Wild Tales (9 page)

We got the word right away that EMI wanted to sign us. The deal was for a recording contract on
Parlophone, the same label as the
Beatles. The mechanism for hits was already in place, so it was like a cookie-cutter process, you just stamp ’em right out. “Let’s put these boys in the studio and use the same energy and distribution that sold the Beatles records.” Hey, I had no problem with that. It was exactly what we wanted, a shot with a proven strategy.

“Let’s get right down to work,”
Ron Richards said. “Come to EMI and make a real record, on four-track.”

EMI: That meant Abbey Road, the sanctum sanctorum. We drove back home that night after the audition, but we felt like we were flying.

T
HE
H
OLLIES’ FIRST
recording session was on April 4, 1963, only five short months after we formed the group. We rolled into
Abbey Road studios, and it was like
—holy shit!
This was the place. Four amazing studios in a Georgian mansion that had recording history written all over it. It was like a factory, but an intimate factory, with so much going on that it was impossible to take in right away. Abbey Road: Now the Hollies would be written into its incredible history.

I remember how psyched the Beatles were the day before they went in to cut their first record. That night, they happened to be playing at the Oasis in Manchester, and the Hollies were around the corner at the Twisted Wheel. We all got together after our respective shows at this after-hours drinking place. When the pubs closed at 10:30, that was it, you were out of luck, but there were certain illegal places where you could drink after that, and we knew a
good one. Three bands crammed into that little dive: The Big Three were also along for the ride. They were a kick-ass group from Liverpool with a couple of legendary characters—
Johnny Hutchinson, a fearsome drummer with a short fuse whom I first saw play with
Johnny and the Moondogs, and
Johnny Gustafson, their bass player, an all-around head case. In fact, that night Johnny Gus plucked a rose out of the vase on the table … and
ate
it! After which he ate a cigarette, which blew my mind. Lennon was in an ugly mood that night. We’d all had a few pints, but John was feeling it from some other place. He was really unsettled about what the
Beatles should record the next day.

“I want to do this fuckin’ song, ‘Anna,’ by
Arthur Alexander,” he growled, “but I can’t remember the fuckin’ words.”

“I know ’em,” I told him, which was easy, because the Hollies did “Anna.” So I wrote out the words, lifting the gloom. And I must say, the Beatles made a pretty good record of it.

Now we were about to get our chance in the studio. Not making an album, not yet anyway, but initially a couple of singles to test the market, like the Beatles did with “Love Me Do” and, later, “Please Please Me.” Ron thought we should stick with
“(Ain’t That) Just Like Me,” our cover of a 1960
Coasters song that the kids loved when we played it at gigs. “
Mary had a little lamb / Well, ain’t that
—thunk thunk
—just like me?
” It was a little trifle, but catchy enough. Naturally, Allan and I hoped the A-side would be one of our songs. We played two of our tunes for Ron—“Whole World Over” and “Hey, What’s Wrong with Me?”—but he wasn’t in love with them; he didn’t think they were commercial enough. And he was right, they were naïve and teenage. Even so, Ron encouraged us to keep writing. In fact he chose “Hey, What’s Wrong with Me?” as the B-side, a nice gesture.

There was no fooling around in the studio in those days, no going in half-assed and waiting for inspiration to strike. It was all business at Abbey Road. The engineers wore white lab coats, and we couldn’t touch anything, especially the board. Which meant we didn’t really learn anything about the recording process at first. We
were there to perform, and that was it. Sessions were only three hours long, a union rule. Then a woman with a tray of tea would come in and she’d hand out little brown envelopes with some cash in them to pay us, also a union rule. So we had to be fast: get the basic track down, lay on the vocals, and be out in three hours flat. Not a lot of wiggle room to make a great record.

Parlophone released “(Ain’t That) Just Like Me” in May of 1963, and it went straight into the top twenty. Eventually, it stalled at number sixteen, but
—are you kidding me!
—our first record was an unqualified
hit.
We were on top of the world.

What do you do as a follow-up to that? Easy: another single just like it. With our new manager,
Tommy Sanderson, on piano, we covered the
Coasters’
“Searchin’,” a song all the bands in the north had in their set, and this one went to number twelve, with our own “Whole World Over” on the B-side. The Hollies were on a roll.

