Sick On You Read online

  It is the Railway Hotel in Harrow and, yeah, it might be a bit on the decrepit side, but we think it’s rather fab.

  Tim sets up a rehearsal and we give it a bash. Since Roger, Tim, and I have been at this for a bit now and the Aussies are, of course, familiar with each other, the band has a cohesion it has never had before and in parts is sounding, dare I say it, a scintilla of a percentage point above average.

  There’s a pub upstairs, a prior visit to which may account for the warmth of my assessment and definitely accounts for the people that show up from time to time to watch us go through our moves. This turns out all right, as you tend to give it that little extra kick when half a dozen girls walk in and linger while draining their Babychams.

  During a break, one girl comes up to me and says she works for CBS Records. “Do you have a tape?” she asks. No, we don’t. Truth is, fuzzy warm assessments aside, we’re not that good. We’re nowhere near where I want us to be. She’s in the record biz so there’s a good chance she is on mind-altering pharmaceuticals.

  * * *

  At the church hall in Stanmore on the next drizzly Saturday, Tim says that Gorvan, the Norwegian keyboard player, has called again, out of the blue. Lost our number for a month or so then found it, apparently. Bright boy. Tim says the three of us, sans Mal and Yosemite, are going to Paddington on Monday night to meet him.

  Why we need a keyboard player, I don’t know. We are just starting to sound half-decent. Besides, it would make us a six-piece, which doesn’t fit my template. What are we, the Nashville Teens? Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames? I ask you.

  Monday night. London Street, Paddington—where the bear comes from. Seventeen London Street, to be precise. Drizzle as usual and there’s a pile of rags with a filthy, dented bowler hat and cantankerous personality slumped against the wall outside Ladbrokes. We step kindly over him and locate the address. Tim pokes a forefinger in the buzzer and we wait. Finally, we hear him clomping down the stairs, this keyboard player. There are lots of stairs. The clomping gets progressively louder. The door swings open. Good Lord. He looks bloody amazing. Well, aside from the Sgt. Pepper–era mustache.

  He’s wearing tight white jeans, absolutely sprayed-on tight at the hips and flaring at the bottom like an Apollo rocket at liftoff. The guy’s perched atop high heels, wearing a silver-studded leather wristband, more rings than is strictly necessary, and a necklace dangling down over his skintight, black-and-white, horizontal-striped jumper.

  But the main eye-popper is without doubt the hair. It’s thick, it’s straight, it’s wild, it’s dishwater blond, and it’s down to the bottom of the boy’s rib cage. My mind is in overdrive; my band template just ran out into traffic and got knocked over.

  We go for a pint in the Sussex Arms down the street: Who do you like? Where are you from? What have you done? What gear do you have? He likes the Stones and the Pretty Things; he’s from Norway; he’s been auditioning; he doesn’t have any gear.

  As the minutes go by, in the way that the subtle dynamic of dialogue engineers these things, Tim and Roger become more and more surplus to requirements. In mere minutes they are secondary, peripheral. It’s nothing personal, it’s just that Gorvan and I see eye to eye; we’re weirdly in sync on some Twilight Zone level.

  Tim arranges for Gorvan to come to rehearsal in Stanmore on Saturday. Doesn’t matter that he hasn’t got any gear—there’s an old, kicked-around upright piano in the hall, and it’s surprisingly only a mile out of tune. I’m revved up about the possibilities now and I can’t wait to see him play. I know he’s going to be perfect.

  Oh yeah, and his name isn’t Gorvan.

  It’s Stein Groven.

  * * *

  Saturday. Stein shows up in Stanmore looking as fab as I had expected, a picture in white and pale blue, carrying four small, black ovals with wires on the ends. In the middle of each oval is a volume knob. They turn out to be a sort of black noise-sperm. For the uninitiated, which is me, he explains that they are pickups. He climbs aboard the upright piano, sticks his arms deep into the guts, and places these pickups, like sabotage mines, where they can do the most damage, and then asks if he can plug into an amp. His wish is someone’s command, and soon he’s got volume and soon we tune.

  Stein sits on the wooden piano stool facing away from the band, toward the wall. Above his piano is an arched stained-glass window, the afternoon sun shining through. I can’t see his face but I do see him take a deep breath.

