Wild Tales (6 page)

The thing is, we were
good.
We could sing our asses off, and word about us started to get around Manchester. Pretty soon we were working coffeehouses and pubs, anywhere we could, earning a few bob and a leg up with the girls. Girls, we discovered, were a nice little perk that came with performing. It was all the incentive I ever needed. The first love of my life was
Rose Oliver, a magnificent-looking creature with long, wavy blond hair and a body that was bursting into womanhood. She was beautiful and funny and not about to let me touch her. Didn’t matter. Soon afterward, I got my first kiss from a girl called Sylvia. First sex, too (thanks, Sylvia), standing up in the alleyway out behind her house. I can’t say that it was a transcendent experience. It was over before either of us knew what had happened. But you can be sure it whetted my appetite for what came later in the sixties.

As the Two Teens, Allan and I—make that Ricky and Dane—played local old-fashioned competitions that were a big part of northern England entertainment. We’d do talent shows that were right on the edge of vaudeville, where ten or twelve amateur acts would vie to see who would move on to the next week’s contest. These weren’t just singers, but jugglers, ventriloquists, mimes, accordion virtuosos, plate spinners, the whole gamut. One of the earliest of our escapades was at the Middleton Towers Holiday Camp, where we performed Conway Twitty’s “It’s Only Make Believe” to thunderous applause and were invited back for the three-day finale, which we lost to some crooner.

The hottest competition we entered was
Star Search
, at the Hippodrome Theatre in Manchester, on November 19, 1958. Carroll
Levis, a slightly overweight Canadian impresario who had seemingly cornered the market on amateur talent, was the emcee, which heightened interest from all across the north. It seemed like every act in Lancashire showed up to make their name. I recognized
Johnny Peters, the frontman for the
Rockets, whose coolness quotient was way off the charts. Ronnie Wycherley, who later morphed into
Billy Fury, was slumped in a chair backstage, as was Freddie Garrity, a short guy with glasses who would have hits in the sixties with
Freddie and the Dreamers. Most of the preshow buzz was around a group from Liverpool called
Johnny and the Moondogs, who did a
Buddy Holly number, “Think It Over.” I thought they were pretty good, which confirms my taste, considering it was
John Lennon,
George Harrison, and
Paul McCartney, with
Johnny Hutchinson sitting in on drums. Allan and I decided to stick with “It’s Only Make Believe” because we could wring every last ounce of emotion out of the lyric.

That evening the place was packed. Carroll Levis was a pretty famous guy, and the crowd came for him almost as much as for the performers. The acts, as it happened, were surprisingly good. The Harmonica Rascals were local favorites; they had a midget playing a big bass harmonica who was a cutup and mugged shamelessly for the crowd. And the Moondogs went over as you might expect. They’d probably have walked away with a win had they been able to stick around for the finale, but the last bus back to Liverpool was at 9:27, long before the show was done.

Allan and I had as good a shot as anyone. Our harmonies were airtight and we killed that ballad. When Levis dragged us all out onstage at the end, it was anyone’s guess who would take first place. He lined up each act in a single row, then walked behind us and held a hand over our heads. If the crowd went crazy, you knew your chances were good. Billy Fury and Freddie Garrity had their friends out front, and the noise they made was deafening. The same with the Harmonica Rascals and Johnny Peters. But
when it came time to rate Allan and me, there was no doubt we had won the night and would move on to the finals a week later in Morecombe.

Our star was rising, that was for sure. A manager even had his eye on us, a guy named Arthur Fee, who managed a band called Kirk Daniels and the Deltas. Fee was a real piece of work. He’d been a budding musician who hadn’t made it and decided instead to develop pop acts in a way that was novel. His approach was that we’d become a show, an evening of cabaret, as opposed to just a band. So Kirk Daniels and the Deltas would open with us singing harmonies, followed by Ricky and Dane Young in matching green lamé jackets, then we’d all change into animal skins and be like the Flintstones, or some such stunt. And it worked—for a while. Dates for Saturday- and Sunday-night dances started rolling in, big reception halls in schools that could be converted into dance clubs where 150 kids would jive until curfew. And bigger pubs, like the Yew Tree in Wythenshaw. We’d do two forty-five-minute sets, no repeats. Needless to say, we learned a lot of songs. At first it was an interesting way to work, but we soon got pissed off at the gimmicky stuff and eventually decided to work on our own.

