Life [27]
Then, “Since my baby left me”—it was just the sound. It was the last trigger. That was the first rock and roll I heard. It was a totally different way of delivering a song, a totally different sound, stripped down, burnt, no bullshit, no violins and ladies’ choruses and schmaltz, totally different. It was bare, right to the roots that you had a feeling were there but hadn’t yet heard. I’ve got to take my hat off to Elvis for that. The silence is your canvas, that’s your frame, that’s what you work on; don’t try and deafen it out. That’s what “Heartbreak Hotel” did to me. It was the first time I’d heard something so stark. Then I had to go back to what this cat had done before. Luckily I caught his name. The Radio Luxembourg signal came back in. “That was Elvis Presley, with ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ ” Shit!
Around 1959, when I was fifteen, Doris bought me my first guitar. I was already playing, when I could get one, but you can only tinker when you haven’t got one of your own. It was a Rosetti. And it was about ten quid. Doris didn’t have the credit to buy it on hire purchase, so she got someone else to do it, and he defaulted on the payment—big kerfuffle. It was a huge amount of money for her and Bert. But Gus must have had something to do with it too. It was a gut-string job. I started where every good guitar player should start—down there on acoustic, on gut strings. You can get to wire later on. Anyway, I couldn’t afford an electric. But I found just playing that Spanish, an old workman, and starting from there, it gave me something to build on. And then you got to steel strings and then finally, wow! Electricity! I mean, probably if I had been born a few years later, I would have leapt on the electric guitar. But if you want to get to the top, you’ve got to start at the bottom, same with anything. Same with running a whorehouse.
I would just play every spare moment I got. People describe me then as being oblivious to my surroundings—I’d sit in a corner of a room when a party was going on or a family gathering, and be playing. Some indication of my love of my new instrument is Aunt Marje telling me that when Doris went to hospital and I stayed with Gus for a while, I was never parted from my guitar. I took it everywhere and I went to sleep with my arm laid across it.
I have my sketchbook and notebook of that year. The date is more or less 1959, the crucial year when I was, mostly, fifteen years old. It’s a neat, obsessive piece of work in blue Biro. The pages are divided by columns and headings, and page two (after a crucial page about Boy Scouting, of which more later) is called “Record List. 45 rpm.” The first entry: “Title: Peggy Sue Got Married, Artiste(s): Buddy Holly.” Underneath that, in a less neat scrawl, are the encircled names of girls. Mary (crossed out), Jenny (ticked), Janet, Marilyn, Veronica. And so on. “Long Players” are The Buddy Holly Story, A Date with Elvis, Wilde about Marty (Marty Wilde, of course, for those who don’t know), The “Chirping” Crickets. The lists include the usuals—Ricky Nelson, Eddie Cochran, Everly Brothers, Cliff Richard (“Travellin’ Light”)—but also Johnny Restivo (“The Shape I’m In”), which was number three on one of my lists, “The Fickle Chicken” by the Atmospheres, “Always” by Sammy Turner—forgotten jewels. These were the record lists of the Awakening—the birth of rock and roll on UK shores. Elvis dominated the landscape at this point. He had a section in the notebook all to himself. The very first album I bought. “Mystery Train,” “Money Honey,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone.” The crème de