Rod: The Autobiography (11 page)

I was fascinated by Julie: bobbed hair, kohl-rimmed eyes, great dress sense. She would later, along with Brian Auger, have a hit with ‘This Wheel’s on Fire’ and become something of a 1960s icon. She loved Nina Simone and Martha and the Vandellas and she was learning French and would often study her textbooks in the van. We had a few stolen minutes of passion in a field near the Richmond Athletics Club, but nothing more than that. In fact I ended up going out with Julie’s best
friend, Jenny Rylands, who was also exceptionally pretty, with long blonde hair and what seemed to me at the time a fabulously exotic interest in using make-up to create a ‘sun-bronzed’ look. Jenny had a flat in Notting Hill and we spent afternoons there, drinking tea and eating toast and listening to the Otis Redding album
Otis Blue
over and over again. She occasionally mentioned an artist friend of hers called David Hockney. I wonder what became of him.

I, of course, was still living with my parents, but Long John would generously lend me his flat in Goodge Street for assignations. I also owed it to Long John for expanding my social horizons in these days. Long John knew Lionel Bart, who wrote the musical
Oliver!
, and he took me one night to a swish party at Bart’s house in Chelsea, which was full of theatrical furniture – thrones and props of all kinds – and where the great and good of London’s theatre scene stood drinking champagne and eating from trays of canapés, while, visible for everyone’s entertainment through a large two-way mirror, people periodically hopped onto a bed in the room next door and had sex. Tucking into a sausage roll while watching an unknown couple have it off struck my wide-eyed nineteen-year-old self as the height of sixties sophistication.

Anyway, Steampacket’s biggest show came right at the start of the band’s life. In August 1964, Gomelsky got us booked to open for the Rolling Stones and the Walker Brothers on a short British tour, including the London Palladium – a grand and iconic theatre venue, of course, and a different league from the usual damp basements and sticky-floored student dance halls. Even more than miming on a gantry on
Ready Steady Go!
, singing at the London Palladium seemed to suggest seriousness, which is presumably why this gig attracted members of my family – specifically my brothers Don and Bob, my sister Mary and her husband, and my aunt Edna – to come and see me perform for the first time.

I couldn’t get any free tickets, so they had to pay for themselves – which put them right up high, way out of sight at the
back of the balcony. This may have been to my advantage: if you’re a self-conscious performer, in the sensitive, early stages of your public career, catching your aunt Edna’s eye mid-show could potentially ruin you. The Palladium was otherwise mostly stuffed with screaming girls and wired boys – there for the Stones and the Walker Brothers, obviously, although they screamed and leapt around for Steampacket, too. It was my first proper taste of fan hysteria. At one point, to the alarm of the Stewart family party, the balcony began to bounce as if it might detach itself at any time and drop in on the stalls. My brother-in-law Fred had soon had enough and went downstairs to wait in the foyer. Mary, loyally, stuck it out and maintains that that night she had the very first glimmer that something might become of me in this line of work.

Not with Steampacket, though. At one stage the opportunity came up to tour America with Eric Burdon and the Animals, but John turned it down. I was pretty disappointed about that: I was bursting to see America because it was the home of so much in music that I loved. ‘My American public isn’t ready for me,’ John joked, but it was sheer terror and cowardice, so far as I could make out. So instead we just ploughed on round the university circuit, in what rapidly came to feel like a diminishing circle. The problem was, no matter how hot we were as an act – and we could be blisteringly hot – in the end we were always a covers band, an imitation of something better. Inevitably, frustration set in. It’s often said that a band is like a family, and that may well be true, depending how often your family is tired and drunk. What’s definitely the case is that if you sit in a small van with the same people for long enough, and drive up and down enough motorways late enough at night, tensions will eventually emerge. Micky Waller was in love with Julie. Julie was always in love with someone, but never, alas, with Micky Waller. Ricky Brown had just got married and grumbled loudly if he ever had to travel any further than an hour up the road.

