a shock and a pressure. The critics at the time didn’t take this into account. John Hurt stole the show at Newport nevertheless. Joe Boyd (9) writes about the tension between the desire of white audiences to hear ‘authentic’ blues and the attempts of the blues singers to be ‘up to date’. This lead to the absurdity of having snappily clad blues singers dressed as sharecroppers. When Muddy Waters first came to the UK he played an electric guitar and British fans were shocked. By the time he returned in 1962 he had relearned some earlier acoustic material. The same attitude gave rise to the cries of “Judas!” when Dylan went electric. (10)

  The blues revival had the effect of exposing black musicians to more liberal attitudes. One bluesman, Champion Jack Dupree, an ex-boxer who served his country in World War II and became a Japanese prisoner of war, sought a life in England and Europe to escape the pressure of segregation in America. He had good reason: born in New Orleans in 1909, Jack Dupree was orphaned when his parents died in a fire allegedly set by the Ku Klux Klan and was brought up in the Coloured Waifs Home for Boys, as was Louis Armstrong.

  Blues And Pop

  “These English boys want to play the blues so bad. And they play it so bad.”

  Sonny Boy Williamson. (11)

  Parallel to this, pop music had exploded in Liverpool in the early Sixties. In addition to consumer articles unavailable in post-war austerity Britain, the “Cunard Yanks” sailing between Merseyside and New York had brought in equally unavailable jazz and blues records. The influence of black music soon penetrated pop bands such as the Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds and The Animals. One of the best interviews I experienced was with WRFG: Radio Free Georgia in 1998. The interviewer was enthusiastic and interested in what I had to say and he had things to contribute as well. He mentioned the Stones cutting their first album at Chess Studios, Chicago, and said that such blues virtuosos as Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf would be “hanging around”. I had to disagree: I am entirely certain of the musical superiority of these bluesmen and insisted that it would have been the Stones who were doing the “hanging around” – mentally at least. You only have to listen to what Keith Richards had to say about the musical stature of these men to know this.

  Son House

  I never met Sonny Boy Williamson but all the blues musicians I did meet – leagues ahead of me musically – would be complimentary about a little white boy singing the blues. Brownie McGhee said he liked the way I changed my turnarounds and the way I tried to do jazzier chords. He spoke to me as a fellow musician. When I played with Son House he was equally complimentary and very helpful. I met him in 1967 or 1968 and he taught me how to play slide. When I appeared on WRGF thirty years later, I performed Son House’s song, “Death Letter” – long part of my own repertoire – in tribute to him. Son House was criticised in the British music press for poor performances at that time and I was very angry about this. I supported him on several of these dates. I was there. He was old and ill and frail but he gave you the main line into his suffering: his music showing Southern gospel and spiritual influences, his whole body pushing the feeling and sound into the steel guitar, his right hand flailing and pulling the strings while his left hand worked with precision, moving the slide up and down. The audiences were fine. What right had some acnied kid from Melody Maker to slate him when he was a hero?

  A pastor by the age of twenty, Son House had fallen from grace by falling for an older woman, developing a liking for corn whisky and picking up a guitar to play what the church regarded as the devil’s music. Son House was possessed by the music, not the devil, but perhaps they were one and the same to him. Like Leadbelly, he spent some time in jail.

  I feel honoured that the man with long feet and hands who played with Charley Patton and influenced Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters also took the trouble to teach me.

  From listening to interviews I have done, remembering my first encounters with blues musicians, I know that the young Pete Johnson didn’t possess the clear musical and historical perspective I have now. He was living it all; he wasn’t contemplating it and anyway, perspectives require distance. But remembering and talking about the great blues legends I have met, drunk with, cooked for, smoked with and learnt from, is still a humbling experience for me even after all these years.

  Tribute

  Without the committed interest of Fred Watts and Bert Bellamy, I wouldn’t have had these unique experiences or such access to blues music on record. Now that music is instantly accessible through downloading, it’s hard to imagine the effort – and the relative cost – required in the early Sixties to enjoy the blues. Mainstream popular music of the Fifties and early Sixties sounded very sugary and tame but it was readily available on the radio, as sheet music and on 78s. Its subject matter was acceptable: sentimental ballads, novelty songs, coins in fountains, rings on fingers … whilst for many, the blues represented something raw and sexually menacing. Tin Pan Alley didn’t make too many references to rampant sex or blokes being visited at the gallows or dying mothers comforting their children or slain pimps or lovers at the morgue. Even black people were shunning it as being embarrassing because it said something about their past and current oppression. It was the white kids, mainly from the student community, who took to the blues and it’s really strange to see the newsreels of these – often suited – audiences of polite middle class kids. Bert and Fred, older and engaged in working class employment and family life in a northern industrial town, were unusual. Meeting Bert (and then Fred) through Leadbelly’s music was to be the first of many musical convergences in my life. Such events require a prior effort as well as luck. In my case I had the temerity, aged thirteen, to ask about the music; I was already spending my pocket money on what was available to me in Woolworth’s and this opened the door for Bert’s effort in encouraging and educating me.

