One Train Later: A Memoir (9 page)

Rebellion is still worth having a go at because it's not yet an over-thecounter item. In a few years the corporate world will suck up everything from the underground and brand it with a logo; coolness will be obtained by drinking sugary caffeinated confections, wearing prewashed jeans and sneakers made by people in the Third World. But on the beach as I hand five pennies' change back from an ice-cream-covered shilling, the underground is being raised into white consciousness by a few poets in the United States such as Kerouac and Ginsberg and Gary Snyder and William S. Burroughs, who take it from black culture, the jazz scene, and Buddhism. I make my way toward the pier, thinking about what I will practice tonight and that I must wear shades at all, times from now on.

One night I go with Nigel to a club called with a disarming lack of originality the Blue Note. Every Friday night a quintet of ex-London jazz musicians set up and play in a local hotel, and when I hear the quintet roar through a repertoire of Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, the MJQ, Miles Davis, and Monk, my confusion about whether it is beat and hip to play music fly out the window. The music is so inventive and bursting with joy that it wipes out all concerns about being cool-this is what I want. This is it.

Although I am still in the early stages, I can improvise my way through standard chord changes, more by a visual interpretation than with full harmonic knowledge. I begin going to the club every weekend, and with pretty girls in the crowd and the surging solos, it becomes the high point of the week. I pluck up the courage one night to ask their sax player if I can sit in with them. Alan, the group leader, is pleasant but sarcastic and I think rather amazed that one so young could have the balls to propose such a thing. He kindly demurs but asks if I would like to play during their intermission.

I begin a long series of appearances in which I try out all number of trios, duos, and whatever I can cobble together for Friday night. All through the week I wait tremulously for the moment when I will get up and play during the break. This moment will be preceded throughout the evening by Alan Melly's mock solemn announcements that a living legend is to appear later in the evening, to be followed by a fan club meeting afterward in the telephone kiosk across the road. This is usually greeted by a fair amount of hilarity, but the result is that I become a pet feature of the club and taste very minor celebrity. Gradually, instead of heading straight to the bar, people begin stopping to see what I will do this week. As this goes on, Alan takes to including my name in the local ads for the club, and each week it is different: "Tonight Andy Summers plays West Coast blues" or "From New York City-the Andy Summers onetet" or, most winningly, "Andy Summers plays the Mao Tse-tung Songbook."

Every week I am forced to put together whatever musicians I can find to pull off this cliff-hanging twenty-five minutes, usually a trio of guitar, bass, and drums, but a couple of times it's just me and a trombonist, which puts an unintended avant-garde edge to the proceedings; I notice some people are on the floor splitting their sides with laughter. The highlight of all this comes one night when Alan suggests that I sit in with them for one song, and what would I like to play? I suggest an old standard called "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" and wait for the moment, trembling like Bambi in a forest glade.

A grandiloquent announcement is made and I get up onto the stage, plug in and look nervously over at Alan, who raises an eyebrow and, grinning, says, "Count us in, then." With a feeling on the inside of a stained-glass window shattering, I count the bastards in. I start playing and state the theme before I take off on a double-chorus solo that is about as good as I have ever played. I pass through it as if in a dream, locked into the notes, the frets, the strings, and no sense of anything other than the accompanying piano chords, the drums behind me, and maybe a far-off voice whispering as if through clouds, "This is what it is really like." I finish my solo and there is wild applause, which is probably the sound of an audience even more relieved than I am that I haven't blown it.

But I am sixteen years old; everyone here knows me, and it's possible that there's a lot of love in the room (even if laced with pity). The club swims in front of my eyes and I come very close to fainting but manage to stand there and keep a grip. I have just been chucked into the deep end. I don't sleep that night-or that week, for that matter-but just keep recycling the solo over and over again in my head. Somehow I have crossed a line, as if I have been shot full of junk.

I realize that my sense of self is in fact defined by the guitar, and that's that, which I suppose makes me a guitarist. I begin to feel worthy or unworthy according to the merit of the last solo I have played. If the last solo was shit, then so am I, but if I have pulled off a good one, then I feel like a king.

