One Train Later: A Memoir (5 page)

As I get back on the twentynine bus to go home at the end of the afternoon, my head is swimming with guitar licks. I wanted to stay at Eddie's and play on through the night, but it's getting late; I have homework and my mum will be getting anxious. The conductor arrives at my seat and asks me where to. "Nashville," I reply dreamily, staring out the window into the rainy English night and the sputtering neon of Brown's fish-andchip shop.

Sometimes I go over to Carl Hollings's house. Carl is an Elvis fan, and that is the only music he will play or listen to, anyone who doesn't like Presley getting a bloody nose for lack of respect. I prefer to stay on Carl's good side, and we sprawl on a fake fur rug in front of his mum's imitation coal fire-which features actual flickering flames-and croak along with the El, singing "Teddy Bear" or "Heartbreak Hotel." Other times, in a more pensive mood or depressed by homework, we get serious and play his EP Peace in the Valley, El's spiritual side coming through in the old-style hymns he sings with such sincerity. When we're not listening to the King, Carl and I sometimes go into the town center and try to nick sweets from Woolworth's while we hum along with Neil Sedaka in the background singing "Oh Carol."

There's a boy a year ahead of me named Peter Jones who some of the kids say is the best guitar player in school. He has this reputation because apparently he can play the intro to "Move It," which is a hit by Cliff Richard and the Shadows, but he won't show it to anybody, so I get friendly with him with the ulterior motive of capturing this lick. We get chummy and one afternoon after school he invites me to his house to have a session in his mum's front room. We play for half an hour, strumming along in unison on the simple chords that we know, and then I ask him if by any chance he knows the intro to "Move It." Oh yeah, comes the nonchalant and unsuspecting re ply. He quickly rips it out, a very simple double stopping in fourths on the E and B strings ending on the E major chord. It's a knockout, this simple lick that seems to contain everything for which I lust: the blues, sex, glamour, electric guitar, and the far-off shores of America. But casually, as if I already vaguely know it, I say, "Oh, I get it, yeah-now I remember," for now that I have seen it, I possess it, and a new guitar door opens with the light of heaven pouring through.

With this lick under my fingers, it seems like a godlike coincidence when it's announced that they-Cliff Richard and the Shadows-are coming to town. All of us aspiring young guitarists go because Cliff and his group are about the nearest thing we have in England to Elvis or anything from the United States. They are on at the Winter Gardens, where previously I have been only on school outings to hear Sir Charles Groves conduct the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. The show, about an hour and a half in duration, is divided into two parts, with an intermission halfway through so that the proprietors can flog ice cream, chocolate, and orangeade. During the first half, naturally enough, the guitarist wannabes in the audience never take their eyes off of Hank Marvin with his red Stratocaster. Hank is already a guitar hero, although that phrase hasn't yet been coined. Black horn-rimmed glasses a la Buddy Holly make him cool, an interesting prototype nerd and the perfect nonthreatening foil to Cliff, who is a good-looking Elvis clone. We all think that Hank is a great guitarist, and to a man we all want to be him. But he's a long way in front of us, and the Shadows are already having hits on their own with instrumental pieces like "Apache." They play a pleasant English variant of surf music, pretty melodies played with a nice, clean twangy sound, like Dick Dale or the Ventures, but somehow lacking the grit of the original. Another thing about the Shadows that impresses us all is a little dance step they have worked out when backing Cliff. It's a neat backward two-step that makes a circle and can be repeated infinitely. Of course, we all ape it and try it when we practice; sometimes we even practice it with tennis rackets or a cricket bat, and it still looks cool.

During the intermission we pile out of the theater for a breather, and I separate myself from the mob for a moment to cogitate on what Hank is doing up there. I wander toward the back of the theater, and to my amazement standing there like Zeus is the man himself. "Hank, my G-G-God," I stutter, and I scream out, "H-a-a-a-a-n-k," and propel myself toward the skinny guitarist like an F-16. What Hank sees coming toward him is hard to be sure of, but while it is actually a slight fourteen-year-old with an ear-toear grin, I think for Hank the boy has morphed into a thousand-pound rhino or the Incredible Hulk because a look of cold white terror passes across the lead guitarist's face and he takes off like a reebok.

I zoom after him like a heat-seeking missile, the word autograph strobing across my brain like a red alert. Hank tears down into Bournemouth Square, shoots around it and back again toward the Winter Gardens. It's peculiar, to say the least, because it's only the two of us running, there are no other fans in sight, just the two of us, a bespectacled guitarist being pursued by a small boy at full tilt past bus stops, queues of bored-looking people, the upper pleasure gardens, and various assorted litter bins stuffed with ice-cream wrappers, old newspapers, cigarette stubs, and the shit of seagulls. Hank runs and I run. It becomes dreamlike, a film in slow motion-the world falls away, and I am pursuing not only Hank Marvin but the guitar itself, which seems far away and suspended in amber.

"Hank," I yell-my voice blending with the screech of the overhead gulls that wheel above us like rats with wings-"pleeeeeeeease." We shoot back toward the theater and my hero finally pulls over near a large rhododendron bush, panting like a racehorse at the end of eight furlongs. "Oh, alright," he gasps. I proffer my grubby little program, and Hank smiles in a dazed way and scribbles his name. I thank him, and he disappears back into the theater. Several years later when I sit down in a music shop in the West End with Hank one afternoon and exchange pleasantries, somehow I don't have the heart to mention our Keystone Kops chase a few years earlier, as it might have sullied the moment when I finally met one of my heroes on not quite, but almost, equal terms.

