# ..many things before he died... #
When I joined John's band,
he chose me for how I played - he didn't tell me what to play.
# ..trying to tell you Many things before he died... #
What he supplies very often is a platform
for people to develop.
And in a very giving way,
he lets them do that.
John did open a door, opened people's ears
to the American home-grown,
and then that got transported back to America.
Cos at that time, blues was a dirty word.
This programme contains some strong language.
He attracted good people because they knew they
didn't have to play commercial crap
or stupid chart material for a quick buck. He was just into the blues.
What is it about John Mayall that enabled him to discover and launch
some of Britain's biggest rock stars
by his '60s Bluesbreakers bands?
# Looking back through the years... #
I had a little meeting with John about two years ago,
part of a mission I had undertaken to connect with my past.
I wanted to make amends to John cos I sensed, as the years went by,
that to a certain extent I'd used his hospitality,
used his band and his reputation to launch my own career.
And I felt that I'd never really given him credit for that personally.
But I wanted to sit with him and just say how much he meant to me
as, um...as a sort of a guide.
# Playing the blues on my wind-up gramophone... #
To be honest, I don't think he changes.
He's got some kind of secret, you know,
that we all need. But I think he's a great musician.
I just admire and respect his steadfastness.
# I got me a band called the Bluesbreakers
# I'm setting out on a life that I never know... #
I was only born in Macclesfield because my father was a drinker
and his favourite pub was there.
But we lived in Cheadle Hulme, which is in Cheshire.
That's where I grew up.
My father played guitar and banjo, so there was always
a guitar around the house.
But the starting point for me was to buy for 2/6
the George Formby ukulele banjo tutor book.
Later on, when I was about 13,
I started to branch out and got fascinated by boogie-woogie.
From that point on, I was addicted.
PIANO PLAYS BOOGIE-WOOGIE
Everybody at the age of 18 had to register for National Service
so I signed on for three years and I was sent to Korea.
I was like, "Whoa-oa!"
By the time I got there, the Armistice was on
and I made myself indispensable in the office.
And that's where I stayed for the rest of my term.
Flying in from his home in California,
veteran blues man John Mayall is about to settle many of the ghosts
from his colourful past.
I just love the lifestyle of going out there and going to new places,
revisit old venues and whatever.
The focus has always been on the road work,
rather than on hoping for some hit record,
which has still not happened!
So I've done fairly well so far.
# Well, standing on the corner watching every kind of car
# Friendly people come and say they want to know your star
# I'm walking on Sunset
# And I never reach the end
# Well, I'm walking on Sunset
# Everything is like a friend... #
After I came out of the Army,
my future wife was already at Manchester College of Art.
I met him in the local parish hall on a Saturday Night Hop,
which was our only access to meeting the opposite sex,
and run through the local church.
At art school, I had a band and we used to play impromptu concerts
in the lecture hall at lunch breaks and things like that.
Basically, it was playing Sonny Boy Williamson stuff
and Leadbelly stuff and anything attached to boogie-woogie.
We didn't have a piano at home, so I had to learn on the art school
piano and other people's pianos.
Anybody who'd put up with me for a couple of hours.
He hung himself from a scaffold at the end of the, um...stage,
with blood dripping from his mouth and his head right down
and I thought, "Wow, that's some wild guy!"
I thought he was insane...
..doing this... And then I just thought he was a showman and...
..I just thought he was funny.
I knew him first as a photographer.
He turned up at a rehearsal and started crawling around the floor,
shooting up the legs of the piano player
and taking weird shots from every angle.
I first heard of John Mayall when I was about 14 years old
and reading the Daily Mirror.
There was an article about this Manchester art student
who was being evicted from
his treehouse for not paying rates.
Seriously, that was the first time I actually heard about John Mayall.
After my parents got divorced and we moved up the road to, um...
..my grandfather's house and my mother's father,
so rather than share a room,
I built a treehouse at the bottom of the garden
and spent a lot of time up there.
It then got more sophisticated.
I had a water tank attached to the outside and a power line
running from the house.
He'd invited the local press to take pictures of him
carrying his bride up a rope ladder to this tree.
