Wild Tales (4 page)

Sure enough, everything soon turned to shit. They carted my dad off to Strangeways, a brutal high-security prison, with an execution shed and a permanent gallows. You’d see it as you walked through downtown Manchester, dark and ominous, a scary fucking place right out of a Dickens novel. I couldn’t imagine my dad being in there with hardened criminals. And neither could my mom—she just came undone, which was so unlike her.

Things got really tough at home. I had to become the man of the house—make sure the front and back doors were locked at night, the oven was off. Kept the outside looking respectable so the neighbors wouldn’t talk. My sister Elaine became my responsibility. I’d be going to meet my friends, and as soon as I put my hand on the door, my mother would yell: “Take your sister with you.” Awww, fuck! “Okay, c’mon, Elaine.” If you think there were no luxuries before this fiasco, now we had to cut back on necessities to pull through. Food was in extremely short supply. Most of my clothes came from the Salvation Army, clothes that neither fit nor matched. I was wearing tops that seemed like Grandpa’s nightshirt, coats that hung off me like a tent. One time, after wearing out the soles of my shoes, I was forced to wear a pair of my mother’s flat brogues, which was fucking humiliating for a twelve-year-old kid. This came at a time when I was supposed to be cool, trying to attract girls and friends in general. Here I was in these shitty clothes, looking stupid, anything but cool. Man, it’s affected me to this day. Even after all the great things in my life, I still have trouble with my coolness quotient.

Before all this had happened, I’d kept my grades up in school and passed the Eleven plus exam, which separated those of us who’d go on to grammar school from those who wouldn’t. This took a great and unexpected toll on my friendship with Allan. We’d been best friends since we were six, but around this time we began to drift apart because of the exam. Clarkie’s not passing drove a bit of a wedge between us. I’m not sure exactly why. Maybe he didn’t feel as bright as I was, although that wasn’t the case.

That year was complicated for so many reasons. My dad had
finally been released from prison. He’d been at Strangeways for the first five months of his sentence, then got transferred to a minimum security facility called Bela River.

But the man who came back to Salford, to our home and family, was completely broken. He’d lost his self-esteem and self-respect as a result of the incarceration, and soon afterward he lost his job as well. David Brown Jackson’s firm fired my dad for no good reason other than the fact that he’d been in jail; no consideration was given to his years on the job or to his personal character, which was otherwise beyond reproach. Seeing what my dad had gone through had a huge effect on me.

Still, passing the school exam was a pretty big accomplishment, especially in our family, and as a reward my mother bought me a Philips record player. Talk about sacrifices! I have no idea how she managed to scratch up enough to pay for it, because we had absolutely no money to speak of. What a fantastic gift. The first thing like that I ever owned. Man, I
loved
that machine, even if we had no records.

The guy who had the records was named Ralph Etherington, who lived a few doors away, at the bottom of our street. One day, in early 1956, he called out, “Hey, come over here and listen to this.” He had an
electric
record player, you didn’t even have to crank it. He just flicked it on and dropped the needle on … “Heartbreak Hotel.”

Wham!
—it was as though someone had slugged me. My mouth fell open as Elvis powered through that ferocious thriller. No matter how many times I hear it, it still affects me the same way. Oh, man
—are you kidding me?
That smoldering voice just grabs you and refuses to let go. All that anguish, heartache, loneliness, and soul delivered by that
voice.
He just spilled his guts, he put it all out there. It’s a piece of musical theater that has very few equals.

From that point on, the heavens opened. I started to hear American rock ’n’ roll everywhere I turned, all those great records that people’s brothers and cousins were bringing back from having gone to America with the Merchant Navy. “The Great Pretender,”
“Butterfly,”
“That’ll Be the Day,” “Hound Dog,
” “Long Tall Sally” … 
Skiffle, Lonnie Donegan—man, I was
gone.
Lonnie did a number on all us British teenagers. He’s the guy who gave us the ticket in—he made it possible for even poor kids like me to assemble a band using things you already had around the house, like a washboard and a tea chest for percussion and bass. It was a brilliant intro to playing music. So many bands in the north started as skiffle groups, including the
Beatles, which made Lonnie Donegan a very important cat. But skiffle couldn’t compete with the magic of rock ’n’ roll. I remember a foggy afternoon in Salford, walking to the local record store. They had little speakers outside that played the latest American hits. Through the fog I heard “Blue Moon” by Elvis and it was … perfect.

