The Man Who Lived by Night (14 page)

Hoag:
How long did you live up there?

Scarr:
A week.

Hoag:
Wait, I thought you—

Scarr:
Moved up there? No. We got it together around home. Found ourselves a new name. Most people thought Us had to do with racial harmony or like that. Actually, it came from sitting around one night with a list of twenty-five names and liking that one the best. Marco staked us to some better equipment. Fender Strato for Rory, Fender Precision Bass for Derek. Vox AC thirty amps. We started out by playing a lot of the songs we’d been playing, only more up-tempo. That was Puppy’s influence. He was totally up. Had what I call The Energy, y’know? And he was so bleedin’ good we figured we’d give him a couple of drum solos. No band had done that before. When we had it together we took the train up and checked into a cheap hotel. Marco knew Ray McFall, who owned the Cavern, which the Beatles had made famous. Got us a gig there. A dingy jazz cellar in the city center, it was, walls dripping with sweat. Record company executives in suits were queued up to get in the door, hoping lightning would strike the same place twice. What did they know about the music? They knew shit … We’d been at it for years, y’know? When it finally did happen for us, it happened
bam—
EMI offered us a contract on the spot. They’d signed the Beatles. When they got wind we weren’t actually locals they figured as how we should say we were, as did Marco. He handled the contracts. Gave each of us an allowance. We were bleedin’ louts about the business end. Signed whatever the fat little cunt put in front of us. Fucked us royally, he did … We cut our first single at the EMI Studios in London. George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, was our producer as well. Very polite. Also very much the big boss man. Told us “Great Gosh Almighty” would be our first single, with “Shake, Rattle and Roll” as the B-side. Told us Puppy’s drum solos didn’t fit. Told me to leave m’harp in m’pocket. The entire thing was over in four hours. Then the hype started. Marco gave us Beatles haircuts and gold blazers and new identities. Derek was the Face, Rory the Serious Musician, Puppy the Joker. I was the Talker. I was always to put on the scouse accent. Got to be second nature, after a while. What took getting used to was the things they started planting about us in
Rave
and
Fabulous,
the teeny fan mags, like who our favorite film stars were and what we ate for breakfast. I mean, they never even asked us. Then they put us in a cinema hall package tour, opening for the Everly Brothers in Northampton, Leicester, Nottingham … That’s when it started to pop for us. It was the girls, mostly. It was how they responded to Puppy.

Hoag:
How did they respond?

Scarr:
They screamed. Tried to climb up on the stage. Rushed the stage door afterward, wanting to meet him, touch him. I mean, the man was doing some very sexy, outrageous things up there. Inflaming ’em. He was
black,
mate. The boyfriends, they tore up their seats. Threw rocks and bottles at the coach as we pulled away. Rioted, practically. Marco, he milked it, started alerting the police and newspapers in each town before we arrived. That got us the “Fear Jungle-Boy Riot” headlines. Turned us into a sensation. The police had to form a human chain in front of the stage every night. And “Great Gosh Almighty” went to number three on the charts.

Hoag:
How did Puppy react to all of this?

Scarr:
He was a performer. He loved the attention, particularly from white girls.

Hoag:
How did you and Rory feel about this—that this is what it took to put you over the top?

Scarr:
This was our shot, mate. We didn’t care how we got it. The important thing was what we did with it once we had it. Plenty of groups came and went with their one hit, their one gimmick. Staying hot, that was something else. Had to keep the hits coming, one after another. Only a handful of groups managed that—the Beatles, Stones, the Who, and Us.

Hoag:
What did it take?

Scarr:
No great mystery there. To stay on top, a group had to grow musically. Had to care about the music, not just the trappings. Fight for the music, which meant you telling the record company what to do, rather than them telling you. Rory and me, we wrote our first song together in the motor coach between Sheffield and Leeds. I put some lyrics down. He strummed some chords. We hummed a melody, and soon we had something—“Come on Over, Baby.” We recorded it soon as the tour ended. Now that Puppy was a celebrity, George Martin let us include a drum solo. And I played m’harp. “Come on Over, Baby” shot to number one. That got us a spot on
Ready, Steady, Go,
the top telly program. And it got us released in North America.

Hoag:
You mentioned the Beatles, Stones, The Who. You go back a lot of years together. Your readers will be interested in your thoughts on them.

Scarr:
The music?

Hoag:
The people.

Scarr:
I don’t know about that, Hogarth …

Hoag:
Let’s try a word association. I give you a name, you tell me what pops into your mind.
(pause)
Lennon …
(silence)
Jagger…
(silence)

Scarr:
Look, I’d rather not do this. I don’t wish to write about my mates in this book. I really don’t.

