Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life

by Graham Nash

  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.

  After our set, a young, good-looking guy came up to us and introduced himself. He was Joe Abrams, the son of a man who owned the biggest newsstand in Manchester, about two hundred yards from the Bodega. At the age of fifteen, Joe had left school to help his father sell newspapers and magazines to the thousands of workers who passed by there every day. Joe happened to play the drums, and he came into the club to check out our act. “You and Allan are real good,” he said to me, “but you need a band.”

  “What do you mean we need a band?” I said, getting defensive. “We’re doing great together. Allan and I are each making five pounds a night. We don’t need anybody else.”

  “Yeah you do. You need a drummer, a bass player, and a lead guitarist. Now, I happen to be the great drummer you need, and beyond that you need a bocking.”

  Now I was really getting in his face. “What the fuck are you talking about—a bocking?”

  “No, no,” he said. “You need Pete Bocking in your band.”

  “Oh yeah? What do we need this guy for?”

  Joe Abrams smiled—he finally had me on the hook. “Because he can play every solo you’ve ever heard, every Buddy Holly solo, every Gene Vincent solo, all the Little Richard stuff …”

  “Well, you know,” I said, “let’s go meet this Pete Bocking.”

  The three of us immediately made for a house in Didsbury, on the outskirts of Manchester. Even today it’s hard to describe Pete Bocking. He was unlike any musician I’d ever met before—or since. He was shy and introverted, he rarely spoke above a whisper, and he was already bald at the age of seventeen. He wore sunglasses and a dark suit with sleeves that were too long and he smoked like a chimney. And he carried this rectangular case that he put on the floor in a ceremonious way.

  “What’s in the case?” I asked, without expecting too much.

  Bocking didn’t say a word as he flipped open the case, and—Good God! A Stratocaster! The first Fender Stratocaster I ever laid eyes on. I’d heard plenty about them, but that was about it. No one I knew in Manchester had one. They were too expensive—more than £170—but Pete had saved up and got this beauty, sunburst and sleek as a surfboard. I could tell from the way he handled it how special it was. And then he began to play. He didn’t even plug it in, he just played it acoustically, but I could hear the magic in his touch. He played all the solos that we loved, and with style. He was everything Joe Abrams cracked him up to be.

  I turned to Allan and said, “Joe is absolutely right—we need this kid.” And I knew Allan felt the same way. We’d been very comfortable as a duo; we had two little guitars and a whole lot of gumption. But we saw what was coming. We wanted to have a rock ’n’ roll band, and Pete Bocking on lead, Joe Abrams on drums, and their friend Butch Mepham, who played bass, were the guys who could help make it all come true.

  We became the Fourtones, even though there were five of us. The Fourtones: my very first band. At the outset, we stuck to “complicated skiffle”—instrumentals and the Ventures kind of stuff. Soon enough, however, we drifted into American R&B: the Coasters, Barrett Strong, Arthur Alexander, artists like that, with our trusty Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly set mixed in. Allan and I loved the fact that Joe and Butch could keep a groove, but we were always waiting for Bocking’s solos. He was one of those guys who never played the same solo twice. He was that good. And during our sets, Clarkie and I would glance at each other and go: “Oh fuck—solo time,” then we’d edge over toward Pete and practically inhale his fretwork. What a feeling! With the Fourtones, Allan and I had finally tapped into some incredible energy. We’d still do Everly Brothers and skiffle, but with a beat behind us and Pete Bocking’s solos, we were on our way at last, ready to rock ’n’ roll.

