The Loneliness Of The Dobro Player
From an age that has experienced heavy metal, thrash and punk it’s impossible to imagine what a culture shock the blues was, even as late as the Sixties. It was as if punk happened then, if you want some idea of the impact.
My taste in music didn’t endear me to the folk enthusiasts, who said I had a good folk voice and should stick to sea shanties, nor did it qualify me for a stint in Hamburg. My music was not popular except to a niche audience, generally older than me. Although it is folk music the folkies didn’t embrace it; what I brought was a world away from Jansch, Renbourn, Davey Graham or Martin Carthy. My voice wasn’t liked; my music wasn’t liked. Resonator guitars were another rarity and I had a Dobro; if the majority hadn’t heard the blues I played, they certainly wouldn’t know about slide guitar. In spite of opposition in folk circles I gradually introduced blues songs but it was a lonely field. In those days I was aware of only one good slide player in the UK: Sam Mitchell. He owned a National and I met him once.
These days, since the success of Brothers In Arms by Dire Straits everyone knows from the cover what a Dobro looks like and it’s known as a Mark Knopfler guitar, even though he only used it on one track.
First Resonations And The Bolivian Coke Spoon
My interest in musical instruments per se began when I was fifteen. I’ve never been without a resonator guitar since. It was an unconventional choice but resonators have a modern art deco appearance, a unique tone and a wider range than either electric or ordinary wooden acoustic guitars. People who love them get dramatic about them; one note from a Dobro “that weird, crude, evocative plunk, full of wonderful echoes and overtones” (18) evokes a whole culture. Mike Harding introduced his Dobro as “my Barnsley Fighting Guitar” and it does have an edge of danger.
It’s loud, too, and you seem to be able to get almost the same volume from a single string as you can from a whole chord…when I applied the old brass slide – Lord above, is that my train I hear a-coming? There ought to be a health warning stuck on the side; persons of a nervous disposition should on no account play this instrument anywhere near a crossroads after eleven o’clock at night…there’s something about the things and people are going to keep on buying them…if anybody wants me, I’ll be sitting on the porch with no shoes…
Rick Batey. (19)
Although resonators were aimed at Hawaiian musicians and guitarists in white dance orchestras, they were taken up by bluesmen, hillbillies, and jazz musicians. I was in good company!
I found my first vintage guitar in a garage belonging to my friend’s father. The garage door was open to reveal piles of stuff and I noticed the edge of something under a pile of paint tins. With some difficulty I managed to extricate it from its grave; the barely-recognizable object was the squashed skeleton of a resonator guitar. I recognized it because I had seen Son House play a National and I’d also seen pictures in blues books. It wasn’t the sort of thing you saw in a shop, unless it was a junk shop. Without knowing something about them you’d think they were a bit of a toy. But this was a Dobro – or the basis of one – and I had known the whole from the tiny part showing from beneath the tins. The resonator was there but squashed; the spider’s web was there but a pencil was holding the strings up; the bridge was missing; a name had been deeply burnt into the wood with a soldering iron.
It was in pretty bad shape.
I swapped my car radio for it, took it home and assembled the bits. I knew that there were still some parts missing so I went back to the garage. Sure enough: there was the brass cover plate – likewise all squashed – and the two eyes. A man who worked in Rolls Royce sorted the cover plate and then the corroded silver work went to Niphos in Hope Street (aptly named) to be re-plated with copper, then nickel. I wanted it to look like a Russell Hobbs kettle: a duller shine than chrome which is a flashy surface thing. Nickel has depth and class. Armed with my intuition and my love of music, I put a veneer over the head stock to cover the burnt-in name and also replaced a part that was missing in the back . When asked the price for his work, the man from Niphos said, “Put it all together and play me a tune.”
So I did.
I sold this guitar more than ten years ago to an international bio chemist who kept in touch for ages and brought me a coke spoon from Bolivia. The guitar goes all round the world with him; it could so easily have rotted away in that long-ago garage.
An Odd Couple
At the beginning of the Seventies I had a residential at a Congleton pub and that’s how I met Des, my life long friend and occasional musical collaborator.
Way Ahead Of His Time
Pete, in those days was a dapper young businessman with a job. When I first heard Pete play all those years ago I’d never seen anyone play like that before. It was quite moving. He was way ahead of his time. Nowadays, perhaps for the past, say, fifteen years, there is more appreciation for that type of music but he was so ahead of his time. There has been a bond between us ever since.
Des Parton. (20)
Guitars And Stop Watches
There’s a 1901 notice from the London & North Western Railway which states: “It is forbidden for vagrants, beggars, itinerant musicians and females of doubtful reputation to enter these premises. By order”.