Hoag:
Derek said you have no mates.

Scarr:
Did he? I could get a hundred of them here in thirty minutes. All I have to do is ring them up.

Hoag:
So why don’t you?

Scarr: (silence)
Perhaps I will one day soon. Perhaps I will.

Hoag:
I’ll be looking forward to it.

(end tape)

(Tape #2 with Derek Gregg. Recorded at his new art gallery, The Big Bang Theory, Nov. 30. Workmen are still in process of unfinishing it—walls and ceiling are being stripped to bare brick and exposed pipes. And left that way.)

Hoag:
Interesting decor.

Gregg:
Perfectly dreadful, isn’t it? Whatever’s in, I always say.

Hoag:
I’d like to talk about what was “in” here in ’64, when you first hit it big.

Gregg:
They called it Swingin’ London, luv. We were a part of it. But it was bigger than us. It was a wave of new talent that was shaking up just
everything.
Actors like Michael Caine and Terence Stamp. Fashion designers like Mary Quant, with the miniskirt. David Bailey, the photographer, was changing the meaning of glamour, and models like Tulip were changing the meaning of beautiful. She asked about you, by the way. I said you were okay. She’ll see you.

Hoag:
That’s terrific. Thanks. Are you two close?

Gregg:
We all remain close—we went through a revolution together. Suddenly, it was hip to be a commoner, to be loutish, untutored, real. Suddenly, we were the celebrities. The photographers followed us day and night. The more the older generation put us down, the more the young ones wanted to be just like us. We rolled around in it, we did. Shit, we were twenty-two. We dressed flash and behaved flash. Drank and partied all night at the Ad Lib Club and Bag O’ Nails. Each of us had three or four different flats where we crashed with three or four different girls. Even me. Treated them all the same—“Hang out, doll. Maybe I’ll be back.” Mr. Cigar, he emerged as this major spokesman on public issues. “Who’d you be voting for in the upcoming election?” they’d ask him. “Donald Duck,” he’d reply, and it would be on the front page the next day. I remember he said to me one night that if he stuck two lit Woodbines up his nostrils, every teeny in Great Britain would start smoking his cigarettes like that … We had
power.
That’s what it was. It was a trip. I miss it.

Hoag:
After “Come On Over, Baby” was released in the U.S., you—

Gregg:
We went on over, yes, and it was a big disappointment. Here at home we had a number one song. There, we were merely another new British group. There were no screaming girls when we landed. No press conference. Nothing. Mr. Cigar wanted to fire Marco on the spot, he was so pissed off. We stayed at an overheated salesman’s hotel on Thirty-Fourth Street, the New Yorker. We did not get booked on
The Ed Sullivan Show
or play Carnegie Hall. We were on the radio with some guy called Murray the K, and our gig was at a discotheque in Times Square called The Cheetah. But we did go over well there. Met recording people. Also met the Warhol crowd, and fell in with them. Went down to that utterly bizarre place of his, The Factory, where we got turned on to marijuana. Mr. Cigar started his thing with Edie Sedgewick then. I personally had my first gay experience with someone I met there. Through Puppy we met Jimi Hendrix, who was playing at a basement dive in Greenwich Village. He blew us away with his music. He and Rory were both guitar freaks—spent hours together in the guitar shops on West Forty-Eighth Street. New York was a happening place. But once we left there, Christ, it was like being back in the northern provinces. In Philadelphia we lip-synched “Come On Over, Baby” on the
American Bandstand
program, and also appeared on a chat show called
The Mike Douglas Show.
The host had been a big band singer, so he thought it would be a gas to put on a Beatles wig and join us. Rory simply handed the fellow his Strato and walked off. God, he hated that shit … From there we hit the road in a rented motor coach, with Jack at the wheel. Marco had booked us on a tour of the South, playing auditoriums and fairgrounds in places like Birmingham and Jackson where the civil rights thing was really quite volatile. The idea was that Puppy’s antics would set off the same fireworks they had back home in the north.

Hoag:
Did they?

Gregg:
Too much so. After our first couple of appearances our gigs were canceled in a lot of cities down the road. Too risky, they called us. That got us some national attention, made Pup a cause célèbre. When we arrived in Los Angeles we even got invited—dig this—to a dinner party at Sammy Davis Jr.’s home. It was a show of racial support for Pup by the liberal show-biz crowd, or some such thing. Blew us away—all of these famous Hollywood stars like Sidney Poitier, Gregory Peck, and Natalie Wood showed up there to support us. Mr. Cigar freaked out over meeting Natalie Wood, with her having been in
Rebel Without a Cause.
He asked her all about James Dean. Then he took her home and fucked her. And told
everyone …
Tris was really taken by America. He particularly took to the glamour and unsavoriness of L.A.—Grauman’s Chinese Theater, Disneyland, Marilyn Monroe’s grave. He ended up living in Malibu for a few years when we got into tax trouble. I chose the Italian Riviera. To each his own … Do they know yet who shot at you?

