13. covering our tracks
The songs we were going to play were hand picked to play to our strengths (mainly Pat's guitar and the drums) and disguise the voice. Songs I could busk, which didn't require holding any nohhhhhhts. My limitations kept us to just nine numbers - and I wasn't sure about some of them!
*
1. Honky Tonk Women
I said I play the same songs over and over. This was the first.
When I went on holiday to Italy in 1969, to see relatives, I wasn't happy. Fourteen years old, with no-one of my age around. People didn't know what to do with me. I went to the beach with a cousin eight years younger, and the older generation passed me on to each other for a day. I spent an afternoon with a cousin's daughter, who showed me her mangiadischi, her disc eater, a mini plastic record player you slipped a vinyl 45 into like a CD. I'd never seen one in England. She was lively and very pretty but seven years old. I spent the whole holiday with young kids and grown-ups.
One of them was my aunt Sandra, who brought me up when I was a baby (long story). She lived with her long-time girlfriend high up in a condominium, and I was the wrong age for two middle-aged women. She'd adored me as a toddler, but I doubt she'd have wanted to bring me up beyond childhood!
I remembered they were so worried I'd mess up their record player, they wouldn't let me change records myself! I had to call Sandra every time. And they were three-minute singles! Proud Mary by Creedence, with its epic B side Born on the Bayou - and Honky Tonk Women.
Naturally you can't get your maiden aunt to come in and play the same record twenty times in a row. I was so bored, I took to lobbing grapes out the window, to watch them burst on the garage roofs below. I really could've done with other teenagers to hang out with.
Honky Tonk Women struck me in a number of ways.
What the hell was a honky tonk? Why couldn't he sing properly so I could understand what it was about? Memphis sounded like Merfuuuuuuurz, with the second syllable stretched right out. 'Laid a divorcée' meant nothing to a teenager in England who didn't know american idioms. Almost as impenetrable as Virginia Plain.
But the sounds were great. I'd never heard two guitars bounce off each other so raunchily, with that drunken sax. And who starts a song with a fucking cowbell? When they emerged from the studio, no wonder Jagger said 'We done a number one last night.'
We picked the song because the drummer and guitarists had good things to do - and the vocalist could talk his way through it. But the last word of every line, Jagger holds the note, and even something as slight as that exposed my intonation, the utter inability to reproduce what I was hearing. Robert Morley was right.
I've had the same problem reading out loud. I was good at that in school, but it seems trickier now. Morley wouldn't have had that problem, being an actor. So's my wife. When she does audio books, she sounds like what I hear in my head when I read the words on the page. It's a genuine gift. You don't realise till you try it.
Then there's the chorus. I didn't even attempt that. The first syllable is dragged right out: It's a Hohhhh-o-hohhhhn kytonk Women. I chopped it into pieces you could talk instead of sing: It's a Honky Tonk, a Honky Tonk, kytonk Women. Jagger did it himself on stage sometimes, maybe when he got tired.
Also: it's one thing for him to write about picking up women in New York and Tennessee, because he'd done that. Whereas me singing about meeting bar-room queens in America was just plain silly.
But it didn't matter. When you cover a song, everyone knows it's not autobiographical. I enjoyed singing that she 'covered me in roses'. I thought it might mean love bites. I didn't even mind that it's a song that's hard to dance to!
Here we are. A dance band or we're nothing. And we pick a track that doesn't let you move properly. Around that time, there were other numbers like that. You'd hear the start of All Right Now or Rebel Rebel or Spirit in the Sky or Nutbush City Limits, jump up on the dance floor, then remember oh yeh shit this doesn't go anywhere.
But it was still worth starting the gig with Honky Tonk Women. It's slow, so people wouldn't feel they had to leap and down immediately. And - here's the main thing - we enjoyed playing it. Therefore, with respect, fuck the audience.
That attitude belongs more to acts who write their own stuff, have a point of view - but even a covers band ultimately plays what it wants to hear. If your audience doesn't like what you like, it can be a miserable evening for both sides - but ultimately it has to be your choice, as performers. Anyway we picked songs most people would go for at the time. Especially this one. It turns everyone on. Everyone.
2. Not Fade Away
This is the Buddy Holly song I mentioned. But we didn't get it quite right.
The Rolling Stones made a lot of instruments more exciting than they are.
Harpsichord on Play with Fire.
Sitar on Paint it black and Street Fighting Man.
Acoustic guitar on Street Fighting Man.
