For now, I have started writing something and it needs a home - this is it.
CoveFM is still going strong and a fellow volunteer there, much younger than my nearly 60 years, has been asking questions about my "musical history" as a record collector and fan. I wrote this as the first part of the answer as a private message to him on http://www.rateyourmusic.com/ but thought I should offer it to a "wider", more permanent audience.
Musical Time-line Chapter One: The Steel Needle Years
Summer 1956.
I've just turned four years old. My father has gone to a conference and my mother has taken me to stay with her parents in Clapham, London SW8.
On a Saturday afternoon, I am left with my grandfather (Gramps) while the ladies go shopping.
He goes to the attic and gets an old gramophone (phonograph) that my uncle had left behind when he got married about 6 years earlier. It's a table-top HMV model with the painting of the famous "His Master's Voice" dog "Nipper" listening to an external horn gramophone. There is a box of 100 steel needles and three 78rpm records. They are:-
The Darktown Poker Club / The Possum Song by Phil Harris.
Woodman Spare That Tree / The Preacher and the Bear - Phil Harris and
In the Mood / At the Woodchoppers' Ball - Joe Loss & His Orchestra.
I still have all three 56 years later.
Gramps shows me how to wind up the machine, change the needle, put the record on the turntable, start the clockwork motor and put the needle on the record.
I watch and listen, captivated, to all six sides. Life is changed, permanently.
The Phil Harris sides are all novelty songs from 1946/7, only about 10 years old at the time. One is about a man being cheated at cards; one is about a man trying to stop a woodman from cutting down the only tree his wife can't climb, his hiding place; one about a man trying to catch the possum that's been eating his chickens and one about a preacher who gets cornered by a bear while hunting and tries to escape by prayer. While many the of the (very American) lyrics were beyond my 4 year old English comprehension (Henry, if you'll break the seal on that new deck o' Bicycles, we'll go on from there, Yeah - yeah yeah yeah), I got the gist of the stories and quickly memorized them.
The Joe Loss record was of two English covers of American big band classics from 1939/40. They are almost note-for-note reproductions of the Glenn Miller and Woody Herman originals though, of course, I wouldn't know that for several years yet. Being instrumentals, I couldn't learn the lyrics but I could hum, sing and screech my way through all the parts (and still can, though an octave or two lower).
Gramps had created a monster! My parents and I always visited there on Saturdays and the gramophone HAD to come out and I wanted no part of any other activity.
This was the time in the UK when "early adopters" were switching to 45's and 33s, with the electric record players and sapphire or diamond styli that went with them. As a result, people were getting rid of 78s and gramophones. It wasn't long before Gramps had brought home a pile of 78s, maybe 30 or 40, that he got from a co-worker. I had more songs to learn - everything from Guy Mitchell's "She Wore Red Feathers" which was still almost new, back to "Come Into the Garden, Maud" from the early 20s, before the invention of the microphone.
You might say I was an indiscriminate listener. If it went round on the turntable and made a sound, I'd play it. I quickly developed favourites, though. The original three were always (and remain) popular, especially "The Possum Song" and "Woodchoppers' Ball". "Little Red Monkey" / Roundabouts and Swings" by Frank Chacksfield - another UK band leader, was a particular hit too.
I think it was early 1957 - definitely before June - that Gramps came home from work one Saturday with another gramophone. A portable Parlophone model with mock-alligator exterior. Magically, the winding handle screwed out and could be attached to clips inside the lid so it didn't stick out when the machine was carried. You could fit a dozen or so records inside the lid too - though it was a bit heavy for me like that.
"THIS one", Gramps told me, "you can take home with you. Take some of the records too, but leave a few here for Saturdays".
Of course, I did.
There was a popular singer in England at the time called Michael Holliday. He has been described since as an English Perry Como; a very laid back baritone voice, all woolly jumpers and niceness, although he did do some up tempo songs which, while not exactly rock 'n' roll, did at least acknowledge its existence. One such was "The Story of My Life", a cover of the US hit by Marty Robbins (although, again, it was years before I knew that) which I still think trumps the original.
In Arding & Hobbs department store at Clapham Junction one Saturday, we (Mum and I) went into the records department. I'd never seen such a thing. Being still not yet five, it hadn't occurred to me that these wonderful things came from SHOPS and could be bought NEW!!! They were old, by definition, and came from the sheet metal works where Gramps worked. Everybody knew that!
We (well, Mum) bought (WHAT a concept, still amazes me) the new Michael Holliday record and we took it home and played it. It was less scratchy than I was used to, but I could tolerate that because this was special, this was somebody I'd seen on TV singing this very song only last week! How did they DO that?
The old 78s kept on coming. By the time of my 5th birthday (June 1957) I had probably 100. There was a boy next door now, Clifford, and we had become friends. He had a gramophone too and we used to spend much of our indoor free time playing them.
His first NEW record had been his own choice and it blew me away. The Everly Brothers "Wake Up Little Suzie / Claudette. A rock 'n' roll classic.
Mostly, though, we liked skiffle. It was all the rage in 1957 and Lonnie Donegan was the KING. He was on TV quite a lot and his new record in mid '57 was a double "A" side - groundbreaking at the time - of "Putting on the Style / Gamblin' Man. On June 2nd. 1957, my Mum and I went next door to the Bawdens and Mrs. Bawden (Carol, as I came to know her years later) gave me a birthday present - that record, shiny and new in its perfect "Pye-Nixa" sleeve. I've still got it, and the Michael Holliday and the Frank Chacksfield, though a good many others have perished own the decades.
Over the next eighteen months, I got more old 78s, plus some more new ones, by Lonnie Donegan, Tommy Steele (at that time an English Rock 'n' Roller but later a big name in stage musicals like "Half a Sixpence"), Harry Belafonte, Johnny Duncan an the Bluegrass Boys (a skiffle standard called "Last Train to San Fernando) and maybe a few more.
Some time late in 1957, my father bought a record too, one of only two occasions I recall. He had been raised in Italy and when an Italian called Marino Marini and his Quartet had a UK hit with "Volare", sung in Italian, Dad had to have it. Of course, I learnt it off by heart, parrot fashion, no clue what I was saying. The "B" side too, "Come Prima". I'd just started school at that time and when the teacher said we were going to have a "concert" where anybody in the class could sing a song, tell a joke, recite a poem - anything, I got up and sang "Volare" full pelt, no holds barred, in parrot-Italian. It should have been horrible but it must have sounded OK on some level - the singing or the fake Italian, I doubt it could be both, because, Mrs. Davies proceeded to send me round the whole school, to all six other classrooms, with a note to the teachers who promptly stopped what they were doing and told their classes that "David, from Class "C", is going to sing for us"
"Oh, all right then" said I the first time, and launched into "Volare" again.
Seven times in an afternoon, in front of seven teachers, six of whom I didn't know, and about 220 kids, ages 5 to 11.
I've never had stage fright since.
I got my love of syncopated rhythms from skiffle and the early big band tunes; Imaginative, novel and story-like lyrics from Phil Harris, guitar sounds from Lonnie Donegan and Tommy Steele.
At Christmas 1958, I was finally made certain that Father Christmas (aka Santa Claus) was made up, not real, sure as sure can be. This was because Uncle Teddy, a family friend who worked for Decca, had MADE my Christmas present. A Record Player - or "electric gramophone" as I called it, and the Steel needle years were over.
So a new era begins
No comments:
Post a Comment