One Train Later: A Memoir (12 page)

The most unlikely people now get and feel the music of the American South, young men who before might have had a nice office job or gone into undertaking become deeply committed blues players and are ready to sacrifice their lives on the altar of the Mississippi Delta. Clapton has had an effect: in retrospect, a rather great one because if this style is about anything at all, it's about playing with feeling; rather than being technically perfect or being a speed maniac, you are supposed to play with soul. Unfortunately, as time moves on, all these blues licks will become formulaic and dated-done to death-but probably no one will ever play them with Eric's power when he is ripping them out with the John Mayall Blues band.

In fact, the whole blues-boom thing is rather away from the style of pop music that has been dominant so far. What Eric is doing is something very different from the Beatles, who at this time rule the record charts, but this expansion and new expressive voice of the guitar keys in with the new face of pop music as it becomes more self-conscious, more searching, and calls itself art (and, as some critics like to point out, is the ruination of it).

But there's also a layer of snobbery that comes with the blues boom, just like New Orleans jazz versus Dixieland in the fifties. Some musicians-like the pigs in Animal Farm-are purer than others. Many a guitarist now adopts a pokerlike demeanor-born to play the blues-and drops a remark like "I don't play that kind of music, man" to us less-enlightened souls, the subtext being that if we are not playing the blues, we haven't yet seen the light and thus are inferior. Fine, we think, except where would you be without Eric as your role model? Somehow when you are white, English, and from somewhere thousands of miles east of the Mississippi, these kind of remarks seem puerile.

But Clapton becomes a star and leaves John Mayall to form Cream with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, and shortly thereafter his '59 Les Paul gets stolen. Knowing that I have the other one, Eric starts calling and asking me to sell it to him. By this time, in a telepathic flash on my own future, I have moved on to a Fender Telecaster, thinking it to be the hipper guitar. I also think that there's something wrong, with my Les Paul, the back pickup doesn't work or something. We are still fairly naive about the technical aspects of guitars, and it probably just needs to be sprayed with switch cleaner. I decline because although it hasn't yet reached its future stratospheric price, the Les Paul is already becoming a sought-after guitar. But Eric persists and I weaken. He is offering me two hundred pounds, which is more than twice what I paid for it.

One night I drag it out from under the bed and open the case with its plush pink fur lining. I play it for a few minutes and stare at a poster of Ravi Shankar. I dunno: two hundred, back pickup doesn't work, it feels like the love affair with this one is over, I am not a Les Paul man. I reach for the phone. I tell him okay-I'll do it. He gets the Les Paul, I stay with the Telecaster, and both will be signifiers in our careers. We agree to meet tomorrow night at the Cromwellian, where Robert Stigwood, his hard-nosed manager, will give me the money. Twenty-four hours later, with the din of the Supremes singing "Baby Love" in the background, I lean across a table in a dark booth as Stigwood hands me a wad of notes, remarking that it's too much money for a bloody guitar.

The next day I drop off the Les Paul at Advision in the West End, where Eric's in the middle of recording with Jack and Ginger. Not wanting to hang around, I hand the guitar over to the kid at the front desk and tell him to give it to Clapton. I go into the toilet at the side of the reception area and when I come out I can hear Eric's voice over the PA system, which is inadvertently hooked into the foyer. He is remarking how great the guitar is, just like his old one. I feel a rush of seller's remorse and get the Green Line back to West Kensington with "I'm So Glad" rolling through my head.

Eric records Fresh Cream with my Les Paul, becomes a guitar hero, is identified with this guitar-the terms Les Paul and Clapton become synonymousthe star of the '59 Sunburst begins to ascend. Before Clapton it was regarded as a weird failure, but after Fresh Cream the little Gibson becomes the absolute guitar. What if I hadn't sold my guitar to Eric? Maybe it would all have turned out differently, and the Les Paul would have been merely another interesting historical clunker rather than a cultural icon. But possibly because of our little interchange, it becomes a Stradivarius of rock guitars.

The audience for the Big Roll Band continues to grow and we continue on in a life of nonstop gigging, sometimes managing up to thirteen shows a week. Most days I drag myself out of bed around noon and get picked up by the van at around three to head off for somewhere north of Hatfield. We play farther and farther away from London, from Swindon and Plymouth in the west, to the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, Durham University in the north, and the Cavern in Liverpool, which despite being just another dank basement, seems imbued with some sort of magic, as this was where John, Paul, George, and Ringo became the Beatles.

