The chronology gets a bit mixed at this stage - lots of different things overlapping. I hope it makes some sort of sense.
I suppose, if I`m honest, I was never really a typical anything. I'm not one of those who deliberately goes out of his way to be different, but my major interests are seldom completely mainstream. In music, I have always disliked the tendency to classify things, to pidgeon-hole them. I referred in Part 3 to the attitude in the UK in the mid-60s that there were, at most, three kinds of music; classical, pop and jazz - and even then, sometimes the lines got blurry.
I only started to have a problem with this as the sixties whizzed, tripped and span their psychedelic, hippy way towards the 70s. Most of my contemporaries picked up genres like "folk" or "rock" while I liked bits of all but clung firmly to the original wider definition of "pop" for the rest of the decade - in fact, truth be told, I still do.
I have long maintained that what Americans know as "The British Invasion" HAD to be just that; an invasion. They could not have come up with it themselves because to get played on US radio, even then, you had to fit the format of one set of stations; Popular, Country, Blues, "Race" etc. Sound different and nobody plays you. We had the BBC, Luxembourg and the pirates and they all played everything. Doesn't matter how different it is - in fact it helps if it is. If we think people will like it, we'll play it.
So, for the first couple of years, 1964-5, it really was an invasion, with no defences. The Beach Boys, perhaps, were the exception, but that's about it. Motown, Stax, Chess and the rest just kept on being Motown, Stax and Chess and waited for things to get back to normal; which of course, they never did. No alternative. When new American groups did start to appear, it was because they had formed in order to imitate a new genre that had been created elsewhere, just as Cliff Richard and his contemporaries, following the tradition of Joe Loss and HIS contemporaries, had done in the UK in decades previous.
The early ones, like Gary Lewis & The Playboys, were just copying - and often covering - what they heard from across the pond. Only when some more creative types like The Turtles, The Loving Spoonful and Simon & Garfunkel broke through did they start to contribute and steer things in a more American direction. If I'm honest, though, even later, when people around me started to take an interest in the likes of The Byrds and The Doors, I found most of them derivative und uninteresting.
Enough of all that ponticication, this is a dyary, dammit. Let's have a word or 300 about the Beach Boys. After the UK success of "I Get Around", they had had little luck with "When I Grow Up", though I liked it and had it on my tape, then rather more with "Barbara Ann" which, until I came to understand the story of the "Party" album much later, I always thought an odd choice. Around the time I was due to buy another album, they had the double "A" side, "Sloop John B / God Only Knows" on the UK Top 10. I had taped both sides at different times but knew nothing of "Pet Sounds", Brian Wilson's troubles, or any of that. Browsing in Mrs. Thorpe's shop one day in 1966, I came across, not "Pet Sounds" but "Best Of the Beach Boys", at a good price. Seeing that it had the two recent hits and "I Get Around", I bought it. I knew nothing of surfing or drag racing. As far as I knew till that day, the Beach Boys had been new at "I Get Around". This album was a revelation. From "Surfin' Safari" to "Good Vibrations" in half an hour, calling at "Fun Fun Fun" and all stops between.
I said in Chapter 1 that Phil Harris had captured my attention despite, or perhaps partly because of, the inpenetrability of his lyrics. It happened again here, for the first time since. I knew the term "T-Bird" from my dabblings with toy cars but what on earth is a "Dooscoop", a "Surfin' Safari", a "woodie"? It even took me a while to work out that a "Lie- brerry" was a library - which we pronounce "Lie-bree". I was hooked - mostly by the harmonies, but also by the strange world of which they sang.
I turned 14 about this time and had started to earn a little money. I would help out in the shop where my mother worked and do the odd paper round for it when somebody got sick or quit. I sold primitive lottery tickets door to door for Tooting & Mitcham United Football Club (Come on you Striiiipes!) and sold programmes at their ground on match days. As I said in the last chapter, I also began to lose interest in the tape recorder. I continued to make tapes of other people's records for some time but the collector gene kicked in and I wanted to own the records. I also discovered that I could get "ex-jukebox" records easily and very cheaply in a local shop and filled in a lot of gaps with them.
I became something of a Beach Boys nut. I found a copy of "Surfin' USA" at Mrs. Thorpe's and bought "Pet Sounds" to make THREE albums. Someone at school was selling off records to buy a bike and I got a stereo (my first, though I still had Teddy's original mono player so wouldn't it in stereo till 1972!) copy of "Shut Down Volume II" from him. I bought "Smiley Smile" when it came out and was hugely disappointed with all except the two singles, "Good Vibrations" and "Heroes And Villains". Faith in them was restored with "Wild Honey" and by early 1969, I had NINE Beach Boys albums, in a total collection of probably no more than 30, including a very rare "Surfin' Safari" and a german import stereo copy of "Surfer Girl".
I kept up with The Beatles too - all the singles from "I Feel Fine" onwards and albums from "Rubber Soul" I filled in the rest later and replaced the whole lot with the "Collection" box sets of albums and singles in the 70s. From late 1967 to mid-1969, I was also known as "THE EGG MAN". I delivered "Quinney's Fresh Farm Eggs", on a bike, for about eight hours every weekend and did very well on commission. So the records poured in.
Things were changing fast. As the Beatles and Beach Boys went, so followed just about everybody else. Many of the established groups fell by the waysdide. I was still a fan of the Hollies and Kinks, became a fan of the Small Faces, but bought only singles of all of them. All three seemed to be doing their OWN thing, as valid as anything the Beatles were doing, just different. Most others who tried to follow SOUNDED as if they were following. I lost interest in the Stones, buying only the occasional single.after the excellent "Ruby Tuesday". I maintained an interest in the more poppy side too, buying singles by the Tremeloes, Dave Clark Five and even Herman's Hermits as late as 1969.
I liked the new sounds of sitars, phasing, fuzzed and distorted guitars (in moderation, I was never a Hendrix fan) but only when used cleverly. George Harrison is credited with bringing the sitar into western pop and I approved. When Traffic used it in "Hole In My Shoe" I thought (and still think) it was wonderful. Too many others, though, seemed to add it just to be "cool" and, consequently, failed.
My left-over interest, after the "big two" went mostly to new names. The Monkees were probably the first of these, late in '66, and I cared not a hoot when the whole "but they don't play their instruments" scandal broke; I liked the music and the TV show and that's what they were all about. I was, by now, savvy enough to have recognised that they were not playing live on the TV show anyway. But hot on their heels came The Equals and The Move. I liked the early singles of both but really took notice after seeing them live. My exposure to live performances previously had been limited and disappointing. I had seen The Animals at Mitcham Carnival in 1964 - presumably booked before they were famous - and was not impressed with the sound at all, it was horrible. I'd seen and heard a few groups, mostly unknown, at Streatham Ice Rink, where I misspent much of the late 60s, and been similarly underwhelmed. Then The Equals came to the Ice Rink. They sounded good - just like the records. This was more down to their engineer than the band, I'm sure, but at the time I thought "Wow these guys are good". The music was very simple pop stuff, "Baby Come Back", their biggest hit, "Softly Softly", "Hold Me Closer", "Michael and the Slipper Tree", loud, bassy and basic. But the POWER, the delivery! Even playing in front of a crowd of skaters and in horrible accoustics, Eddie Grant, the leader who would become much more famous under his own name a dozen years later, performed superbly. I was impressed.
Then, a friend and I "won" (they were just giving them away really) tickets to the "Carl Allen Awards" at the Lyceum Ballroom, Leicester Square, a now defunct event sponsored by Mecca Leisure who also ran the ice rink. We went, of course, and most of the acts on the bill were well known but, to me, forgettable. I remember P.P Arnold was there, a Motown group that I didn't know from all the other Motown groups (never liked Motown) and The Move!. Magnificent.
I already had ex-juke box copies of their "Night Of Fear" and "I Can Hear The Grass Grow" and now bought "Flowers In the Rain", one of the best of the "new sounds" records to date. It coincided with the end of pirate radio. I had not listened to these stations very much simply because the poor reception we got in Mitcham ruined my attempts at home taping but I favoured Radio London (BIG L 266) over the bigger, more famous Radio Caroline. When they were closed down by "The Man" in August 1967, I was at Mitcham Fair - a travelling amusement park that came every Summer - where all the radios were tuned to "Big L". They closed with the Number One song - "Flowers In the Rain", just as the BBC's new "replacement for the pirates", Radio One, started with it a little later.
As happens occasionally, it was the "B" side of that record that sent me out for the LP. I always played "B" sides at least once and have found many favourites amongst them, two in particular in 1967. The Move's "Lemon Tree", from "Flowers In the Rain" and "Act Nice and Gentle", on the back of the Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset"
The Move's LP, just called "MOVE" was the weirdest thing I had heard to date, but I loved it, and still do. Almost all the lyrics are at least partially obscure, but only partially. A song about walking on water, one about being in an asylum, one about a dream (well, maybe they're all about dreams), one about a crazy neighbour running round a lemon tree in a silver bikini, and so on. It wasn't "Plasticine porters with looking-glass ties", but it was a long way from "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah" as well.
What Douglas Adams later called the "Fundamental interconnectedness of all things" slapped me in the face about now. I deliberately avoided talking about Sergeant Pepper until this point. When it came out in mid-67, it was a first for me in many ways. To everyone, it was the first album to have the lyrics printed on the sleeve. Wow!
It was also my first gatefold sleeve. Wow! It was also the first time I'd bought an album on the day of release so, not only unheard, but unseen too. Wow! I was marvelling at the sleeve before I had even walked the two minutes home from Mrs. Thorpe`s. Taking the record out of the sleeve, there are no track gaps.....huh? What? I'd only ever seen that on an LP once before; on my "Flintstones" album. Surely, there can't be only one song on each side? No, wait a minute, I've read the back of the sleeve, there are the words to at least a dozen songs there, What the????.
OK, play it, stupid. I did. I sat on the little bed in that spare room, listening and following along on the sleeve. It just sort of flows! Wow! One song runs into the next, but they're all so different! And when it was over, it didn't stop; it just kept repeating about two seconds of......of what? What IS that? What are they SAYING? I played it right through again, and probably again. Before long - can't remember, but no more than a couple of weeks - I'd memorized the whole thing. I really cannot express what a huge leap this was. Music had changed so much already in my roughly ten years of paying attention but now, with one record, there was another whole world opening up and, for the second time, out of three, it was the Beatles who had opened it.
Even to me, whose first five years following new music had taken me from "Putting On the Style" to "Please Please Me" and whose next five were just ending, this was radical. It's hard to imagine today. Think back ten years and describe what has changed in music since 2002. OK, I'm waiting..... Anybody? Mmmm Thought so.
Allow me to demonstrate. On the left, here are some of the UK Top 20 singles in July 1967. On the right, roughly equivalent place holders in July 1957.
A Whiter Shade of Pale - Procol Harum All Shook Up - Elvis Presley
Alternate Title (aka Randy Scouse Git) - The Monkees Putting On the Style - Lonnie Donegan
She'd Rather Be With Me - The Turtles Little Darlin' - The Diamonds
All You Need Is Love - The Beatles We Will Make Love - Russ Hamilton
Carrie-Anne - The Hollies Around the World - Ronnie Hilton
See Emily Play - Pink Floyd Yes Tonight Josephine - Johnnie Ray
San Francisco - Scott McKenzie A White Sport Coat - The King Brothers
Paper Sun - Traffic When I Fall in Love - Nat "King" Cole"
Okay! - Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich Around the World - Bing Crosby
Here Comes the Nice - Small Faces Butterfingers - Tommy Steele
And dammit, Petula Clark (Part II) doesn't want us to sleep in the subway. Mr. Wonderful - Peggy Lee
Thanks for spoiling my point, Pet.
From Johnnie Ray to Pink Floyd, in just 10 years - well, OK, Except for Petula Clark (Part II). And then comes Sergeant Pepper. I was asked a short while ago - you getting this Sam? - whether I thought at the time that the rapid change would continue and whether I had any idea where things would go next. I struggled to answer at the time but now, having written all this, it's crystal clear. YES, of course the change would go on. it always had (not true, but it seemed that way to me) and it always would. Did I think I knew where it was going? NO. No more than I could have predicted "See Emily Play" from hearing "Yes Tonight Josephine". Impossible. Young though I still was, I realised that, I'm sure.
The Whirlwind in the title of this chapter did not start that day - it was already well under way - but it reached full force at this point and being a music fan became infinitely more complicated. Over the three years that the sixties had yet to run, we got a host of new styles, schisms, fads and words.
First, I think, came the split between "pop groups" and "rock bands". In essence, the division had been around since the days of deciding between the Beatles and Stones but now it took on new meaning. This derived not only from the rapid changes in the music but also because it now had two distinct audiences, with a large grey area in the middle in which I found myself.
The original late-teenagers who had bought "Please Please Me" in 1963 were now in their early twenties, either students or working. They had grown and developed with the best of their teenage heroes and were moving into the new world of albums, shunning singles, looking for meaning (often by over-interpreting the deliberately nonce words of the John Lennons and Van Dyke Parks's of the world). Like the jazz-heads of a generation before, they wanted to go deep - or in some cases, at least appear to. The American artists had now caught up and some of the best were starting to lead again. They were getting back into protest, political awareness, peace and the rest. In the US and UK, they also rediscovered blues - again - only louder, heavier and longer. In the late sixtues, my classmates were playing Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, Fairport Convention, the seemingly bullet-proof but still off-key lyrical genius Bob Dylan, The Who, Yes, and dozens of other names ignored by folks only two or three years their junior. All this, with a few exceptions, was mostly bought on LPs. Led Zeppelin never even released singles AT ALL - unthinkable in 1969.