  THE FOURTONES TURNED out to be a pretty good band. We played a lot of local gigs, almost every weekend, and began to draw a faithful following in the north. One of the benefits of being a good rock ’n’ roll band in the late 1950s was that it was obvious that girls loved musicians. There was always a great-looking flock that clustered near the stage, and all sorts of eye contact would go ping-ponging back and forth. But one of the pitfalls was that if someone’s boyfriend was watching his girl flirt with one of us, you usually stood a chance of getting the shit kicked out of you afterward. Bob Joy was one of those guys. He was an African American kid who had a habit of carrying around a silver dollar. He would look at you, flick it high in the air, and catch it … flick it high and catch it … over and over, flick it high and catch it, until he had your attention. Then he would flick it higher than before, and as your face went up to follow it, he would head-butt you as hard as he could. One night, Allan and I were carrying our amps to the bus as it was just pulling out, but somehow I got left behind. With Bob Joy, who was waiting there as well. That fucker was out to get me, and that silver-dollar-head-butt combo left an impression on my soul. It was dangerous, man. Jealousy was not to be taken lightly. It was a lesson, hard learned, that I wouldn’t soon forget.

  AS THE SIXTIES dawned, it was great being on my own, earning a decent wage, and playing music to crowds a few nights a week. Few eighteen-year-olds can claim as much. But sometimes all it takes is a chance encounter to remind you how much of a kid you really are.

  Sometime after the new year began, I spotted an ad in the Manchester newspaper: the Everly Brothers, live and in concert, at the Free Trade Hall. Oh, you bet I was going to be there. Allan, too. And we made up our minds that some way, somehow, we were going to meet our heroes. It was a dream of ours that wouldn’t quit. Of course, we never thought it would happen. You know how those things go. But we talked out a plan that seemed logical at the time and determined to give it our best shot.

  The night of the show we were eight miles high—adrenaline pumping, heart beating outside my chest. We had great seats, maybe eight rows back. My sister Elaine was with us. Word was floating around that Phil and Don weren’t speaking to each other, and I had a fantasy of leaving Elaine there in the seats with Allan and taking Phil’s part if he didn’t show. But when the lights came up, there they were, together, just as we’d hoped. And they were fucking fabulous. Did all their hits. Two acoustic gray Gibsons, strumming them like mad. They sounded incredible. They sang around one mike, perfect balance. And those voices! C’mon, who did anything like that? They were just stunning.

  Their drummer that night was an eighteen-year-old kid named Jimmy Gordon, who later played on “Marrakesh Express.” Things do tend to come full circle.

  After the concert, the place cleared out pretty quick. It was a school night for a lot of the audience, and besides, it wasn’t cool for girls to be out that late, so we put my sister on a bus headed home. She didn’t mind, she was on cloud nine. During the show Phil Everly broke a string, and I darted to the stage and got it for her. I’m sure she stared at it all the way home, because I know she still has it to this day. After she was safely on the bus to Salford, Clarkie and I put our plan into effect.

  There was no tour bus on the street by the theater. Okay, that narrowed things down. We figured the Everlys had to be staying in Manchester overnight, probably at the Midland Hotel. It was the best place in the city and a well-known rendezvous, where Rolls met Royce in the 1920s, about a hundred yards from the Free Trade Hall. A uniformed doorman stood sentry on the front steps. In my best Mr. Cool guise, I approached him and said, “Are the Everly Brothers in?” Incredibly, he fell for it. “No, not yet,” he said, a
nd we knew we had them.

  Clarkie and I took up position near the steps. I glanced at the clock tower across the street: 10:00. The next time I looked it was 11:45. The buses stopped running at midnight. It was typical north of England weather—pissing down and brutally cold—but there was no way we were giving up the quest. We knew we were going to have to walk the nine miles back to Salford in total darkness, but so what? It’s the Everlys, man. Sometime after one o’clock, I spotted them coming around the corner. They were a little drunk; they’d been to a nightclub.

  “There they are!” I hissed at Clarkie. “Oh my God, they’re actually walking toward us. Fuck! Now what?”

  It was obvious that they’d have to pass us because we were planted at the foot of the steps by the front door. One look at their faces and you knew they’d recognized us as fans.

  “We don’t want to bother you,” I said, “but I’m Graham and this is my friend Allan, and we sing together. We sing like you—we copy your style.”

  “That’s nice,” Don said. “Are you any good?”

  “We think we are,” Clarkie told him. He explained about our band and how we played shows around Manchester.

  “Hey, Graham and Allan, keep doing it. Things’ll happen,” Phil said.