  Bert Bellamy died aged fifty when I was eighteen. It was a shock. I’m still listening to music from his record collection given to me by his widow. I’m grateful to him.

  Girls

  One of my reasons for picking up a guitar was to impress girls and it worked. I used to go to the air raid shelters opposite the entrance to the Queen’s Park – this would be the late Fifties/ early Sixties – and there was a lot going on sexually even before the sexual revolution. At this time a glimpse of stocking top and being allowed to touch a girl’s breast was quite something. But it was all a bit furtive and tense. Within five or six years it was to be miniskirts, see-through tops, nipple counts and free love. Young people had been liberated from periodic anxiety by the Pill.

  From the age of fifteen I had a regular girlfriend who eventually became my first wife but I’d also had a lot of sexual adventures, aided and abetted by my opportunistic libido, my music
ian’s charisma and the freedom of my movements as a performer. Interestingly, although my father knew something of my philandering ways, he was never judgmental.

  I had my first girlfriend when I was about thirteen. We sometimes had the house to ourselves and one day she called me to the bathroom. She was naked. Nothing came of the invitation because I was too scared. I had heard my brother talking to my father about “having to get married”.

  But mostly I was shocked by the pubic hair.

  Whilst a student in Manchester I enjoyed a hedonistic lifestyle and a new kind of freedom in which the women had the sexual confidence to do the choosing. I would crash at one flat or another in the area, depending on where I had been playing music. I recall being friendly with a good-looking guy with a fashionable Mexican moustache who was older than me – about twenty-three years old – and he took me to a student flat to meet two nice girls. The foursome split into two twosomes and the settee was arranged to provide two ‘compartments’, with me and the Derbyshire girl on the side nearest the fire, and the Geordie lass and the hunk on the other side. A little later in the night I was woken by the request, “He’s gone to sleep; can I join you?” Being a magnanimous chap I had to say yes. I ended up living part of my time with both girls. It was all very light-hearted and simple.

  I met a girl with an Alpha Romeo and hundred quid shoes during my days at university. She was very keen on me so I let her be my roadie and she drove me to gigs in her exceptional car. One weekend she invited me to stay at her house for the weekend; her parents were away and we would have the place to ourselves. Talk about culture shock! Her huge place at Alderley Edge was like Buckingham Palace. We were standing in the ballroom; there was a horse running about in a paddock at the back. “Would you like a swim?” my hostess asked. I couldn’t see any pool. She pressed a button and the ballroom floor slowly moved to reveal a swimming pool below. But where was James Bond?

  Interestingly enough, I’d long had the habit of visiting stately homes – with a tent! Yet this visit to the mansions of Cheshire brought out the angry young man in me. I was a communist at that time – against wealth and privilege; supporting Castro and the underdog and involved in student protests. But I didn’t terminate the visit; I wasn’t puritanical about wealth. Though I never was impressed by it per se, that didn’t stop me having and enjoying yachts and fast cars for a while! And I remember well how lovely my roadie looked in her expensive underwear.

  My father remarried when I was twenty-two but before then he had had a couple of relationships. Aged nineteen, I arrived home late one night, undressed without switching on the light and got into my bunk bed. It was already warm and occupied – by a beautiful girl. “I’ve always wanted a brother!” was the cheerful welcome.

  She turned out to be the daughter of the woman from Blackpool my father was seeing. To add to the incestuous nature of things, this brotherless blonde had already had a fling with Melvyn, my drummer-to-be whom I already knew and whose band had played at Blackpool. I remember picking her up from Crewe station on my scooter. She played with my bits all the way to Wistaston. Unfortunately – perhaps fortunately – my father severed the Blackpool connection.

  Another encounter had less auspicious beginnings. I had a mutually hostile relationship with one of the women where I worked. Part of the management consultancy training included in-service courses which involved stopping in hotels. On the last night of the last course, one of the women persuaded me to dance with the woman I disliked. The chemistry took over. The next day, during the car journey back, the matchmaker turned to speak to the happy couple we had become in the back of the car. “I can’t talk now; I’ve got my mouth full!” said the lady.

  My present wife Zoe had been part of my social circle since our Edleston Road School days. I’d known her since we were nine. Unusually for the area, she came from a middle class background and lived in a big house in Walthall Street, Crewe. Her upbringing was free, bohemian and intellectual. And a bit wild. She had total freedom to do what other kids couldn’t do. I remember going to her house, where she had her own bedroom in the attic. It was painted red and black and she was allowed to entertain friends: there were settees and CND pictures and posters of political heroes and we played records and had discussions. It was like a youth club. We were great friends and by the age of thirteen or fourteen we were going out together in a foursome.