But the world was still making new teenagers. They were no different fom earlier versions except that they now had the Merseybeat as their ancient history instead of Lonnie Donegan, Cliff Richard or Glenn Miller. The more progressive of the old groups weren't playing to them any more - and the ones that tried were too old for them to relate to anyway. Something new was needed for them but what with independent labels and producers and an ever more diverse field of inspiration to draw on, there was little chance of consensus.
Those younger kids had their own styles and favourites but they, too, were splintering. The "skinheads" emerged around this time and oddly, granted the direction their successors later took, adopted Jamaican Reggae as their own. Some others adopted.Motown, Soul and other American pop forms which now had a resurgence. Some picked up the lighter side of the new "rock" with bands like CCR. Yet others, the more dance oriented, took to what became known as "bubblegum" - disposable pop singles by a huge array of one-hit-wonders and others who are rarely more than footnotes in musical history today.
In three years we got the terms Rock, Progressive, Teeny-bopper, Bubblegum, Reggae, Blue Beat, Ska, Concept Album, Rock Opera, and more, I'm sure, that don't spring to mind. I've just picked a month fom that period at random (May 1969) and done a quick analysis of the best selling singles in the UK. Here goes:-
UK groups from at least three years earlier - 4 (Beatles, Herman's Hermits, The Who, Manfred Mann)
Newer UK groups - 1 (Fleetwood Mac, the instrumental "Albatross")
Motown or Soul - 4 (Junior Walker, Isley Bros., Diana Ross & The Supremes, Bob & Earl)
Jamaican - 2 (Desmond Dekker, Johnny Nash)
"Old school" UK solo singers - 4 (Mary Hopkin, Clodagh Rogers, Tom Jones, Noel Harrison)
"Old school" US singers - 3 (Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Tommy Roe)
plus Simon & Garfunkel and the 5th, Dimension ("The Boxer" and "Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In" respectively).
The "Old School" artists had always sold well in the UK, to our Mums and Dads, but only ever appeared in numbers in the Top 20 when there was no "big thing" going on - when younger fans were divided or disinterested.
I continued to follow the Beatles and Beach Boys, through albums and singles, where different. I bought mostly singles of other favourites, even Jethro Tull and The Who, but absorbed a lot of the other styles, either from school, other friends or the ice rink. I would come back to much of the album based material much later but found it pretentious at the time..Much of it lacked the vocal harmony and the sense of fun which had always been what drew me in.
Late in 1967, a school friend who was an electonics whiz started a little side business building record players and radios to order for his classmates, I was one of his first customers and he made me a replacement for my now tired and tempramental old machine. The two big enhancements I wanted were an autochanger and a headphone jack. He lived some way away, in Ewell, and I had to take a train there one Sunday to collect it - and have "tea" with his family, then, very gingerly, take it home on the train. It was flashy by comparison with the old one - white and sky-blue; twice the power (I now understood such things, at least vaguely, 4 watts instead of 2). I moved it and my records into my own bedroom and could now lie in bed at night with eight albums stacked on the turntable, headphones on and, in complete and utter silence apart from a "clunk" every 20 minutes or so, listen until either:-
a) I fell asleep or
b) one of the discs started to slip on the one beneath it or
c) two and a half hours or so went by..
There's a little piece of commentary that sits squarely between this chapter and the next one. It covers the few months across the end of 1968 into early 1969. I'll put it here.
In 1968, I was spending most of my spare time at the aforementioned Silver Blades Ice Rink in Streatham, London SW16. I formed a loose gaggle of informal friends there including a girl of my age whom we shall call "G". I was still at school, doing "A" levels but she, although my age, had left school to work in her grandparents' greengrocer's shop in Bermondsey, almost in Central London. Although most of my admissions to the rink - I normally went four times a week - were covered by either winning tickets for sillyness, doing odd jobs there or just being waved through because the guy on the door THOUGHT I was working, she had far more disposable income than I did (it seems it was a very good greengrocer's shop) and liked to go to concerts and, occasionally, London's famous Marquee Club, for which we were both underage. She liked to take me because I was tall and old looking and never got challenged in pubs or by the bouncers at the Marquee.
Her musical tastes.were varied and; to me, they bordered on odd. She was a huge fan of Tyrranosaurus Rex, before abbreviation and electrification; need I say more? So I got to hear and see some strange gigs in those few months and got my first real introduction to live performances. At the Marquee, over about four or five visits, we saw Blodwyn Pig, Fleetwood Mac, Yes, Brett Marvin & the Thunderbolts (about whom more next chapter) and a host of others whose names I don't recall. In concert we saw Creedence Clearwater Revival, Delaney & Bonnie & Friends featuring Eric Clapton and (separately) Ravi Shankar.
I enjoyed the Marquee more for the "derring-doo" of the whole caper than for most of the music, although it was good to see Fleetwood Mac who had already hit with "Albatross" and I really enjoyed the very messy but fun set by BM & T. The others, I'm afraid, missed me; too heavy. Of the concerts, CCR were great but the sound in our side-of-stage seats was awful; mostly bounced from the back wall of the Albert Hall. It was a huge experience to WATCH them though. Delaney and Bonnie were good but I knew only one song - "Comin' Home" and lost the plot at a certain point; too many long solos by wailing guitars again. Ravi Shankar was, for the first 15 minutes or so, highly educational and fascinating. The last 2.39 fortnights of the concert (seemed like, anyway) just left me behind.
At the ice rink itself, I saw a host of unknown groups, the only names of which I remember being "Cashbox" and "Dr. Marigold's Prescription". Occasionally, though, a "name" played there and, as a casual, general factotum employee, I was always there on those nights, whether I cared about the music or not.
I saw Amen Corner (awful! Saxes out of tune, both times they played there), The Equals (also twice, with Eddy Grant, already mentioned), Bill Haley & The Comets (yes, in 1969, part fabulous history and part sad), Status Quo ("Pictures of Matchstick Men" era, psychedelic but not the same without all the effects), Geno Washington & The Ram Jam Band (great fun), the Herd and Love Affair (both dreadful). I'm sure there were more and if I think of any, I'll add them later.
Also in 1969, two other things happened which would change my direction for all time. I started to get the hang of the cheap guitar I'd had for about three years and I joined a youth club. But those stories are for another day.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Sunday, April 1, 2012
MUSICAL TIME-LINE CHAPTER 3 - Merseybeat, Mods & Rockers
In October 1962, when the Beatles' "Love Me Do" briefly entered the UK Top 20, nobody, certainly not ten-year-old me, had any idea what it signified.
At this time distance, I'm not even sure I heard it. I would typically only hear new music by established artists who appeared on TV variety shows, big hits that made it to "6-5 Special" or "Ready Steady Go", or as a new release put before the week's panel of celebrities by David Jacobs on "Juke Box Jury".
Early in 1963, though, everything changed. The Beatles' second single. "Please Please Me" definitely crossed my bows and I'm sure the only reason I didn't buy it at first hearing was lack of funds. It sounded unlike anything before but was nonetheless instantly accessible even to my young ears. These guys were VERY cool!
Very soon, mere weeks later, it was as if somebody had opened a huge gate and, in a sense, they had. Almost instantly all those TV and radio shows were full of groups in suits with hair that we thought was long but which was, by the standards of only a few years later, positively military. Most had the standard "Shadows" line-up of three guitarists and a drummer (subtleties like lead, rhythm and bass would soon be understood, but not yet) used by the Beatles, quickly followed by Gerry & The Pacemakers, the Searchers, Kinks, Four Pennies and many others.
There were variations, though, and we, the new fans - especially the junior ones like me - took note of them all. Add a "stand-up" singer with nothing more than a tambourine, pair of maraccas or a mouth-organ and you'd get the Rolling Stones, Hollies, Brian Poole & The Tremeloes or Billy J Kramer & The Dakotas. Add a funny little organ on tubular steel legs to that and you've got the.Animals. Add a saxophone to that and you've got the Dave Clark Five - doubly odd for being a group named after the drummer but who wasn't the singer. One, the Honeycombs, had a girl member (is that even allowed?) playing drums, of all things. Another, The Applejacks, had a girl bass player.
Terms like "Merseybeat" (I don't think I'd even heard of the River Mersey previously), "Beat Boom", and the like were suddenly everywhere. I heard the term "Scouse" meaning the suddenly fashionable Liverpool accent, for the first time - and the accent itself. Even a manager, Brian Epstein, became famous, along with his version of the story of his "discovery" of the Beatles (hiding under a pile of fans in the Cavern Club, I presume). Magazines like "Merseybeat", ``Teen Beat" and more joined the choices at the local newsagent - and one called simply "The Beatles". It was all suddenly about Liverpool, guitars, hair (now pronounced "'er") and "the beat"
Suddenly too, and seemingly from nowhere, came a new gaggle of girl singers. We'd had the Helen Shapiros and the Susan Maughans before and this was essentially not very different except these girls were somehow supposed to be part of everything else that was going on - I didn't get it. OK, so Cilla Black had been the coat-check girl at the Cavern Club and had a "Scouse" accent better than three of the Beatles! (George being the exception). But her first big hit, and all the others that I can remember, had no guitars but an ORCHESTRA playing! Whaddya think this is? 1962? No, it's 1963, get with it.
Dusty Springfield had been in The Springfields until shortly before. That was a folky sort of three piece group with her brother Tom. I knew and tolerated her but still, she wasn't a group. And Petula Clark's back? Isn't she supposed to be in France or somewhere? And she's on this program with the Rolling Stones? You can't do that, it'll destroy them. Contamination was dangerous. The only one of these girls I liked was Lulu. She belted, rocked and screamed her way through "Shout" so fast and loud you just HAD to like her, but the rest, uncool.
A word about words. These were "groups" not "bands". "Bands", until much later in the decade, were either jazz (meaning New Orleans jazz, known in the UK as "Trad") bands, "big" bands (meaning swing and/or dance bands left over from the 40s) or marching bands. "Rock", on its own was never used. Rock 'n' Roll meant the 50s kind ONLY. This music was POP. That's it, just POP. Whether it was really pop in the modern, American radio, sense of the word, or blues, ska (The Migil Five's "Mocking Bird Hill`` surely was), a ballad, country song - no matter. If it's not classical (and to some, if it's not jazz) it's POP.
Soon, of course, just like with football, it became necessary to pick sides. It was OK to like any group at this early stage, even Freddie & The Dreamers, though not for long, but you HAD to choose a favourite between the Beatles and the Stones. I don't know why. Some playground bully somewhere wrote down the rule and there it was, I suppose. I was Beatles, when forced to choose, but really, back then, it was pretty close.
Parents, and adults in general, had no such difficulty. Generally, they all thought all the music was too loud, even when played very quietly. What they MEANT was they could hear the drums and (given state of the art reproduction and/or Bill Wyman) bass. My father once conceded that the Beatles "had a few nice tunes" but thought the Stones were "a disgrace". My mother, while more tolerant generally, could not look - I mean really COULD NOT LOOK - at Mick Jagger singing - "Ugh, those LIPS!!!".
The ones we went off very quickly - Freddie & The Dreamers, The Four Pennies, The Searchers, tended to be the more acceptable ones to adults and the fragmenting of "pop music" started to accelerate, but more of that in later chapters. At this stage, the big divide became between the "Mods" and "Rockers"
This was serious stuff - headline news, not entertainment news. Huge riots and fights in coastal resorts all over the country fought by gangs - one on Italian scooters the other on British motor-bikes. They disagreed about everything except how important it was to fight each other and where they should do it. In music, the Rockers were what the name suggests. Their heroes were Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, even Bill Haley. Their music, and many of its top exponents, had either died, been conscripted, been disgraced or had just plain disappeared - their music was old, but still cool and often covered by the new groups. The Mods, on the other hand, and again, as the name suggests, wanted the modern music. Instead of leathers, they wanted costumery and they inadvertantly started the move towards the seriously odd fashions of the latter part of the decade. Their heroes - in London anyway - were The Who, the Kinks, The Small Faces.
Apart from the "playground" decisions, this was all just a sideshow to me. Turning 11 in June of 1963, I still knew little of the 50s Rock 'n' Roll, except for a few singles I had. I was firmly with the new groups but in no way felt I was embracing "Mod Culture". My record purchases that year included The Beatles' next two singles "From Me To You" and "She Loves You", plus the "Twist And Shout" EP, (culled from the "Please Please Me" LP). The Rolling Stones' "I Wanna Be Your Man" and "Not Fade Away", The Hollies' "Stay" and, still a contender for favourite single of all time, though an odd fit here, The Ran-Dells' "Martian Hop". This last perhaps speaks to my youth at the time but it was not a hit - just something I heard and asked Mrs.Thorpe for. I still maintain it's an overlooked classic and, having copied onto a CD years ago, still play it often.
Unlike at any time in my, still short, experience, my favourite music was being made by people who regularly appeared in mainstream media. We learned about their lives - especially the Beatles. Everybody, yes, EVERYBODY knew the names John, Paul, George and Ringo. Most knew which was which without too much study of a photo. We even knew Ringo's real name. In contrast, it was years before I knew that "Lonnie" was a name that Anthony Donegan had borrowed from Lonnie Johnson. We began to realise that the beat phenomenon was not just from Liverpool. There were big name groups right here in London - The Rolling Stones and The Kinks being the two biggest of the early ones. The Hollies were from Manchester - same place as the, already three year old, Coronation Street (how does THAT work?).
