Ain't Bad for a Pink (12 page)

Anyway, I plan to move around a bit this summer (about November) and I hope to go to the southwest coast maybe Albany or Esperance. I’ve heard it’s beautiful country, very green, with lots of old whaling towns.

Must have been a choker about the anonymous phone call. I don’t know why people do such things. Do they think it’s going to improve anyone’s life? Linda was probably quite content until the phone rang…I reckon it’s the V.A.T man!

Anyway I’d better sign off and get some “kip.” Remember “Old skunks never die they just stink away.”

All the best Pete; love to Lynne and Ralph and everyone.

Pete Whitt.

P.S. What happened to Cathy, is she still in Crewe?

Write soon.

P.P.S I only drink ½ as much as I did, but I work twice as hard.
(13)

Pete was in Australia for twelve months and was about to return to England when he died of a heart attack. Ironically, he had given up drinking, though he was still a smoker and he never looked after himself properly. Pete Whittingham was thirty-nine when he died in 1985 and I was thirty-six. If you lose one half of a particular partnership, you can’t replace it. The same thing had happened with my sporting partner, Keith Brammer two years previously. The riding stopped. The music stopped.

I was invited to go to Australia but I declined, being more interested in the respect of life than the tribute of death. Everyone who knew Whitty was shocked and upset by the tragic waste. I received a letter from John Billington in New Zealand. It is very touching to notice that John has copied Pete’s style of writing about his friends. This feeling that I was a good friend to Pete Whittingham has a poignant echo in the letter, written in the form of a poem, which I received from Mr and Mrs Whittingham.

Dear Pete,

I got the news about Pete from Alice. What a fucking shame, it seemed like he’d sorted things out a bit for himself, seen the kids, realised where he stood with Pat and seen something of the world, so I suppose he had achieved a lot of what he needed. I find it really difficult to believe I won’t walk into your shop to find you two sitting on amps, drinking Scotch and skunking it up. Alice told me he died of a heart attack, do you know anything else?

…How goes it Skunk in Crewe – are you playing? If you have any tapes of yourself I would love to have a copy to let people know what the Skunk band was about, also if you have got any of Whit’s music I would really appreciate it. You know what I felt about that man and I would really like a tangible memory of him, I miss him. If you can find anything I’ll refund the postage etc.

Give my love to people we know. As Whitty said:

Give Lynn sweet dreams

Shep a twelve bar

Mick the sound of a Norton

Jonty a bacon butty

Linda a rare bird

And yourself the knowledge you were a good friend to Pete, probably his best friend and that you kept him sane when everything else fell out of the window.

Thinking of You

JB
(14)

Dear Peter Johnson,

A friend in need is a friend indeed,

That is what they say.

What better tribute could you give,

Or proof of your friendship true.

Believe us Pete, we his Parents,

Are really proud, that we know you.

Peter spoke of you so warmly,

Your friendship was so sincere.

Not just friendly handshakes,

But mutual help through many years.

And now, your final gesture,

Sums up your feelings, Lad,

For the Son we loved so very much,

One of the best any Parents could have.

God Bless you Lad,

Ivy and Joe Whittingham.
(15)

For all his problems, Whitty’s musical prowess hadn’t declined. We’d played and sung when we’d been drunk and it had been fine. As long as I could get to him before he had a drink and then control what he had, things went OK. But it was rather edgy; I’m not the worrying kind but on a personal level I did worry about his self-destructive tendencies. The possibility of appearing on
The Old Grey Whistle Test
was round about the time of the notorious Leeds gig but the luck didn’t happen and Whitty couldn’t have been relied on at all. Of all the variables, I suppose he was the main one.

Every woman was in love with Whitty. Tall and good-looking, he had a regal, charismatic air about him; even when he was drunk he walked very tall. Linda’s father said of him: “He always looks the same whether he’s standing up or sitting down – like he’s got a rod up his back.” Whitty wasn’t fazed by being in trouble, or in a formal situation. Once when he was in the dock for a minor drugs offence he said to the magistrate, “I am a fool. I’ve done a foolish thing.” We all fell about: we recognised the lines from a Loudon Wainwright song. The magistrate thought it was an eloquent statement of remorse. He didn’t know the subtext.

