Broken Music: A Memoir (18 page)

“She was only your girlfriend for five minutes and I did not steal her off you.”

He lights up a cigarette and thoughtfully blows the smoke right in my face. “Look, cheer up, it’s not the end of the world.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No, it’s not. Listen, I’ve heard about a gig, Andy Hudson told
me, a real gig, playing in the pit in the theater. How’s your reading now?”

“It’s all right,” I reply sulkily.

Gerry leans closer and looks around as if to make sure no one’s listening. “They’re doing a revival
of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor
whatsit at the University Theatre and they’re looking for a younger band, and it’s real money.”

“Real money?” Now it’s me looking around furtively. “How much?”

“Sixty a week, for six nights and a matinee, two weeks rehearsal, and a month minimum. You in?”

I lean back in my chair, balanced on its back legs, and weigh up the paucity of my options. I haven’t made sixty quid a week since Megan and I worked at the frozen bean factory.

“I’m in.”

The weeks that follow are not the easiest of my life. A college is a very small place for two lovers and a cuckold, and I’m getting sick of the whispering noises behind me whenever I walk by, and even sicker of the pitying looks, heartfelt advice, and amateur psychology that comes my way between classes. Even the teaching staff are starting with their kindly wisdom routine. It’s infuriating and I’m utterly miserable. When I do eventually see my mother she is shocked by how much weight I have lost and cooks me an enormous supper that I can’t eat. She has the good sense not to ask what is wrong, and I don’t have to tell her; she has seen the movie a hundred times. So having successfully played my mother’s role in the eternal triangle, I’m now forced into playing the bitter role of my father.

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
was written by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber when they were still at school, and
it is arguably their best work. Based on the Old Testament story of Joseph and his coat of many colors, it is retold in a series of musical tableaux, charting the fall and subsequent rise of the favorite son, who enrages his jealous brothers, is sold into slavery in Egypt, becomes chief advisor to the pharaoh, and finally is reconciled to his astonished and repentant family Now, that’s a rock-and-roll myth if ever I’ve heard one. The music is perfectly charming if flagrantly unoriginal, being a camp pastiche of fifties’ pop, simply arranged and sweetly unpretentious. The show, expertly directed by Gareth Morgan, will be a massive success, the huge and unexpected hit of the 1974 season, and will more than double its projected run to ten weeks, each performance selling out more quickly than the last.

I am so proud that after all this drifting and treading water I have a professional, well-paid job making music. This was my ambition, and here I am turning up every night under the enormous steel structure of the stage set, finding my own music stand, its tiny light glowing among the wires and equipment and the parts for the show, waiting in the darkness as the audience files in for the evening performance.

Excitement and expectation are humming in the auditorium, in the cavelike mystery of the theater. I love the frenzy of the backstage before the show, the swirl of costumes and makeup and the glare of the mirrors as the actors transform themselves into heroes and villains, old men and vamps, calming their nerves with outrageous camp and last-minute cigarettes. I fall in love with this magic of the theater and become intoxicated by its tawdry glamour and cheap illusion, its noise and its pretense. It’s not that I have any desire to be an actor, I just love being here at the center of it all, playing the bass in my dark cave. I grandiosely imagine that the whole artifice is being constructed on the subterranean foundation of this sound, the steady, grounded, invisible pulse from the instrument in my hand.
For when the lights go down and the conductor raises his baton in the silence before the first bar, nothing else exists and I am ridiculously happy.

Ewan Williams is the show’s giant, bumptious teddy bear of a musical director. Ewan will wave his little white stick at us while watching the TV monitor and listening to the lighting cues on his headset as if they are the messages of God. Local legend John Hedley will be on guitar, and the equally legendary Ronnie Pearson on drums. John, who’d moonlighted with the Phoenix Jazzmen for a while, had previous to that enjoyed a briefly stellar sojourn in London with Blinky Davison’s band, and long before that had been one of my favorite players on the local blues scene. John looks like a blond Hendrix, with his shock of frizzed-out white hair framing the long, lugubrious features of his face. His body is painfully thin, like that of a great skeletal bird atop two long spindly legs. He is a delightful person and an extraordinary guitarist with a wry, wizened sense of humor. John seems to have rolled with some of life’s hard knocks and fallen back on simple philosophy and the therapeutic discipline of music.

Ronnie Pearson, so legend has it, turned down the Beatles when they were struggling in their early days to find a drummer. Ronnie did hail from Warrington in Lancashire, only a few miles from Liverpool, and would be about the right age, but I would never probe him about the details of this fabled story for fear of its veracity dissolving in the cold light of scrutiny, and also wanting to maintain my own thrill at this proximity to greatness. The problem for Ronnie was that this “nearly was-ness” would become a recurring motif in his life. He had walked out of the Teeside band Back Door just as they were beginning to make a name for themselves, and then later, regarding my own success, he felt he’d been left behind yet again. Ronnie is a great drummer—and that was never in dispute—always
in demand as a session musician, slick, professional, able to play in any style, and is considered even among other drummers to be the best. Gerry and I are very proud to be playing under the same stage with such luminaries.

On the romantic front, having recovered from my humiliation over Megan and Derek, I am now stepping out with a girl named Lizzy, a tall willowy blonde and undoubtedly the prettiest girl in the college. This provokes an interesting reaction in my former girlfriend. Whether things aren’t working out with Derek or whether she is merely chagrined at being replaced in my affections by the spectacular Lizzy, I shall never know for certain, but when she pleads with me to come back, I have the exquisite pleasure of informing her that such a thing will never happen. Straight out of the script from one of my mother’s dreadful movies I tell her that I couldn’t risk any more pain, where the truth is I’m infatuated with Lizzy and the wheel just keeps on turning. My heart is like a revolving door in a cheap hotel, and though Liz and I stay together off and on for a while, I am not prepared to make another commitment. It is the romance of the road that is calling me.