At Christmas, I was given The Beatles' second LP, "With The Beatles", my first real pop album, and played it till I knew every note. It was actually the fourth LP I had. After "Olde Englyshe" (see Chapter 2), I had used birthday money the previous year to triple my 33rpm holdings. The choices are evidence that I was still an indiscriminate listener but I still have both additions and they have proven well worth the expense. "Pye" records had a budget label called "Golden Guinea" - a guinea being an obscure and obsolete monetary unit still in use at that time by bespoke tailors, horse dealers and antique shops. It was 21 shillings, or one pound, and one shilling, commonly written as " 21/- ". "Golden Guinea" albums, and there were hundreds, sold for 21 shillings - on sale for only 19/- the day I went, instead of more like 2 pounds (40 shillings) for regular releases. Having gone flush with birthday money and determined to buy records with it, I bought two that Mrs. Thorpe happened to have in the shop.
One was "Top TV Themes", a surprisingly listenable album featuring the theme tunes of popular TV shows of the time, domestic and American. "Steptoe & Son", which the Americans later cloned to make "Stamford & Son" had a theme tune called "Old Ned" by Ron Grainer - who also did the original "Doctor Who" theme. That was the one that sold me the LP but also "Maigret", "The Saint", "Dr. Kildare", "Z Cars", "Dr' Finlay's Casebook", "Perry Mason" and "Hancock's Tune", from "Hancock's Half Hour" were favourite shows and I knew I liked the theme music. Writing this now, in 2012, I am inspired to hear it. Wait a sec, I'll put it on...... Good. Z Cars!
I played it rigtht through and it's pure golden nostalgia.
The other bizarre but unregretted choice was "The Flintstones" - yes, Fred and Barney. The series had started on UK TV a year or so earlier and I was a fan. Here, on this album, were the soundtracks, complete, of the first two episodes; "The Snorkasaurus", about how they got their pet "Dino" while supposedly on a hunting trip and "The Big Bank Robbery". I haven't made a scientific analysis but I think only Monty Python and the Hitch-Hiker`s Guide To The Galaxy have provided me with more quotable quotes down the years.
As 1963 and 1964 cruised along, the only thing that stopped me from filling my bedroom with records was a chronic cash shortage; it certainly wasn't for lack of choice . A friend (who will probably read this at some point - Hi Ro) had an older sister who had left school and was working. She was consequently unbelievably wealthy in our eyes and bought quite a few records, mostly the same ones we would have bought given the means. She let us play them (I THINK she knew we did) and that filled in many gaps. It was from her pile of singles that I first heard the Beach Boys. She had the "I Get Around / Don't Worry Baby" single and I thought, even then, that this was VERY special though it would be a couple of years yet before I could call myself a fan. She also occasionally bought LP's. "A Hard Day's Night" is the first I remember.
My solution to the poverty induced shortage of new records came by inspiration from another friend. His father had a tape recorder and lots of music on tape.. The problem was we liked very little of the actual music he chose to record, but what a CONCEPT!!
I forget the details but I worked out a plan with my father who understood and approved of the plan but was anxious to stop me from buying some cheap thing that wouldn't do the job and, around October 1964, I bought a "Shaftesbury" reel-to-reel tape recorder for (I think) about 10 Pounds.
By this time, I had moved my record player, records, DC comics, Corgi cars, everything I owned, into the tiny spare bedroom in our house. My father had also acquired a new radio to replace the old valve affair that Teddy (see Chapter 2) had made for him some years before. The old one now came upstairs with me too.
Every Sunday sfternoon, Alan Freeman, one of the BBC's big name music presenters (they weren't calling them DJs yet) had a show called "Pick Of the Pops" for two hours. He would play a selection of new releases for the week, a couple of other segments I can't recall and then, in the second hour, the entire Top 20, countdown style. It's old hat now, of course, but new to me then and a goldmine when you have a tape recorder.
I could get masses of music on a tape. Four track mono meant I got 2400 feet of tape at 1.875 inches per seconds and used the tape FOUR TIMES over! That's about 400 songs on one tape and all A sides. That's equivalent to a pile of singles four feet high.but, because it was difficult to find particlar songs or edit the tape once recorded, I had to make sure I only recorded what I wanted to keep.
For 18 months or so, I concentrated on taping songs from the radio and built up about three tapefuls - including my friend's sister's records which, by the end, included "Meet the Monkees" and "Rubber Soul". All this recording was done by placing the machine's microphone in front of the radio or record player, finger on the "Pause" button and keeping very quiet indeed, so the quality was not great!. Such cash as I had still went on records but now I would trawl used bins again and get far more for the money.
By late 1966, I had all the obvious singles from the intervening period. The Stones, for me, peaked in those years with "19th. Nervous Breakdown", "Paint It Black" and "The Last Time", The Beatles were still getting better and cooler. Most of the "tamer" groups from 1963 had gone or at least faded but we still had the truly transformed Kinks, the much slicker Hollies, the rapidly improving Small Faces and Who.
There were also many great "one hit wonders" and short lived groups like "Hedhehoppers Anonymous", ""Pinkerton's Assorted Colours", "The Poets" and dozens more, plus artists, usually solo singers to be avoided at all costs lest they spoil the whole tape. Who? Oh all right, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Ken Dodd, Jim Reeves, Donald Piers, Cilla Black, Petula Clark (Part II), Julie Rodgers, The Bachelors, and others, but you get the idea. Occasionally, my taping would capture a new release that did not grow into a hit. I remember pushing "RECORD" on hearing the names "Simon & Garfunkel" and getting "Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine" and later being glad I had it but sad it had failed. Two oddities that I have only quite recently found on compilation CDs but, until doing so, had never heard except on my old tape were Dickey Lee's "I Saw Linda Yesterday" and Little Jimmy' Dickens' "May the Bird of Paradise Fly up Your Nose", both US hits but miscalculations on Alan Freeman's part as far as UK success went.
By late 1966, it was obvious that the music was moving into new territories and picking up new and strange influences. I was becoming unsatisfied with the tape experience and gradually started to move back to records. I still played the old tapes for many years but, strangely for me, have no idea what eventually happened to them or the player. The innocent days of the Merseybeat were over although the best of its proponents were still very much alive. At the same time, I was becoming a teenager.
At this time distance, I'm not even sure I heard it. I would typically only hear new music by established artists who appeared on TV variety shows, big hits that made it to "6-5 Special" or "Ready Steady Go", or as a new release put before the week's panel of celebrities by David Jacobs on "Juke Box Jury".
Early in 1963, though, everything changed. The Beatles' second single. "Please Please Me" definitely crossed my bows and I'm sure the only reason I didn't buy it at first hearing was lack of funds. It sounded unlike anything before but was nonetheless instantly accessible even to my young ears. These guys were VERY cool!
Very soon, mere weeks later, it was as if somebody had opened a huge gate and, in a sense, they had. Almost instantly all those TV and radio shows were full of groups in suits with hair that we thought was long but which was, by the standards of only a few years later, positively military. Most had the standard "Shadows" line-up of three guitarists and a drummer (subtleties like lead, rhythm and bass would soon be understood, but not yet) used by the Beatles, quickly followed by Gerry & The Pacemakers, the Searchers, Kinks, Four Pennies and many others.
There were variations, though, and we, the new fans - especially the junior ones like me - took note of them all. Add a "stand-up" singer with nothing more than a tambourine, pair of maraccas or a mouth-organ and you'd get the Rolling Stones, Hollies, Brian Poole & The Tremeloes or Billy J Kramer & The Dakotas. Add a funny little organ on tubular steel legs to that and you've got the.Animals. Add a saxophone to that and you've got the Dave Clark Five - doubly odd for being a group named after the drummer but who wasn't the singer. One, the Honeycombs, had a girl member (is that even allowed?) playing drums, of all things. Another, The Applejacks, had a girl bass player.
Terms like "Merseybeat" (I don't think I'd even heard of the River Mersey previously), "Beat Boom", and the like were suddenly everywhere. I heard the term "Scouse" meaning the suddenly fashionable Liverpool accent, for the first time - and the accent itself. Even a manager, Brian Epstein, became famous, along with his version of the story of his "discovery" of the Beatles (hiding under a pile of fans in the Cavern Club, I presume). Magazines like "Merseybeat", ``Teen Beat" and more joined the choices at the local newsagent - and one called simply "The Beatles". It was all suddenly about Liverpool, guitars, hair (now pronounced "'er") and "the beat"
Suddenly too, and seemingly from nowhere, came a new gaggle of girl singers. We'd had the Helen Shapiros and the Susan Maughans before and this was essentially not very different except these girls were somehow supposed to be part of everything else that was going on - I didn't get it. OK, so Cilla Black had been the coat-check girl at the Cavern Club and had a "Scouse" accent better than three of the Beatles! (George being the exception). But her first big hit, and all the others that I can remember, had no guitars but an ORCHESTRA playing! Whaddya think this is? 1962? No, it's 1963, get with it.
Dusty Springfield had been in The Springfields until shortly before. That was a folky sort of three piece group with her brother Tom. I knew and tolerated her but still, she wasn't a group. And Petula Clark's back? Isn't she supposed to be in France or somewhere? And she's on this program with the Rolling Stones? You can't do that, it'll destroy them. Contamination was dangerous. The only one of these girls I liked was Lulu. She belted, rocked and screamed her way through "Shout" so fast and loud you just HAD to like her, but the rest, uncool.
A word about words. These were "groups" not "bands". "Bands", until much later in the decade, were either jazz (meaning New Orleans jazz, known in the UK as "Trad") bands, "big" bands (meaning swing and/or dance bands left over from the 40s) or marching bands. "Rock", on its own was never used. Rock 'n' Roll meant the 50s kind ONLY. This music was POP. That's it, just POP. Whether it was really pop in the modern, American radio, sense of the word, or blues, ska (The Migil Five's "Mocking Bird Hill`` surely was), a ballad, country song - no matter. If it's not classical (and to some, if it's not jazz) it's POP.
Soon, of course, just like with football, it became necessary to pick sides. It was OK to like any group at this early stage, even Freddie & The Dreamers, though not for long, but you HAD to choose a favourite between the Beatles and the Stones. I don't know why. Some playground bully somewhere wrote down the rule and there it was, I suppose. I was Beatles, when forced to choose, but really, back then, it was pretty close.
Parents, and adults in general, had no such difficulty. Generally, they all thought all the music was too loud, even when played very quietly. What they MEANT was they could hear the drums and (given state of the art reproduction and/or Bill Wyman) bass. My father once conceded that the Beatles "had a few nice tunes" but thought the Stones were "a disgrace". My mother, while more tolerant generally, could not look - I mean really COULD NOT LOOK - at Mick Jagger singing - "Ugh, those LIPS!!!".
The ones we went off very quickly - Freddie & The Dreamers, The Four Pennies, The Searchers, tended to be the more acceptable ones to adults and the fragmenting of "pop music" started to accelerate, but more of that in later chapters. At this stage, the big divide became between the "Mods" and "Rockers"
This was serious stuff - headline news, not entertainment news. Huge riots and fights in coastal resorts all over the country fought by gangs - one on Italian scooters the other on British motor-bikes. They disagreed about everything except how important it was to fight each other and where they should do it. In music, the Rockers were what the name suggests. Their heroes were Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, even Bill Haley. Their music, and many of its top exponents, had either died, been conscripted, been disgraced or had just plain disappeared - their music was old, but still cool and often covered by the new groups. The Mods, on the other hand, and again, as the name suggests, wanted the modern music. Instead of leathers, they wanted costumery and they inadvertantly started the move towards the seriously odd fashions of the latter part of the decade. Their heroes - in London anyway - were The Who, the Kinks, The Small Faces.
Apart from the "playground" decisions, this was all just a sideshow to me. Turning 11 in June of 1963, I still knew little of the 50s Rock 'n' Roll, except for a few singles I had. I was firmly with the new groups but in no way felt I was embracing "Mod Culture". My record purchases that year included The Beatles' next two singles "From Me To You" and "She Loves You", plus the "Twist And Shout" EP, (culled from the "Please Please Me" LP). The Rolling Stones' "I Wanna Be Your Man" and "Not Fade Away", The Hollies' "Stay" and, still a contender for favourite single of all time, though an odd fit here, The Ran-Dells' "Martian Hop". This last perhaps speaks to my youth at the time but it was not a hit - just something I heard and asked Mrs.Thorpe for. I still maintain it's an overlooked classic and, having copied onto a CD years ago, still play it often.
Unlike at any time in my, still short, experience, my favourite music was being made by people who regularly appeared in mainstream media. We learned about their lives - especially the Beatles. Everybody, yes, EVERYBODY knew the names John, Paul, George and Ringo. Most knew which was which without too much study of a photo. We even knew Ringo's real name. In contrast, it was years before I knew that "Lonnie" was a name that Anthony Donegan had borrowed from Lonnie Johnson. We began to realise that the beat phenomenon was not just from Liverpool. There were big name groups right here in London - The Rolling Stones and The Kinks being the two biggest of the early ones. The Hollies were from Manchester - same place as the, already three year old, Coronation Street (how does THAT work?).
