One Train Later: A Memoir (11 page)

But from the stage you get a panoramic view, and as the fetid air of the club singes the hair in your nose, you feel that the decline of the West is progressing nicely-the Hieronymus Bosch scene of a Saturday night with beer, scotch, vodka, rum, Mandrax, purple hearts, whites, blues, purples, smack, charley, dilated pupils, seizures, and money for sex playing out in their own sweet rhythm. With saxophones and Hammond organ blaring at my back, I bend strings and shoot snake-tongue lines out into the dark, roiling swamp, where they flick through the Saturday-night inferno of grinding bodies, jabbering talk, and pill-driven excess.

In some ways doing the all-nighters is more like bearing witness or providing the swan song to the decadence of late-night London. Staring into the murky wound before rne, I sometimes wonder-as the green hills of Dorset strobe across my memory-how the hell I came to be in this Dante's Inferno. But the moment passes and I continue to slur a seventh at some pilledup young honey whirling within the mob.

Johnny, for his own amusement, is usually the emcee on Friday and Saturday nights. He sports a razor scar on his left cheek that runs from his mouth to his ear that seems emblematic of the Gunnells and their background. There is much. whispered speculation about how he received it, but no one dares ask. He announces the bands as they arrive onstage to play their sets, and these intros are laced with deprecating acid humor that gets progressively worse as the night wears on and he becomes more and more inebriated. But Johnny is a true comedian, and his Cockney wit peppers the night with a spicy counterpoint to the enthusiastic efforts of the bands. Toward the end of the night, with red eyes, rolled shirtsleeves, and a sideways list, Johnny's intros become rambling and slurred. As he slouches over the microphone he picks on a girl in the audience and, instead of introducing the band, asks her with a soft, innocent look on his face if she is on the rag tonight or if she is getting any, and then staggers off the stage for another slug in the pit of the dressing room. But we always do good business for the Gunnels, and there is a. thread of mutual affection between us. It's a family of sorts, and being associated with them brings a veil of protection-Rik and Johnny's boys.

Sometimes, to the audience's delight, a visiting celebrity gets onstage with us for a song or two. At different times we have various Tamla Motown stars: Ben E. King, John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson, Eric Burdon, Long John Baldry, among others. The sit-ins with the band sessions, as they are known, have varying degrees of musical success. Ben E. King comes to sing "Stand by Me," and this is no problem because every musician knows this one and we pull off a decent backing job. But when Solomon Burke arrives onstage to a version of "Maggie's Farm," it's a different story. For a start, he is a huge, heavy man with a fierce look on his face, and as we start into the song he turns and snarls at me, "Louderlouder." I turn and crank the Fender amp up a bit more; he turns again, this time with a foam-flecked mouth: "Louder-much louder." I start shaking and turn the fucking amplifier up to ten, now not caring if I drown him out. Eventually he departs the stage to vociferous applause and not even a glance back in our direction. I feel utterly wrecked and it takes a couple of lagers, several pats on the back, and words of consolation from the rest of the band before I recover. John Lee Hooker sits in with us and plays his blues all on one chord with a couple of five-four bars thrown in for good measure. This fucks us all up, and afterward we surmise that it wasn't that he didn't know what he was doing but that it was very, very African.

Long John Baldry is a gay six-foot-seven folk-blues singer from the Marquee scene and is popular in the West End. A talented singer and guitarist and the possessor of a dry urban wit, he is fun to be around. As everybody seems to hang out with just about everyone else on the scene onstage and off, it's not long before we are in Long John's semifurnished flat in Earls Court, drinking tea and smoking dope. He makes it clear during the evening that he wants me in the closest possible sense. Being straight hetero, I point out to him through a blue cloud of Tibetan temple ball that not before the Red Sea parts for a second time would such an event occur. But from that night on, whenever he is around us at the Flamingo, Long John never fails to point out that he is ready for love.

This culminates one night when, even more inebriated than usual, he picks me up bodily and shoves his way across the densely packed floor, up the stairs, and out into Wardour Street, where he hails a cab and throws me inside. I protest and struggle vigorously the whole way, but it's useless: my efforts to free myself from the clutches of this giant are like a worm struggling in the beak of a crow, and it's only when he has me in the confines of the taxi that he relents and lets me go. I croak out a good night and leap like a piece of live bait back down the stairs to the relative safety of the Flamingo, happy that I am not going to be split in half in a seedy west London bedsit.

