Broken Music: A Memoir (16 page)

    I return to Newcastle a week before the new term, leaving Megan in Leeds, and when I arrive at my parents’ house I am shocked to find my mother and the lovely Deborah sitting together in the kitchen.

I hadn’t seen Deborah in almost a year. Precisely what my mother’s plan was, I have no idea, and I doubt if she did either. It’s
not something she would have thought out. Yet she had obviously engineered this meeting in one of those ill-conceived, spontaneously romantic gestures that shed dredged up from an imagination fueled almost exclusively by old movies. Old movies that wed watched together on rainy Sundays, which fed an appetite for turgid sentimentality and trite perfect endings. Not only is she unwilling to let go of her own emotional attachments, she can’t let go of mine either. Suddenly she’s the expert on affairs of the heart, the fixer of broken dreams, the facilitator, and though there’s no real malice in it, this is dangerous meddling. I wonder if unconsciously she wants to bridge the chasm between us by putting me in her position, suspended between love and duty, idealized romance and practicality. We have never discussed this between us, and neither of us has the verbal skills or even a common language to match the complexities of the situation: we share no fund of literature that parallels and articulates our lives, and it is as if I have to become her to understand her. We are like characters in a primitive masque, but it is a dumb show, and a mystery play without an author.

So now the star-crossed lovers are reunited, and of course, my mother knows me well enough to guess that I too am far from immune to the promptings of this same sentimental and childlike vocabulary.

Perhaps it is the scarcity of vocabulary that is the root of the problem.
Love
seems like such a deeply inadequate word for a concept with so many complex shades and shapes and degrees of intensity. If the Inuit have twenty words for the concept of snow, then perhaps it is because they live in a realm where the differences between each type of snow are of vital importance to them, and the minutiae of their specific vocabulary reflects that central importance. Yet we, who spend vast amounts of our time, energy, and ingenuity thinking about love, being loved, loving, longing for love, living for love, even
dying for love, have no more than this paltry, troublesome word that is no more descriptive or effective than the word
fuck
is for expressing the wonderful and infinite varieties of sexual congress. It’s rather like a city dweller looking at the jungle and dumbly grunting the word
trees
for the manifold diversity that faces him. There are plants out there that can feed him, plants that can cure him, and plants that can kill him, and the sooner he identifies them and names them, the safer he will be.

However, as I’ve allowed my emotional evolution to be stunted by the shallow and tepid waters of popular culture, I can only throw up my Neolithic hands and grunt. Besides, Deborah, following her stage directions to the letter, looks stunning, like a film star. All that is missing are the violins, but the tears flow all the same, and she is suddenly in my arms, and my mother’s crying, and I’m in trouble. Thanks to my mother’s intervention I will have to break with Deborah all over again and the second time is even harder than the first, but at this time I’m convinced that I love Megan and that she loves me.

I move into Gerry’s old flat in Jesmond at the beginning of the autumn term, while Megan lives a few miles away with a couple of girlfriends. Although we don’t live together we are considered an item, a recognizable feature on the landscape of the college.

    The danger of premature parenthood is never far away—every month we will go through the torture of anxious waiting. The years of safe sex and condoms being years hence, we live with a libertine fatalism and I’m too ignorant and horny to calibrate my amors to the female cycle. But when a few days become a week and the next morning is accompanied by an undeniable nausea, Megan is convinced that our days of freedom are numbered. She takes to her bed and I leave for college where the day’s lectures are just a
background drone to the drama playing out in my head:
We’ll have the baby, we’ll get married, I’ll get a job, and somehow everything will be okay
.

