Wild Tales

by Graham Nash

  The light got sucked right out of that theater, and just when you thought you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, a small white spotlight hit the center of the red velvet curtain. A hand pulled it back a few inches, and a face with a spit curl plastered on its forehead stuck through the seam and shouted: “See you later, alligator!”

  “Well, I saw my baby walkin’ / with another man today …”

  The curtain swung open, and the sight left an indelible mark on my soul.

  There he was: Bill Haley, in the flesh. He wasn’t pretty to look at, he wasn’t Elvis, wasn’t sexy, but, man, could that cat put on a show. He and the Comets, wearing their matching plaid dinner jackets, rocked that house, with theatrics that were as good as any I’ve seen since. The bass player, Al Rex, sat astride his stand-up bass, riding it like a stallion and slapping at its side, while Rudy Pompilli straddled him, leaning as far back as he could with his sax in the air. Lots of clowning, but plenty of great music. With Haley out front, they ran through all of the hits: “Razzle Dazzle,” “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” “Rudy’s Rock,” “Calling All Comets,” “Dim, Dim the Lights,” “Birth of the Boogie.” By the time they segued into “Rock Around the Clock,” Manchester had been launched into the rock ’n’ roll era.

  You could look around the theater that night and see it in action. The audience was made up of mostly kids my age, whose faces were lit with an eerie intensity. They bought right into the music. It was something new, something our own—not the crap they played on the BBC or fed us in school, not our parents’ brand of postwar schmaltz. Rock ’n’ roll spoke to us directly: teenage music, a totally different sound. It was like a new religion, and Bill Haley was delivering the Word.

  Clarkie and I were beside ourselves. The music, the showmanship, the pulse of the crowd—we didn’t say as much, but I know we were both projecting ourselves onto that stage. Even at fifteen, I was positive that was where my future lay. And I knew it that night: Nothing would stand in my way. After the show, when the crowd spilled into the street, I ducked around the corner into an alleyway and eluded a cordon of police in order to touch Rudy Pompilli’s elbow as he climbed onto the tour bus.

  I was looking for contact anyplace I could get it. Mostly I had to rely on the records we heard, those that made it to the stores in Manchester, because it was still pretty tough going in the north to hook into the sound that was starting to take root. We had Saturday Club on the BBC, which played the latest hits from America. But that was about it, as far as rock ’n’ roll went.

  One Saturday night in the fall of 1957, Clarkie and I headed over to a dance in the basement of St. Clements, a Catholic school in Salford not far from Ordsall Board. It was a rival school, and we normally didn’t hang out with those kids, but it was crawling with Catholic girls. Need I say more? We were dressed to kill. I had just bought a sharp red shirt with black flecks in it, no tie. A half gallon’s worth of Brylcreem slicked our hair back—we were a couple of young James Deans, Clarkie and I.

  We walked down the stairs and handed our tickets to the young lady who was collecting them at the door. Looking past her, I could see inside the darkened room: Maybe a hundred kids were already in the hall. We lingered by the door watching the action. “You Send Me” was crooning over the sound system and knots of lust-filled couples were grinding away. Here and there, teachers were crowbarring kids apart, and you could read the lips of the offended guys: “I wasn’t holding my girlfriend like that.” Man, we could hardly wait to get in there. Allan and I were besotted with girls. We weren’t cool, but we hoped we had something going, and this crowd promised to raise our stock. As the song faded, the lights came up and the couples who had been feeling each other up during the slow dance scattered to opposite ends of the floor.

  Across the hall we spotted Norma Timms and made a beeline toward where she was standing. Norma was a girl who, shall we say, developed early. She was from council houses that were a bit posher than ours; they had bay fronts instead of just flat entrances. Clarkie and I were definitely attracted to her on all fronts and vying to see who could get to her first. So there we were, making our way across the dance floor, kind of edging each other out of the way, when all of a sudden a sound came blasting out of the speakers that stopped us dead in our tracks.

  Bye bye love, bye bye happiness,

  Hello loneliness, I think I’m a-gonna cry-y.