Acoustic guitar and maracas on Jumpin' Jack Flash - and Not Fade Away.
Maracas on Sympathy for the Devil (see below).
Keith stuck a mike inside the acoustic guitar, squeezed the notes through a cheap little cassette recorder, and came out with this thrilling aggressive sound, right in your face. We didn't.
This time Harry's straightforward rhythm guitar didn't counteract Patrick's swing. For some reason, they both swung. Which meant they sounded more like the Buddy Holly original - which has no poke. It uses a cardboard box as a drum, which is cool - but it just bounces along in a very Fifties kind of way, with those 'ooh-pup, pup, pup-pup' backing vocals. And you can't dance to it. The Stones version you can.
This is the track that made me urge them to 'attack those guitars' - which Holly does in the lead break - but they couldn't somehow, not on this number. So it was just a filler really. The difference between the Stones putting their stamp on something, and a one-off bunch of students.
That included me, of course. The Stones studio version has handclaps, maracas, and mouth organ. I shook the maracas (though you couldn't hear them on stage!) - but I didn't want to burden myself with handclapping at that speed, and the world wasn't ready for my harmonica playing. Yet.
3. Around and Around
I didn't like this one either! Only more so.
A third Stones song in a row, and another cover, this time one of their many Chuck Berries.
It's not one of his best. It starts with naked vocals, which I didn't mind, in that classic old structure: a sung line, responded to by the rest of the band, then another line, another response.
Well the joint was rocking
Dum dum di-dum
Going round and round
Dum dum di-dum
After six of those, it goes into the dance bit, and you repeat the sequence several times. But it always sounded lame to me, genuinely weak. It was the original B side to Johnny B Goode, which is about its level. Johnny B and Roll over Beethoven not only have pace and poke but something to say. Around and Around is about dancing to rock music. Perhaps that mattered in 1958.
Still, it gave Pat a lead break, made it clear where I had to come in, and maybe sounded better than I remember. People who like a jazz band might dance to its swing.
4. Sympathy for the Devil
By way of complete and utter contrast, here's the ultimate self-indulgence. A track no amateur band should ever take on.
I mean, Mick's singing about himself as Satan, for fucksake.
As heads is tails, just call me Lucifer
Whereas a last-year undergraduate is emphatically not the antichrist.
I lay traps for troubadours
Who get killed before they reach Bombay
No you don't. Stop it immediately.
But again I wasn't singing about myself. And the whole thing is just so irresistible. When you're 21, you relish verses like
I rode a tank
Held a general's rank
When the blitzkrieg raged
And the bodies stank
The Pleased to meet you chorus starts on a major chord - something loud, anyway - so a) it's a genuine moment of drama, you can ham it up a bit, like you really are the Devil, and b) I knew when to come in every time!
Musicians enjoy the track too. It gives you a lot of interesting things to do. The original has bongos, and I shook a pair of maracas. But you can't hear those in an electric band, so I found something interesting to replace them, of which more later. Bernie did the same with the bongos, of which likewise.
Mind you, the song's very long - especially for yet another number you can't really dance to (did we have any you could?!). It's a samba, apparently - but that was an irritating south american thing my mum used to put on at parties. That or the bossa nova, and I don't care what the difference is.
Until I was thirteen, it was the only dancing I'd ever seen. When I tried it at the Top Rank in Reading, alternate arms swinging behind my back, girls smiled in the wrong way ('Ooh, how do you do it?'). I found some other method. Meanwhile my mum couldn't have danced to Sympathy.
But still.
If you've had a few drinks, in a small basement room, you can move to it and imagine you're somewhere dark and dangerous. And the band's enjoying it too much to leave out.
5. Baby, come back
This came out of left field.
The Equals were a Sixties pop band. The name sent out a message, because three of them were black and two of them white. Two of the black guys were brothers; the other one, on backing vocals, rhythm guitar, and dodgy hair dye and dancing, was Eddie Grant, later very successful on his own.
Interesting - to me - that their rhythm section, bass and drums, were the two white guys, while the lead guitarist was black. Same with the Specials. I did the classic thing of thinking it would be the other way round, especially in a ska band.
Most of the Equals' singles were lightweight bordering on frivolous (Rub A Dub Dub, Michael and the Slipper Tree), and the opening riff to Softly, Softly is a straight rip from Satisfaction. But Police on my back was given a makeover for the ages by the Clash, who rivalled Creedence as the best covers band of all time.