He slung her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes
and climbed up this rope ladder saying,
"Folks, our honeymoon now begins. Take as many pictures as you like."
# My baby would sure hate to lose me
# Your baby ain't sweet like mine
# Do the right thing every time... #
It was my cousin who'd found this youth club
and he said, "There's this guy up there, a bit eccentric,
"but he's a really nice guy.
"And he's running this youth club music night."
John was there. Actually, he was called Johnny Mayall.
He had a short crew cut, a kind of sloppy sweater,
and he was what we'd call a bohemian.
And he just flailed around on the piano, playing endless 12-bar blues.
I didn't know he was a player until this trumpet player, John Rowland...
We'd been to see the Alexis Korner Blues Incorporated
and Alexis playing a bit of guitar and singing.
And afterwards, John Rowland said,
"We should bloody well do that. Stick a singer up and play jazz all night.
"They'll think it's rhythm and blues.
Get him to sing some numbers
and we'd pack the place out."
I said, "Good idea. Who do you know who could do that?"
He said, "There's this fellow John Mayall I know
"who plays boogie-woogie at the Black Lion in Salford Tuesday nights."
He very quickly took over the band and when it came to live gigs,
he did all the announcements and introduced US!
PHONE RINGS
Hello.
This is John.
Although he lives the sunshine life
in California,
Mayall has been constantly on the road throughout his 40-year career.
His next trip back to England will culminate
in a 70th-birthday concert in Liverpool,
where he will reunite onstage
with Eric Clapton for the first time in 38 years.
..in July in Liverpool.
We're celebrating my 70th birthday
and Eric Clapton will be joining me,
which is the first time in three or four decades.
So it's a Bluesbreakers fan's dream come true.
The second time I met him
was at his house. He told me that on Saturday nights,
if I wanted to come and hear some new records,
he had an open house at this semidetached
Longsight house he lived in.
People rolled up right through
the night and sat and listened to jazz records
that he'd either bought or taped from the Voice Of America Jazz Hour
from a 40-foot wireless mast at the bottom of his garden.
John was like a DJ. He'd jump up and down, have everything prepared
and he had music taping, all reel-to-reel stuff.
He used to tape AFM, Voice Of America,
French and German programmes that played a lot of jazz and blues then.
If things were flagging, you know...
..there was a bit of dope smoked
and people would be nodding off,
and he'd liven things up.
He'd go upstairs and change into his Roman centurion outfit.
He'd come down the stairs and go, "Ha!"
I mean, what else did I expect on a Saturday night?
It was hardly going to the Ivy or anything like that.
I'd got small children and a day job.
I went to bed. It didn't bother me.
I met Pamela and she was very beautiful.
Dark hair, very long Pre-Raphaelite hair, I seem to remember,
and a couple of kids, but we never saw them,
So it was the beginning of my apprenticeship with John
in terms of getting to know a lot of music.
So I went out for a meal and I sat down,
thinking up titles and things like that.
So at least we've got keys now and some idea
what we're going to do. We'll get on the stage now.
You could scream out a title... It wouldn't mean a light.
It would mean nothing! I don't know the titles!
Yeah, baby!
We never considered taking it up professionally.
It wasn't in my mind and it certainly wasn't in his in the very early days.
And only when our great friend Alexis Korner
used to come and play in Manchester
and would always stay with us and we then discussed,
"Now's the time to move, now's the time to move,"
that we considered that he'd become a full-time musician.
We were playing a private party, a girl's 21st-birthday party,
at the Whaler Room at this big hotel in Wilmslow. A very good job for us.
We were well paid, an appreciative audience,
and
at the end of that night, John said,
"That's it. I'm turning professional.
"Now, straight away, I'm going to London.
I'm going to go to London within a month.
"Anybody who wants to join me is in. Anybody who won't is out."
Many British kids were as excited
by the discovery of this alien music from black America
as the previous generation had been by rock and roll.
I thought I'd give it a go and went down to London,
I'd met Alexis in Manchester,
and he said, "If you come to London, I'll introduce you to a few people."
So he introduced me to, um...several musicians
and more importantly, Rick Gunnell at the Flamingo.