IT IS 1974. THE WINTER IS DRAWING IN AND HIGH ABOVE THE city geese are migrating south, instinctively drawn by the rhythm of the seasons and the magnetic fields of the earth. Gerry and I know that if we don’t leave soon we never will. He has become unusually reflective lately and I know he is hatching a plan. He wants to enlist both Ronnie and John in his new project. He already has the name of the band. We will be called Last Exit after Hubert Selby Jr.’s harrowing novel
Last Exit to Brooklyn
. I suppose Gerry is hopeful that the name will be prophetic of our final escape from the claustrophobia of our limbo into the big world and not of our fall into moral and spiritual degeneracy. But the first step will be to convince our elder brethren, John and Ronnie, to join the crusade because without them, and the legitimacy of their virtuosity, we will be a nonstarter. Convincing them will not be so easy.

They are both a generation older than Gerry and me, and it is unlikely that either of them would give up steady professional work for some vague promise of glory farther down the line. It isn’t that they are jaundiced, just more cautious, having grown-up responsibilities such as mortgages and hire purchase payments. They can make a
reasonable living doing sessions and backing the better acts in local night clubs; why would they want to rough it in a van and flog their carcasses around the country for next to no money, with just the promise of an adventure? This will be a difficult proposition to sell to our two reluctant hobbits, but we do manage to coerce them into a couple of rehearsals.

The seed that would grow into the idea for Last Exit had been sown about a year before on a disastrous gig with the Big Band. Wed been booked in a support slot at Newcastle Polytechnic for a band called Return to Forever, led by jazz piano legend Chick Corea. Chick was an alumnus of Miles Davis’s
Bitches Brew
sessions, but even that knowledge didn’t prepare us for the coming onslaught. We had bumbled through our usual set of big band covers in a kind of swooning stupor that approximated swing but more often than not drifted like a listing galleon in a storm, three sheets to the wind. The cavernous sound of the hall didn’t help either, and the rare moments of subtlety that escaped from the arrangements became lost in the vastness of the room. A few isolated hand claps from the indifferent student audience witnessing this pathetic spectacle meant that the evening was a thoroughly dispiriting experience, not least because what followed forced us all to recalibrate the scale upon which we had measured our competence as musicians.

Watching Lenny White attack the drums with an unbelievable ferocity and technique demolished our drummer’s pretense that he was any more than a noisy builder of sheds, and Andy our pianist and leader was simply agape at the dazzling, even inexplicable pyrotechnics of Mr. Corea at the Fender Rhodes. We thankfully had no guitarist at the time, as I’m convinced that there would have been a slashing of wrists should any hapless twanger have witnessed Bill Connors in full flight. But it was the bass player who utterly
demoralized me. Stanley Clarke, as far as bass playing was concerned, had reinvented the wheel. Pops and growls, thumb slaps and startling runs of semiquavers had vaulted the bass, often merely the plodding supporter of harmony, to the front of the band. For much of the music, Clarke’s bass had become the lead instrument, with a baffling array of effects that I couldn’t even imagine emulating. The one saving grace for me was that no one in the band was singing. If I could bring the level of my playing up to a quarter of what Mr. Clarke had demonstrated, and sing at the same time, I could maintain the belief that I could still be a contender in this wholly redefined universe.

Last Exit would be loosely based on what we had witnessed that night—the same instrumentation, with a similar basis in jazz fusion and the addition of a singer.

As soon as the
Joseph
run was over we began rehearsals at Ronnie’s house. Our jazz rock pretensions were laced with songs by Bill Withers and Marvin Gaye, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” becoming Ronnie’s chance to sing, while I inherit Graham Bond’s “Springtime in the City” from Megan and Neil Young’s “Don’t Let It Bring You Down.” We rehearsed long and hard, even attempting some Chick Corea compositions, with bombastic sci-fi titles like “Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy,” aping our heroes note for note. Being the least accomplished member of the band, I was indulged by the three others for the length of time it took me to perfect these tunes, but they must also have been struck by my tenacity.

The manager of the Gosforth gave us the upstairs room every Wednesday night for as long as we could fill it and make it worth his while to pay an extra hand to open the bar. Our first-night audience was made up entirely of friends from college and drum pupils of Ronnie’s, who sat in the front and marveled at his awesome
skills. My confidence as a singer was improving, and serving an apprenticeship in Andy Hudson’s big band had given me an appreciation of the importance of talking to the audience. And that inclusive and self-deprecating humor between numbers could make the punters feel that they were part of the adventure, which of course they were. Ronnie and John reveled in the almost cult status that they began to command among the budding musicians who frequented the room on a Wednesday night, while Gerry and I were content to man the engine room and concentrate on writing new material for the band.

Gerry and I had moved in together in a flat in Heaton. It had two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen with an old miner’s fireplace that had a built-in oven. Some college friends of ours named Jim and Stef had lived upstairs for a year. They were a very respectable married couple, and when they informed us that the downstairs flat was up for rent, they also told us the landlady was only interested in another married couple to take over the rooms. Short of one of us dressing up as a woman, there was no way Gerry and I would qualify, until Gerry had the brainwave of asking Megan to help us out. Megan, who’d since split up with Derek, was, despite our estrangement, kind enough to masquerade as my wife, for old times’ sake, as she put it. The irony was not lost on me that the woman I’d fantasized about marrying was now using all her acting skills to pretend that we were in fact respectably wed, even borrowing Stef’s wedding ring for the evening.