In any case, we were making twenty or thirty quid in some weeks, pretty good bread for a sixteen-year-old kid, especially when you consider my circumstances at home. We needed all the help we could get as a family. My parents were both working, but it was next to impossible for them to make ends meet, and the prospects in Salford were dim and dimmer. So I decided to leave school and go to work. This wasn’t a very hard decision. I wasn’t getting anything out of school, and I knew my future was as a performer, in music. It was time, I decided, to get on with my life.

My parents didn’t try to talk me out of it. As usual, we didn’t go for discussions about really personal stuff, but I knew deep down that they approved of my decision. I also knew they hoped I wouldn’t take the standard Salford route, which was to work in
the mine or the cotton mill until I was sixty, then get the gold watch—and just die. What a waste. That’s the way most kids wound up. In fact, to earn extra money, Allan had started out working in the cloth mill in Salford. I went to visit him once at lunchtime, and it looked and sounded like hell to me. All these gigantic machines throbbing in the same rhythm, lots of shuttles flying around. And it was filthy, with bits of cloth flying all over the place. Amazingly, Allan didn’t seem to mind, which made me realize that you could shut out anything if you wanted to. But it wasn’t a place for me, I knew that right away. Fortunately, Allan left the mill for his position at Alexander Kenyon’s, so he referred me there and I landed my first real job.

The two of us would go to work together, and it was insane just to get there. It was right outside Manchester, in Ardwick. We had to leave home about six in the morning, take two buses, and walk a bit. After work, at 5:30, a van would pick us up and we’d be driven to a town in the vicinity, where we’d play a gig and get home about three in the morning. I even had a job at a record store on Saturdays. It was a grind and a half that went on for years. But it felt great, at last, to earn a decent wage. I’ll never forget my first pay packet—£2.10, about seven dollars US—which I took home to my mother.

I always contributed to the family pot, but I also managed to put away a few quid. Ever since laying eyes on Allan’s electric guitar, I’d been saving up to buy one of my own. He was also trying to upgrade, and after a few months at Kenyon’s we each had enough to buy matching
Guyatones. Mine cost about fifteen pounds, which was a fortune at the time. But it allowed us, finally, to play rock ’n’ roll.

We became—what else?—the Guyatones and began getting gigs at the network of coffee bars that was springing up across northern England. We did mostly
Everly Brothers songs, with
Buddy Holly stuff in two-part and a little
Gene Vincent mixed in for good
measure. One afternoon, we got booked into a show at the Bodega, a relatively small bohemian club just off Deansgate, by the Albert Square in Manchester. It was kind of a fake weekend-beatnik joint, with kids who wore striped shirts and berets and would click their fingers instead of applaud. We knew it was bullshit, but it paid cash money just the same.

After our set, a young, good-looking guy came up to us and introduced himself. He was
Joe Abrams, the son of a man who owned the biggest newsstand in Manchester, about two hundred yards from the Bodega. At the age of fifteen, Joe had left school to help his father sell newspapers and magazines to the thousands of workers who passed by there every day. Joe happened to play the drums, and he came into the club to check out our act. “You and Allan are real good,” he said to me, “but you need a band.”

“What do you mean we need a band?” I said, getting defensive. “We’re doing great together. Allan and I are each making five pounds a night. We don’t need anybody else.”

“Yeah you do. You need a drummer, a bass player, and a lead guitarist. Now, I happen to be the great drummer you need, and beyond that you need a bocking.”

Now I was really getting in his face. “What the fuck are you talking about—a bocking?”

“No, no,” he said. “You need
Pete
Bocking in your band.”

“Oh yeah? What do we need this guy for?”

Joe Abrams smiled—he finally had me on the hook. “Because he can play every solo you’ve ever heard, every
Buddy Holly solo, every
Gene Vincent solo, all the
Little Richard stuff …”

“Well, you know,” I said, “let’s go meet this
Pete Bocking.”

The three of us immediately made for a house in Didsbury, on the outskirts of Manchester. Even today it’s hard to describe Pete Bocking. He was unlike any musician I’d ever met before—or since. He was shy and introverted, he rarely spoke above a whisper, and he was already bald at the age of seventeen. He wore sunglasses
and a dark suit with sleeves that were too long and he smoked like a chimney. And he carried this rectangular case that he put on the floor in a ceremonious way.

