Wild Tales (10 page)

All in all, I got the better end of the deal. We’d get laid a lot, of course, mainly girls that you picked up at the shows. There were always adventurous girls who would find a way to get to us. They either had friends who worked as chambermaids at a hotel where we were staying or knew someone who could get them backstage. They’d find you if they wanted to. And once you were found, it usually led to sex. There wasn’t any kind of courtship. It was fast. “Hello,” and right to bed.

Another perk was signing breasts. Really. I’m not making this up. Girls would love you to sign their breasts. They’d just whip their shirts off. “Here, sign this!” So, naturally, I’d say, “Of course, yes, ma’am. How do you spell that? You don’t, by any chance, have a longer name, do you?”

Once the Hollies hit the big time, our gigs took on a more respectable sheen. Instead of those piss-and-liquor-stained ballrooms, we graduated to cinemas and theaters, where the grime was more refined. There was a Top Rank theater in every town in England, and eventually the Hollies played ’em all: the Odeon in Manchester, where we’d seen
Bill Haley; the Finsbury Park Empire; places in Blackpool, Bristol, Scarborough, Stoke-on-Trent, Birmingham, Coventry, Bedford. They never ran out. You could literally play a different place every night of the week, and for a while that’s exactly what we did.

We were going to ride that horse for as long as we could, not having the slightest idea where it would end up. We were babes in the woods as far as all this fame was concerned. Things were
happening so fast; it was all so fluid. And the gig had changed since we’d burst onto the scene. It was something else entirely from the
Billy Fury–
Johnny Gentle–Marty Wilde–Dickie Pride–Vince Eager era, when a pretty-boy face and a dopey name got you fifteen minutes of English pop stardom. A whole new scene had exploded, grounded in talent, with great songs, versatile musicians, and bands that could put it all together onstage. Man, they were coming out of the woodwork. Kids from all over the country were making great music, often in the industrial cities where you’d least expect it. Liverpool, Newcastle, Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham, Manchester—even those slick fuckers in London had a little bit of talent. No doubt about it, there was a new seriousness to rock ’n’ roll, both as an art form and as a business. The kids knew it. Everybody knew it, even the Tin Pan Alley geezers who were fighting to hold on to their share of the rockpile. It was an undeniable force. The Beatles had started it all. They’d brought excitement and excellence to the mix and changed the ground rules.

The Hollies had earned their seat at that table. We’d come to play.

T
HE HOLLIES WEREN’T SATISFIED WITH NURSING OUR
homegrown success. To make it—to have a long-lasting impact on rock ’n’ roll—you had to crack the American market. That’s where it all started, where Elvis and Buddy and Chuck and Fats and Ray and Richard and Phil and Don were. It’s where Leiber and Stoller ran the factories, where
Phil Spector built walls of sound and Berry Gordy cranked out hits on the Motown assembly line. Music history was being written in every major American city—by Allen Toussaint and Ernie K-Doe in New Orleans, Sam Phillips in Memphis, the Chess brothers in Chicago, the Ertegun brothers and Florence Greenberg in New York,
Alan Freed in Cleveland, Dick Clark in Philadelphia, in Nashville, Los Angeles, Lubbock, even Hibbing, Minnesota. America was the holy land for any English band, and we were determined to pray at the altar.

It wasn’t going to be that easy. Cliff Richard and the Shadows had gone there in 1962 and were treated like riffraff. No one took them seriously. Even the
Beatles had been given the cold shoulder by three different record companies before they got a break. But once again, they had cracked open that door, and we intended to squeeze through after them.

Trouble is, we didn’t have a huge hit out in the States. We didn’t have a hit of
any
kind. The only record of ours that was released there was “I’m Alive,” which failed to crack
Billboard
’s Hot 100. So we still didn’t have an offer to perform there.

In April 1965, we finally got our chance. A guy named
Morris Levy asked us to be part of a show he was producing at the
Paramount Theater, in Times Square in New York City. Now, at the time, we didn’t know Morris was one of the music industry’s heaviest hitters, which was no exaggeration on several fronts. But he said the magic words “New York,” and we sure knew the Paramount. It’s where Frank Sinatra had played—and
Buddy Holly. Where
Love Me Tender
had its premiere. It was Mecca, a very big deal. Don’t forget, the Hollies were still basically Manchester boys; being in the Smoke was a big deal for us. Just to play for American rock ’n’ roll audiences was enough of an incentive to make us salivate.