Hoag:
Planning to confess?

Gregg: (laughs)
You have a wonderful sense of humor. That bothers me about Jeffrey. He’s so solemn. So
dumb.

Hoag:
On the face of it, it couldn’t have been you. You’re strictly a black powder man.

Gregg:
And?

Hoag:
Three shots were fired at me in the space of no more than ten seconds. Can’t do that with a muzzle loader—it takes too long to reload. You’ve got your powder, your wadding, your ball. Then you’ve got to push all of that down with your ramrod. No way it was done with a muzzle loader. At least, not a
standard
muzzle loader.

Gregg:
Meaning?

Hoag:
If I remember correctly, they made a few single-barrel muzzle loading
repeaters
with superimposed loading. Mostly experimental. Very hard to find now. Museums have them, a few wealthy collectors. Do you own one?

Gregg: (silence)
No, I own two—an 1828 Jenning/Reuben T. Ellis Repeating Flintlock four-shot and an 1863 Lindsay Repeating Percussion Rifle-Musket.

Hoag:
Make quite a puff of smoke, don’t they?

Gregg:
They do. What of it?

Hoag:
Then again, you
could
have done the job simply by using three different standard muzzle loaders, all of them loaded and at hand … Couldn’t you?

Gregg:
You don’t actually believe
I’m
the one who shot at you, do you?

Hoag:
You did seem pretty upset about Tris mentioning your child in the book.

Gregg:
Oh, that. We had a phone conversation, Mr. Cigar and I. He promised me you’d be cool—not name any names. So long as the boy’s identity is protected, I have no problem. I’m not angry. Besides, firing long arms in the street isn’t exactly my style. I prefer a quieter, more civilized approach.

Hoag:
Poison?

Gregg: (laughs)
No. I’m really an old-fashioned sort of bloke at heart, Mr. Hoag. I hire lawyers. Quite dear ones.

(end tape)

(Tape #2 with Marco Bartucci. Recorded in his office at Jumbo’s Disco Nov. 30. Hasn’t licked his stubborn perspiration problem.)

Bartucci:
Our second tour of the States was an entirely different story from the first.
More for Me
was the number one selling album there. At the very same time, their movie,
Rough Boys,
was the summer’s hottest release, and it in turn had a hit soundtrack of its own. Ever see it, Mr. Hoag?

Hoag:
Eight times in one weekend.

Bartucci:
The kids screamed for them now like they had for the Beatles. They sold out Shea Stadium. Played the
Sullivan Show.
Three sold-out shows at the Hollywood Bowl. A monster tour I put together, not that I’m trying to pat myself on the back.

Hoag:
Of course not.

Bartucci:
In Chicago, I took them to Chess Studios, where they recorded some of their favorite R and B songs backed up by old-time Chicago bluesmen.
Chess Moves
it was called.

Hoag:
How come it was never released in the U.S.?

Bartucci:
The record company thought it would compete with the live album of the
More for Me
tour. The boys enjoyed the Chess sessions. They enjoyed the tour. Marco took care of everything for them. After the show, Jack filled their rooms with liquor and pot and fifteen or more game young ladies—innocent fun compared with what went on later, with the heroin, the sexual perversity, the wanton destruction of hotel property. Back then, they were merely fun-loving, horny boys. Touring was a tremendous release for them. Here at home there was great pressure on them to go into the studio and make more hits. There were also the domestic pressures. T. S. and Tulip had married. Secretly—EMI and I felt it was best that way. Here was this impudent stud, this bad-boy idol of millions. He just oughtn’t be married to the famous daughter of a prominent barrister, especially one who took him to the ballet and taught him to eat with a knife and fork. It wasn’t his image. It wasn’t
him.
The second he got away from Tulip on tour, he rebelled with both hands. This made Rory happy. He preferred the old T. S. The old clubs, too. In the giant arenas, with all of the kids screaming, Rory said he was starting to feel like a performing monkey. One night, to prove a point, he stopped hitting the strings entirely. The kids were making so much noise they didn’t even notice.
(laughs)
That tour was a gas. Until they lowered the boom on poor Puppy, of course.