Once I had a pretty little girl
I lose my baby, ain't that sad?
Once I had a pretty little girl
I lose my baby, ain't that sad?
You know you can't Spend what you ain't got
You can't lose What you ain't never had
Well, you know you can't Spend what you ain't got
You can't lose What you ain't never had
- We'll take it fancy, just however. - Well, that's, that's good.
- That's gonna work. - That's really getting there.
- There's no changes in there, is there? - No, none.
Am I wrong
Only in loving you?
Tell me Am I wrong
Only in loving you?
While your other man Was out there
Cheating and lying Stepping all over you
Am I wrong
Going that way?
How's it going?
Good.
- What is it called? - Lush life.
It just starts right in. One, two, three.
I'm known as a rambler
And my home is in No one man's town
I'm known as a rambler
And my home is in No one man's town
And I ain't gonna let nobody
Ever gonna tie me down
The judges all knows me
As a man with a smiling' face
The judges all knows me
As a man with a smiling' face
And there's no man
There's ever gonna take my place
You gotta to find, my baby
If you wanna get along with me
You got to, got to, got to, Got to, got to, got to
Find, my baby
If you wanna get along with me
Hand to the child Hand to the child
I'm not that fool That I used to be
Every morning the sun comes up
With the evening
In the evening the sun goes down
Every morning the sun comes up
In the evening the sun goes down
I gotta live
Fast in your town
Key of E?
No, it's fine, but it's a hard key for alto, though.
It is.
- Yeah, how was that? - Beautiful.
And the most popular form of popular music...
was the big band style from the posh hotels.
Ambrose and his orchestra from the Mayfair Hotel...
somebody else. Sidney Lipton from the Dorchester and all that.
The dance bands were the big thing in those days.
Musicians played in big bands...
slaving over hot scores to earn their money...
and then went down and played jazz after hours for nothing...
for the love of it.
Bear in mind that in the forties the jazz scene was these clubs...
where people played records and discussed it in...
serious sorts of tones, you know.
There was no Blues scene.
Here was half a dozen people in Britain who knew what it was.
It began in the late, very late forties, really.
It didn't get into a big scale with the public until...
I suppose really when we started up in the band in '53 with Ken Colyer...
in '54 when I took the band over. About then.
The first jazz band that I ever saw was the Freddy Randall Jazz Band.
Shortly, very shortly after that I saw the Humphrey Lyttelton band...
which was much more sort of what I would call authentic.
When I got to London...
I discovered that there was this movement led by Humphrey Littleton...
the revivalist movement, not the traditional movement...
playing jazz of the kind that was recorded in the 20s in Chicago.
Oliver, Armstrong, Morton and so on.
It was a revivalist thing in the sense, so it was...
those of us who played it and I was one of them.
Had this idea that we were going to pick up where...
Jelly Roll Morton and all those people left off.
Woke up this morning'
When chickens was crowing' for day
Felt on the right side Of my pilla'
My man had gone away
By his pilla'
He left a note
Reading', I'm sorry, Jane
You got my goat
No time to marry
No time to settle down
I'm a young woman
And ain't done running' 'round
The revivalists, for instance, wouldn't tolerate Bebop.
- Really? - No.
And the Bebop people wouldn't tolerate revivalism...
they called us moldy figs.
And then came Ken Colyer and that again sort of sub-split the split anyway.
Ken was a strange man actually. Great trumpet player.
He's a man who's been... who's been, I feel rather...
misrepresented by many people who...
claimed to represent his ideals and everything else.
And I first knew Ken, indeed my first band was a revival style band.
We got together with Ken in 1948.
He liked George Lewis and revived archaic New Orleans was his bag.
While classic New Orleans was our bag...
so we thought: It doesn't really work, so it didn't.
I don't think we've had a New Orleans style trumpet player of his equal.
Finally he managed to get... he got to New Orleans...
by joining the merchant Navy and jumping ship at Mobile Alabama...
and got to new Orleans without a passport or a work permit.
He went over there and found all these very old boys and played with them.
And adopted the way they played.
There are legends that he...
- pay slightly out of tune to get... - No.
- Not true? - Rubbish.