So we did three gigs at the weekend with the Manchester guys
and that showed me it was where I wanted to go.
London was very fortunate in the '60s
to have many clubs where you could see bands, either above pubs
or down below in very hot, steamy basements.
Ideal, really, for hearing a hot blues band playing.
It was the start of the blues boom. R&B was all the rage.
It seemed like there was a new group every week.
But behind all the new groups, like the Spencer Davis Group
or the Yardbirds or the T-Bones,
was John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. Everybody looked up to them.
The first time I ever met John
was at the Flamingo in Wardour Street. I remember thinking that
there was something about John's sound and him as a personality
that made him just that little bit more interesting, musically,
than other bands I went to see.
Most of the other bands were copying
American black R&B and blues products. To me,
John was the closest to something new and original
in the blues framework. That excited me.
Most of the bands in those early days - that was another thing
that was different about John -
most of the R&B bands in London had come out of jazz.
They'd come out of trad, perhaps,
but the great majority of them had at least one modern jazz musician.
In the case of the Manfreds, three or four.
Even politicians get the blues.
Mayall and his bemused American band members have been invited
to the Houses of Parliament as a result of their forthcoming
concert in aid of the children's charity, UNICEF.
Lovely to see you again. Better weather than last time. Definitely.
Hello. Nice to meet you. Mrs Mayall.
Hi. This is Sampson. Nice to meet you.
Do come in.
Mr Chales Kennedy, Mr John Mayall,
Mr Robin Millar, Buddy Whittington... Hello, sir.
OVERLAPPING CHATTER
..little John Mayall... Right.
..and Mrs John Mayall behind him. Yes.
Can you stand next to John?
Great privilege to meet you. Thank you. Nice to meet you.
The leader of the Tory Party hosted a reception here last night
for the relaunch of the Carry On films.
Oh, really? There is no competition!
No competition! I agree. I totally agree.
Hitting London after his apprenticeship,
John Mayall was older and cannier
than most of the emerging young players on the scene,
and as a band leader, he had a nose for business and an eye for talent.
Some of the gigs were on a percentage of the door.
It'd be a guarantee against so much percentage of the door.
So John bought a clicker, as they were called,
and as soon as the door opened, he'd go to the door
and he'd stand there clicking the thing
as each punter came in until it was time to go onstage,
then we'd play, and he'd know exactly how many people were in that hall,
so he'd go to the manager and say...
..so he was very astute.
He was more sort of your actual businessman band leader
and I-pay-you type of bloke.
He told you what you should do
and when he thought you didn't do it right.
The day I joined John was the first day I started work. I was 16.
Here I was, launching on a career, a job with a tax office!
And also, in the evenings, playing in a band. That was very exciting.
It was travelling, and...
..it was fun.
When I first started, I was young -
I was 16, 17 - and he was quite a bit older.
At that time, I thought he was a complete nutcase.
He had these harmonicas and his weird gadgets.
He used to live in trees.
Until The Yardbirds with Eric Clapton,
I felt I was the only one who had the background and understanding
of what the blues was all about.
He'd done about a year with them, and their first record,
For Your Love, went to the top of the charts,
and made them into a pop group, which is what Eric didn't want,
so he walked out on them.
On the B-side was an instrumental which was totally Eric.
MUSIC: "Got To Hurry" by The Yardbirds
It was just an amazing piece of blues.
I heard that record, and would play that over and over,
and I just wanted to work with him.
I got a call from John.
He was asking if I was interested in joining his band.
I think he had a guy called Roger Dean,
who was the guitar player before me,
and I don't know whether Roger had left
or John was wanting to replace him, but I was intrigued by him.
That's when I made him the offer to play blues with the Bluesbreakers
and, of course, he accepted.
It was just a partnership that was meant to be.
When Eric came into the band, it really took off,
because he was such an exciting player.
Friends used to come to see the gigs and they'd say, "He's fantastic!"
He was obsessed with making it as a blues player. He was a blues purist.
That was his total focus.
That was a powerful band. It wasn't just John.
