Ain't Bad for a Pink (8 page)

Snakey Jake’s Dead Skunk Band evolved out of these circumstances at the Nantwich Road shop and was more than the sum total of its four musicians. There was already an embryonic band: most of the original line-up were musicians who worked for me, and Pete Whittingham wanted me to join because we were already musical partners. Initially I felt like an adjunct but I played for fun. Whitty and I became the front men playing guitar and writing and arranging songs. Alan Dean was the bassist and Melvin Allan – the only one who didn’t work in the shop – played drums. The Skunk Band soon had my stamp on it and all the songs we played came from my musical background and approach, apart from the original material. I’m still surprised that this happened because I always doubted my abilities. Still do.

People ask about the name. The three Johnson brothers were always known as “Jake” and the rest refers to a Loudon Wainwright III country song about a dead skunk in the middle of the road stinking to high heaven – a song that had the distinction of being number one in Little Rock, Arkansas for six weeks. I wonder why.

The essence of the Skunk Band was variety and Leadbelly was a strong influence in that respect, but we were also bang up-to-date with numbers from Pink Floyd’s
Atom Heart Mother
such as “Fat Old Sun” and “If”. We never aimed to sound like any other band but drew together the strands from my early musical experiences: amalgamating elements of pop, rock, folk, folk-rock, blues and original material with Vaudeville and Whitty’s Celtic connection. Our covers were not so much covers as re-interpretations and some people preferred our version to the original. We could adapt our music to our mood, the mood of the audience, the current composition of the band – all of this. We could edge it with blues, popularise it, folk-rock it or ham it up. We could emphasise the melodic, the raucous, the humorous, the rhythmic or the pathetic. We could be lyrical-emotional, drunken-sentimental, and bawdy-hilarious. We were rhythmic rock-basic or floating tuneful harmony. The band did well and received critical acclaim.

Another aspect of the Skunk Band was its theatricality. In spite of the anarchic behaviour I always had a professional attitude towards public performances. I believed you shouldn’t go on stage wearing what you arrived in. Our dressing up was part of the performance and not a fashion statement. Phil Doody remembers a bass player who wore one glove. There were a lot of these idiosyncratic performance details and Phil probably wouldn’t have remembered him otherwise. Incidentally, the most valued item in the auction of Michael Jackson memorabilia on 22nd November 2009 was the rhinestone-studded glove – just the one – he wore in the Motown 25 celebration in 1983 where he first did his famous moonwalk. It fetched $420,000 from a Hong Kong buyer.

There’s a black and white photo of me in my Skunk Band suit: slightly shabby, moth-eaten and with wide lapels. The £2.50 Oxfam label was attached for years, until Mick Wicklow borrowed it for a respectable do at the Civic Hall, Nantwich. The shop threw in the bowler hat I’m also wearing. To complete the parody there’s a quaver-shaped diamante brooch on the lapel which also failed to survive Mick’s evening out. What is evident is not so much the outfit, as the single-minded concentration on my face as I play the music. Our dressing up had a humorous edge but we were always serious about the music – which isn’t the same as being solemn. I still have a great big kipper tie Cathy made for me. Whitty painted a Rubens nude with a skunk tail on it – it’s a classic. Eugene bought two ties and hand-painted one with a Dobro logo, the other with a National logo. The occasion was the Resonator Show but he was too ill to go. I’ve worn the Dobro tie for Skunking. I have been known to wear one tie at the front and one at the back.

There’s another photo – again black and white – of Pete Whittingham at the microphone wearing a plaid dressing gown. When he was drunk we dressed him up and put makeup on him. This photograph has poignancy, actually: it captures a sad clown moment.

Marking the transition between private person and public performer – a common enough convention – is psychologically as well as visually important as preparation and announcement. As the pop explosion progressed bands increased the gap between their ordinary life and their stage life. Pink Floyd were taking pop performance into the realm of spectacle. As things escalated some musicians wore the sort of makeup that completely masked their identity. King Crimson started their show in Hanley with a screen showing waves crashing on a beach then one by one the musicians came on the stage, starting with the drummer, thus creating suspense. At the end of the show it all happened in reverse. There was a standing ovation and the audience started stamping their feet for an encore. This was impossible, of course: in those circumstances you can’t do a conventional encore because you would have to recreate the world you had just dissolved. A Shakespearian actor can’t come back and say a few lines once the play is over. It would be absurd and it would break the spell.