At Christmas, I was given The Beatles' second LP, "With The Beatles", my first real pop album, and played it till I knew every note. It was actually the fourth LP I had. After "Olde Englyshe" (see Chapter 2), I had used birthday money the previous year to triple my 33rpm holdings. The choices are evidence that I was still an indiscriminate listener but I still have both additions and they have proven well worth the expense. "Pye" records had a budget label called "Golden Guinea" - a guinea being an obscure and obsolete monetary unit still in use at that time by bespoke tailors, horse dealers and antique shops. It was 21 shillings, or one pound, and one shilling, commonly written as " 21/- ". "Golden Guinea" albums, and there were hundreds, sold for 21 shillings - on sale for only 19/- the day I went, instead of more like 2 pounds (40 shillings) for regular releases. Having gone flush with birthday money and determined to buy records with it, I bought two that Mrs. Thorpe happened to have in the shop.
One was "Top TV Themes", a surprisingly listenable album featuring the theme tunes of popular TV shows of the time, domestic and American. "Steptoe & Son", which the Americans later cloned to make "Stamford & Son" had a theme tune called "Old Ned" by Ron Grainer - who also did the original "Doctor Who" theme. That was the one that sold me the LP but also "Maigret", "The Saint", "Dr. Kildare", "Z Cars", "Dr' Finlay's Casebook", "Perry Mason" and "Hancock's Tune", from "Hancock's Half Hour" were favourite shows and I knew I liked the theme music. Writing this now, in 2012, I am inspired to hear it. Wait a sec, I'll put it on...... Good. Z Cars!
I played it rigtht through and it's pure golden nostalgia.
The other bizarre but unregretted choice was "The Flintstones" - yes, Fred and Barney. The series had started on UK TV a year or so earlier and I was a fan. Here, on this album, were the soundtracks, complete, of the first two episodes; "The Snorkasaurus", about how they got their pet "Dino" while supposedly on a hunting trip and "The Big Bank Robbery". I haven't made a scientific analysis but I think only Monty Python and the Hitch-Hiker`s Guide To The Galaxy have provided me with more quotable quotes down the years.
As 1963 and 1964 cruised along, the only thing that stopped me from filling my bedroom with records was a chronic cash shortage; it certainly wasn't for lack of choice . A friend (who will probably read this at some point - Hi Ro) had an older sister who had left school and was working. She was consequently unbelievably wealthy in our eyes and bought quite a few records, mostly the same ones we would have bought given the means. She let us play them (I THINK she knew we did) and that filled in many gaps. It was from her pile of singles that I first heard the Beach Boys. She had the "I Get Around / Don't Worry Baby" single and I thought, even then, that this was VERY special though it would be a couple of years yet before I could call myself a fan. She also occasionally bought LP's. "A Hard Day's Night" is the first I remember.
My solution to the poverty induced shortage of new records came by inspiration from another friend. His father had a tape recorder and lots of music on tape.. The problem was we liked very little of the actual music he chose to record, but what a CONCEPT!!
I forget the details but I worked out a plan with my father who understood and approved of the plan but was anxious to stop me from buying some cheap thing that wouldn't do the job and, around October 1964, I bought a "Shaftesbury" reel-to-reel tape recorder for (I think) about 10 Pounds.
By this time, I had moved my record player, records, DC comics, Corgi cars, everything I owned, into the tiny spare bedroom in our house. My father had also acquired a new radio to replace the old valve affair that Teddy (see Chapter 2) had made for him some years before. The old one now came upstairs with me too.
Every Sunday sfternoon, Alan Freeman, one of the BBC's big name music presenters (they weren't calling them DJs yet) had a show called "Pick Of the Pops" for two hours. He would play a selection of new releases for the week, a couple of other segments I can't recall and then, in the second hour, the entire Top 20, countdown style. It's old hat now, of course, but new to me then and a goldmine when you have a tape recorder.
I could get masses of music on a tape. Four track mono meant I got 2400 feet of tape at 1.875 inches per seconds and used the tape FOUR TIMES over! That's about 400 songs on one tape and all A sides. That's equivalent to a pile of singles four feet high.but, because it was difficult to find particlar songs or edit the tape once recorded, I had to make sure I only recorded what I wanted to keep.
For 18 months or so, I concentrated on taping songs from the radio and built up about three tapefuls - including my friend's sister's records which, by the end, included "Meet the Monkees" and "Rubber Soul". All this recording was done by placing the machine's microphone in front of the radio or record player, finger on the "Pause" button and keeping very quiet indeed, so the quality was not great!. Such cash as I had still went on records but now I would trawl used bins again and get far more for the money.
By late 1966, I had all the obvious singles from the intervening period. The Stones, for me, peaked in those years with "19th. Nervous Breakdown", "Paint It Black" and "The Last Time", The Beatles were still getting better and cooler. Most of the "tamer" groups from 1963 had gone or at least faded but we still had the truly transformed Kinks, the much slicker Hollies, the rapidly improving Small Faces and Who.
There were also many great "one hit wonders" and short lived groups like "Hedhehoppers Anonymous", ""Pinkerton's Assorted Colours", "The Poets" and dozens more, plus artists, usually solo singers to be avoided at all costs lest they spoil the whole tape. Who? Oh all right, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Ken Dodd, Jim Reeves, Donald Piers, Cilla Black, Petula Clark (Part II), Julie Rodgers, The Bachelors, and others, but you get the idea. Occasionally, my taping would capture a new release that did not grow into a hit. I remember pushing "RECORD" on hearing the names "Simon & Garfunkel" and getting "Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine" and later being glad I had it but sad it had failed. Two oddities that I have only quite recently found on compilation CDs but, until doing so, had never heard except on my old tape were Dickey Lee's "I Saw Linda Yesterday" and Little Jimmy' Dickens' "May the Bird of Paradise Fly up Your Nose", both US hits but miscalculations on Alan Freeman's part as far as UK success went.
By late 1966, it was obvious that the music was moving into new territories and picking up new and strange influences. I was becoming unsatisfied with the tape experience and gradually started to move back to records. I still played the old tapes for many years but, strangely for me, have no idea what eventually happened to them or the player. The innocent days of the Merseybeat were over although the best of its proponents were still very much alive. At the same time, I was becoming a teenager.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Musical Time-Line Chapter Two - The Inter-regnum.
Christmas 1958.
I'm six-and-a half. "Uncle Teddy" was the husband of an old friend of my mother's - "Auntie Eileen". In the way of such things, we were not related to them, it's just what I learned to call them. Uncle Teddy worked in some kind of research capacity for Decca, the electronics company which was also a record label.
He was way ahead of his time in terms of electronics. In 1953 he had had the first television I ever saw - a monstrous contraption which projected a grainy image onto a white wall - if you closed the curtains. I'm told I "saw" some of Queen Elizabeth's coronation that way, but it was on my first birthday and I slept through much of it. Some years later, Teddy gave us all a demonstration of stereo. I remember there were speakers hidden behind the armchairs and he played a record of train sounds. We heard the train pass right through the living room. Weird. I don't know when this was exactly, but mid-fifties, judging by the vagueness of my memory.
So it was nothing, I suppose, for Teddy to put together a real electric record player for me as a Christmas present. I came down on Christmas morning, like you do when you're six, and there it was, under the tree. Nobody had tried to wrap it. It just sat. Christmas was usually my parents and I, my three survivng grandparents and my great -aunt Jenny, who lived with my father's long-widowed mother. THIS morning, though, Teddy was there.too. He was also the only person we knew who had a car - a quite recent Ford Consul - so no problem for him to drive from the other side of Mitcham with my weighty gift on the seat.
I sat goggle-eyed but attentive, or so I'm told, while Teddy explained the complications of the new apparatus. "Be careful to select the right speed. Don't turn the volume up too high. Make sure you flip the "stylus" (my new word of the day) over if you change from a 78 to a 45 or 33 - or back - because the grooves are different sizes and so are the two styli. The stylus is made of "sapphire" (new word #2) and will last for 100 hours of playing if you're careful, but DON'T touch it. We'll get you a new one when you need it. Pull the arm back gently to start the motor then lower it very gently onto the record. It'll stop by itself when the record's finished."
Looking back, I realise he had bought or acquired the cabinet ("portable", meaning there was a handle on the side, but it would be years before I could lift it) and turntable - a maroon and cream "Collaro", very common at the time, though I'd never seen one before. He must have built the valve amplifier and installed all the guts himself. It looked just like a shop-bought one except there were no markings anywhere except on the turntable. The three-speed selector (33, 45, 78) was on the turntable and clearly labelled but the two knobs on the side of the cabinet were unmarked. The lower one was to turn it on and off and controlled the "volume". That's what you had to do instead of adding and removing rolled up socks to/from the sound-hole (yes, really - it's where we get the phrase "put a sock in it" from). The other knob was "tone". I'm sure Teddy explained this wonderfully but it went right over my head.
He also told me - and this was a tough one - that I shouldn't play some of my more scratched 78s on it or it would damage the stylus. I still had my gramophone, so I could play them on that if I wanted. We went through my whole pile, looked at each one, and sorted them into two piles - pass and fail.
Then he produced the piece-de-resistance. Musically, Teddy was something of a one-trick-pony. A HUGE fan of Ted Heath - an English band leader, still going strong some 20 years after his first hits covering American big-band tunes during the 30s.Teddy must have had just about everything "Ted Heath and his Music", as the record labels always billed him, had ever put out - and that was a lot. With him, that Christmas morning, Teddy had a 45rpm single: "Swingin' Shepherd Blues / Raunchy", by Ted Heath and his Music. He explained that he now had the LP that included the single (first time I'd heard THAT concept too), so he didn't need the 45. I could have it.
We played it - both sides, of course - carefully changing the speed and flipping the stylus over and all the other magical routines. It was SO CLEAR. Hardly any crackle and pop. It sounded like the orchestra was right there with us. And the record! So small, made of plastic, "unbreakable, but don't try too hard". So SLOW. I was used to 78s whizzing round like there was a race to be won. This just daudled.
Through all this, "Gramps" who had created the monster back in Chapter One, sat in his armchair and smiled whenever I looked at him. I have no idea what he was thinking, but he was thinking, that's for sure.
Everybody else, except for occasional visits from my father to see how we were doing, was in the kitchen, busy with the turkey which was, of course, now totally irrelevant to anything as far as I was concerned. My paternal grandmother, the widowed Scottish Baptist one, and her sister Jenny probably tutted up a storm at the music that was wafting their way. For my next birthday, they would give me a children's record - "Little White Duck" / "Old Macdonald Had Farm" by the "Red Raven Orchestra With Chorus" on an odd sized 78 with a huge label that made pretty patterns as it span. The next Christmas, "Mary's Boy Child / Eden was Just Like This" by Harry Belafonte, also on a 78, but at least a real one. They were trying, but they never did get it - or want to.
We played Lonnie Donegan, Tommy Steele and all my other good condition 78s, until I'd quite mastered the process and lunch was called.
There was still one more surprise to come. Teddy had with him the Decca Records catalogue for 1958. He could get a staff discount on anything in there and my parents had said they would buy me any LP I chose from it - but look carefully, get a good one. A few weeks later, although I don't really remember the selection process, I got my copy of "Olde Englyshe", another Ted Heath record. It made a sort of sense - I was familiar with a lot of the tunes on it, from "London Bridge Is Fallynge Downe" to "Cherry Ripe", but Tommy Steele was on Decca! Surely HE had an album out - I know he did, but I may have missed it in the book.
I still have all the records I've mentioned so far and that leads me to think there were other significant 78s at the time that have suffered the fate that befell so many of these fragile, brittle things. I came to know "Olde Englyshe" back to front but hadn't played it decades until, on a whim, I span it a few weeks ago. What a piece of nostalgia that was! So familiar and yet so strange. It's softer than I remember, but still easy to listen to, if a little corny in places. The "Swinging Shepherds Blues" / Raunchy" single is still a favourite and the "A" side was a contender in an "election" I held on Cove FM last Summer to choose a theme tune for my radio show. Up against various instrumentals, mostly from the rock era, it lost out to another Ted Heath single given to me by Teddy some months later - "Shish-Kebab". "Raunchy" is another of those covers of American hits which I did not recognise as such until much later. The Bill Justis original did not come to my attention until about 1973.
I called this chapter "The Inter-regnum" because it was my lot to enter the vinyl age right at the end of the rock 'n' roll and skiffle eras but five years before the "Merseybeat" marked the beginning of the 60s proper. Two months after that Christmas, Buddy Holly's death missed me completely. I knew about Elvis Presley, but didn't care particularly - I didn't have any of his records until "Return to Sender" several years later. I knew Bill Haley for his major hits and was aware of Eddie Cochran, I think, but that was about it.
In 1959, my first year able to play 45s, and the year I turned seven, I bought or was given singles by Russ Conway, a popular pianist who played tinkly little tunes at considerable speed, Tommy Steele, Lonnie Donegan, Michael Holliday and perhaps a couple more. More significantly, as it turns out, I came to know Mrs. Thorpe. She was the lady who ran the local record shop in Mitcham. She had originally operated from a room in the back of her husband's electrical goods store - where I had previously bought my 78s and gramophone needles, by the way. By now, she had her own little shop next door.
I guess there were not too many kids my age going in there in the late 50s and she took a shine to me. Whenever she found she had stock she did not expect to sell, she would put a few singles in a box and give them to me - just GIVE them to me - next time I was in. Of course, these were all records the populace of Mitcham did not want but, to me, they were a treasure trove. Some were, frankly, dire and as the years rolled on I have purged them. Many remain, though, and most of those are prized possessions.