I couldn’t wait to get over there. I was packed and ready to go weeks in advance. Except, as it turned out, international travel was outside of our expertise. We got to Heathrow, ready to roll, only to discover our visas weren’t in order. You had to prove to American authorities that only you could do the job you were being hired for before they let you into the country. Somehow our handlers had overlooked that proviso. So we checked in to the Aerial Hotel at the airport, where we would be quarantined while they sorted it out.

Getting those visas stamped went right down to the wire. The Paramount gig was in five days’ time, and after four days being cooped up in that airless room I was getting a little nuts, to say the least. Finally, with no time to spare, the visas came through and we took off for New York.

No need to tell you it was worth the wait. America was everything it was cracked up to be—and more. We arrived fairly quietly, not like the
Beatles, no press corps waiting, no entourage. We took care of ourselves, carried our own luggage. When we landed, we got shoveled into the most enormous taxi I’d ever seen; it had like three doors on each side. The driver kept turning the radio dial and there were hundreds of stations, all playing rock ’n’ roll, news, R&B, pop, classical, whatever you wanted. You could find it in an instant. We were used to the BBC’s despotic monopoly of the airwaves, listening
to whatever they wanted us to hear. Choice was never a factor. “You don’t like Rosemary Clooney, too fucking bad. That’s what we’re playing at the moment.” Not in New York. Spin the dial, you got the Ronettes, the Four Seasons, Gene Pitney, Sam Cooke, Dion, Nat King Cole, the Impressions, Jackie Wilson, the Beatles … It was a musical banquet, and we gorged ourselves on it all the way into the city.

We barely had time to check in to the hotel before soundcheck, but my head was spinning from the glitzy cityscape. Walking along Broadway gave me the chills. It was just like in the movies. The lights and the people were
insane.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the Camel billboard that blew gigantic smoke rings into the air. And right across from it, just north of Times Square: the Paramount, in all its gaudy glory. This wasn’t some shithole in Hoboken. It was the big time, and cavernous: 3,500 seats, with marble columns, a crystal chandelier like they had on the
Titanic
, a grand staircase, and balconies layered one on top of the other like a New York skyscraper. I immediately climbed to the top of the theater, the very last seat in the last row of the house, and stared down at that empty stage, contemplating who had played on it and how I had gotten there. I thought: If only my parents could see where I was sitting. They’d never even made it to London, and here I was, about to play the Paramount in New York.

The gig was the Soupy Sales 1965 Easter Show, with one of those Caravan of Stars–type lineups—the Hollies and eleven other groups. Half of the acts were less than forgettable, just schlock tacked on to pad the bill. But there was enough starpower to keep us interested: Shirley Ellis, Dee Dee Warwick, the Exciters, and King Curtis and the Kingpins.
Bobby Elliott, a stone-cold jazz fan, was thrilled to meet Ray Lucas, who was King Curtis’s drummer. But for me the payoff was playing opposite the headliner,
Little Richard. That fucker was one of the greats, up there in the pantheon. I’d cut my teeth on “Long Tall Sally” and “Lucille” and “Good Golly, Miss
Molly.” They were twenty-four-carat rock ’n’ roll hits. Fifty years later, I still get off on them. Richard hadn’t had a hit in seven or eight years, but no one gave a shit; he and his band still brought down the house.

The Hollies were ready to show America our stuff. I remember telling the stage manager, Bob Levine, “Our show is about forty-five minutes,” and he went, “Yeah, well, that’s not happening.”
What?
“You’re gonna do two songs.”
What?
“That’s right, two songs—for five shows a day.”
What?
“That’s the long and short of it, baby.” They packed those screaming teenagers in there, trotted us out like beauty-pageant contestants, then right out the revolving door again—five times a day. The first show was at 10:30 in the morning. Try getting it up at that time of day. We played “Stay” and “Mickey’s Monkey” over and over and over and over. And we didn’t finish until nine at night, so when we walked out of the Paramount onto the street, Times Square was lit up like a Roman candle. We’d be rubbing our eyes just to get ’em to focus.
What?

Even with all that, doing the show wasn’t a grind. We were thrilled to be there, especially watching the master, Little Richard, five times a day. The guy was unreal. An incredible showman. He’d pound that piano as if it were a tough piece of meat and throw his head back and wail. And that band of his kicked ass, especially his guitar player, a young, skinny kid with fingers out to there. One night I was standing in the wings as Richard came off the stage and he was livid, his eyes bugging out like a madman, screaming like a motherfucker at that poor kid.
“Don’t you ever do that again! Don’t you ever upstage Little Richard!”
They got in the elevator, slammed the gate, and I could still hear him ten floors above, taking this kid’s head off.
“You hear me, motherfucker! Fuck you—playing your guitar with your teeth!”
He was called Jimmy James then, but you don’t need me to tell you it was
Jimi Hendrix. Probably the only guy who could steal the spotlight from Richard.