  I’d never heard anything like it before. The acoustic guitars going chawng ki-chawng ki-chuk-chuk. Barre chords layered one on top of each other. Two twangy voices harmonizing seamlessly as one. I’d never heard voices harmonizing in that way before. Whatever the power of that vocal blend, the magic, it stunned me. It was something else! “Whoa!” I gasped. “What the fuck is that?” We stood stone still and listened to it for a while, until we realized we were sticking out like sore thumbs. Kids had started crowding around us, wanting to dance, but I was transfixed. That is, until I saw Allan making headway toward Norma, which jolted me from my reverie.

  But that moment was incredibly important, one of the turning points in my life. It was like the opening of a giant door in my soul, the striking of a chord, literally and figuratively, from which I’ve never recovered. From the time when I first heard the Everly Brothers, I knew I wanted to make music that affected people the way the Everlys affected me. That was it for me. I can trace it to that night at St. Clements.

  I eventually nudged Clarkie aside and Norma later became my girlfriend, but the real victory was our musical conquest. We found the deejay a half hour later and demanded he tell us everything he could about that amazing record. He dug the disc out of a pile and gave us the lowdown: the Everly Brothers on Cadence Records. Voilà! He told us that they really were brothers who came from Kentucky and were fans of the Louvin Brothers, whose names I noted for future reference.

  Allan and I started performing “Bye Bye Love” right away, copying their style as best we could. And we searched all over Manchester, looking for more of their stuff, figuring that if they had singles, they probably had an album. Within a month we hit the jackpot, The Everly Brothers, learned all the songs, and in no time had them down cold. “Brand New Heartache,” “Maybe Tomorrow,” “Wake Up Little Susie,” and, most especially, “Lucille”—wow!

  By this time, Allan and I were singing every chance we could get. There was a club in Manchester, the Plaza Dance Hall on Oxford Street. It was run by Jimmy Savile, an incredibly important English compere who wore outrageous costumes and had dyed plaid hair. Years later, there were serious and shocking allegations that Jimmy had engaged in horrendous sexual abuses of children—it was a scandal that rocked the BBC and the country—but at that point in our lives, all we knew was that he was very supportive of us. We were totally unaware of his dark side. The only thing we were aware of was that every Monday evening the club held a talent contest that drew crowds. Well, Allan and I won it four weeks in a row, doing “Be-Bop-a-Lula” like the Everly Brothers did, and “When Will I Be Loved.” Jimmy really encouraged us. He felt we had something special and could take it further than just being two kids with two guitars.

  We played our hearts out at the Plaza and other dance halls in Manchester. For the time being I remained at Salford Grammar, but I thought long and hard about packing it in. Allan had already left Ordsall Board and was working a day job at Alexander Kenyon’s, an electrical builder’s supply store, and a gig at night with a Broughton skiffle band, the Riverside Rockets, as their lead singer, so he was making decent money. But it separated us for a while, and my mother was very upset with him for deserting her son. I did, in fact, feel abandoned and had no one to sing with for months.

  As for my dad, he went to work as a warehouseman at Imperial Tobacco, by the Salford docks. It was a real comedown as far as positions went, but he faced the job in his usual stoic way. Two days later, he came home and said, “I’ve quit smoking today. You have no idea what goes into those cigarettes.” He described opening up containers full of toba
cco and finding rats, cockroaches, and all kinds of life-forms that had laid eggs in there, along with other kinds of shit too disgusting to mention. Instead of removing any of it, they simply closed the door and fumigated the works, leaving all the crap right in the mix. Small wonder why I never took up smoking! But in any case, my dad wasn’t the same guy anymore. He’d lost his gregarious spirit, his inner glow. The change disturbed me no end, even though we never discussed it. The veil of emotional silence had not been lifted.

  More grief befell me on February 6, 1958, as I was on my way home from another miserable day at school. I remember getting off the bus that day in a fog so thick that it was impossible to see two feet in front of me. When my eyes finally adjusted, I could make out the throng of newspaper hawkers who wore little placards across their shoulders announcing the day’s latest headline. That day’s big news was: MANCHESTER UNITED KILLED—and my insides seemed to drop right out of my body. The “Busby Babes” were my team. They were our local pride, on top of the world. My dad had taken me to dozens of their football matches, and some of their most celebrated players—Duncan Edwards and Eddie Coleman—had gone to my school. I grabbed one of the papers and tried to absorb what happened. From what I could gather, the team had been returning home from a European Cup match against Red Star Belgrade when their plane crashed on takeoff from a refueling stop in Munich. Gone … they were gone. It was impossible for me to digest.

