Sick On You

by Andrew Matheson

  And so it transpires that, from the nursing and the snarling, we are instantly thrust into a tumult of grinning and slurping by the simple miracle of Oily Jack, the manager of the Marquee, sashaying over to us, buying us pints, and offering us a gig on September 30.

  * * *

  There are two clubs in town, the Marquee and the Speakeasy. But the Speak is out. Play there? We can’t even go there. It is the forbidden kingdom, home of the famous, the fatuous, the fabulous, where we would be as non grata as five personas could ever be. Then there’s the glorious, exalted, celebrated Marquee. The greatest club in the history of clubs. The undefeated, undisputed King of Clubs. Bring on the contenders. What have you got? Los Angeles, what have you got? You’ve got the Troubadour, home to every knee-staring, bearded, Martin-strumming folkie who ever whined his way into the charts. And you’ve got the Whisky a Go Go. New York has something called CBGB, so they say. Where else? What else? Nowhere and nothing.

  Absolutely everybody has played the Marquee. The Stones, the Who, Hendrix, Yardbirds, Animals, Cream, as well as more recent affronts to the sensibilities like Yes, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, and Strawbs.

  Now, out of the blue, it is our turn. We are beyond excited. It’s a mere three weeks away.

  IV

  With the big day looming and no other alternative, we decide to rehearse in my room at 32 Cross Road so, one Monday afternoon when all students and toupee models are out, we lug in the gear and set up. We begin clandestinely, all acoustic and wire brush on snare, but within half an hour of plugging in we are at full tilt. Two hours later we are out the door and off to the Rifle. As we walk by, curtains twitch in neighboring houses.

  And so it goes in the days and weeks leading up to the Marquee: full volume in a ten-foot-square bedroom. Ears constantly ring, but the band is getting tighter and better. So what’s a little tinnitus?

  One day there’s a knock on the door. It is the distinguished-looking elderly gent in a cardigan from two doors down, imploring politely for tranquility to return to his leafy life. Can we please turn it down? Sure, will do, Pops. But in fact, can’t do, Pops. It’s the Marquee, you know? Sorry . . . ish.

  More rehearsals, more neighbors knocking. Housewives in aprons, gents in tweed jackets, young mums, pensioners, all united under a banner of grievance toward this new malignance in their midst. Still we rehearse. No choice.

  Next day, the knock is louder than usual. On the doorstep stand two policemen armed with billy clubs, stern expressions, and clipped tones: the full British arsenal. Even pencils. I say something, they write it down. This is unnerving. They ask my name. I tell them “Lou Sparks.” The new Lou promises to keep it down in future. The policemen note this in their little books. They turn and slowly saunter off under the lamplight. One looks back over his shoulder. The new Lou waves.

  The magical day draws nearer. All the girls from the Rifle say they will be in attendance at the Marquee. Brillo says he’ll get his work’s van and drive us. Sonja gives me a pair of her trousers to wear, white and skintight.

  The rehearsal is our best yet. Lou plays like a demon and even Mal throws a pose or two into proceedings.

  After this blisteringly sweaty workout we are heading to the Rifle, when a man in a three-piece suit with a two-piece mustache opens a briefcase, walks up to us, and thrusts some papers into my hands. Are we being served? Yes we are. A glance at the letter: the law firm of Quirk, Peevish, & Somesuch is accusing and warranting and foreswearing and generally demanding that Lou gets out of Dodge by sundown.

  “How did they get my name?” asks Lou. I shrug my shoulders, crumple the papers into a ball, toss them in the gutter, and we continue to the pub.

  Curtains no longer twitch; the neighbors stand openly at their windows, arms folded, faces dark and full of foreboding.

  * * *

  The day dawns—or at least it did twelve hours ago. This is the day that will change music history: September 30, 1972. We arrive at the hallowed Marquee at the appointed time, whipped up, nervous and excited. But we are ready to go, ready to burst onto a scene that won’t know what hit it. We are rehearsed to the hilt. We can’t get better than this. Ladies and gentlemen, direct from a one-month engagement in a bedroom in Bushey, a warm round of applause for the Queen. Thirty quid we get for this. Not bad.