Pete Whittingham had
style
.

Whitty’s death was a terrible blow to me. I had lost my friend, my musical brother. With regard to all important relationships I believe in total commitment – in going to the emotional edge without calculating the risks. All relationships are equally risky. The alarm bells don’t ring for years.

I miss him.

After this death, I didn’t play music for a while. Then I organized a charity gig to raise money to be put in trust for Pete’s children. When the kids came of age they visited me in Crewe. I was morosely sitting in the Brunswick, having split up with a girlfriend, when two beautiful girls came up and kissed me.

These were Whitty’s daughters. Later, Raphael, his son, came to England and played drums for me at The Limelight. I recall how like his father he was and how weird it all seemed.

I have a postcard from Whitty addressed to the Nantwich Road shop and another postcard addressed to the Edleston Road shop. Round the time he was away there was an economic downturn – during which I sold my Hanley shop and was forced out of my shop on Nantwich Road. I was on the edge of bankruptcy when I took the premises in Edleston Road. The going of Whitty and Brammer and the going of Nantwich Road were all of a piece and at the age of thirty-seven I entered a period of depression. I haven’t recovered though I learned to live with it.

I was touched by this tribute I found on the website
www.ogband.org.
Adrian Peever, who wrote it, was a Crewe musician who went to live in Miami.

Snakey Jake has been a great influence on a lot of people in the thirty-plus years he’s been providing gear and inspiration from his store, Custom Amplification, in Crewe, Cheshire. When I worra young snot-nosed brat passing his dark abode daily on my way to school, the barred confines, guarded in those days by an enormous German Shepherd lurking in the doorway, already fronted a place unlike any other in town. Of course, it wor all trees back then.

If you could get past the dog (for dog it was), you found yourself in a fragrant den hung with priceless pieces and piled high with speaker cabinets, on which there was always some biker or generally scary-looking character either reclining or trying out a vintage Gibson, or a National, or something equally far beyond my perpetually skint means. In those days I had to save up to buy my picks (hey, I still do!) but Pete was always as helpful as he could be, given that actually selling things never seemed to be on anyone’s agenda. It hardly seemed a shop at all, more just a place where real musicians hung out.

Some of my earliest experiences hearing electric live music involved hearing Snakey Jake and the Dead Skunk Band, as Pete has generally called his bands. As I’d never heard any of the tunes he played I associated it all with him, though what I was hearing, I gradually discovered as time went by, was the music of Lowell George’s Little Feat, of Ry Cooder, Loudon Wainwright III (“Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road”), Hot Tuna, J.J. Cale, and a whole lot of other stuff I’d never have heard otherwise. Now that was what you call an education.

Snakey was the first slide player I’d ever seen, and his occasional acoustic sets with his great friend the late Pete Witt (billed as “Brahms and Liszt”) showed me that there was more to the acoustic guitar than just bleeding-hearted singer-songwriters (though a few dozen more lessons in that department would have been even more useful!!). There was ragtime. There was hat-dancing.

Snakey and Pete even performed at Sandbach folk club more than once, though they were certainly not folkies, and that was the last time I saw Snakey play with Pete Witt, a great player who I’m sure Snakey has missed over the years.

In 1987, having often rented equipment off Pete, the Captain and I invited Snakey to Leeds for an evening, and to our delight he agreed, as long as we could lift his unassuming-looking 2x15 cabinet. Now the Captain is not a small person, and I thought this was no problem, but the cab in question contained speakers of such improbable mass that it nearly put both our backs out! However, a real one-off night of rare axe-wielding joy ensued at the Duck and Drake.

Snakey guested with us once more, at Crewe Oakley Centre in summer of ’87, and the video recording of the evening remains notable for the way the sound breaks up entirely whenever the camera is pointed in Snakey’s direction, giving the viewer something of the sense of being in one of those Maxell wind-tunnel ads.