No, rubbish.
Total rubbish. Ken never played out of tune.
Ken was a wonderful ear. Sadly he didn't know any music...
cause he'd have been better off if he had known music.
He never punched me. He threatened to.
But that as I said has nothing to do with it at all.
Ken Colyer was the closest thing to George Lewis...
I think that you can find on this side of the water. I didn't know it...
it's interesting to someone who wasn't even nowhere near being...
musically savvy at that time. I was a young teenager, I could know that.
It was all so it has to be intuitive.
What was amusing was that there was Ken Colyer in the club.
Louis Armstrong played and I watched Ken, you know...
because Ken, he'd been the great deviator...
the man that stopped jazz being jazz by killing the New Orleans tradition.
- The Devil. - Yes. The Devil.
So when he'd finished blowing wonderfully, with Humph, I think...
I went over to Ken and said "What do you think Ken?"
I was so mischievous Ken said: "He'll do".
I also sat and listened enthralled to Big Bill Broonzy...
sitting on a chair in the middle of the room, playing the guitar...
and talking about the Blues.
He was one of the first to come over.
Billed as the last of the Mississippi Bluesmen...
in 1951 when he first came over or '50.
And of course since then there have been about a hundred.
We also went on tour with Big Bill Broonzy...
who was a lovely man.
A terrible liar, of course.
He said that he owned eight farms and all that...
and when he died, he left nothing at all, but why not?
Broonzy had a big body of work, which not everyone is familiar with...
being in bands playing with piano players.
We booked Broonzy for the concert but asked him...
not to play the electric guitar...
and also to play the old field blues, country blues.
He was living a kind of a lie, as we found out later...
because one got the impression he'd come straight from the Delta...
into a studio and then into fame.
But that was an important lie, though, wasn't it?
An important lie, but the real truth was he came out of Chicago...
where he'd sung rhythm and blues at one time.
It didn't matter, did it?
He could play and he could sing wonderfully.
He was in fact a forerunner...
of the Muddy Waterses and the Buddy Guys and people like that.
Think about how all the people who came up through Big Bill Broonzy...
he was like the Art Blakey of the Blues world, you know.
He had, you know, Memphis Slim and the original Sonny Boy Williamson...
Jazz Gillum, Big Maceo, Josh Altheimer.
So many people.
Broonzy got shown on TV, too.
The other things was that he was big here...
was because on something like "News Night"...
or one of those they showed some footage and it was so spellbinding...
that I think anyone that was leaning in that direction got it from there.
Big Bill Broonzy was the first singer I heard.
He came over and it was on Six-Five Special, I think.
I just loved the rawness of it, but he was very musical with it.
To me, the connotation was Black music was acoustic...
and White rock 'n ' roll was electric.
Also Brownie McGhee.
Now I know that Brownie himself actually played in the club...
I was in and I was there at that time as a boy sitting at his feet, you know.
That was the first time close up I'd ever seen somebody play the Blues.
Hey
Hey Lord, Lord hey, Lord
Hey, hey, hey Lord, Lord, Lord
The blind one wants to go for a pee...
so the crippled one says...
"Better go with him. He don't always aim", and so on.
At that moment, he came back in the door: "What are you saying?"
They had a terrible race round the table.
The crippled one trying to escape from the stick of the blind one.
And the room was full of quite valuable pictures and objects...
it was a heart-rending moment.
'57 Rosetta Tharpe came with a fender, with a solid fender...
and an amp...
and '58 Sonny and Brownie, and Brownie had a little amp...
and acoustic guitar with pick up on it.
And of course, later in '58 Muddy Waters with an amp and electric guitar.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe was big in my life at that point.
Sister played most, really good rock 'n ' roll blues guitar.
Ripping into gospel songs and she played electric guitar...
and had Hammond B3 and a drummer you know...
as a part of church music, which was...
The thing was Sister Rosetta Tharpe onstage, of course...
had a practically halo...
but offstage she liked her brandy...
and was quite randy, as well, I was rhyming on purpose.
And behaved very badly, I'm glad to say.
Mulligan was quite worried before we went on tour with her...
but he soon wasn't, in fact you used to have to lock his door.