  We, the Queen, are the opening act, supporting some outfit with two singers, male and female. They operate under the sidesplittingly clever name of Mahatma Kane Jeeves. Their troglodyte roadies are irritable and stingy when it comes to giving us room to set up on stage. Roger and I get our verbals in front and center, stating our case. We get five minutes for a soundcheck. Things are frosty.

  No fear. This is the launchpad. After tonight the world changes. Jack sends over a couple of rounds on the house. We hunker down in the closet-sized dressing room cunningly disguised as a stinkhole directly behind the stage, drinking our drinks, talking it up. Two slashes of red lipstick like a teacher marking a final exam, and I pull on and zip up Sonja’s white strides with a top to match. Red velvet jacket, donned for the first couple of numbers at least. White silk scarf around the throat. Ready to roll.

  Roger’s in black leather, sporting my rock ’n’ roll sweater underneath with black jeans and nasty boots. Stein looks fantastic, all heels and hair, green eye shadow, tight pink top. He’s still got the damned blond ’tache, though. He looks like the Sundance Kid’s nephew. When’s he going to learn that the lip fringe doesn’t jibe with the master plan?

  Showtime nears. The lads peek through the curtain. The joint is filling up with the usual Marquee mob: the hippies, posers, tarts, and City boys. And musicians dotted throughout. Some, the exalted ones, with record deals, most without; some with bandmates, some with girls, some lone wolves. All of them hypercritical, feigning boredom, leaning on the bar or standing at the back of the room, here to be seen, here to watch. Here to sneer.

  Sonja has brought along a haughty, icy, delectable coven of blonde-on-blonde au pairs. And the girls from the Rifle have made good on their threat. Some are almost unrecognizable in unfamiliar finery and kooky hair, and even though the night has barely begun, all appear to be well lubricated.

  They’re all out there waiting. It’s a snake pit, really.

  The crap, overwrought, “progressive” sludge pounding out of the club’s speakers is at last switched off, and onstage somebody takes the mic. A cough, a scratch, a feedback squeal. The crowd rumbles expectantly. A voice, whose voice? Oily Jack? Don’t know, but it begins to announce us.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Marquee.” The audience rumble goes up a notch.

  Backstage, we stand up, shoulder to shoulder in the tiny, sweaty space. Are we ready? We’d better be. We shift around until Lou is first in the conga line and I’m last. That’s the way. Drummers need to get there first, singers last. The voice at the microphone continues: “Tonight we welcome a new band, great boys, great name, irreverent name, please . . . hands together for . . . the Queen.”

  We’re on, to enthusiastic applause—not to mention whoops, yelps, and squeals—from our stacked-deck portion of the audience. Lou, then Stein, then Roger, then Mal, and finally me, with enough seconds twixt me and them for Lou to get started with a rat-a-tat-tat and the lads to get plugged in. I walk onto the stage, as rehearsed a thousand times in the bedroom in Bushey, stare at the crowd for three beats, strike a shape, wrap my fingers around the microphone, press lips to Shure, and count the boys in: “One, two, three, four.”

  And what happens? What happens on this, the most important occasion in the history of our world? What happens at this crucial juncture, at this holy site, at this moment we have striven toward relentlessly through all the Snowy Whites, the biker chicks, the defections, the deprivations, the Yosemites, the countless hours of rehearsals spent honing the nastiest half hour of rock ’n’ roll this world could ever witness?

  What happens? I’ll
tell you what happens. The horrible happens. The worst, the most toe-curlingly embarrassing, crawl-into-a-hole-and-die hideous happens.

  Nothing happens.

  Well, not exactly nothing. Lou is in. Bashing away, cymbal crash on the count of five, full throttle. All the rest of us are dead. Dead microphone, dead guitars, dead bass, dead piano. Dodo dead. Doornail dead. Norwegian Blue dead. We’ve got a drummer thrashing and everyone else looking at each other wide-eyed, panicked, accusatory.

  Roger, bless him, is the first to react. He dives to the Selmer amp on the floor, stage left, and in a blur unplugs this, replugs that, reaches up and plunks Stein’s keyboard, looks over his shoulder and indicates to me that I should say something into the mic, which I do. “Hey,” brilliantly, is all I can think of at the moment. But it works and booms through the Marquee over the top of Lou’s drumbeat. Then Mal’s Strat comes alive and we’ve got some weedy, tentative guitar and then, on his knees, Roger’s bass is alive and well. He picks up the track.