Other bands introduced ritual destruction into their act. The Who routinely smashed up their instruments. It wasn’t just gimmicky sensationalism; according to them it was like sacrificing an animal. During their debut on American TV Keith Moon blew up his drums, setting fire to Townsend’s hair and causing Miss Bette Davis to faint – a delirious moment. Jimi Hendrix set fire to his guitar. He needn’t have bothered – he already had! Personally though, I feel that any musician worth his salt wouldn’t destroy his instrument. Perhaps in his case he did it because he didn’t like what he had become: you have to remember what Jimi said about his commercial success when he cut short “Hey Joe” on
The Lulu Show
(1969
)
before launching into Cream’s “Sunshine Of Your Love”.

The Skunk Band didn’t go to such lengths – shows and sacrificial goats cost money for one thing but we weren’t the sort of band to make such a demarcation between ourselves and the audience or put ourselves into a situation where we couldn’t be spontaneous about encores.

In all bands with longevity, people come and go, drift in and hang about, fall over, fall out, start their own band…die. I’ve always said that I could assemble the Skunk Band at a moment’s notice because I’ve built up a large loose network of musicians I can call on. The Skunk Band had at least five phases – not that anyone was counting – and the fluidity was part of its vitality and success. Most of the musicians I called in had heard the set and knew the feel of it. When I was billed as “Pete ‘Snakey Jake’ Johnson & Special Friends”, this was a reference to the wide musical circle I could call on for support.

A steady girlfriend of the time was a performer in her own right: she was a model with an almost professional attitude to nudity and a relationship with the camera that brought this out. Photos reveal her fun-loving, mischievous nature and her slim, smooth body. She obviously enjoys the fantasy role playing afforded by the fetishist clothing and accessories. The nicest, most erotic photograph shows her in a white satin bodice with one breast almost covered. She is looking away from the camera, which in other photos she defiantly confronts. In another photo she is sitting on my friend Keith Brammer – lucky him! But all you can see of him are his oily hands. He is obliterated by her full-frontal pose; her relationship is with the camera, not him or the person behind the camera. She is a woman quite comfortable in the nude yet not aggressively sexual, having an ethereal quality: varied moods flickering over her. Chameleon is a good description: she could easily and instinctively blend in with whichever crowd or boyfriend she was with, and could and should have been an actress. Talk about multitasking: she could do regional accents and monologues, strip and tell jokes all at the same time.

The Crown in Audlem used to hold a weekly disco for which I did the sound equipment. It was the end of the night and people were lingering for a late night drink. Someone remarked that “The Stripper” had tempted no dancers; my girlfriend said she would dance to it so someone put the record on again. She wore a long evening gown and she started to dance. Sexy and erotically teasing, she was very accurate in her timing and by the end of the record she had skillfully removed her dress to reveal she was wearing nothing underneath and had everything to show. Then she walked slowly to the bar, sat down and ordered a drink.

She had style.

Never seen a landlord more delighted. He invited her to dance at The Crown professionally but this resulted in an interesting demarcation between the amateur and the professional. What had been excellent as a spontaneous gesture became banal in different circumstances. She wore a bathing suit and managed not to look sexy or dance sexily in it. Perhaps the amateur performance came from the heart; the professional dancing from the head.

I remembered this when I went to Hooters in the US: a well-known establishment famous for its sexy girls. I beg to differ: they wore sports clothes and very firm bras.

Strangely enough, a later girlfriend illustrated a different side of this audience-orientated behaviour. She favoured public sex but it wasn’t public because no-one knew what we were doing on the park bench! She had had sexy glamour photos taken before she met me and one of the studies is very revealing but not in the sense you would think. The photograph I have of her is professionally posed and very static. It’s arty and in a
fin de siecle
setting: she leans on the mantelpiece of an Edwardian tiled grate. There is a conch shell – a typical piece of erotica – on the mantelpiece and an oval-shaped mirror above, which doesn’t reflect her face, or anything else. She is dressed in a pair of brief knickers, and a sheer flimsy calf-length black skirt through which you can see her suspenders. Her dark stockings have seams and she wears high-heeled shoes: not stilettos as in the early Sixties, but something more of the New Look Fifties style. Her top is see-through and she is wearing a black bra. She has a beautiful hourglass figure but the setting and the stillness in the body give a feeling of detachment, amplified by the fact we don’t see the face. The whole effect is one of the artful use of fetishist clothes and items, to produce an erotic tableau. But it’s depersonalized because you can’t see the face. She has turned her back on the viewer. Did she dress up entirely for herself?