God bless him - he was the focal point and the custodian,
and all of it comes from his choice in musicians,
and he always had great people passing through,
but the net result was the combination
of Hughie Flint and John McVie and me and John.
We'd been on the road long enough to go in and play our set.
The whole time this was going on, I'd been plugging away at Decca,
"You must sign John Mayall. Not only has his band improved tenfold,
"but he has a star in the making within the band in Clapton.
"If you miss out on this, you'll miss out on something big,
"because this guy, Mayall and the band, are going.
"They'll go big time, and if we don't get in now, somebody else will."
So we went into the studios, the Decca studios,
with that band, with John and Eric,
which became the Beano album.
My recollection of that date in the studio
was we were unloading the gear, taking it in,
playing, packing up and leaving.
We played the same way we did in the clubs in the studio.
MUSIC: "Have You Heard" by The Bluesbreakers
The Bluesbreakers' Beano album with Clapton became the benchmark
British blues album of its era.
The engineer, Gus Dudgeon, wasn't too pleased about it,
cos it was distorting or louder than he would've liked.
Mike said, "This is the way it should be."
With Eric playing at the volume he was playing at,
they didn't know what to do, so we had to find the way to do it,
and that was exciting.
That was the most exciting part of the project -
when we found how to deal with it, we had the sound.
What they were doing was using their excitement and their love
of artists like Freddy King,
and saying, "I'm going to play those licks and put my own sound
"on top of the sound I hear on King's record, and make that MY sound."
It did really well in the charts and I think it was one of the ones
that really helped us to get to America.
Hi, come on in. This is the cinema.
We're just having a movie day today,
which means we have this great place in here
that I constructed and decorated myself.
It's full of memorabilia
which you can look around.
Right now, I'm going to get some popcorn going.
This is the museum, a blues museum or whatever.
I'll just put one batch in there.
Over here is one of our showcases of weird memorabilia.
A mongoose and a snake
donated to me by John McVie,
and various other strange and wonderful things.
I came to John's house one day and he'd been out in the garden
reading Melody Maker and he was furious.
He said, "Eric's rehearsing with a man in some church."
I said, "Is he?" So the next thing I know is John has sacked Eric.
There may be more to this story,
but that's how I understood it then.
It was after I'd been in the band that he started experimenting
with drink and all that stuff,
and women, too, because I was a complete
absolute sex maniac at that point,
and we, at the end of our collaboration,
were fighting over one woman, if I remember.
We fell out pretty big time over one lady in particular.
We were both into the ladies, that's for sure.
I've seen that tape where he says there was a battle of some sort.
I have to ask him who that was.
I don't know!
He now had to replace God. Wherever you went, you saw it written
on walls - "Eric Clapton is God".
He had to find someone to replace him who at least had the spirit Eric had.
We had a good chemistry together.
It was like... The illusion I created to a certain extent in my own head
was, "Now I can take this and go anywhere with it." It wasn't true.
When I went to Cream,
I thought I'd go to a higher platform, but it didn't.
A lot of the energy that I had managed to...
..formulate with John, stayed there, you know,
and Peter Green actually moved in and got hold of that.
Basically, Peter was somebody who used to come to The Flamingo
and hear us a lot,
and he wanted to have a go.
He thought he was qualified enough,
so, like I say, when Eric went off to Cream,
I gave him a shot and he was really remarkable.
MUSIC: "Someday After a While..." by The Bluesbreakers
John usually chooses the people he wants,
chooses very carefully. He knows what he wants. He usually gets it.
How long he keeps what he gets - this goes for anyone -
is a different matter.
There are great guitar players who technically you can't fault,
but they don't have what Peter has -
the inner soul.
Mayall clearly had an extraordinary knack as a band leader,
attracting one future rock star to his band after another.
Once Eric Clapton had left to form Cream, the future guitar hero
of Fleetwood Mac fell into his place.
Good though Peter was, he hadn't got the flair yet that Eric had.
He wasn't as mature as Eric's playing was,
and I was grumbling and very unhappy,
so John Mayall one day rang me up and said,
"The Marquee on Saturday will be your last gig."
So I said, "OK." I was fed up with it.
"But, anyway, OK, if that's what you want."