  We decide on, what else, that ode to the boy with the gunny-sack guitar case from deep down in Louisiana. Tim rips into the intro, Yosemite, Mal, and Roger hit the three downbeats, and the boys are just about to tumble in on the fourth, when out of the speakers pours a sound we’ve never heard before. It’s a lightning waterfall of piano notes as Stein executes a cool glissando with one upturned thumb scraping down the upper keys, perfectly timed to end with Yosemite’s crash.

  Well, sir, if this ain’t the magic it is at least mixing the potions. The band is immediately elevated to another level. We get to the first solo and the guitar boys are fighting over who takes it. With a bow and a sweep of the arm I give the nod to Tim, seniority trumping the mild colonial boy. Tim shakes off his Screaming Lord cobwebs and attacks his upper frets with menace. Out of the corner of my eye I see Mal turn up his Marshall, sneaky boy. Next time around it’s his turn, and undeniably something new has been unleashed in Melbourne Mal. He makes some moves. He crouches and makes his Strat squeal. He nods his head and his corkscrew haystack hair wobbles to the beat. Roger and I look at each other and raise all four of our collective eyebrows. Then we hit the last verse. Time to go Johnny go.

  We’re at maximum volume, everybody’s in, and we’re rocking, whipping this nag down the final furlong. I’m twirling the mic stand around above my head like a cheerleader when a piano stool whips past my shins and goes flying, spinning across the wooden floor. Turning to my left I see Stein on his feet and bent over, pounding on the keys, head down, twin curtains of hair tossing, flying, grazing his wrists.

  We build to a furious finish, bringing proceedings to a halt with three emphatic power chords. On the last one Stein doesn’t even make a pretense of playing the chord; he just smashes his palms down on the keyboard.

  When the last feedback-drenched note dies we all start laughing and yelling. We’ve never been remotely close to sounding this good. Who is the idiot that said we didn’t need a keyboard player?

  During a break in proceedings Stein and I knock back a beer in the kitchen. I like this Norwegian guy. This Norwegian guy is a relief. The thing is that he emphatically gets it. I don’t have to twist his arm or plead or buttonhole him or grab him by the lapels or talk him into anything. Everything I say he gets, and vice versa. Also, he looks great and, like me, he’s thinking way beyond this rehearsal hall in Stanmore. He’s thinking of making waves, making trouble, making records, making his mark and looking sharp while he’s doing it—playing fast and nasty. It’s a shame about the upper-lip toupee but without a doubt, now that he and I are together, we’ve got the nucleus.*

  Now, what do we do with the rest of these chumps?

  * * *

  One day goes by and the phone rings in Watford. Stein asks, “Do you have any lyrics?” Do I? A train ride to hand over a sheaf and the next day the phone rings again in Watford. He says, “I love these. Let’s write.”

  I start spending time at Stein’s place in London Street and he becomes a regular visitor to 112 Bradshaw. We play records and talk and talk and talk until our jaws ache. In Watford, Carole feeds us; in London Street I meet Sonja, Stein’s girlfriend. Wow. She’s a nice girl, a bit shy about her command of the English language, but she doesn’t have to talk. She’s six feet tall and a classic Nordic blonde. Another Rock ’n’ Roll Rule down the drain.

  Stein and I learn about each other and plot the future. He is a Stones fanatic. I love the Kinks. He tries to sell me on t
he Pretty Things but it doesn’t work. Like me, he hates everything that is going on at the moment in music.

  We tune up a couple of guitars. It’s as though we’ve been doing this forever. Stein has my sheaf of lyrics and the first thing he takes out and puts on the coffee table is my attempt at mimicking the brown-eyed handsome man. A couple of months ago I barely knew three Chuck Berry songs, now I’m doing my best to copy him.

  Stein plays what he has come up with. Crap acoustic, dead strings maybe, but his music delivers. Fifteen minutes later we’ve moved this, changed that, and written our first song, “Southern Belles.”

  * * *

  The pub is rowdy and cheery, decorated for Christmas with little twinkling red-and-green lights, almost believable plastic holly, and fake frost sprayed on the windows. It’s Christmas Eve, and I’ve met Roger late this afternoon, after his shift at Boosey & Hawkes. The jukebox is cranked but it is drowned out by carols sung in happy voices by various drunken off-key choirs. Blackouts, strikes, the IRA: all forgotten in the spirit of the season. Next Yule pub, same Yule scene.

