Kid Gloves (11 page)

I could imagine arraigning Dad in some sort of
family tribunal.

Mars-Jones Jr: Perhaps the clerk of the court
will be good enough to read aloud the passage marked. There by my thumb. Speak up, man! You're
mumbling.

‘Her hand closed around an enormous, blood-gorged pole of muscle.

It pulsated in her hand like an animal and almost weeping with grateful ecstasy she pointed
it into her own wet, turgid flesh.'

Prisoner in the dock, you there, judge of
first instance – Is that something you would wish your cleaning lady to read? I hardly think
so. Small wonder you are unable to meet my eye. Yet you left it in plain sight on your
bookshelves, where it might cause any amount of distress to impressionable young people,
tender-minded homosexuals among them, who might stumble upon it. I put it to you, judge in the
dock, that you are no more than a
whited sepulchre
, yea a
whited sepulchre
,
full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness …

For all I know, Dad had the same conflicted
feelings about passages like that as I did about pages from Burroughs and Genet, which disgusted
me but gave me a jolt of nihilistic arousal just the same. If we'd had that confrontation I was
so well armed against, he might have admitted that this was his objection to the availability of
pornography, not the fear that
Psychopathia Sexualis
might be bought by the lower
orders from station bookstalls but the fear that he might buy something viler than
The
Godfather
himself. Before this conversation could take place, of course, he would have had
to start cultivating the habit of admitting doubts and vulnerabilities.

I had unwittingly bought an album to which Tina
Turner and the Ikettes contributed backing vocals, but I wasn't yet ready to buy actual black
music – my breakthrough came at long last with Marvin Gaye's ‘Got to Give It Up' in 1977. Can it
really be true that Dad was more open to black music than I was as a teenager? There's a certain
amount of evidence to support the suggestion, and in our family we're crazy for evidence. We
can't get enough of it, either to strengthen our hand or to inform ourselves about the high
cards the opposition is likely to play.

Dad bought only two singles
in 1968 and both of them were MOBO, as it's called now, Music Of Black Origin. In fact they
book-ended the range of what the culture had to offer at the time. There was The Edwin Hawkins
Singers' ‘O Happy Day', gospel at its most submissive and serene. And there was Pigmeat
Markham's raucous novelty record ‘Here Come The Judge'. I thought ‘O Happy Day' was soupy, and I
was not the one in the family who habitually ordered soup. I thought
‘Here Come The
Judge' was infantile, and I was embarrassed that Dad got so much pleasure from it (‘
This
judge is hip and that ain't all / He'll give you time if you're big or small
').

Pigmeat Markham was as much a comedian as a
musician, almost a vaudeville act insisting on a bygone stereotype – it was only a few years
since he had been appearing at the Apollo blacked-up, with his lips painted white. Of course Dad
didn't pay attention to the racial angle. ‘Here Come The Judge' was cashing in on the popularity
of Markham's appearances on
Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In
. And naturally it was the
catch-phrase itself that appealed to Dad.

For a while he used the song as his theme tune,
entering a room (‘Here Come the Judge, Here Come the Judge') to his own accompaniment of
rhythmic speech. It seemed a bit amateur, somehow, even self-defeating. The Queen doesn't blow
her own trumpet. She has heralds for that. Dad was a one-man band.

Gloriously, we had the last laugh. We listened to
the B-side, billed as ‘Here Come The Judge (Part 2)', which amounted to an extended smutty joke
of exactly the sort that Dad hated. A defendant is up in front of the Judge on a charge of
indecent exposure. Eventually it turns out that he has twenty-seven children. The case is
dismissed by the Judge on the basis that the defendant hasn't had
time
to put his pants
on. We knew
how appalled Dad would be if he realized what he'd subsidized
with his six-and-eightpence.

So we had the last laugh as far as ‘Here Come The
Judge' went. Unfortunately Dad had the laugh after that. The song's place in the history of
popular music has been reassessed, and it's now sometimes described as the first rap record. Oh
God. It's official. Dad was ahead of his time, while I was barely keeping up with mine.