We came on the old John Bee
My grand pappy and me
Old seven sea
We did
It was very much a part of my...
introduction to like Lonnie Donegan's skiffle...
all of that stuff, and it was kind of on the way out...
by the time I got my hands on a guitar...
but it was very much for formative stuff for me.
Became too broken I wanna go home
Skiffle was an influence as well I, you know...
tried to play in skiffle bands when we were young.
Once I heard Lonnie Donegan that was it. I had to pick up a guitar.
The thing about skiffle, it was an accessible music...
- that couple of people with guitars... - It was sort of British, wasn't it?
It was purely British.
We played spirituals, gospel, blues, jazz...
pop songs of the day.
Lonnie Donegan, when he first started and all the hits he had...
I didn't realize at the time that they were all Lead Belly songs.
Me and my wife settled down But me and my wife have parted
'Cause it was only much later in the kind of late 80's...
I suddenly realized where all, all these songs had...
had come from, probably thirty years later.
Well it is a total mix...
of primarily Afro-American, but not exclusively.
Donegan was... he was huge then...
and this skiffle phenomenon was starting then.
Was there a comparable movement in the States?
There was a comparable movement yes, which was just plain folk song.
The American student age generation discovered their own folk music.
You mean like Peter, Paul and Mary?
Yes and the Kingston Trio and people like that.
In the spring of '55 Jack and June arrived in London...
to find a burgeoning and surprisingly passionate folk scene.
Would be folkies were putting a new...
spin on traditional tunes.
This do it yourself take on folk music became known as skiffle.
I don't know what train he's on Won't you tell me where he's gone
Skiffle ain't worth shit. I don't even want to talk about it, it's disgusting.
It was some half-assed non-musicians...
who thought it'd be a cute idea to buy a guitar learn one chord and sing...
Takes a worried man To sing a worried song
Were you influenced by people like Ramblin' Jack Elliot?
Did you meet him when he came to London?
Yeah.
- Did he make an impact? - No. Next.
- Really not? - No.
I always thought he was a faker. Well, I'm a Woody Guthrie man, you know.
So somebody who does imitations of Woody Guthrie doesn't impress me. I do that.
I think Lonnie Donegan took his name from Lonnie Johnson...
and it would be Alonso, would have been his name actually in Spanish, Alonso.
Turn your face a little And turn your head a while
But everybody knows She's only putting on this time
Right? That's not a folk song, that's a pop song.
Actually, since I've been going' a lot to middle Tennessee...
I've realized now where a lot of these skiffle tunes came from.
They were renditions of bluegrass tunes...
which originally came out from to the Appalachians...
you have via Scottish and Irish settlers...
although the songs were rewritten, songs like...
"Down in the Mines" and "Rock Island Line".
Ken Colyer did the skiffle thing...
in the intermission or whatever of the trad jazz band thing, and then...
when Chris Barber had got his own band and Chris started doing it...
then Lonnie Donegan was part of that, he was a banjo player...
but he played guitar in the skiffle stuff.
All of this was evolving out of what you called jazz, then.
All of it came under the heading of jazz.
A couple of years ago I went with Van Morrision to Belfast...
and we put on what you call the skiffle sessions, skiffle concert right...
coincidentally that Dr. John was working round the corner...
gave him a whistle and he came roaring around...
and Lonnie Donegan: "Oh, my God...
Rock Island Line was the greatest record was ever made and you started me off".
I say: I started you off? Have we got this right?
There was a kind of hybrid between skiffle and traditional jazz...
that occasionally flirted with blues...
and that was also very interesting.
The first real British blues record I think I heard...
was Humphrey Lyttleton's Bad Penny Blues...
which was instrumental...
and Johnny Parker, the pianist in the band...
played a fantastic boogie-woogie on that.
Yeah, it doesn't stop.
Yeah, muted trumpet...
and apparently they did that song like that...
because half his band didn't show up or something.
- Right. - So it just was his rhythm section.
- Good job, hey. - Exactly.
I said to Johnny Parker, the piano player at that time...
"Let's do that thing we play in the club".
When I heard it I was horrified.
Had I heard a test pressing of it before I'd gone on holiday...
