by Chris Welch
Eric explained he’d been driving to the gig. So what if he was a bit late. “I drove here as fast as I could.”
“Well you fucking leave earlier next time, you cunt!”
Grant picked up Eric Burdon, the famous chart topping pop star, and threw him bodily, ten feet across the room. “I hit a wall, slid down and hit the floor. I was never late again. Peter got his point across. He was what I needed. He was what we needed.”
The Animals were often brought down by the grim and dismal gigs they had to play, even during the time when their records were high in the charts. But one day their tour manager brought them good news. “Well, you guys will be pleased to know that Harold Davidson has got you the tour with Chuck Berry.” The band regarded him as the greatest rock’n’roll star of them all. Although famously grouchy and prone to bully his backing bands, Berry seemed to get on well with Burdon. He certainly appreciated the spontaneous waves of enthusiasm at his British shows. However he was never a man to confuse art with commerce, and laid down certain ground rules right from the start of his first UK tour in 1964. When he discovered that his fee was three shillings and eleven pennies short, there was hell to pay. “I ain’t going on,” said Berry, eyes narrowing. The crowd were yelling and drastic action was required to avert a riot. Mr Berry’s driver and personal assistant for the duration of the tour found the nearest cigarette machine, smashed it open and extracted the small change. It was enough to placate the bill topper. Thanks to Peter Grant, Chuck Berry was ready to ‘Roll Over Beethoven’.
On the last night of the tour, London’s Teddy Boys went berserk and invaded the stage. But it was all good-natured and Chuck carried on playing. Grant and Arden stood nervously in the wings, wondering how much the damage to the theatre would cost. Eric Burdon watched Chuck duck walking with his guitar across the stage, shouting at Peter Grant, “Did you get the money yet?” Grant shook his head and shouted back, “No, we didn’t.” Berry moved back to the audience and sang one more encore. Then he duck walked across to Grant again and said, “Did we get the money yet?” This time Grant smiled and nodded his head. Chuck Berry unplugged his guitar and carried on duck walking, off the stage, down the stairs and into his waiting limo. Eric guessed he was probably in his hotel room having a cigarette while the audience were still yelling for more.
Burdon could see why Berry had become a hard man to deal with. Time served in prison had made him bitter and he didn’t trust figures of authority, whether they were managers, promoters or agents. Eric once saw Peter Grant and Don Arden on their knees, peeling off one-pound notes and pushing them under Chuck’s dressing room door. He had demanded payment up front before he would leave his room and start the performance. There were even rumours that a gunshot was heard in a London theatre auditorium during one such altercation, and the police were called.
When The Animals went to America they found themselves touring with Chuck Berry once again, while the old firm of Peter Grant, Don Arden and Mike Jeffrey were backstage, taking care of business. Eric Burdon would claim in his biography* that Peter had told him he had been to the States before. Intriguingly Grant claimed to have visited Gene Vincent when he was filming The Girl Can’t Help It in Hollywood.
This would have meant Peter travelling to America during 1956, when he was still working at the 2Is. Given the pittance he was earning, it seems unlikely that he could have afforded such a trip. Mickie Most certainly doesn’t remember him going to the States at this time. However, on early trips to the US, Peter handled Herman’s Hermits as well as The Animals and gained plenty of useful knowledge about the US live music scene and record industry. He saw at first hand the gun-toting cops, the ‘crazies’ in the crowds who might attack long-haired pop stars and the racism and bigotry still prevalent in the South. Eric Burdon once witnessed him purple with rage, screaming abuse at Ku Klux Klan protesters handing out racist literature at a concert.
Back in London Don Arden began to sense that his assistant was getting the measure of the rock business and the huge potential of the American market for British bands. What he saw inspired him to make plans for the future. Said Arden: “He began to get involved in unnecessary politics. I could see he was drifting away from Don Arden Enterprises. Peter was very ambitious. I seem to remember his wife always urged him on. I remember one night we went out to dinner. My wife was wearing a diamond ring that cost $200,000 and his wife never got over that. She wouldn’t let him be. She used to say, ‘I want to wear jewellery like Don Arden’s wife.’”