No kind of discussion, no kind of,
"We've been together for ten years, we're old mates," but,
"Your last gig is on Saturday"!
MUSIC: "Down In Mississippi" by The Bluesbreakers
On the one hand, you're kind of sorry
to not be with that person onstage any more,
but on the other hand it gives you...you
put somebody else in, and it alters the chemistry,
and it gives you a new lease of life on the music that might have
otherwise gotten a little bit stale.
He said, "Bit of a hard week this week. We only did four gigs,
so instead of £35,
"I'm afraid I can only pay you £30"! Thanks, John.
One, two, three...
Nearing 70, Mayall has been keen to make peace with his past.
Recently, he's played with many of his old Bluesbreakers,
including his one-time rhythm section
John McVie and Mick Fleetwood.
# Can't figure it out But she understands... #
The behaviour thing really wasn't an issue until, um,
the demon drink took over John McVie.
I was drinking too much, which John took care of...
..by firing me. Twice.
He'd get turfed out of the van in the middle of...up north, you know.
At the top of the M1, John would chuck John out of the van
with a bottle of rum in his hand, swearing,
then the next day it would be as if nothing had happened.
That became difficult because it would affect the performances.
I didn't have any rules as long as people showed up to do the job.
He's the boss.
To a point.
I mean, hell, if you want to go by those rules, then everything's fine,
but if you...um,
step outside of that, then it's his prerogative.
HE PLAYS BASS GUITAR
No doubt about it, he was a great bass player,
and he was the right person for The Bluesbreakers.
He and Peter got on great,
and Mick Fleetwood came in the band.
Peter said, "I know this guy that can do a two and four! That's about it.
"He can just about do a drum roll,
"but he keeps good time and he's a great friend of mine."
That's how it happened, I do believe.
I just lucked out, because it suited my playing.
I'm not a technician.
I play from the heart,
so the music that John Mayall was playing,
and then, later on, Peter Green and John McVie and myself,
we were a blues band, pure and simple.
There was a solidarity there that was obviously going to move on.
I mean, you could tell that,
and they knew John McVie would
eventually come.
That's why they
came up with the name Fleetwood Mac.
When someone's ready to move on, John knows that, and it's like...
..what he supplies very often is a platform for people to develop
and, in a very giving way, he lets them do that,
and when it's time for them to go
or you can feel the horse is pulling a bit,
it's like, "Sure," and that's what he's done.
# The odds are stacked
# They're up and down
# Got a yoyo man... #
Of course it was a totally different lifestyle
and it was something that led to the split up of our marriage, you know.
In 1966, we split up,
because I'd never had an experience in life like...
..you know, doing music for a living...
I don't know, just the whole thing.
It was a turnaround in my life.
It was the early days of the '60s, loads of girls around,
and he felt he was trapped within a marriage.
He couldn't stay out all night or one time he wanted to build
a thing at the end of our big garden
and be able to bring people back, which didn't fit in with my views.
I'm fairly liberal.
We'd adopted a fourth child, and he left when he was two months old.
He went off with his fan club secretary! There you go!
With the American members of the band now recovered from jet lag
and their visit to the House of Lords,
the band is on the road to Liverpool
to meet up with Eric Clapton,
Chris Barber - the man who first brought many American blues artists
to Britain in the '50s and '60s -
and Mick Taylor.
I was 15 and I was very much into rhythm and blues.
Playing the music that John plays,
it gives you a lot of opportunity to develop your own ideas -
it gives you a lot of freedom, you know, within the blues framework.
So it did do me a lot of good, being with John.
Do you respect him as a musician?
Oh, yeah. He knows what he's doing.
I went to this show at Welwyn Garden City Community Centre, or something.
I said to John Mayall when I got backstage,
"John, would you mind if I, um...sat in with you
"and had a play?" And, much to my amazement,
he looked up at me and said, "Yeah, why not?"
He really loved it, and we said that we would keep in touch
with each other, and exchanged phone numbers.
But I think we lost touch with each other somehow.
I put an advert in the Melody Maker.