Two

BRIDGEHAMPTON, AUGUST 18, 1983

I get up from the piano and stretch-what bloody time is it anyway? I remember that there is a clock in the hallway and I go to discover with a nasty jolt that it's barely nine A.M. This is horribly early; I don't have to be at the gig for fifteen hours, but it's only fucking Shea Stadium tonight (only the biggest gig) and I have to go back to bed. I climb back up the stairs and return to my room, pick up my guitar, and get into bed with it. The guitar lies next to me with its head on the pillow. I run a hand over its scarred surface, caressing the warm wood. There's the metaphor, I think dozily, there's the marriage. It's to this, this bloody thing. I lean back on the pillow with the guitar across my chest, and strum a few gentle chords that make me dreamy. Big one tonight-you'd better practice.... Lying hack in the sheets, I run through some chord passages that are as familiar as old friends, always there when you want them.

Music and the suspension of time ... I pick up a pen at the side of the bed and write down the phrase. Time ceases to exist when you play-collapses.... You play in ... real time.... Extemporization means to play outside of time ... getting lost in the instrument, following your fingers, tracing a line of ' thought out onto the f rets and strings, letting it become a maze through which you wander-learning to play means learning to forget yourself, to disappear into the thing you are doing. Like an act of meditation-the instrument is a sacred space you always return to. Just practicing is enough. This has been my touchstone since the first obsessive years as a teenager, when I would sit in my bedroom at home and practice ten hours at a stretch, lost in the guitar.

In the first year or so I learn from other kids and the book my uncle gave me, but the great inspiration of the week is a radio program called Guitar Club, which is on at six-thirty every Saturday night. It's hosted with dry English humor by Ken Sykora and features the best British guitar talent-players such as Diz Dizley, Ike Isaacs, and Dave Goldberg. I never miss it. I listen intently and after a while I notice something that sounds like a crying or laughing sound in the middle of solo passages. I wonder what it is and how they do that. One day while practicing I accidentally push the B string over sideways and then release it to its correct position on the fret, and I hear the string make the crying sound I've heard on the radio and I almost fall on the floor. I have just played my first blues note! After that, I can't wipe the smirk from my face as I bend the strings when I am around other kids with guitars. Most of the guitarists on Guitar Club are jazz players whose playing-typical of the timecomes out of Charlie Christian and bebop, and I am knocked out by the effortless way they rip out solos. My fourteen-year-old response to this is from the gut; I have to get this stuff, no matter what it takes. This is the path to the stars. Most of my friends are content to get the hang of a few Shadows tunes, but I take the high road, sit on the edge of my bed, and struggle into the night.

On Sunday afternoon at two o'clock there's a TV show with vocalists, big-band numbers, and various soloists. One is the guitarist Dave Goldberg, and munching on a Birds Eye fish finger, I wait for his solo spot when I can watch his fingers dance across the pearloid double parallelograms of his Gibson ES 175. My mum usually stands there with a huge pile of ironing, murmuring little pieces of encouragement like "You'll be able to do that one day, love-just keep practicing," and then runs the iron down my cotton shirtsleeve as if heating it up for my future.

I spend hours in my bedroom hunched obsessively over my guitar, trying to sound like the records that I play over and over. Sometimes I think about girls and feel faint as I drown in a fantasy of women and music, and then I feel like a prisoner. I meet a kid named Mike, who plays guitar and also likes jazz. He invites me over to his house and we listen to his one Tal Farlow record together. He points out things to me about the guitarist's phrasing, and it thrills me to have found someone who is as excited as I am about this music. We turn up at each other's house with our guitars and practice together, swapping licks and trying to accompany each other on "Autumn Leaves" or "All the Things You Are," although we haven't really got the chords figured out. And we don't have the deep swing feel yet, so it doesn't sound like much. But we love it anyway and enjoy talking and studying the pictures on the back of our few records: cool Americans with great-looking guitars, dark suits, and button-down collars. We want to be like that, play like that, dress like that, and maybe this is the first inkling of what will later be called Mod.

Slowly I build my collection of LPs until I have a grand total of eight. They sit on the windowsill beneath damask curtains, and I stare at them and feel like a king. Holding my breath, I pull the precious fuliginous object from the sleeve, check it for imperfections, flick at it with my sleeve, and then lower it into place on the spindle that rises like a miniature cathedral from the center of the player. I set the volume and then gently lower the tone arm into place and nervously find the passage by dropping the stylus point into the black until I find it, carefully noting its distance from the perimeter of the disc so that I can find it again. I sit on the floor by the fireplace of my bedroom, playing them at 16 revs per minute instead of the prescribed 33%;. Now I learn the solo by repeatedly dropping the needle into this spot, trying to match my notes to the player's. The disc spins like a black sun below me, and out comes the solo, a full octave below the speed at which it was recorded. Sometimes, if it is a slower passage, it sounds like a wolf howling into the night and I imagine the player drunk and staggering down a dark street.

This playing of LPs at half speed is a fairly common practice at the time, and if you want to learn the fancy stuff, this is how you do it. But I get better at it, become more adept at copying the phrasing and the flow of the musicians I am listening to. Sometimes it is beyond me, I can't always hear the intervals. I make mistakes, become frustrated but gradually get faster and begin to recognize patterns, grasp the vocabulary, and get the lick that always works over a minor seventh chord.

The neck of the guitar becomes a territory of chords, melodic lines, shapes, and colors, and the grid of strings and frets fills my head as if from a dream. I talk with others; we are all after the same thing: the flow, the cascade, the ripple and stream, the notes that rise like highlights over the burnt umber harmony below, the jazz improviser's swerving, reacting, parrying, and dancing lead. His ability-like an actor-to be sad, jubilant, poignant, and earthy. The Taoists described the act of meditation as facing an unsculpted block of time, and the musician as he extemporises creates a dream, a suspended state, a place that has slipped from the grasp of the ordinary; at the end of a good solo with the last phrase appearing as the final blossom of the first, the audience seems to wake as if from a trance.