Wild Tales (5 page)

“Mr. Nash, you weren’t out
sick
yesterday, were you?” Simms growled.

It dawned on me right away:
They knew.
Better not lie. “No,” I mumbled.

“You were in the queue, waiting for concert tickets.”

“Uh-huh.”

As it happened, Mr. Lewis had also been in Manchester on some personal business and saw me outside the Odeon. And of course that prick just had to report me.

Mr. Simms fixed me with one of his most ferocious stares. “You know what happens now, don’t you?”

So I got slippered, which was a plimsoll on your ass while you were bent over the desk. That fucker hit me ten times. I’d been slippered before, it was no big deal, but this time I got madder than hell. The so-called crime didn’t deserve this kind of punishment, and each hit made me angrier and angrier. I hadn’t talked back or disrupted class or cheated on an exam.
I didn’t murder anybody
, for fuck’s sake. All I did was follow a passion I had. Why didn’t they recognize that? Why were they making such an example of me?

Afterward I staggered back to class, where everyone knew I’d been slippered by Simms. Kids were whispering, giggling. I was embarrassed, sure, but sitting there I started to seethe with resentment. The injustice of it all! They had dismissed my passion as if it were something offensive. And I was enraged by their intolerance, a word I might not have known at the time, but the discontent I felt was real enough.

I couldn’t stop thinking about how I got punished so mightily. Just like my dad, who went to prison for what I thought was a relatively minor offense. I came to the conclusion there was no such thing as true justice. Justice was malleable and subjective. There was too much politics involved, too many personalities. And I began thinking that if this was the way things worked, then fuck justice—and fuck school. I didn’t need any of their rules and regulations.

I’d been on fire before, but, man, after the beating I was really raging. They didn’t understand how much music meant to me, how their disdain for it made me rebel. From that moment on, I turned against school and especially against my teachers. Little did they know, this was one fire they couldn’t put out.

Wednesday, February 13, 1957

I
’
LL NEVER FORGET THE DAY AS LONG AS I LIVE, JUST
eleven days after my fifteenth birthday. Clarkie and I hung over the brass balcony railing of the Odeon Theatre, watching the crush of teenagers swarming in the aisles. It was intermission, and that old movie house was throbbing at the seams. We were so wired, we could barely stay in our seats. The Kalin Twins had opened the show and soldiered through an otherwise forgettable set, and now the electricity in the place surged to peak—and beyond.

Things spun out of control when the lights began to fade. It’s that magic moment when you’ve been sitting there, waiting … waiting … and then suddenly the lights go down and you
know
—this is
it.
I love that moment, always have, and as the crowd scrambled back to their seats a charge went up that rippled along the length of my spine.

The light got sucked right out of that theater, and just when you thought you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, a small white spotlight hit the center of the red velvet curtain. A hand pulled it back a few inches, and a face with a spit curl plastered on its forehead stuck through the seam and shouted: “See you later, alligator!”

“Well, I saw my baby walkin’ / with another man today …”

The curtain swung open, and the sight left an indelible mark on my soul.

There he was:
Bill Haley, in the flesh. He wasn’t pretty to look at, he wasn’t Elvis, wasn’t sexy, but, man, could that cat put on a show.
He and the Comets, wearing their matching plaid dinner jackets, rocked that house, with theatrics that were as good as any I’ve seen since. The bass player, Al Rex, sat astride his stand-up bass, riding it like a stallion and slapping at its side, while Rudy Pompilli straddled him, leaning as far back as he could with his sax in the air. Lots of clowning, but plenty of great music. With Haley out front, they ran through all of the hits: “Razzle Dazzle,” “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” “Rudy’s Rock,” “Calling All Comets,” “Dim, Dim the Lights,” “Birth of the Boogie.” By the time they segued into
“Rock Around the Clock,” Manchester had been launched into the rock ’n’ roll era.

You could look around the theater that night and see it in action. The audience was made up of mostly kids my age, whose faces were lit with an eerie intensity. They bought right into the music. It was something new, something our own—not the crap they played on the BBC or fed us in school, not our parents’ brand of postwar schmaltz. Rock ’n’ roll spoke to us directly: teenage music, a totally different sound. It was like a new religion, and Bill Haley was delivering the Word.