We get a gig in Newcastle at the Club A-Go-Go, which is run by Mike Jeffries, who later will manage Jimi Hendrix. Driving to Newcastle seems like an expedition of galactic proportions, and we decide to meet at five A.M. to start driving, guessing that it will take us the better part of a day to make the journey. At that ungodly hour we sleepily crowd into the front room of the basement flat and study the map on the floor, aiming flashlights at it as if planning a commando raid. I comment that it looks as if we have to travel a full three inches before we reached the frozen North. At any rate we set off with the length of England in front of us, but even with stopping for tea, etc., we arrive in Newcastle by about 10:30 A.m. This is not what we had planned, and all we can do is sit in the van until we play that night at eight. Outside in the black streets of Newcastle it's freezing and raining, and a few miles away a youth by the name of Gordon Sumner stares at a blackboard but thinks about music.

We become gigbots. Wake up, piss, get in van, drive to gig, do gig, piss, get back in van, drive home, piss, get back in bed, sleep. Get up-repeat previous day. At the beginning of each month we are handed a date sheet by our manager, Bob Hinds, a sharp young groover about our age who is from Hounslow but works in the Gunnell office and is working just about everything else. We play somewhere different every night of the week: Hull College of Art, Leeds College of Art, Huddersfield, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Sheffield. I dream of tarmac, road signs, cloud-torn skies, and seem to be moving even when lying in bed.

Through the rainy, befogged, mud-smeared windscreens, wiper motion, and endless blur of roads and motorway cafes, I numbly grasp that this is now my reality, this traveling zoo exhibit is where I live. We get to know all the best cafes and where to pull over for food stops, and can name the highways of England by heart. After a while we are occasionally greeted or rather grunted at by the staff who begin to recognize us. This is an assortment of paunchy middle-aged men with male pattern baldness accompanied by a variety of northern and midland "lasses" such as Sheila, Rita, Janet, and Sally, about whom various sordid remarks are made. We sit together at rickety Formica tables covered with white sugar granules, stray chips, and a light film of bacon fat. We eat with our hats, coats, and scarves on and see our breath in the air while staring at the walls decorated with black-and-white photos of rock groups posing with guitars and a grim determination to look heavy.

They always have names like the Raiders or the Rockets or Duane and the Tyros-it doesn't matter, they all seem interchangeable. Most of the pictures are autographed with flashy signatures indicating that not only are these stars resonant with glamour and at the top of the game but they also have the common touch and are happy to authenticate their dining experience with a glossy eight-by-ten. From the volubility of the messages, you imagine that they have just dined at the George V in Paris. There are long tributes to the high quality of the egg and chips at Bert's, and sometimes we wonder in the midst of our deprecating remarks and plates of grease if we are eating in the same place.

We have our own vocabulary for the various menu items. For instance, fried eggs are referred to as dead dog's eyes, beans on toast as a thousand on a raft, sausages are widows' memories, and chips are grease capsules. One can request a big five, which is basically all of the above, including bacon and tomatoes and half a pound of lard. Naturally, this style of cuisine results in the most evil sulfurous and stomach-wrenching kind of farting, and the next leg of the journey inside the van is a feat of grim endurance.

One night as we are on the way back into London, Zoot and Clive Burrows, our baritone sax players, are sitting in the front seat, and Zoot, who has been the happy recipient of a big five at the Blue Boar, imperceptibly raises a left buttock cheek, and seconds later the deadly fumes waft through the cabin like the last gasp of a dying star before it becomes a black hole. In the backseat we know that it's one of them, but while we moan about Auschwitz, heat death of the universe, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, neither of them moves or says a word. The only giveaway is when Clive lights up a ciga rette about five minutes later and starts humming a little ditty to himself as he stares out the window. It's a rather brilliant performance on his part, and one has to admire him for his incredible guts in withstanding Zoot's incredible guts. It's only when we arrive back at the flat in West Ken that he finally breaks down and admits that he wanted to scream and throw up and is now worried it might have given him an exotic disease.