I have said I'm not having that put out.
He said he only had a few musicians there...
so he had to make it sound big.
Left hand of the piano was distorted...
had a sort of bonging noise: Bonga bonga bon...
the drums were heavily over, off-offbeat brushes...
and the brushes were heavily over-recorded, and...
it was actually balanced in the studio by Joe Meek.
That a later became famous in pop circles.
Yeah, Joe Meek. So...
cause I recorded with him in, you know, early sixties...
and he was starting to mic... that's why the piano was so loud.
I've always referred to him as the first of the creative sound mixers.
In other words, he was doing a whole lot of things that...
I wouldn't have approved of at the time. But when I came back from holiday...
and found it was number 19 in the top twenty, I kind of shut up.
With Joe Meek, you know, to each his own, I mean, I've got nothing against...
I don't hold it against anybody but, I mean, whatever, but it when it...
when it gets in the way of the music...
instead of getting the music done, there's something else...
it's like for good looking girls, it's the casting couch...
you know what I mean, with heterosexual men...
cause he was like "You got as bit of a, you know".
I said "yeah, those jeans fit you well, don't they?"
I said well "fuck yeah", I said...
"Looks like you got a bit of a..."
and I said "yeah, well it serves its purpose, you know".
So it was all that, I thought what the fuck is he on about.
So then he was carrying on.
And then he was saying that he was gonna get these tapes released...
and, yeah, EMI was gonna have it...
we went to EMI and they didn't know anything about it...
then I went to Decca, they didn't know anything...
so then I went for him and went back to the thing and said "You fuck"...
so I went across the desk at him...
and it was the first time I ever saw anybody fly.
I mean, it's unbelievable. It was like Peter Pan.
Next thing I knew he was, he was...
one minute he was standing there at the desk...
and the next minute he was sitting on the mantelpiece.
I thought, "How the fuck did he get up there?"
Bad Penny Blues.
"Bad Penny Blues". Yeah, that was the...
Johnny Parker's solo out of Bad Penny Blues...
was used on Lady Madonna, wasn't it?
Quite right, yeah.
Lady Madonna
Children at your feet
Wonder how you manage To make ends meet
Note for note, it was the same kind of feel.
It was a four bar thing but with eight to a bar overlaid on the top.
When we turned up to the rehearsal room and Eddie Cochran was sitting there...
with his leather waistcoat, leather trousers, and his Gretsch Guitar...
and his cowboy boots and Eddie said: "Anybody ever heard of Ray Charles?"
And I don't think anybody put their hand up. I hadn't heard of him...
and he said: "Well, this is one tune I wanna do in my show"...
and he went...
Started that Ray Charles lick called "What I'd Say"...
and we all went: "What was that?"
Hey mama Don't you treat me wrong
Come and love your daddy all night long All right now
Hey hey
Eddie Cochran introduced the music of Ray Charles to the masses of this country...
on that tragic tour when he was killed.
Well, because John Lee Hooker was the first one to come over for a club tour.
He had previously been over on one of the blues packages in concert...
but this was, you know, when he came over to do a tour with us...
it was that was a big success.
We backed Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, T-Bone Walker...
Champion Jack Dupree, and...
Memphis Slim, Jimmy Witherspoon.
The time I was with John, I was asked to play, by Mike Vernon...
I was asked to play with Muddy and Otis Spann...
and they came to London to do, I think, like a promotional tour or something...
and that was unbelievable, and they were in their heyday...
and they had these big silk suits on...
man, I was just gob smacked, I could hardly move.
Had a little girl
But I lose my baby boy Ain't that bad?
Had a little girl
I lose my baby boy Ain't that bad?
You can't spend What you ain't got
You can't lose some girl You never had
When I was called to the session...
and everything was in the key of F-sharp...
or B-natural...
and in those days I could only play in like three or four keys, C, G, F...
and now having to play with guitar players...
I could play a bit in E and A.
As long as I kept good time...
that's all, I felt really proud of myself just doing that because...
I never had the technique...
and it never actually interested me...
the only technique that I have is just by default...
because I played so long or...
when someone shouts change the something in the chorus...
