Owning Up: The Trilogy (80 page)

Jimmy saw me perform on several occasions and was very complimentary, not about my voice, but about my showmanship. This was reassuring. The general feeling in the band was that my poncing about had become a bit much. Ian Christie, for example, while acknowledging that whatever popularity we retained with the public was due to me, resented the way this allowed Mick to pay the minimum attention to the musical side.

‘It’s not very bringing up,’ said Ian, ‘for a musician to feel he only gets work because you can imitate a monkey.’

He was referring in particular to my practice on ‘Organ Grinder’ of swinging about the stage, scratching myself and examining the conductor for fleas during the band chori, but his criticism was intended generally, and I did to some extent share it.

Jimmy wouldn’t have any of it. ‘We’re entertainers,’ he insisted, and told me by way of practical emphasis about a producer of ‘them big Harlem shows I was in during the thirties’. It was this gentleman’s custom to line up the chorus, ‘Them beautiful high yellow girls’, at the front of the stage on the first day of rehearsal and tell them: ‘I don’t care if you’ve been fucking all night, when the show starts, I want you to get out there and
show them teeth
.’

Jimmy had one small and rather endearing vanity. He liked to hear his own records. His way of achieving this, for most people imagine that the last thing an artist wants is to hear himself, was to ask if you had such and such a record of his because ‘the arrangement is so pretty and I haven’t heard it for some time’.

I was always sad to see him go, and sometimes went to Waterloo Station to wave good-bye when he caught the train to Southampton, for he refused to fly anywhere. He would walk a little down the platform and then swing round on one foot to wave, holding his grey trilby in place with his other hand, his brilliant red shirt catching the light. I would always remember his adaptation of the traditional way the old itinerant blues singers finished their songs:

‘If anybody asked you who done sung this song,

Just tell ’em little Jimmy Rushing done been here and gone.’

The practice of using a British group on the same bill as a visiting American band became, after the Armstrong All-Stars’ provincial tour, pretty widespread. In the case of solo artists the accompanying group was selected if possible because they played in the same idiom. Jimmy Rushing naturally sang with Humph whose brand of mainstream was approximately the same vintage as pre-war Basie with whom Jimmy had made his name. The New Orleans veterans on the other hand usually played with Ken Colyer.

Chris Barber carried this a stage farther by actually importing, for admirably altruistic reasons, as his own band at that time could fill the largest concert halls in the country, a series of old and forgotten blues singers.

Some of these have since achieved international stature through the present boom in rhythm and blues; others, kindly old gentlemen who had been working in obscurity since the early twenties and beyond, enjoyed their temporary share of the limelight and retired again into the shadows. I am thinking in particular of ‘Speckled Red’, an elderly piano player and blues singer of great charm who was so delighted with his reception here that he contemplated staying and opening a school of ragtime.

He was an Albino Negro with just a few spots of pigmentation, hence his name. He was also very short-sighted and between numbers would remove a list from his breast pocket, peer at it closely and, having reached a decision, announce with great courtesy: ‘My next selection is a song called “You Got the Right String But You’re Playing with the Wrong Yo-Yo”. I thank you for your attention.’

He dressed like a Southern Colonel in a rye whisky ad, and his life, which had been hard, had failed to embitter his patiently sweet character.

The Mulligan band, never an automatic choice to accompany American visitors, did occasionally get in on the act. This only happened when the bigger names weren’t available, but was none the less rewarding for that.

We did one tour with Big Bill Broonzy and a younger Gospel singer called Brother John Sellers. Apart from the pleasure of hearing and being with Bill for a week, there was the additional if less kindly interest of watching the interplay of two entirely dissimilar characters.

Brother John obviously considered Bill as something of a hasbeen. He was furious when Max Jones, reviewing their first London concert together, made it clear that he found Broonzy the finer artist. Not that Max was particularly strong in what he had to say; he simply suggested that, although Brother John could swing adequately enough, for those who preferred a more authentic blues style, Broonzy was of greater interest. This however was quite sufficient to infuriate Sellers. He slammed down the
Melody Maker
and hissed through his teeth: ‘Why! That HI’ bol’ head man!’