I become more confident with my Blue Note intermission sets and continue learning on the job, finally reaching a point where local musicians are actually importuning me to play. I affect a new confidence and swagger that is undermined only by the fact that my eyes are now so weak that I have to wear glasses, which make me look like a misplaced librarian. But without them I can barely see the frets on my guitar. I eventually cover this Achilles' heel by wearing a pair of clip-on sunglasses on top of them, much to the amusement of the quintet.

I survive by the largesse of my parents and whatever gigs I can find on the local scene, so it's a surprise and a relief when Don Hardyman, the brilliant pianist of the quintet, asks nie if I would like to play in his other band, which holds a residency at a local hotel, the WhiteCliffs.

The bandleader, Cyril, is a mean old bastard from Yorkshire; he is supposed to be the bass player, but with a shit-eating grin on his face, he merely leans against it like a dog pissing against a tree. With scant musical ability, he is a networker on the Jewish hotel scene more than anything else, and he rules by fear. He's agreed to have a guitar in the band only because the teenagers at the hotel are asking for one. I don't like him but I have to keep in with him because he is paying me nine pounds a week, a royal sum at the time. He's always telling me to turn down the volume and not get so carried away in the solos. And so I plod on through the endless fox-trots and waltzes, trying to quench the fire within, but it's musical purgatory. The only thing that saves it is my relationship with Don Hardyman, who has taken to showing me hip changes and instructing me generally about jazz. We smile secretly at each other as Don slips a nifty little flat-five substitution into a standard that has been hacked to death while Cyril grins woodenly at the dance floor and thumps like a moron on his bull fiddle.

My electric guitar is an appeasement for the teenagers who stay at the hotel with their parents. So, to give the impression of a band that is fully contemporary, we play a small repertoire of pop songs during which I stand up and do a Hank Marvin or Duane Eddy imitation. This is well received by the cute girls who litter the dance floor. I have lustful thoughts in their direction, but Cyril sees it and warns me with a nasty glint in his eye not to go anywhere near them.

Dominating the proceedings most nights is the proprietor of the hotel, a matriarch of whalelike proportions named Mrs. Goldblatt (or Goldfart, as I call her under my breath). She watches over the dance floor with a laserlike scrutiny and rules with a fist of iron. All behavior has to be kosher, and teenagers are expected to conduct themselves like people in late middle age; snogging and jiving are banned.

So I sit behind my little bandstand and get through the night, sometimes so bored that I hardly know I'm there. And then I begin noticing an unusual phenomenon when on one or two occasions I suddenly wake up realizing that although I haven't technically been asleep, I've been in a dream state for the past twenty minutes and have actually been playing on autopilot without making any mistakes. I find this slightly disturbing and wonder if I should move on or start into a life of drug use, but somehow playing at the WhiteCliffs with an arm full of heroin doesn't quite fit the bill, so I carry on risking the odd touch of teenage doziness.

Meanwhile, Cyril, who really wants to get the guitar out of the band, is looking for an excuse, and I provide him with one in the shape of a nubile girl by the name of Mona Silverman. We have been eyeing each other across the crowded room, and nature is working its chemistry. Mona glides by the bandstand in the arms of a Henry Kissinger look-alike and drops a small folded piece of paper onto the stage at my feet. I surreptitiously glance at it as Cyril announces the "Gay Gordons." It gets straight to the point: "Meet me at the cliffs ... after the dance?" I start breathing faster and can't wait to get bloody "Hava Nagila" over with so I can get out of there and embrace this olive-skinned, almond-eyed girl. Sex is in the air, and all thoughts of Cyril's warnings and my future in the dance band business go out of my head as I pack up at warp speed, my brain now centered in the groin area.

I meet Mona on the cliffs at the designated spot, and we dive into one of the numerous shelters so kindly provided by the council elders for those who wish to have an illicit bunk-up in a public setting, or in full view of the English Channel. After a few pleasantries about pop music, Mona is primed to a point of about 75 percent. She is a fantastic kisser and we don't part lips for about forty-five minutes, by which time I have the most incredible case of blue balls known to man, and then she abruptly pulls away from me and says, "Got to go now-if my mum finds out, she'll kill me." Like a poisoned dart, the cold arrow of truth pierces my brain and I rapidly shrink back to reality. Fuck, I gulp to the now-empty wooden bench scarred with the names of lovers who actually had trysts here, who actually did it, if Cyril hears about this, fuck-with the black realization of an early death to my career, I imagine a samurai impaling himself on his own sword-Im done for.