  Finally, agonizingly, we are all in and trying to revive any semblance of dignity, remnant of poise, or shred of the “dead cool” we thought was just naturally oozing from our pores. But “dead cool,” like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. And the beholders out there in the club know we’ve blown it. What an embarrassment. If I was standing on a vaudeville stage I would gladly pull the lever myself to open the trapdoor and send me plummeting down.

  Musicians out there are laughing, actual bent-over-at-the-waist laughter. The song ends. Our supporters, those who haven’t left the building or at least made a dash for the bar, clap fervently and smile grimly. We press on.

  Halfway into the next song, the guitar amp blows up, complete with a blue flash and a spiral of smoke curling up to the ceiling. Piano, drums, and vocals forge on valiantly and, judging by the music police out front, to great comic effect. Twenty agonizing bars later, frantic replugging ends our brief career as a trio and Roger and Mal return, sharing the same amp. Mal, however, has no idea where we are in the song and appears to get more and more befuddled as it crawls to the edge of a cliff and throws itself off.

  By the fourth song we are a bag of nerves, shaking like junkies in jail. By the fifth we come up with a brilliant idea for accelerating our career suicide and decide to do “Crying Time,” a weepy, traditional country song in the middle of what is already the worst rock ’n’ roll set in the history of music. But let’s make it even worse, shall we?

  There is a verse in the song that is spoken rather than sung, in true hokey country fashion, and in rehearsal we always let Stein do that bit because he does it in a hilarious unintelligible Norwegian/Nashville patois. The trouble is, we never actually got around to fixing that part, and here we are at the Marquee where the Music Gestapo are already sneering and shaking their heads, and then we reach that point in the song and away goes Stein with eight slow bars of Nordic gibberish.

  We stagger to the end of our set like punch-drunk palookas: bleeding, legs gone, eyes swollen shut, hanging on to the ropes, and praying for the bell. Five minutes later, sitting in the dressing hole, dripping with sweat, utterly deflated, we decide not to discuss it.

  * * *

  Number 17 London Street the next afternoon. Stein and I are cracking cans of lager, Exile on Main Street is on the turntable. Two curs licking wounds. Stein telephones the Marquee at the prearranged time for the verdict. I can hear him in the hallway. Stein’s not saying much, just listening. Finally, he hangs up and comes back to the room.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said we’re not ready.”

  I go into a rage, ready to sack everybody, blow up the band, apply for a management-trainee course at Selfridges, knock over a betting shop, anything. I blame Oily Jack. Evidence showed that he had stepped on the plugs after introducing us, bending the inputs, cutting the power. I blame Oily Jack for his inability to spot glaringly obvious potential. I am plunged into a black, malevolent mood, sucking lager, cursing the fates.

  But who am I kidding? Certainly not the long-haired Norwegian guy in the armchair. Truth is, we were fragile, unable to overcome the simple inevitability of an equipment malfunction. We were rookies, raw recruits. And we are nowhere near as brilliant as we thought we were.

  And, personally speaking, I’d say the lead singer needed a bigger pair of swinging spheroids tucked inside Sonja’s trousers.

  V

  Harrow Weald has a high street full of shop windows and I get a job washing them. The day begins at 7 a.m., which is insane and plays hell with my lack of circadian rhythm. Every day is foggy, gray, cheerless, and freezing; my hands are red and numb with cold. Every day I arrive late for work. Mercifully, at the end of two weeks I get the sack, while dodging the mannequins in Woolworths’ windows.

  I rise at two in the afternoon and I pull the blanket with me against the chill. No tea bags to be found in the kitchen. Maybe Angus, Ewen, and Dick take them into their rooms for safekeeping. I boil some water, pour it into a cup, and stir in two teaspoons of sugar. In the living room I plop Something Else on the turntable, sip my sugar water, and let the beautiful melancholy of “Waterloo Sunset” waft over me. Could be worse.