My first Bill Haley record (and still my favourite, "Whoa Mabel / Chiquita Linda") came to me this way. Bill couldn't bribe people to buy his records by the time this came out in 1958, so it's no surprise it was in one of my boxes. I have never seen another copy, anywhere. Oddities by people such as Basil Kirchin's Rock-a-cha-cha Band, The Betty Smith Group, Lorrae Desmond (later a famous soap-opera star in Australia), The Goofers (The Dipsy Doodle / Take This Heart which once appeared in the UK "Record Collector" magazine in the list of "The 1000 most collectable singles of all time", but I have no idea why), The Southlanders, The Three Barry Sisters and others still crop up in my, admittedly rather odd, radio show quite regularly, all thanks to Mrs. Thorpe.
In retrospect, the music scene of those years was dire. "Clearing space for the Beatles" I once called it. Cliff Richard & The Shadows ruled the roost in the UK and were following the Elvis path from Rock 'n' Roll to movies. His films "The Young Ones" and "Summer Holiday" were both huge successes and inspired me to a luke-warm fandom for a time but it was only when the Shadows played instrumentals on their own that I really took notice. Adam faith was a cut above most and I bought his "Poor Me", still without realising how heavily Buddy Holly influenced he was.
Apart from Cliff and possibly Adam Faith. it was a time of genuinely second rate pop-stars in the UK. The Eden Kane's, the Craig Douglas's were of no interest to me. Michael Holliday had a few more interesting singles but was fading and died at his own hand in about 1963. Frank Ifield, once an Australian milkman, or so the story went, became a huge star with a gimmick. He yodelled! In the middle of otherwise sensible songs, for no apparent reason other than that he could, he yodelled. I loved it. I bought "I Remember You", "Lovesick Blues / She Taught Me How to Yodel", and his updated version of "Waltzing Matilda". I can't listen to them now. Rolf Harris, another Australian, made his first appearance around this time too. I bought "Sun Arise" and still think it's a classic waiting to be rediscovered. I met Rolf in Newcastle in the mid-70s and was glad I'd liked him - really nice man.
The two saving graces of this time were instrumentals and novelty songs. There were enough of both to keep a 7 to 10 year old happy. In 1960, I heard Johnny & the Hurricanes' "Rocking Goose" on the radio. I still had some Christmas money and went to Mrs. Thorpe for it without knowing the title or who it was by. I had to describe it by the "HONK HONK" sound that permeated it. It sat wonderfully in the middle ground - instrumental AND novelty. I picked up some Shadows singles; "Foot Tapper" and "Dance On", Then in 1962, the two big ones that crowned the instrumental craze appeared. Jet Harris & Tony Meehan had been bassist and drummer of the Shadows until leaving in a blaze of publicity. They soon came out with one of the big ear-worm singles of 1962, "Diamonds" - the lead played on bass and with a drum solo in the middle. Hot on its heels, The Tornados blockbuster, "Telstar", named for the first ever communications satellite came out and not only took over the UK number one spot seemingly permanently but also became the first single by a British group EVER to top the Billboard charts in the US - a sign of things to come. It's "B" side, "Jungle Fever" was even better - another entry in my theme election last year and I was secretly hoping it would win.
In the novelty camp, I took to Bernard Cribbins, a well known comic actor who had hilarioius hits with "Right Said Fred" and "Hole in the Ground" during this time. Mike Sarne and the later MUCH more famous Wendy Richards ("Are You Being Served" and "Eastenders") had the, now corny but cute, then excellent "Come Outside". Joe Brown had me with "Jellied Eels`` too. Well I was only eight! There were still "concert" afternoons at school and "Jellied Eels" became my entry of choice for a time although that year's teacher, Mrs. Mills, criticized it - and my performances - for the exaggerated Cockney dialect it was sung in. "Bad speech", she called it, but actually, just our local dialect and much better than the fake American accents most other were songs were sung in.
Through all this, the old 78s kept coming in, from Gramps and, as word of my obsession spread, from other sources. I discovered the real American big-bands through donated 78s by Glenn Miller, Woody Herman, Stan Kenton and others, had my first real intoductions to Rock 'n' Roll through the Everly Brothers, more Bill Haley (sadly broken in the later 60s) and Little Richard. The spring in the old gramophone broke in about 1961 and I had to push the turntable round with my finger to play the old scratchy 78s that were not good enough for the new machine. I bothered with this less and less and at some point (strangely, I don't remember the event), it went.
Late in 1962, there was a song on the radio called "Love Me Do" by a new group called "The Beatles". The world was about to change again.
I'm six-and-a half. "Uncle Teddy" was the husband of an old friend of my mother's - "Auntie Eileen". In the way of such things, we were not related to them, it's just what I learned to call them. Uncle Teddy worked in some kind of research capacity for Decca, the electronics company which was also a record label.
He was way ahead of his time in terms of electronics. In 1953 he had had the first television I ever saw - a monstrous contraption which projected a grainy image onto a white wall - if you closed the curtains. I'm told I "saw" some of Queen Elizabeth's coronation that way, but it was on my first birthday and I slept through much of it. Some years later, Teddy gave us all a demonstration of stereo. I remember there were speakers hidden behind the armchairs and he played a record of train sounds. We heard the train pass right through the living room. Weird. I don't know when this was exactly, but mid-fifties, judging by the vagueness of my memory.
So it was nothing, I suppose, for Teddy to put together a real electric record player for me as a Christmas present. I came down on Christmas morning, like you do when you're six, and there it was, under the tree. Nobody had tried to wrap it. It just sat. Christmas was usually my parents and I, my three survivng grandparents and my great -aunt Jenny, who lived with my father's long-widowed mother. THIS morning, though, Teddy was there.too. He was also the only person we knew who had a car - a quite recent Ford Consul - so no problem for him to drive from the other side of Mitcham with my weighty gift on the seat.
I sat goggle-eyed but attentive, or so I'm told, while Teddy explained the complications of the new apparatus. "Be careful to select the right speed. Don't turn the volume up too high. Make sure you flip the "stylus" (my new word of the day) over if you change from a 78 to a 45 or 33 - or back - because the grooves are different sizes and so are the two styli. The stylus is made of "sapphire" (new word #2) and will last for 100 hours of playing if you're careful, but DON'T touch it. We'll get you a new one when you need it. Pull the arm back gently to start the motor then lower it very gently onto the record. It'll stop by itself when the record's finished."
Looking back, I realise he had bought or acquired the cabinet ("portable", meaning there was a handle on the side, but it would be years before I could lift it) and turntable - a maroon and cream "Collaro", very common at the time, though I'd never seen one before. He must have built the valve amplifier and installed all the guts himself. It looked just like a shop-bought one except there were no markings anywhere except on the turntable. The three-speed selector (33, 45, 78) was on the turntable and clearly labelled but the two knobs on the side of the cabinet were unmarked. The lower one was to turn it on and off and controlled the "volume". That's what you had to do instead of adding and removing rolled up socks to/from the sound-hole (yes, really - it's where we get the phrase "put a sock in it" from). The other knob was "tone". I'm sure Teddy explained this wonderfully but it went right over my head.
He also told me - and this was a tough one - that I shouldn't play some of my more scratched 78s on it or it would damage the stylus. I still had my gramophone, so I could play them on that if I wanted. We went through my whole pile, looked at each one, and sorted them into two piles - pass and fail.
Then he produced the piece-de-resistance. Musically, Teddy was something of a one-trick-pony. A HUGE fan of Ted Heath - an English band leader, still going strong some 20 years after his first hits covering American big-band tunes during the 30s.Teddy must have had just about everything "Ted Heath and his Music", as the record labels always billed him, had ever put out - and that was a lot. With him, that Christmas morning, Teddy had a 45rpm single: "Swingin' Shepherd Blues / Raunchy", by Ted Heath and his Music. He explained that he now had the LP that included the single (first time I'd heard THAT concept too), so he didn't need the 45. I could have it.
We played it - both sides, of course - carefully changing the speed and flipping the stylus over and all the other magical routines. It was SO CLEAR. Hardly any crackle and pop. It sounded like the orchestra was right there with us. And the record! So small, made of plastic, "unbreakable, but don't try too hard". So SLOW. I was used to 78s whizzing round like there was a race to be won. This just daudled.
Through all this, "Gramps" who had created the monster back in Chapter One, sat in his armchair and smiled whenever I looked at him. I have no idea what he was thinking, but he was thinking, that's for sure.
Everybody else, except for occasional visits from my father to see how we were doing, was in the kitchen, busy with the turkey which was, of course, now totally irrelevant to anything as far as I was concerned. My paternal grandmother, the widowed Scottish Baptist one, and her sister Jenny probably tutted up a storm at the music that was wafting their way. For my next birthday, they would give me a children's record - "Little White Duck" / "Old Macdonald Had Farm" by the "Red Raven Orchestra With Chorus" on an odd sized 78 with a huge label that made pretty patterns as it span. The next Christmas, "Mary's Boy Child / Eden was Just Like This" by Harry Belafonte, also on a 78, but at least a real one. They were trying, but they never did get it - or want to.
We played Lonnie Donegan, Tommy Steele and all my other good condition 78s, until I'd quite mastered the process and lunch was called.
There was still one more surprise to come. Teddy had with him the Decca Records catalogue for 1958. He could get a staff discount on anything in there and my parents had said they would buy me any LP I chose from it - but look carefully, get a good one. A few weeks later, although I don't really remember the selection process, I got my copy of "Olde Englyshe", another Ted Heath record. It made a sort of sense - I was familiar with a lot of the tunes on it, from "London Bridge Is Fallynge Downe" to "Cherry Ripe", but Tommy Steele was on Decca! Surely HE had an album out - I know he did, but I may have missed it in the book.
I still have all the records I've mentioned so far and that leads me to think there were other significant 78s at the time that have suffered the fate that befell so many of these fragile, brittle things. I came to know "Olde Englyshe" back to front but hadn't played it decades until, on a whim, I span it a few weeks ago. What a piece of nostalgia that was! So familiar and yet so strange. It's softer than I remember, but still easy to listen to, if a little corny in places. The "Swinging Shepherds Blues" / Raunchy" single is still a favourite and the "A" side was a contender in an "election" I held on Cove FM last Summer to choose a theme tune for my radio show. Up against various instrumentals, mostly from the rock era, it lost out to another Ted Heath single given to me by Teddy some months later - "Shish-Kebab". "Raunchy" is another of those covers of American hits which I did not recognise as such until much later. The Bill Justis original did not come to my attention until about 1973.
I called this chapter "The Inter-regnum" because it was my lot to enter the vinyl age right at the end of the rock 'n' roll and skiffle eras but five years before the "Merseybeat" marked the beginning of the 60s proper. Two months after that Christmas, Buddy Holly's death missed me completely. I knew about Elvis Presley, but didn't care particularly - I didn't have any of his records until "Return to Sender" several years later. I knew Bill Haley for his major hits and was aware of Eddie Cochran, I think, but that was about it.
In 1959, my first year able to play 45s, and the year I turned seven, I bought or was given singles by Russ Conway, a popular pianist who played tinkly little tunes at considerable speed, Tommy Steele, Lonnie Donegan, Michael Holliday and perhaps a couple more. More significantly, as it turns out, I came to know Mrs. Thorpe. She was the lady who ran the local record shop in Mitcham. She had originally operated from a room in the back of her husband's electrical goods store - where I had previously bought my 78s and gramophone needles, by the way. By now, she had her own little shop next door.
I guess there were not too many kids my age going in there in the late 50s and she took a shine to me. Whenever she found she had stock she did not expect to sell, she would put a few singles in a box and give them to me - just GIVE them to me - next time I was in. Of course, these were all records the populace of Mitcham did not want but, to me, they were a treasure trove. Some were, frankly, dire and as the years rolled on I have purged them. Many remain, though, and most of those are prized possessions.
My first Bill Haley record (and still my favourite, "Whoa Mabel / Chiquita Linda") came to me this way. Bill couldn't bribe people to buy his records by the time this came out in 1958, so it's no surprise it was in one of my boxes. I have never seen another copy, anywhere. Oddities by people such as Basil Kirchin's Rock-a-cha-cha Band, The Betty Smith Group, Lorrae Desmond (later a famous soap-opera star in Australia), The Goofers (The Dipsy Doodle / Take This Heart which once appeared in the UK "Record Collector" magazine in the list of "The 1000 most collectable singles of all time", but I have no idea why), The Southlanders, The Three Barry Sisters and others still crop up in my, admittedly rather odd, radio show quite regularly, all thanks to Mrs. Thorpe.
In retrospect, the music scene of those years was dire. "Clearing space for the Beatles" I once called it. Cliff Richard & The Shadows ruled the roost in the UK and were following the Elvis path from Rock 'n' Roll to movies. His films "The Young Ones" and "Summer Holiday" were both huge successes and inspired me to a luke-warm fandom for a time but it was only when the Shadows played instrumentals on their own that I really took notice. Adam faith was a cut above most and I bought his "Poor Me", still without realising how heavily Buddy Holly influenced he was.
Apart from Cliff and possibly Adam Faith. it was a time of genuinely second rate pop-stars in the UK. The Eden Kane's, the Craig Douglas's were of no interest to me. Michael Holliday had a few more interesting singles but was fading and died at his own hand in about 1963. Frank Ifield, once an Australian milkman, or so the story went, became a huge star with a gimmick. He yodelled! In the middle of otherwise sensible songs, for no apparent reason other than that he could, he yodelled. I loved it. I bought "I Remember You", "Lovesick Blues / She Taught Me How to Yodel", and his updated version of "Waltzing Matilda". I can't listen to them now. Rolf Harris, another Australian, made his first appearance around this time too. I bought "Sun Arise" and still think it's a classic waiting to be rediscovered. I met Rolf in Newcastle in the mid-70s and was glad I'd liked him - really nice man.
