Sick On You

by Andrew Matheson

  Then Lou says, “Hey, Rog, can you give me an E?”

  * * *

  The day goes from mad to worse. We sound terrible. Maybe it’s the hangovers. Maybe it is because we are not used to rehearsing in such a large space, in such luxury with such full bellies, but something is definitely wrong. The music sounds thin, Eunan is at his tame, timid worst, and Stein’s new Chris Andrews Italian organ sounds like it should be the comic accompaniment to a clown convention.

  We force it for an hour then take a break to wander off and sulk separately.

  We try again and argue our way to lunch. Roger is just going through the motions. He acts as though he’d rather be anywhere else, back at Boosey & Hawkes, perhaps, polishing his umpteenth spit valve.

  I bark at Eunan to try to get him going. He snarls back and plays the remainder of the song with his back to us, facing his amp, like Stuart Sutcliffe in Hamburg, his bony rear end defiantly static. If only the music was half as angry as the band. Then Roger tells us he’s not crazy about the new songs Stein and I are writing, which begins a shouting session that soon erupts into shoving and swearing.

  You can go from peacemaker to antagonist in two seconds with this mob. One guy holds another guy back, saying “Calm down, calm down,” then it’s “You fucking calm down, cunt,” then those two are going at it. Then another guy tries to break them up but catches a clip in the mouth, and soon it’s a three-for-all. Within ten seconds we’re all punching and swearing and knocking over cymbal stands; microphones are flying and feedback is screaming.

  Into the room run five or six peaceniks, waving their arms and yelping shrill orders like “Don’t touch the tapestries.” One particularly demented-looking specimen actually clangs a large gong he’s carrying.

  It is this gong that cuts through our bloodlust. So ludicrous does it look and sound that we turn, hands still gripped around throats or clutching lapels, to stare at the mad gonger.

  This guy could be a star on the prog-rock circuit. With his beard, filthy hair, and sandals he’d be a cert for, say, Blodwyn Pig or Uriah Heep or any other unkempt herd of posers.

  So we endure our second lecture of the day, this one even more religious than the last. They even phone the great Bongo himself to double-check that he actually invited these maniacs into his home. I get on the phone and blab away about misunderstandings, miscommunication; I apologize a bit and lie a bit more.

  “Hey, c’mon, Cliff, you and the Shads must have had a few wild nights and maybe even the odd slap-fest.” His mood improves by degrees and all seems fine; Cliff’s a complete gentleman about it all. I put Scary Magdalene back on the phone and join the boys picking through the wreckage.

  Luckily, we didn’t break any of the room’s precious chattels, though our crap equipment took a few shots and the amps are buzzing and popping even more than usual. We take a break for a beer. This helps matters enough to put grudges aside and get through the rest of the rehearsal without killing each other.

  Roger gets his car back from the garage. It cost a bomb but at least the steering wheel is back where it belongs and the potatoes have been hosed off the undercarriage. After dinner we climb in and head off to the pub. Well, not the pub, of course, but another one, and this time, except when pouring drinks down, we keep our traps shut. Like a good Christian lad, I’m back under my cloud-like duvet by midnight.

  Next day, Sunday, we suffer half an hour of hymns at breakfast sung by a motley assembly of troubadours in the room next door. They go by the name Agape and have a hand-painted sign to prove it. We sit there scoffing scrambled eggs and rolling our eyes, mocking and giggling. Lou sings along to “Rock of Ages.” Then we get to work in the main room.

  Today, the music is better, tighter, more fun to play. Roger even smiles once. Sort of. Late in the afternoon, we pack up, say good-bye to the sect, and head back to Bushey, Hatch End, Finchley Gardens, and London Street. Before we leave, Lou visits Cliff’s liquor cabinet with a hairpin and a fork and liberates a souvenir bottle of whiskey.

  The hippies stand in a cluster at the door with distinctly un-Christian expressions of relief on their hairy mugs. One of them half flashes a peace sign then thinks better of it and scratches his ear instead.

  On the long drive through Hertfordshire my thoughts go back and forth between two things.

  This is nowhere near the sound Stein and I are looking for.

  And I will really miss that duvet.