I still don't know what the chorus is...
I'm like playing with Sonny Boy...
where they just change and...
and believe me, they're right and you're wrong.
Had money in the bank
But I got busted people Ain't that bad?
And I saw Muddy a few years later...
and I just mentioned to him I said: "That recording session, man"...
I said: "It was terrible, you know...
everything was in F-sharp or B".
I said: "I was very uncomfortable. I'm sorry about that".
He said: "Shit, man. You should have told me. I would have moved the capo".
But you were so in awe of somebody like Muddy Waters...
you didn't say: "Hey man, can you change the key?"
Had a sweet little home
But it got burned down people Ain't that bad?
Had my own home
People, ain't that bad?
You can't spend What you ain't got
You can't lose some new girl You ain't never had
Well, T-Bone Walker did a tour with us.
He was the second one who did the actual complete tour...
and they did scattered performances here and there with Sonny Boy Williamson.
Sonny Boy Williamson came to play with the Yardbirds...
and Sonny Boy stayed on in Europe for quite a while...
and they... because Georgio had this band, the Yardbirds...
and it seemed like a good idea to put the two things together...
and that was a hardcore experience...
and quite frightening, I mean, it almost coulda turned me off, I think...
what was life-saving about it for me was that...
I wasn't a huge fan of Sonny Boy in the first place.
And because I was like a bit of a mouth around this stuff, too...
I think we didn't hit it off very well.
More with some musicians than others. I mean...
John Lee Hooker was notorious for doing all kinds of...
which actually was part of what made his music, his music.
It's kind of rough because you know he's...
got no idea, no concept of chord changes or where they come...
or anything like that, so you really have to be on your toes...
all you really have to know was the key of E and...
just watch carefully also like intuitively feel...
where he was going to make the changes.
But John Lee wouldn't give you a clue, you had to hear it and feel it.
But that was the magic of the original Delta blues...
because they'd just change whenever they felt like it...
they weren't limited to a structure...
but to play with these guys was an education...
because they took us right back to the roots again.
Love letters straight
From your heart
Keep us so near
While apart
I'm not alone
In the night
When I can have
All the love you write
I memorize
Every line
And I kiss the name
That you sign
And darling then
I read again Right from the start
Love letters straight
From your heart
I'm not alone
In the night
When I can have
All the love you write
I memorize
Every line
And I kiss the name
That you sign
And darling then
I read again Right from the start
Love letters straight
From your heart
- That was the best, wasn't it? - Yeah, it was.
That was gorgeous.
Jumpin' with my boss Sid in the city
Mr. President of the DJ committee
So I'd heard all that before we started working down the Flamingo, so...
we had some of that kind of stuff and a bit of Ray Charles under our belts...
so when we started down the Flamingo and...
all the black American G I's were in to there they thought, "this is home, boy".
I could go to the West End to the Sin Club when I was fifteen years old...
and to the Flamingo when I was seventeen, eighteen years old.
We landed ourselves a job round the corner at the Flamingo Club...
which was a jazz club...
but on weekends it was rented out by a guy...
that later became our manager, his name was Rick Gone.
And Rick used to put on all night sessions as a jazz club...
with an R and B band playing for dancing.
The place was really frequented by Black American GI's...
that were stationed over here in the Air Force.
The best place and the place that I was scared to go...
until I actually was in bands was the Flamingo.
One night it would be Larry Williamson, John Guitar Watson...
next night would be John Lee Hooker, next night, Howlin' Wolf.
There was a great sort of West Indian contingent and night people...
club people, that worked in other clubs until three am...
and they'd come down to the Flamingo...
'cause we'd start at midnight and end at six am...
every Friday, every Saturday...
and on Sundays play afternoon sessions...
for the stragglers that couldn't get back to base.
Next weekend would be Chuck Berry, Nina Simone.
You could go and see all these people...
and sit there and actually learn your trade.
Please write my mama
Tell her the shape I'm in
Please
Write my mama
And tell her the shape I'm in
And tell her to pray for me
And forgive me for my sins
The Flamingo was an established Jazz club.
There was a small, there was a baby grand piano in there...
for the jazz musicians.
