Broken Music: A Memoir (15 page)

I look with horror at Megan, who is utterly stony-faced. She turns to me slowly. “Boy, you know how to show a girl a good time, don’t you?”

I must be blushing redder than the lighthouse because her face suddenly begins to break into a faintly amused smile and then she drops her head back to release a raucous and derisory laughter that fills the car. This laughter is so rude that were I not so relieved I
would be totally crestfallen. My embarrassment is tempered only by the fact that we are still alive and, apart from the freezing estuary water around our knees, unharmed. When I at last see the headlights of my father’s car descending the narrow road toward us, Megan is seated on a nearby bench, dripping but still surprisingly elegant in her leather boots, and smoking a thankfully dry cigarette. My car is marooned in the center of what looks like a lake, the salt water lapping gently at the windows.

My father gets out of his car and takes in the whole scene immediately. With an infuriating smile he walks to the rear of his car, takes out a length of towrope, and hands it to me without a word. Then he takes a seat next to Megan and lights up his own cigarette. It is clear he is not going to help me.

As I struggle in the moonlight with the two cars and the towrope, Megan and my father watch with a detached amusement. They make charming conversation, as if they are guests at a cocktail party, my father making sly asides, I imagine at my expense, as Megan releases another of her awful laughs. My father seems hideously urbane and at ease. My humiliation is complete and absolute.

Perhaps there is some large element of the instinctual competition between alpha males here, but it is only in seeing my father’s spirit aroused in this way that I realize, after I have calmed down, that I am falling more deeply in love with Megan than I had ever intended.

    When Gerry leaves for Bristol, he doesn’t leave me entirely without opportunities. He has kindly fixed me up with auditions for two of the bands with whom he’d been moonlighting when Earthrise were short on gigs. One is the Phoenix Jazzmen, and the other is the Newcastle Big Band.

My tenure in the latter will be commemorated by a picture, on the front page of a local paper, of the entire band outside of the University Theatre. We normally play here on Sunday mornings to a packed audience in the bar, but this particular morning, for legal reasons, we are playing in the car park.

My amplifier is plugged into the battery of my new car, a Citroën 2 cv. Don Eddie is behind his drum kit to my left and beyond him is John Hedley on guitar, and then three ranks of musicians: five trumpets, five trombones, and six saxophones, two altos, three tenors, and a single baritone. Standing in front of us and waving his hands in the air is Andy Hudson, the bandleader. Andy is a walking homage to tried and failed fashions of the sixties. A jaunty blue ascot at the neck, an oversize sweater, tight hipster pants secured at the waist by a wide and piratical-looking belt, and suede loafers, all topped off with one of those ridiculous nautical hats that people wear at boat shows. The rest of the band are dressed a little more conservatively but not much better, come to think of it, nor am I. This snapshot of the band is unusual in that it includes the local constabulary, as we are all about to be arrested, and not just for our crimes against fashion.

In the foreground are two officers from the Northumberland Constabulary, who are trying to stop Andy waving his arms, in the vain hope that this will stop the unholy row that we’re making. We are apparently in contravention of the Sunday Observance Act, which forbids the playing of secular music in public places on the Sabbath. This is a bylaw concocted in the nineteenth century, I suppose by local fundamentalists to stop people having fun. The fact is, we have been playing inside the bar of the University Theatre every Sunday lunchtime for over two years now. The bar has been packed with over two hundred “punters” paying a pound a head to listen to
big band arrangements by Stan Kenton, Neal Hefti, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Johnnie Dankworth. We may play them in a manner lacking the tonal subtleties and elegance of the original versions, but this is more than made up for by sheer brute force and disarming enthusiasm. The Newcastle audience, while never being exactly a pushover, become less and less discriminating as copious amounts of brown ale and lager are consumed and a great deal of “ungodly” fun is had by all.

However, it is a Sunday, and although none of us could be described as observing the Sabbath in any traditional sense, it is not the church that has complained. In this instance it is a rival bandleader, embittered and driven by jealousy that we can pull a large, enthusiastic crowd every Sunday morning while his “superior” orchestra, who play at the posh Park Hotel on a Saturday night, are lucky, in Andy’s quaint phrase, if they can draw “two lesbian nurses and a Labrador.”