I have a gig that night, playing at a dinner dance with an ancient pianist and an even older drummer. They are both well past retirement age and stooped over their instruments like wizened relics. The pianist has wisps of baby silver hair combed artfully in a swirl from just above his left ear to the other side of his shining, freckled pate, while the drummer is wearing a ludicrous bouffant of a toupee, so dark and rich in texture against the pallor of his skin that he looks as if he has a cat on his head. Apart from the barely perceptible movements of their wrists they are utterly still. The toothless “Gerontius” behind the kit seems to be whisking an egg with his brushes and looks as if any further effort will give him a seizure, while the piano player stumbles and shuffles through an hour-long medley of standards, foxtrots, quick steps, and waltzes. The only indication as to what comes next is a faint signal from the pianist’s right hand. If the next key is to be G major, he will raise one withered finger to indicate the one sharpened note in that particular key. If he raises two digits we will enter the key of D, three for A, and so on. The flat keys will all be indicated by a subtle finger pointed at the floor for the key of F, two for B flat, etc. There is no other communication between us. I have to recognize the tune within two bars and busk the changes through to the middle eight until the next key change. These two have probably been playing these same tunes in the same order since the thirties. I listen with the concentration of a safe-cracker, trying to second-guess changes in the harmony before they occur. This is not easy work.

After an hour we retire backstage for a drink and a sandwich break. The two musicians sit and eat their sandwiches silently, as I
imagine they have done for year after year, decade after decade, the same tunes, in the same keys, wearing the same tired dinner jackets, gig after gig after gig. I’m afraid to ask where the normal bass player is tonight; I suspect that he may have died. Part of me feels privileged to be learning this arcane craft with this geriatric duo, while another part of me wonders what the hell I’m doing this for, and shouldn’t I be spending more time with people my own age?

When the break is over, we continue to accompany the dancers gliding across the chalk floor in their shiny shoes. This kind of event always ends with the “Bradford Barn Dance,” the “Hokey Cokey,” and gratefully, the last waltz. I pack up my equipment and the pianist slips me two five-pound notes and croaks that, “busking is all very well, but you should learn the proper changes to ‘Stella by Starlight.’” The drummer adjusts his toupee and gives me a thumbs-up and a gummy grin. I drive back into town with the two crinkly notes in my pocket and wonder if I could support a family this way, doomed to play dinner dances until I too have one foot in the grave. I shudder at the possibility, and think about poor Meg in her sickbed. What am I going to do?

On the way back I pass a big roundabout at the end of the Coast Road. It is March, and the roundabout is covered in daffodils. I circle it twice, an idea forming in my head. I park in a nearby street. It is early morning and there is no one around. I check for police cars and head across the road to the roundabout.

Half an hour later I let myself into Megan’s flat and slowly open her bedroom door. My arms are full of daffodils, maybe a hundred all told, their drooping yellow trumpets lighting up the entire room. Meg starts to cry, and so do I. The next morning our prayers are answered, but our relief is mixed with a subtle, unspoken regret.

* * *

    There are no publicity shots of the Phoenix Jazzmen, and for good reason: no one in their right mind would ever have employed us on our looks. It’s the spring of 1973, and I’ve started playing with this band on weekends. Our uniform consists of pink nylon shirts and gray slacks. I am the bass player, and at twenty-one the youngest and least experienced member of the band. It is Gordon Solomon, the bandleader and trombonist, who will give me the name Sting.

The Phoenix Jazzmen have been playing together since the “trad” boom of the fifties. The music of Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, and Bix Beiderbecke, much of it recorded before the war, had inspired countless British admirers and imitators, among them George Melly, Humphrey Lyttelton, and Chris Barber. Theirs seemed to be an atavistic reaction to the smooth big band sound of the forties epitomized by Glenn Miller and the Dorsey Brothers.

Trad, or traditional New Orleans-style jazz, was raw and authentic, closer to its blues roots than the sophisticated dance music that followed it. This quest for authenticity led many musicians to the smaller band format, usually comprising a rhythm section and three front-line players, trumpet, clarinet, and trombone. More often than not the trumpet would take the melody while the other two instruments would weave around the main tune in a kind of improvised fugue. (This music would evolve and eventually reach its apogee in the bebop improvisations of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk, but this development was to a large extent ignored by enthusiastic British amateurs who were trying exclusively to re-create a music that belonged to a bygone era.) These small bands thrived in the pubs and clubs of Newcastle, the tradition kept alive in the music of the River City Jazzmen, the Vieux Carre
Jazzmen, and the Phoenix Jazzmen. I would play in all of these combos at one time or another and developed a deep fondness for the raucous polyphony of these bands in full flight. It was every bit as exciting and visceral as rock and roll.