The next night as I am nervously packing up, Cyril comes over to me with the death ray in his eye and says, "I'd like a word with you, young man," and I feel icicles-or rather, stalactites-pierce my heart. He takes me into the kitchen and gives me a coruscating tongue-lashing that would break Attila the Hun. You would have thought I had just had it off with the Queen Mother, so dire, so evil, are my actions with a willing girl who in fact had importuned me. I try weakly to protest but can't get a word in edgewise. It turns out that Mona's little sister has told their mother that her sister was out on the cliffs snogging with one of the musicians in the band. The mother practically had a seizure, sent Mona back to London the next day, complained bitterly to Mrs. Goldblatt, and then shredded Cyril. Cyril was told to fire me-which, of course, is what he is doing, also knowing in his heart of hearts that anyone playing the guitar is probably of low character. He's right, but nevertheless he finds it necessary to strip me of any idea of manhood or hope of having a career.

At a young age these events assume a somewhat oversize legend in your life. I am terrified by this small, mean Yorkshire man who can't play his instrument and I slink home that night in a deep funk. About a week later I hear that I have been replaced by another local guitarist by the name of Robert Fripp.

But eventually it is the guitar itself that restores my spirit and sets me back on track, and as the great Saddhu Mahhamsarat Jinji Yoga said, "Music washes from the soul the dust of everyday life." I return to a life of subsistence, doing gigs when and wherever I can scrape them up, but about this time things change when I am introduced to a red-haired Italian rocker by the name of Zoot Money. Zoot sings and plays keyboards, and is already an accomplished performer. We start getting together and one afternoon we sit on the floor of his brother Bruno's bedroom and he plays me some records of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Ray Charles and sings along, demonstrating the deep blues feeling. Across the road on Horseshoe Common in the hazy summer heat, boys chase girls into the trees, hoping to cop a feel, get a kiss, make out. In the dark confines of the Victorian flat opposite, I am transfixed as I hear Ray Charles belting out, "See the girl with the red dress on ..."

Gradually through the fixed point of the Blue Note, more like-minded young musicians around town get to know one another; before long there's a gang of us hanging around and playing together. On the weekends we crowd into the Downstairs Club, a dark, smoky cellar underneath a grubby Italian ristorante in the town center. On Fridays and Saturdays it's open all night, not closing until about six A.M., and in the claustrophobic darkness we attempt to outdo one another with our latest licks.

Frenetic and wired, we jam, joke, and jostle in the company of feverish young girls and play everything we can think of, from standards like "I Cover the Waterfront" to the rhythm and blues of "What'd I Say" and "Sack 0' Woe" by Cannonball Adderley. We crowd on and off the stage, yap incessantly about music--everything from Miles to blues to Ringo's new bass drum patterns. In the hot little sweatbox the atmosphere is visceral and edgy. With heat and music pulsing through your veins, you come off stage and in a few minutes are pushing a girl against the back wall of the club in an impassioned embrace that will probably end in the backseat of a car or on the sand of Bournemouth Beach as the summer sun breaks in the eastern sky.

I feel euphoric all the time and live for the weekend, when we will pack into the dark again, when the future seems cloudless, a swelling balloon of endless possibility.

Unfortunately, this dirigible is not fueled by much other than hot air and a lust for music and girls, and to a man we are without a job. After the mindnumbing task of collecting our weekly dole packet of two pounds, we-a cluster of unemployed teen musicians-fill the blank days of the week by sitting upstairs in the El Cabala coffee bar with foamy cappuccinos and watching the girls walk by on the street below, talk about music, and listen to "Love Me Do" on the jukebox.

Typically after one of these grueling days and possibly after watching Dixon of Dock Green or Opportunity Knocks, we turn up at the Pinocchio Cafe, which stays open until four A.M. With its Formica tabletops and air of violence, it's a nasty little hole; but happy in one another's company, we sit around the tables, suck up more coffee, and eat pizzas until it's kick-out time. One night we are there as usual and bullshitting up a storm until someone foolishly tries to interject a note of culture by suggesting we all read a book called Catcher in the Rye, which is greeted with faint interest before we get back to the nasty sex talk.