As well as working with Chuck Berry and Gene Vincent, Peter Grant also looked after Bo Diddley during the R&B pioneer’s trips to England. The connection resulted in Peter getting The Rolling Stones their first broadcast on BBC radio. The Beeb had already auditioned the Stones for Saturday Club, presented by Brian Matthew and had turned them down because they “weren’t good enough”. When Bo Diddley needed a band to back him on the show, Grant recommended the Stones should do the job.
“Brian Matthew agreed to it, but then I got a call from the producer of Saturday Club telling me that since the band had failed the audition, he felt it wasn’t such a hot suggestion to use them. I replied, ‘No Stones, no Bo Diddley!’ They got the job and their first break on the radio.” It was a kind of practice run for the sort of tactics he would employ managing his own artists. Many years later he saw himself described in an American music magazine as ‘an ex-rock errand boy’. His laughter on reading this put-down was chilling. “Fucking great. Fantastic,” he said impassively.
After his spell with The Animals, Grant worked for a while with The Nashville Teens, who in 1964 had a big hit with ‘Tobacco Road’, produced by Mickie Most. By now Peter felt ready to take the plunge and manage his own acts. He set up in business, sharing an office with Most at the Tottenham Court Road end of Oxford Street. Visitors would never forget the sight of the two go-getters facing each other across large desks, forever on the phone, doing deals, promoting bands and setting up hit records. It seemed like the engine room of Swinging Sixties London.
It had been six years since the Soho coffee bar and wrestling days. While Peter had been busy as a tour manager, Mickie Most had realised his own dreams of stardom and was already a wealthy man. He had formed the Most Brothers with Alex Murray back in 1958. The duo recorded for Decca and toured with Cliff Richard & The Shadows. Then, in 1959, Most put together Mickie Most & The Playboys and lived and worked in South Africa. He had eleven number one hits there by singing ‘covers’ of the latest American songs. Says Mickie: “I went to South Africa in the late Fifties. I had brought Gene Vincent out to South Africa with his manager Don Arden and we did a tour together. Don said, ‘Just give me a ring when you come back to England.’”
It was during this period that Peter married his wife Gloria, a petite former ballet dancer, who he’d met in London. Says Mickie: “She was very nice Gloria. I had known her since 1962 when they first got married. I didn’t go to the wedding because I was in South Africa. They had been married for a year when I did that first tour, which was in 1963.”
Peter Grant’s wife would remain in the shadows throughout their marriage, rarely attending public events and shying away from the kind of celebrity which her husband attracted. She concerned herself solely with the raising of their two children and maintaining the household. “I think they lived two separate lives,” says film director Peter Clifton, one of few people ever to take a photograph of Gloria. “She just didn’t want to be in the limelight at all.”
At the time of his marriage to Gloria, Peter was still working for Don Arden. “He knew all the tricks in the book,” says Most. “He was a master at promotions. He had this company called Anglo-American Artists in Curzon Street and he had the balls to bring over these people. I remember Peter Grant going to a prison in Arkansas, waiting outside the gates for Chuck Berry to be released. ‘Wanna come to England to do a tour?’ he said, as Berry walked free.”
In 1962 Mickie Most returned to England, hoping to break into
the beat group scene as a solo singer. But it was hard to gain acceptance, as there were so many R&B acts already pursuing The Beatles into the charts and the clubs.
“So I called Don Arden,” continues Most. “He said: ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Not a lot.’ ‘Well I’m just putting this tour together, do you want to go on it? There’s the Everly Brothers, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, oh and we’ve got a group called The Rolling Stones.’ So I did the tour and every time we were in hitting distance of London I drove home. I had a Porsche car that I’d shipped back from South Africa. I was already a millionaire at the age of 24. Mick Jagger said: ‘Are you going back to town tonight?’ I was married and had a place in London, so I didn’t want to stay in a hotel if I could get back. I was opening the show and doing my ‘Johnny B. Goode’ Chuck Berry impersonation. The Stones were just doing their Bo Diddley impersonation, so we’d all be off stage in fifteen minutes. Then we jumped in the car and Mick, Keith and me drove back to London together.”
