Adventures of a Waterboy (2 page)

American Joe, it transpired, was the Portobello Studios engineer, and under his alien eye I embarked on my session. Quickly, shockingly, I discovered there was more to the recording process than I’d ever imagined. I expected the instruments to be miked up and already sounding like they did on all my favourite records: instant Beatlesound. But no, each had to be set up, individually miked and soundchecked from scratch. Joe was helpful enough, but he spoke a mysterious language I didn’t understand, full of esoteric words like
cans
and
foldback
. And assessing the sound of the instruments, let alone directing Joe to modify them to my taste, was a task beyond my comprehension. The ad in
Melody Maker
had said the studio was equipped with a piano and I’d imagined a full-sized grand, but what awaited poor Leonard was a plastic-looking electric keyboard that sounded like a xylophone. At least the promised Fender Stratocaster guitar was present, but I’d never played one before and couldn’t believe how thin and watery it sounded when I plugged it in.

Then came the job of giving a spirited performance, not a problem usually but suddenly difficult in the antiseptic studio atmosphere, using instruments that sounded like the band on
The Sooty Show
. And bloody hell, did my voice really sound like that? Even with reverb and turned up loud in the speakers, I sounded mushy and Scottish, nothing like the razor-sharp, all-knowing teenage rock‘n’roll adventurer in my head.

With Leonard on piano and Joe guesting on rumbly bass guitar (‘It’ll save you time if I play it,’ he said kindly) I led us through several dubious takes of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ till we got a semi-acceptable version on tape. Next came the unspeakable process of overdubbing other instruments including, God help me,
drums
. When Joe played me back my efforts they sounded like a squirrel scurrying back and forth over a bunch of dustbin lids.

But eventually, stumbling like a dizzy explorer through a vast and inexplicable new country, I completed my version of ‘Rolling Stone’. Then I recorded a pair of my own songs, long-forgotten one-take masterpieces, which I performed on the xylophone-like piano. By now I’d run several hours over time, an omen perhaps of the distant future when it would take me three years to record
Fisherman’s Blues
, and with another session due to start after mine I had to wrap up fast. But before I left Portobello Studios one more bracing rock‘n’roll revelation lay in wait. I was now to learn that behind every friendly creative person in the music industry there’s a moneyman. For as helpful Joe packed away the microphones, a well-heeled young Englishman called Nigel materialised from nowhere to smilingly unburden me of a hundred quid, a sum far in excess of my budget. My financial calculations, which took no account of running over time, paying for tape or the mysterious workings of value added tax, had been as naïve as my time estimates. Luckily for me, my mum coughed up the balance.

Finally I emerged into the early evening sunlight with a reel-to-reel tape under my arm that I couldn’t even play when I got home. A few weeks later I found someone to transfer it to cassette for me and sat back in my bedroom to take a listen. The results were dog rough and it would take me eight, maybe nine years to close the gap between the sound in my head and the sound on tape. But it was a start.

Chapter 2: The Realm Of The Teenage Band

It’s 1977. My band, White Heat, named after half a Velvet Underground song, is on stage in some kind of social club in rural Scotland. Well, I say ‘on stage’ but there’s only a low triangular wooden platform, big enough to fit our drummer Crigg, while myself, guitarist Ronnie and bassist Jim are all on floor level. The locals sit at long tables or slouch against the bar at the far end of the room, and all seem to have long thin heads the shape of bricks and a look in their eyes like the flash of a razor blade.