The womblike entrance of the Flamingo goes around a corner and down two lights of stairs, which like a spiral into Hades are a hazard to us, for somehow we always have to carry our Hammond organ down these stairs and across the crowded floor without dropping the lead coffin. The only way to do it is with a man at each corner, and there is a great deal of argument about who is on Hammond duty each night. It's amazing how musicians suddenly develop sprained wrists and bad backs when the time comes to lift a heavy weight. In these days the concept of help or roadies has not been thought of; we get a long way into our career before somebody has the bright idea of getting actual assistance, and it's a mighty big decision to actually pay out our hard-earned cash for such a service. But after a while we give in, mostly because of a brush with death on the point of a sharp blade.

One night we arrive as usual around eleven-thirty at the entrance to the club. Wardour Street is awash with a thick mob of pill-chewing mods, so dense in fact that getting from the back of the van and into the entrance of the Flamingo with drums, amps, and Hammond is a farce. The swirling sea of mods around us just doesn't seem to recognize that we are trying to cross six feet of pavement with a large heavy object that would crush a man like an egg if dropped, but as if by an act of God, one of the heavies from the club emerges and is threatening enough for the mass to part and let us through.

A reluctant pallbearer, I am on organ duty tonight and am hanging on like grim death to my corner, hoping the weight won't ruin the rest of my guitarplaying life or destroy my ability to father a child. We shuffle across the pavement and start making our way down the stairs with the Hammond, and halfway down we hear shouting and yelling from somewhere below, then two men come struggling around the corner, fighting their way up the stairs. We are on a steep angle, desperately hanging on to the Hammond with barely enough room to squeeze a mouse through as they reach us-two men intent on murdering each other. We press back against the wall like statues as they wrestle into our three feet of staircase, with one of them cursing in a thick Glaswegian accent, "You fickin' bastard," and then whipping out a knife and plunging it several times into the gut of the other man. So, I flash, this is how it ends, halfway down the stairs of the Flamingo, stabbed and crushed beneath half 'a ton of Hammond organ. Glasgow runs his dark whiskey-filled eyes over us; "Cunts," he spits, then takes off up the stairs while, groaning, the stabbed man slides down the stairs in the direction of the joyous dancing mob. The police arrive and we line up to give descriptions. Finally we are allowed to get on with the show, which we play with extra zest. By about 6:30 A.M. it's over and we wearily haul ourselves and our gear back out into the grey London light, our brains a strange turmoil of flashing blades and "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag."

Most of the bands playing around London eventually end up playing at the Flamingo also. Everyone likes to play in the clubs because it's such a vibrant scene and also smack in the middle of the West End. You can hang out with other bands, meet a willing girl, get stoned, and check out the action. The band you are in may fall apart, that's par for the course, and the club is where you can find out who is working and what's happening and get a sense of your own standing in the scene. We regularly share the stage with Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds, featuring the phenomenal Albert Lee; the Birds with Ronnie Wood; Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames; John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, featuring at various times Peter Green, Eric Clapton, and Mick Taylor; the Action; Fleetwood Mac; and the Pink Fairies.

Among guitarists, there is circumspect but fierce eyeballing of one another's playing. The electric rock guitar is still in the childhood stage, and we all creep forward together, feeding off one another's playing and only discussing it tentatively, not wanting to give too much away.

During this period I am still more influenced by jazz than by pop music. I'm into Kenny Burrell, Grant Green, and Wes Montgomery, my taste being more for bluesy soulful jazz on the guitar rather than the more direct electric Chicago blues style. But everyone mixes it up, and jazz, R&B, and rock and roll are all hybrid styles anyway. I work on playing with chord changes, phrasing, and time within harmonic frameworks that are outside of the standard pop song. I can't always insert it into the Big Roll Band repertoire, but I can usually get a few off during a night.

