The Rhythm Method
Sex, DRUMS and Rock'n'Roll!
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SAMPLER from The Rhythm Method We join the writer as a star-struck, star-stalking youth… My Jack Bruce Adventure By 1972 I was 16, had a proper drum kit, and was practicing daily. I’d lost some interest in the Beatles when they released ‘Sergeant Pepper’. Although Cream had split in 1968, Eric Clapton’s group had remained one of my favourite groups, largely because of Ginger Baker’s drumming. I’d heard a rumour that bassist Jack Bruce, like my family, also lived in Essex and only a few miles up the road in a village called Pebmarsh. Still consumed by pop groups and stardom, I looked on a map to locate the village. Wow! I pointed at the map, a pop star lives right there. An exciting, yet wildly haphazard theory developed in my brain: perhaps Mr Bruce might sometimes even drive past my very door on the way to and from that musical Mecca, London. After all, we lived right on the main through route from London to Pebmarsh. Gleaning from the Melody Maker that his current mode of transport was a vintage Rolls Royce from the 1930s, I reasoned that an old motor like that shouldn’t be too hard to spot if I posted myself like a sentinel at the roadside. After all, all things come to those who wait. I decided to wait. He’ll probably be in London on a Saturday night, out at a gig or some wild party or signing a recording contract or doing a radio interview or making a record or drinking champagne with beautiful girls or something. That’s what pop stars do. So I got up at five in the morning, sat by the front gate and watched the world wake up to Sunday. Jack Bruce did not pass by. Perhaps it was too much to expect. Determined not to be outdone I returned to our front gate and waited, same time, same day, exactly one week later. I’d taped the l.p., Nice Enough To Eat, onto my Phillips cassette player and was listening through its mono, cream earplug: ‘Black Night’ by Deep Purple; ‘Better By You, Better Than Me’ by Spooky Tooth. Then at about 7.15am, a ghostly apparition loomed through the early morning mist. At first it was just the headlights, glowing like two candles in old brown beer bottles. A curious whine of the engine, the rumble of tyres on Tarmac, then a black, vintage Rolls Royce trundled past - with Jack Bruce at the wheel. What a result! But now what? Within five minutes I’d pulled on my platform shoes, Afghan coat and crash helmet and had the garage doors open. I wheeled out my mean machine: a Raleigh Wisp moped. The Wisp had a 50cc engine and tiny wheels, a bizarre contraption designed for trendy young ladies in the mid-1960s. But by now it was tired, out-of-date and frankly, for a virile young man, not suitable for a virile young man. My mates had new mopeds by Puch or Fanticmotor that looked like choppers, or at least a bit manlier than the pitiful, bright orange Raleigh Wisp, but it was all I could afford. Normally I only rode it at night, parking away from the pub so no girl would mock me as I pedalled it down the street, twisted the throttle and hoped the thing spluttered into life, which sometimes, it did. Anyway, I wisped along the twisting ‘A’ roads (flat out at 23mph) on my two-wheeled sewing machine. The smell of freshly cut lawns, ploughed earth from the fields and spring dew on oak leaves mingled with a heady mixture of two-stroke oil from that whining, rattle-bag, toy-town embarrassment laughingly described as transport. A blue vapour trail of exhaust smoke filled the road behind. The nauseating buzz from the poxy little engine distracted my attention from what I might say to Jack, were I to succeed in catching up with him. All the way to Pebmarsh there had been no sign of the decadent yet unrestored motor glimpsed earlier, with its canvas roof, big running boards and enormous chrome headlamps. After whining around the village on the Wisp, carefully avoiding the paperboy and milkman, I was beginning to think it was all a figment of my... There it is! There was the big black car, parked and driverless, partially hidden from the road behind a row of trees and untamed privet hedge. It sat at the end of a sweeping gravel driveway outside a very nice country house. I wobbled to a halt on the moped and simply stared for a while at the pop star’s obligatory mansion. Well, they all have them, don’t they? Big mansions bought with all that big money from big gigs in big groups with big deals in the big city. The Rolls Royce engine was making ticking noises as it cooled. After pondering for a moment, I took a few tentative steps up the drive but the crunching of my boots on the pebbles disturbed some perching wood pigeons. They flapped noisily away and I backtracked quickly. What would my earth-shatteringly-original line be, anyway? Probably: ‘Hello, are you Jack Bruce?’ I could just imagine what his reply might be. I bleated back home and ran out of petrol a mile from my parents’ house. I pedalled the Wisp the rest of the way, got in all sweaty, and had breakfast. And that would have been the uneventful and anti-climactic ending to my Jack Bruce Adventure, were it not for a surprise epilogue. After reporting this detective work to my brother, he espied the same car a couple of weeks later outside a supermarket in Halstead, a small town near to Pebmarsh. My brother went in and saw Jack Bruce at the checkout. He walked up to him and politely said, “Excuse me, are you Jack Bruce?” “Yes I am, now fuck off!” We join the band in New York, on one of their relentless, self-financed USA tours… First of the bigger, prestige gigs was the Ritz on 11th Street between 3rd and 4th Avenues in central Manhattan, where the band played two nights to packed audiences. The Revillos had a strict rule that nobody, except Roadie Rod, was allowed backstage for half an hour either before or after a gig, so we could get ourselves together. This allowed us to psyche ourselves up before going on stage, plus enough time to cool down, get changed and have a damn good argument after the show. Shortly before going on, we were tense. While changing into our stage outfits, the dressing room door opened and in stumbled two blokes. They were from England and the first one seemed to be a minder for the second guy who was short, about five feet nothing and was dressed in an old coat and wearing a flat cap. He looked a bit of an unshaven down-and-out with a mid-length feathered hairdo and a moustache. He was utterly pissed and stoned out of his head, holding a whisky in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He spoke with a strong east London accent and his first words were, “Where the fuck’s the booze?” Everyone ignored this and his follow-up line: “Got any drugs, anyone?” Eugene, busy drying his hair, responded, “No we haven’t and what are you doing in our dressing room? Who do you think you are, bursting in here?” “Who the fuck are you?” the little man said and Eugene returned the question, “I’m Eugene, the singer, and who are you, you little runt?” “I’m Steve Marriot, that’s fucking who!” “Well, fuck off, then!” shouted Eugene. I had recognised Steve Marriot straight away but didn’t have the opportunity to say anything before the outburst. Marriot was the singer from the Small Faces and later Humble Pie. He was probably at the club with Peter Frampton, his former guitarist from Humble Pie, who was reportedly also checking us out that night. As a 14-year-old I had seen Humble Pie at their peak, in 1970, at the London Palladium. Marriot had total mastery of the stage, with husky renditions of songs like ‘I Don’t Need No Doctor’. I remember the glitterball being lowered at the end of their show, showering the audience with spinning starlets of light. Now I was playing two nights in a comparable gig and here is Steve Marriot looking dreadful. Shame, really. I felt sorry for him. Eugene bundled Marriot and his minder unceremoniously out the door. We never saw him again. Marriot was a rock’n’roll dude and his subsequent death some ten years later was uncommon but predictable. He came home late one night to his cottage in Essex, exhausted after yet another pub gig to earn a crust, and fell asleep in the armchair with a lit cigarette: auto-cremation. Sporting a hangover, Eugene was short-tempered. We all were. Not only were relationships becoming strained within the band, we were also becoming less tolerant of others. Following the Ritz shows the band played a similar-sized venue just down the road, called Privates. Other acts playing Privates around that time included Bauhaus, Secret Affair and John Cooper Clarke. Before the Privates gig it was hassle, hassle, hassle from ‘security’, the very people who are supposed to look after the band. As so often happens, the bouncers hope for a fight to prove how tough they are. Normally they want to attack the punters but that night they were giving us a hard time. We were getting pissed off with their attitude. At the end of the balcony was the door into the dressing room, which was above the stage. I was doing a live interview with a radio show, politely telling the interviewer how well the band got on and what a great time we were having in America. At the same time and unbeknownst to me, Eugene was outside on the balcony. He lost his rag with the biggest, meanest bouncer in the western world and punched him one in the face. As I spoke into the microphone, the locked door beside me smashed off its hinges and shot across the room. With it, the bouncer came flying backwards past the interviewer, landing on his back in the middle of the room. He lay unconscious amidst some broken bottles. “But sometimes Eugene can lose his temper,” I added, casually. Next afternoon we appeared on the ‘NY Dance Stand’ TV show. Playing live on TV, during Krupa’s guitar solo the wooden floor gave way and he fell right through the stage. He managed to keep playing, though. On to a gig at Club Malibu, Lido Beach, Long Island, where I got off with a blonde girl I’ll call Gillian. She stayed the night at the Aderbear and the next day I met up with her again, at lunchtime. She worked in the Wall Street area, up one of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, in something tedious. I stepped into the chrome and glass of the WTC and couldn’t help feeling incongruous there, amongst a plethora of smart, grey suited chaps with their natural hair colours. I met her in the foyer. We whizzed at speed up a lift to the 44th floor, then into another lift, up, up, up further, and on into her office. I asked her, “Do you fancy a quick one?” She was a Thin Lizzy fan. She just looked at me with those big, blue eyes and she said, “Well, I’d do anything for you babe, ‘cos you’re a rocker!” The only place to go was to the loos. Money was tight. The Ritz and Privates gigs had helped pay the band some per deums - Latin meaning ‘every day.’ Sorry if that is obvious to you. I don’t mean to be patronising. (Patronising, of course, means ‘talking down to people’). Anyway, these are the theoretically regular cash payments handed out for a band to spend daily, over and above any salary. These laughably small payments were far from daily and, in our case, took the place of, instead of being additional to, a regular salary. More accurately, they could be described as per week-ums, or per-if-you-are-lucky-ums. We still needed another earner for the petrol money out of New York and to the next leg of the tour. Additionally there would be turnpikes and motels and stuff to pay. We may even like to eat every now and then. The group was to play the world famous Peppermint Lounge, where Chubby Checker and his ilk popularised the Twist, the dance craze that swept Britain and America in the early 1960s. A song called the ‘Peppermint Twist’ immortalised the club name. At one time, this place was so hip it attracted film stars like Robert Mitchum and Elizabeth Taylor, painters, pop stars and presidents. It was already dark and I was sitting in the front seat as the band’s van swung into the car park next to the Peppermint Lounge, situated at 45th between 6th Avenue and Broadway. Our headlights disturbed a prostitute and her punter shagging in the rubbish and dirt in the corner of the lot. The cops came along and busted them, but it seemed pretty pointless because the street where the club was situated was a main - mainlining - hookers’ hangout. Before the sound-check I went in search of a bar of Hershey’s chocolate, some Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and a can of Tab. Dunno why I liked Tab: it tasted like a mix of cola, bleach, donkey spit and pond water. The club wasn’t far from Times Square and 42nd Street. Since the area’s heyday as the entertainment epicentre of New York, the whole place had descended to an all-time low. Every other shop was a sex parlour, interspersed with porno cinemas. The steamy heat of the summer evening was awash with the sound of ghetto blasters. The oppressive, dangerous street atmosphere felt more than ever like the living reality of ‘Taxi Driver’: “All the animals come out at night...” From every porch and every corner a white trash, spandexed, glitter boob-tubed, orange mini-skirted, platform-shoed paramour came on to me, “Hey, young boy! You wanna get some on?” said a girl, holding out her hand. Her arm had track marks along it. “I’ll suck your cock ‘till it explodes!” said an African-American girl, a strumpet in a blue Afro wig and not much else, “So how about it, whitey?” She wore a white mini skirt, which doubled as a belt. A dusky Puerto-Rican woman wearing way too much rouge shouted across the street, “You wanna dick me from behind, man? I know you do. I do special deal.” I completed my chocolate mission at the local deli but still couldn’t get used to the legendary New Yorker rudeness. It was so outrageous it was funny. The collection of candy came to nearly four bucks including tax. I gave the assistant the small change to make it up to four dollars and a five-dollar note so she could give me one-dollar change. She slammed the coin down on the counter. I asked, “I just made your job easier. Aren’t you going to say ‘thank you’?” “It’s printed on the receipt.” I went back and sound checked. So this is the famous Peppermint Lounge, eh? I had seen monochrome footage of the Beatles dancing on the club’s stage while visiting America at the height of Beatlemania and now we were standing on the very same boards. The club had a small balcony and tiny stage. Looking around, it didn’t appear the venue had changed much, or had even been cleaned, since the 1960s. From the drum kit I shouted to Eugene, “Remember listening to the ‘Peppermint Twist’? The Ronettes had their first break by dancing on the balcony up there and now here we are! Exciting or what, eh?” Except, as we were broke, we had to do two shows that night to make some money. So we climbed on stage at midnight and gave an hour of frenzied playing in steaming heat to a capacity crowd. The bouncers then chucked everyone out of the club and shovelled in the second wave while we recovered backstage. I furiously tried to dry seven plastic and leather stage outfits with one hair dryer, over the next couple of hours. We went on again, knackered, at two in the morning to another packed audience who kept calling us back for more encores. We staggered off the stage, plodded out of the club at 4am and finished packing the gear into the van by five. Day was almost breaking and the refuse collectors were out hosing down the streets. The prostitutes had gone but evidence of their stomping ground was clearly visible on the sidewalk: blood encrusted needles and a selection of used condoms. Still wet from the gig, we reluctantly climbed into the cold van. There was an immediate drive ahead of us: the next gig was in Connecticut. Buy The Rhythm Method to read more… |