We would hurtle through “Twelfth Street Rag,” “Tiger Rag,” “Beale Street Blues,” “Basin Street” with wild evangelical zeal even though, at the time we were playing it, the music was hilariously unfashionable. The early seventies were really the era of glam rock with David Bowie and Marc Bolan at the high end of the spectrum and Gary Glitter and the Sweet at the other. I had no interest in any of it.

I would wear the band’s hideous pink nylon shirt with a certain amount of perverse pride. We would turn up at workingmen’s clubs on a Saturday night, and following the bingo would ply our archaic and often anarchic music to a largely indifferent clientele of miners and their wives in Cramlington, shipyard workers in Sunderland, or the chemical workers of Teeside. These were tough rooms by anyone’s standards, but we believed that our enthusiasm and passion would blind the audiences to our total lack of contemporary style, either in the way we looked or in what we played, and largely we got away with it. We were thrown out of a club on only one occasion, as I remember.

In a workingmen’s club in the north of England, the central event of the evening’s entertainment is not the act, or the “turn,” as it’s known, but the playing of bingo. Everything is organized around this quasi-religious ritual. The bingo caller is the high priest of the ceremony and sits at the center of the stage behind a large Perspex box filled with luminous colored Ping-Pong balls, numbered from one to a hundred. Inside the Perspex box is an electric fan that, when turned on, causes the balls to tumble attractively before they are randomly sucked into a tubular column from which the caller removes
them, one by one. He reads the numbers out and places the balls neatly in a waiting rack.

“Kelly’s eye, number one.”

“Doctor’s orders, number nine.”

“Downing Street, number ten.”

“Two little ducks, twenty two.”

“Two fat ladies, eighty-eight.”

“Was she worth it? Seven and six.”

The bingo caller, usually the club secretary, will read out these numbers with the solemnity of a hanging judge, and importantly for this story, what prevents the colored balls from being spewed out into the room is a tiny plastic membrane over the mouth of the tube, which secures each ball until the caller is ready to remove it.

The occasion of our ignominy takes place on a Saturday night in the Red House Farm Social Club, Sunderland, in the middle of a tough working-class area in the north of the city. The Phoenix Jazzmen will perform at 9 P.M., after the bingo session. It is the early part of the evening and we are lounging in the dressing room, which we also share with the Perspex machine.

We are all there:

Gordon Solomon, or Solly, the bandleader. His boyish, rather innocent chubby face is belied by a mischievous and sadistic wit. He is also a fabulous trombone player.

Don Eddie is one of the maddest drummers I ever worked with, and also one of the best; playing with him is like being tied to the front of an express train. He is a big man in his forties with a bald head and a handlebar mustache like Flying Officer Kite. He is also a functioning alcoholic.

Graham Shepherd is the clarinetist. He is an eccentric, closet intellectual, music student, and ladies’ man. His feature in the
show is “Stranger on the Shore” by Acker Bilk. Graham hates this tune with a passion, and Gordon, being the kind, considerate bandleader that he is, forces him to do it every night. It is this same sadism that will force me to sing “Never Ending Song of Love” by the Seekers. I dread this moment in the set but I do it all the same.

Finally, there is Ronnie Young, trumpeter and vocalist, and a sweet, sweet man on the wrong side of fifty who sings much better than he blows his horn. There is a tradition among Jazzers that when you are given a solo, you are expected to improvise, to create something fresh, something extempore. Ronnie is to the art of improvisation what the pope is to belly dancing: he can only play what he knows, note for note, night after night. He plays the exact same solo in every song, and this we all learn to hum, sotto voce, behind him, note for note, night after night. Ronnie doesn’t mind the ribbing about his horn playing when he can scat like Satchmo and croon like Sinatra.

Gordon is going over the set that we will play tonight.

“Ronnie, could you try not to crack that high note in ‘Caravan’ again tonight? Or I’m gonna start calling you the Cruel C”