When for example a record like Dave and Ansell
Collins' ‘Double Barrel' made an appearance on
Top of the Pops
, I was sincerely
mystified, waiting for an actual song to appear, something properly equipped with verses and
chorus. Lyrics too, please. It didn't occur to me that a groove might be enough in itself, more
than enough – but now I've redoubled the fogey factor just when I was trying to make it go away.
I should just punch the Gieseking button on the juke-box one more time, and give my rocking
chair a stately nudge.

The counterculture embraced sleaziness pretty
much whole-heartedly, but there were things in it that helped me just the same. Tim was more
adventurous than me, a little more than can be accounted for simply by the twenty-month age
difference. He had been given tickets to a preview of
Flesh
while queuing with a
girlfriend to see
Klute
.
Flesh
! Girlfriend!
Klute
! He was seizing the
day, seizing both the day and the night.

He also kept various underground magazines in the
little chest of drawers between our beds in the attic of the Gray's Inn flat, through which I
would guiltily rummage. In one of them there was a strip cartoon of two men in bed together.
They weren't getting up to anything, except amusing each other by reading aloud from Dr David
Reuben's
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex
, published in 1969.

I knew about this book without having read it,
making paranoiac use of my peripheral vision, flickering towards a
headline
and flinching away (still perhaps the perceptual mode of the closeted teenager, unless the
Internet has made it obsolete) to absorb its dismal message from the attendant newspaper
coverage. David Reuben was a doctor, and if he said that public sex was the supreme expression
of attraction between men, and that quarrels between cohabiting men had a bitchiness beyond
anything known in the normal world, who was I to doubt it?

I absolutely did not want to explore my
sexuality, even before Dr Reuben told me that it was a territory of undifferentiated
debasement.

The men in the cartoon, though, with their long
hair and narrow chests, had a different reaction. When they had reached their favourite bit
(‘homosexual encounters are always about the penis, never the person'), the biggest joke in the
whole hilarious book, they laid it aside and moved into a tender embrace. That stayed with me as
an image, bigotry refuted with a smooch.

I wonder if the echo of Dante's Paolo and
Francesca was intentional, with the morality reversed.
Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo
avante. That day we read no more …
In Paolo and Francesca's case a book inflamed
adulterous desire, but for Mike and Ralph (to give them names) a single kiss was enough to
quench the calumny of print.

I hadn't actually read Dante, but was familiar
with the passage by way of an eccentric source. Tim and I got a kick out of reading
The
Plain Truth
, an eccentric religious magazine to which Dad subscribed. Possibly
‘subscribed' is too active a verb, failing to convey his helpless struggles to escape the
flypaper of a fantastically adhesive mailing list.

The Plain Truth
once ran an article
deploring sexual explicitness in literature, in which Canto V of the
Inferno
was cited
as an example of good practice. No specifics of the adulterous
act,
something more along the lines of three tactful dots on the page or a cinematic fade, with no
detail to pass on arousal by contagion. Hard to see, all the same, how this particular strategy,
however admirable in its tact, could be rolled out across modern culture, displacing
The
Godfather
and any number of other books from their places on the shelf.

There was particular pleasure, for disaffected
sons leafing through their father's copies of
The Plain Truth
, in reading the columns
written by its founder's son, Garner Ted Armstrong. What a toady to follow in the moralizing
trudge of his father's footsteps! Except that as time went by there was trouble in televangelist
heaven, with Garner Ted described by his father as being ‘in the bonds of Satan' and relieved of
his role in the church. There were allegations of adultery, gambling, even assaulting the
stewardess of his personal plane.

Dad didn't have a radio station or a magazine to
promote his views, but he didn't go short of lionizing. The only accolade a judge is unlikely to
receive in court is an actual ovation. Dad hungered for that, and luckily there were
opportunities to put himself in applause's way. He had been playing the guitar since his teens,
and sometime in the 1930s had made a non-commercial recording, with a band, of a tune he had
written himself (‘Fellow Take the Floor'). He sang as well as played. The 78-rpm record was
still in his possession, though his tenor voice, surprising light in his young days before his
vocal cords developed the authority necessary to command a court, hardly made its way through
the surface noise and scratches.

