A taster from my forthcoming memoir:
GOLDEN PLAYGROUND: Summers of Love on the English Riviera.
STEPPING OUT (Blues Festival, November 1967)
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| Cousin Rick (right) and myself preparing for departure. |
I was still sixteen and Rick was fifteen, but we had done
proper jobs and earned our own money, such as it was, during the summer of ’67.
We had also entered the fringes of the worlds of blues and jazz and were
determined to see some of our heroes when they crossed the big water to play in
London that year.
Our budget was pretty much non-existent. We could book some
shows at the Hammersmith Odeon and a week’s sharing accommodation at the YMCA.
Rail travel, or even the Royal Blue bus would be out of the question. We had
hitched often enough between Torquay and Paignton, why not London?
As our parents fretted, we held our ground and gathered the
necessities that would ensure that the mission went ahead. Rick had an old
rucksack and a substantial coat. I managed to acquire a similar garment - an
Australian bush coat - and enquiries at school turned up a rucksack for me.
Its kind donor Henry Madge lived in Cary Park. His camping
equipment was very much of the time - none of the lightweight and lycra about
the rucksack he offered me. With its heavy-duty canvas and what seemed like a
steel girder frame, it took some carrying empty, so I was glad of a little time
to get used to wearing it before the great day.
Knowing we would be attending concerts, my mother ensured I
packed some decent clothes for the evenings, a jacket, some respectable
trousers and a selection of neatly-ironed shirts. Some time was spent working
out how best to place them in the rucksack, so they wouldn’t lose their crease.
Ever practical, she also issued me with a miniature bottle
of brandy, to be carried in the inside pocket of my coat - for emergencies.
We set off very early on the morning in question. A photo
was taken for evidence, and perhaps to remember us by. Once we had walked
beyond the cul-de-sac we would be lost from the family’s sight. Unless we
phoned home, no communication or monitoring of our whereabouts would be
possible from that point until we were together once more.
All those years of practice when we were out of sight and
out of mind somewhere on the estate or off in Bluebell Woods must have helped,
but there was a good deal of trusting to providence in my mother’s wistful farewell.
Rick and I gave a final wave as we disappeared into the
darkness beyond the streetlights and set our feet upon the road to London - the
Tolkienish road that goes forever on and on - the Torbay Ring Road for a start.
We heard our first car approaching from behind, passing the
Devon Coast Country Club, as we were about a hundred yards from our starting
point, so we practiced thumbing.
The car stopped immediately.
‘Where are you going, lads?’
‘London, for the Blues Festival.’
‘Jump in. ‘I’m going that way myself.’
This hitch-hiking lark seemed very easy.
He told us he was in the music business and had been
managing The Animals among others. That makes him either ex-Animals bassist,
Chas Chandler, whom I always believed he was, or Mike Jeffery, who took over
their management that year, and who would later take over (from Chas) the
management of Jimi Hendrix. When I came to write this, I allowed some doubts to
enter in and did as much research as possible on the two and their
relationship.
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| Chas Chandler |
In the final analysis, I have returned to my original belief
that it was Chas. Although I’m familiar with his face now from old footage of
the band, I think he more accords with the impression of the man who drove us
to London and even bought us lunch on the way. Mike Jeffrey was a much more
singular looking cove with glasses and long hair and would I think have been
more memorable.
It’s too late to check with either of them. Chas died soon
after a reunion gig with the band from an aneurism and Mike was killed in a
mid-air collision over Nantes.
In any case, I must express my gratitude to someone who
would doom themselves to a journey of over two hundred miles with a couple of
smartass kids and treat us with such kindness and interest
.
He dropped us in London and we set about finding our way to
the YMCA. This was when we discovered something that has proven true all my
life: Londoners have no idea where they are. They know which bus or underground
train will take them where they want to go, but don’t know where it is in relation
to where they are now.
One way and another, we arrived in Great Russell Street and
the YMCA was before us. We presented our papers to the man at the front desk
and he told us we were too early. Our room would not be ready for a couple of
hours.
