Rod: The Autobiography (8 page)

The band would be sat around in the back of the van, on four knackered old sofas which were grouped around a paraffin stove, tied down to the floor with ropes to prevent it upending when the van turned corners. The stove kept us warm. It also filled your throat and eyes with oil fumes. I’m not sure ‘health and safety’ would have been impressed. And God knows what would have become of us all in the event of a crash. Any collision at speed would have converted the van into a rocket.

The sense of danger was increased by Mad Harry’s driving style, which owed a lot to the accelerator and not much to the brake pedal. For Harry, speed was everything. He drove at all times as though hammering a plane along a runway. Long John – a nervous passenger at the best of times – would permanently be thumping on the dashboard and shouting, ‘For the love of God, man, slow down!’

Mad Harry had a special trick for the last stages of the trek to Eel Pie Island, which was to take the final corner at speed and nearly put the van over the side of the road into the Thames. It was his signature move – his barrel roll, if you like. Long John eventually got tired of being scared and started taking the train to gigs whenever he could. Ian Armitt, the pianist – Scots boy, fabulous player – bought himself a car, specifically because he thought it would increase his chances of staying alive. I probably would have done the same, but I was still saving up.

Of course, it was pretty punishing for the van, too. It eventually decided it had had enough on the way to a gig at Newcastle University, when it ground to a halt and would go no further. We turned up for that show in the back of a tow-truck.

Still, by then, the mock Lancaster bomber had carried us the length and breadth of Great Britain. It had taken us to Stoke-on-Trent, to a club called the Place, where the audience went nuts, punching the air in delight – to the confusion of Long John, who, misinterpreting the gesture, thought he was witnessing some kind of Nazi gathering and halted the band in order to announce, ‘We’ll have none of that fascist bullshit here!’ It killed the gig stone dead.

And it had taken us to Dundee, where a performance at the university was the setting for my first experiment with tartan clothing onstage. Long John had suggested we go into the city and buy some Scots-themed trousers and waistcoats. He thought this would be a winning gesture with the crowd, which we knew could be tough to please. In the event, the audience took one look at this tall English guy and his mate with the big nose and the Dusty Springfield hairdo, both of them wearing tartan to try and ingratiate themselves, and decided they were having none of it. Beer cans rained down on the stage. It would be a few years before I tried that again.

In some places, of course, I didn’t need to be wearing tartan to attract hecklers. Sometimes the hair was enough. Every now and again you’d get some wag who would ask loudly, between numbers, ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ I had my stock answer ready: ‘Come up here and I’ll show you.’ Not that witty, maybe. But effective.

Mind you, it was John himself who nicknamed me ‘Phyllis’. Hence the graffiti, by unknown hand, which appeared on the wall at Eel Pie Island, and in which ‘Long John Baldry and the Hoochie Coochie Men’ had been amended to become ‘Ada Baldry and the Hoochie Coochie Ladies featuring Phyllis Stewart’. This was the price you paid for taking care of your hair in 1964.

At the Manor House in London, where we had a residency for a while, the stage was made of planks and crates, none of it nailed down. Over the course of a show, cracks would open up into which entire members of the group and their instruments
would disappear. Either that or the drummer would disappear off the back of the stage and there would be a short pause while he dusted himself down and the drums were reassembled. I saw Zoot Money at that venue once. Little sharkskin jackets and skinny ties – what a band they were. And could they drink.

My trouble was holding it. One night on stage at Eel Pie Island I was taken short by the urge to empty my bladder, and because the toilets were a fair old hike out to the back of the club, I elected to dash upstairs into the doll’s house dressing room and relieve myself into an empty beer glass instead. This would have been a more sanitary procedure if I hadn’t stood the glass on the floor and then accidentally kicked it over in my haste to return. The liquid soaked its way through the floorboards and later reappeared in the form of a succession of warm drips directly onto Long John’s head and shoulders.

Lesson of this story: never build a dressing room directly over a stage. I had to give Long John the money to get his suit dry-cleaned.