You’d think that it had been “by order” of my father. In the opposite corner to my musical passion was my father’s continued disapproval of it. When my mother died the subtle moderating influence she had over my father went, and things became very fraught between us over my yet to be decided future. I wanted to be a musician; I was a musician. Every home had a piano in those days but I wanted to play the guitar and this made me a renegade. If my music had been classical then perhaps his antagonism would have been less strong, but this was rock ‘n’ roll and the guitar was already my downfall, seducing me from studying for my O-levels or becoming a committed athlete. My relationship with Nantwich and Acton Grammar School was equally turbulent; I was troubled and rebellious and class-conscious. Aged sixteen, things came to a head and I floored my father – something to do with me not coming up to expectations and his guilt about my troubled home life. Perhaps if we had talked about my mother, things would have been easier but I was too aggressive and strong-willed to fit into school life any longer, and that wasn’t his fault. I was effectively if not officially expelled: refused entry into the Upper Sixth in spite of my remarkable prowess in athletics.
I am sorry to have to advise you that his behaviour here, his aggressive attitude to authority and his influence on his fellows, make it impossible for us to accept him for an Advanced course.(21)
I was a rebel with a cause: to me the school was riddled with class prejudice. I came from working class Crewe, not rural, well-heeled Nantwich. My school hadn’t caught up with the new spirit of educational equality for all; it was still imbued with the values of privilege and the prejudice of class.
The school spat me out and partly in deference to my father I went to college to do A levels, then joined the Civil Service where even the considerable amount of horseplay and foreplay in the Filing Room could never compensate for the boredom of such a job. This was Billy Liar territory and I left after a year . I considered joining the Forces: all three invited me for interview; all three accepted me. One of the things we had to do was to give a talk. I suppose they were interested in communication skills and individual interests as well as political beliefs. I talked about the blues and slavery. The reason I didn’t join up was because you had to sign up for sixteen years and that was too long. But it was interesting to see the same hierarchical attitudes in school, in the Civil Service and in the Forces. At one point I was shown into the officers’ mess on my own where it was silver service with half a dozen people waiting on me. In all the services I found the sergeants’ mess level more comfortable socially.
Throughout my white collar days I was playing music but I was trying to find work I liked and which would give me the security my father valued so m
uch. That’s how I ended up at Manchester University enrolled for a B.Ed. following my two brothers who were both teachers. I left within a year after a dispute over leadership styles. My tutor was in favour of ‘progressive’ approaches to education and I had a more authoritarian position with regard to the tough kids at my teaching placement. Subsequently running a business and a band my instinct was reinforced: there has to be a chief and rules and everyone has to be clear where they stand.
Frustrating career-wise, fortunately my time at Manchester flowed musically.
After Manchester, I was getting into that morningless condition that afflicts the unemployed: late nights and up after midday. This offended my father’s sense of the way things should be. He arranged for me to go and work on the bins. I quite enjoyed it; I was physically strong; I enjoyed being out of doors and I had the incentive of finishing by 2.00 and 11.00 on Fridays. All for a fairly decent wage and plenty of time for music. It was not the most pleasant job; the night soil run: I couldn’t hack that. The worst thing was a bloke eating a pork pie after we’d just finished collecting shit! I did the job for two months and then went to work at Calmic as a Works Study Officer. When asked why I should get the job, I answered that I had the “air apparent” for it and I think this witty answer clinched things. I was then made redundant and went to work at Ideal Standard in Middlewich. Theoretically excellent, I failed on the practical side of my Industrial Degree. Why was this? I was hopeless at stopwatching and observing peoples’ work rates. I felt it wasn’t possible to do this unless you’d actually done the job yourself.
By anyone’s standards I was upwardly mobile: a homeowner with a respectable job, married to a teacher. I had conformed, with some difficulty, to my father’s ideals as well as keeping faith with the music.
However, I was again made redundant. Both redundancies were carried out on the last in first out principle and I found myself on the dole. I had failed to fit in with the educational establishment and the economics of management consultancy had also ejected me. It was at this moment that the musical imperative took over and my career went in a more conducive direction. With hindsight it seems obvious that I was always going to spend every waking moment on music and music-related activities: the karma was just so strong. The jerky rhythms of recent times were about to end.
Cabinets And Coffins: A Plum Business
There was an important convergence: aged twenty-two, I once again came across David Ernest Barrow – a man I had known since the age of fifteen – at the dole office. Plum was out of prison; I was out of work. During the time in the mid Sixties when we were going to The Oddfellows on a Sunday evening with our rock band Axe, along with most of the other local musicians, I realised that there was a potential market amongst this fraternity for repairing and supplying equipment. I had the eye for a good venture and a good musical purchase and Plum had the practical skills. Here was an opportunity for collaboration: making, hiring and selling speaker cabinets. So we started a partnership using Plum’s front room in Ford Lane. We subsequently took over a workshop in Hewitt Street, just off Nantwich Road – where, incidentally, coffins used to be manufactured. Eventually, in 1971, premises on Nantwich Road were taken on the proceeds of the Hewitt Street business and I came off the dole. We had started with nothing but built up the business steadily and gradually: buying and selling guitars, making and selling speakers and hiring out sound systems. We bartered speaker boxes for instruments from other shops; we made equipment for local bands and I continued to collect guitars. In those days they were not worth a great deal but I saw a future in it. I used to go to Birmingham and Manchester to buy and I would buy to order as well. Once a month there were enough orders from Crewe musicians to warrant a 5 a.m. journey to London. A thousand pounds would eventually convert into fifteen hundred pounds worth of sales. Plum thought I was off on a nice day out: a view that was to lead to a rift between us.