Apparently he was in the US playing the Atlanta Blues Festival in 2000, and he doesn’t play out very often. If you get a chance to see him, take it. A website, snakeyjake.com is also in the offing, I hear. Though there is apparently a commandment somewhere that all jakes must necessarily be snaky to at least a certain extent, this man is the real thing.
Adrian Peever, 27th June 2001.

The shyest and most introverted of my girlfriends is associated with this period. She had a sultry earthy beauty: smouldering eyes and pre-Raphaelite hair. Public shots of her show a fresh-faced girl but more intimate photos show how good she looked and how comfortable she was in erotic clothes. She was affected by the photographer: the photos I took were more relaxed and more spontaneous than those taken by others. More trusting. In one photograph she is a cross between a biker chick and a hippie; another shows her in French mode with fishnets and a basque, no knickers, a snake armlet, a ribbon round her neck and a Hawaiian flower in her hair. There is a photograph of her wearing not much more than a Janis Joplin style woollen boa – clearly aware of the power of carefully placed accessories. For me the loveliest of the photographs belonging to this era shows both of us; it isn’t posed but it has artistic integrity – something to do with the way the limbs are positioned – that makes you think it is.

When things went wrong with this relationship I became very wary of emotional involvement. One fun-loving girl I went out with combined directness with humour. She was very, very young and I had a mass of grey hair by then. When we arrived at Terry Butters gigs the band would be singing, “She was just seventeen” and we would dance. I knew not to get involved and hoped she would find a younger version of me but in the meantime we would have some uncomplicated fun. That was the theory, anyway. On one occasion Sweet Seventeen and I were visiting a classic car show and lying on the grass in the park having a drink. She was wearing a long dress and proceeded to tumble on top of me. “What will all these people think?” was my alarmed response. “Oh don’t worry! They’ll think I’m beating my dad up!”

In spite of moving on from me, this agile ‘daughter’ kept in touch. It would be fair to say that she always took the initiative but I enjoyed her company. She dropped by one Tuesday; I was having a very difficult time with my present partner and was glad of some no-strings simplicity. We went to a pub in Rode Heath and then for a walk across the fields. A few days after this enjoyable encounter I heard that she was honeymooning in Yugoslavia! A fortnight later Miss Seventeen came again to the shop and again invited me to the pub in Rode Heath. I ended up at her house and thought I’d better mention the husband. “Oh – he was too boring,” was the response.

But that didn’t stop her, in her mid twenties, marrying a heavy-drinking builder with an interest in guitars. I remember the two of them coming to the shop with photo albums of patios and garden walls, the whole thing seeming incongruous. Zoe, Andy Boote and I had attended their wretched wedding reception which teetered between disaster and farce: the bride had been drunk throughout the ceremony and there was no sign of anyone making a speech. Upset by this lapse in wedding etiquette I stood up and talked about the bride’s partying ways, referring to the time she had ‘dressed to thrill’ in order to cheer me up when I was depressed and assuring the new husband that he was a fortunate man. I meant this with all lubricated sincerity but the bride’s mother took exception and left the room. I think she had remembered the Winifred Atwell moment.

When Pete went to Australia the Skunk Band entered a fourth phase and had continued as a three piece band. I see that period as being fluid and more selective with regard to quality gigs. The fifth phase of the Skunk Band was less fluid and had a line-up of Moggsie, Melvyn, Andy Boote, myself and occasionally Des Parton.

Mark Bryan was thirteen when he first came in my shop and I took him on as the Saturday boy to clean things. He was a school contemporary of John Darlington and Andy Boote who used to send Moggsie into the shop to see what I had in; the others were obviously circumspect about my legendary grumpiness. Moggsie had been associated with the Nantwich Road shop, JD a little with the Nantwich Road shop and Andy only with Edleston Road, so Moggsie had some seniority over the other two. He had just lost his mother and paradoxically I became his surrogate father.