Rod: The Autobiography (10 page)

Blame the song choice. Whose idea was that anyway?

In December 2010, I reached a major career milestone. I appeared on the cover of
Model Railroader
magazine for the second time. Getting on the front of
Rolling Stone
had nothing on this.

In 2007, when
Model Railroader
first ran a feature on the layout that I am building on the top floor of my house in Los Angeles, the reaction I got was extraordinary. People were coming up to me all over the place and saying, ‘Well done, Rod. I’ve been a closet model railroader for years and now there’s a rock star doing it who’s not afraid to admit it.’

Well, my pleasure. You could also mention Roger Daltrey, with whom I exchange emails about his British layout, and Jools Holland, who shares pictures with me every now and again, and wanted a building of mine for his own model. Frank Sinatra Jnr, too, is one of us.

But so are thousands upon thousands of other people, and I’m unashamed about being a model railroader – if a little guarded, like most of us are, about the typical reactions you get, the stupid ‘Chuff Chuff Rod’ headlines and so on. As long as people don’t call it a ‘train set’. I have a diploma from the National Model Railroad Association of America declaring me to be a ‘Master Model Railroader’. Forgive me for saying so, but you don’t get one of those for making a ‘train set’.

In any case, it’s not really about the trains. They don’t especially interest me. I’m not a trainspotter and I can’t recognise different classes of locomotive, or anything like that. What interests me is the modelling of the city and the landscape
around the railway tracks, trying to get that right and make it look real. For me, the trains are just the way into heart of it, which is the modelling.

What Dad bought me when I was seven – now that
was
a train set, a tiny circle of Tri-ang track and an electric train. I still played with it after the electrics packed up, pushing the train around the track by hand. Going into my teens I started building my first proper layout on a board, six feet by four feet, which seemed huge at the time. But then my dad bought me a guitar, and railways got dropped for a while.

They stayed dropped until my dad retired and my parents moved out of the Archway Road newsagent’s and into a neat little council house a couple of streets away at 24 Kenwood Road in 1966. I built a layout right around my bedroom, at the level of the windowsill, on a board about two feet wide, with a hinged lift-out section in the doorway – a pretty complex piece of engineering, even though the room was tiny. I constructed a papier-mâché hillside for it, with a tunnel running through. My bed was squeezed in under the baseboard. Mum always had to crouch when she came in to give me a cup of tea in the morning.

Ronnie Wood stayed over at Kenwood Road one night – this must have been around the time the Jeff Beck Group was getting going, in 1967. Mum came in with the morning tea and Woody sat straight up – ‘Oh, thank you, Mrs Stewart’ – and smacked his head on the underside of the boarding, an incident he has never let me forget. And one warm evening I lost an entire train and its carriages when it derailed and dropped out of the open window, smashing to bits on the concrete below. But you will know about that incident already: it went down famously in history as the Great Rail Disaster of Kenwood Road.

Music intervened once again when my solo career and the Faces were taking off, and the hobby was dropped until 1971 when I bought Cranbourne Court, near Windsor, where I knocked two bedrooms through into one. That was a fairly serious layout: I got the baseboards in, got the track laid and the wiring done.

But that track had to be abandoned when I moved to America in 1975. At Carolwood Drive, Beverly Hills, when I was living with my first wife Alana, I used to fiddle about making buildings from kits, but I had no layout to put them on. The current layout was only made possible when I built the house I now live in, in Beverly Park, in 1993, while I was married to Rachel Hunter. Malcolm, my personal assistant at that time, who used to be a roadie for Strider but came over to work for the Faces, was also a model train guy, and he helped me to lay the tracks.

It’s in the attic of the house, in a room fifty feet long and twenty-one feet wide, with a workshop across the corridor. It’s based on an American city in the transitional period between steam and diesel; diesel is just being phased in. So it’s about 1945, the end of the war. Plain roofs are the giveaway: there are no air-conditioning units or ducts, except on some of the big factories, which had started to incorporate cooling systems by then. There’s a city scene, which could be any major American city in that period, with skyscrapers, some of which are five feet tall, and then an industrial area, with factories and an oil refinery, and then the train lines head out across the countryside. The layout is properly stage-lit to convey late afternoon sunshine and there’s a sound system for ambient noise. It’s about two-thirds completed, so it should keep me going for a while. Nick Barone, who runs the Allied Model Trains store in LA, comes in and helps with things I can’t do myself – electrics are not my strong point – and the bridge over the river is modelled on the Brooklyn Bridge and was made for me by a friend who builds architectural models. But otherwise the buildings and the street scenes and the hand-painted figures have been assembled by me.

