Authors: Graham Nash
Their drummer that night was an eighteen-year-old kid named Jimmy Gordon, who later played on “Marrakesh Express.” Things do tend to come full circle.
After the concert, the place cleared out pretty quick. It was a school night for a lot of the audience, and besides, it wasn’t cool for girls to be out that late, so we put my sister on a bus headed home. She didn’t mind, she was on cloud nine. During the show Phil Everly broke a string, and I darted to the stage and got it for her. I’m sure she stared at it all the way home, because I know she still has it to this day. After she was safely on the bus to Salford, Clarkie and I put our plan into effect.
There was no tour bus on the street by the theater. Okay, that narrowed things down. We figured the Everlys had to be staying in Manchester overnight, probably at the Midland Hotel. It was the best place in the city and a well-known rendezvous, where Rolls met Royce in the 1920s, about a hundred yards from the Free Trade
Hall. A uniformed doorman stood sentry on the front steps. In my best Mr. Cool guise, I approached him and said, “Are the Everly Brothers in?” Incredibly, he fell for it. “No, not yet,” he said, and we knew we had them.
Clarkie and I took up position near the steps. I glanced at the clock tower across the street: 10:00. The next time I looked it was 11:45. The buses stopped running at midnight. It was typical north of England weather—pissing down and brutally cold—but there was no way we were giving up the quest. We knew we were going to have to walk the nine miles back to Salford in total darkness, but so what? It’s the Everlys, man. Sometime after one o’clock, I spotted them coming around the corner. They were a little drunk; they’d been to a nightclub.
“There they are!” I hissed at Clarkie. “Oh my God, they’re actually walking toward us. Fuck! Now what?”
It was obvious that they’d have to pass us because we were planted at the foot of the steps by the front door. One look at their faces and you knew they’d recognized us as fans.
“We don’t want to bother you,” I said, “but I’m Graham and this is my friend Allan, and we sing together. We sing like you—we copy your style.”
“That’s nice,” Don said. “Are you any good?”
“We think we are,” Clarkie told him. He explained about our band and how we played shows around Manchester.
“Hey, Graham and Allan, keep doing it. Things’ll happen,” Phil said.
Graham and Allan.
Phil and Don called us Graham and Allan! It was Allan and me and Phil and Don standing on the steps of the Midland Hotel, talking music. Giving us encouragement. Instead of brushing us off and going to bed, they talked to us for what seemed like forty minutes, but it could have been forty seconds for all I know. Either way, it changed our lives. It was a big moment for me. After that night, I swore to myself that if I ever became famous and
met fans, I would talk to them like the Everly Brothers talked to me and validated my very being. Today, if my bus is pulling out from a gig and I see fans standing there waving, I’ll stop the bus and talk to them for a few minutes. Take it from me, you just never know!
Before we realized it, the Everly Brothers were gone, just like that. Clarkie and I were beside ourselves, clapping each other on the shoulder and hopping up and down. “Holy shit! Did that really happen? Man, I can’t believe it!”
It kept us going for weeks. I was especially knocked out and took all their advice to heart. One of the things we talked about that night was writing songs, whether it was a cool thing or not. The Everly Brothers already had a stash of fabulous material to their credit, so obviously Allan and I were going to give it a try. They told us not to overthink it, just—you know, let it rip. A few months later, we finally got up our nerve.
We were camped out on a park bench outside the Regent Road Baths, a local swimming joint a few blocks from my home. We’d been across the street to a bakery, where we’d gotten some cheap day-old bread, and launched right into our first original tune. We didn’t even have guitars with us, so we had to remember it: “Hey, What’s Wrong with Me?” Not a masterpiece, but that didn’t matter. It wasn’t bad for a first shot at songwriting, and it eventually became the B-side of our very first record. It gave us enormous satisfaction to know that we could write a pretty decent rock ’n’ roll song. I loved the whole creative process—combining personal feelings with poetry and music—and suspected that, in time, I could become a good songwriter.
Allan and I continued to work at it, to write together, and the
Fourtones got really tight. There was a lot of great rock ’n’ roll in our sets: “Mr. Moonlight,” “Anna,” “Mickey’s Monkey,” “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,”
“Stay,” “Poison Ivy,” songs that were so much fun to play. Eventually, in late 1960, we made our first acetate at the local record store, Johnny’s Roadhouse. One Saturday morning,
we dragged our equipment up to the second floor, where they had a paneled room with egg cartons on the walls to absorb and deflect sound. Strictly a rinky-dink affair. All five of us chipped in for the session, scraping together four shillings, and did three songs: the
Everly Brothers’ “Cryin’ in the Rain,”
“Wimoweh,” and a song we’d written called “Learn How to Twist.”