Clarkie and I were beside ourselves. The music, the showmanship, the pulse of the crowd—we didn’t say as much, but I know we were both projecting ourselves onto that stage. Even at fifteen, I was positive that was where my future lay. And I knew it that night: Nothing would stand in my way. After the show, when the crowd spilled into the street, I ducked around the corner into an alleyway and eluded a cordon of police in order to touch Rudy Pompilli’s elbow as he climbed onto the tour bus.

I was looking for contact anyplace I could get it. Mostly I had to rely on the records we heard, those that made it to the stores in Manchester, because it was still pretty tough going in the north to hook into the sound that was starting to take root. We had
Saturday Club
on the BBC, which played the latest hits from America. But that was about it, as far as rock ’n’ roll went.

One Saturday night in the fall of 1957, Clarkie and I headed over to a dance in the basement of St. Clements, a Catholic school in
Salford not far from Ordsall Board. It was a rival school, and we normally didn’t hang out with those kids, but it was crawling with Catholic girls. Need I say more? We were dressed to kill. I had just bought a sharp red shirt with black flecks in it, no tie. A half gallon’s worth of Brylcreem slicked our hair back—we were a couple of young James Deans, Clarkie and I.

We walked down the stairs and handed our tickets to the young lady who was collecting them at the door. Looking past her, I could see inside the darkened room: Maybe a hundred kids were already in the hall. We lingered by the door watching the action. “You Send Me” was crooning over the sound system and knots of lust-filled couples were grinding away. Here and there, teachers were crowbarring kids apart, and you could read the lips of the offended guys: “I wasn’t holding my girlfriend like
that.
” Man, we could hardly wait to get in there. Allan and I were besotted with girls. We weren’t cool, but we hoped we had something going, and this crowd promised to raise our stock. As the song faded, the lights came up and the couples who had been feeling each other up during the slow dance scattered to opposite ends of the floor.

Across the hall we spotted
Norma Timms and made a beeline toward where she was standing. Norma was a girl who, shall we say, developed early. She was from council houses that were a bit posher than ours; they had bay fronts instead of just flat entrances. Clarkie and I were definitely attracted to her on all fronts and vying to see who could get to her first. So there we were, making our way across the dance floor, kind of edging each other out of the way, when all of a sudden a sound came blasting out of the speakers that stopped us dead in our tracks.

I’d never heard anything like it before. The acoustic guitars going
chawng ki-chawng ki-chuk-chuk.
Barre chords layered one on top of
each other. Two twangy voices harmonizing seamlessly as one. I’d never heard voices harmonizing in that way before. Whatever the power of that vocal blend, the magic, it
stunned
me. It was something else! “Whoa!” I gasped. “What the fuck is that?” We stood stone still and listened to it for a while, until we realized we were sticking out like sore thumbs. Kids had started crowding around us, wanting to dance, but I was transfixed. That is, until I saw Allan making headway toward Norma, which jolted me from my reverie.

But that moment was incredibly important, one of the turning points in my life. It was like the opening of a giant door in my soul, the striking of a chord, literally and figuratively, from which I’ve never recovered. From the time when I first heard the Everly Brothers, I knew I wanted to make music that affected people the way the Everlys affected me. That was
it
for me. I can trace it to that night at St. Clements.

I eventually nudged Clarkie aside and Norma later became my girlfriend, but the real victory was our musical conquest. We found the deejay a half hour later and demanded he tell us everything he could about that amazing record. He dug the disc out of a pile and gave us the lowdown: the Everly Brothers on Cadence Records.
Voilà!
He told us that they really were brothers who came from Kentucky and were fans of the
Louvin Brothers, whose names I noted for future reference.

Allan and I started performing “Bye Bye Love” right away, copying their style as best we could. And we searched all over Manchester, looking for more of their stuff, figuring that if they had singles, they probably had an album. Within a month we hit the jackpot,
The Everly Brothers
, learned all the songs, and in no time had them down cold. “Brand New Heartache,” “Maybe Tomorrow,” “Wake Up Little Susie,” and, most especially, “Lucille”
—wow!