  Graham and Allan. Phil and Don called us Graham and Allan! It was Allan and me and Phil and Don standing on the steps of the Midland Hotel, talking music. Giving us encouragement. Instead of brushing us off and going to bed, they talked to us for what seemed like forty minutes, but it could have been forty seconds for all I know. Either way, it changed our lives. It was a big moment for me. After that night, I swore to myself that if I ever became famous and met fans, I would talk to them like the Everly Brothers talked to me and validated my very being. Today, if my bus is pulling out from a gig and I see fans standing there waving, I’ll stop the bus and talk to them for a few minutes. Take it from me, you just never know!

  Before we realized it, the Everly Brothers were gone, just like that. Clarkie and I were beside ourselves, clapping each other on the shoulder and hopping up and down. “Holy shit! Did that really happen? Man, I can’t believe it!”

  It kept us going for weeks. I was especially knocked out and took all their advice to heart. One of the things we talked about that night was writing songs, whether it was a cool thing or not. The Everly Brothers already had a stash of fabulous material to their credit, so obviously Allan and I were going to give it a try. They told us not to overthink it, just—you know, let it rip. A few months later, we finally got up our nerve.

  We were camped out on a park bench outside the Regent Road Baths, a local swimming joint a few blocks from my home. We’d been across the street to a bakery, where we’d gotten some cheap day-old bread, and launched right into our first original tune. We didn’t even have guitars with us, so we had to remember it: “Hey, What’s Wrong with Me?” Not a masterpiece, but that didn’t matter. It wasn’t bad for a first shot at songwriting, and it eventually became the B-side of our very first record. It gave us enormous satisfaction to know that we could write a pretty decent rock ’n’ roll song. I loved the whole creative process—combining personal feelings with poetry and music—and suspected that, in time, I could become a good songwriter.

  Allan and I continued to work at it, to write together, and the Fourtones got really tight. There was a lot of great rock ’n’ roll in our sets: “Mr. Moonlight,” “Anna,” “Mickey’s Monkey,” “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” “Stay,” “Poison Ivy,” songs that were so much fun to play. Eventually, in late 1960, we made our first acetate at the local record store, Johnny’s Roadhouse. One Saturday morning, we dragged our equipment up to the second floor, where they had a paneled room with egg cartons on the walls to absorb and deflect sound. Strictly a rinky-dink affair. All five of us chipped in for the session, scraping together four shillings, and did three songs: the Everly Brothers’ “Cryin’ in the Rain,” “Wimoweh,” and a song we’d written called “Learn How to Twist.”

  But teenage bands don’t last forever. In time, the Fourtones went their separate ways. Joe, Pete, and Butch moved on, and Allan and I began working with a different set of guys: Vic Farrell, who later became a pretty famous guitar player called Vic Steele; Eric Haydock, who’d played bass with Kirk Daniels and the Deltas; and Don Rathbone, a decent drummer to speak of, but, more important, his father owned a mortuary, and that allowed us use of its van.

  One night in 1962 we were playing a gig at the Two J’s on Lloyd Street by Albert Square. It was an incredible little place on the ground floor of an old building, one of the first coffee bars in Manchester to feature live music. In a later incarnation, it became famous as the Oasis, which is where the eponymous band got its name. Anyway, I was working there in the afternoon, serving coffee, cooking burgers, wiping tables, cleaning up. I’m not even sure I got paid for doing that; I just wanted to be part of the club. I told the owner, Jack Jackson, that our band was worth a listen, and he agreed to let us audition. Graham Clegg, who was the emcee, grabbed us just before we went on.

  “I’m about to introduce you,” he said. “What’s the name of the band?”

  Good question. We didn’t have a name at this point and went off in the corner to mull it over.

  “What about the Deadbeats?” Don said, taking a cue from the family business.

  Deadbeats: I thought that sounded kind of cool. Clarkie, thankfully, didn’t agree. “We’re not Deadbeats,” he said. “We’re more fun than that.”

  Someone else—and I honestly don’t remember who—thought we should name the band after one of our favorite singers. In an instant we all agreed, and I went off to deliver the verdict.