Whilst with me she changed her image and took to wearing neutral, unisex clothing but I don’t know why.

Our band was subsidised by a side band called Chameleon that did regular gigs for money so that the weekly wage would be fairly stable. The line-up was Pete Whittingham and me in our usual roles on guitar and vocals, Melvyn on drums and Keith Brammer on bass guitar. He was a fellow sportsman who’d played in a band with Geoff Ambrose: the owner of Speedway Motorcycles. Al Dean had a position in another band anyway. Chameleon was fun; it had a popular, commercial bias and was conceived as a local way to supplement earnings without involving the Skunk Band. In order to raise the status of the main band I had to separate it from the undiscriminating need to get paid. I sought gigs further afield and I was choosy and uncompromising in order to get the band into the proper circuits.

I decided the most important thing in running a band was being straight: I was the chief and people had to be professional about things
.
It might not have looked that way on the surface, when I was digging Whitty out of the pub but underneath things were tightly run. It was the same with the business – otherwise we wouldn’t have been so successful. And somehow it all worked because there was consensus; we were all mates; we had a good time. I don’t think I saw myself as a conventional boss – I was a communist at heart in those days. I’d leave Whitty in charge and he’d sell one packet of strings and then disappear to Holland’s to buy cooking sherry or I’d arrive back to be told by Shep and Dean that he’d gone across to The Barrel. On one occasion I got them to dress up in white coats and go and fetch him as if they were carting him off to an asylum. There were always practical jokes going on. But the work got done; the music got played.

Phil Grice – Gricey – is a good example of what I mean. He was a good guitarist who stuck with pop and didn’t become part of the Skunk Band but he worked at the shop. He was possibly the laziest lad I’ve ever met, and I had to go and dig him out of bed, cup of tea at the ready, if I wanted him to come to work. I am, and was then, very tolerant of erratic timekeeping as long as the priority work was done. Plum was similarly poor at morning timekeeping. Once the business was really up and running you had to have a bit of a hierarchy though the rules weren’t conventional. They were based on friendship and good will and flexibility.

I recall the amount of preparation that had to go into equipment for gigs. One night we were making a “snake” for an important gig the next day. It involved 32 channels, 64 plugs and 3 soldered joints per plug. We were doing this upstairs at Nantwich Road and it was going to take all night.

With a big bag of grass.

Anyway – it got late and I had to let my wife know I wouldn’t be home. We didn’t have a phone so I had to phone the old lady next door. She was religious and squeaky and I got the old spliff giggles and I couldn’t communicate with her for laughing and in the end I couldn’t leave the message. I think it was a crucial moment in relation to my wife. We were in two different worlds. There are pivotal moments when you start working in the business. You get a different outlook on life and that separates you from other people.

Wayne Davies (Slim).
(3)

I had a long acquaintance with Plum; he went in and out of my life even after we had split up as business partners. I admired his practical skills and thought his strengths were complementary to my own; the original partnership was a sound idea in more ways than one. Unfortunately he didn’t know how I operated. He thought my lucrative visits to cities like Manchester, Liverpool and London to buy stuff for customers were pleasure trips and believing this he rightly felt resentful. He certainly hadn’t rated my input – in fact he probably thought there was no input from me. So he wanted to split up. Plum kept Hewitt Street and I had Nantwich Road; I retained the Custom Amplification trade name and Plum renamed his section: Air. We had a share-out of stock and there was some animosity between us, but only initially. He continued making and supplying cabinets and if I wanted a cabinet I might have it off him but I was much more interested in retail than manufacture. Hewitt Street was in effect a wholesale factory shop. If Plum had listened to me I could have made it into a manufacturing unit but at the end of the day Plum was only interested in having just enough money for his present needs and never worried about the future: he just spent the money without considering tax or VAT or money for materials. Unfortunately his practical excellence was not enough to compensate for his lack of business acumen and he went bankrupt within six months. Meanwhile I had a growing business in vintage guitars which Gordon-Smith was advertising.