  The third pub on the path to Watford is a carbon copy of the first two, except the patrons are more soused and, if possible, even more off-key. It’s crammed, elbow to elbow: a cheery, beery throng handing pints overhead from front to back.

  Then, out of nowhere and nothing, violence erupts—instantaneous, nasty, and a hair away from lethal. A pint glass is broken, the jagged edge shoved full in the face of a chap standing at the bar not four feet from where we stand. Girls start screaming, glasses are hurled from all sides. Madness ensues, with people thrown to the floor and crushed underfoot. More smashing glass, chairs flying through the air, and the floor slippery with blood and beer.

  I stand still on the periphery, dangerously transfixed and gaping wide-eyed, until Roger grabs my collar, yanks me through a side door, and pushes me toward the car. An hour later we are wrapped in the calm, cool disco chaos of Christmas at the New Penny in Watford.

  Happy Christmas, everybody.

  Food comes first, then morals.

  Bertolt Brecht

  1972

  I

  Tim informs us that he has lined up a gig in Southend-on-Sea. The trick is that it’s for this Friday, a mere two days hence. Some band canceled at the last moment so he was asked and said yes. He bumped up the fee accordingly, real cash, nearly thirty quid each.

  This time it’s pure Brylcreem. Some kind of severe rock ’n’ roll emporium for duck-tailed die hards and Teds. There will be no flashes of “Jumpin’ Jack” at this gig. No feathered-haired blues-pop hybrid stabs at modernity need apply. This is strictly Elvis, Bill Haley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis territory. And this presents a problem.

  Tim and Roger can play this stuff in their sleep and Stein seems surprisingly familiar with the Jerry Lee Lewis catalog. But Mal, Yosemite, and I haven’t got a clue. During rehearsal Mal tries to grasp the chords, his wide eyes glued to Tim’s fingers on the fretboard, and Roger plays facing Yosemite, tutoring him on the stops and starts. Me? I’ve got two hours’ worth of fifties grease lyrics to learn.

  Ballpoint pens scratch frantically, with Tim and Roger dredging up and writing down the lyrics to all these ancient rockers: “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” “Great Balls of Fire,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Heartbreak Hotel.” And what’s with the mathematics? It’s always one for the money, one o’clock, two o’clock, one-eyed cat peeking in a seafood store, twenty-flight rock, numbers everywhere.

  Speaking of numbers, have you counted the cast of characters in “Jailhouse Rock”? You’ve got the Warden, Shifty Henry, the Purple Gang, Spider Murphy, the Prison Band, Number 47, Sad Sack, Number 3, Little Joe, and a drummer boy from Illinois all doing things to one another (as apparently happens in the slammer), and I’ve got to sort it out and sing it. Do you know what Bugsy said to Shifty? Me neither. Turns out to be, “Nix, nix.” Who’d have guessed?

  In the back of the van, as we fight traffic on the long slog from Harrow to Southend, Roger plays acoustic and puts me through my paces. Tim yaps back over his shoulder from the front seat when I screw up “Breathless” and “Somethin’ Else.” It’s too much, man.

  Due to traffic we arrive at the gig way too late for a soundcheck and are forced to lug the gear in under the gaze of many an evil eye. The joint is full and getting fuller. Black leather and chains and jeans, brothel creepers, winklepickers, pretend Hells Angels, real ones, Teddy Boys, and tarts in poodle skirts and red chiffon scarves.

  A pall in the hall of cigarette smoke, lager, sweat, hairspray, Old Spice, Evening in Paris, Brut—all the good ones. Malevolence too. The patrons ain’t patient and they make it apparent that they do not like what they see strolling in.

  Onstage, Stein surveys the upright piano and climbs aboard, up top, lifting the lid, reaching in, and placing, with care, his stick-on pickups. He’s brought along another toy today as well: a tool that looks like a candle snuffer, a wooden handle with a ratchet on the end for tuning the piano. He and Roger set about playing notes over and over—“Give me an E”—until things sound reasonably in tune. Naturally, the punters are enthralled.

  A knot of horrible, rough-looking womanish types, a chromosome or two short of alluring, are gathered around the front of the stage, already yelping nasty things at us.