The two saving graces of this time were instrumentals and novelty songs. There were enough of both to keep a 7 to 10 year old happy. In 1960, I heard Johnny & the Hurricanes' "Rocking Goose" on the radio. I still had some Christmas money and went to Mrs. Thorpe for it without knowing the title or who it was by. I had to describe it by the "HONK HONK" sound that permeated it. It sat wonderfully in the middle ground - instrumental AND novelty. I picked up some Shadows singles; "Foot Tapper" and "Dance On", Then in 1962, the two big ones that crowned the instrumental craze appeared. Jet Harris & Tony Meehan had been bassist and drummer of the Shadows until leaving in a blaze of publicity. They soon came out with one of the big ear-worm singles of 1962, "Diamonds" - the lead played on bass and with a drum solo in the middle. Hot on its heels, The Tornados blockbuster, "Telstar", named for the first ever communications satellite came out and not only took over the UK number one spot seemingly permanently but also became the first single by a British group EVER to top the Billboard charts in the US - a sign of things to come. It's "B" side, "Jungle Fever" was even better - another entry in my theme election last year and I was secretly hoping it would win.
In the novelty camp, I took to Bernard Cribbins, a well known comic actor who had hilarioius hits with "Right Said Fred" and "Hole in the Ground" during this time. Mike Sarne and the later MUCH more famous Wendy Richards ("Are You Being Served" and "Eastenders") had the, now corny but cute, then excellent "Come Outside". Joe Brown had me with "Jellied Eels`` too. Well I was only eight! There were still "concert" afternoons at school and "Jellied Eels" became my entry of choice for a time although that year's teacher, Mrs. Mills, criticized it - and my performances - for the exaggerated Cockney dialect it was sung in. "Bad speech", she called it, but actually, just our local dialect and much better than the fake American accents most other were songs were sung in.
Through all this, the old 78s kept coming in, from Gramps and, as word of my obsession spread, from other sources. I discovered the real American big-bands through donated 78s by Glenn Miller, Woody Herman, Stan Kenton and others, had my first real intoductions to Rock 'n' Roll through the Everly Brothers, more Bill Haley (sadly broken in the later 60s) and Little Richard. The spring in the old gramophone broke in about 1961 and I had to push the turntable round with my finger to play the old scratchy 78s that were not good enough for the new machine. I bothered with this less and less and at some point (strangely, I don't remember the event), it went.
Late in 1962, there was a song on the radio called "Love Me Do" by a new group called "The Beatles". The world was about to change again.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Musical Time-line Chapter One: The Steel Needle Years
No apologies, water under the bridge and all that - lots has happened - maybe later.
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
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
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Cove FM 94.3, The Voice Of St. Margaret's Bay
I suppose I should have posted about this 8 weeks ago when the station went on the air but at least now I have an experience to report.
Cove FM is the brainchild and passion of JD, a friend here, and is a community radio station project.
For the months of July and August, it had "Special Event Licenses", allowing it to broadcast over a low power transmitter - 50 watts. That's all the technical stuff you'll see here 'cos I'd only get it wrong. If you want more, see http://www.covefm.com/ . (Go there anyway, there's pictures and all sorts).
For eight weeks, we've had a truly local radio station here. Mostly music, with sponsorship spots (NOT commercials, that's a no no), information on local events and happenings, weather, interviews with local folks of interest including musicians, vendors and customers at the farmers' market and sundry interesting people and, uniquely in my experience, tide information (thanks Kevin).
Now, many years ago (from 1978 to 1991) I was involved in another radio station - Radio Netherne. It was not really radio at all - no broadcasting involved. It was based in a psychiatric hospital in Surrey, England, and was hardwired to speakers in the day-rooms of the hospital's wards.
For 13 years, I had a Sunday afternoon music show there and enjoyed it immensely most of the time. Apart from the constant scrapping for money to run it (it was a registered charity but try raising money for a psychiatric hospital while competing with those working for sick kids, animals, what have you - it's not easy), the biggest drawback was audience response. We were constantly told that we were, in some never quite explained way, therapeutic, but mostly, all we got were the same handful of requests from the same small group of the "better" patients.
Many will have heard my stories down the years of "Dickie" who kept asking us to play "Fleetwood Mac" by Albert Ross, when what he wanted was "Albatross", by Fleetwood Mac; of Peggy insisting that I play Frankie Laine's "Gunfight At OK Corral" every week for years, until the track on the old vinyl album was visibly worn; of Arthur, who carried around the plastic casing of a miniature transistor radio (no radio, just the casing), holding it up to his ear and repeating "I wish somebody'd mend my radio. When our station engineer DID fix it (by putting a complete new radio in the case), the next week it was just a casing again and the mantra went on.
Maybe all this played into my thoughts as I contemplated my "return" to radio on Cove FM, maybe it didn't, but I certainly didn't expect what actually happened. I was on the air on the first morning of Cove FM - just playing music offered up by the computer system and some CD's by local artists, chatting in between, pressing buttons and sliding sliders that didn't need to pressed or slid while, simultaneously NOT pressing or sliding those that did (this is actually surprisingly easy). There was a party atmosphere, food and drink outside our superb little studio in the mall in "downtown" Hubbards, sundry folks dropping by and all the volunteers meeting up, many for the first time.
There was a great sense of occasion but, even then, I think I thought, "yeah, but really, who's gonna change the car radio? Who's gonna be listening from 9 to 11pm on a Wednesday night, in Hubbards, in Summer?"
Well, they listened. Lots of them - and not just in St. Margaret's Bay. My first scheduled show went out the following Wednesday at 9pm, entitled "Aardvark Archives Presents....A Transport Of Delight".
"Aardvark Archives" is a name I, rather pompously I suppose, gave to my record collection sometime in the late 60s, and it stuck. "A Transport Of Delight" is the title of a song about a London Transport bus and is the opening number in Michael Flanders and Donald Swann's musical review "At The Drop Of A Hat", from about 1960. The show was an assortment of songs about moving around; walking, driving, flying, sailing, orbiting, you name it. It was, as were the 7 shows that followed, a deliberately silly couple of hours. If I can remember them all, I'll list the themes at the end so I'll have somewhere to look when I', in danger of repeating myself.
I bungled and fluffed my way through it, blissfully unaware until the end that the connection to the transmitter had failed about half way through - I talked and played music to myself for an hour, just like at Radio Netherne all those years before.
Even so, at work the next day (remember the liquor store?) I found out people HAD been listening. Some, naturally I suppose, had done so because they knew me but a good few others had been listening anyway and had recognised my voice (I'm one of few in town without an accent!). They were gracious and complimentary. I was encouraged.
I had been listening to the station while driving - mostly to and from work, 5 minutes at a time, 4 times a day, but found myself going out of my way to hear the "manned" shows (much of the output was computer generated, as, I am told, much modern radio is) and getting wrapped up in it.
The presenters are an eclectic bunch. A school age lad with a fascination with (and extensive knowledge of) 60s music, two older gents with a very warm, homey feeling country/bluegrass show, a Celtic Woman and Korn fan, a local rock musician who bantered and jammed with other local musicians in between recorded tracks, a master of outside-broadcast co-ordination who seemlessly linked back and forth between the studio and (variously) the farmers' market, the World Tuna Flat Races and Chester Race Week from which other unflappable volunteers reported, interviewed and quipped.
It was darned good radio.
Being available on the internet, the audience quickly widened. There were, I'm told, listeners in Australia that first morning. I know of friends of mine who listened in Toronto, Vancouver, England (where my show ran from 1 to 3AM!, on a week-night!) and Texas. The positive feedback was relentless, varied, surprising and, most of all welcome (thank you, all).
Then suddenly, due to the vaguaries of the licensing process, last Saturday, at midnight, once again with JD and I at the switch, it all stopped. We have to wait now and apply for a permanent license for a community station - next spring if we're lucky.
As I type, our fabulous little studio (which I just felt I'd got the hang of - the technology's changed a bit since 1991) is being dismantled, the premises vacated. We've had our "last night cast party" and there's now't but a gap . It was evident at the great party we had (thanks again G & J) on Sunday and it's been evident in the conversations I've had with customers the last two days. We all, volunteers and listeners alike, miss our little radio station. We want it back. I want to be on it, yes, but mostly, I want to HEAR it.
I'm not alone. Signatures on our letter of support that goes (I understand) with the license application are still rolling in and the momentum is not lost. I have a few months to boost and organise the music database so that, when we start up again, there'll be less mucking about with CD's and, therefore, less manual logging of content. A big job, but right up my alley and I'm looking forward to getting started.
So, to the other CoveFMers, I say, thanks for the opportunity, the effort, the support, the fun. To the listeners I say, thank you, for listening, for the kind and morale boosting words. To everybody else who reads this - thank you too and "stay tuned", we'll be back.
Aardvark Archives Presents...
A Transport Of Delight - anything and everything to do with getting around.
Let's Sing The Beatles - all and sundry covering Beatles Songs.
Food For Thought - songs about food, eating and (occasionally) drinking.
Music By Numbers - songs with numbers in the titles.
Let's Dance (Or Not) - songs about dancing, dances, wanting to dance (or not), being able to dance (or not) etc.
Career Guidance For Dummies - songs about jobs and working (or not)
Favourite Odds And Ends - the 2 part finale, all my favourite thises and thats.
(There's one I've forgotten - I'll add it when it comes back to me).
UPDATE:
It's now October and it HAS come back to me. It was one of my favourites.
AARDVARK ARCHIVES PRESENTS - Before They Were Famous.
Two hours of music by people who didn't know that, weeks or years after recording, they would be famous. Thanks are due to Mr. Reg Dwight who provided much of the content back in 1969 by singing anonymous covers of the pop hits of the day for cheap party albums.
The interest in still keen in bringing back Cove FM next year. I did a couple hours behind the bar at an "Oktoberfest" fundraising event last weekend and it's clear this place wants its radio station back.
Cove FM is the brainchild and passion of JD, a friend here, and is a community radio station project.
For the months of July and August, it had "Special Event Licenses", allowing it to broadcast over a low power transmitter - 50 watts. That's all the technical stuff you'll see here 'cos I'd only get it wrong. If you want more, see http://www.covefm.com/ . (Go there anyway, there's pictures and all sorts).
For eight weeks, we've had a truly local radio station here. Mostly music, with sponsorship spots (NOT commercials, that's a no no), information on local events and happenings, weather, interviews with local folks of interest including musicians, vendors and customers at the farmers' market and sundry interesting people and, uniquely in my experience, tide information (thanks Kevin).
Now, many years ago (from 1978 to 1991) I was involved in another radio station - Radio Netherne. It was not really radio at all - no broadcasting involved. It was based in a psychiatric hospital in Surrey, England, and was hardwired to speakers in the day-rooms of the hospital's wards.
For 13 years, I had a Sunday afternoon music show there and enjoyed it immensely most of the time. Apart from the constant scrapping for money to run it (it was a registered charity but try raising money for a psychiatric hospital while competing with those working for sick kids, animals, what have you - it's not easy), the biggest drawback was audience response. We were constantly told that we were, in some never quite explained way, therapeutic, but mostly, all we got were the same handful of requests from the same small group of the "better" patients.
Many will have heard my stories down the years of "Dickie" who kept asking us to play "Fleetwood Mac" by Albert Ross, when what he wanted was "Albatross", by Fleetwood Mac; of Peggy insisting that I play Frankie Laine's "Gunfight At OK Corral" every week for years, until the track on the old vinyl album was visibly worn; of Arthur, who carried around the plastic casing of a miniature transistor radio (no radio, just the casing), holding it up to his ear and repeating "I wish somebody'd mend my radio. When our station engineer DID fix it (by putting a complete new radio in the case), the next week it was just a casing again and the mantra went on.
Maybe all this played into my thoughts as I contemplated my "return" to radio on Cove FM, maybe it didn't, but I certainly didn't expect what actually happened. I was on the air on the first morning of Cove FM - just playing music offered up by the computer system and some CD's by local artists, chatting in between, pressing buttons and sliding sliders that didn't need to pressed or slid while, simultaneously NOT pressing or sliding those that did (this is actually surprisingly easy). There was a party atmosphere, food and drink outside our superb little studio in the mall in "downtown" Hubbards, sundry folks dropping by and all the volunteers meeting up, many for the first time.
There was a great sense of occasion but, even then, I think I thought, "yeah, but really, who's gonna change the car radio? Who's gonna be listening from 9 to 11pm on a Wednesday night, in Hubbards, in Summer?"
Well, they listened. Lots of them - and not just in St. Margaret's Bay. My first scheduled show went out the following Wednesday at 9pm, entitled "Aardvark Archives Presents....A Transport Of Delight".
"Aardvark Archives" is a name I, rather pompously I suppose, gave to my record collection sometime in the late 60s, and it stuck. "A Transport Of Delight" is the title of a song about a London Transport bus and is the opening number in Michael Flanders and Donald Swann's musical review "At The Drop Of A Hat", from about 1960. The show was an assortment of songs about moving around; walking, driving, flying, sailing, orbiting, you name it. It was, as were the 7 shows that followed, a deliberately silly couple of hours. If I can remember them all, I'll list the themes at the end so I'll have somewhere to look when I', in danger of repeating myself.
I bungled and fluffed my way through it, blissfully unaware until the end that the connection to the transmitter had failed about half way through - I talked and played music to myself for an hour, just like at Radio Netherne all those years before.