By this time, Allan and I were singing every chance we could get. There was a club in Manchester, the Plaza Dance Hall on Oxford Street. It was run by Jimmy Savile, an incredibly important
English compere who wore outrageous costumes and had dyed plaid hair. Years later, there were serious and shocking allegations that Jimmy had engaged in horrendous sexual abuses of children—it was a scandal that rocked the BBC and the country—but at that point in our lives, all we knew was that he was very supportive of us. We were totally unaware of his dark side. The only thing we were aware of was that every Monday evening the club held a talent contest that drew crowds. Well, Allan and I won it four weeks in a row, doing “Be-Bop-a-Lula” like the
Everly Brothers did, and “When Will I Be Loved.” Jimmy really encouraged us. He felt we had something special and could take it further than just being two kids with two guitars.

We played our hearts out at the Plaza and other dance halls in Manchester. For the time being I remained at Salford Grammar, but I thought long and hard about packing it in. Allan had already left Ordsall Board and was working a day job at Alexander Kenyon’s, an electrical builder’s supply store, and a gig at night with a Broughton
skiffle band, the
Riverside Rockets, as their lead singer, so he was making decent money. But it separated us for a while, and my mother was very upset with him for deserting her son. I did, in fact, feel abandoned and had no one to sing with for months.

As for my dad, he went to work as a warehouseman at Imperial Tobacco, by the Salford docks. It was a real comedown as far as positions went, but he faced the job in his usual stoic way. Two days later, he came home and said, “I’ve quit smoking today. You have no idea what goes into those cigarettes.” He described opening up containers full of tobacco and finding rats, cockroaches, and all kinds of life-forms that had laid eggs in there, along with other kinds of shit too disgusting to mention. Instead of removing any of it, they simply closed the door and fumigated the works, leaving all the crap right in the mix. Small wonder why I never took up smoking! But in any case, my dad wasn’t the same guy anymore. He’d lost his
gregarious spirit, his inner glow. The change disturbed me no end, even though we never discussed it. The veil of emotional silence had not been lifted.

More grief befell me on February 6, 1958, as I was on my way home from another miserable day at school. I remember getting off the bus that day in a fog so thick that it was impossible to see two feet in front of me. When my eyes finally adjusted, I could make out the throng of newspaper hawkers who wore little placards across their shoulders announcing the day’s latest headline. That day’s big news was:
MANCHESTER UNITED KILLED
—and my insides seemed to drop right out of my body. The “Busby Babes” were my team. They were our local pride, on top of the world. My dad had taken me to dozens of their football matches, and some of their most celebrated players—Duncan Edwards and Eddie Coleman—had gone to my school. I grabbed one of the papers and tried to absorb what happened. From what I could gather, the team had been returning home from a European Cup match against Red Star Belgrade when their plane crashed on takeoff from a refueling stop in Munich. Gone … they were gone. It was impossible for me to digest.

So much shit was weighing me down that it was a relief when, a few weeks later, I ran into Allan on the street. It felt a bit awkward standing there, making small talk with my best mate, but we filled each other in on personal news. From what I gathered, he’d already left the
Riverside Rockets and was looking for another musical outlet. “Hey, check this out,” he said, flipping open a guitar case. Bending down, he lifted out a black thick-body semiacoustic electric guitar and handed it over as if it were the Magna Carta. Man, that baby felt good in my hands, and I have to admit I was jealous as hell. He had a small amp, too. That combination, amp and guitar, made him a rocker instead of a
skiffle guy—exactly where I wanted to be. My envy aside, I was happy for Allan. He was heading in the right direction. And this time, I went with him.

We began doing shows around the Manchester area, billing ourselves as the
Two Teens, Ricky and Dane Young. I was Dane—don’t
ask me why. Something about the name sounded flash and cool. If we were serious about making it in show business, we needed better names than Graham and Harold. As for Young, we were fresh-faced kids and thought it would be a fitting last name, which is weird when you factor in Neil later on. Looking back, it was all such a lark. Allan and I were trying on different personas, wanting desperately to be like James Dean.