  So much shit was weighing me down that it was a relief when, a few weeks later, I ran into Allan on the street. It felt a bit awkward standing there, making small talk with my best mate, but we filled each other in on personal news. From what I gathered, he’d already left the Riverside Rockets and was looking for another musical outlet. “Hey, check this out,” he said, flipping open a guitar case. Bending down, he lifted out a black thick-body semiacoustic electric guitar and handed it over as if it were the Magna Carta. Man, that baby felt good in my hands, and I have to admit I was jealous as hell. He had a small amp, too. That combination, amp and guitar, made him a rocker instead of a skiffle guy—exactly where I wanted to be. My envy aside, I was happy for Allan. He was heading in the right direction. And this time, I went with him.

  We began doing shows around the Manchester area, billing ourselves as the Two Teens, Ricky and Dane Young. I was Dane—don’t ask me why. Something about the name sounded flash and cool. If we were serious about making it in show business, we needed better names than Graham and Harold. As for Young, we were fresh-faced kids and thought it would be a fitting last name, which is weird when you factor in Neil later on. Looking back, it was all such a lark. Allan and I were trying on different personas, wanting desperately to be like James Dean.

  The thing is, we were good. We could sing our asses off, and word about us started to get around Manchester. Pretty soon we were working coffeehouses and pubs, anywhere we could, earning a few bob and a leg up with the girls. Girls, we discovered, were a nice little perk that came with performing. It was all the incentive I ever needed. The first love of my life was Rose Oliver, a magnificent-looking creature with long, wavy blond hair and a body that was bursting into womanhood. She was beautiful and funny and not about to let me touch her. Didn’t matter. Soon afterward, I got my first kiss from a girl called Sylvia. First sex, too (thanks, Sylvia), standing up in the alleyway out behind her house. I can’t say that it was a transcendent experience. It was over before either of us knew what had happened. But you can be sure it whetted my appetite for what came later in the sixties.

  As the Two Teens, Allan and I—make that Ricky and Dane—played local old-fashioned competitions that were a big part of northern England entertainment. We’d do talent shows that were right on the edge of vaudeville, where ten or twelve amateur acts would vie to see who would move on to the next week’s contest. These weren’t just singers, but jugglers, ventriloquists, mimes, accordion virtuosos, plate spinners, the whole gamut. One of the earliest of our escapades was at the Middleton Towers Holiday Camp, where we performed Conway Twitty’s “It’s Only Make Believe” to thunderous applause and were invited back for the three-day finale, which we lost to some crooner.

  The hottest competition we entered was Star Search, at the Hippodrome Theatre in Manchester, on November 19, 1958. Carroll Levis, a slightly overweight Canadian impresario who had seemingly cornered the market on amateur talent, was the emcee, which heightened interest from all across the north. It seemed like every act in Lancashire showed up to make their name. I recognized Johnny Peters, the frontman for the Rockets, whose coolness quotient was way off the charts. Ronnie Wycherley, who later morphed into Billy Fury, was slumped in a chair backstage, as was Freddie Garrity, a short guy with glasses who would have hits in the sixties with Freddie and the Dreamers. Most of the preshow buzz was around a group from Liverpool called Johnny and the Moondogs, who did a Buddy Holly number, “Think It Over.” I thought they were pretty good, which confirms my taste, considering it was John Lennon, George Harrison, and Paul McCartney, with Johnny Hutchinson sitting in on drums. Allan and I decided to stick with “It’s Only Make Believe” because we could wring every last ounce of emotion out of the lyric.

  That evening the place was packed. Carroll Levis was a pretty famous guy, and the crowd came for him almost as much as for the performers. The acts, as it happened, were surprisingly good. The Harmonica Rascals were local favorites; they had a midget playing a big bass harmonica who was a cutup and mugged shamelessly for the crowd. And the Moondogs went over as you might expect. They’d probably have walked away with a win had they been able to stick around for the finale, but the last bus back to Liverpool was at 9:27, long before the show was done.