But teenage bands don’t last forever. In time, the Fourtones went their separate ways. Joe, Pete, and Butch moved on, and Allan and I began working with a different set of guys: Vic Farrell, who later became a pretty famous guitar player called
Vic Steele;
Eric Haydock, who’d played bass with Kirk Daniels and the Deltas; and
Don Rathbone, a decent drummer to speak of, but, more important, his father owned a mortuary, and that allowed us use of its van.
One night in 1962 we were playing a gig at the Two J’s on Lloyd Street by Albert Square. It was an incredible little place on the ground floor of an old building, one of the first coffee bars in Manchester to feature live music. In a later incarnation, it became famous as the Oasis, which is where the eponymous band got its name. Anyway, I was working there in the afternoon, serving coffee, cooking burgers, wiping tables, cleaning up. I’m not even sure I got paid for doing that; I just wanted to be part of the club. I told the owner, Jack Jackson, that our band was worth a listen, and he agreed to let us audition.
Graham Clegg, who was the emcee, grabbed us just before we went on.
“I’m about to introduce you,” he said. “What’s the name of the band?”
Good question. We didn’t have a name at this point and went off in the corner to mull it over.
“What about the Deadbeats?” Don said, taking a cue from the family business.
Deadbeats: I thought that sounded kind of cool. Clarkie, thankfully, didn’t agree. “We’re not Deadbeats,” he said. “We’re more fun than that.”
Someone else—and I honestly don’t remember who—thought we should name the band after one of our favorite singers. In an instant we all agreed, and I went off to deliver the verdict.
A few minutes later, we were gathered at the side of the postage-stamp-size stage when
Graham Clegg stepped forward and leaned into the mike.
“Why don’t you give a nice round of applause to a local band,” he announced, “
—the Hollies
!”
T
H
e H
OLLIES HIT THAT STAGE AT THE TWO J’S AND
we never looked back. Ready to go for broke as a band, we found our groove right away, and it transformed us into something intense and exciting. You put five guys onstage who can play together well, man, that’s when all the planets align. It’s like walking for the first time or riding a two-wheel bike. You get your legs—and you
go.
There’s no stopping you after that. It’s like a religious experience. Everything just clicks.
The sound we made onstage, the energy that came pouring off us, was fantastic. And our vocals—the harmony structure that Allan and I had perfected—pulled everything together in a tidy package. The songs we did weren’t anything special—every band in England played the same basic set—but the
Hollies managed to give them a unique sound. And besides, we were cool, we had a certain mystique. Allan and I had attitude up the wazoo, and
Eric Haydock, our bass player, was a real piece of work. He was the James Dean of the band, moody and surly, but a real north of England lad. He had a
six
-string Fender bass, which was as offbeat as Eric, and all of that just added to our appeal.
The more clubs and dances we played, the better we got. We’d go anywhere, play anywhere we could. Nowhere in the north was off-limits. From Blackpool to Stoke, you name it, we played it. We had wheels, Don’s van, that’s all it took. It’d cruise by Kenyon’s after Allan and I were done working, and we’d drive two or three hours
to Stoke and play the King’s Hall. Often we wouldn’t get home until three in the morning, then do it again the next day … and the next. We did that for several years, didn’t think anything of it. When you’re young and playing rock ’n’ roll, time becomes irrelevant.
So much music was storming through the north of England. Every town we rolled into, there were bands playing gigs. Those days, it seemed like there was one on every corner. Manchester had its share of good bands:
Johnny Peters and the Rockets,
Pete MacLaine and the Dakotas,
Herman’s Hermits, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders,
Freddie and the Dreamers. But I think there were more bands per capita in Liverpool than anywhere else. They were louder and tougher than the groups we were used to in Manchester. More merchant seamen there, more violent street gangs, more Teddy Boys, all of whom were scary. You didn’t fuck with kids from Liverpool. They’d beat the shit out of you. Even so, we kept our eyes on everything that was going on there. That city was crawling with bands who were already attracting attention in the south: the Big Three, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, the Swinging Blue Jeans, the Fourmost, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, the
Searchers, and, of course, the granddaddy of them all, the
Beatles.