Even so, at work the next day (remember the liquor store?) I found out people HAD been listening. Some, naturally I suppose, had done so because they knew me but a good few others had been listening anyway and had recognised my voice (I'm one of few in town without an accent!). They were gracious and complimentary. I was encouraged.
I had been listening to the station while driving - mostly to and from work, 5 minutes at a time, 4 times a day, but found myself going out of my way to hear the "manned" shows (much of the output was computer generated, as, I am told, much modern radio is) and getting wrapped up in it.
The presenters are an eclectic bunch. A school age lad with a fascination with (and extensive knowledge of) 60s music, two older gents with a very warm, homey feeling country/bluegrass show, a Celtic Woman and Korn fan, a local rock musician who bantered and jammed with other local musicians in between recorded tracks, a master of outside-broadcast co-ordination who seemlessly linked back and forth between the studio and (variously) the farmers' market, the World Tuna Flat Races and Chester Race Week from which other unflappable volunteers reported, interviewed and quipped.
It was darned good radio.
Being available on the internet, the audience quickly widened. There were, I'm told, listeners in Australia that first morning. I know of friends of mine who listened in Toronto, Vancouver, England (where my show ran from 1 to 3AM!, on a week-night!) and Texas. The positive feedback was relentless, varied, surprising and, most of all welcome (thank you, all).
Then suddenly, due to the vaguaries of the licensing process, last Saturday, at midnight, once again with JD and I at the switch, it all stopped. We have to wait now and apply for a permanent license for a community station - next spring if we're lucky.
As I type, our fabulous little studio (which I just felt I'd got the hang of - the technology's changed a bit since 1991) is being dismantled, the premises vacated. We've had our "last night cast party" and there's now't but a gap . It was evident at the great party we had (thanks again G & J) on Sunday and it's been evident in the conversations I've had with customers the last two days. We all, volunteers and listeners alike, miss our little radio station. We want it back. I want to be on it, yes, but mostly, I want to HEAR it.
I'm not alone. Signatures on our letter of support that goes (I understand) with the license application are still rolling in and the momentum is not lost. I have a few months to boost and organise the music database so that, when we start up again, there'll be less mucking about with CD's and, therefore, less manual logging of content. A big job, but right up my alley and I'm looking forward to getting started.
So, to the other CoveFMers, I say, thanks for the opportunity, the effort, the support, the fun. To the listeners I say, thank you, for listening, for the kind and morale boosting words. To everybody else who reads this - thank you too and "stay tuned", we'll be back.
Aardvark Archives Presents...
A Transport Of Delight - anything and everything to do with getting around.
Let's Sing The Beatles - all and sundry covering Beatles Songs.
Food For Thought - songs about food, eating and (occasionally) drinking.
Music By Numbers - songs with numbers in the titles.
Let's Dance (Or Not) - songs about dancing, dances, wanting to dance (or not), being able to dance (or not) etc.
Career Guidance For Dummies - songs about jobs and working (or not)
Favourite Odds And Ends - the 2 part finale, all my favourite thises and thats.
(There's one I've forgotten - I'll add it when it comes back to me).
UPDATE:
It's now October and it HAS come back to me. It was one of my favourites.
AARDVARK ARCHIVES PRESENTS - Before They Were Famous.
Two hours of music by people who didn't know that, weeks or years after recording, they would be famous. Thanks are due to Mr. Reg Dwight who provided much of the content back in 1969 by singing anonymous covers of the pop hits of the day for cheap party albums.
The interest in still keen in bringing back Cove FM next year. I did a couple hours behind the bar at an "Oktoberfest" fundraising event last weekend and it's clear this place wants its radio station back.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Matthew's Question
So, if you've read the last post, you'll know that this one concerns an internet conversation I had in 2007 with a young man called (here, at least) Matthew. He did not take part in the debates and arguments I referred to, but was obviously following along closely.
The first I knew of him was a private Facebook message he sent me. Here is that message in its entirety, except for some personal info (removed or changed for privacy's sake) and some minor grammatical editing.
From: Matthew Young. August 8th. 2007 at 11:33am.
Hi Dave, I happen to be a Christian and have been following the posts about atheism. I was very impressed by what you have been saying. While I have been studying many religions and beliefs/non-beliefs, I am still in the dark about some things.
Am I reading it right? You are, for sure, an atheist? If so, then I have a question for you. As such, you are claiming that you know everything. To say that there is no God is to say that you know everything there is to know. So, my question is how many grains of sand are there on the beach nearest your home?
My point is that, as far as I know so far, there is no such thing as an atheist because it is impossible for a man to know everything there is to know. It is in those things that we don't know or accept that I believe we find God. Not just a God who sits up in the sky, looking down and judging us but a very real, present and intimate God who cares for the lives of every last person on Earth.
Deep inside, we all have the desire to know God. How else can you explain how and why the very IDEA of God exists? Everyone, at some time, wants to know just where they came from and how all this got started. I'm sure there is still more proof but without God; without a sense of knowing that what you do here on Earth matters eternally, then what's the point of life? Why do we have things that we consider wrong? Without God there can be no absolute truth when, in fact, absolute truth is all around us (2+2+4!). Absolute!
How is a watch made? A man assembles all these little parts. So what does a watch do then? It glorifies its creator by doing what it was created to do. So then, how do we glorify OUR creator? By living in the center of his will for our lives. That will is specific to each and every individual and you can find that will y studying God's Holy Word.
All that is just to say this; I believe that people choose (there we are again, Ed.) not to believe in God because they never get to know God. If you're up for a challenge, then, I want to challenge you to see if God is actually real. Read some Bible. If you like, I'd be happy to suggest some places to start. Just ask God to show himself to you.
I hope I haven't taken up too much of your time or caused you any grief but you seemed like one of the few who actually believed what they were saying as far as atheism is concerned. I appreciate you reading this if you get this far.
END QUOTE.
Much of this was the standard circular reasoning one gets used to on this subject; what boils down to "the Bible must be true because it says so in the Bible" and its close cousins, but there was one point - the futility argument - that I can never let pass and one other that I'd never heard before; the contention that an atheist, by definition it seems, claims knowledge of everything. Where did this come from?
Dyve: August 8th. 2008 at 2:18pm.
Thanks for that Matthew. I DID make it all the way to the end although the point, as far as I'm concerned, is right at the top.
The assumption that if I don't believe in God, I must know (or think I know) everything there is to know is completely unfounded.
There are knowable things, (Where is the beach nearest my home?) THEORETICALLY knowable things (like how many grains of sand are on the beach. That real number exists, it is a large positive integer, but it is not practical to count them and KNOW that number) and there are completely unknowable things (how many grains will there be in March 2012) but this says nothing whatsoever about God or whether or not "he" is a real being or a man-made concept.
Here's how I would use your analogy to express how I think about such things.
I do NOT know everything. Among the literally infinite number of things I do not know is the exact number of grains of sand on the beach. That does not mean I know NOTHING about the sand on the beach, though. I may not know the exact number of grains but I DO know that it's not 27. There are many other numbers I know it's not. This kind of thinking is (I presume) why atheists are often accused of being negative - because of all the things they know are NOT, without necessarily knowing what IS. There is no conflict in this, we all do it all the time. You do not know how much oranges cost in my local supermarket, but you know it's not $5,000 each. God or no God, these "knowables" are the same.
I could, if I cared enough, do some measuring of the beach, measure individual grains of sand, take depth samples and the like and come up with an estimate. It would not be the "right" number but, if I was careful and detailed, I should get the order of magnitude right. I'd be able to say something like "it's in the tens of billions, probably around 40 billion" or whatever. I do not need to do any of that to know the the answer is not 27.
So, by extension, I do not know the entire history of the universe. I cannot speak with any authority on the likelihood that, out there somewhere, there might be beings more knowledgeable than us, more advanced (whatever that might mean to them). Some of these hypothetical beings may have created life somewhere. They may be regarded, with some justification, as gods by the beings they created. But I CAN know (in the way that I KNOW 27 is the wrong answer to the beach question) that they did NOT create heaven and earth in a week, do NOT take an active role in the lives of humans, do not demand that we live a certain way with regards to birth control, Sundays, etc. They do not care who wins the World's Series or Superbowl, have no opinion about pork or head coverings and had nothing whatever to do with writing the Bible, Koran, Torah or anything else we've heard of because THOSE things (like 27 grains making a beach) are not possible.
The foregoing doesn't "prove" that, any more than I have "proved" that there are more than 27 grains on the beach (I haven't even BEEN to the beach today), but it's just as certain.
The "proof" is all around us - on Earth and off it.We can SEE how life developed, how stars were (and still are) formed, how the Earth came to be and even how gods were created. There are mysteries in the detail. Every time we learn something, new questions are raised. That's life in a huge universe. We don't know everything and we never will. That doesn't mean (or even suggest) that God does. I don't even see how you make that connection.
As for needing God to give us purpose, I read your reasoning as "I cannot believe that life has no ultimate purpose, that would be unbearable, so God must know what the purpose is". See the problem? Why are we so arrogant as to assume that, because we WANT a purpose, there must BE one? We have limited purposes made from our own intellects which are, in turn, the product of our long evolutionary history but ULTIMATE purpose is a nonce concept. Such a thing just cannot be. If we think God provides it, we are intellectually obliged to go on to ask what the purpose of God is? US? Surely not? If that's the answer, it's circular logic again, leads nowhere; certainly nothing "ultimate" about it. His own glorification? Seems a little shallow doesn't it? No, get used to the idea, no matter how unpalatable it may seem at first glance, ultimately, if you stretch the mind and the concept far enough, there is NO ultimate purpose. Wishing that there was does not make God spring spontaneously into existence, and it would not help if he did.
I've read some Bible, as you put it. Sorry, lots of history (and very bloody and "unchristian" much of it is too if I may say so - though that's not my point), a lot of fable, a lot of blatant historic and scientific inaccuracy, a lot of superstition, a few bits of wonderful mistranslation and some downright fabrications. In short, just what we would expect from a huge assortment of ancients from different cultures and centuries with different backgrounds, beliefs, agendas, perspectives and loyalties but NOT what we would expect from an omniscient creator. That's it, that's all, and YES there are atheists and I AM one. If I haven't convinced you of that, I don't know how to and I would have to refer you to an expert - Richard Dawkins would be my choice - try "The God Delusion".
Thanks for your interest, I hope at least some of this makes sense.
END QUOTE
Well, that's quite long - hope you're still with me. There's more. Matthew's reply next time. Stay tuned.
The first I knew of him was a private Facebook message he sent me. Here is that message in its entirety, except for some personal info (removed or changed for privacy's sake) and some minor grammatical editing.
From: Matthew Young. August 8th. 2007 at 11:33am.
Hi Dave, I happen to be a Christian and have been following the posts about atheism. I was very impressed by what you have been saying. While I have been studying many religions and beliefs/non-beliefs, I am still in the dark about some things.
Am I reading it right? You are, for sure, an atheist? If so, then I have a question for you. As such, you are claiming that you know everything. To say that there is no God is to say that you know everything there is to know. So, my question is how many grains of sand are there on the beach nearest your home?
My point is that, as far as I know so far, there is no such thing as an atheist because it is impossible for a man to know everything there is to know. It is in those things that we don't know or accept that I believe we find God. Not just a God who sits up in the sky, looking down and judging us but a very real, present and intimate God who cares for the lives of every last person on Earth.
Deep inside, we all have the desire to know God. How else can you explain how and why the very IDEA of God exists? Everyone, at some time, wants to know just where they came from and how all this got started. I'm sure there is still more proof but without God; without a sense of knowing that what you do here on Earth matters eternally, then what's the point of life? Why do we have things that we consider wrong? Without God there can be no absolute truth when, in fact, absolute truth is all around us (2+2+4!). Absolute!
How is a watch made? A man assembles all these little parts. So what does a watch do then? It glorifies its creator by doing what it was created to do. So then, how do we glorify OUR creator? By living in the center of his will for our lives. That will is specific to each and every individual and you can find that will y studying God's Holy Word.
All that is just to say this; I believe that people choose (there we are again, Ed.) not to believe in God because they never get to know God. If you're up for a challenge, then, I want to challenge you to see if God is actually real. Read some Bible. If you like, I'd be happy to suggest some places to start. Just ask God to show himself to you.
I hope I haven't taken up too much of your time or caused you any grief but you seemed like one of the few who actually believed what they were saying as far as atheism is concerned. I appreciate you reading this if you get this far.
END QUOTE.
Much of this was the standard circular reasoning one gets used to on this subject; what boils down to "the Bible must be true because it says so in the Bible" and its close cousins, but there was one point - the futility argument - that I can never let pass and one other that I'd never heard before; the contention that an atheist, by definition it seems, claims knowledge of everything. Where did this come from?
Dyve: August 8th. 2008 at 2:18pm.
Thanks for that Matthew. I DID make it all the way to the end although the point, as far as I'm concerned, is right at the top.
The assumption that if I don't believe in God, I must know (or think I know) everything there is to know is completely unfounded.
There are knowable things, (Where is the beach nearest my home?) THEORETICALLY knowable things (like how many grains of sand are on the beach. That real number exists, it is a large positive integer, but it is not practical to count them and KNOW that number) and there are completely unknowable things (how many grains will there be in March 2012) but this says nothing whatsoever about God or whether or not "he" is a real being or a man-made concept.
Here's how I would use your analogy to express how I think about such things.