  Allan and I had as good a shot as anyone. Our harmonies were airtight and we killed that ballad. When Levis dragged us all out onstage at the end, it was anyone’s guess who would take first place. He lined up each act in a single row, then walked behind us and held a hand over our heads. If the crowd went crazy, you knew your chances were good. Billy Fury and Freddie Garrity had their friends out front, and the noise they made was deafening. The same with the Harmonica Rascals and Johnny Peters. But when it came time to rate Allan and me, there was no doubt we had won the night and would move on to the finals a week later in Morecombe.

  Our star was rising, that was for sure. A manager even had his eye on us, a guy named Arthur Fee, who managed a band called Kirk Daniels and the Deltas. Fee was a real piece of work. He’d been a budding musician who hadn’t made it and decided instead to develop pop acts in a way that was novel. His approach was that we’d become a show, an evening of cabaret, as opposed to just a band. So Kirk Daniels and the Deltas would open with us singing harmonies, followed by Ricky and Dane Young in matching green lamé jackets, then we’d all change into animal skins and be like the Flintstones, or some such stunt. And it worked—for a while. Dates for Saturday- and Sunday-night dances started rolling in, big reception halls in schools that could be converted into dance clubs where 150 kids would jive until curfew. And bigger pubs, like the Yew Tree in Wythenshaw. We’d do two forty-five-minute sets, no repeats. Needless to say, we learned a lot of songs. At first it was an interesting way to work, but we soon got pissed off at the gimmicky stuff and eventually decided to work on our own.

  In any case, we were making twenty or thirty quid in some weeks, pretty good bread for a sixteen-year-old kid, especially when you consider my circumstances at home. We needed all the help we could get as a family. My parents were both working, but it was next to impossible for them to make ends meet, and the prospects in Salford were dim and dimmer. So I decided to leave school and go to work. This wasn’t a very hard decision. I wasn’t getting anything out of school, and I knew my future was as a performer, in music. It was time, I decided, to get on with my life.

  My parents didn’t try to talk me out of it. As usual, we didn’t go for discussions about really personal stuff, but I knew deep down that they approved of my decision. I also knew they hoped I wouldn’t take th
e standard Salford route, which was to work in the mine or the cotton mill until I was sixty, then get the gold watch—and just die. What a waste. That’s the way most kids wound up. In fact, to earn extra money, Allan had started out working in the cloth mill in Salford. I went to visit him once at lunchtime, and it looked and sounded like hell to me. All these gigantic machines throbbing in the same rhythm, lots of shuttles flying around. And it was filthy, with bits of cloth flying all over the place. Amazingly, Allan didn’t seem to mind, which made me realize that you could shut out anything if you wanted to. But it wasn’t a place for me, I knew that right away. Fortunately, Allan left the mill for his position at Alexander Kenyon’s, so he referred me there and I landed my first real job.

  The two of us would go to work together, and it was insane just to get there. It was right outside Manchester, in Ardwick. We had to leave home about six in the morning, take two buses, and walk a bit. After work, at 5:30, a van would pick us up and we’d be driven to a town in the vicinity, where we’d play a gig and get home about three in the morning. I even had a job at a record store on Saturdays. It was a grind and a half that went on for years. But it felt great, at last, to earn a decent wage. I’ll never forget my first pay packet—£2.10, about seven dollars US—which I took home to my mother.

  I always contributed to the family pot, but I also managed to put away a few quid. Ever since laying eyes on Allan’s electric guitar, I’d been saving up to buy one of my own. He was also trying to upgrade, and after a few months at Kenyon’s we each had enough to buy matching Guyatones. Mine cost about fifteen pounds, which was a fortune at the time. But it allowed us, finally, to play rock ’n’ roll.

  We became—what else?—the Guyatones and began getting gigs at the network of coffee bars that was springing up across northern England. We did mostly Everly Brothers songs, with Buddy Holly stuff in two-part and a little Gene Vincent mixed in for good measure. One afternoon, we got booked into a show at the Bodega, a relatively small bohemian club just off Deansgate, by the Albert Square in Manchester. It was kind of a fake weekend-beatnik joint, with kids who wore striped shirts and berets and would click their fingers instead of applaud. We knew it was bullshit, but it paid cash money just the same.