It was during this UK tour that Mickie bumped into his old pal from the 2Is. “Peter Grant was the tour manager and he said: ‘Ullo Mickie, how are you going?’ We were like mates for the whole tour. Then after it finished we did another one with Duane Eddy and The Shirelles. Peter was brilliant as a tour manager and he really looked after you. If you needed a few bob he would give you a sub out of the programme money or something. He was great with artists and there were no bigger artists than the Little Richards of this world, not to mention Jerry Lee Lewis. He’s not a stroll in the park, I can tell you! I toured with him and he was a bloody nightmare. You never knew when he was gonna smack you in the head for nothing. He was just a loony guy. He’d say to me, ‘Hey, ya got some of that English money? Get me a cigar.’ The next day he’d say, ‘Mickie, ya got any more of that English money?’
” ‘Jerry. You’re top of the bill. You’re getting thousands, I’m getting no pence, and I’m spending money buying you cigars. Go to the bank, change your dollars into pounds and get your own cigars.’
” ‘Ah go on Mickie, get me a cigar.’ And I’d give in and get him a cigar because you never knew if he was going to throw a piano at you. And Little Richard never had a clean shirt. So he’d decide to borrow my shirt with the cufflinks and halfway through his act he’d take his jacket off, then the cufflinks and throw them at the audience followed by the shirt. ‘Oy, that’s my shirt you’re throwing!’ Then his guitar player would turn up without a guitar, so he’d use mine every night and break all the bloody strings. Peter Grant saw all this and he was the only one who could take care of them.
“Although we had met in the Fifties we never actually did anything business-wise until the Sixties. I was telling Peter that the reason I came back from South Africa was that I wanted to go into the studio and produce artists. I could play and sing a bit but I wasn’t that wonderful. It was on that tour, in fact, that we found The Animals. We were in Newcastle and went to the Club A Go Go and on stage were The Animals. I loved the band and thought they were great. To get them to sign to me was difficult. They didn’t know me from a bar of soap. But eventually they did, we went into the studio, cut ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ and the rest was history.”
Most used all his experience and flair to achieve an astonishing success rate as a producer. He recorded some of the biggest pop acts of the Sixties. As well as The Animals, he produced Herman’s Hermits, Donovan, Lulu and The Yardbirds. When he set up RAK Records he continued his success into the Seventies with a roster of artists that included Suzie Quatro and Hot Chocolate.
It seemed like Peter Grant was being left behind. Among the first acts he signed was a band called The Flintstones and the all-girl group She Trinity, originally from Canada. Unusually for a girl group in this era they played their own instruments but changing personnel weakened the band, although Beryl Marsden, formerly of Shotgun Express, was briefly a member. She Trinity signed to Columbia and released three singles, including a spirited cover of Bobby Fuller’s ‘I Fought The Law’ retitled as ‘He Fought The Law’ but they were not a great success.
In the event, Peter Grant fared much better with a band whose music was poles apart from the blues or heavy rock. Unlikely as it may seem, The New Vaudeville Band – a pastiche Twenties act – would provide the unlikely stepping-stone for Peter’s management aspirations. At least they had a smash hit record and their success ensured he went back to America in triumph. The band also served to introduce him to another important figure in his life, the equally hard-nosed and pugnacious Richard Cole. A former scaffolder from north London, Cole would become Grant’s right-hand man in the excitement and battles to come. Peter had already come a long way from his humble beginnings in Battersea. Now he was about to embark on his greatest adventure.
Mickie Most: “At that time Peter was saying, ‘I want to get into management myself.’ So we formed a company called RAK Music Management. Peter and I were partners in this management company and it led to Led Zeppelin!”
* * *
* Charterhouse later became the birthplace of another successful rock band, Genesis.