That did it! Once rock ’n’ roll got under my skin, it was all over for me. Instead of listening to my lessons at school, I began doodling, drawing Fender Stratocasters and stage setups. I started practicing my autograph. Daydreams took over, and I pulled myself toward those dreams. No matter what they tried to teach me, I knew where I was headed. Nothing was going to derail my dreams.

Meanwhile, people continued to feed them, left and right. A friend of mine at Salford Grammar, Arthur Marsden, would bring his records to school in a little portable thing that you could plug in and play almost anywhere. One day he pulled out a 78-RPM copy of “Be-Bop-a-Lula,” which he agreed to swap for my lunch. Bless you, Arthur. First record I ever actually owned—and what a record! It fired my imagination in so many ways.
Gene Vincent’s snarly, brooding voice oozed sex and danger, and he wrapped it around an unforgettable lyric. The way he spit it out—man, it just
killed
me. I’d seen a picture of him in a black motorcycle jacket, with his hair slicked back, looking like he was ready to kick some ass. He was the whole package. Rock ’n’ roll incarnate.

Clarkie and I were completely besotted. And a couple years later, my friend Fred—he got a two-wheel bicycle for his birthday and rode all the way to Bad Nauheim in Germany, where he met Elvis. So, of course, from that moment I wanted a bike. But music was all
we talked about. We craved it like a couple of junkies. Sang together almost every day. We’d meet up after school at the Salford Lads Club, a little social center for kids who didn’t have anything to do, where we’d play chess, snooker, and Ping-Pong. Allan and I were in a minstrel show there. Slapped on some blackface, today an incredibly un-PC thing to do, but who knew back then, in the fifties.

Back in 1955, just before I turned thirteen, my mother asked, “What do you want for your birthday?” So of course I said I wanted a bicycle, my own set of wheels, but you know how it is—we were too poor. Can you imagine growing up and not owning a bike? It kept me from going anywhere, from exploring with my friends. But now I had a choice between a bike—and a guitar. That was like one of those Mensa puzzles, and I debated it for days. Bike … guitar? Guitar … bike? I knew my mother couldn’t afford a decent two-wheeler, so I went for a secondhand pawnshop acoustic guitar. It was called a Levin, a sunburst cheapie, with action so high you had to hitchhike to the frets. Man, it was so hard to press the strings down. My fucking fingers would bleed. But I could keep it in tune; I have a damn good ear.

Clarkie got a guitar at the same time and we taught ourselves how to play chords using
Burt Weedon’s
Play in a Day
books, which is probably the same way
Eric Clapton,
George Harrison, Dave Davies, and
Jimmy Page learned. We’d pass those books around among friends, so we already knew three chords when
skiffle came along. I remember learning my first minor chord: A minor. It was from a Crickets record called “Baby My Heart.”
Oh my God!
A minor chord! Fantastic! When you learned how to make a new sound, your brain went off in a dozen different directions. It opened up a whole new world for me far from Salford.

Those guitars were never out of our hands. Allan and I practiced all the time, playing at each other’s houses. The skiffle hits made up our trusty set list: “Don’t You Rock Me, Daddy-O,” “Rock Island Line,” “Bring a Little Water, Sylvie,
” “Wimoweh.” With two or three chords, you could crank out a couple dozen songs, no sweat. “John
Henry,” “Midnight Special,” “Cumberland Gap,” “Pick a Bale of Cotton,” “Worried Man Blues” … the two of us got to be very good, not only playing these tunes, but with two-part harmony.

One afternoon, while I was visiting at Clarkie’s, his older brother Frank walked in while we were rehearsing. After listening to a few songs, he said, “I really like the way you guys sound. Do you mind if I suggest that you entertain at a club I belong to?” He was a member at a workingman’s association called the Devonshire Sporting Club, owned by a famous wrestler called Bill Benny. After Frank put in a word, Benny told him to bring us up. Every kind of performer worked this place—accordion players squeezing off “Lady of Spain,” jugglers spinning plates, dogs that barked in a certain sequence, just madness. Two fourteen-year-old skiffle players would fit right in.