When the blues boom hits London and everyone starts doing the Eric, I keep playing the way I hear it, ignoring the bovine mentality that's spreading like a flu epidemic through guitarists around London. As well as jazz, I'm pulled toward another sound that's more esoteric. Indian music, the oud playing of Hamza el Din, the East European flavor of the guitarist Gabor Szabo: these sounds catch my ear and I start to experiment with weird open voicings on the guitar that I cannot put a name to.

In a well-publicized moment Eric Clapton leaves the Yardbirds and joins John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. Mayall, like us, is a fixture at the Flamingo, and we often do all-righters together. Being guitarists, Eric and I nod at each other, the way guitarists tend to, rather like medieval knights passing each other on horseback and acknowledging that the other fellow also has a weapon. Clapton gives off an air of intense seriousness that is really, really the blues as some of us refer to it, and it is an accepted fact that Eric has the blues deeper than anyone else. But his air of intensity and being lost in this music is seductive and is backed up by his great playing. Coupling intense volume and poetically bluesy phrasing, he creates an audience for himself alone. Undoubtedly he is the star of John Mayall's band. The songs are really just a framework for Eric to take off; and when he solos, the whole place moves. Graffiti with the words CLAPTON IS GOD start appearing on walls around London. Among white boys in London at least, he is the first to play this loud and distorted, to make the solos the high point of a set, and to create shock with the guitar.

About the time that we share a stage at the Flamingo, I acquire a new Gibson from a store on Charing Cross Road. When Eric sees me with it, a '59 Les Paul Sunburst, he asks where I bought it. I innocently tell him that they have another one on sale for eighty quid and he could go get it. At this time there is no market for these guitars, which in the future will go for $100,000, so it doesn't occur to me to whip back to the store and grab the other one. But Eric gets the other Les Paul and eventually changes the sound of rock guitar forever.

We become friends for a while and I drop over to his flat in Notting Hill; we go and get coffee and baklava nearby and talk about books, girls, and guitars. We trudge through the rainy streets of Marylebone, nudging each other at the achingly short miniskirts that pass by us, and then disappear into the fetid black of the cinema to watch Olivier act out the agonies of Richard III.

One night we meet after a gig in South London. There are a lot of fans hanging around, and within short order we pull two girls. We offer to drive them back to their flat, which is within striking distance. We arrive at their place and split off into two different rooms with the willing females and emerge about half an hour later, both from our respective corners, worthy of the title "lead guitarist." Driving back in my blue mini, Eric takes a long drag on his cigarette and remarks that we'll all be dead by the time we're thirty if we keep up this sort of behavior. I lean forward to turn up the pathetically underachieving heater and reply that I am already on an extended visa.

One morning in Notting Hill Eric puts on a record with some remarkable blues guitar. "Christ, that's great," I remark. "When dya do it?" "It's not me, it's Buddy Guy," he says. I sit down on the faded Turkish carpet and think, So that's where it comes from-the sound, the distortion, the vibrato. I am amazed; he's copied this sound and style perfectly and is now bringing it to a white English audience. It's not actually original unless it's the fact of being put through a white sensibility that makes it into something else, but it doesn't matter because Eric gets it across with conviction and intensity and in that sense he owns it. He often remarks during this time that he's not interested in pop music, that he is playing in a tradition, the blues. There is a kind of austerity to these remarks that seems to imply that everyone else is just skating around on the surface while he is in the gold mine.

Personally I admire Eric's philosophy and that he has tapped into a sort of guitar collective unconscious. But I have my own ideas and despite the new prevailing blues climate, like a fish swimming upstream, I stick to my own thoughts about music. I like harmonic change, weirder scales, asymmetry, and I still dig Monk. But Eric, with his simple but powerful style, has an enormous influence on guitarists in London and is emulated by eight out of ten players. Within a short time there are a great number of blues guitarists in London. Uniform in style and dress, they generally sport long hair, anoraks, and plimsolls. You imagine them in places like Hounslow and Ealing, cranking out a deep blues in their bedrooms while Mum downstairs tries to get the breakfast ready or Dad cuts himself shaving in the bathroom, distracted by the plangent whine of "Dust My Broom." The Les Paul becomes the guitar, and the London blues boom lifts off like a bent string at the fifteenth fret.