A Stray Cat Struts (3 page)

Since we were so young and made such a big impact on the rock-and-roll culture at the time, it's impossible to step away from it. I never wanted to. I'm proudly the drummer from the Stray Cats and will happily have that as my epitaph. The others have tried to distance themselves more. After our initial success, I felt I didn't have anything left to prove. The trick is to keep it going, which I know now is the hardest thing to do.

Like Hyman Roth told Michael, “This is the business we've chosen.”

 

2

Escape from New York

I had never been on an airplane before, but I wasn't afraid. I was too excited to be afraid. We were getting out; we were going to London, the place where it all happened. We were never so sure of anything in our lives. I was nineteen. We'd sold our equipment except for the basic stuff that we'd need in London. We'd bought one-way plane tickets and had the tearful good-byes with our families and small following of fans, none of whom wanted us to leave. One of the club owners said we were stabbing him in the back. We just wanted a shot. I'm not quite sure what we were expecting. We thought we knew everything; it turned out that we knew just enough to go all the way. We cut a striking figure boarding a plane with one-way tickets at JFK in 1980: three kids tooled up in rockabilly finery with a double bass in the seat next to us.

Arriving at Heathrow before we knew the game turned out to be the first challenge. It came very close to being over before it even started. We all got in the same line for immigration. Fate intervened slightly, and Lee, carrying the bass, was told to go to a different line. Brian and I were called to the desk together. The woman didn't like us right away. Luckily, dishonesty was the default defense mechanism. We told her we were on vacation; we weren't in a band and had no intention of trying to play in England. The truth was that trying to get a gig and play there was the whole reason for coming. We couldn't go back, so we pleaded and convinced her enough to where we were granted a thirty-day visa with a special notation in our passports that if we were found trying to work we would be deported with prejudice. Our first stamps were a special outlaw category, which fueled the whole us-against-them mind-set. We would cross paths with the same woman quite a few times over the next year while going back and forth to Europe. She always gave us a mean face and said she regretted ever letting us in the country. So we antagonized her any chance we got.

We had an address. Someone who had come to a few gigs in New York told us if we were ever in London to look him up. This was all we had to go on; this was the whole plan. We somehow made it there. The subway and bus ride were unlike anything we'd ever seen. The address turned out to be a huge mansion in Kensington that had been taken over as a squat by punk rockers. The walls had been spray-painted and furniture taken out, probably stolen. Trash, bottles, and cans were strewn everywhere, and the floor and carpets were one big ashtray. The story was that it belonged to a drug kingpin who had been busted for smuggling and was in prison. After the shock and initial panic about what to do, we found some floor space, stashed the luggage and instruments in a closet that wasn't being lived in, and set about the mission to become world-famous international rock stars. How to actually go about this was the part of the plan we hadn't come up with yet. We were always supremely confident that if we ever got a chance, we could deliver. Where's the gig? How do you get a gig?

Back in New York, we had made our own scene. The established rock clubs wouldn't hire us—American kids playing American rock and roll was too weird, too out there for New York in 1979. It was still very much all flares and long hair, Southern rock, and the American interpretation of the English interpretation of the original American blues. So we went around to neighborhood taverns—what we called old-man bars—that were usually owned and operated by the bartender. We would promise to bring the PA and to pack the place out—they'd keep the bar; we'd keep the door. We did this for over a year, four sets a night, five nights a week in a little circuit around the South Shore of Long Island: Tuesdays at Arrow's in Bellmore; Wednesdays at the Fifth Amendment, a singles bar way out on the island; Thursdays at Arthur's in Massapequa; Fridays and Saturday at TK's Lounge in Amityville. We learned the craft at these gigs. We got dressed to the nines every night and played hard every set. We played a lot and loved every minute of it, discovering this great music as we went along. We had to do four sets a night, so we learned the greatest hits of Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, Ricky Nelson, Johnny Burnette, tracks from Elvis's
Sun Sessions,
Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and any song on any compilation we could find.