Chisel it in stone: It was the very first performance we ever did. Someone asked if I was scared going in. Scared? I didn’t even know what they meant. Why would I be scared? This was
exactly
what I wanted to be doing. I was fourteen years old and ready for anything. Besides, we were a couple of fresh-faced kids who thought we were indestructible. And, man, we
killed
’em that night. We rocked the place, and afterward, I remember Bill Benny taking this huge roll of pound notes out of his pocket and, folding them back to where the smaller denominations were, handing over two ten-shilling notes.
Wow!
I took that home to my family. My first paying gig.

At another show, we got paid even more—something like twenty bucks, a fucking
fortune
! It started to sink in that we could earn some serious bread doing this kind of thing. Especially at pubs on Sunday afternoons, where they had small stages and craved entertainment. We’d hit places like the Yew Tree, where they told us, “You can go on at four thirty, but only two songs.” It was less a performance than an audition. There would be booking agents in the audience who would come up to us afterward and, if they liked what they heard, slip us their card. “I’m from St. Ann’s Club, and we have an opening Monday night. Do you want to come by? What’s your price?” Some of our early contracts were for £2.10s, which was
about seven bucks, and were we glad to get it. “Listen, do you want to play in Altrincham next Saturday night for ten quid?”
Ten quid!
Are you kidding me!

Kids our age could play the pubs as long as we weren’t drinking, and my mother would occasionally chaperone Allan and me to make sure that was the case. The funny thing is, in a couple of the workingman’s clubs we shared the dressing room with strippers. That was the second pair of tits I ever saw. Clarkie and I were in heaven. First of all, we were singing; second of all, we were getting paid; and then the bonus: Occasionally we’d see beautiful women in all their glory. Heaven indeed.

Skiffle was keeping us pretty well entertained, but you could tell music was heading in another direction. I sensed it the day I took the bus into Manchester and paid my shilling at the Theatre Royal to see
Blackboard Jungle.
Man, oh, man, did that movie stir up the kids. Ineffective teachers in an inner-city school, teenagers engaged in antisocial behavior—what
wasn’t
there to stir up the kids? There was an undercurrent of energy in those young audiences, a mix of growing up, getting your balls, teenage lust, and rejecting the status quo. Just a cluster bomb of teenage rebellion. And when “Rock Around the Clock” played over the opening and final credits, the Teddy Boys would go absolutely apeshit. They’d tear up the seats, turn on the fire extinguishers, releasing all that energy they’d been storing up inside. I saw that movie
twice.
Every kid saw it. It was utterly fabulous and ignited our fantasies. And when we heard
Bill Haley was coming to town—well, that sealed it.

Bill Haley coming to Manchester was a very big deal. Every kid wanted to attend, and there was no way that Clarkie and I were going to miss it. We knew it was going to be special. We
had
to go, no two ways about it.

But—how? Tickets were going on sale on a Monday in early September, at ten in the morning, and we’d both be in school. The concert would be sold out by the time we got to the box office. Another factor was that Allan and I were now at different schools. As
I mentioned, I had passed the Eleven plus, but Clarkie hadn’t, so while I had moved on to Salford Grammar, he was still at Ordsall Board Secondary Modern, and this threw a monkey wrench into our plans. One of us had to skip school that day, and one guess who got the nod.

Monday morning, I set out for school. I had my book bag with me, I took my younger sister in her pram to nursery school—kept everything nice and routine. But instead of getting on the number 58 bus to go to school, I hopped on the number 2 bound for Manchester. It was another gray day in the dreary north, chilly and overcast; winter was approaching. The queue wasn’t that bad when I got into the city, around 10:30, and made my way to the Odeon on Oxford Road. There were maybe fifty guys my age in line ahead of me, very few girls, all of us bullshitting about how great this was going to be. “I wonder if Rudy Pompilli is still one of the Comets?” “Is Franny Beecher gonna be playing his black Les Paul? We’ve never seen one of them before.”

Finally, it was my turn to buy tickets and I went for a pair in the front row of the balcony, where Clarkie and I could overlook it all. Those tickets were like gold to me. I kept running them through my fingers all the way back to Salford.

The next day at school, after morning announcements, I got called to the principal’s office. Something was up, and I knew I was fucked. You never got called to the principal’s office for praise. E. G. Simms was a tough son of a bitch and students did everything to stay out of his way. While I was standing there, waiting to see him, one of my teachers, Mr. Lewis, came in, and he wasn’t looking happy to see me. Turns out Lewis had ratted me out to Mr. Simms.