Johnny and the Hurricanes “Rocking Goose” was riding high in the UK charts a couple of months after I was born in July 1960. My parents chose one of their theatre buddies to be my Godmother. Her name was Kristine Howerth and she chose to give me a copy of this record as a present. She disappeared into the sunset not too long after and I have no idea whether she is alive or dead. But her work was done. “Rocking Goose” is a splendid record and a fine introduction to many of the essential aspects of rock’n’roll. Although an instrumental, it contains a wordless vocal refrain – ostensibly sung by the rocking goose itself – following which a violent saxophone duets with a wildly unrestrained electric guitar, all set to an urgent uptempo shuffle over a basic 12 bar blues. It rocks hard and it takes no prisoners. I still have the record after 62 years and it still gets played. In those days, records were pressed to last. I have always been obsessed with records and gramophones. I have no idea why. My parents used to boast to their friends that I could operate their gramophone at the age of 18 months. Around that time I got given a baby battery operated gramophone which came with a little record called “Cha Cha Twist”. It had a yellow label and it played at 78rpm. I still have that one too but it doesn’t get played as often as “Rocking Goose”. Not long after that, another theatre friend of my parents named Derek Hunt gave me a wind up gramophone and a handful of 78s. Bliss. Utter bliss. I still have it and it still works (although you do have to crank the handle for it to get through a complete side of a 78). My idea of heaven as a child was to be given carte blanche to play my parents records. I only ever broke one – an EP containing selections from Roger Livesy’s production of “Perseus & Medusa”. I was utterly mortified and have been looking for a replacement without success ever since. (Debbie Golt, bless her, sent me an mp3 of it as recently as a few months ago but I’m still after the vinyl.) Amongst my parents 78s was a copy of Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls Of Fire” with “Mean Woman Blues” on the other side. My dad had bought it for a theatre production and kept it when the show was over. I played it a lot. But it was just one of many that I liked. “Come On Baby” by Fred Barnes and his Jelly Babies was very popular too. So was “Cigareets ’n’ Whisky ’n Wild Wild Women”. But the actual act of putting on records, watching them go round, taking them off and putting them back in their sleeves was what I really enjoyed (and still do). The actual music was secondary. If I liked it, that was a bonus.
All this preamble is to make clear that I grew up with rock’n’roll in my life. It was always there and I always liked it. But I didn’t really differentiate it very much from other music that I liked. I remember seeing The Beatles on television doing “I Want To Hold Your Hand” and being mesmerised. Soon after, I got taken to see “A Hard Day’s Night” which firmly established The Beatles as religion to me (which they more or less still are) but I didn’t think of them as a rock’n’roll band. They were just The Beatles. My dad liked them too. In fact, he would buy most of their records when they came out so I grew up with them in the house. As someone who tends to regard the 1960s as the highpoint of civilisation I think the reason is simply that I was happy then. Everything was in its place. Uncomplicated. I was popular at school, my parents were still together, my sister was manageable, The Beatles were still together. I would periodically cajole my parents into buying me a record like The Who’s “Happy Jack” and Traffic’s “Hole In My Shoe” which I would play over and over. It wasn’t until the beginning of 1971 that pop music in general took over from football as my all consuming passion. I had always enjoyed “Top Of The Pops” on television but now it became a thing of enormous importance. I bought T.Rex’s “Hot Love” *with my own money* and that was that. From then on, pretty much all my spare cash went on records and so, yea, even unto this very day. (Guitars and amplifiers came later but records have always been there.)
In addition to records, I have always been an avid reader and I would read everything I could get my hands on about The Beatles and pop music in general. Thus I absorbed Hunter Davies’s “The Beatles: The Official Biography” and Jann Wenner’s “Lennon Remembers” by the time I was about 11. My dear aunts played a hand in this too. One aunt bought me a copy of Lillian Roxon’s “Rock Encyclopaedia” – which was the first of its kind – and the other bought me (big fanfare) Nik Cohn’s “Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom”. This last, more than anything, shaped my knowledge and understanding of pop history. It was Cohn, with his flamboyant championing of 50s rock’n’roll (and his iconoclastic rubbishing of just about everything that came after) that made me appreciate that Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent et al were part of a movement, a wave, and that the music they made in the 1950s had paved the way for everything that mattered most to me. I have always been thorough in my obsessions and so I made it my business to seek out this music wherever I could find it. Nowadays it’s easy. The entire history of recorded music is just a couple of clicks away, but for a kid in his early teens in the early 1970s with very little money it was a different story. Armed with a precious pound, I would look at Hallmark budget editions of Bill Haley and The Comets for 99p but something told me they were dodgy. Besides, I could get three cut-out 45’s for 30p each and still have change for a chocolate bar. My aunts came to the rescue again, they gave me a little portable cassette recorder for Christmas in 1971 which changed the game. Now I could tape things off the radio or TV with the little microphone provided and thereby harvest and curate to my hearts content. A documentary about the early days of Elvis, The Faces live on ‘In Concert’, Alan Freeman running down the chart on a Saturday afternoon, Alexis Korner arguing with Paul Oliver over something called ‘blues’- such possibilities were only limited by how many batteries and cassettes I could afford. I would tape records and sell them in part exchange for other records (oh! the things that slipped through my fingers). Heady days. It was a full time job. I would keep notebooks documenting the contents of all my tapes and records. For my birthday in 1972 I requested a stopwatch so that I could record the length of tracks before entering them into the log. It was my whole life until I got a guitar and started down that road. Everything I did, thought, felt, aspired to, dreamed of was contained within that music. It’s the reason I became a musician. It’s the reason I didn’t go to university (who had time for school work?) It’s the reason I didn’t go into the family business and become an actor. It was everything.