  Could be like old Ivan Denisovich. I’m reading one day in his life by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Ivan’s trudging around his gulag with a shovel, in daft clothes and a funny hat, doing pointless jobs in wretched conditions. His personal hygiene is atrocious. His guards and overseers are, to a man, grunting, monosyllabic sadists. It’s a dreadfully detailed account for such a slim book. Old Ivan eats better than me, though. What I’d give for a tin cup of potato-peel soup with a slice of sawdust bread.

  The Marquee nightmare is still vivid and bumping around in my psyche, but an odd thing happened when I finally summoned the courage to go to the Rifle Volunteer again. The girls who came to the gig actually seemed to like it. At first I thought they were yanking one of my lower extremities, but no, they said they actually enjoyed the band and wanted to know where we would be playing next. A couple of them even seemed totally unaware of the various disasters that occurred during the set. But I’m under no illusions. We stunk out the joint. Still, it’s a funny thing, an audience.

  A funnier thing happens a few days later. I am alone at home swearing at some drivel on Opportunity Knocks when there is a knock on the door. I open it and there stands Lou, with a suitcase dangling from his arm. He moves in. Now two mouths to feed, but at least we’re having a laugh.

  Roger arrives at a bedroom rehearsal with news of a gig. Clambering back aboard the nag is just what we need. A certain Paul A. Quinton has heard of us, Christ knows how, and wants us to play the Greyhound, Redhill, on Saturday October 21. He has even sent along a one-page “agreement” between “Paul A. Quinton (Referred to as the Employer) and the Queen (Referred to as the Artist) for the said sum of 80 percent gate monies.” We’ve never had an “agreement” before. And there it is, our name in print, “the Queen.”

  I am no longer enamored with the name of the band. The joke has worn thin and, anyway, I’d prefer a plural handle. The Something or Others. Lou and I like the Brats, but not just the Brats, the somewhere Brats. Lou suggests the Brixton Brats and even comes up with a pen-and-ink design for the bass drum head.

  The only problem is that we’ve never been to Brixton, and we aren’t planning a visit in the near future.

  Back in Cross Road there is a stunted apple tree in the backyard with scabrous green apples dangling here and there. Lou picks a few and boils them up in a pot in the kitchen, adds sugar, and turns them into a lumpy applesauce. It’s delicious and we eat nothing else for the next few days.

  Afterward, in desperation, we turn to a life of petty crime. I discover that I have a knack for pilfering life-sustaining items. In a fake-fur coat with deep pockets I work quickly while Lou uses his charm and humor to distract the shopkeep. Tins of stew, salmon, and sardines, soap, toothpaste, rashers of bacon, bar
s of chocolate—all manner of necessities disappear in a blur into the inner confines of the faux fur.

  It calls for sleight of hand, sangfroid, and steady nerve. At least we eat on a reasonably regular basis, brush our fangs, and wash our paws. Pangs of conscience and hunger, in a tug-of-war.

  Cometh the hour, cometh the van. Brill drives us to Redhill, fighting through two hours of hellacious traffic until we find the Greyhound and pull into the car park shortly after 6 p.m. Within minutes it becomes frighteningly clear that this is yet another biker club. Everyone on the staff is in black leather, with bicycle chain necklaces on the girls and borstal tattoos on the guys. By 6:10 I’m petrified.

  But it’s a strange business, this rock ’n’ roll thing. We were whipped dogs, tail-between-the-legs types when we slunk back to Bushey after the Marquee. I was a snarling, sulking, defeatist mess the day after at Stein’s place. But this is now and this is here. And you know what? We do okay. We don’t look anything like the audience. Lou, Stein, and I are in full makeup; I’m in Mr Fish and red velvet.

  At first the crowd stares, cautious, caustic, and curious, then a few comments about how we look, some nasty and taunting, but from the first chord, from the first drumbeat, we’ve got ’em. These rockers want to rock.

  They are strange, these Hells Angels types. I don’t understand the breed with their filthy initiation rituals and fetishistic engine worship. One does, after all, hear strange rumors of pissed-upon jerkins and jerked-upon pistons.

  All that aside, by the third song the place is a seething mass of black leather, chains, and stomping boots. We keep ’em bouncing off the walls for the whole night. The bikers love derogatory tales about coppers and sing along lustily to the chorus of “The Boys in Blue.” Lou is on fire, Roger is in his element, Mal keeps up, and Stein and I just keep smiling at each other.