We’ve been bashing through a selection of our own punky originals and rebellious rock anthems like ‘My Generation’ and ‘Pretty Vacant’ but the locals, surely wondering who the hell booked this lot, don’t get it. We’ve even had a request to ‘play a Jim Reeves number, son.’ I’m singing my ass off. I’ve got that much together, though my guitar, as usual, isn’t brilliantly in tune. Ronnie is widdling away and Jim’s bass chunders along cheerily. Crigg is bashing cymbals and not taking events quite seriously, throwing in mock fills and madcap pressed rolls as if he’s Keith Moon’s naughty nephew. After every song a different brick-headed local approaches the stage, fixes us with his terrible eyes and tells us to turn down, until by now, near the end of the night, we’re playing so quietly I can hear my guitar strings buzzing above the sound of the amp. We finish the number, a cover of the Stones’ ‘Sympathy For The Devil’, which has gone down like a Sieg Heil at a Bar Mitzvah, when a youngish fellow comes up, leans over and speaks directly into my ear. In a wheezy voice he instructs me to ‘play “God Save The Queen”, pal.’ ‘You mean the Sex Pistols song?’ I reply disbelievingly, though with a sudden rush of hope that I’ve found a kindred spirit in this wilderness. ‘No,’ comes the dour response, ‘the national anthem.’

My teenage years were spent in the bustling county town of Ayr, on the southwest coast of Scotland, the cradle of boot boys, hairdressers and hardworking folk with no airs or graces and a predisposition to anonymity. My mother had taken a job in a college there, and Ayr, as I quickly learned, wasn’t the place to be spectacular or outrageous. The unofficial town motto, a harsh retort to any perceived vanity or self-glorification, was ‘who do you think you are?’

I’d been a city boy, attuned to Edinburgh’s rumble and uproar, profoundly at home amid its gothic towers and Enlightenment architecture without ever truly noticing any of it. Ayr was built on a lesser scale, though it wasn’t without magic. Its charms were natural ones: a proximity to the western sea (so much more mysterious than Edinburgh’s industrialised east coast), long hazy beaches and an abundance of green parks and woodlands under a backdrop of vast, ever-changing skies; a magnificent place for dreaming. And dreaming is what I did there, mostly, for seven years.

The nearest place to catch big rock concerts was Glasgow, an hour’s train ride away. From the age of fourteen my friends and I regularly made the trek to the famous Apollo Theatre where we saw The Who, The Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney’s Wings, among others. But for an idealistic, ambitious rock‘n’roller in training there wasn’t a whole lot of anything going on in Ayr.

My bandmates in White Heat were Jim Geddes, a scarf-toting Stones fan who played a Hofner fiddle bass with a set of ancient black strings of which he was fond of saying, ‘they were in tune when I bought it’; Ronnie Wilson, our most accomplished musician, the chubby son of a music teacher who played a home-made guitar with an exotic tuning (which meant he couldn’t play minor chords); and Crigg, a wiggy-haired mod drummer who’d been in the year below me at school where we’d been enemies. Crigg had been in a suedehead gang called The Mental Lords and spoke only three words to me all the years of our schooling: these, prompted by his disdain for my long hair and flares, were ‘There’s that poof!’ But when Crigg realised the poof was a fellow Beatles fan and I discovered the suedehead was a handy drummer, we became friends. Now our band practised every Saturday afternoon in the sonic temple of my front room with curtains drawn and lights out.

When we were sufficiently rehearsed to venture out and actually do some shows, we found there was nowhere to play unless we bashed out top twenty hits at agricultural dances or polite ‘soft-rock’ in local hotel ballrooms, neither of which we wanted or were able to do. If we were to play what we considered a
real
gig, one in which we stepped out on the true road of rock’n’roll performing music we wrote or loved, we had to make it happen ourselves. There were three possible routes:

1. The humanitarian method: put on a charity gig and hustle venue, bouncers, ticket printing and coverage in the local paper for free.

2. The entrepreneurial method: club together with mates, hire a hotel function room (lots of those in seaside Ayr) and sell tickets to friends.

3. The deception method: lie to the booker at a venue that our music would work for his punters.

We tried all three. Our sole charity gig, a benefit for the local Cancer Research group, was at Alloway School on the outskirts of town, a spit and a hop from Rabbie Burns’s Cottage, a lovingly preserved tourist landmark against the wall of which my under-age drinking pals and I used to gaily pee on our way home from discos. Alloway School Hall had a real four-foot-high stage, a thing of wonder that looked sublime bedecked with our two WEM P.A. columns and motley collection of amps and drums. And stepping onto it was a magnificent feeling. The wooden boards echoed under our heels and the generous vista of the broad hall stretched away below us. Yes, I was made for this!