  VII

  Chris Andrews (unaware of Slats, of course) has us booked to play a gig at an Air Force base in West Wittering, wherever that is. Well, that sounds promising. We are the support act to a bunch of no-hopers he signed a few months ago. They have a whiny little pop number, a simpering plea to a babe called Ivy, which has taken up a sure-to-be-fleeting residence in the upper 90s of the Top 100.

  West Wittering is a million miles away and, despite Brillo’s psychotic rally driving, we arrive late enough to induce some straight-arrow type in a gray uniform with egg-yellow stripes on the arms and really shiny buttons to go absolutely berserk.

  The base is a world unto itself. Straight Arrow passes us on to two bullet-headed, no-neck freaks that look at us as though we’re Martians. They show us to the dressing room. Chris’s band is in there: permed hair, drinking orange juice, wearing denim. They freeze when we walk in. Freeze they may. We’ve got an even bigger chill in store for them.

  We don’t say a word. We act like they don’t exist. We occupy 90 percent of the dressing room. Slap on the war paint, wrap the boa, strap on the belts and all the armor. Away we go. No soundcheck.

  Shock news! The air force hate us. The sea of drunken stubble-heads and their country-bumpkin girls hate us the second we tread the stage. They bay and whistle and hoot and yell out their thick invective, howling afterward at their wit like moronic post-kill wolves. Before we play a note, before we plug in, before Lou shifts the snare between his legs just the way he likes it, they hate us.

  I’m adjusting the microphone, twisting it up to lip height, when the first splash of beer hits my shoes. The bleary-eyed fly-boy who did the splashing is standing front and center, waving an empty glass, arm around his council-estate slattern. His sandpaper skull is at a perfect football height and I pull my leg back like I’m going to volley his head into a goal twenty-eight yards away. He flinches and ducks behind his tart. Then he gestures that I should come down and stand in front of him where we could, I don’t know, fight, I guess. Eejit.

  The first two crashing chords of “Melinda Lee” shuts ’em up, or at least drowns ’em out. For three minutes and five seconds. Then the baying boys are back. They’re crowding in on the stage, pointing their fingers, throwing things, spitting. Look at these specimens. The sons of the Few. They are a disgrace to the Royal Air Force.

  If they think they are going to intimidate us, they are wrong. Drunken provincial twits.

  The four lads behind me, bless ’em, rise to the occasion. Gone are the divisions and rifts of the weekend at Bongo’s. They play a blinder. We rock this shiny-buttoned-uniform joint under a constant barrage of garbage, beer, and lout-speak.

  We end the set on our terms: crashing, feedback-drenched chords to shake up their tight little auditorium. After the last ear-assaulting hog-howl of Eunan’s guitar dies, I give the fly-boys a Nazi salute and a “Sieg heil” as a final attempt to win their hearts.

  Then we exit stage left, like Snagglepuss would have wanted it, to an absolute screeching cacophony of drunken RAF derision. They want to kill us. Well, scramble your fighter planes, boys.

  Back in the dressing room, Chris’s headlining act are mouths-open in shock and perms quivering, having heard the reception their “warm-up” act garnered. As we walk past the little popsters, with their song at number 94 in the charts, Stein looks at them and out of the side of his mouth sneers, “Follow that, pussies.”

  * * *

  Two days later
Roger quits. It is not a shock. It had been coming. The gulf between him and the rest of us had been widening. He’s got a real life; he lives in a house; he’s got a car, a job, an ironing board. He doesn’t like the direction Stein and I are taking this thing. He won’t wear makeup—don’t ask him. He wants to play the blues and he’s not used to being constantly booed onstage. Perhaps he’s been feeling increasingly marginalized.

  It is a watershed moment for me. He is the last of the old guard. The last original member of the band for which I auditioned way back when. He joins the list of former members who either couldn’t take the heat or were elbowed out the kitchen door: Tim, Martin, Yosemite, and Mal.

  So now it’s back to, where else, the Melody Maker. On April 7 we place an ad.

  WANTED

  Young bass player

  Wymanesque

  For outrageous band

  Essential: Pretty face (No beards)

  Slender build

  Look, act, think like a star

  We offer fame & fortune

  Phone 723-0759 after 5 pm

  Brian is tall, slim, good-looking, nineteen years old, with black Japanese-straight shoulder-length hair parted in the middle, King’s Road clobber, Fender Precision. There’s only one problem.