I first saw the “Beatles” in Manchester of all places, which was an eye-opener as far as gigs went. It was at the Two J’s, which had just changed its name to the Oasis. They were scheduled to play that night. They came through the front door about three in the afternoon to set up their equipment, and every girl in there stopped dead in their tracks. Man, it was like four Marlon Brandos had walked in: John, Paul, George, and
Pete.
They had an innate, primordial swagger. Aside from the raw energy they put out, they looked fantastic. They had just come back from Hamburg and were dressed in black leather with that Beatle haircut. What a sight! A total coolness emanated off them, like a
Young Riders
kind of vibe. You know, they’d swing the door open and they’d all be standing there while the dust settled around them. They hadn’t even played a note, and the girls would swoon and faint. Fuckin’ fantastic.
The Hollies played double bills with the Beatles a few times. In 1962, at Stoke-on-Trent, we shared a gig at the King’s Ballroom. After soundcheck, I was standing around the ballroom backstage when John and Paul came up to me. “Hey, Graham, want to hear a new song?” Now, I’m alway
s
interested in a new song, but this was a new
Beatles
song. Interested?—take a wild guess. So they gave me what musicians call a total ear fuck: John and Paul on either side of me, with John playing the guitar, and they sang:
The world is treating me baaaaa-aaad, misery.
What a moment for me. John and Paul doing their trademark two-part harmony in the purest form, like the Everly Brothers, but different. The minute I heard it, I knew it was a smash hit. And later the Hollies went on tour with
Helen Shapiro, who had a hit with it. The world treating them
baaaaa-aaad
—not in this lifetime.
The most unforgettable Beatles-Hollies double gig, of course, had to be at the Cavern, in Liverpool. It was in late 1962 and they owned that city. Meanwhile, the Cavern was like no place on earth. It was three tunnels linked by archways that made one room, wall-to-wall kids—hundreds of them—hot and sweaty, filled with dense cigarette smoke. No ventilation to speak of. Condensation streamed down the walls from the 100 percent humidity; circles of water pooled on the floor. The club was a cellar: literally underground. There was only one way in and one way out, via an endless flight of stone stairs that were always wet with sweat or urine. A real death trap. It was intense, a great rock ’n’ roll scene. That was the first time I ever saw Ringo, who didn’t even have a Beatle haircut at the time.
Ringo didn’t change the sound of the band much, but he definitely changed the groove. Simpler and more understated than
Pete Best’s style. Ringo plays a heartbeat, which is a sound I love. It’s one of the secrets of great drumming, because, in life, everything starts with the heartbeat. Your mother’s heartbeat is the very first thing you hear when you are conceived, and that sets the rhythm for the rest of your life. There’s no way around it. The heartbeat is the most important part of music if you want to connect on a personal level.
And it’s very subtle: Ringo’s right foot on that kick drum. He’s an incredible drummer, one of the most underrated. And the Beatles were very lucky to get him.
In general, that band was flat-out amazing, and everybody knew it. They played a molten, scruffy brand of rock ’n’ roll. And they had attitude in spades. They’d swear and smoke onstage, tell off the audience, all of which just added to their mystique.
The Hollies didn’t have that kind of power. Oh, we had our share of loyal fans, we could put on a damn good show, pulled enough birds, but we hadn’t hit our sweet spot, that point where you take the stage by storm and everything just falls your way. I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe we hadn’t played enough gigs; perhaps we needed different material. Who knows? For one thing, there was still too much uncertainty within the band. We were playing more than a couple of nights a week and had gotten a residency at a place called the Twisted Wheel. A great little club, funky as hell, where you’re on a stage the size of a skateboard and about as stable, no real PA system to speak of, jammed every night, the kind of room every rock ’n’ roll band needs to cut its teeth. The money was respectable. Hard to believe, but I was making more with the Hollies than at my day job and could support myself pretty well. Most of us thought it was time to go for broke, to turn professional and just play music full-time. Unfortunately,
Vic Steele didn’t see it that way. In the north of England, there was a union hierarchy: You apprenticed at a job and worked your way up, the payoff being a lifetime gig to support your family. And Vic wasn’t willing to give that up, which was too bad because he was a pretty good player.