I’m fascinated by the buildings, and in particular the ageing process, the weathering. I take a lot of photographs of buildings for reference, especially when I’m in places like Chicago or Kansas City, the great railroad towns. Even seemingly simple things, like the way rust lies on a piece of corrugated iron, can be incredibly tricky to replicate. The only way you do it is by
looking at photographs and getting your paints right and your pastels and your inks. It’s like being an architect: you put buildings on there sometimes, and they look wrong and have to come out. But I’ve got an eye for where they should be, and the scale of them.

The buildings I make are from kits, or adapted from kits. Three padded flight cases travel with me on the road, with paints and tools and whichever model I happen to be working on. I make the big structures in pieces and then put them together when I get home. Those cases go all over the world. When we schedule the hotels for the tours, we request a suitable clear table and a bright light, and from Jakarta to Saskatoon, many a quiet and otherwise vacant afternoon has been whiled away with modelling.

When I’m at home, I regard a day as wasted if I haven’t spent at least a little time working on the layout. My wife Penny likes it because it keeps me upstairs and out of the way for a while. But it’s pretty addictive – and totally absorbing. The world disappears while I’m doing it.

So, there is no wearing of peaked caps, waving of flags or blowing of whistles. Furthermore, anyone found in the vicinity of the layout making train noises will find themselves forcibly ejected without further question.

My daughter Ruby was on her own in that upstairs room not long ago, and she said she found herself thinking, ‘If I didn’t know my dad, I would say the person responsible for this was a psychopath.’

Well, it’s a point of view. I prefer to remember what my dad used to tell me. He always said, ‘To be properly contented, son, a man needs three things: a job, a sport and a hobby.’

So, in my case . . .

Job: singer.

Sport: football.

Hobby: model railroading.

Loud and proud.

SO, MY FIRST
single flopped. And on top of that my band broke up. And a happy Christmas to you, too.

Long John Baldry and the Hoochie Coochie Men came off the road in October 1964. I was nineteen and had been on board for the best part of ten months. The bookings had dried up a bit and then it reached the point where Long John was veering dangerously close to bankruptcy by keeping us all on those rather loveable wages. He reckoned he owed £3,000 eventually – a steep old sum at 1960s prices. So that was it. I was gutted. I loved going out to sing with that band. In terms of pay, colleagues, working conditions and opportunities, I couldn’t have had a better apprenticeship. Also, I hadn’t yet saved up enough to buy a car, which was the broader point of the project.

But such was the live circuit back then. Your novelty quickly exhausted itself. You found a band, and you worked it as hard as you could until the work ran out. And then you found another one. (And, if you were lucky, bought a car.)

Or, better still, your managers found you another one. Rowlands and Wright, who weren’t keen on my being unemployed for long, sent me to try out as the front-man with a band called Ad Lib, and when that didn’t really work, they put me together with a group from Southampton called the Soul Agents. They were a four-piece: a great organ player called Don Shinn; Tony Goode, who was the guitarist; Dave Glover on
bass; and Roger Pope, who played drums and would much later tour the world in Elton John’s band. The Soul Agents eventually had a couple of singles out on the Pye label, but while I was with them, as I recall, we mostly played R&B covers: Rufus Thomas’s ‘Walking the Dog’, Tommy Tucker’s ‘Hi-Heel Sneakers’.

For getting about the place, the band had a fully functioning Commer van, with a conventional, factory-fitted heater rather than the Hoochie Coochie Men’s recklessly imported, oil-fired deathtrap, so I guess that was a step-up. At the same time, while I was with the Soul Agents we had a weekly residency at the Marquee for a couple of months and were only paid £15 a night, which was quite a comedown after the £35 per week that Long John had been paying me in the Hoochie Coochie Men. The Soul Agents did get booked to support Buddy Guy, the Chicago blues guitarist. In March 1965 we drove up to Manchester to the Twisted Wheel and opened the midnight session, and then I went off and the rest of the band stayed on the stage as Guy’s backing band. Quite good fun, but as good as it got.