They wouldn't let me play it because I was playing Fats Domino.
It was just a sweaty place that never seemed to close...
particularly in the hours of darkness.
People like John Mayall would drive down from Manchester on a weekend...
to hang out in the club and play in the club and sit in at the club...
before John got the chance to bring his own musicians down from Manchester.
It was primarily a black club, you know.
It was like mostly West Indians would go in there maybe to listen to blue beat...
or Ska or jazz or whatever.
It was all night, it was nice, most nights I think it'd go pretty late...
and on the weekends it'd be all night and people would get hurt.
You could do ten gigs a week, you know, just based around the Flamingo...
and just around the London area.
- Was it always pretty full? - Oh yeah, it was packed out.
There was a great Jamaican disc jockey called Count Suckle who had...
a Jamaican club in Carnaby Street...
of all places they called it "The Roaring Twenties"...
and it was just a Jamaican club. We opened it as a band with...
Count Suckle's records and Suckle had this fantastic record collection...
James Brown's "Night Train," he had the mixture...
he had a great source in Memphis...
who used to send all the black American imports...
and plus he had all the West Indian stuff.
The roaring twenties seeing a lot of the ska music in the early days... Flamingo.
We was in the Flamingo one night playing...
and someone said to me...
"Did you see that black guy sitting in the front of the row looking".
Well there all black there, all Gis.
I say: "They are all black, GI's, they come down for the weekend, you know?"
"No, it's Otis Redding." I say: "Go away, Otis Redding. Get off."
I'm sitting in the dressing room, the door opens and Otis Redding walks in.
Comes up to me and says: "You are a great singer".
I says: "Oh, dear me, it's Otis Redding, it is.
"So, Otis, how you doing?"
He said: "I want you to be on my... I'm doing a TV show next week...
called 'Ready, Steady, Go', he said: "I want you to be my guest".
And I say: "pinch me", I think, this is one night, you know?
I've been loving you
Too long
To stop now
My manager and I opened the club in Brixton...
called the Ramjam Club.
And I saw Otis, I saw that Stax review on a Sunday afternoon...
I biked over, I cycled from Chelsea over the river to Brixton...
to see that Sunday afternoon session. It was fantastic.
Very exciting. Because I come from Guilford, you know, country boy...
coming up...
and probably sleeping on the Charing Cross Station and stuff like that.
But very exciting.
And I hated the name Georgie Fame...
because I been saddled with this name by Larry Ponds...
as one of his exotic rock 'n ' roll stable of singers.
But when we went down to Flamingo and the GI's are saying...
"Hey, Fame motha"', It sounded ok, it sounded hip.
And in return
You could give up yours Before we think
Straight? Okay, I need to look you in the eyes.
What would we do later on?
What kind of life would we have
Just in case we both were wrong?
I'd give up my woman
You'd give your man
But it don't make sense to
The whole thing kind of took off for me when I met John Mayall.
I mean, I had already got a long way down the road...
but he had a massive collection of records.
Lived in Blackheath I lived in a sort of wardrobe in the top of his house...
and I would spend all day just going through his record collection...
listening to stuff and deciding what the band was gonna play, God bless him.
I know you told me
I'll play.
Yeah, we need lyrics, if we're gonna do this again we need lyrics.
That you want me
I was off listening to Ray Charles and Mose Allison...
and then I started to hear people like Oscar Brown Jr.
There was a Muddy Waters EP...
I think there was a Little Walter EP.
Then maybe Josh White.
Josh White? Yeah.
As a matter of fact Josh White singing "House of the Rising Sun".
- Really. - Yeah.
B-side was "Strange Fruit".
And Art college kids who were these enthusiasts...
so they would take me down to record shops and give me records.
And when I heard Sarah Vaughn, she was my favorite.
Jeri Southern was my favorite jazz singer.
I started to hear some of the early Vee-Jay recordings.
John Lee Hooker, Jimmie Reed.
Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard.
Great guitar players, that was what really caught my ear.
It was Cliff Gallup with Gene Vincent...
James Burton who played with Ricky Nelson.
Sonnie Terry, Brownie McGhee, Lightnin' Hopkins...
and of course Ray Charles who was a big discovery.