With two hit singles under our belts, Parlophone ordered up a Hollies
album. Basically, we decided to take the best material from our two forty-five-minute sets and fuse it into one kick-ass hour. There were plenty of songs to choose from: “Mister Moonlight,” “Poison Ivy,” “Searchin’,
” “(Ain’t That) Just Like Me” … The whole thing was done in one morning session. Then, after the lunch break and a cup of tea with some biscuits, we did the same set again—the entire album in two hours flat. That was it. Ron chose the twelve best songs. He could always find the true essence of our sessions. He had a great ear, and we relied on his judgment. The only thing he did that pissed me off was to tell us we couldn’t record past 10:30 in the evening because the echo machines went off at that time. It wasn’t until years later that I realized,
Wait a second!
Echo machines don’t automatically shut off. It dawned on me that 10:30 was closing time at the pub. Ron and the engineers wanted to get a pint before last call, which is why
the echo machines went off.
In any case, they released our first album,
Stay with the Hollies
, on January 1, 1964, and the single from it,
“Stay,” a cover of the Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs hit, reached number eight, our first top-ten hit.

The Hollies were starting to carve out a groove in the nascent British rock ’n’ roll scene. This was an amazing development for us. The British Revolution, as it was being called, had fired its first shot with Cliff Richard and the Shadows, a London act and bona fide stars, especially with Hank Marvin on guitar, but since early 1963 the scene had been dominated by northern groups: the
Beatles,
Gerry and the Pacemakers, the
Searchers, and now the Hollies. For the first time in all of our memories, being from the north was an asset down in London, the Smoke. It didn’t get any sweeter. Instead of walking around London feeling like lowly outcasts, we were suddenly
desirable
outcasts, treated with respect. The Hollies were a hit. We were all over the radio, all over the record stores, gradually edging our way onto TV. We’d even joined the Bobby Rydell/
Helen Shapiro tour that was crisscrossing the country. No one recognized us on the city streets because by that time everyone had a Beatle haircut, even the girls. But we felt special, like we owned that fucking town.

Music was still the center of our universe. Our lives revolved around songs, finding the next suitable hit.
Tony Hicks was our point man when it came to material. He used to troll the warren of publishers’ offices along Denmark Street, looking for songs that we could record. One day, at lunchtime, we’d all gone down to a folk club called the Troubadour. Tony barged in while we were eating and said, “I’ve been to a publisher and found this song.” He pulled an acetate out of his bag but couldn’t figure out how to play it for us. One of the guys said, “They must be able to play music here. Leave it to me,” and he disappeared with the record. A few minutes later, this incredible sound came blasting over the loudspeakers. It was
Doris Troy singing “Just One Look.” We knew right away. We could sing the shit out of this.

It was a sturdy, seductive ballad with a center of gravity: Everything else we’d done previously had been leading up to this. It captured everything the Hollies excelled at. We knew we could arrange it expressively so that it expanded on the original, while harmonizing beautifully, breathlessly, providing a soulful delivery, and
giving it our own unique spin. We knew we could cover the song without apology.

We actually rehearsed it that same night. Allan and Tony belted out the refrain with an upbeat urbanity and I took the lead in the bridge, pleading the case of a determined lover:

You can hear how I gave it an exuberant polish.
Doris Troy’s original
Atlantic recording is almost subdued by comparison. Hers has a gorgeous moodiness to it, a vulnerability with an underlying sense of despair. The Hollies gave it an entirely different interpretation and, thus, new life.

Tony knew what he was doing when he brought us that song, and it became a smash hit in March 1964, eventually reaching number two on the charts.

This was turning into a storybook career. And I was having the time of my life. I moved to London at the end of 1963, bunking at the Imperial Hotel in Ladbroke Square. The city was just starting to take on its new spirit in the days before Carnaby Street exploded, and I loved everything about it. Tony also moved down, as did
Bobby Elliott when he replaced Don as the band’s drummer, but Allan stayed behind in Manchester after deciding to marry his girlfriend, Jeni. Eventually, I rented an apartment in a mews house on Kynance Mews in Paddington, right around the corner from where Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. It was a great little place of my own, where I could get away from the hustling scene.

