7. hard lines
We need a drummer.
Bernie's been saying that from the start. I've been ignoring him.
Didn't matter to me what instruments we used. The original idea included a mouth organ and Harry on piano. Now we'd be playing in a small room in a basement flat: what did we need drums for? We'd be too loud as it was. And we were going to play only once.
We need a drummer.
He never really explained why, to a non-musician like me. And Pat or Harry didn't seem to think it was urgent. But he insisted, so we advertised, though I can't remember how.
Oxford University used to print a news bulletin every day. It was called Daily Information - not very imaginative but telling it as it was - and it looked like the small ads page in a local paper, only much bigger and more colourful, a proper poster. You paid 45p a day to sell things or advertise concerts and sports events. Note the price: not 50p. Round numbers cross a threshold and put people off. The poster went up in your college lodge every day, indispensable reading for every student.
I presume we put an ad in that. We can't have gone round pinning a photocopy in every college. But anything we put on Daily Info I usually cut out and kept in a scrapbook, and there's nothing about 'drummer needed'...
I didn't expect a stream of eager applicants. And you could say I wasn't far wrong. We got a grand total of one. At least he couldn't be any worse than me.
*
Without him, we were already playing Johnny B Goode.
And losing.
I just couldn't get it right.
For our guitarists, these twelve-bar rhythm and blues tracks were a piece of piss. But I'd never really listened to Chuck Berry songs. Danced to a couple now and then, but I didn't know the words - and the twelve bars sounded all alike to me.
It was the same with a slide rule, which I never learned properly at secondary school. This was before pocket calculators, and the teachers never looked over my shoulder and showed me what to do.
Similar thing with these twelve bars. I could hear how each one started and ended, but I wasn't going to count the bastards or I'd forget the words - so I had to rely on the lead guitar to sound different at the right spot. Patrick did - but it took me a while to be sure what I was hearing. I kept coming in late or too early, frustrating for all of us.
When you sing along to records, you wait a split-second for the singer to start, then you follow him. You don't know you're doing that, holding back a fraction - until you try singing to a track without the words. Then there's no singer to follow. The singer's now you - and you have to come in on time, every time. I might as well have been learning opera.
On top of all that, Johnny B Goode trips you up in a specific way. The last verse ends abruptly. It's short of a few words, so you find yourself starting the 'Go Johnny go' chant too early, which means you leave a gap before the guitar part after it, and that doesn't sound right. You're supposed to pause before the chant, but I always had trouble timing that. Write so it scans, Chuck.
No wonder it took me weeks to learn the beast. Even in early december, after our gig, it was still going round in my head. There was a parade of shops near our rented house, and I remember standing in the laundrette and working through the verses.
The same day, I heard on the radio that Oxford had lost to Cambridge at Twickenham. Again. This despite having Charles Kent in the centre. In the four years I was there, including the one abroad, Oxford lost the Varsity Match every time. I was already a big sports fan, so this pissed me off more than it should have. Naturally they beat Cambridge the term after I left.
Maybe one day your name will be in lights
Saying 'Johnny B Goode' tonight'
Now pause, you prat!
*
The obvious thing would've been to hear the song over and over. It's what I generally do. Even when I'm not trying to learn something.
I've always had a tendency to play the same track or album dozens of times in a row. One christmas I spent a fortnight clearing the garden while listening to nothing but Creedence greatest hits. I even had a Led Zeppelin phase, after a gap of forty years, though I didn't like them back in the day. In 1977, when I was leaving college, I played Pretty Vacant till the needle had a breakdown.
In my second year at Worcester, Jonathan Speelman had the room below me. Tall, with glasses and a mass of curly dark hair, studying maths. He went on to write about chess for a living and came within a couple of matches of playing Kasparov for the world title.
Someone told me he didn't mind hearing my record player above his head (it was cheap and tinny, therefore not very loud), he just wished it wasn't the same tune all the time! When I'm dead and gone by McGuinness Flint. The lead instrument's a mandolin, catchy till it gets really irritating. Took me forty years to listen to it again..
In Australia in 1985, I had a sony walkman but only one cassette - so when I sunbathed on my own, I played Making Movies by Dire Straits two or three times a day for four months and never got sick of it. Side one on my back, side two when I turned over. Side one's better, of course.
