Sick On You Read online

  You want to know what it’s like

  Condemned to live with you

  It’s some kind of daily suicide

  Some phase that I outgrew

  I ain’t sadistic, masochistic

  You and me we’re through

  I’m sick to death of everything you do

  And if I’m gonna puke

  Babe I’m gonna puke on you

  “Sick On You”

  The Hollywood Brats, 1973

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  First published in Great Britain by Ebury Press in 2015

  Copyright © 2016 by Andrew Matheson

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Cover photographs and here and here © Gered Mankowitz.

  Author photograph by Tom Pilston.

  All other photos from author’s collection.

  Blue Rider Press is a registered trademark and its colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Matheson, Andrew.

  Title: Sick on you : the disastrous story of the Hollywood Brats, the greatest band you’ve never heard of / Andrew Matheson.

  Description: New York : Blue Rider Press, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015047029 (print) | LCCN 2015047709 (ebook) | ISBN 9780399185335 (trade pbk.) | ISBN 9780399185342 (eBook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Hollywood Brats (Musical group) | Rock musicians—England—Biography.

  Classification: LCC ML421.H654 M38 2016 (print) | LCC ML421.H654 (ebook) | DDC 782.42166092/2—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047029

  Version_1

  For Kerry

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Prologue

  1971 I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  1972 I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  1973 I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  1974 I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  1975 I

  II

  III

  IV

  EPILOGUE I

  II

  III

  IV

  Photos

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Introduction

  This tale comes via memory, reel-to-reel, diary, acetate, journal, and cassette.

  I was eighteen years old, six feet tall, 148 pounds, sopping wet, and, like Dylan’s farmhand on “Maggie’s Farm,” I had a head full of ideas that were driving me insane. Most of those ideas revolved around starting a band.

  I was driven by the purest of all the emotions: hatred. I hated absolutely everything I heard in the charts. Music needed to be grabbed by the lapels and shaken up.

  So I got some cash, a suitcase, and a guitar, and off I went to London where legend had it the streets were paved with gold records. I also took with me a set of rules. Five rules chiseled in granite, sacrosanct and unbreakable. Follow these rules and I would create the perfect band.

  Rules for a Rock ’N’ Roll Band

  ~ The Template ~

  Four or five members maximum. No sax, no horn section, no keyboards, no Moog-synthesizer boffin, no backup chanteuses, no nothing. Two guitars, a bass, drums, and singer, that’s it. Think the Beatles, Kinks, and Who for four, Stones for five.

  The singer sings. That’s it. No hanging a guitar around his neck mid-show and strumming a few cowboy chords to show he can play, no sitting at the piano for a poignant ballad or two, and definitely no tambourine bashing. And for Christ’s sake, no standing on one leg and sucking and wheezing into a flute like that hobo in Jethro Tull. At a pinch a shake of maracas but just for a portion of a song then toss them aside. If a singer can’t think what to do with himself during a bandmate’s solo he should consider a career as a bank teller.

  Great hair, straight hair, is a must and is nonnegotiable. If a member starts going thin on top put an ad in the Melody Maker immediately. If he has too tight a natural curl or, saints preserve, a perm, well, shame on you for hiring him in the first place. Be firm about this; a hat won’t work.

  No facial hair. Girls, or at least girls you’d ever deign to paw, do not swoon over the Grateful Dead. Jerry Garcia is no sane, recently showered girl’s idea of a pinup.

  No girlfriends. They are cancerous for the esprit de corps. They lower the band’s collective sexual currency and can twist a measly bass player’s brain until he thinks he should get a triple-album solo deal and headline Vegas.

  Two words: Yoko and Ono.

  I still believe in these rules but as fate would have it we broke most of them.

  Prologue

  Staring up. Standing in steel-toed rubber boots and filth-encrusted overalls; standing in the mud and the crud, staring up. Standing in crypt-like total darkness pierced only by the beam from the lamp on my hard hat, a beam growing weaker by the minute as the battery pack on my belt dies. Staring up, waiting for, praying for, the cage.

  The cage, the chariot comin’ for to carry me home, at long last descends into this stinkhole. Clanking, juddering, the jail-cell-on-cables crashes to a halt. The chainlink guillotine door rises. I climb aboard. The guillotine crashes down and I get yanked up to the blessed, sunlit surface, never to go down a mine again, I pray, for the rest of my life.

  In the shower I lather up in terror as usual, eyes wide open and stinging from soap. Keeping a sharp lookout because these Canadian nickel miners are a tribe of knuckle-dragging, grunting, violent troglodytes. They know it’s my last day and they’ve been making noises about cutting my hair.

  Twenty hours later and I’ve escaped. I’ve got a blue cardboard suitcase with white leatherette piping in my hand and a black Vox Mark VI teardrop guitar at my feet.

  I’m eighteen years old.

  I’ve got a thousand bucks in my pocket.

