Don’t believe a thing you have heard; in early 1963, in Liverpool, in soon-to-be-swinging England, the best band was The Big Three. For the Beatles, world domination was months away, when they would fly up, up and away out of Liverpool with a cloned frenzy of Pacemakers, Searchers, Fourmosts, Merseybeats, Cillas and Tarbies hanging on like grim death to the starry, beatle’d jackets of the Fab Four. But this is not about the Beatles.
This is about The Big Three, and me, and remembering. I can still remember the sweated excitement of their now legendary E.P. Live At The Cavern. For those who don’t know, an E.P. was longer than a single and shorter than an L.P. or album as they later came to be known in the starry-eyed days of hippiedom. If my memory re - collects itself, the Big Three E. P. contained four tracks performed, of course, live at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, as it’s title would suggest. After a short introduction by Bob Wooller, the club’s resident D.J., the Big Three tore into the Ray Charles classic What’d I Say in a manner in which the blind American singer should always have performed it - if only he had been backed by The Big Three. Next they charged through a killer version of their debut single Some Other Guy before ripping in to the Burl Ives/Disney classic Zip A Dee Doo Dah , re-worked into a snarling rhythm n blues concerto for guitars and drums, how did you feel about that Walt?
The other track still eludes me. What’d I Say, Some Other Guy, Zip A Dee Doo Dah, and what??? I know it’s still there, twelve barring away in what has been termed the unconscious, the re-pository of everything forgotten and never even membered. I wish I could re-member it but, for the moment, it will have to remain unconscious. I do know there were four tracks and that there should have been more except for a Decca engineer’s cock-up that denied the world a whole L.P. (album) of the Big Three Live At The Cavern.
The Big Three were big Johnny Gustafson, big Johnny Hutch(inson) and an even bigger bloke on the drums who looked like he was one of their dads, and who probably had a van.
It’s all a memory - scratchy, vinyl, 45 revolutions per minute on a Dansette two tone record player complete with carrying handle and a device that allowed records to crash clumsily on top of each other so that the music never stopped. Whatever happened to those revolutions? Were they just in our heads? That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be a revolution, but only as loud as Marshall speakers and tiny amplifiers would allow it to be. Have you seen the film of the Beatles at Shea Stadium? Thousands of screaming kids drowning out the noise produced by equipment that would nowadays sit quietly in a corner of the modern teenager’s bedroom. It was an almost silent revolution.
It’s all a memory, fuelled by the distilled essence of what it was like to be a teenager then, probably the first generation of teenagers that roamed the planet. Suddenly we had shops catering for us, Ben Sherman shirts and Pierre Cardin suits with ten foot slashed vents at the back. The moped became an icon with its underpowered lawnmower engine topped by a shimmering eldorado of silver and a hall of mirrors that looked forward to a future that was sharp, in focus - not blurred and straight and smelling of too-long-boiled cabbage and brylcreem. The future was bright, wasn’t exactly orange but certainly wasn’t grey, it was frying tonight, sizzling, and as sharp as the needle on a Dansette record player.
In 1963, I was fourteen years old, can remember spending summer with my gran, out in the country, reading Kit Carson comics, riding farm horses down country lanes that don’t exist anymore. They had high banks topped with hedges and, though I didn’t appreciate them then, the thought of them now often makes me weep silently for a reason I can’t explain. Is it nostalgia? is it sentimental? Words which nowadays have a perjorative character, as if even our memories should be controlled by the thought police and fleeting fads of a fucked-up present. Perhaps it is the present itself denying access, a present ashamed of itself, jealous of a past that makes people like me cry. The weight of the present lies like a suffocating blanket over our minds, creating an un-conscious that can only gasp for a memory of a cleaner air in which we can dream of another time, another place, another time, another place, another time, another place.
I must have been about fourteen when I first went to the Cavern. Unconscious of the journey there, of the vast mass of the city itself, indeed of any consequences whatsoever, Clive and I merely told our respective parents that we were staying at each other’s house. Simple as that, easy, a doddle, hitched the 40 miles to Liverpool along roads that just led somewhere, somewhere else, somewhere out of Preston, roads neither more or less travelled than any other, just roads we all travelled. Nearly 40 years later we have ‘self help’ books to tell us how to travel these roads, how to do it with a massive self-consciousness, a consciousness of self that borders on the psychotic in which the massive, sophisticated, fearful, urban introspection of Johnny Ego has taken over from the somehow despised rural simplicity of Johnny B. Goode who lived in a log cabin made of earth and wood and carried his guitar in a gunny sack.