I didn't mention who it was for,
just, "Blues guitarist wanted
for well-known blues band, blah-blah,"
and Mick Taylor answered that advert,
I think maybe on the second day, or something like that.
I didn't really need to answer the phone after that.
I've never been as nervous in my life,
because I was following in the footsteps
of Eric Clapton and Peter Green.
It was about 18 months before I really found my feet,
and would improvise more and more,
and play different things every night, and, um...still do.
One of his great qualities was his slide guitar playing.
We hadn't had anybody in the band who'd been into that.
Mick, also...
he had a more jazzy background than the other two.
We used to do all kinds of stuff with John Mayall.
We never used to know what he was going to do next,
and I learnt a lot
about different types of blues music and styles of playing and sounds.
Some American...jazz orchestra
had put together something which was a suite - a jazz suite -
and I thought this would be a good idea, to...to actually tell a story,
a complete story, like chapters, and have them all joined together.
In the Bare Wires Suite, Mayall began to add
some jazz flavouring to his blues,
while his personal diary-style songs explored
the break-up of his first marriage.
Considering the musicianship I had at my disposal,
it was an opportunity to do that and write a whole story,
which filled one side of the LP.
Bare Wires stands up,
and it was, I have no doubt, the forerunner of the jazz-rock movement.
I do think Bare Wires is a groundbreaker, I really do.
It just kind of focused a lot of that stuff in a completely different way,
and I think partly it had to do with the fact that John hadn't had a lot
to do with jazz up to that point.
He thought, "I could get into this!" And he could!
I learnt that you could write a song
about going down to the supermarket and meeting a girl.
I mean, he just used to write some songs off the top of his head
without even thinking.
And if you read them - if you just read them as lyrics,
they'd sound ridiculous, you know?
But...
You know - "I went down to the supermarket to find myself a chick!"
John was the first person I knew
that was trying to write in a blues format.
In the Yardbirds, we would always do covers,
and I don't think we had much success at writing things.
So it was interesting to me that John would try and write songs,
but remain in the blues format.
DRILL BUZZES
This isn't my guitar, you see.
This is one of those that I get from the guitar shop -
Norm's Rare Guitars.
And he lends them to me, and then I do some of my artwork on them,
and then he lets me have two in exchange,
so it's a pretty good deal.
It had been nearly four years,
and then he certainly felt that it was not only time for a change
for him musically, but time for a change of personnel,
and also it was time for him to move to America.
I wanted to do something different,
quite frankly.
I was kind of bored with the same line-up of guitar, bass, drums,
and whatever else I played.
So conveniently, Mick Jagger called me up around that time.
He wanted a replacement for Brian Jones so they could go on the road,
and so I told him that I was going to be changing over my line-up
and Mick Taylor would be available.
John Mayall called me and told me that the Stones were interested in...
..in trying me out as a guitar player,
I thought for some session work, but apparently it turned out
to be a bit more than that.
Everybody thought that he was forever
going to have a band featuring
the new Eric Clapton or Peter Green.
He reached a point where he got sick of that, and put together an album
with a band called Turning Point.
He turned his back on the expected format of guitar, bass and drums
and brought in acoustic instruments.
I just wanted to do something
different with a little less volume,
experiment in that area.
It worked very well, but it had its limitations
and that particular line-up only lasted pretty much a year,
to the exact month.
Of course it did widen my audience,
particularly in the States.
Previously, we'd made our first American tour,
and I was really thrilled with that.
It wasn't just the appreciation for the music, it was the way of life
and everything else about it.
And so at that point I had decided that was where I wanted to move to.
I think the move to America was a recognition of where I belonged.
I'd always been connected to America
via movies, literature and music, of course.
So I moved there and it felt right.
35 years later, it still feels right.
And we recorded the album USA Union in Los Angeles,
and that became the next chapter,
but the first chapter with American musicians.
# My, my pretty girl
# Sitting in her room of red
# My pretty girl
# Lying on her furry bed
# Pretty as the moonlight I only want to treat her right... #
I'd left school at 15, did a year in Wales in a sixth-form college,
farting about - taking mushrooms and making home-brew -
came back to London, three-day week, 10.30 the BBC's off.