His habit of shaving with depilatory wax, a painful and lengthy process, was another facet of his behaviour which Bill found endlessly amusing, and he would mime the operation with surprising accuracy for a man so different in build and temperament. It’s true that superficially Broonzy appeared a far more naive character, almost illiterate and, due to his age and background, a walking compendium of stock ‘Uncle Tom’ mannerisms, even going so far as scratching his head forward from the back, but it was all on the surface. As Mick said so often: ‘There’s a lot going on in that old nut.’

When Bill died we were sent some rather harrowing photographs of his funeral. Brother John officiated in religious drag, and Broonzy lay in the open casket – the excuse for what was clearly a big emotional deal.

We could imagine what he would have said.

The other major tour we did was with Sister Rosetta Tharp, another Gospel singer. I was rather nervous about this. I admired her as an artist, but had always understood that the Gospel singers, although full of jazz feeling, were an ostentatiously pious lot. The blues singers certainly did nothing to dispel this idea. Broonzy was once booked to appear at the Albert Hall on the same bill as the magnificent Mahalia Jackson, and was terribly worried about what the Baptists would have to say about it when he got back to the States.

‘They think the blues is sinful music,’ he told us.

He was also inclined to believe it himself. His criticism of Ray Charles – ‘He’s singing the blues sanctified, and that ain’t right’ (a reference to the obvious gospel-influence on Charles’s style) – showed that he accepted the moral superiority of the hot gospeller.

I wasn’t, of course, over-concerned about the Baptists back in the Stares, but I thought we might be in for a tiresome and God-bothering ten days.

In fact it was a rave. It’s true that Sister Rosetta, who could, as we discovered at a private session, belt out a marvellous blues, would never do so in public, but that was about her only strict rule. One of her numbers was called ‘God don’t like it’, and the words were aimed at most pleasurable human activities. It became clear to us within the first two days that if she believed in what she was singing, she must realise that she was causing the Almighty almost non-stop displeasure, but that there was no sign it bothered her at all.

On stage her performance was splendid, although we all found her introductions a bit strong. The sentimental piety of these was, however, in part relieved by the outrageous way she managed to plug her recordings in the same breath as the love of Jesus. When she actually started singing though, her formidable bottom swinging like a metronome in time to her wailing voice and emphatic guitar, it was pure delight. She wore on stage a series of brilliant dresses with plunging necklines, and a great deal of chunky jewellery. She asked me whether I approved of these and I told her yes, emphatically. They reflected the larger-than-life theatricality of her personality to perfection. She seemed pleased.

‘Lots of people has criticised me because I don’t wear robes like Mahalia do!’ she explained. ‘Well what I says is robes suits Mahalia and they don’t suit me. The Lord is beautiful, and I dress pretty to praise the Lord.’

The only member of the band who couldn’t take Sister was Miff Bell. This dated from our very first concert with her. During the course of one number she decided to play a few chori at the piano, and not only failed to signal her intention, but simply backed towards the instrument still singing and smiling at the audience with her usual manic expression of piety, but having made contact with the piano stool, she gave a kind of controlled twitch with her monumental backside and shot Miff into the outer darkness. She did the same every night.

‘The old black coo!’ Miff used to mutter with rage, as she sat hammering the keyboard.

The day she left England, Mick and I went round to say good-bye to her at her hotel off the Edgware Road. She flung her arms round us and tried hard, although obviously feeling no pain at all, to make herself weep.

13

An Increasingly Dull Noise

Several years before Ian Christie joined the band, Mick and I bumped into him one Monday evening in a pub in South Kensington called ‘The Hoop and Toy’. We drank together until closing time and enjoyed each other’s company very much. As we swayed about on the pavement outside before going our separate ways, Mick, with the serious optimism of the convivial drunk, suggested that we made it a regular Monday date.