  This is a foreign country. I don’t speak the language and I don’t know the customs. The tight blue strides and red kimono I’m wearing don’t seem to be helping matters, either. There’s a bad feeling to this. You’d swear hate was hanging in the air, an almost palpable red fog of the stuff rolling in, from them to us. Altamont on the Estuary. What kind of greaseballs were these yokels expecting? Orange-glowing cigarette ends bob up and down out there in the darkness.

  Roger seems resigned and taciturn as ever, busy plugging things in and tuning, but he’s wary, keeping an eye on the enemy. Mal is whiter than ever, bleach white, with fear. Yosemite’s holed up behind his kit, screwing with his hi-hat, in siege mode already. Stein seems implacable, outwardly calm, facing the wall, fingers on the keys, playing along with the records coming out of the hall’s loudspeakers. But I catch his eye and he’s nervous. He’s hiding behind his hair.

  Tim, though, is at ease—eager as Vince, a native, prodigal sonny boy returning home to his people. He’s got his thinning hair combed back, black denim trousers, white T-shirt, and leather biker’s jacket. Stick him in a museum. He’s tuned and plugged in. He flips a switch on his amp and, presto, he’s got some of what he calls “Duane Eddy reverb” going and he’s itching to unleash it.

  Me, I’m knocking back cans of warm lager. I’ve untied the kimono at the front and I’m ready.

  Soundcheck? We don’t need no stinkin’ soundcheck.

  We kick off with “Blue Suede Shoes.” The balance is awful—I can’t hear Stein or Mal—but, wonder of wonders, the black leather seas part to open up some hardwood floor space, and within seconds factions of the mob are dancing. They’re bopping around like extras from some Gidget movie, Von Zipper’s gang on bennies and bitter. They’re jiving, they’re twisting, they’re doing some strange dance where they stand, legs spread, feet planted, hands on hips while they bend at the waist and shake their shoulders at each other.

  First set lasts just over an hour. I’m doing my best with this glut of fifties lyrics, making some up as I go to the obvious and audible disgust of the prowling purists out there in the dark. Still, we get through it unscathed and the whiff of applause at the end of the set almost offsets the hecklers.

  These include the pack at the back, the heaving, swaying herd crushing in around the bar. They are monumentally unappreciative of our efforts, and their proximity to the intoxicants isn’t improving their mood. As Yosemite and Roger bring each number to a halt we hear catcalls and insults from this cashew gallery.

  And the weird-gendered gaggle at the front, stage right, with their conical, ra
ncid-pink, fairground candyfloss hairdos, their leather and chains and their miserable Easter Island faces, are starting to give me the willies. A couple of times during the first set I try to engage these creatures at the lip of the stage. I try charm and inclusion. “Hey, don’t you chicks dance? C’mon, shake a tail-feather.”

  No response. Just sneers, a general tilting of their beehives together and minutes spent muttering.

  Sheesh. Tough crowd.

  The second set starts with the clock just nudging 11 p.m. and the crowd just nudging completely drunk. Tim decrees a shot of Jerry Lee Lewis, so it’s over to Stein Lee Groven and away we go with “Great Balls of Fire,” something about shaking my nerves and rattling my brain. Shame I can’t remember the rest.

  I get drunker, the songs get dodgier, the night gets edgier. Some short, greasy rider with “Hells Angels—Essex” on his jacket and a German helmet plonked on his fat skull starts flicking lit cigarette butts at me. Mal decides discretion is the better part of retreat and backs up until he’s almost behind his Marshall stack. Roger, though, doesn’t stand for this cigarette flicking. He’s up front and giving lip. Von Ribbenflick responds with two fingers and a couple of syllables but the butt flicking stops.

  We serve up a “Summertime Blues”/“Shakin’ All Over” combo, Tim twanging all over the place, and the room starts jumping. A couple of scuffles erupt at the back near the bar. What’s the cause? Who knows? Girls and drinks probably, same combination that’s been causing grief since the dawn of time. Again, I try to work my magic on the stage creatures.

  “Good lookin’ chicks here in Southend.”

  I massacre “Jailhouse Rock,” completely messing up the mathematics and who’s doing what to whom, which upsets the local Elvis Presley Immaculate Lyric Preservation Society, whose members start howling from all corners when the song ends.