Remember that time, when they used to cut television alternate nights?
I thought, "Fuck this for a laugh! I'll go and make a fortune,
become a millionaire in America."
So I called up me dad, and I said, "Hey, John, it's your old son here.
"I'm going to come out to LA."
# It's so... #
The only place I lived during those years was the house in Laurel Canyon
that inspired several songs.
In Laurel Canyon, Mayall found himself
at the epicentre of the new Californian counter-culture,
rubbing shoulders with the likes of Joni Mitchell
and his new neighbour, Frank Zappa.
Living in Laurel Canyon without a car, we relied on everybody else.
But mind you, he was a real drinker, so it would have been
not a good
thing to be driving as well.
I drank extensively
and wholeheartedly for...about 14 years, I think.
I started late.
I think I didn't take my first drink until 1967 or 8.
And I had a beer.
And I was out of it!
It was known as the Brain Damage Club in those days.
We had the best-stocked bar in Hollywood.
The bottles were this big, with big plungers on the top,
you know, for your shots.
You had your vodka and your whiskies,
then you had a million other - creme de menthes and every mixer
and books on how to mix every kind of drink under the sun.
And it was... I did my very best to drink that bar dry with my new mates,
skateboarding buddies! Dogtown And Z-Boys, all of that.
My favourite period with my dad's band was when he moved to America
and I had hit pubescence - I was like, 13, 14 -
and I started to go over there a lot on my own
and hang out with him at the Brain Damage Bar
with all the gangsters and all the movie stars
and the famous musos and the Vietnam vets.
Some fantastic nights there.
I was one of those drunks that could drink first thing in the morning,
all the way through the day until last thing at night,
and rarely show any side-effects, other than a happy glow!
But I always took care of business.
He wasn't like a binge drinker - he just started drinking,
but got a real taste for it, cos it was fun!
I was telling myself that I was experimenting -
seeing what it would do to my head.
If there was a good side to it at all, it might have been my total
freedom to go out with any band
and say, "OK, we're not going to have any set list,
"we're just going to play. I'll call a key, we'll just do it."
That was one of the ingredients
that made the jazz-blues fusion
thing kind of unique,
because it was a lot of fun to go out and improvise the whole set.
# Oh, what you do... #
At that time, the industry changed - disco came in
and there was less interest in the blues. It was left to us
to put out the albums, and they just didn't
do the business they thought they would,
cos there wasn't the market for that kind of music any more.
We were left out in the cold, really.
# ..life is a gamble
# Gave up the 9 to 5
# It always stored up
# Get up in the morning just to survive... #
Yeah. I could not remember the exact year - '72 or something.
Oh, it's reflected. You'll have to move over, dear.
It's not working. There - that's sort of.
There we are in the garden on Grand View Drive, Laurel Canyon.
I was singing with Harvey Mandel,
and John sat in with the band...
..and we started a torrid affair.
He was the strangest man I've ever met.
Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.
He was very eccentric - he still is - and a renaissance man.
When I met him, he was wearing these cut-off shorts
that he'd sewn himself,
no shirt, he was tanned and gorgeous, flowing hair, no shoes.
Another thing on his belt that he'd made,
that he had his harmonicas stuck in.
John had been hustling me for rent, so I said, "There you go - $400."
And I go off to work with my next-door neighbour,
leave my nice little car outside the yard,
and we drive off in his jeep to work at Universal Studios,
and at lunchtime we come out, look up -
"That's Laurel Canyon! That's a fire!"
So we drive back up, and just see the house burning down
from the bottom of Sunset Strip, going, "There's my house,
"but yours is gone!"
MAGGIE: We'd just had a swim,
and went into his cinema to watch The French Connection.
I don't think we even had shoes on.
We just had to get out really quickly.
The house across the street blew up right in front of our eyes.
In the panic, you don't really think.
It was snowing ash
and the helicopters were there.
It was pretty scary.
A friend had come over to visit and so we went off in his vehicle
and left everything behind, thinking that we'd come back later.
Of course, we never did come back later.
It wiped out everything I'd ever had.
All my possessions, everything I'd ever had.
Hard to imagine that...