  A few minutes later, we were gathered at the side of the postage-stamp-size stage when Graham Clegg stepped forward and leaned into the mike.

  “Why don’t you give a nice round of applause to a local band,” he announced, “—the Hollies!”

  chapter4

  THe HOLLIES HIT THAT STAGE AT THE TWO J’S AND we never looked back. Ready to go for broke as a band, we found our groove right away, and it transformed us into something intense and exciting. You put five guys onstage who can play together well, man, that’s when all the planets align. It’s like walking for the first time or riding a two-wheel bike. You get your legs—and you go. There’s no stopping you after that. It’s like a religious experience. Everything just clicks.

  The sound we made onstage, the energy that came pouring off us, was fantastic. And our vocals—the harmony structure that Allan and I had perfected—pulled everything together in a tidy package. The songs we did weren’t anything special—every band in England played the same basic set—but the Hollies managed to give them a unique sound. And besides, we were cool, we had a certain mystique. Allan and I had attitude up the wazoo, and Eric Haydock, our bass player, was a real piece of work. He was the James Dean of the band, moody and surly, but a real north of England lad. He had a six-string Fender bass, which was as offbeat as Eric, and all of that just added to our appeal.

  The more clubs and dances we played, the better we got. We’d go anywhere, play anywhere we could. Nowhere in the north was off-limits. From Blackpool to Stoke, you name it, we played it. We had wheels, Don’s van, that’s all it took. It’d cruise by Kenyon’s after Allan and I were done working, and we’d drive two or three hours to Stoke and play the King’s Hall. Often we wouldn’t get home until three in the morning, then do it again the next day … and the next. We did that for several years, didn’t think anything of it. When you’re young and playing rock ’n’ roll, time becomes irrelevant.

  So much music was storming through the north of England. Every town we rolled into, there were bands playing gigs. Those days, it seemed like there was one on every corner. Manchester had its share of good bands: Johnny Peters and the Rockets, Pete MacLaine and the Dakotas, Herman’s Hermits, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Freddie and the Dreamers. But I think there were more bands per capita in Liverpool than
anywhere else. They were louder and tougher than the groups we were used to in Manchester. More merchant seamen there, more violent street gangs, more Teddy Boys, all of whom were scary. You didn’t fuck with kids from Liverpool. They’d beat the shit out of you. Even so, we kept our eyes on everything that was going on there. That city was crawling with bands who were already attracting attention in the south: the Big Three, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, the Swinging Blue Jeans, the Fourmost, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, the Searchers, and, of course, the granddaddy of them all, the Beatles.

  I first saw the “Beatles” in Manchester of all places, which was an eye-opener as far as gigs went. It was at the Two J’s, which had just changed its name to the Oasis. They were scheduled to play that night. They came through the front door about three in the afternoon to set up their equipment, and every girl in there stopped dead in their tracks. Man, it was like four Marlon Brandos had walked in: John, Paul, George, and Pete. They had an innate, primordial swagger. Aside from the raw energy they put out, they looked fantastic. They had just come back from Hamburg and were dressed in black leather with that Beatle haircut. What a sight! A total coolness emanated off them, like a Young Riders kind of vibe. You know, they’d swing the door open and they’d all be standing there while the dust settled around them. They hadn’t even played a note, and the girls would swoon and faint. Fuckin’ fantastic.

  The Hollies played double bills with the Beatles a few times. In 1962, at Stoke-on-Trent, we shared a gig at the King’s Ballroom. After soundcheck, I was standing around the ballroom backstage when John and Paul came up to me. “Hey, Graham, want to hear a new song?” Now, I’m always interested in a new song, but this was a new Beatles song. Interested?—take a wild guess. So they gave me what musicians call a total ear fuck: John and Paul on either side of me, with John playing the guitar, and they sang: The world is treating me baaaaa-aaad, misery. What a moment for me. John and Paul doing their trademark two-part harmony in the purest form, like the Everly Brothers, but different. The minute I heard it, I knew it was a smash hit. And later the Hollies went on tour with Helen Shapiro, who had a hit with it. The world treating them baaaaa-aaad—not in this lifetime.