I could always depend on rock’n’roll. Sometimes when my sister and I are talking about some of the bad stuff that went down with our family I say: “I don’t remember that.” “Well you were in your room listening to records”, she will say. I remember when my first girlfriend dumped me for a Dutch karate expert I stole a half bottle of whisky from my parents and locked myself under the headphones with a tape I’d made of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones cover versions of 1950s rock’n’roll songs. It got me through. It always gets me through. Over the years, the half century or so since it took over my life, I have entertained other things. Films certainly, books. I got married, fathered a child, even did a couple of vaguely responsible things that grown ups do like pay into a pension (that I’m now living off). But rock’n’roll has always been there, in the background, waiting to take centre stage at a moment’s notice. Of course, I never became a rock star myself but, to be honest, I’m quite glad. I would almost certainly have drowned in the syrup of success. Either that, or I would just look ridiculous. What’s at stake in celebrating a music founded on youth now that I’m getting old? I can’t abide old men refusing to acknowledge that they are no longer young. It’s foolish at best and pathetic at worst. Perhaps my hardline on this is partly based on my fear that I am guilty of this myself. The Old Leather Jacket syndrome, sufferers from Keith Richards-itis, the paunch barely contained within a band T shirt – it’s nearly always men and it’s something I really do try to avoid. Most of my favourite musicians wore suits and I do believe that after the age of 50, a decent suit is the only chance a man has of looking good. But that’s just my opinion. Good taste is very subjective, after all. Some people call Kiss a rock’n’roll band. But I don’t want to get into aesthetics here. Was is pop? What is rock’n’roll? What is rock? These are questions for ageing men to argue over while their hair falls out and their wives tap their feet to whatever they happen to like. What is not debatable is that the music made by Elvis, Chuck, Richard, Gene, Eddie, Bo etc etc was the original rock’n’roll and that stuff still sounds like dynamite. I remember one time when I was touring and had money in my pocket I bought a 4 cd box set of 1950s rock’n’roll named “Loud, Fast and Out Of Control” – a marvellous title and a beautiful production. If you see it, snap it up. It’s a real labour of love and there isn’t a duff track on it. See, I’m not sure that it was all about youth. Pretty much everybody involved in it was young, yes, and maybe the qualities it was celebrating were all to do with youth, but I’m always about the music and the music itself is about more than that. It’s about the blend of black and white music, the fast tempos, the polyrhythms, the harnessing of what was then new instrumentation (Nik Cohn theorised that it all boiled down to electric guitars), the open expression of lust in the lyrics, the joy of speed (in every sense), the endless *possibilities*. The toughness of the old blues, the sentimentality of country, the free availability of legal amphetamines, the booming post-war economy of America. This is an exotic mid 20th century combination that will not occur again. If you love it, you will never stop loving it and age is irrelevant.
Music and me, we are pretty inseparable. I love jazz, blues, Indian classical music, fascinated by Arabic music, African music, old Music Hall, old dance bands from the 1920s and 1930s, psychedelic rock, avant garde wacky stuff that sends people running from the room – I’m there. Plus Bach, Beethoven, all the usual dead white males. But rock’n’roll, ooh my soul! I love it so, and I miss it dearly. Very much I miss it. Being able to go to some grungy pub somewhere, lay out a nominal amount, buy a pint, watch some gang of hopefuls setting up their gear, starting their set, hoping they might do a couple of Chuck Berry tunes, however badly. THAT was my youth. That’s what’s over, never to come again. I wouldn’t have swapped it for the world. But it would be foolish to keep blowing on the embers of a fire that has long gone out. What remains are memories and an abiding love for what started it all. It’s fabulous music, it really is. Frozen in time. Never to grow old. Those old records, some of them nearly 70 years old now, provide proof that once such optimism, such joy was possible. It’s a vision of America that America itself has never matched since. Nor is it likely to. It was a moment. You can analyse the economics, the politics, the sociology – and goodness knows, enough people have made livings from doing precisely that over the last half century – but the music gloriously celebrates itself. And that’s enough.