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| YMCA Great Russell Street |
We asked him to put our bags behind his counter so we could
go out and get our bearings.
After a cheap café lunch, we explored the local area,
marvelling at the newly completed Centrepoint and Foyle’s famous music shop.
Our two hours up, we returned to the YM and asked for our
bags. A hatch opened and they were slung the full length of the foyer. Rick and
I did a double take as they flew past between us.
We were given our room number and made our way to the lift. I
think we needed floor 4, but the lifts were in an advanced state of psychosis
and took you to the top floor, the basement or anywhere in between without
consultation. Eventually we arrived on a floor near ours and made the final
approach by way of the stairs.
The room was pre-swinging London dark and grim with an
impression through the grimy window of unchanged and unchanging routine down
below. Modern Routemasters made their way among pre-war LT buses from which the
drivers still gave hand signals before pulling out and clippies often got off
to count people on at bus stops. Black taxis ran the gauntlet for spaces
between the buses, the odd horse and cart, Evening Standard vans and delivery
bikes, waved at and directed by a stout policeman in a cape and white gloves.
When I had come to visit with my mother half a dozen years
previously there were teddy boys among the passing parade of old soldiers and
pinstripers. Now there was a bit of colour about, the ‘swinging’ crew having
reached beyond Carnaby Street and the Kings Road.
When the beautiful art-deco Hammersmith Odeon first opened
its doors to a potential audience of three and a half thousand people it
commanded a generous corner position across the wide carriageway from St Paul’s
Church and its famous school. By the time we stood before it, forty odd years
on, the churchyard had been carved up, its incumbents disinterred and Ernie
Marple’s monstrosity of a flyover unceremoniously plonked across the view,
robbing the building of its form and elegance.
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| Hammersmith Odeon |
Rick and I had got there much too early, but better safe
than sorry. As we stood on the wide pavement surveying the supporting arches,
we got talking to a guy who would be attending the gig later that day. He told
us how he had met Bo Diddley at just that place when he was playing the UK.
He’d asked the great man for his autograph and if he would pose for a picture.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wallet of photos
- Bo Diddley standing normally, Bo Diddley standing on his head, Bo Diddley
doing a cartwheel.
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| Bo Diddely |
He’d hardly left us to go off and get ready for the show
when a Bedford Duple bus pulled up to the kerb. Inside was the who’s who of
blues legends who would be taking the stage that evening. No one was there to
meet them except Rick and me. There was Little Walter, Koko Taylor, Sonny Terry
and Brownie McGee - even the legendary Son House and Bukka White. Some of these
guys were powerfully old, Sonny Terry had been blinded in two separate
accidents and Brownie didn’t walk too well.
Rick and I helped them down from the bus and they signed our
programme for us - Son House and Bukka taking a very long time about it, Sonny
Terry took out an ink pad and stamped his autograph for us. I got to look after
Koko Taylor’s pie while she added her name to the roll of honour.
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| Koko Taylor |
Finally, with the aid of the bus driver, we managed to raise
someone from the venue to receive the artists and get them to much needed
hospitality and dressing rooms.
In those days there was a café opposite the theatre. As we
fortified ourselves for a long night, we looked around at other tables occupied
by blues legends. I guess the café was pretty well used to having famous
musicians pop across the road for a cup of tea or pie and mash. We thought it
was wonderful to see these heroes in such an English setting chatting about
still other heroes: ‘I was over to John Lee Hooker’s house the other night…’
The gig itself received mixed reviews, but to be in that
glorious venue listening to Walter’s amplified harmonica raising the rafters
and to sit in hushed reverence as Son House and Bukka White took us right back
to the birth of the blues - bottleneck and open chords on iconic steel guitars
- was more than enough for Rick and me.
And when the show ended, the feeling went right on. We
gathered alongside such luminaries as the Melody
Maker’s Chris Welch, whom we would meet in the same place at each gig we
managed to attend. Walter and his band were clearly happy. Drummer Odie Payne
was obviously the bus clown, playing tricks and jokes on the rest of the party.