  Zoe’s father was a schoolteacher and a considerable classical pianist; she herself had eclectic musical tastes and was musically influenced by her uncle. She collected records by Dave Brubeck, MJQ, Thelonious Monk and Big Bill Broonzy among others, and she also enjoyed listening to my blues records. This was at a time when most of her contemporaries were listening to The Searchers and The Hollies.

  As often happens during the experimental period of adolescence, we swapped partners and drifted apart when she started doing festivals, and later on going to the Twisted Wheel in Manchester and taking poppers. Our musical tastes were too divergent. Zoe was intimidated by my intensity and busy finding herself. She was like a butterfly. Although she and I remained great friends, it was inevitable that I should end up with her more mature friend.

  So by the age of twenty-one I was married and living in Sandbach with my first wife Linda, a raunchy, sexy woman with an hourglass figure and nice breasts. I started going out with her about the time my mother died and I became very attached to her. She was sexually approachable and with her I had the combination of domestic stability and intimate good times that I needed after such an uncertain home life. Linda was the first girl I had seen topless; this was on a Cornish beach in the days before beach nudity was acceptable.

  Intensity Of Need

  At that time I was physically quite immature; Pete Johnson terrified me with his sexual intensity. I felt he was desperately in need of love and attention and was substituting sex for this. Linda was stable and motherly and more physically mature than I was and I think she was what Pete needed at that time. His mother was very ill and his home life was affected by this. He was essentially conservative and shy but became an intense, angry young man. A lot of his behaviour was bravado and this is more true now than when he was young. The emotional trauma of his mother’s illness and death was not handled at all – it wasn’t that it was badly handled – it was just not handled. He’s psychologically stuck in his bereavement.

  Zoe Johnson. (12)

  For A While The Balance Was Right

  In those days I was more than happy to go along with Pete. Because of his adventurousness I had adventures. I was the domestically stable one: a bit staid even. I deny the beach nudity, by the way. My relationship with Pete made me independent; I had soon learnt not to rely on him. In the early days in Manchester clubs with Bert Bellamy, Pete used to leave me in the audience and go backstage with Bert to meet blues singers. He’d be gone for ages – he used to watch from the wings and when he appeared at the end of the performance he’d be surprised that I was anxious. But for a while the balance was right; we needed one another. He lifted excitement into my life and I gave him stability. He had lost his mother and I feel that if that hadn’t happened he wouldn’t have turned to me. I sort of replaced her.

  Linda Johnson. (13)

  One night my wife appeared at a party dressed as Morticia Addams. Another woman was also dressed as Morticia. The second Morticia vowed to the first Morticia that she would get me off her. A couple of years into the marriage, this is what happened though it didn’t cause a divorce at that time.

  “I’m A Little Pimp With My Hair Gassed Back”

  Finding the lyrics to “Mississippi Queen” whilst looking for something else reminded me of a heavy rock band called Axe – something to do with Plum – that I was in briefly round about 1966-67, before I went to Manchester University. Plum, an instinctive heavy rocker, was someone I’d known for a while who was to play an important part in my future business. Axe had a good lead guitarist in Pete Trotman, who went on to play in a well-regarded ban
d called Strife, with Paul Elson and there was Phil Simcock on drums, Plum on bass and me on vocals and slide guitar. Ozzie was our roadie. The Frank Zappa number, “I’m A Little Pimp With My Hair Gassed Back” is one I remember from the set and Plum always did “Rock Me Baby” and songs of that ilk. I left after a few gigs – it was fun rehearsing but I wasn’t into the music. Being the least experienced player in the band, I had the least influence over anything.

  Some of the guitar playing in heavy rock is skilful but I didn’t and don’t find it melodic. I don’t like distorted guitar sounds – it’s too much of a manufactured noise. If I play electric guitar it’s clean, the same as an acoustic guitar. With regard to virtuosity, as far as I’m concerned it’s not the number of notes – it’s the economy of notes, the spaces between the sounds that matter and heavy rock goes for a continuous sound. The exception would be a band called Spooky Tooth; their music had lots of gaps in it and if I’d wanted heavy rock, I’d have gone that way. Their version of “I Am The Walrus” is memorable.

  A Banned Band

  From early on in my career I attended jam nights at various clubs and pubs. One was held on Sunday nights at the Oddfellows Club in Edleston Road, Crewe. Every musician in the area would be in there if they weren’t gigging. There would be a sort of rota and then people did additional turns as well. Axe did a rendition of Edgar Broughton’s “Out Demons Out” and it created a riot, with people stamping and making a noise. We were subsequently banned from every working man’s club in the area.