New York, New York. I was in love with the place, and it kicked off my lifelong romance with the States. Every night, after the last
show, the guys and I would head out onto the street, not knowing what to expect out there. It was a different town in those days, still something of an asphalt jungle. None of us ever went anywhere on our own. The Hollies stuck together out of camaraderie—and for protection. If anything were going to happen, you’d have to fuck with the five of us. The first day I got to New York, I’d opened the newspapers and there were like eight fresh murders on the front page. I remember reading about one guy who had been killed
for a fucking quarter!
So we were pretty cautious out there on our own. Walked all over Times Square, past all the girlie shows and tittie bars. There was a great record store on Forty-second Street where I bought Lord Buckley records and Lenny Bruce records and
Miles Davis records. We didn’t have access to that kind of edgy stuff in London, and that store was like hitting the jackpot. It was an adventure just walking into that place. Afterward, we’d lug all the shit we bought over to Tad’s Steaks for a great dinner—$1.98 for a steak and a baked potato. Right around the corner from the Paramount was a little coffee shop, which was the first time I ever had corned beef hash with an egg on top. And if we felt flush, we headed to Jack Dempsey’s bar for a bowl of Hungarian goulash. Just fantastic!

We were getting the royal treatment. We stayed at the Abbey Victoria on Seventh Avenue and it was the first time we each had our own room. Very posh. I couldn’t get over how the taps turned on in the bathroom and hearing the phone ring like it did in the American movies and getting take-out food.
Take-out food!
There was no such thing in England, not even a hamburger stand. There was a black-and-white TV in the room and I watched Johnny Carson every night.

That is, if I wasn’t already otherwise engaged. I have to hand it to American girls: They taught me a few things about sex that were outside of my advancing experience. It was obvious that American girls liked to fuck much more than their English counterparts. They were freer spirits and more experimental. English girls were shy.
You know that play
No Sex Please, We’re British
? Well, that about sums it up. Trust me, it was a lot of work to get an English girl’s knickers off. So I was a willing and dedicated student. My education started with
Goldie and the Gingerbreads, the first all-female rock ’n’ roll band signed to a major American label. They had a nice little groove. A lead singer with a big, throaty voice—Goldie Zelkowitz, who later changed her name to Genya Ravan and fronted Ten Wheel Drive. But I only had eyes for Ginger, the drummer, a fabulous creature who had all the right moves. She showed me what English women had only hinted at. Ginger couldn’t wait to get her knickers off for me. And talk about playing rim shots! Yeah, there was a lot to learn about American women.

One night, before we wrapped up the gig,
Morris Levy decided to take us out to dinner. He’d caught our show a few times and obviously liked what he’d heard because he’d staked us to a few hours in a New York recording studio, where we laid down demos for about twenty-five Hollies songs. I suspected it wasn’t out of the goodness of his heart (a muscle insiders claimed had been left out of Morris’s body), and that something else was going on. He had something up his sleeve. Now, at dinner, he was laying it on thick. We went to a pretty posh place, the Roundtable, a Turkish restaurant with a tasty little belly dancer with a bare midriff down to there, whom we later wrote “Stop! Stop! Stop!” about. Nothing like a little navel-gazing to soften us up. Somewhere between dessert and coffee, Morris played his card. In an effort to expand his business interests, Levy offered us $75,000 for our music publishing. Now, in 1965, that was a
lot
of money. Twenty-five grand each for Tony, Allan, and me. We weren’t making anything that approached that sum. You can’t imagine how tempting it was to take it. But having dinner with Morris Levy was one thing; getting into bed with him was another altogether. We’d heard stories … how he put his name as writer on all the records Roulette released, how at one point he owned the phrase “rock ’n’ roll” and held the mortgage on
Alan Freed’s house, how … nah, better not go there. But we heard other things that scared the shit out
of us. (He’d have cut off my dick and put it on a keychain had he discovered I was sleeping with his secretary, Karen.) So we weren’t willing to sign with him, even for seventy-five grand, even though he was very kind to the Hollies. Later, he was eventually convicted of extortion and went to jail, so our intuition saved us from making an early mistake.