Wild Tales (2 page)

“Wow! Wait a second. What the fuck was that?”

The three of us were harmony freaks and came from groups that had refined two-part as an art: the Hollies, the Springfield, and the Byrds. But the sound we’d just made was different, so fresh. We had never heard anything like it before. It was the Everly Brothers
plus.
And yet so simple: just one acoustic guitar and three people singing as
one.

It shocked David and Stephen. I’m not sure they’d ever thought about the song in three parts. But I’d heard it right away.

Crosby was beaming ear to ear. “That’s the best thing I ever heard!” he said.

I asked Joni: “Did that sound as incredible to you as it did to me?”

“Yeah, it sounded pretty incredible.”

Something magical had happened, and we all knew it. When you sing with two or three people and you get it right—when the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts—everything kind of lifts a couple feet off the ground. The three of us were levitating, all right. The vibe was so high, it was hard to touch down. There was an intense joy that we had found something new, an original sound different from anything that was out there. It was there, complete, a minute into our relationship. We all felt it, knew it. We
wanted
it for ourselves. But we were reluctant to discuss how to pull it off. It was almost as if we were afraid to talk about it, to let the secret out in case it wasn’t there tomorrow morning.

Besides, there were so many roadblocks in our paths. To sing with these guys I would have to sever my ties with the Hollies—not such an easy thing to do. For one thing, they were my mates; I loved those guys.
Allan Clarke and I had been joined at the hip since we were six years old, and I was an integral part of the group. I’d have to get out of my record contract, get my publishing rights back. It was a mess, but it could be done.

“We have to make this work,” Stephen said.

I nodded. “We have no fucking choice but to make this work.” There was no doubt in my mind. The moment I heard that sound I knew the rest of my life was headed in another direction. No two ways about it. I had no choice.

E
VENTUALLY THE GUYS
left and, frankly, I was happy to see them go. I only had three days to spend with Joan, to get to know her intimately, and there are some things that even music doesn’t trump. Nor did I see them the rest of the weekend. I was just with Joan; let’s get real. But I couldn’t get that sound out of my mind. I
was haunted by those voices, the way they’d blended so naturally. And those guys. And their songs.

On the flight back to London, I was more fidgety than ever. Not confused: I knew now what was in my heart. I had fallen deeply in love with Joni Mitchell. I was a goner in that department. And those two rascals, Stills and Crosby, were messing with my head. Maybe I had fallen for them, as well.

Everything in my world was spinning, colliding, but I knew what I had to do. There was no doubt in my entire body. And by the time the plane touched down I had it all figured out. I was going home to untangle the first twenty-six years of my life, and to tie up loose ends for the next however many decades. I had heard the future in the power of those voices. And I knew my life would never be the same.

Me at Carnegie Deli, New York City
(© Joel Bernstein)

I
N
1996, I
FOUND MYSELF IN
B
LACKPOOL OF ALL PLACES
, a kind of run-down seaside resort where workers from northern England ventured for relaxation, and where I happened to be spending some precious downtime. My two sons, Jackson and Will, were with me, and one hazy afternoon as we strolled down New South Promenade, I detoured into a joint called the Kimberley Hotel, whose two-and-a-half-star Trip Advisor rating kind of says it all. At the front desk, the porter on duty looked up from a magazine he was reading as we hovered into sight.

“Listen, I have a really strange question,” I said.

He waved a hand to cut me off. “It’s around the corner. You go down two stairs and turn left.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, with something less than tact, “but how do you know what I’m about to say?”

“You think you’re the only one to start a question that way?” he said. “Every one of you who comes back asks for it the same way.”

We followed his directions and there it was: the maternity ward, where I took my first breath, at 1:50
A.M.
on February 2, 1942. It was pretty much as I’d imagined it—a dark, dank-smelling thirty-foot-square bunker lined with red flocked wallpaper probably put up during Queen Victoria’s reign. That windowless room was a pretty grim affair, but hell, I’d been lucky to even have a roof over my head.

I should have been born in Salford, near Manchester, where I eventually grew up, but in 1942 Manchester, an important industrial
center, was busy being bombed to oblivion. So its squadron of pregnant ladies, of which my mom was a star member, was evacuated to a safer locale, like Blackpool, where they could have their kids in relative peace. Which is how I wound up making my debut at the Kimberley Hotel.

By the time I got back to Manchester, the war was halfway over, but its scars were visible on every street. Salford, our neighborhood, was a pile of rubble. At least ten houses had been destroyed by enemy payloads, which peppered the city on a nightly basis. Streets blown apart, huge craters in the landscape. It was a very dicey scene. My cousin Ray, whose place nearby had been bombed, was blown under the fireplace, where he lay trapped until workers rescued him four days later. Everywhere you looked, there was total devastation. Then again, maybe it would have been better had the Germans leveled the neighborhood, considering the dreadful living conditions. Salford was a ghetto, a warren of unseemly row houses built around the late 1890s, and, by my count, that was the last time anyone had made improvements.

Salford wasn’t at all representative of Manchester. It had a laid-back character all its own. I found out later it was one of the worst slums in the north, maybe in all of England, but when I was growing up it was a poor but honest community. Everyone just trying to get by best they could. There was no crime to speak of, no one locked their doors. Horses and carts paraded along the streets. A bunch of characters, rag-and-bone men, made regular rounds collecting old clothes in exchange for what we called brownstones, a soaplike block that you would rub against the wet pavement outside your door to dress it up, give the place a shine. Families celebrated events together in the streets, like Guy Fawkes Night or when Elizabeth became Queen in 1952. Kids, future boomers, running all over the place. Kind of made you forget you were living on top of each other.