We developed a good following, and it was genuinely different; no New York City hipsters, punk rockers, or even new wavers. Rockabillies had not been invented in the USA yet. Our gang consisted of just regular, slightly dirtbag Long Island types who loved us and came every night, rallying around the scene we had created. All we wanted to do was to play rockabilly music and be left alone. The term
rockabilly
had existed in the past in reference to the music but not as a lifestyle yet. The audience didn't have a name for it. We loved dressing up and greasing our hair every day. We wound up being the local eccentrics who shocked everyone everywhere we went, and we embraced it. Every trip to 7-Eleven became a potential fight. There was no template for what we looked like. If we had been dressed like a classic rock 1970s front man with boas, sequined bell bottoms, and long hair or like a Southern rock hippie, it would've been all right; the
Saturday Night Fever
disco-boy look would have been pushing the envelope in our neighborhood but would've been accepted, but our look was totally foreign. They were all threatened by it, but our little following of people stuck with us. They liked following us around and protecting us. A few of them were pretty heavy kids into some shady stuff, a few carried guns, and they all carried drugs. They had discovered us and built their own schedules, love lives, and dealing around our shows.

Brian had a tiny flat in a house on the canal near my parents' place. I moved in with him. We played almost every night, slept until noon, had late breakfast at the luncheonette, went to thrift stores, listened to records, and were generally happy. We were making a living as musicians.

There was still a certain restlessness and the deep knowledge that we had to get out. If we wanted to get this thing as big as we instinctively knew it should be, we had to travel. There was the once-a-month gig in the city with the hope of a journalist or record company big shot being in the club, but it wasn't happening fast enough for us. A few of the English weekly rock papers had found their way to the USA, and we saw pictures of a music scene, punk rockers on the Kings Road, and concert reviews. We met a few English people in New York who knew about teddy boys and told us that Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran were household names in England. That was all we needed to hear. Within a couple of months, we sold whatever we had and bought one-way tickets for London. That was it; that was the whole plan—let's go to London; it's cool there.

We found out a couple of places to go and hang out, trying to make the scene, meet anyone who could help find a gig. We heard about a gig in Camden, which was supposed to be a happening area, by a band called Cockney Rejects in a place called the Electric Ballroom. The whole thing sounded very appealing, so we got tooled up in drape coats, drainpipes, bootlace ties, creepers, and half a tin of Nu-Nile full regalia and hit the subway. The club was a classic old ballroom converted into a venue. The band was a loud, raucous thing, and the crowd was more interested in slam dancing than anything else. This was all new; we'd seen people be into gigs before, but not on this scale. In New York City, even the punk rock gigs were a bit more subdued and not as big as the thousand kids at this one. Standing at the bar, no one really took much notice of us. In an instant, it all turned bad. A full-scale riot spilled out from the main room into the bar: pint glasses flying, a rush of bodies swept us aside, punches and kicks rained all around. We found ourselves crouched behind the bar. I picked up a bottle to use as a weapon if anyone came behind the bar. It was mayhem. I looked up to see a German shepherd attack dog attached to a leash that was attached to a policewoman. She had a look of combined pity and annoyance. “You Teds had better get out of here,” she said. She didn't have to say it twice. It wasn't directed at us this time, but it was our first taste of a whole new, slightly violent world where people take the bands and the gigs and the fashion to a very serious level.

We found ourselves walking down Camden High Street. We passed by a few skinheads spray-painting a bum in front of the Kentucky Fried Chicken. Luckily, they didn't see us. I didn't understand the tribal aspect of musical tastes yet. I hadn't met enough people who went all in with their style; I still thought it was anyone with a haircut against the squares. Even against this backdrop, the Cats were about to get a lot of attention.