The concert, on a cold night in January 1977, was well attended with a tangible sense of event. But halfway through some teenage thugs in David Bowie bum-freezer suits turned up and, unobstructed by our timid voluntary bouncers, smashed up the toilets causing damage amounting to more than the takings for the night. The Cancer Research office, instead of making a profit, had to shell out for repairs. Still, it was a killer show, youthfully heroic, legendary in the locality for about three weeks thereafter and tinged with a frisson of violence that, though scary at the time, lent the event a glamorous edge in hindsight.

The second method, the self-promoted function room gambit, yielded three gigs at local hotels. I found a college for the disabled that would print tickets cheaply, and we drew advertising posters by hand on huge sheets of coloured card, proudly sticking them up in Ayr’s only hip record shop, Speed Records. Friends were then press-ganged into buying tickets, some proving uncannily resistant when there was no cause other than our career advancement, while the general public, passing our customised poster in the Speed Records window, paid no attention whatsoever.

These shows, two at the Blue Grotto on Ayr’s seafront and one at the Golden Eagle in neighbouring Prestwick, were anti-climatic after the dramatic highs of Alloway School Hall. And with the complications of bar managers who told us to keep the music down and the lights up, embarrassed audiences that stayed magnetised to the bar, complaints about noise from hotel residents, and the financial gulf between the costs of putting on the gig and the takings, this method was almost more trouble than it was worth. We didn’t even get to strut around on a decent stage. The Blue Grotto’s was six inches high and narrow as a wardrobe, while the Golden Eagle had no stage at all. Each event was a massive contraction from the glorious shows constantly running on the film spool of my imagination.

The third method, by which we bogusly blagged gigs in places where the general public was gathered anyway, was where we really paid our dues and took tentative steps learning our trade as performers. But these were the toughest of all. Standing on a dance floor playing a smattering of punk covers at curtailed volume to an audience of brassed-off Scottish holiday-makers in a caravan park disco is challenging, especially when the owner insists on three separate forty-five minute sets.
Three sets?
We had to play everything we knew twice plus a couple of Chuck Berry medleys to manage that. So when one day I noticed an entry form for a Battle of the Bands contest winking at me from the counter of the town’s musical instrument shop, the Keyboard Centre, I saw a new and hassle-free way to get myself and my mates on stage. The contest was in the ballroom of the Darlington Hotel, a straight-laced local nightspot. I submitted the form and got a phone call a few days later telling us we’d been drawn against a cabaret band called Revival and would play a two-band concert with them, the winner, after an audience vote, to go on to the next round. This was brilliant news; not only a free gig, but with our rock edge we would surely destroy these cabaret charlatans!

Come the date we arrived at the ballroom to discover there was no audience, or at least no audience made up of bona fide members of the public; there was only whoever the two bands had brought with them. We had a few mates and girlfriends with us, but Revival shipped in two rowdy busloads of rustics from the hinterlands of Ayrshire. Looking at the voting forms laid out on each table, the names Revival and White Heat each with a blank voting box next to them, then clocking our mates sitting dejectedly at a table in the far corner, their numbers countable on the fingers of one hand, I began to see the evening wasn’t going to go as expected. Revival played first. They were twenty years older than us and their set featured all the middle-of-the-road groaner songs of the day: Neil Diamond’s ‘Red Red Wine’, Peters & Lee’s ‘Hey Mister Music Man’ and the high pinnacle of middle-of-the-road naffness, Daniel Boone’s satanic ‘Beautiful Sunday’. The busloads of fans lapped it all up, cheering and applauding like football supporters. Revival finished to rapturous response and even played an encore, something I’d only ever dreamed of.

