Life [39]
Mick and I had a totally identical taste in music. We never needed to question or explain. It was all unsaid. We’d hear something, we’d both look at each other at once. Everything was to do with sound. We’d hear a record and go, That’s wrong. That’s faking. That’s real. It was either that’s the shit or that isn’t the shit, no matter what kind of music you were talking about. I really liked some pop music if it was the shit. But there was a definite line of what the shit was and what wasn’t the shit. Very strict. First off, I think to Mick and me it was like, we’ve got to learn more, there’s more out there, because then we branched out to rhythm and blues. And we loved the pop records. Give me the Ronettes, or the Crystals. I could listen to them all night. But the minute we went on stage trying to do one of those songs, it was like, “Go to the broom closet.”
I was looking for the core of it—the expression. You would have no jazz without blues out of slavery—that most recent and particular version of slavery, not us poor Celts for example, under the Roman boot. They put those people through misery, not just in America. But there’s something produced by its survivors that is very elemental. It’s not something you take in in the head, it’s something you take in in the guts. It’s beyond the matter of the musicality of it, which is very variable and flexible. There’s loads of kinds of blues. There’s very light kind of blues, there’s very swamp kind of blues, and it’s the swamp basically where I exist. Listen to John Lee Hooker. His is a very archaic form of playing. Most of the time it ignores chord changes. They’re suggested but not played. If he’s playing with somebody else, that player’s chord will change, but he stays, he doesn’t move. And it’s relentless. And the other, the most important thing apart from the great voice and that relentless guitar, was that foot stomp, a crawling king snake. He carried his own two-by-four wood block to amplify his stomps. Bo Diddley was another one who loved to do just that one elemental chord, everything on one chord, the only thing that moves is the vocal and the way you’re playing it. I really only learned more about this later on. Then there was the power in people’s voices, like Muddy, John Lee, Bo Diddley. It wasn’t loud, necessarily, it just came from way down deep. The whole body was involved; they weren’t just singing from the heart, they were singing from the guts. That always impressed me. And that’s why there’s a lot of difference between blues singers that don’t play an instrument and blues players that do, be it piano or guitar, because they have to develop their own way of call and respond. You’re going to sing something and then you’ve got to play something that answers or asks another question and then you resolve. And so your timing and your phrasing become different. If you’re a solo singer you tend to concentrate on the singing, and most times hopefully for the better, but sometimes it can be divorced from the music in a way.
One day, very early on after we’d met up again, Mick and I went to the seaside and we played in a pub, on a trip with my mum and dad to