The truth is, at this point, being a band’s sole front-man wasn’t something I felt completely comfortable about. In the Hoochie Coochie Men I had been second string to Long John, and I think I was happier being slightly sheltered that way – getting to have my moments of attention, but not having to carry the entire show. It’s possible that I still had some shyness to shake off as a performer. It would certainly be several years before I felt ready to deal with being a front-man.

After six months with the Soul Agents, I went back to sitting around at home and vaguely bothering my parents by being indolent on a semi-professional basis. And then, in the summer of 1965, another vacancy opened for me, and once again the provider of the opportunity was Long John.

At the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, Long John had become enthused about working with a 25-year-old organist called Brian Auger and his group, the Brian Auger Trinity. Auger’s manager was Giorgio Gomelsky, who was one of the pivotal figures in
British pop music – a big bloke on the scene, and a big bloke literally, with a tubby stomach, a lot of presence and a throaty Eastern European accent. He had persuaded the Marquee to stage a weekly blues night in a period when there was outright hostility to the idea among the trad jazz purists. Then he started the Crawdaddy Club at the Station Hotel in Richmond and gave the Rolling Stones their first break as the house band. When they moved on, he brought in the Yardbirds as a replacement, and they were no slouches either. People inevitably thought of Gomelsky as someone who knew his onions.

The plan that Gomelsky cooked up with Auger and Long John was to create a kind of revue show, or a record label package, but all in one act – a one-stop shop, if you like, for all your live R&B and soul music needs. Long John proposed me – his protégé, as he referred to me – as part of the bundle. Gomelsky thought the band should also have a female singer, and he put forward Julie Driscoll, an eighteen-year-old who, at that point, wasn’t doing much more than opening the Yardbirds’ fan mail in Gomelsky’s office but whom he knew to have a great, clean and powerful voice and an interest in Motown records.

The idea was that Auger would come on with the band – Ricky Brown on bass and Micky Waller, who was to become a long-standing compadre of mine, on drums – and do a few Jimmy Smith numbers and some stuff of his own. Then he’d introduce Julie, who would sing a couple of Motown songs. And then Julie would bring me on and I would do some Sam Cooke and some Wilson Pickett. Sam Cooke was truly coming through as the real deal for me in this period. The albums of his that had the most influence on me were
Night Beat
(1963) and the two live albums,
Live at the Harlem Square Club
(1963) and
Sam Cooke at the Copa
(1964). I had them at the time, and I still listen to them now – such simple songs, written around such simple chord sequences. And just the beauty of his voice. I always fancied myself as sounding like him, and now, within this revue format, I had the scope consciously to try to do so.
And in trying to sound like him and also like Otis Redding, and David Ruffin from the Temptations, I eventually arrived at my own style.

So I would do my thing, and then I would bring on Long John, and Julie and I would sing backing for him on his blues set. The name of the band was Steampacket – a type of river boat, obviously, but also a reference to the ‘package’ idea and an allusion to the term ‘a steamer’, popular in the day, as in ‘he’s a proper steamer, that one’, and used to mean someone who was really throwing themselves into it, party-wise.

Looking back, this was pretty obviously a dangerously combustible premise. Three lead singers and a thrusting organist who also sang – that’s an awful lot of ego for one small touring van to contain, and an awful lot of ego to try and wedge onto the stages of some fairly poky provincial blues clubs. And so it would prove, eventually. Yet the band lasted a year – working hard, playing five nights a week and commanding £500 for a show in some places, which was as much as the Small Faces were getting in those days, and they’d had hit records. And we were a really good unit. Auger was a storming organ player, Brown and Waller were dead tight, and the sound of me and Julie singing backing for Long John could lift the hairs on your arms when we got it right. And we looked great – dressed to the nines, a complete fashion parade: me in a broad pinstriped blazer over a dark polo neck with cream trousers; Julie in a twinset over a stripy top; and John in a light-coloured suit with double-breasted jacket and skinny lapels and a tie with a tiny knot. John was rarely without a tie.