Well, not entirely away. Earlier that same year, I’d walked into the Two J’s and smack into a scene that would change my life. Across the floor was an incredibly beautiful young woman, blond, tall, and well built, in a low-cut long-sleeve sheath dress that was as revealing as it was short. I kept an eye on her as the music started
and a local guy asked her to dance. Man, could that girl move. No way was I going to let her get away from me, so I walked over in the middle of the song and cut in. Inconceivably, the fool she was dancing with turned her over to me, just like that. Her name was Rose Eccles. She was eighteen, she lived around the corner from my parents in Salford, and she was an independent soul. A no-bullshit girl with a big laugh and great sense of humor. I liked her immediately.

Really, I couldn’t believe my good luck. Rosie was a head turner and smart, a powerful combination. Equally alluring to me was that she didn’t know I was a budding rock ’n’ roll star—and once she found out, she couldn’t have cared less. We felt lucky to have found each other. Aside from the sparks we created, there was lots of laughing. We hung out together whenever I wasn’t performing, haunting the coffee bars and clubs in Manchester, dancing at the Plaza Ballroom, listening to a lot of rock ’n’ roll, making love always like it was the last time we’d get the chance.

We never talked much about our dreams, but I knew Rosie had always wanted to have a dress shop of her own, so Tony Hicks and I invested in one called Pygmalion in Backpool Fold, just off Albert Square. We rented the place and renovated it ourselves, my father put up the wallpaper, friends took care of the decorations. Rosie and her mate, Anne, were the resident fashionistas, so we left the style decisions and buying to them. It was one of the first boutiques in Manchester, with very hip stuff and a great vibe. I loved having a store where very pretty women would come in to try on dresses—and it was an instant hit. Rose was definitely behind its success.

Sometime in 1964, in the midst of all the Hollies’ success, Rosie and I decided to get married. I know what you’re thinking: Rock ’n’ rollers whose careers are taking off are supposed to regard marriage like the plague. We were supposed to be available to all the girls who came to our shows and screamed their asses off. But Clarkie had been married to Jeni for a year, and it didn’t seem to be affecting our popularity. And I loved Rosie, I wanted to be with her
all the time, especially in London, where the scene had shifted. So we did it quickly and quietly, stealing off to the registry office in Albert Square in Manchester, no family or friends other than
Pete MacLaine and his wife, Susan, and we spent our wedding night in the MacLaines’ house—on their floor, of all places.

After that, everything changed. Rosie bowed out of Pygmalion and moved to London with me. We got a place of our own, a flat in a small high-rise in Shepherd’s Bush, where Rosie painted the living room black. She came to all the Hollies gigs, hanging out with Allan’s wife, and our scene felt snug and secure. For a while.

Everything kept coming our way, and in spades. The Hollies segued from “Just One Look” to “Here I Go Again,” which went to number four, and followed that with “We’re Through,” the first A-side written by Tony, Allan, and me under the pseudonym L. Ransford, which we used on all our collaborations. Clarke-Hicks-Nash was too much of a mouthful, so we used my grandfather’s name. The Hollies were consistently in the top ten, consistently featured in
Melody Maker
and
NME.
We were part of the prestigious Poll Winners Concert at the Empire Pool, Wembley, and were invited to play on the BBC’s Light Programme,
The Talent Spot.
And our live shows were insane: wall-to-wall girls, screaming their heads off. Thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen-year-old girls. They really went nuts when the lights came up, letting it all out, probably for the first time in their lives. There was a very real sexual undercurrent to those audiences, a by-product of young, good-looking guys playing loud rock ’n’ roll. Those girls let themselves go. Total hysteria, wet panties. Incredible stuff. You could practically feel those twitchy girls exploring new sexual territory, casting aside all the taboos in their uptight English upbringings. Later on, guys would start turning up in greater number, but early on those eager young ladies ruled the roost.

At one of our shows at the Barrowlands Ballroom in Glasgow, where we backed a pop crooner named
Johnny Gentle, seventy-five girls fainted during the Hollies set and had to be passed hand-over-head like in a mosh pit. Some of those gigs in the north
had an eerie war-zone quality. The girls up there got us into a lot of deep shit. Look, half the reason I got into music was to attract women—who’s kidding who?—but if some chick took a shine to the lead singer, you could bet he was going to get his ass kicked by her boyfriend and his thuggy pals after the show. Those fuckers were tough. I can’t tell you how many buses I ran for after shows. Playing those northern provinces was murder. One time I got three front teeth shattered.