My solo repertoire had begun to expand. As well as ‘The Night Time Is the Right Time’, I started being trusted with Muddy Waters’ ‘Tiger in Your Tank’ and with John Lee Hooker’s ‘Dimple’. Did I think of myself as a blues singer? Not really. I was a folkie at heart. But I have always thought I could turn my voice to most things, and I gave these numbers what I had. No more ‘black bombers’ necessary, by the way. I would have a bottle of Newcastle Brown and, alongside it, a scotch and orange juice – a remarkable combination, probably as bad for the teeth as for the liver – and that would last me all night. If it was a London gig, at the Marquee, say, I would leave home in the early evening, holding on to my hair, and walk up to Archway station, stopping in at the Woodman pub, and have my brown ale and Scotch and orange there. Then back on the Tube at the end of the night, still slightly pissed and pleased with myself.

My presence in the band seemed to be bringing a new contingent into the Hoochie Coochie Men audience – namely figures from the mod scene, who liked a bit of R&B sung by
someone in a tailored suit with well-controlled hair. Reflecting this, the billing in some places would be altered to become ‘Long John Baldry and the Hoochie Coochie Men, featuring Rod “The Mod” Stewart’. Long John started introducing me that way from the stage: ‘Ladies and whatever you’ve got with you – here he is . . . Rod “The Mod” Stewart!’

And, even as that was happening, I was learning one of the great truths of human chemistry: girls quite like a singer. Indeed, it was clear that, having seen a person sing, girls would happily approach that person directly, open a conversation with him and seek to spend some time in his company. This turned out to be the magic bestowed by singing: pulling power. It was exceptionally good news. My great trick at these times was to head to a venue’s bar a while before I was due onstage, and get into conversation with an attractive girl, without telling her I was part of the evening’s entertainment. Then, when Mad Harry got up and introduced the band, I would be able to say to the girl, ‘Excuse me – got a show to do’ and set off through the audience to the stage. This rarely failed to be an impressive surprise, and when you rejoined the girl after the show, you were usually made.

In March 1964 we got to support Sonny Boy Williamson, the American blues singer and harmonica player and one of the great originators, in a gig to open the Marquee Club at its new premises in Wardour Street, Soho – a huge deal for me, because I was such a fan. Williamson, who was to die of a heart attack only a year later, aged fifty-three, was in an immaculate two-tone suit and seemed almost impossibly charismatic – the real deal.

No alcohol licence at the Marquee at that time, by the way: Coke and coffee only. This was the venue where, one night, a member of the audience at a Hoochie Coochie Men gig had the temerity to stand near the front reading a newspaper – intending to convey, I suppose, his contempt for our faux-American R&B stylings. Long John dealt with him most efficiently. He stepped down off the stage and, using a cigarette lighter, set fire to the paper.

We played a gig with Little Walter, too, another of the formative American bluesmen and still the only person to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame exclusively for services to harmonica playing. He was a little frightening, to be honest, and may have had one or two problems with anger management. At any rate, he asked me backstage to find him some girls and then, when I looked doubtful about it, threatened to pull a knife on me. I spent the rest of the night carefully avoiding him. Great harmonica player, though, obviously.

There is only one stormy patch that I recall in this whole period, and we ran into it in Portsmouth, on the south coast of England. The Beatles had invited Long John to make a guest appearance on one of their television specials – not the sort of invitation you were likely to decline, claiming that your hair needed washing – and he had remained in London for the filming, promising to join us in Portsmouth later, in time for a gig at the Rendezvous Club.

Come show time, though, there was no sign of him and we were obliged to take the stage by the angry club owner, with me filling in. I’d only really got three numbers to offer, and I drew them out for as long as I could, but I was struggling and the audience was getting restless. There was the occasional cry of ‘We want Long John’ and ‘Fuck off, you big queer.’ A couple of numbers in, Long John finally entered through the audience and, in my anger at having been hung out to dry, I made the mistake of greeting him from the stage, with something along the lines of the traditional ‘About fucking time.’ Long John climbed on the stage, completed the show and then, backstage afterwards, very calmly fired me – causing me, I don’t mind admitting, to burst into tears. I didn’t think firing was something that happened to people in bands. I thought it was only something that happened in the real world of work.