  He’s American.

  * * *

  There’s a letter nailed to our door, addressed to Mr. Spark Matheson—an eviction notice from the law firm of Claude Barker and Partners. This is the second home in a row for Lou and me and the second eviction notice, third if you count Dick giving us the heave-ho. How dare he attempt this legal ploy. How can he reasonably expect us to come up with rent every single Monday without fail? We are musicians, for Christ’s sake.

  This life is brimful of tedious irritants, and it’s beginning to get on my nerves. Booed, threatened, arrested, evicted, convicted, spat upon, named as a nincompoop in the newspaper, starving, pissing out of windows, reduced to common thievery for sustenance, scrounging shillings to feed the meter. This life has sunk to the most low and demeaning level possible.

  Lou chooses this moment to announce that he has a boil on his arse.

  A frost-covered Wednesday evening. Famished, gaunt, forsaken, and forlorn, the two of us sit in our slum, on the brink of eviction and with nary a shilling to our name. Lou sits sort of sideways on his bed.

  So dark is it that we can barely see each other, not that we particularly want to. We’re wrapped in blankets and coats, and one of us, I’m not saying who, has a tea-towel hat. Make that a boil on his arse and a tea-towel hat.

  Apparently, this boil has been developing for a while now and, coincidentally, Lou has been forging a reputation as something of a gentleman for the numerous times he has given up his seat on the bus for a lady.

  This morning he summoned the nerve not only to tell me about it, but also to ask me to lance it.

  “What? Are you out of your mind?”

  “Come on, it’ll take five seconds and it’s killing me.”

  “You’re serious? Are you crazy?”

  “Yes, I’m serious. I can’t sit down. Help me out.”

  “Even if I knew the first thing about lancing boils, what makes you think I’d lance a fucking boil on your arse?”

  “It’s easy. You stick a needle through it and drain it.”

  “Oh Christ, spare me the visuals. And if it’s so easy, you do it.”

  “It’s on my arse. I can’t reach it. I had to look in a mirror to even see the bastard.”

  “Forget it. You’ve lost your mind, mate. I’m a singer, not a boil lancer.”

  “But you’re my friend.”

  “To hell with that. Friendship has its limits. And believe you me, arse-boil lancing is the fucking limit.”

  “But . . .”

  “Take it to the girl in Clapham.”

  Lou’s got a girl in Clapham. Rule number five broken again.

  Now it’s nighttime and we don’t have one shilling for electricity. Wrapped in blankets, with freezing fingers we play endless games of Crazy Eights until it gets too dark. For a forlorn hour neither of us has mumbled a syllable. Misery, thy name is Lou and Andrew.

  Then Lou is struck by an idea so brilliant that at first we just continue sitting, stunned by the sheer genius of it. Next, we are kneeling on the floor, tea-towel hat flying into a corner, me striking match after match, all the better to illuminate the electric meter as Lou, working with a pin and fork, attempts to pick the lock of the attached coin box. It is difficult and the obstacles include an imprinted lead seal, the breaking of which is meant to alert the authorities to malfeasance.

  As we have by now learned, no lock can withstand Louis John Sparks armed with a fork. This meter is no exception. With a metallic pop the lead stamp falls apart, the back of the meter swings open, and a cascade of shillings spews out onto the floor.

  We yell and laugh and celebrate and count them. Over ten quid. Ten quid! It’s after midnight. All the stores are closed and shuttered; all the streets are dark and bare.

  Then Lou is struck by a second idea almost equally brilliant as the first, and we are out the door in seconds, pockets swaying and clinking with the weight of our—possibly, arguably—ill-gotten gains. He has remembered a vending machine just down Aldenham Road, and there we go to load up on twenty or so chocolate bars. Back in our sty, we scoff chocolate and swig Tizer until we are bloated, groaning, and sick.

  For the next few days we keep the back of the meter open and use the same shilling over and over again to power our new luxury lifestyle. Meanwhile, we stock up on cigs, cheese, bread, eggs, and a couple of pints. What a caper.