  I’m standing on the cobbles of Carnaby Street.

  London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  1971

/>   I

  London. What’s it like, this town in July 1971? This town just past the fag end of the sixties? This so-called Swinging London? Let me tell you, it’s bloody marvelous. It is tawdry and garish, filthy and littered and chokingly diesel perfumed. It is filled with a thousand hucksters and shysters and gypsy girls in Piccadilly with sprigs of heather already pinned to your lapel before you can protest, palms held out and a “cross my palm with silver, for luck,” the veiled, unsubtle threat of misfortune should you not, with coin, comply. It is teeming with girls and the girls are stunning, teetering around in stack-heeled, knee-high boots, in suede micro-miniskirts with gossamer scarves, Cleopatra eyeliner underlining fluttering Twiggy lashes.

  Union Jacks are everywhere, flapping amid the gargoyles on the stone buildings, hanging in whipping-in-the-wind plastic rows on the shops and stalls, on T-shirts, knickers, tea towels, socks, ashtrays, salt and pepper shakers, bowler hats, bobbies’ hats.

  Rule Britannia.

  Britannia rules the airwaves.

  Maybe.

  “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” by Middle of the Road, a song that makes you want to drive spikes into your ears and crucify your brain, hits number one in the charts and stays there.

  The Beatles are dead. Poor, pure, blond, bitchy Brian drowned. Jimi choked. Morrison, reduced from a pretentious West Coast pseudo-poet, albeit with great hair and a svelte physique, to a bloated, bearded metaphor, soon to float, barely, in a Paris bathtub.

  Hippies run the show: beards and denim and crap music with mind-numbing guitar solos and daft, boring, nonsensical lyrics; drummers allowed to thump their stupid tubs alone on stage for fifteen minutes while everyone else takes a break. Gongs, for Christ’s sake. Gongs. Incense. Double bass drums.

  Who looks good? Nobody looks good. Who sounds good? Nobody sounds good. My grand plan is to create a band to rectify that situation. Wipe the slate clean.

  But first I must find some digs. I haven’t been in London since my parents kidnapped me as a child, dragging me, kicking and screaming in a sack, to Northern Ontario. Word is that an agency is the best bet so there I go. The Greek lady behind the desk says that what I am seeking in terms of accommodation (not much) will cost between six and ten quid a week. No sweat, I’ve got the grand in hand. She reaches over her shoulder and sells me a London A–Z, slips a few addresses in my hand, and sends me all over town to see bedsits. But none do I see. As soon as the prospective landlords clap peepers on my guitar case it is case closed. Time after time I knock. Time after time it happens.

  This becomes tiresome and demoralizing. I am hot and tired and jetlagged and hungry and dying of thirst.

  Six o’clock. The buses and Tubes and streets are jammed with commuters on the move. This is tough and it’s getting late. There is just one more address in my pocket: Finborough Road, Earls Court, London SW10.

  “Kangaroo Valley, mate,” says the guy wedged near me on the stifling Tube, reading over my shoulder.

  “Kangaroo Valley?”

  “Fuckin’ Aussie ghetto, innit?”

  So, it’s a fucking Aussie ghetto. What does that mean to me? Nothing. Off I get at Earls Court station, turn right, and, with the A–Z as my guide, I set off for Finborough Road. I pass two pubs adjacent to one another, busy with the after-work crowd. At least I assume that’s what they are. Actually, the customers all seem to be men. They are all men, but I’d lay a quid or two that these specimens don’t actually come from Australia. They’ve spilled out onto the street, standing in studied poses wearing leather chaps, Brando Wild One hats, silver wallet chains, and white singlets, mustaches apparently mandatory. They mew and whistle as I walk by.

  The building I’m looking for is triangular, at the point where Finborough Road and Ifield Road converge. P’raps I should stash the guitar in a hedge or something. Make a better impression. Perish the thought. Stash my black Vox Mark VI teardrop? Not a chance. This guitar is not leaving my white-knuckled grip.

  It’s the same guitar I saw Brian Jones play on The Ed Sullivan Show when I was thirteen. It’s the only guitar I have ever wanted and I worked down that stinking nickel mine to get the $263 it took to buy it. I had it custom-painted black. Brian’s was white, mine’s black, and I’m never going to part with it, and I’m certainly not going to stash it in a hedge.

  Number 119. I press the buzzer and wait.

  The old chap who answers the door is garbed in slippers and smoking jacket, with a polka-dot scarf knotted nattily around his neck. He is tall, slightly stooped, and leaning on a silver-tipped cane, snow-white hair combed straight back, military ’tache. Quite a look, actually. He gives me the twice-over and politely asks me to follow him up the stairs.

  Over strong tea he tells me the bedsit is mine if I want it, £6.50 a week, two weeks in advance. The small room is on the top floor. It is shopworn but clean, with threadbare carpet, single bed, rattan armchair, sink, wee cooker thing with a tiny electric element, and window facing west over Ifield Road. Down the hall is the bathroom, shared with the two other top-floor tenants. Want a bath? Shilling in the meter.