I, meanwhile, seemed to have created a small pot of lightly
bubbling resentment by not responding with particular enthusiasm to the task of humping the band’s gear in and out of venues. When we arrived at a venue, for example, it was sort of understood that you would pick up a piece of equipment as you left the van. However, I would often be in such a hurry to get to a mirror to sort out my barnet that I would accidentally omit to grab an amplifier or a speaker cab along the way. I would say now, in my defence, that this was not untypical singers’ behaviour. Singers reason that they need nothing more cumbersome than a microphone and a microphone stand in order to go about their business, and rarely consider that they were put on this earth to hump someone else’s organ, as it were. However, my perfectly standard behaviour in this regard seems to have infuriated everyone in Steampacket, and especially Auger.

But then Auger was almost permanently in a snit because pretty much the entire running of the band had fallen to him – including being the driver. There were two vans, one for the gear and one for the musicians, but only Auger and the roadie had driving licences, so Auger ended up providing the band with a taxi service. He lived out west in Richmond, and on gig days he would have to drive across to Vauxhall, in south London, to pick up Julie, then come north over the river to collect Long John and then head up to Archway for me. And at the end of the night, perhaps frazzled by the combination of a gig and a long drive back from, say, Stockport, he had to repeat the whole pan-metropolitan process in reverse. It was probably adding about an hour and a half to the length of his working day. Auger was also responsible for collecting the money from the club managers after the shows and for seeing that everyone got paid. Essentially, then, he was acting as organist cum chauffeur cum tour manager. It’s amazing that nobody asked him if he would mind cleaning their windows at the same time.

As for Julie, she was the junior member of the band and, of course, the sole woman present, and she had to fight her
corner – which she did with some style. There was a certain amount of rivalry between us over material and who was going to sing what. I knew that she wanted to have ‘In the Midnight Hour’, but so did I and I hogged it. We did manage to share Mary Wells’ ‘My Guy’, which we sang as a duet, and generally a perfectly amicable peace reigned. However, in the dressing room before a show at the Klooks Kleek Club in West Hampstead one night, in a fit of I don’t know what, I said something unpardonably rude to her about her legs. Quite rightly incensed, Julie did a lot of shouting and an equal amount of flailing and a pint glass got lobbed in my direction – breaking on the floor, as it happened, rather than on me, although I would have deserved it. And then, with the tension between us still crackling, we went out on the stage and sang perhaps the least sincere version of ‘My Guy’ ever witnessed. Ah, showbusiness.

It all finally boiled to an end in the summer of 1966 when the band was offered a tempting four-week residency at a club called La Papagayo in St Tropez. Auger must have been over the moon at the prospect. Not only was he not going to have to drop off anyone in Vauxhall for a whole month, but he was finally going to get a holiday. And in the south of France, to boot. I think Long John really fancied the idea as well. The composer Leslie Bricusse and Lionel Bart were going to be in the area at the same time, and John was no doubt envisaging a month of yacht-borne jollity.

A meeting was held, at which neither I nor my management was present. I don’t know what my management’s excuse was, but I think I may have skipped it. Big tactical error there, for it emerged in the course of this meeting that the only thing that wasn’t tempting about the St Tropez deal was the fee, which was tiny. In fact it was hardly worth going at the rate that was being offered.

I like to imagine a silence falling around the table at this point in the meeting, and a certain amount of tapping of pencils occurring as everyone wrestles with their consciences and the images in their minds of the clear blue Mediterranean Sea in
the gorgeous sunlight. And then someone (I bet it was Auger, although frankly it could have been any of them) says, ‘You know, there
is
a way that we could make this work . . . but it would involve leaving a member of the band behind.’

And then everyone else pipes up and says, ‘Oh, no, no, that’s unthinkable. No, no, we couldn’t possibly do that . . . could we?’

Guess which member they chose.

Bastards.

Sold me up the river for a few hours on a sunbed. Still, they got their comeuppance. By all accounts the St Tropez residency was a disaster. Long John became distracted by the availability of cheap, good-quality French wine and was not always, shall we say, in a position to give of his best. In fact, sometimes he went AWOL altogether. When they came back, Steampacket were no more.

I, meanwhile, like a spurned lover jumping into the next available bed, signed straight up with a band called Shotgun Express, with the organist Peter Bardens and Beryl Marsden, a gutsy singer from Liverpool. More cover versions, more revue-style staging, and one wince-inducing set of publicity shots in which Shotgun Express posed with (guess what?) shotguns. It was Steampacket all over again, except that, lacking an authority figure like Auger, there was an added element of organisational chaos – band members forgetting to turn up, or going to the wrong club on the wrong night, or being so late that club owners docked half the fee, that kind of thing. I don’t have especially happy memories of those months – and, incredibly, there were at least eight of them, going through to February 1967. Was I going to be stuck doing ‘Knock on Wood’ for eternity?