Twice during the 1970s he put on a show in Gray's
Inn Hall after dinner, to an audience that included students as well as his fellow benchers. The
programme was announced as ‘Master Mars-Jones Makes Music', and Dad played a handful of pieces
by Sor and Tárrega. He put in a certain amount of practice before the show. A certain amount,
but perhaps not enough.

The drawback about having a
career in a hierarchical profession (and actually living in its parochial stronghold), in terms
of self-awareness, is that the hierarchical element, being constant, becomes invisible. It was
never on the cards that he would be booed or slow-handclapped by the company of colleagues, but
an acute ear for the timbre of applause might have detected something perfunctory and even
resentful about it. Sheila to her sorrow, inconspicuous in the audience, saw and heard a student
give a little shake of the head and murmur to a neighbour, ‘power mad'.

The concert was successful enough for Dad to
repeat it the following year, but on this occasion the response was more perfunctory, the
rapture very moderate. Dad was presenting himself, after all, not as a guitarist among others
but as a guitar-playing judge. This was essentially a novelty act, and novelty dare not risk
repeating itself. He would have needed to raise the stakes somehow, to swap his Spanish guitar
for a more crowd-pleasing instrument, assaulting the crowd with shards of feedback or pouring
lighter fuel, to cries of alarm, onto his beloved vintage Gibson, which though not electrified
from birth had been fitted with a pick-up in its early adulthood.

On the bench, the unstuffiness of an amateur
guitarist was a more dependable weapon. One of Dad's proudest moments presented itself during a
case involving some Hendrix tapes that had been remastered for posthumous release. I think the
original bassist and drummer (who would be Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell) were suing for a
share of royalties on the basis that they had been part of the recorded performance, co-creators
who couldn't be cut out of the financial side of things just because a later decision had been
taken to get other musicians to redo their parts. At one point a barrister started to explain to
him the function of a particular piece of kit, and Dad (mindful of the ubiquitous myth of the
judge as being
all at sea in the modern world) was able to interrupt him
with a plausibly tetchy ‘I know perfectly well what a wah-wah pedal is!' It was no bluff – he
had bought one for Matthew the previous Christmas.

It wasn't clear that Dad admired Hendrix's
playing. He didn't have much time for gadgetry or electronics. Hendrix would certainly never
depose Django Reinhardt, let alone Segovia, in his personal pantheon. He admired the way Django
overcame the disadvantage (to put it mildly) of having two fingers paralysed as a result of a
caravan fire when he was eighteen.

Dad's tip for the future of a truly popular music
was always the return of that swinging, big-band sound. Nevertheless he had admiration and
sympathy for singer-songwriters, creators as well as performers, even if he would pause by the
television during
Top of the Pops
just long enough to mark Kris Kristofferson or John
Denver down for using a ‘capo', which allowed them to transpose music without refingering.
According to Dad this was a cheat, and the sure sign of the dabbler. If I'd known more at the
time about musical history I might have pointed out that the ‘capotasto' was already in use
early in the seventeenth century, with the word itself attested from 1640, so that this cheat's
device can claim to be older than the guitar in its modern form – but perhaps on the whole it's
a good thing that I didn't.

He presided over one significant case,
O'Sullivan & Another v. Management Agency & Music Ltd & Others
(1982), in
which a downtrodden singer-songwriter took on his oppressive management company. It seemed to
Dad that Gilbert O'Sullivan's innocence had not just been taken advantage of by MAM Ltd but
positively mocked. At one point in early 1974, O'Sullivan was advised by his manager, Gordon
Mills, that he must leave the country at once for tax reasons. He went to Portugal, a poor
choice since revolution broke out there almost at
once. He took refuge
successively in Spain, Italy, Spain again and finally Holland. In October he was told it was
safe to return to British soil. How much had these complicated manoeuvres saved him? Not a
penny. They were pushing him around in the most obvious way, pushing him around the map.