“What’s in the case?” I asked, without expecting too much.

Bocking didn’t say a word as he flipped open the case, and
—Good God!
A
Stratocaster!
The first Fender Stratocaster I ever laid eyes on. I’d heard plenty about them, but that was about it. No one I knew in Manchester had one. They were too expensive—more than £170—but Pete had saved up and got this beauty, sunburst and sleek as a surfboard. I could tell from the way he handled it how special it was. And then he began to play. He didn’t even plug it in, he just played it acoustically, but I could hear the magic in his touch. He played all the solos that we loved, and with style. He was everything
Joe Abrams cracked him up to be.

I turned to Allan and said, “Joe is absolutely right—we need this kid.” And I knew Allan felt the same way. We’d been very comfortable as a duo; we had two little guitars and a whole lot of gumption. But we saw what was coming. We wanted to have a rock ’n’ roll band, and Pete Bocking on lead, Joe Abrams on drums, and their friend
Butch Mepham, who played bass, were the guys who could help make it all come true.

We became the
Fourtones, even though there were five of us. The Fourtones:
my very first band.
At the outset, we stuck to “complicated
skiffle”—instrumentals and the Ventures kind of stuff. Soon enough, however, we drifted into American
R&B: the
Coasters,
Barrett Strong,
Arthur Alexander, artists like that, with our trusty
Everly Brothers and
Buddy Holly set mixed in. Allan and I loved the fact that Joe and Butch could keep a groove, but we were always waiting for Bocking’s solos. He was one of those guys who never played the same solo twice. He was
that
good. And during our sets, Clarkie and I would glance at each other and go: “Oh
fuck
—solo time,” then we’d edge over toward Pete and practically inhale his fretwork. What a feeling! With the Fourtones, Allan and I had finally tapped into some incredible energy. We’d still do Everly
Brothers and
skiffle, but with a beat behind us and Pete Bocking’s solos, we were on our way at last, ready to rock ’n’ roll.

T
HE
F
OURTONES TURNED
out to be a pretty good band. We played a lot of local gigs, almost every weekend, and began to draw a faithful following in the north. One of the benefits of being a good rock ’n’ roll band in the late 1950s was that it was obvious that girls loved musicians. There was always a great-looking flock that clustered near the stage, and all sorts of eye contact would go ping-ponging back and forth. But one of the pitfalls was that if someone’s boyfriend was watching his girl flirt with one of us, you usually stood a chance of getting the shit kicked out of you afterward. Bob Joy was one of those guys. He was an African American kid who had a habit of carrying around a silver dollar. He would look at you, flick it high in the air, and catch it … flick it high and catch it … over and over, flick it high and catch it, until he had your attention. Then he would flick it higher than before, and as your face went up to follow it, he would head-butt you as hard as he could. One night, Allan and I were carrying our amps to the bus as it was just pulling out, but somehow I got left behind. With Bob Joy, who was waiting there as well. That fucker was out to get me, and that silver-dollar-head-butt combo left an impression on my soul. It was dangerous, man. Jealousy was not to be taken lightly. It was a lesson, hard learned, that I wouldn’t soon forget.

A
S THE SIXTIES
dawned, it was great being on my own, earning a decent wage, and playing music to crowds a few nights a week. Few eighteen-year-olds can claim as much. But sometimes all it takes is a chance encounter to remind you how much of a kid you really are.

Sometime after the new year began, I spotted an ad in the Manchester newspaper: the Everly Brothers, live and in concert, at the
Free Trade Hall. Oh, you bet I was going to be there. Allan, too. And we made up our minds that some way, somehow, we were going to meet our heroes. It was a dream of ours that wouldn’t quit. Of course, we never thought it would happen. You know how those things go. But we talked out a plan that seemed logical at the time and determined to give it our best shot.

The night of the show we were eight miles high—adrenaline pumping, heart beating outside my chest. We had great seats, maybe eight rows back. My sister Elaine was with us. Word was floating around that Phil and Don weren’t speaking to each other, and I had a fantasy of leaving Elaine there in the seats with Allan and taking Phil’s part if he didn’t show. But when the lights came up, there they were, together, just as we’d hoped. And they were fucking fabulous. Did all their hits. Two acoustic gray Gibsons, strumming them like mad. They sounded incredible. They sang around one mike, perfect balance. And those voices! C’mon, who did anything like
that
? They were just stunning.