But that’s what Clive and I did, we just carried our guitars in our gunny sacks and didn’t look back and, like Robert Johnson, pursued our future down a railroad track. Nowadays there are so many roads, so many trains to ride, and the old maps and timetables no longer work. Nowadays, the one true path is prescribed, by American psychiatric gurus and middle class women who spent a weekend with some dodgy Red Indian. The future is mapped out, the past is explained in terms of oppression and abuse, and lack, and a sort of negation. Re-collections and re-memories are re-created in the fucked up selves of the present and sent like steel tipped shafts of guilt to re-inhabit and re-make a sort of sense of the past that can then re-define who we are today. We’re big on blame and guilt and re-crimination, so much so that the past becomes no longer a different country but an entirely different multiverse that is continually changing due to the needs of the present, like the holo-deck in Star Trek manipulated by Americans in space. Not only do these Americans want to dictate the popular culture of the world, they also want to colonise our minds. It’s an invasion of the mind snatchers through words, through literature, through self-help, in which the insane help the oppressed to sort out the problems created by the insane in the first place. It’s an insane asylum populated by the sophisticated of the world while the rest of the world can go to hell and not even have enough clean water to drink.
The signs have changed and it seems as though we all need some kind of professional help to follow the new ones. Like Tonto in The Lone Ranger, we used to be able to read the signs, in a world which was black and white. Now our world is in blazing technicolor complete with special effects, and that which once seemed simple has become ‘problematic’. Today’s Space Ranger is no longer able to read the signs and is propelled through a cold and uncaring universe inhabited by the phantoms of his deepest nightmares. This space is of the deepest Freudian complexity and no longer of an Indian simplicity. Tonto’s Expanding Head Band now plays all the tunes and the drummers and chanters have turned to dust.
Anyway, I was 14 and Clive and I went to the Cavern. Inside, the heat, the sweat condensing straight on to painted brick walls that then perspired just like everyone else. I think the Escorts were playing - the same songs every other band played - Fortune Teller, Walkin’ The Dog, Dizzy Miss Lizzy, Money, My Babe, Roadrunner - it was teenage heaven and as hot as hell, listening to this far-away American music written by a load of black guys who we had never heard of. But it didn’t matter then, any mop-topped scally with a cheap leccy guitar could learn them, form a band and play them - and it seemed the entire male teenage populaion of Liverpool had done just that. It seemed that thousands of lads had suddenly emerged from their teenage bedrooms and formed bands with other starry eyed dreamers - they just bloody did it, no fuss, no big deal, no music industry hype. They were ahead of the hype. As in San Francisco a few years later, the music industry’s big guns came to them, begged them to sign for their labels, labels that were going nowhere and which, unlike nowadays, needed something more than just the name of the bloody label to make their fortunes.
Anyway, I was 14 and Clive and I went to the Cavern - unselfconsciously, the whole innocent beauty of being that age. An unselfconsciousness that never questioned the hows and whys of life, just the moments of the very essence of living itself. And the Cavern was exactly the place where one such moment happened. Immersed in the uncomplicated slipstream of teenage existence, I heard for the first time the brand newly released ‘You Really Got Me’ by the Kinks. This was it, a defining moment as you can call it in later life although I certainly didn’t then. A spaceship from the planet Rock ‘n’ Roll had just touched down and I was instantly abducted. Hours of listening to Radio Luxembourg beneath crusty bed sheets had led me to this sublime moment of epiphany. Hours spent listening to an American Top Ten populated by the weird and the wonderful, by ‘The Monster Mash’ by Bobby Pickett and the Cryptkickers, by surfing birds and wipeouts and pipelines and dead man’s curves and Ronnettes and Crystals and Horace Batchelor from Keynsham, Bristol. All this suddenly made a huger kind of sense. Watching live groups smashing out sweet and sweaty versions of the American Dream was brilliant enough, but how much more brilliant to hear the Kinks doing the same in English. We were dancing in English and the world would never be the same again.
I guess you couldn’t tell me the first English group to have a number 1 hit in America. It was the Tornados, blowing away the dross with the almost perfect ‘Telstar’, written and produced by Joe Meek. Joe Meek, the first real record producer, made great sounds in his front room on equipment that had no right to produce great sounds. He created beauty from the banal, from old valves and bits of domestic appliances. Hearing ‘Telstar’ on Radio Luxembourg probably stopped me in mid wank, and changed my life forever. ‘Telstar’ is the only record that remains a constant in my ever changing choice of records for when I make my appearance on Desert Island Discs. It is the one fixed point of reference in a constantly changing constellation of music that I have heard and loved since. Joe Meek blew his brains out. Rock ‘n’ Roll, heh! But for a short while the Meek truly inherited the Earth!
The thing is, music still blows my brains out. After all these years I can hear stuff that makes me cry out in approval. Robert Johnson didn’t love in vain, didn’t live in vain, didn’t die in vain and the joint has never stopped rocking ever since, the beat goes on and so it goes..... on and on, same as it ever was.