Half an hour later, after moving our gear on stage in front of the bemused gaze of Revival’s fans who stuck around for the fast-becoming-inevitable crowning of their favourites as the night’s champions, we began our set. After the first number my self-proclaimed status as a teenage rock visionary was sorely punctured when I was approached by a middle-aged woman and handed a slip of paper that said: ‘Play “Simple Simon Says” for the Grimmet Farm girls.’

And it got worse. Between songs women came up and complained, ‘We cannae hear the words!’ or ‘Can you no’ play somethin’ we ken?’ while the menfolk turned their backs and ignored us at the bar. The Grimmet Farm Girls, determined to enjoy themselves whether or not we played Simon Says, started doing jigs, linking arms and dancing cheerfully while we bashed out a doleful version of ‘Waiting For The Man’. Staying in doomy rock mode while happy people are having a good time ignoring you is very hard to do, and we were sufficiently charmed by the girls’ display to play a loopy Scottish march for them. Responding to the calls to ‘Dae one we ken!’ I even sang them an a cappella verse of ‘Love Me Tender’. But the battle of the bands was lost, and after our last number, for which we reverted to type with a long and incomprehensible (to them), heroic and revolutionary (to us) version of Patti Smith’s ‘Land’, we wheeled off our gear to no applause whatsoever. A few minutes later Revival were proclaimed winners by a Stalinesque margin of votes and our humiliation was complete.

We were fleeing the scene, dragging our amps through a corridor to the boot of my mother’s waiting car, when one of Revival, a cheerful moustached fellow of about thirty-five, gregarious in his hour of victory, cornered me before I could escape and gave me some friendly advice: ‘Get yourself a pedal-steel player, son. There’s money in the cabaret business.’

During the year of its existence White Heat played a grand total of ten shows around Ayr, and despite playing music people didn’t want to hear, and the weekend violence that was an inescapable part of local culture, we never got beaten up. To get publicity we hustled the writer of the
Ayrshire Post
’s pop column ‘Discoround’ until he sent a photographer to my house to take pictures of us in the living room where we rehearsed. One of these, with a tiny accompanying article, appeared in the paper the next Thursday. Inspired by this thrilling success we decided to send pictures of ourselves to the national music press. So we found a mate with a camera and embarked on the grand folly of all teenage bands: the photo session in a cemetery.

The cemetery was on a hill behind my old school, and we mugged and gurned around the gravestones, thinking we were pulling off some natty poses. Next Saturday at rehearsal we saw the results: exactly thirty-six holiday snapshot-sized photos, for our mate, being an amateur, had shot only one film and hadn’t thought of enlarging them. The pictures were fascinating, though not in quite the way I’d anticipated. We looked like guys from four different bands: a mod, a chubby biker, a tanned bon viveur and a hairy rock starchild. Nor had we managed to project a unified attitude: if three people looked tough the fourth was simpering; if two were smiling, the others were grimacing. Or somebody had his eyes closed. Or somebody looked glazed. And our outfits and body language were all mixed up. The only one who had his look sorted was Crigg, with his Eddie & The Hot Rods hairdo and a series of half-decent mod poses. But guitarist Ronnie was cuddly and cheery, while bassist Jim looked like he’d come from a sports car rally and couldn’t wait to go back. As for me, I was whippet-thin with flared jeans – even in the punk Year Zero of 1977 – tight velvet t-shirt, shoulder-length hair, and no sense of what to do with my body. Shall I put my hands on my hips, or here, halfway up my chest, or shall I make a funny face, or look wary, or suspicious? I hadn’t yet quite landed.

The photos were deemed unusable and we divvied them up between us for souvenirs, each band member taking the ones that showed himself in the least-worst light. It was almost our final act as a band; at the end of summer Crigg split to form a mod trio, Ronnie gave up groups, Jim went to drama college and I moved back to Edinburgh, then ablaze with punk rock, where a new constellation of possibilities glimmered on the horizon. But before we went our separate ways there was one last local show to play.