  Four days later Lou patches up the meter and melds the lead seal back together. Eunan says he’s found a squat in West Hampstead. A squat. Charming.

  * * *

  We’ve got another gig coming up in April at the Café des Artistes. Rehearsals with American Brian are going okay. He can play all four strings and he’s reasonably fast on the uptake. Not to mention he’s got an amp that works and doesn’t buzz or hiss or burst into flames at regular intervals.

  And he is a jolt, an adrenaline shot—a new bass player after all this time with Roger. He’s got energy aplenty but he doesn’t understand our look or philosophy or attitude. He wears stars-and-stripes trousers, for Christ’s sake. He says “far out” at annoying intervals until I take him aside and tell him to knock it off. Take a break down the boozer and all he talks about is the Doobie Brothers.

  That’s it. Rule number six in my rock ’n’ roll template: No Americans. They can’t dress, can’t shave, can’t rock. No Americans. I wanted a band of Englishmen and what have I got? An American, a Norwegian, an Irishman, and a Micmac.

  How’d that happen?

  In the days before the gig, Stein and Eunan (I’ve completely lost patience with that name; it is about as non–rock ’n’ roll as it is possible to get—must come up with something) go to Kingston, upon Thames I’ll have you know, to a music shop called Bargain Basement.

  They “part exchange” some of the junk from Chris Andrews’s garage—one 50-watt Bendix PA amp, two 4 x 10 columns, one El Pico microphone—for a Hi Sound speaker cabinet and a small but deadly piano that doesn’t require five guys to lug it up and down the stairs at London Street. Total cost of transaction: £83.60. Cost to the lads: £0.00. Thanks, Chris.

  * * *

  Café des Artistes, April 21, 1973: Eunan, now living in a squat in West Hampstead, gives us heart palpitations by showing up, yet again, five minutes before showtime. Incredibly, he’d been arrested earlier in the day for selling, guess what, stolen women’s blouses on Portobello Road. They just let him out of jail an hour ago. It appears we’ve got an elderly, none-too-bright, petty-criminal wide boy on guitar. Anyway, we’re back, and from the first note we take no prisoners. Down in the catacombs of the Café, the joint is jammed at 8 p.m. and by midnight you ca
n barely breathe. We mainly play our own songs, debuting one called “Running Wild.”

  We can hardly take a break between sets as the crowd is so raucous, demanding we continue. I’m not so sure that they’re in love with us; they’re just drunk and don’t want the music to stop. Or maybe they really don’t want the between-set disco. Maybe they do indeed want us. They go mad when we come back onstage, and for the third set we just play what we did in the first.

  American Brian, with blue streaks on his cheeks like a glam Comanche, blue stack heels, white strides, and a shimmery blue T-shirt, has definitely added another dimension to the sound. And we’re glad to be back in London.

  West Wittering was an absolute delight, but this is our kind of town.

  After paying expenses, the van, and the man, we don’t end up with much. They want us back next week, though, and they can’t have missed the effect we had on the punters. Afterward, Eunan and I spend the night at Brian’s place in Marble Arch. He lives with his dad, who appears to be some sort of mid-level diplomat, with the accompanying belly over belt and polyester leisure suits. They’ve got an American flag in the foyer. Either that or it’s Brian’s trousers draped over the banister. Great pad. Eunan and I share a large bed, with a glass dome way above our heads. Rain beats down on the dome. The dome leaks. The leak drips on the pillow between our heads. We spend the night far apart, clinging to the outer edges of our respective sides of the bed. This is more than fine by me.

  Before we nod off I tell Eunan he’s got to do something about his name.

  * * *

  A knock on the door. We hate knocks on the door. Come to think of it, when, in the history of the world, has a knock on the door ever meant anything good? Naturally, we freeze and look at each other with fear and dread in our eyes. Naturally, we don’t move a muscle. The knock comes again, louder this time. We still don’t so much as bat a mascara-encrusted eyelash. A key rattles in the lock and in walk two Pakistanis. They seem as shocked as we are and start chattering away between themselves in a language we don’t understand, but which we enjoy as a brief comedic interlude. Turns out they are here to empty the electric meter. Well, of course they are.