This rather sad individual, whom I had the misfortune to work for but once, must know someone on the board of magistrates, because a “cease and desist order” is served upon Andy, and the theater bar is forced to close its doors. That is why we are here, set up in the theater car park. We are unbowed and defiant and, if it’s possible, playing even more loudly than usual to a displaced if cheerful audience, when the gentlemen from the constabulary arrive.

The Newcastle Big Band had been started by a group of university students in the late sixties. Andy Hudson, who was reading chemistry at the time, met up with Nigel Stanger, a brilliant if rather dissolute student of English. Nigel was an extraordinary saxophonist and pianist who could quite easily have carved out a professional career for himself if he’d had a mind to. When I join the band, he is following a career as an architect and Andy is carving out a living as an entrepreneur. These two had teamed up with the tall, patrician-looking
John Pierce, who as well as being a lawyer was a damn fine trumpet player and an ambitious arranger. While Andy could play the piano, no one would ever have described him as any more than simply proficient—he could tickle the ivories but no more. However, Andy is one of those fortunate individuals who upon recognizing their limitations in a particular field are then able to devote all of their remaining energies into something for which their talents are far better suited.

Andy Hudson is a brilliant bandleader and he has taught me a great deal. He has irrepressible energy, he is innovative, he is urbane, he has charm, and he seems to have an eye for talent, an ability to see promise in the most unlikely places. My audition for the band is a case in point.

The Big Band by this time had become something of an institution, playing in the upstairs room of the Gosforth Hotel. They had been without a bass player for a number of weeks now. The band would share the proceeds of the door money, and less committed members were often poached away into more lucrative situations.

I had seen the band on a couple of occasions when Gerry had played with them, and it seemed to me that everyone was having a great time, being trapped in a “time lock” somewhere between 1940 and 1959. I would love to play with this band, and I feel that I could learn something within their ranks that playing rock and roll in a garage will not give me. On Gerry’s recommendation I turn up at the Gosforth Hotel with my bass and my amp to audition.

There are few things more intimidating than the sounds of a big band warming up. They are a cacophony of flashy runs and arpeggios, trills and riffs, quotes and improvisations all designed to put the hapless auditioner as far from ease as possible. I watch everyone
very carefully, looking for an ally, a sympathetic glance, or a gesture of welcoming kindness for a stranger, but nothing comes my way.

Almost everyone in the band is at least a generation older than me and had been playing many of the tunes for years. I set up my equipment at the back of the room, where shortly a pile of charts are thrown in my direction. They are covered in beer stains and crossings out, where codas have been moved, whole sections transposed or quite simply missing, so that the charts, while having begun life as guides to the music about to be played, are anything but. I manage to look confident despite my apprehension as the band swings into a Woody Herman tune called “Woody’s Whistle.” It is essentially a twelve-bar blues, so I can busk through the changes without having to refer to the chart, which by the way looks as if it has been written by a spider on acid.

I believe, by the end of the tune, that I have managed quite well, although there were vaguely disgruntled noises emanating from the trumpet section when what I had obviously improvised did not exactly tally with the notes that had been written. I also manage to busk Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train” without being derailed, although I can now see a few unconvinced and shaking heads in the saxophone section.

Disaster, though, is just around the next bend. Nigel Stanger, who seems to want to get this torture over as quickly as possible, calls out a tune by double bass legend Charles Mingus: “Better Get Hit in Yo’ Soul.” I don’t yet know this tune, and what is more, it is played at such a lick—in double 6/8 time—that I simply can’t keep up. Within sixteen bars it is apparent to everyone, including myself, that I am no Charles Mingus, or anything even close. I abandon even attempting to read the chart and while the “A’ Train” may have safely reached its destination we are now in the wreckage of a
full-fledged, high-speed rail crash. The band collapses in a disheartening heap of broken saxophone runs, comical trombone glissandos, and the tragedy of soaring trumpet lines brought disastrously to earth.