* Collier’s Encyclopaedia.
* I Used To Be An Animal, But I’m All Right Now (Faber & Faber 1986).
3
STAIRWAY TO ZEPPELIN
“He was a big lump of jelly. You didn’t look at him and think ‘What a tough guy’ – you thought ‘What a big guy.’”
– Simon Napier-Bell
Under the stewardship of Peter Grant, The New Vaudeville Band hit the charts in 1966 with ‘Winchester Cathedral’. A mock Twenties ditty, complete with megaphone vocals, the song was a long way from rock’n’roll and more of a novelty item, hardly the kind of thing to interest a budding entrepreneur in Grant’s mould. Yet there were undercurrents of intrigue behind the scenes of this seemingly innocuous novelty outfit that might well have attracted Peter to them in the first place.
The New Vaudeville Band was the creation of London born songwriter and record producer Geoff Stephens. Session men had recorded the song and a touring band was hastily put together to exploit the hit. Peter was called in to knock them into shape. The record reached number four in the UK and, astonishingly for a novelty item steeped in nostalgia, it got to number one in America. The group enjoyed several more hits at home, including the chirpy ‘Finchley Central’ in 1967.
However, there was resentment from a rival outfit. The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band had been playing Twenties style comedy numbers since 1962. Their lead singer, Vivian Stanshall, was furious when the Bonzos’ trumpet player, Bob Kerr, defected to help form the chart topping Vaudevillians.
Bob Kerr insists that he didn’t quit the Bonzos to steal their act. He left because of arguments and was fed up with the band. “Vivian Stanshall had his own theory of why I left, because the New Vaudeville Band thing came up. But I left because I just couldn’t take it any more. I really wanted to run my own band. A week later, a chap called Henry Harrison, a drummer friend of mine, phoned me up and said: ‘Look, there’s this record that is going in the charts called ‘Winchester Cathedral’. I’ve got to get a band together and you’re the only bloke I know who can help me.’ Geoff Stephens, who wrote it, was a great mate of his. So I said, ‘Oh, sounds good to me.’
“So we went up to meet Geoff, who’d recorded it all and Henry had got some other guys together – but they didn’t look right. I suggested I could get some guys who could really fit in with that style of music. Three days later we were on Top Of The Pops doing it. I had the words strapped to the side of the Hammond organ so I’d remember how to sing it!”
Members of the Top Of The Pops orchestra had recorded ‘Winchester Cathedral’ with a secret vocalist (secret because he was signed to another label). Most of the subsequent Vaudeville Band songs were pre-recorded for them by session players. “There were rumours going around that Geoff Stephens had originally asked the Bonzos to do that record, but he never did. There was also this thing that Viv said we’d ‘stolen his show’, which wa
s not true at all,” says Bob. “He never saw the show, so he wouldn’t know.”
After doing Top Of The Pops and a couple of London gigs, Peter Grant took the New Vaudeville Band to America, where they appeared on the prestigious Ed Sullivan Show. The single had already been at number one, but as a result of their TV appearance, it went back to the top and sales exceeded seven million.
Americans just loved them. As the band’s album went gold, Peter was on a tour of the States with Bob Kerr and his mates, playing cabaret in Las Vegas and sharing bills with The Beach Boys and The Mamas & The Papas. ‘Winchester Cathedral’ was even covered by Frank Sinatra and Dizzy Gillespie. It was all a far cry from the pubs of London. Said Peter: “They only had one hit song but I took them on tour to places like Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada, playing on the cabaret circuit. They weren’t exactly a rock band, but it was a great experience.”
Even in this apparently idyllic situation there were problems that could be solved only by the smack of firm management. The band wanted more money. Following disagreements with Grant over pay and conditions, Bob Kerr was fired.* Meanwhile Grant called in Richard Cole to take charge of American touring operations. Cole enjoyed his stint touring with the New Vaudevilles, the experience cementing his relationship with Grant and standing both men in good stead for future expeditions to the States.