Same with DVDs. I don't watch any at all now, but I used to play one on the small portable by my desk while I typed. The same Poirot or Morse, sometimes for a week at a time, films like Hot Fuzz or Dark Night of the Scarecrow thirty times in a row (probably underestimates). No wonder I amaze the wife by quoting scenes from Miss Marple or The Ipcress File before anyone says a line.
It's how I learned the words to things like Nessun Dorma, which I've sung along to at times (piece of piss if you leave out the high notes).
Obviously some kind of OCDC, but it's always seemed harmless to me. And it would've come in useful with the band.
But the songs I was learning in '77, I didn't listen to them again and again. For a start, I didn't own anything to play records on. I'd had a very good portable Grundig in Rome, plus a small case for carrying cassettes, with compartments inside. But even if I'd still owned those, I wouldn't have played them outside the house much - because everyone else would've had to listen too. No ipods of course, even the walkman was three years away. I can't remember seeing any earphones and I'd never owned a pair of headphones.
For a start, they were expensive, like the stereo system a lot of students had. I never wanted to sit in a darkened room listening to Santana or King fucking Crimson, picking out individual instruments. Rock 'n roll is fine in mono, and anyway I was going out with girls instead.
So, all in all, I had to learn lyrics off the page, where I'd written them in biro. Besides, listening to Johnny B Goode time after time would've driven me mad. A classic track for a Seventies band to play, but not really my thing.
*
I was on firmer ground when it had Stones in it.
As I say, I knew all the tracks - and when to come in - so they didn't take so long to learn. Mick and Keith recorded a number of Chuck Berry covers, but some of those are relatively sedate (Around and Around, Little Queenie), so I could have a go at them - and their own songs were in my blood. We planned a few of those for the gig.
But rock bands with L plates shall not live by Rolling Stones alone. We knew we had to be a dance band or nothing, because the last thing we needed was an audience listening to us play, especially me sing.
For dance numbers, we could've looked more closely at our own era, something like Virginia Plain. The lyrics are indecipherable in places (don't pretend you got hard edge the hipster jiving) - but it rocks, and someone said I had a voice like Bryan Ferry. There again, it sounded more complicated than it was, and anyway we didn't know any stray oboists.
Besides, in those days pub bands always played old classics. Bernie had practised Chantilly Lace and Great Balls of Fire, but for me Jerry Lee's voice was as unattainable as Manfred Mann and Raphael. So we stuck to Chuck and one Elvis track.
These were things I had to learn from scratch. So they took time - and I couldn't see how someone on drums was going to help. One more person to hear me sing badly.
*
The sole drummer who applied was Bill Drysdale. As soon as he sat in, I thought he was too good for us.
For a start, he was serious about it. His kit looked new to me, and I presume he'd graduated to it, because he didn't struggle with anything we attempted, so he'd obviously been playing for years. Alright, twelve-bar rock isn't hard for drummers, but he could turn his hand to anything - and he had wrists like ropes, loud as fuck when required. Told you we didn't need him.
I warned this maestro in advance. Told him about our vocalist. He laughed it off - even after he heard me. Like Bernie, he enjoyed how Patrick played, and he clicked with Bernie's bass. He seemed happy to be in a band at all.
I presumed that's because he was in his first term at college. If he was in his second year, he would've surely been in a band by then, and it had to have been better than ours. Or he'd been in one and it didn't work out.
Anyway, maybe he was still eighteen, which made him two years younger than Patrick, who was one below me and Harry. Bernie was our Bill Wyman, a pensionable 22.
The new guy was good looking as well as young. A few years later, when he played with Howard Goodall, a photo caption called him 'heart-throb drummer Bill Drysdale'. He was a six-footer like me but clean-cut and more strongly built. He played one gig stripped to the waist.
Did I come to understand why Bernie was so insistent on having drums? Maybe I found it easier to follow the beat, though that wasn't my problem in the first place. But it added power to the sound, and you can't be a proper rock band without a drummer.
So we had to hope he stuck it out.
I say that because it wasn't long before young Bill was scratching his head as much as anyone. Too polite to let it show, but he told me afterwards he'd wondered where this was all going.
Fucking hell. This was meant to be a laugh, a one-off silliness. Now there's all these people to keep onside. Johnny B the death of me.