I may as well pack up now, this isn’t going well. There are now open smirks displayed on my behalf. I actually overhear “The kid didn’t make it,” I think because I’m meant to, and “Nigel doesn’t want to play with ‘people like that,’” with nods in my direction in case I have missed the point. I am mortified, ashamed, and utterly embarrassed. Andy makes his way over as I am absently shuffling the useless parts and looking out the window.

“That’s a difficult tune.”

He smiles, but all I see is the face of an executioner.

“I’m sorry.” I feel like crying, but Andy says he liked what I was playing in “Woody’s Whistle” and that I obviously have a good ear. At least he’s a diplomat, I think, but here comes the ax….

“If you took these charts home you could probably learn them by next week, couldn’t you?”

I can’t believe my ears, but I grab the pile of useless hieroglyphics in front of me before he changes his mind. “You bet”—and I’m out the door.

I don’t know what it was that Andy saw in me on that first day. It was a terrible audition, but I was determined that I would try and live up to his inexplicable faith in me, and the following week, after managing to decode the semiotic charts, I got the job.

    I will spend the summer holidays living with Megan’s family; her parents have given me a room in their home in Leeds. Megan has gotten both of us jobs at a frozen-vegetable factory in Hunslet. The seasonal workforce is entirely made up of students, who work
twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week for a month, coming on at 8 A.M. to take over from the night shift. We will be paid sixty pounds a week, which is more money than I have ever earned.

Megan is the middle child of a large, successful, Catholic family. Her father is a grouchy and irascible headmaster of a secondary school, and he dominates the family with a zeal that oscillates between the warmth of his paternal devotion and the extravagance of his foul tempers. Megan’s beautiful mother has an Italianate elegance and a calm grandeur that is the perfect foil for the father’s Celtic unpredictability. They are clearly devoted to each other and exhibit a proud tactile sensuality between them. I am enthralled by their affection for each other and realize that Megan’s toughness seems to have been bred in her to survive the noisy commerce of this extraordinary family—an older brother and sister, no longer living in the house but still drawn by the gravitational pull of the family and the rituals of Sunday lunch, and two younger siblings of school age. Arguing seems to be the family sport, but it is not the destructive bickering that I became used to as a child in my own family, it is instead a game of mental agility, vibrant with passion and love and ideas, and the ability to articulate them. I can no longer distinguish whether it is Megan’s family I’m in love with or her.

There is a factory tea break in the morning, a lunch hour, and another break in the afternoon, but for most of the twelve hours I am pushing armies of green beans off a conveyor belt and into a freezing plant. Megan works with the rest of the girls downstairs in the packing department, all dressed in blue overalls and white cotton hats. We see each other only during the breaks.

The noise in the factory is excruciating and talking is near impossible. With only the relentless marching of the green beans to watch, I very quickly begin to hallucinate and imagine massed battalions of marching insects being carried irresistibly to an apocalyptic battle,
and myself armed as I am with a long rake as a sort of grim reaper mercilessly sweeping the combatants to their doom. And apart from daydreaming about sex with Megan, this is the only fun to be had, except that at the end of this purgatory I will have enough money to buy a Fender Precision bass, which has become something of a fetish for me.

I have had my eye on a secondhand Fender in the back of Barratt’s music store in Newcastle since the beginning of the summer term. It is a careworn relic of the sixties, the fingerboard scarred with overuse at the third and fifth frets, the paintwork ruined and the varnish flaked and piebald. Among all the shiny others on the wall there is something orphaned, something life-scarred about this instrument that appeals to me. I have absolutely no desire for a new bass, I want something with a history, where every scratch and dent in the varnish has a tale to tell. I try to imagine all of the music that has been played on its sculpted surfaces and what the musicians must have looked like and thought about, holding this thing in their hands night after night, gig after gig, road trip after road trip. What were their dreams and their aspirations and how close did they get to realizing them? Why was it sold, and what were the circumstances? No one in the shop remembers, but I am convinced that I can pick up the trail where it was left and if I have as much skill in dreaming as in playing, I will dream up a new and glorious future that the past has only hinted at.