Rick always had a mouth harp about him so, when we got to
meet Walter, he offered one to him.
At that point, the manager appeared at the stage door and
told everyone to move on. We feared this would mean an interruption of our
meeting, but Walter said: ‘You want us to move on, man; we’ll move on,’ and
came with us out toward the road.
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| Little Walter Jacobs |
He played a few note-bending phrases and regarded the
instrument quizzically. ‘Man! This harp’s gone!’
We asked him where they would be playing next. ‘Some town
out east,’ he told us: ‘Sweden.’
Over the next few nights we would witness some of the best
jazz and blues players in the world, and we got to meet all of them in that
hallowed alleyway beside the Hammy-O. Guitarists Larry Coryell, Barney Kessel
(with whom we had a long conversation) and George Benson, then a top jazz
picker (his singing career started much later) were there and, in my role of
porter to the stars, I held Sarah
Vaughan’s shopping bag while she signed autographs and posed for photos.
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| Barney Kessel |
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| Sarah Vaughan |
For us one of the greatest thrills was meeting blues guitarist
extraordinaire Buddy Guy. As we were talking to him, a car drew up to the kerb
and somebody approached him to say there was this guy called Jimi Hendrix
playing across town and the car had been sent to take Buddy to meet and jam
with him.
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| Buddy Guy |
We could have got into that car with Buddy. I think he was
more or less expecting us to. Idiots that we both were, we missed out and only
waved to him as the car drove away.
In his autobiography, Buddy says that he met Hendrix at the
Newport Jazz Festival. Technically, this series of shows was the Newport Festival
on tour. I can only report the way I heard it.
The housekeeping side of the trip was not quite the success
that the musical element had been.
On our first return to the YM, I opened the wardrobe to find
all my neatly pressed and packed shirts and the other contents of the rucksack
screwed up and strewn about. Nothing was missing, but this seemed a strange way
for the cleaners to behave. Rick thought it was hysterically funny and
immediately set about fitting it into the standard legend that everything would
go wrong and we’d wind up ‘bleedin’, bleedin’ in the gutter’. I don’t know why
this was so funny, but it made us laugh anyway and there seemed little to be
gained by complaining to the rude man on the desk who had launched our
belongings across the foyer in the first place.
Half a century later, in a rare access of honesty, Rick
confessed that it was he who had been responsible.
Before the week was half over, we were broke and starving,
so we reversed the charges to Rick’s parents - who had a telephone - with the
result that my parents wired some
money for collection at Soho post office.
We had been frequenting the wonderful Dobell’s record shop
in Charing Cross Road whenever we weren’t concert-going. The records, the books
and the magazines were a magic storehouse for us. Following the arrival of
telegraphed bounty, we could now become paying customers.
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| Felice Taylor |
I bought a copy of Billboard,
the only copy I ever saw. It was priced at a staggering eight shillings (40p),
but was so full of marvellous stuff from across the pond that I thought it was
worth it, even though it cost more than my other purchase - a single called ‘I
feel Love coming on’ by Felice Taylor, produced by some bloke called Barry
White. If truth were told, it was taken a bit at the trot, like those ‘live’
Motown albums that turned out to have been speeded up to fit on a side of an
LP. But its big attraction was that the B-side was the backing track minus
Felice, so we would be able to play or sing over it when we got back home.
By the end of the last concert, we were broke again, and had
to walk back to Great Russell Street from Hammersmith.
We had less than two shillings between us as we trudged
westwards the next morning - enough for a Mars bar and a couple of packets of
crisps. We knew we would have to walk to the outskirts of London before we got
a lift and we were looking at signs for Staines when we both subsided on the
grass verge and slept.
We awoke with a start to the sound of galloping horses - not
the Mongol hordes, but an outing of young nag-straddlers who were not expecting
people to be sleeping in their path. Fortunately we managed to arise without
frightening the horses and sat awhile in thought.