Baby, come back was a Number 1 hit. A bouncy ride round a catchy riff. There's a touch of ska, but we didn't know that at the time. That was a kind of music we weren't familiar with, and this track isn't obviously ska. We thought it was just up-tempo pop.
And we all fancied a go at it. The drummer gets a break from twelve-bar - and it was a dance number at last!
Have to say it wasn't particularly successful for us. It repeats a set of rising 'oh yeh's, which Eddie Grant answers to, building a tension culminating in a loud vocal before the riff comes back in. To me it always felt like we kept adding to a stack of plates which came crashing down. And of course I couldn't match Derv Gordon's voice.
But it was infectious and something different from the Berry-Stones catalogue. Worth a go.
6. Down on the Corner
I mentioned the stream of albums Creedence Clearwater Revival brought out in only a few years. One of these was Willy and the Poor Boys in 1969. It features covers of old workhorses the world didn't need to hear again - Cotton Fields and Midnight Special - plus a satirical rocker we tried ourselves - It came out of the sky, with a fast guitar Patrick could keep up with - and the magnificent Fortunate Son, about rich people's offspring avoiding the draft for the Vietnam War.
The opening track, Down on the Corner, mentions Willy and the Poor Boys by name - but I wasn't sure about it. You need to be careful about any Creedence track.
A few years later, when I was thinking of another CCR song, imagine Bernie Cook's Yorkshire tones enunciating the words slowly and clearly so a dumb italian southerner would be left in no doubt:
Creedence Clearwater Revival, he said. They have only two things. John Fogerty's voice. And John Fogerty's guitar. The guitar we have. The voice we do not.
Then he stared at me with a 'get out of that' smile.
I pondered this for a moment. There was no flaw in the argument. True, I said. Then a pause.
Let's do it anyway.
Right, he goes.
That's how we operated sometimes.
We were pretty crap at that other Creedence track (I wrote some childish new words), and Down on the Corner was much the same. Or, as Bernie puts it, 'I hate it with a passion'!
Oh? I didn't know that. Why, pray?
'It has flat sides and corners, rather than Patrick's 'good square beat'. It drones on relentlessly without doing anything at all. No highlights, no guitar solo to resurrect it. Lyrics are total bollocks.'
Hey, no need to sit on the fence. The lyrics, about a jug band, are harmless - though they include the phrase 'doubles on kazoo', which Bernie heard as 'devil's on the loo', so I do too. Not an image you want to linger over, but a khazi's more evocative than a kazoo.
Mind you, John Fogerty had previous with this kinda thing. 'Bad moon on the rise' could be 'Bathroom on the right', which is more useful.
Here's Bernie being down on the corners. I don't know what they are on a song. Or the sides. But life's too short to learn musicianspeak.
Anyway, we do this track even though two of us aren't keen. Sometimes you have to keep your guitarist host happy. Again it gave Pat and Bill something different to work with - though I couldn't imagine people jumping up and down enthusiastically.
7. Hand of Fate
Back to the Rolling Stones. But not as most people knew them.
Black and Blue is the worst album they ever released.
Even after they produced song after shit song in their old age.
Black and Blue came out in 1976, and I hated almost every track. I still played it over and over, because they were the Stones and that's what I did. But it was self-flagellation and fucking depressing.
The opener, Hot Stuff, is about nothing at all (the title tells you that).
The single, Fool to cry, is a national disgrace, a mawkish embarrassment in falsetto.
Hey Negrita is about haggling with a prostitute. Can't see Mick being proud of it today - or the LP's original poster, which was typical of his approach to women in songs (Under my thumb, 'Look at that stupid girl', 'Black girls just wanna get fucked all night').
Same with the rocker at the end. Crazy Mama is slow and dull, as meaningless as the rest, and shit about women.
Cos if you really think you can push it
I'm going to bust your knees with a bullet
You crazy mama, ah yeah
Someone really ran out of ideas.
*
A month after the album came out, I went to see them for the first time.
Earl's Court, with my girlfriend and four of her college chums. I'd sent away for six tickets by post - but you were supposed to keep the stub from your application, and I forgot. So they could've cashed my cheque and pretended they hadn't received it. A relief when the tickets arrived.
I bought the cheapest so more of us could go. Two quid, right at the back of the balcony, worst seats in the house, But it was the Stones, so -
No, they were crap. They opened with Honky Tonk Women, no less, and I'm dancing in the aisles from the start. But downhill after that.