We play in Frankfurt for three weeks at a famous club called Storyville. Every night it's crowded with not only young Germans but black American GIs who are rabid for American rhythm and blues. We play six sets a night, forty-five minutes on and fifteen minutes off, from eight o'clock to three o'clock in the morning. It's grueling, sweaty work and we play every single song we know or have ever heard of, and many that we don't know. The GIs love us and it's gratifying to think that we sound authentic to real Americans, because it's their music and we do a half-decent job with it. Storyville is a long, thin club with the dressing room at the far end of the room opposite the stage, and after every set we have to struggle back through the packed room all the way to our little sanctuary, nodding and smiling the whole way. The one advantage of this, despite the struggle, is that we get to meet a lot of the local girls who have turned up, pretty German girls. I meet one. Her name is Helga.

The band stays in a little gastehaus in a street behind the club, two to a room. The rooms are freezing and have only a tiny single-bar gas fire that barely dents the knife-edged cold. I curl up in my narrow cot with all of my clothes on top of the bed in an effort to keep from dying of hypothermia. Occasionally the bed is heated to a higher temperature by the presence of the lovely Helga, when she can get away from her parents. As we don't get back most nights until six or seven A.M., we sleep through the day until three or four in the afternoon, when we finally roll out of bed to start the late afternoon with a warming bratwurst and a cup of tea from the Weinerwold across the strasse.

After six exhausting sets we end the night in a dive called the Cafe Moderno. It's filled with workers, itinerant laborers, prostitutes, and Frankfurt's own variety of malcontent. We always sit together and keep our heads down; it's obvious enough that we aren't one of them. We also remind one another to shut the fuck up about the war and not to make loudmouthed jovial remarks about Hitler. English musicians in Germany have an innate ability to pop out an endless series of jokes about Germans and Hitler and usually at the worst possible time, such as when going through customs. I have seen whole bands goose-step onto a stage in Germany before fans who weren't even born during the time of the Fuhrer. So we zip it and quietly eat our spiegelei and strammer max.

One night some nasty-looking brutes enter the cafe and we instinctively feel trouble. They have a couple of women with them who look like hookers and they sit down and start into the beer, stein after stein after stein. There's a palpable tension in the room, as if a fuse is burning slowly, and suddenly the place explodes into an imitation of Custer's Last Stand as a murderous fight erupts. The whole cafe becomes an inferno of flying tables, broken glass, crunching fists, and tearing flesh involving every man in the joint except us little English boys. The violence is extreme and filled with screaming and bloodcurdling moans as knives and broken bottles rip into flesh. Most of us run out into the street and disappear into the dark, but for some reason, I see a small piano in the upstairs section and leap up the stairs like a frightened rabbit to hide behind it while the carnage rages below. Bottles and table legs hurtle across the room and bounce off the piano keys, making some rather beautiful Scriabin-like chords, which I think the perfect accompaniment to the mayhem as my heart attempts cardiac arrest.

And then as suddenly as the fight started, it goes completely quiet, the silence broken only by the sound of a body moaning softly to itself in the corner. I poke one eye around the edge of the piano. The cafe is destroyed, there is blood everywhere, the band has gone. As the scream of a police car siren fills the night, I leap down the stairs and run like a dog with its tail on fire.

BRIDGEHAMPTON, AUGUST 18, 1983

I stretch and yawn and throw the counterpane off the bed. It's getting hot in here and I still want to sleep. I reach over for the Tele and pick it up again. I begin strumming a simple rhythm pattern. One of the first and most important things I learned was to play tight metronomic rhythm. One of the defining things of a great musician, to me, is great and natural timekeeping ability. It seems that if you have that, you can go anywhere. If you don't have it, music will always be hard. I am not sure if it can be taught, because it seems to be in the realm of a natural gift, like a singing voice. Having played with many other guitarists, I have found it a rarer attribute than might be thought. Many players can learn dazzling licks, but only one in five can turn it into a developed solo with interesting time. The ability to play with time-to play inside and outside of it-is what you hear when you listen to the really great players. In the Big Roll Band we listened over and over to James Brown, and I took in as many of the rhythm guitar patterns as I could. I cradle the Tele and amuse myself by playing the E9 chord rhythm lick of "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" and recall how that line about James Brown"the hardest working man in showbiz"-became like a mantra for the Big Roll Band as we started up another endless stretch of motorway.