The houses—hundreds of identical brick two-up-two-downs, wedged shoulder to shoulder, block after block—had been built for Irish and Scottish workmen who had thronged to the north of
England by the thousands and were indentured in the mills and mines. On my street there were maybe thirty houses separated by what we called an entry in the back, and then another thirty behind them—and many more blocks of them stacked right on top of each other. Sure, go ahead, call it the projects, but in those days we knew them more respectably as council houses.

We lived at 1 Skinner Street, a house by the corner. Nothing posh, in fact nothing even middle-class. It was a pretty humble existence. Two bedrooms for the five of us—my parents, me, and my two younger sisters, Elaine and Sharon. One main window downstairs. An exit out the back to a tiny alleyway, where the outdoor toilet beckoned. Not having an indoor bathroom was a pain in the ass, especially in the winter, when you needed to pee and the chamber pot was full. No hot water, either, until years later when we finally got a heater. In those days, Salford was as far as our little world extended. My dad was born and grew up four houses down at 9 Skinner Street. My Auntie Olive and Uncle Ben lived around the corner on Ada Street, my Auntie Peg and Uncle Jimmy a short walk away. It was one big extended family that stretched back generations and probably on into the future. All of us stuck in that vast northern gulag. I used to think there was no escape, but I’m getting ahead of my story. More on that later.

My parents did everything in their power to make our lives bearable. My dad, William, was a big lad—he must have weighed 260, 270 pounds—and he was tall, taller than I am now. But he was a gentle giant, a dedicated workingman, with twinkly eyes and an incredible sense of humor. Like most men in the north of England, he went to great lengths not to stick out. He didn’t have a booming voice, he wasn’t flashy in any respect. He wasn’t opinionated or political. I found my father to be dignified in his simple way, but tough when the situation required it. In any case, you didn’t want to fuck with my dad. Once, when he came to see me perform at a local pub, and Allan and I were wearing makeup for the show, some jackass made a remark about us being poofters, and my dad picked the
guy up as if he were tissue and threw him right through the door. It was the first and only time I ever saw that side of him.

But much as I loved my dad, we never really got into any deep conversations. Truth be told, we rarely talked, at least not about stuff that mattered. Nothing weird about it, it’s just the way things were in our house. And probably in a lot of houses around us. Not a lot of emotional shit. You pretty much kept that stuff to yourself. That’s how it was in the north. Besides, my dad left for work at seven in the morning and didn’t come home until well after six at night. He’d be exhausted, have his tea, maybe hit the King’s Arms, the local pub, and get some sleep before cycling back into the routine the next morning. So I don’t know a lot of personal stuff about him.

My mom, Mary Gallagher, grew up around Moss Side, which is a neighborhood right by the old Manchester City football ground. Like my dad, she worked beastly hard all her life, originally at a dairy in the accounts department and later for a betting shop, which is legal in England. She had dreams and ambitions of her own, great fantasies of a more glamorous life, that I didn’t learn about until later, when I was an adult, but our circumstances made those dreams impossible to pursue. It was after the war, she got married, had a family to raise, other dreams got sidetracked. My parents struggled all their lives—and they just about scraped by. My dad was an engineer at David Brown Jackson’s—David Brown, of course, being DB, who designed the Aston Martins. His firm was an awesome place to a six-year-old kid—a fortress manned by enormous doors, beyond which lay a huge urn of molten iron. My dad would tip that urn and a stream of sizzling volcano lava would make its way down a trough into a mold that later solidified. You’d think that’d be worth something—that he could have made a decent living considering the effort he put in—but he never earned more than twenty quid or so a week.

Were my parents happy? Hard to say. It was difficult for people in the north of England to actually be happy. There was a lot of laughing in our house, but much of it was a device to mask the
underlying hardship, a smoke screen to overcome destitution. England had been attacked
twice
in eighty years, lots of family and friends had been lost in the havoc, so everyone was more or less content to just be alive. The way I saw it, northerners were tolerant, thankful, hoping to get through the next day. Happiness was a luxury they couldn’t afford.

Money was extremely tight in our family. We didn’t have much, but nobody else did either, so it wasn’t a big deal. Luxuries were few and far between. I don’t ever remember going without eating, but I remember being hungry a lot. I was a skinny little kid, not too much padding on the chassis, pretty much the way I was throughout my life, with wandering eyes and lots of thick hair, even then. I was hungry all the time, thanks in no small part to one of my father’s favorite dishes: a cow’s heart. He’d buy one of those fucking things from the butcher and boil it up. Man, it was awful! The food in general wasn’t anything to get excited about. And wartime rationing was still in effect. Long after the war was over, it was still difficult to get butter, sugar, or milk in the north. Staying warm was also up there on my priority list. One of my earliest chores was taking all the stuff out of my sister’s pram, pushing it to the local coal yard, and filling it up so we’d have heat in our house.

When you’re poor, like we were, and living in a grim place like Salford, dreams were often the only way out. The first time I ever hallucinated—this was years before I discovered acid—it was sunset after a storm. I was staring out my parents’ bedroom window. I can still smell the dust, see the window half open. And I thought I saw a golden city in the clouds. Now, obviously it was deviant sun rays on a cloud formation, but to me, a six-year-old kid with a ripe imagination, it was a golden city on an endless horizon. I heard a sound: the sound of a small town operating. There were few cars in those days, just the horses and carts, rag-and-bone men, a mother shouting for her kids—just life. But to me it was music. And it was the first time my mind opened up to the possibilities of what lay in store.