It was the song that was playing when I had my sudden moment of clarity in South Shields. Ever since I was a kid, Iād dreamed of being a musician. Those dreams had taken many forms: sometimes I was Little Richard, sometimes Jerry Lee Lewis, sometimes Ray Charles. But whatever form they had taken, none of them had involved standing onstage in a supper club outside of Newcastle, not playing a Vox Continental organ, while Long John Baldry alternately crooned to the accompaniment of a tape recorder and angrily threatened to fine members of the audience fifty pounds. And yet, here I was. Much as I loved John, I had to do something else.
Related Quotes
I was learning to live in the disquiet I felt in Moorland-Spingarn, in the mess of my mind. The gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not an alarm. It was a beacon.
It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this.
Our first gig was in the Studentsā Union ā it my first time on stage and it was terrifying. As I looked out to the packed crowd, all there to check out the Student Union band, every part of me was shaking. Because I was so nervous at first, I forgot all the words to the songs and just made up the lyrics. For our Talking Heads cover, for instance, I just sang, āIām blind, Iām blindā over and over because it was the only part of the song I remembered. Once I got over my nerves, though, watching that big crowd of drunken students dancing and jumping up and down, I thought, I could get used to this. We did a few more gigs in the Union and I played with the jazz pianist one night in a local club in Middlesbrough. I got a taste for being onstageā¦ and it was sweet.
And then, catastrophe struck: Long John Baldry had a huge hit single. Obviously, this would usually have been the cause of great rejoicing, but āLet The Heartaches Beginā was an appalling record, a syrupy, middle-of-the-road, Housewivesā Choice ballad. It was a million miles from the kind of music John should have been making, and it was Number One for weeks, never off the radio. Iād say I didnāt know what he was thinking, but I knew exactly what he was thinking, and I couldnāt really blame him. Heād been slogging around for years and this was the first time heād made any money. The blues cellars stopped booking us and we started playing the supper clubs, which paid better. Often weād play two a night. They werenāt interested in Johnās pivotal role in the British blues boom or his mastery of the 12-string guitar. They just wanted to see someone whoād been on television. Occasionally, I got the feeling they werenāt that interested in music, full stop. In some clubs, if you played over your allotted time, theyād simply close the curtains on you, mid-song. On the plus side, at least the supper club audiences enjoyed āThe Threshing Machineā more than the mods did.
But sometimes, something else happens onstage: from the minute you start playing you just know you can do no wrong. Itās as if your hands are moving independently of your brain; you donāt even have to concentrate, you just feel as free as a bird, you can do anything you want. Those are the gigs you live for, and Dodger Stadium was like that, on both days. The sound was perfect, so was the weather. I can remember standing onstage, feeling the adrenalin coursing through me.
It was a pinnacle, and I was smart enough to know that it couldnāt last, at least not at that pitch. Success on that level never does; it doesnāt matter who you are, or how great you are, your records arenāt going to enter the charts at Number One forever. I knew someone or something else was going to come along. I was waiting for that moment to happen, and the thought of it didnāt scare me at all.
Iāve been a professional musician for my entire adult life, but Iāve never got bored with playing live. Even when I thought I had ā when I was playing the cabaret circuit with Long John Baldry, or in the mid-seventies, when I was just exhausted ā I obviously hadnāt. You could tell by the way I would grandly announce my retirement, then end up back onstage weeks later. Throughout my life that feeling I get before I go on each night, the mix of adrenalin and anxiety, has never changed, and thank God it hasnāt, because that feeling is fucking great. Itās addictive. You might get sick of the travelling, the promotion, all the stuff that surrounds playing live, but that feeling will always keep you coming back for more.