Orders flooded in and I continued to travel about to buy for people. Everybody wanted to play in a band and there were plenty of local venues in those days. And young people had money.
Endings
Loss has been tangible in each decade of my being and has set the tone of my life. Music is by nature emotional and intuitive. As a musician I am particularly open to emotional involvement, so separation is always going to hit me hard.
In my infancy it was Uncle Willie Billington: my father’s best friend and my favourite uncle. My favourite storytelling war hero of an uncle. Willie had received the equivalent of a George Cross in Greece, had founded a motorcycle display team and was a Regimental Sergeant Major in the Commandos. Aged forty-two he had come home to his mother’s house to die. It was all in the air: not quite spoken and not quite clear, yet I knew something hushed and momentous was going on. When he died he was laid out in his mother’s bay-fronted net-curtained front room in Ruskin Road and there was something important to see but they wouldn’t let me see him. Even though I was on my father’s shoulders. His was the biggest military funeral held in Crewe.
I was three years old.
It was shortly after this that my mother collapsed. Twelve years later she died. Three years after that Bert Bellamy suddenly died. His was the first death associated with the musical side of my life; there were to be many more.
In my twenties my father became ill coincidentally with having his teeth out. Feeling awful he sought medical opinion and was sent for radiotherapy at Christie’s. His terminal illness – diagnosed as cancer of the chest cavity – lasted for nine months, though he was originally given three months. I accompanied him when he went for treatment and me and my stepmother Vera looked after him at home. I was his youngest son but I had to be the man. I became his father though he was too proud to allow me to nurse him. Vera did that but I administered his medicine in the last few weeks of his life. While my father was dying we became extremely close and he divulged things he wouldn’t have said; I’m more emotional about it now than I was then. He who had such a strong constitution became a frail little thing with everything drawn in and a grey skeletal face. My father died in my arms; I was helping him to breathe and get his medication down when the terrible guttural struggle suddenly stopped.
“He’s gone – thankfully,” I said.
I regret not giving him more morphine in the last days. His final two and a half weeks were spent in a coma. In fact, if I’d known more and been stronger he’d have died two months earlier.
Mother had died unseen in a hospital; I’d been prevented from seeing my uncle laid out in a front room. But this death was in my arms. I felt it; I heard it; I was strong enough to deal with it because I had to be. I didn’t want to see my father again but I went to the mortuary for Vera’s sake. Like with my mother, they’d done a face job but his ‘smile’ was more of a grimace – well there hadn’t been much in his life to make him smile.
My mother’s death left me an angry teenager; my father’s death left me grown-up. I was official and controlled at his funeral; I had to be because everyone else was crying on my shoulder. Wearing his suit, I found myself in his role. Like my father I have found myself in situations where I had to take responsibility for what was happening, where people were relying on me to sort things out.
My father hadn’t lived to see the ultimate success of my business. He had been really upset when I opened a music shop instead of carrying on with a career in management consultancy or sport – my music still meant nothing to him. But before he died I had already begun to make serious money. Partly for his sake, I bought a Volvo 3 litre – almost a Rolls Royce to Norman Johnson and a very posh car in its day – and I took him all over the place in it. He must have realised that I had made a success of something.
The death of my father in 1972 marked the end of an era that had seen the establishment of a viable and growing sound system business called Custom Amplification with branches in Crewe and Hanley, an embryonic business in vintage guitars, the purchase of a house in Sandbach, my marriage to Linda and a
burgeoning musical career.
The main strands of my life had been established from my childhood: the seductive, though limited power of luxury, self-reliance, confronting bullying, the precariousness of life.
And the blues.
1972 saw the inauguration of Snakey Jake’s Dead Skunk Band.
Notes: Section One
(1) War has its ironies. Whilst my uncle struggled with the moral issues of pacifism and my father fretted about being responsible for making life and death decisions and saw unspeakable sights, Fred Watts was kept in a reserved occupation. And that occupation was…making coffins.
(2) Quoted from Son House’s “Death Letter”.
(3) From an undated letter Bina left for her husband.
(4) From website: bluesandrhythm.co.uk
(5) Fred Watts, interviewed by Sandra Gibson, 2006.
(6) Jazz Journal August 1963.
(7) Joe Boyd: White Bicycles, published by Serpent’s Tail, 2005.
(8) Woman’s Hour item, BBC Radio Four, 16th July 2009.
(9) Joe Boyd: White Bicycles, published by Serpent’s Tail, 2005.
(10) Carl Palmer: Rock & Roll, an unruly history, published by Harmony Books, 1995.
(11) Quoted in Rock & Roll, an unruly history by Carl Palmer, published by Harmony Books, 1995.
(12) Zoe Johnson, interviewed by Sandra Gibson 26th April 2007.
(13) Linda Johnson, interviewed by Sandra Gibson 4th November 2008.
(14) Song Talk magazine.
(15) Robin Denselow, The Guardian, Wednesday 17th December 2008.
(16) Linda Johnson, interviewed by Sandra Gibson 4th November 2008.
Ain't Bad for a Pink Page 5