  I pay the man. I take the room. I unpack my suitcase. It contains clothes and five LPs.

  Beggars Banquet—Rolling Stones

  Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!—Rolling Stones

  Let It Be—Beatles

  Something Else—Kinks

  Back Door Men—Shadows of Knight

  Next day I hit the town and I keep hitting it. I buy clothes up and down the King’s Road. I have a smooth drink in the Chelsea Drugstore and a cold one in the Markham Arms, and another here and another there. Chelsea Potter? Why not? I buy a black sweater with “Rock ’n’ Roll” stitched in yellow across the front. I buy a wine-red velvet jacket and tight, black velvet strides.

  I head to Savile Row where I stand across the street from the blessed number 3, home of Apple Corps, center of the Holy Fief of Beatledom. Rooted to the spot, I’m gawking up like a rube at the roof where, not so long ago, his hands were getting a bit too cold to play the chords. It is a hot, humid afternoon in London in July, but I’ve got chills.

  Shaking it off and putting it back in my trousers, I head anywhere, which happens to be south. Where Savile Row meets Clifford Street, I pop into Mr Fish, purveyor of the most dazzling shirts known to man. I order and am measured for two custom-made, hand-stitched stunners with all the attendant and requisite “Yes, sirs” and “Quite right, sirs” a chap could possibly want. A lilac dress shirt with “le cuff Français” at an extravagant £15 and a white chemise featuring an explosion of lace at the front and on the cuffs for a ludicrous £35 strike my fancy. Each will bear a label stating “Peculiar to Mr Fish.”

  When the sun goes down I make my way to Wardour Street and the Marquee. The stage at the Marquee is hallowed ground. The Stones, the Who, and on and on played here, trod these very boards. And tonight, who is on? Some Irish guitarist named Rory Gallagher. Nothing but twelve-bar blues and denim, everything I detest: the tortured grimacing during the guitar solos, the nods of approval and shoe-staring during the drum solo, the shamrock Delta accent. But I don’t care. I’m not really watching. I’m leaning on the bar and it’s the Marquee.

  I’m back nights later too, girlishly giddy with excitement that is all too damply extinguished because who is on? Arthur Brown’s Kingdom Come, that’s who, with his beard (the matted focal point of a general revolting hairiness) and his chronic, faux-demonic makeup and his “I am the God of Hellfire” routine.

  You’ve been telling us that since ’68, mate. We were enthralled then and we are utterly rapt now. Press on.

  It’s a daft show. He moves like a drunk hippy uncle and he looks mildly demented, especially during his showstopper when he sets his hat on fire. But I don’t care. I’m here at the world-famous Marquee.

  The manager of the Marquee, Jack, an over-friendly, unctuous type sporting a shiny suit, black horn-rims,
and a clunking gold pinkie ring, takes a shine to me, asking increasingly personal questions. I tell him I’m going to start a rock ’n’ roll band and I intend to wipe the floor with the competition. This throws him, and it’s the moment when I get the first indication that the term rock ’n’ roll has an entirely different connotation here in the mother country.

  You mention rock ’n’ roll and immediately English brains think of Jerry Lee Lewis, Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, Little Richard, Bill Haley, and all the rest. Brylcreem, duck’s arse hairdos, Teddy Boys, drape coats, winklepickers, brothel creepers, and leather jackets—in short, the fifties. Rock ’n’ roll in Britain is for those who never got over Elvis joining the army. Well, that’s not the way it is for me, chaps. Those guys did their bit but they’re from the Middle Ages as far as I’m concerned.

  First I heard of Chuck Berry, I was on my bike crunching the gravel at Larchwood Public School, holding a Hitachi transistor up to my ear when “No Particular Place to Go” came on. I liked it. I really wanted to “park way out on the kokomo,” but not enough to go out and buy the vinyl. I was a kid on a bike. It took the Fabs with George singing “Roll Over Beethoven” and the Stones doing “Carol” for an entity called Chuck Berry to get into my skull.

  As for Eddie Cochran, well, as far as I’m concerned, “Summertime Blues” is by the Who from Live at Leeds. And Little Richard? It took Paul singing “Long Tall Sally” and the Swinging Blue Jeans doing “Good Golly Miss Molly” for me to get that tutti-frutti picture. So that’s what I find myself up against here, elbow on the bar, at the Marquee. You say you’re going to create a new, wild rock ’n’ roll band in July 1971 and everybody thinks quiffs and pomade.

  Midway through one night, while I’m leaning on the bar drinking light and bitter, surveying the possibilities, Jack sidles up and invites me back to his pad after closing. I came in on a Pan Am flight, not a turnip truck, so I’ve seen it coming and I deflect the overture with what I hope is grace and humor. After all, I want to play here some day.