By the way, the drummer in Shotgun Express was Mick Fleetwood and the guitarist was Peter Green. I think it’s safe to say that their later band, Fleetwood Mac, worked out better for them.

During this period I also found time to record not just one
but two further solo singles that nobody wanted to listen to. This time the label was Columbia Records, Decca having somehow decided they could afford to pass on their contractual option of a second recording from me after the ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’ adventure. So, my second solo single, emerging to a very muted fanfare in November 1965, was ‘The Day Will Come’, a number picked for me by the record company – like a slightly watered-down version of Barry McGuire’s ‘Eve of Destruction’, which had just been a hit, with a thumping beat and a big 1960s orchestral setting. On the B-side was a ballad called ‘Why Does It Go On?’ Now, there’s a title which was a hostage to fortune, if ever there was one.

Then, in the spring of 1966, Columbia tried again, this time with a recording of the dance-floor number ‘Shake’. I went more for the grab-you-by-the-neck, force-you-up-against-the-wall Otis Redding version of the vocal than the gentler Sam Cooke take on it, but either way I might as well have dropped it down a mineshaft for all the impression it made on the record-buying public.

Still, amid these prolonged fumblings, it was becoming pretty apparent to me what the missing ingredient was: original material. Turning out an inch-perfect Wilson Pickett cover on a wet night in Derby was one thing. If I was going to get anywhere, I was going to need to write some songs.

THE CROMWELLIAN WAS,
as the big sign attached to the iron railings outside informed you, a ‘Cocktail Bar & Discotheque’, located in a classic white nineteenth-century terrace in the Cromwell Road, London. In the mid 1960s it was among the most ‘in’ hang-outs for musicians and one of the places where Swinging London went to swing – or, more specifically, to eat, drink and dance, as well as gamble in the small casino on the top floor. It was where, in 1966, down in the basement, I watched a recently flown-in guitarist called Jimi Hendrix – or Jimmy, as we were then allowed to call him. (No string-chewing or guitar-burning in his act at that stage, but already, clearly, one hell of a player and set to scare the life out of anyone in England who played a guitar.) And it was where, in January 1967, in the slightly bleary early hours, I had my first formal encounter with someone else who was no slouch on the guitar: Jeff Beck.

The conversation opened roughly as follows:

Me: ‘Are you a taxi driver?’

Him: ‘No, I’m a guitarist. Are you a bouncer?’

Me: ‘No, I’m a singer.’

Of course, we knew each other by sight. Jeff had seen me sing with Steampacket and liked my voice. And I would have to have spent the 1960s locked in somebody’s garage not to know who Jeff was. He had been in The Yardbirds and was spoken of in awe among musicians as a hot guitarist – hotter
than Clapton, many felt, including me. But The Yardbirds had brought in Jimmy Page, who could play guitar a bit himself, and after the inevitable tensions between Page and Beck – two virtuosos fighting for space – and a fair bit of glaring at each other across a smouldering stage, Jeff had decided to leave. Now he was looking to form a group of his own and he wondered if I wanted to talk about it. We arranged to meet the following afternoon in quieter and more sober circumstances at the Imperial War Museum. In retrospect it was a fairly appropriate location, given some of the battles that would later ensue.

I’ve heard it said that I hated Jeff Beck, but that wasn’t true at any stage in the two and a half years that we were in a band together, nor since. Clearly, though, there were phases where the two of us struggled to enjoy each other’s company, and certainly to relax with one another. The Jeff Beck I met at the Cromwellian was a serious, slightly self-conscious, sometimes rather abrupt figure. He could be aloof – but then he was already a star when I met him, so maybe that’s understandable. The band we were about to form, though ostensibly his band, would cast us as twin front-men, so there was always the scope for skirmishes between us. But we certainly respected each other. I respected him for his playing, and he respected me for my voice, and we knew that when the two of us got together and it worked, we could produce music that was pretty extraordinary.