Feeling My Age

In October 1967 I saw blues guitarist Freddie King perform here with Chicken Shack - who were both his opening act and backing band. Freddie himself is long dead - killed by a heart attack in 1976 according to Wikipedia at the age of 42. Chicken Shack continues to this day, fronted as ever by guitarist Stan Webb. Their keyboard player back in 1967 was Christine Perfect, who subsequently married John McVie, joined Fleetwood Mac and moved to LA in the early 70s. The rest is legend. The gig was rammed and took place in the upstairs room at the Manor House pub - after which the nearby tube station was named. Today, a sign is offering that first floor venue on leasehold as a standalone nightclub. It was something of a shock to see that the main pub premises is now a CostCutter supermarket. Similar oblivion has overtaken nearly all the other legendary London venues of the 1960s - the Marquee, Speakeasy, Scotch of St James, Crawdaddy, Bag o’ Nails… Even the last survivor - the venerable 100 Club, slap bang in the heart of central London - has only just been reprieved thanks to a last minute intervention by Sir Paul Macca. It makes me wonder whether there’ll be similar campaigns to save the Camden Barfly, Lexington, Buffalo Bar, 93 Feet East, Dublin Castle and The Old Blue Last in another 40 years’ time, fronted by the likes of Sir Mike Skinner or Sir Pete Doherty. We’ll never know. Well, you might - but I won't. Like the magnificent Freddie, I’ll very definitely have left the building by then...

In 1964 at age 43 Mum developed a sudden inexplicable taste for pop music and bought “It’s Over” by Roy Orbison. This was odd because she’d never shown the slightest interest in anything else we’d seen on Top Of The Pops, yet she played it constantly on the family gramaphone. “A lot of young people do sometimes feel like that” was all she would say. After lunch every day she would retire to her bedroom for an afternoon nap and lock the door. “Mummy’s crying in there” my eight year old sister said one day with wide eyed wonder. We shook our heads together in sorrowful incomprehension. Orbison’s next hit was the considerably raunchier “Oh Pretty Woman” which I bought, imagining that Mum - as a newly converted fan of the Big O - would be pleased. But after the first few lines she refused to listen to another word, for some reason or other. Women, eh ?

I Got My Mojo Working – Muddy Waters and his band ripping it up it the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960. The band is tightly drilled: only star instrumentalist Otis Spann at the piano is really cutting loose, but the whole thing rocks like a bastard. They must be playing really quietly by modern standards – look how far away from the mic Muddy is singing.

He was born in 1913. So the two facts that every British blues fan in the 60s knew about Muddy were that he was (a) immensely better and (b) immensely older than his skinny white imitators, who were mostly fresh out of their teens. As Jagger, Clapton & Plant in due course passed into their thirties, Muddy’s shining example offered hope that they too could age on stage with dignity in the decades to come. And then in 1983 he suddenly died at (what seemed to us back then) the immense age of 70.

In July this year Sir Mick will turn 68 – and suddenly following in Muddy’s footsteps doesn’t seem like such a great idea after all.

Brilliantly crazed 1966 quote from Birthday Bob:

What made you decide to go the rock’n’roll route ?
Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I start drinking. The first thing I know, I’m in a card game. Then I’m in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13 year old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get get a job as a “before” in a Charles Atlas “Before And After” ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chilli and hot dogs. Then this 13 year old girl from Phoenix comes in and burns the house down. The delivery boy – he ain’t so mild. He gives her the knife and the next thing I know is I’m in Omaha. It’s so cold there, by this time I’m robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburettor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain’t much to look at, but who’s built a special kind of refrigerator that turns newspaper into lettuce. Everything’s going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say ?

And that’s how you became a rock’n’roll singer ?
No, no – that’s how I got tuberculosis.

Happy 70th birthday Bob Dylan…

From an interview with Playboy magazine, quoted in the 1978 paperback Bob Dylan In His Own Words, ISBN-10: 0860015424 – still one of my most treasured possessions. Well that said, it currently sells for £0.01 secondhand on Amazon UK. Delivery costs £2.80 – what did you expect – but it’s still a bargain.

This is where I came in… Please Please Me had been good, while From Me To You topped the charts while I was still twelve. But when She Loves You burst into our lives in August 1963 the Fab Four really, truly became a national phenomenon: even my dad had heard of them. My (older) brother went to see them live in Cambridge that year, but said he couldn’t hear a thing because of all the screaming. I first heard the quip about “not a dry seat in the house” around the time of Beatlemania, tho Wikipedia dates it from Frank Sinatra.

It does look and sound as if they’re actually playing live in this clip. Except none of today’s artsts would get a sound as tight and polished as that without close miking the drums and singing right into the vocal mics ? This is the Beatles at their iconic early best – still strictly under Brian Epstein’s orders with the neat suits, well-cut fringes and bowing politely at the end of the song. But tight as fuck and ferociously ambitious. Anyone who remembers them looking and sounding like this will definitely be feeling their age.

Incidentally at a press conference in the first year of the Fabs’ early fame, some smart aleck journo asked why all their hits up until then had included the word ‘you’ or ‘your’ in the title. “So what should it be?” Lennon shot back “She Loves Them – or I Want To Hold Its Hand??”

Used to listen to Still Crazy in the mid seventies late at night in my room on repeat – Paul Simon at his most sublime and melancholy. Thinking about it after actually meeting my old lover on the street last night. Sure enough we talked about some old times and we drank ourselves some beers too. Still crazy ? Probably. But alive – a lot of our other friends from GLF London of 1974 didn’t make it.

To tell you the truth he was there with me when I came a cropper on the street yesterday. Only then did he admit he’d just taken a tumble himself an hour earlier – measured his length down a flight of hotel stairs in Kings Cross. Thankfully he escaped pretty much unscathed. After a fifteen minute lie-down to get over the shock he’d been fine.

Listening to Still Crazy After All These Years three and a half decades later the daft thing is how young we actually all still were. Along with Neil Young, James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell etc Rhymin’ Simon provided a soundtrack for our generation to mourn the passing of our youth even while we still had it. “Time, time, time see what’s become of me” he wrote  on Hazy Shade Of Winter at the age of – what – 26 or 27.

What we should have said to ourselves at that age was: this is the youngest you’re ever going to be for the rest of your life – better make the most of it. Bit then of course exactly the same thing applies now.