I do NOT know everything. Among the literally infinite number of things I do not know is the exact number of grains of sand on the beach. That does not mean I know NOTHING about the sand on the beach, though. I may not know the exact number of grains but I DO know that it's not 27. There are many other numbers I know it's not. This kind of thinking is (I presume) why atheists are often accused of being negative - because of all the things they know are NOT, without necessarily knowing what IS. There is no conflict in this, we all do it all the time. You do not know how much oranges cost in my local supermarket, but you know it's not $5,000 each. God or no God, these "knowables" are the same.
I could, if I cared enough, do some measuring of the beach, measure individual grains of sand, take depth samples and the like and come up with an estimate. It would not be the "right" number but, if I was careful and detailed, I should get the order of magnitude right. I'd be able to say something like "it's in the tens of billions, probably around 40 billion" or whatever. I do not need to do any of that to know the the answer is not 27.
So, by extension, I do not know the entire history of the universe. I cannot speak with any authority on the likelihood that, out there somewhere, there might be beings more knowledgeable than us, more advanced (whatever that might mean to them). Some of these hypothetical beings may have created life somewhere. They may be regarded, with some justification, as gods by the beings they created. But I CAN know (in the way that I KNOW 27 is the wrong answer to the beach question) that they did NOT create heaven and earth in a week, do NOT take an active role in the lives of humans, do not demand that we live a certain way with regards to birth control, Sundays, etc. They do not care who wins the World's Series or Superbowl, have no opinion about pork or head coverings and had nothing whatever to do with writing the Bible, Koran, Torah or anything else we've heard of because THOSE things (like 27 grains making a beach) are not possible.
The foregoing doesn't "prove" that, any more than I have "proved" that there are more than 27 grains on the beach (I haven't even BEEN to the beach today), but it's just as certain.
The "proof" is all around us - on Earth and off it.We can SEE how life developed, how stars were (and still are) formed, how the Earth came to be and even how gods were created. There are mysteries in the detail. Every time we learn something, new questions are raised. That's life in a huge universe. We don't know everything and we never will. That doesn't mean (or even suggest) that God does. I don't even see how you make that connection.
As for needing God to give us purpose, I read your reasoning as "I cannot believe that life has no ultimate purpose, that would be unbearable, so God must know what the purpose is". See the problem? Why are we so arrogant as to assume that, because we WANT a purpose, there must BE one? We have limited purposes made from our own intellects which are, in turn, the product of our long evolutionary history but ULTIMATE purpose is a nonce concept. Such a thing just cannot be. If we think God provides it, we are intellectually obliged to go on to ask what the purpose of God is? US? Surely not? If that's the answer, it's circular logic again, leads nowhere; certainly nothing "ultimate" about it. His own glorification? Seems a little shallow doesn't it? No, get used to the idea, no matter how unpalatable it may seem at first glance, ultimately, if you stretch the mind and the concept far enough, there is NO ultimate purpose. Wishing that there was does not make God spring spontaneously into existence, and it would not help if he did.
I've read some Bible, as you put it. Sorry, lots of history (and very bloody and "unchristian" much of it is too if I may say so - though that's not my point), a lot of fable, a lot of blatant historic and scientific inaccuracy, a lot of superstition, a few bits of wonderful mistranslation and some downright fabrications. In short, just what we would expect from a huge assortment of ancients from different cultures and centuries with different backgrounds, beliefs, agendas, perspectives and loyalties but NOT what we would expect from an omniscient creator. That's it, that's all, and YES there are atheists and I AM one. If I haven't convinced you of that, I don't know how to and I would have to refer you to an expert - Richard Dawkins would be my choice - try "The God Delusion".
Thanks for your interest, I hope at least some of this makes sense.
END QUOTE
Well, that's quite long - hope you're still with me. There's more. Matthew's reply next time. Stay tuned.
Monday, January 4, 2010
Matthew's Question - The preamble.
As I start to type this, it's been germinating for a long time - at least three years - but a few recent events, minor of themselves, have given me the drive to try and write it. It comes in two parts, just for convenience; this preamble or prologue, then "Matthew's Question".
Way back when Facebook was but a pup and I had just signed up, I got involved in a "questions" board (I can't find it anymore, but it's probably there somewhere) where people could post any question they liked and others who thought they knew the answer could post it. Discussions ensued, debates, outright rows sometimes. It was interesting.
The first time I "played" was when someone asked "What is an atheist?".
I toyed with various tired, flippant answers like "Someone who believes in one less god than you do" but, before I had decided just how to reply, others had beaten me to it.
My first surprise was that whenever anyone gave a "straight" answer (like "it's someone who doesn't believe in God"), an argument broke out as to whether such a thing was possible. The theists in the mix argued along the lines that one could not "not believe" in the ultimate creator - it just was not an option, there's no box for that. What had happened, they claimed, was that the self-proclaimed atheists had (and this IS a quote from one, there were other ways expressing the same idea) "chosen to deny God". One theist answering even defined an atheist as one who "claims" not to believe in God.
This made my jaw drop. I weighed into the discussion and learned something interesting. Bear in mind, please, that many (though not all) of the most vocal theists in this forum were, by now, some stripe of Southern US fundamentalists. The something that I learned was this:-
"These people believe that one can choose what to believe."
Conversely, all the atheists on the board, me included, just accepted that belief is not a choice. They didn't even raise the issue - it just WAS that way. It's actually, I would say, a "linguistic fact"; that is, it's what the word MEANS. "Choosing to believe" is a nonce concept, by definition.
I was familiar, from previous reading, with "Pascal's Wager"; a philosophical argument that says it's a "good idea" to believe in God because you have nothing to lose by being wrong and everything to gain by being right. I had never taken this "reasoning" seriously - and hadn't really thought anyone else did (I gather even Pascal had his tongue firmly in his cheek) - for two reasons.
Firstly, and less relevantly here, surely, any deity worth praying to would KNOW if we were only "believing" so as to hedge our bets and wouldn't grant the benefits we were looking for (or our "Get Out Of Hell Free" card). Secondly, and more pertinently, the idea of a god - any god - either makes sense to an individual or it doesn't. Whether through indoctrination, cultural background, divine revelation or pure thought and reasoning, each of us, surely, believes what we do because, on some level, it makes sense to us, not because we somehow CHOOSE to?
Is Santa Claus real because a child believes he is? In some fiction maybe, but surely not in the real world?
Then another logical penny dropped in my head. What do they mean by "believe IN"?
I "believe IN" free education, no-pay health care, etc. But that means I SUPPORT these things, I think they are right and necessary. It has nothing to do with their existence or otherwise.
That's not what someone is saying when they say they "believe in" some deity, though, is it? They're not just saying "I think God is a good thing" are they?. It had never really bothered me before because the simple fact is that, whatever they mean, I think they're wrong. In just the same way that it doesn't matter to me which god, which religion, which denomination is under discussion. They are all, fundamentally (pun intended) and (almost) equally, wrong.
Now, it is not my purpose here to go into all the reasons why I "believe" what I do. I will do that on request but suffice it to say, for now, in case it's not already obvious, that I am an atheist. That word itself is problematic.
It comes firmly from the other camp. Completing a form that asks my religion, I can easily put "none", since this is, while perhaps unhelpful, undoubtedly true. But "atheist" does not work. A friend recently put this quote on his Facebook page - I don't know where he got it, but I've stolen, and paraphrased it:-
"Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby"
Perfect! I wish I'd thought of it. Thinking about it again, it has Douglas Adams's feel to it, perhaps it's his.
So, I am only an atheist in the context of a discussion on the existence or otherwise of deities. I am no more an atheist the rest of the time than a non-stamp collector is an "aphilatelist" while he's washing his car - though, were he to attend a stamp auction, he might well describe himself that way. This is, incidentally, the beginning of my standard response to comments like "But that's so negative", or "Then what DO you believe in?". I only "have" to be an atheist because "you" are superstitious, t'ain't negative, just real.
See where I'm going with this? LANGUAGE. The languages of the world have all evolved (yes, they did! Just like us) in an environment dominated by religious thinking. It is only necessary for the word "atheist" to exist because subscribing to ancient organized superstitions is still considered normal - it's even still expected, even demanded in many places.
Way back when Facebook was but a pup and I had just signed up, I got involved in a "questions" board (I can't find it anymore, but it's probably there somewhere) where people could post any question they liked and others who thought they knew the answer could post it. Discussions ensued, debates, outright rows sometimes. It was interesting.
The first time I "played" was when someone asked "What is an atheist?".
I toyed with various tired, flippant answers like "Someone who believes in one less god than you do" but, before I had decided just how to reply, others had beaten me to it.
My first surprise was that whenever anyone gave a "straight" answer (like "it's someone who doesn't believe in God"), an argument broke out as to whether such a thing was possible. The theists in the mix argued along the lines that one could not "not believe" in the ultimate creator - it just was not an option, there's no box for that. What had happened, they claimed, was that the self-proclaimed atheists had (and this IS a quote from one, there were other ways expressing the same idea) "chosen to deny God". One theist answering even defined an atheist as one who "claims" not to believe in God.
This made my jaw drop. I weighed into the discussion and learned something interesting. Bear in mind, please, that many (though not all) of the most vocal theists in this forum were, by now, some stripe of Southern US fundamentalists. The something that I learned was this:-
"These people believe that one can choose what to believe."
Conversely, all the atheists on the board, me included, just accepted that belief is not a choice. They didn't even raise the issue - it just WAS that way. It's actually, I would say, a "linguistic fact"; that is, it's what the word MEANS. "Choosing to believe" is a nonce concept, by definition.
I was familiar, from previous reading, with "Pascal's Wager"; a philosophical argument that says it's a "good idea" to believe in God because you have nothing to lose by being wrong and everything to gain by being right. I had never taken this "reasoning" seriously - and hadn't really thought anyone else did (I gather even Pascal had his tongue firmly in his cheek) - for two reasons.
Firstly, and less relevantly here, surely, any deity worth praying to would KNOW if we were only "believing" so as to hedge our bets and wouldn't grant the benefits we were looking for (or our "Get Out Of Hell Free" card). Secondly, and more pertinently, the idea of a god - any god - either makes sense to an individual or it doesn't. Whether through indoctrination, cultural background, divine revelation or pure thought and reasoning, each of us, surely, believes what we do because, on some level, it makes sense to us, not because we somehow CHOOSE to?
Is Santa Claus real because a child believes he is? In some fiction maybe, but surely not in the real world?
Then another logical penny dropped in my head. What do they mean by "believe IN"?
I "believe IN" free education, no-pay health care, etc. But that means I SUPPORT these things, I think they are right and necessary. It has nothing to do with their existence or otherwise.
That's not what someone is saying when they say they "believe in" some deity, though, is it? They're not just saying "I think God is a good thing" are they?. It had never really bothered me before because the simple fact is that, whatever they mean, I think they're wrong. In just the same way that it doesn't matter to me which god, which religion, which denomination is under discussion. They are all, fundamentally (pun intended) and (almost) equally, wrong.
Now, it is not my purpose here to go into all the reasons why I "believe" what I do. I will do that on request but suffice it to say, for now, in case it's not already obvious, that I am an atheist. That word itself is problematic.
It comes firmly from the other camp. Completing a form that asks my religion, I can easily put "none", since this is, while perhaps unhelpful, undoubtedly true. But "atheist" does not work. A friend recently put this quote on his Facebook page - I don't know where he got it, but I've stolen, and paraphrased it:-
"Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby"
Perfect! I wish I'd thought of it. Thinking about it again, it has Douglas Adams's feel to it, perhaps it's his.
So, I am only an atheist in the context of a discussion on the existence or otherwise of deities. I am no more an atheist the rest of the time than a non-stamp collector is an "aphilatelist" while he's washing his car - though, were he to attend a stamp auction, he might well describe himself that way. This is, incidentally, the beginning of my standard response to comments like "But that's so negative", or "Then what DO you believe in?". I only "have" to be an atheist because "you" are superstitious, t'ain't negative, just real.
See where I'm going with this? LANGUAGE. The languages of the world have all evolved (yes, they did! Just like us) in an environment dominated by religious thinking. It is only necessary for the word "atheist" to exist because subscribing to ancient organized superstitions is still considered normal - it's even still expected, even demanded in many places.
So before any discourse can lead to real understanding between these two camps, we have to get very picky about words and what we mean by them.
About 25 years ago, for about 6 weeks, I had a "pet Jehovah's Witness". He came to my door one Saturday morning and when, some three hours later, he left, he promised to come back the next week to continue our conversation because, he said, I was a seeker after truth. He came, week after week, until I told him that one reason I talked to him was that while he was with me, he was not finding more gullible people. He vanished. I enjoyed the mental exercise but only now do I realise how far apart we actually were. When he says "truth", he doesn't mean the same thing as me. I was looking (seeking, if you insist) for insight into the human mind, the social issues surrounding "belief", the rights and wrongs of indoctrination, and so on. He thinks he can open a book and long dead writers will save him from having to think at all. (That's unfair, I know, and deliberately provocative, but I think my point is made).
During the Facebook discussion I was referring to earlier, a young man (I'm calling him Matthew) sent me a private message. Our subsequent discussion was fascinating, enlightening and, in the end, to me anyway, quite sad. I plan to quote from that discussion at length in the next update (which I will start right after I post this one). For reasons that will become clear, I cannot ask Matthew's permission to do this. He may be watching. If so, he will recognise himself and hopefully tell me if he objects. I'm sure he won't/wouldn't and I will not reveal any personal details, but I want to give him what chance I can to comment.
That'll do for this chapter. Next: Matthew's question.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