Needless to say neither Ian, Mick nor I ever looked in at The Hoop and Toy again, not even the following Monday, and when Ian finally joined the band we often referred to the incident; if we had a job on a Monday, Mick would apologise to Ian for having to forego the pleasure of our weekly reunion. The satisfactory element in this simple joke was that it somehow exemplified a general truth. It was rare, once the days of semi-pro enthusiasm were over, for a musician to form a proper friendship outside the confines of his own band. We all knew each other, but it was very much on the ‘Hello, man. How’s it going?’ level. The reason for this was that, being on the road most of the time, it was difficult to meet except on a casual or accidental basis. It was almost like being a member of a ship’s company. It was therefore with some surprise that, answering the telephone quite early one morning shortly after I had moved to Tregunter Road, I discovered it was Wally Fawkes.

I’d known Wally for a long time, but very much on the Hoop and Toy level, first as a hero of my early Humph club days, later as someone I was always happy to see at a party or in a pub. Several years before I’d done a gig for him, a twenty-first birthday in the Home Counties where I’d nearly had a fight with the burly bearded academician, Ruskin Spear, who was attacking Max Ernst, and whose own paintings I described in my rage at this blasphemy, as ‘Sickert’s wet dreams’. What I remembered best about that evening was the presence, for want of a revivalist, of a bomb-dropping bop drummer called Dave Smallman whose only vocal contribution was the phrase ‘Crazy shit, man!’

I’d also been round to Wally’s place a couple of times, but none of this was enough to suggest that his telephone call that Thursday morning in 1956 was purely social. In fact what he wanted to ask me was, would I be interested in writing the dialogue for ‘Flook’ in the
Daily Mail
, and if so could I come round and discuss it in the office that afternoon. I said yes to both questions, put the phone down, picked it up again and rang up my father in Liverpool because he was a great Flook fan and I knew he’d be knocked out.

At the
Mail
that afternoon I wished I’d waited a bit before telling him. The art editor, Julian Phipps, warned me I mightn’t make the grade, or that if I did, it might be necessary to use me as one of a team. However, with a lot of initial help from Wal, I managed to coast over the first few weeks and, almost a decide later, was still writing ‘Flook’ under his critical but entirely constructive surveillance.

In retrospect that telephone call entirely changed the direction of my life, and yet, if I’d been on tour or even out shopping, Wally would have had to ring up somebody else. The stock-pile was only three days ahead of the paper instead of the statutory three weeks, and Humph, who was scriptwriter at that time, was out on the road. Wally had recently left the Lyttelton band whose increasing professional commitments had led to this decision, and Humph was, in his fashion, returning the compliment. That morning Wai and Julian, faced with the strip grinding to a halt, had reached the conclusion that a new scriptwriter had to be found at once. I found out later it was Jim Godbolt who had suggested me.

The immediate effect of writing Flook was financial – even at the comparatively modest salary of my trial period it more than doubled my income – but it also had a disastrous effect on my ego. Here the deflationary tradition of the Mulligan band came in useful. On the first tour following my change of fortune Mick, irritated by my pseudo-casual proffering of the
Daily Mail
every morning, and my anxious hovering about until I was sure that he had read my contribution, remarked quietly but acidly that it was very good of me to let Wally draw my strip. This was the opening shot in the campaign to cut me down to size, but it was only a beginning. The band never let anything go if they could avoid it. An early and shame-making attempt to hammer out some script in the Cottage Club one quiet afternoon was frequently resurrected. My newspaper order to night porters in hotels, my pre-breakfast expeditions to newsagents when in digs, seldom passed without comment, and none of this did me any harm at all, but I was not going to be laughed out of actually getting my script written. I brought my typewriter (it became known as the ‘Flook machine’) away with me on tour, and if at dances there was a suitable room near the bandstand I would sit and work between songs. ‘Office satisfactory?’ the conductor would inquire with sardonic politeness as he passed on his way to play the opening number.

Inside the band the Flook money altered my life very little. I was able to buy more whisky and ate better on the road, and I took to travelling up to the first job of a tour by rail, but that was about all. Mick usually came with me on the train. It meant we could leave London much later than the wagon, and of course it was also more comfortable. Only Frank Parr, to whom the wagon was a holy place, seemed to resent our defection to British Railways. With typical verbal ingenuity he took to calling us the BTCs, initials standing for both British Transport Commission and Big Time Cunts.