Quite a blow. Never got over it to this day, really.
I think it's one of the only times
I've really known him to break down.
And...it was a terrible loss.
I think he was gutted because he lost his diaries,
he lost his porn collection,
he lost everything.
He lost the 400 bucks I gave him.
He lost his passport. I mean, you just lose everything.
But at the same time you go, "God! That was close!"
Up to that point, Laurel Canyon had been the ideal place for me.
After the fire, we did rebuild, but it was never the same.
It was like we were trying to recreate what had been there,
and there was a magic there that really was lost.
And then John married and moved off and then moved back up there,
then had kids. And his whole life changed after the fire.
He became more stable. Second wife,
second life, second family -
and got his career on the move again.
I stopped drinking in '84
and around that time I put together - after various different bands -
I put together the traditional quartet line-up.
I actually had two guitar players -
Coco Montoya and Walter Trout.
# And you know that I can't be in love, child
# Something you never know... #
We went to Hungary and I had one of
the little tape machines on the
sound board,
and recorded an outdoor concert,
and it came out really well.
I shot this thing around with GNP/Crescendo.
I didn't tell them it was just a cassette.
I had the cassette copied onto a reel-to-reel thing,
said "this is it" and let them play it on that.
So they took that and it was like the foot in the door.
So we went to Germany and recorded the album Chicago Line
which was then picked up by Island Records.
So, step by step, we worked back
into the mainstream of known record companies.
And it's been a step up each time.
And albums have just been accumulating along the way.
The Bluesbreakers have now arrived at Liverpool Dock,
where 4,500 of the faithful have
gathered to celebrate John Mayall's
birthday
and to reunite with some of his more
famous former band members.
It's been a long journey to his historic gig
for the godfather of British blues, who now has an all-American line-up
of musicians, featuring Buddy Whittington on lead guitar,
in the latest incarnation of the Bluesbreaker band.
Now, at last, Mayall is back onstage in Britain
with his most famous original Bluesbreaker.
For Eric Clapton, it's time to take the measure of this mentor.
I mean, if there's anything missing it's self-doubt.
I don't know if John has ever experienced self-doubt,
and I don't know that any artist is really 100% without that.
John has always been an incredible
optimist with a tremendous ability to move forward
without ever seeming to question where he's going. He's focused.
I admire and respect it, but at the same time, I wonder, you know,
if there is any of that in him or not. He keeps it well hidden.
I count my two as the one with the...
# Dalala dalala la. #
That's the first one of my two.
Otherwise, I'll need three!
So we break at one, then the next one
and then we're free to go.
One, two, three!
John showed me by example how to be a successful band leader.
You hire a musician for what he's going to bring,
not what you tell him he's going to play.
I learned that as being the ideal way of being a band leader.
When I joined John's band,
he chose me for the way I played - he didn't tell me what to play.
John did open people's ears.
Think what he's...he's done.
People in his bands, what they've done and come out
and made people aware of American blues. Amazing.
He gave people so much room to experiment.
In other bands, you'd never get
as much solo space as you did in a year of two with John Mayall.
To me, John is still as exciting
and in-your-face as he always was.
When you have someone who creates that much of a spot for himself
in the music industry, it's like a flashing beacon. You can't ignore it.
My life would've been very different if it hadn't been for John.
I'd still be dealing with drunk Irishmen in the tax office.
He's going to be rocking on and on and on.
Believe me. What's he going to do on his days home?
Is everybody ready to commence with the festivities?
CROWD CHEERS
Ladies and gentlemen,
would you welcome Mr John Mayall!
CROWD CHEERS
If you call him the godfather of British blues, that's cool with me.
He is the father figure. Who else are you going to look to?
It's the creative enjoyment which is first and foremost
but also I just love the lifestyle.
We just get up there onstage and get our rocks off.
You know, there's nothing like it.
# All the love I miss loving
# All the kiss I miss kissing
# All the love I miss loving
# All the kiss I miss kissing... #
As a singer and the writer of the songs, I have full confidence
in whoever I'm working with.
I'm very proud of all the associations I've had
and it's been a great ride so far.
Yeah!