My banishment lasted a week and I was readmitted, with no lasting rift, fortunately. In June, Long John, who had a solo record deal with United Artists, asked me to sing backing vocals on a version of ‘Up Above My Head’, the Sister Rosetta Tharpe
gospel song, for the B-side of his single ‘You’ll Be Mine’. The resulting recording will not go down as one of my more relaxed performances. In fact, it has all the classic hallmarks of a novice in the studio – bursting to impress and over-singing like a maniac. The song is a ‘call and response’ number, but in this case the response is louder than the call. It sounds like I’m trying to get the upper hand in a shouting match – and mostly succeeding.

My first released recording.

But what an eye-opener this period was altogether – and what an apprenticeship. When I first climbed into the back of that van with the Hoochie Coochie Men, and breathed my first lungful of the paraffin smoke, I was a total musical novice. I could barely get my head around a simple twelve-bar blues at that point. Yet here I was onstage with proper, highly accomplished, much older musicians like Cliff Barton, Ian Armitt, and the guitarist Geoff Bradford, a brilliant jazz player who could also switch effortlessly into blues. Some of these guys were in their thirties and forties. They had all come up through the trad jazz scene and they were properly schooled, hugely experienced, road-tested, tight as a nut. When Geoff Bradford played John Lee Hooker it was perfect. When they did ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’, which John sang, or ‘Got My Mojo Working’, which was the finale, it sounded like the record – it sounded like Muddy’s band. For a singer’s first band to be this good, it was almost unfair. And also not a little scary, because I knew how good they were.

And then, arching over it all, there was the influence of Long John, which was unquantifiable as far as I was concerned. He led the way for me, partly by example, partly by direct instruction – everything from basic stagecraft to the delivery of a vocal. He told me to make sure that I stood at the microphone with my feet apart, and never with my feet together, which gave you no presence or authority. He showed me how to inhabit a song – to take it over, make it your own. He showed me how to talk to an audience, how to engage with people from a stage, how to forge a connection with a roomful of
people that you mostly can’t see. Here were lessons that would inform what I did for the rest of my career and will continue to do so for as long as I stand up in front of people with a microphone in my hand.

Mind you, not all of his wisdom was entirely trustworthy. He once advised me that giving oral sex to women would eventually ruin my voice and that I should desist from the practice immediately, if I valued my career. It was one of the rare occasions when I felt able to ignore him.

Those were golden days, though. I thought: this is it. This is as good as it gets. Wonderful. Doing what I want: singing three or four songs a night, having a drink, looking at the birds, maybe pulling one of the birds, and then going home.’

One of the questions my mum asked me when I went home and told her about Long John’s job offer was, inevitably, ‘Is there a future in it?’ And I’m sure I bluffed and blathered and came up with something to the effect of ‘yes’. The truth is, though, I didn’t know. I certainly hoped so. But whatever happened, I thought, I’ve probably got a job here for nine months, and if that happens, I’ll have enough to buy an MG Midget sports car, which was about £430 at the time. And if I could own an MG Midget – well, happy days.

But it wasn’t just me. Everyone thought what was going on in the music business in the early 1960s was a sudden bright flash in the sky which was destined to fade and fall just as fast as it rose. We thought that the Beatles would have ‘Love Me Do’, and that would be it. We felt the same about the Stones with ‘It’s All Over Now’. We didn’t think this music that was sweeping across Britain, and carrying us with it, was going to last. We thought it was a fad – a big crush that everyone would get over eventually. And so, when you joined a band, you weren’t thinking about the future, or your so-called career path. It was all new, so there was no context or pre-existing pattern to enable you to think of it that way. You were in it because you loved it now, this minute, and anything else that happened along the way was a bonus.

JOHN ROWLANDS AND
Geoff Wright first saw me sing with the Hoochie Coochie Men at the Marquee Club in London in April 1964. They must have thought I was all right because they came up afterwards and asked if they could manage me.