Neither of us felt inspired to continue, but just then I
remembered my mother’s miniature brandy. We took a slug each, hoisted our
burdens and trudged on.
As we proceeded the weather worsened - rain accompanied by a
mounting wind. As the downpour became heavier and the wind stronger, Rick
opened the umbrella that features in the evidence picture of our departure for
the first time. The wind turned it inside out, whipped the top off it and
smashed it against a nearby hedge, leaving him with only the handle.
Later, still trudging liftless through the storm, Rick’s
rucksack gave up the ghost and we were forced to remove its contents into
Henry’s heavy duty model and abandon it in another hedge.
The remaining rucksack was now even heavier and more cumbersome,
but at least we could take turns carrying it.
At this point we ate the Mars bar and crisps. The winter
afternoon had closed in and it would soon be dark.
The sky was black as we staggered alongside the beginnings
of a dual carriageway to be met with a sign that said ‘No Stopping; Clearway’.
We were both freezing, our feet almost too cold to ache, and we’d done in the
brandy. Now there was nowhere to go. We had no way of knowing how long the
‘clearway’ lasted, so we stopped where we were and dropped the rucksack on the
grass verge.
I don’t know how long we waited; how many times a slowing
vehicle brought hope that was soon dashed.
Finally, miracle of miracles, a lorry stopped. It was all we
could do to climb into the cab, and be grateful that lorry drivers are not as
particular about having soggy Herberts in their vehicles as private motorists.
He was going to Salisbury, which at least was a place, so we
signed up for the duration. We were both completely exhausted and slept most of
the way, in my case more than once on the driver’s shoulder, waking with a
start.
The kind man deposited us in the middle of the city. We knew
we had no strength to continue through the night, so we made for the police
station.
As we were given some nice hot strong tea and parked next to
the radiators we managed to resist the temptation to burst into tears and passed
on through chattering teeth the details of Rick’s parents and their telephone
number.
Surprise, surprise! It was not Rick’s doting parents in one
of John’s brand new company cars who turned up to rescue us at six o’clock in
the morning, but my mum and dad and brother Pete in my dad’s self-maintained
Austin A60 automatic. I need not tell you how delighted we were to see them.
Thanks and farewells to the Wiltshire constabulary, who continued to occupy a
special place in my heart until one of their cameras popped off at me on the
A303 sometime n the next century.
Dad took us all straight to a Little Chef where the no
longer condemned men ate a hearty breakfast. The world seemed a little over
coloured, but we had survived our ordeal and were full of stories.
Fed and watered, we put our coats over us and settled down
in the Austin’s red leather rear seat, while Dad turned the starter. Nothing.
He moved the little gear selector from ‘drive’ to ‘neutral’ to ‘park’ and back
again. Were we doomed to be broken down after all that?
He opened the bonnet and checked for obvious problems,
clouted the starter motor with a vicious looking spanner and scratched his
head.
Suddenly something agricultural - Jeep, Land Rover? - too
early for a Toyota or Nissan - bumped onto the car park. ‘Do you need a tow,
mate?’
‘It’s automatic,’ my dad explained.
‘Should work if we can get it up around twenty.’ He rummaged
in the back and came out with a stout rope.
Dad looked doubtful but the options were few. ‘Everybody
out!’ he barked, like Miriam Karlin in the Rag Trade, and we trailed our
blanketing coats back into the Little Chef.
Soon the tow rope was connected, the road cleared and the rescuer
gunned his monster truck. A lurch and the A60 was after him. They were actually
doing fifty plus, a tow-rope’s length apart, when it sprung to life.
Dad was a bit white around the gills and more inclined to
regard his saviour as a ‘bloody idiot’ once the politenesses had been exchanged
and he was out of earshot, but he was back behind the huge, spindly wheel and
we were on the road again, and would be home in the beds we sometimes thought
we would never see again by lunchtime.
And we were in them for several days before we were ready to
contemplate more adventures.