We quickly ran out of money. A couple of weeks, a few gigs, a few adventures, including a night or three sleeping in Hyde Park on borrowed chaise longues, sharing bites out of a burger from Wimpy's in Piccadilly Circus. A few nights of pure sleep on the floor was cheap at fifty pence a man for twenty-four hours in a XXX theater in Soho, and that was that. No one wanted to leave, to go home with our tails between our legs. It was getting grim, but we never lost the confidence that we were just one shot away.

A few people at the squat were loosely connected with the music biz. Like most big cities, once you're there for even a short while, with a little investigation, you realize that each particular scene is pretty small, and everybody knows everybody. Someone told us about a PR person he knew who represented some famous rock bands. I didn't even know what a PR person was, and the idea of anyone actually knowing the Stones and the Who was beyond my conception. I got the address and one afternoon made my own way to Soho and rang the bell. The buzzer rang, and I went up the stairs. It looked like a little apartment. There was a very beautiful girl at a desk in the living room.

“May I help you?” she asked in an accent. I had never met a girl who looked like that before, I had never been in any office before, I had never answered a girl with an accent before.

“Who's the boss?” I say in my right-off-the-boat Long Island accent.

“He's not here. What do you want?”

This type of dialogue went back and forth for a while. She had probably met a hundred guys in bands who thought they were cool, yet I'm sure I had some snappy response. I really didn't know what I was doing there or what I wanted; I really wanted someone to help me. Another woman came in. She was about four feet tall with bright red hair and had a French accent right out of a movie.

“What is all this?” she asked us both in that peeved tone that comes naturally to the French.

I was standing there in drainpipes tucked into black silver-tipped cowboy boots, smiley pocket western shirt, a Hollywood fleck jacket, bandana tied around my neck, with a greasy mop on my head. The whole outfit was dirty from sleeping in it, and I'm sure I looked hungry and tired.

“We're in the best band in the world. We're from New York. We have no money, nowhere to live. We're stuck in London but don't want to go home.”

“What's the name of the band?” she asked while looking me up and down and at her watch.

“We don't really have one,” I stammered.

“Where's your demo tape?”

“We don't have one.”

“Where are you playing?”

“We don't have any gigs.” I was drowning on dry land.

Something must have intrigued her enough to tell me to come back the next day with the others. Maybe she thought I was some insane street urchin and wanted to get rid of me, maybe she just thought I'd never turn up again—but I did turn up the next day, and I had the other two with me.

The Cats always did cut quite a striking figure. We looked young and innocent, slightly hollow from mild hunger but with a leery rock-and-roll dangerousness honed by a month of very rough living. Tattooed children who seemed a bit dodgy and lost with an undeniable obnoxious charm. We had the complete
Three Stooges
–meets–
A Hard Day's Night
act down. We answered each other's questions, had our own lingo, did impersonations of everyone we met, and generally mocked and made fun of everything and everyone. We were a version of the Bowery Boys meets the Beatles. Without really trying, we owned this part of the act. The Frenchwoman was Claudine Martinet-Riley, and the boss was Keith Altham. Without playing one note of music, we had genuinely interested these veteran music biz insiders. They said they would rent us a little rehearsal room and watch us play.

The next day we went back with the guitar, bass, and drum, and they walked us to a studio around the corner. We hadn't played in over a month but had been woodshedding at the bars for more than a year, and this was all we needed. This was the first chance to do what we knew we could. We launched straight into the act: Lee slapping and spinning the bass, me standing behind and on top of the drums, Brian playing on his knees and behind his head, singing perfectly in tune as we ran around this little room, crashing into each other while not missing a beat. We did two or three numbers, ending with me jumping off the drum, hitting my head on the low ceiling, falling, and knocking the drums over. We were very good at it, and they knew it. We had some much-appreciated lunch and beer at a nearby pub. The first and most important part of the plan had happened: we had found someone to help us get a gig. I assume they made a few calls and arranged a couple of gigs at the rock pubs on the London circuit.