The name of the album was supposed to be the kind of music they were playing. But this wasn't the blues, it was funk, which is shit, especially when they tried it. They used the well-known black keyboard player Billy Preston, and he's credited with the 'inspiration' behind one of the tracks on the album, Melody, which is as bad as the rest:
My nose is on her trail
I'm gonna catch her by surprise
Then I'm going to have the pleasure
To roast that child alive
Nice, huh? Even by Stones standards, not a female-friendly LP.
At Earl's Court, they let Preston sing two numbers while Jagger was offstage changing his fucking costume. Preston even took his jacket off at one point, as if we cared.
I guarantee no-one in that crowd went to see him sing. He couldn't hear me booing from the back, but this was a waste of everyone's time. Including Joe Strummer's.
He was at one of those Earl's Court gigs. He got cheap tickets too, but simply walked to the front and sat down. We couldn't do that upstairs. Strummer agreed with me about the Stones at the time: 'the most fantastic band ever, but we know this not their greatest period'. He spent most of the time trying to make Bill Wyman smile, 'Which he eventually did.'
For many years, that was the only time I saw them live. Luckily I had a much better memory in July 1995.
For a mate of mine, another sportswriter, twenty years younger, that was his Supergrass summer. For me, it was the Rolling Stones at Wembley Stadium with Pat Slade and his wife Kath.
I'm no fan of stadium rock. All that queuing, for the bogs too. I hated that aspect of the Who gig at Charlton.
But Wembley '95 was really good. Keith sang Happy, Bobby Keys was there to blow sax, and they always finish with the favourites. It didn't rain, and I stopped a couple of twats from pushing past us to the front. Result and a really good night.
*
Black and Blue has no saving graces. But there's one track that isn't absolute crap.
Hand of Fate is another slow rocker, but it lets you dance. It's about a fatal fight for a woman in the Wild West.
Shoulda known it was a one-horse town
More evidence of a band with nothing to say. But there's plenty of guitar for Pat to play (three lead breaks, no less!) - and I enjoyed having a go. No notes to hit or hold, I knew the rhythm and phrasing, and you can throw yourself into this duel in a wagnerian setting.
The wind blew hard, it was a stormy night
Shot me once but I shot him twice
I sang what I heard. Rained too hard, was a stormy night. Even better.
Snarl the words out, or turn plaintive as you hit the highway to escape the hounds. Work the mike stand. Act the part. I knew this one would go down well. Because it went down well with me.
8. Jailhouse Rock
I say I didn't take to Elvis. Too far before my time.
But I had a girlfriend who adored him. And she swears he saved my sight!
Sometime in the late '90s, she won two competitions and got all his CDs, heard her name on the radio.
One night she's round my flat watching him on TV, one of those Las Vegas embarrassments.
It was one of his later shows, and he was overweight, bulging out of that ridiculous white one-piece of his. You could actually hear him struggling for breath. I may not have liked his stuff, but he shouldn't have been in that state, and I welled up at the sight. That's what cleared up my eye.
I'd had a speck of something in it all afternoon. Couldn't get it out whatever I tried. Now the tears washed it away. Elvis the healer.
Jailhouse Rock rocks. The video is a camp classic. The song, like Around and Around but much stronger, has stop-start singing, with guitar and drums to match, genuinely dramatic. Again, the voice is completely exposed, and I was no Elvis, plus the swinging chorus isn't much. But it's a famous song, and Bill added a drum solo.
Those two words are enough to strike dread in any rock fan (some of them enjoyed Bonham ditching his drumsticks and using his hands for half an hour, but these people are beyond help). Oh yawn, a drum solo.
They're self-indulgent, hold up the song, and stop you dancing. But a roomful of Pat's friends would enjoy his band having a drummer good enough to play a solo. And Bill added a touch of comedy with a military roll.
Some of the lines in Jailhouse Rock must've raised eyebrows at the time.
Number 47 said to Number Three
You're the cutest jailbird I ever did see
I'd sure be delighted in your company
Come on and do the Jailhouse Rock with me
Blimey. Maybe the song title means something else.
9. Johnny B Goode
The encore. Whether the crowd wanted one or not.
Always do an encore. The Who played nearly two hours at Charlton, but because they didn't come back out, some idiots bottled the stage. Didn't want that happening to us, just because we denied people an extra dose of our talent.
Everyone dances to an encore, even if they haven't danced before it. And we were saving the best till last. After six weeks, I'd almost got the hang of it!
Maybe some day your name will be in lights
Saying Freddi be good tonite