- My mother told me - My mother told me
- Before she passed away - Before she passed away
- Said son when I'm gone - Said son when I'm gone
- Don't forget to pray - Don't forget to pray
- 'Cause there'll be hard times - There'll be hard times
- Hard times - Hard times
- Oh yeah? - Oh yeah?
- Who knows - Who knows
- Better than I? - Better than I?
And so I got caught up with Monk and Mingus...
and all of those guys in the same period...
and was listening to it all at the same time.
And I would buy a John Lee Hooker album on Riverside and someone...
you know, a Lee Morgan album on Riverside...
and it all to me it was all, it was all the same thing.
I had a woman, Lord
- Who was always around - Who was always around
- You know he's gone up the octave. - But when I lost my money
- She put me down
- Yes, save it, save it. - She put me down
After that, I heard Lead Belly and Lonnie Johnson.
In my collection I had a whole lot of people.
I had Mahalia Jackson in the gospel field...
and John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim, Muddy Waters.
Canal Street Blues. Dippermouth Blues".
- So I bought those as well... - As long as it had blues in it?
Yeah, as long as it had the name blues on it, I bought it.
We would find some list somewhere...
or some American record store...
where we could write off and get lists of stuff and we'd kind of take potluck.
I got it through a vintage magazine called Vintage Jazz Mart...
which was a for sale or auction thing, you know, private collectors.
I mainly got them, got them through there.
The first long playing record I ever owned as a 14, 15 year old kid...
was a Fats Domino LP with a lot of great tunes on it, you know.
I'm goin' to the river Gonna jump all board and drown
My parents bought me a record player one Christmas...
and there was two records that came with it...
and they came via a seaman who lived downstairs to me...
and was always going to the US.
You know if somebody had been to America they'd always bring back a blueser.
I was given some blues records, three or four blues albums...
and I was studying those, and taking, finding out what I liked.
Oh, tell me baby
Stay that night
But don't you hear me crying
At art school somebody turned me on to the Folk Festival of the Blues album"...
with Buddy playing just the most amazing stuff.
O disco de Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Howlin Wolf...
blue, dark blue cover...
Sonny Boy Williamson, Sonny Boy Williamson sings "Bring It On Home"...
and um Howlin' Wolf sings "Sugar Mama"...
and that's got Buddy Guy on it singing "Worried Blues"...
and "Don't Know Which Way to Go".
Booker T and the MG's "Green Onions". I'd never heard that...
that style of playing.
It just happens to be that record is a milestone in most rock 'n' roll.
We used to have record listening parties, you know on...
on Saturday nights and go all the way through the night...
just listening to all, 'cause I used to get...
this is when LP's were around...
and I used to get the American imports...
and get all the latest Horace Silver stuff, and Erroll Garner...
Cannonball Adderley and all these things...
cause we knew what they... with the cardboard covers.
The cardboard was thick.
This is the real thing, you know...
and all the Prestige stuff, and the Riverside, you know?
- Sitting on top of the world - Sitting on top of the world
Yeah, there's an extra...
it's like an extra bar, an extra two bars.
That's Wolf playing harmonica, I think.
Then he used it's James Cotton, Little Walter.
Yeah...
Little Walter, yeah.
Sitting on top of the world
Another great source was American Forces Network.
Again every house had a pretty good radio and...
you could tune into AFN which was beamed from Frankfurt.
I used to hear the American Forces Network...
they had their own radio program.
This is Willis Conover, from Washington D. C...
and like for us, Washington D.C. Was another planet.
So I got, you know, all day this great input of American folk music.
I used to send requests for jazz records into the March of Dimes, into the AFN...
Bunk Johnson and Kid Ory and Louis Armstrong.
They call it stormy Monday
They tell Tuesday's just as bad
Yes, they do
They call it stormy Monday
They tell Tuesday's just as bad
They tell me Wednesday is no good
And Thursday's just as sad
Stormy Monday Blues Part I and Part II.
We were doing a session for Chris Blackwell...
from Island Records, Guy Stevens...
and while they were setting up all the equipment...
and all that, they just said to us just play a couple of numbers...
so we can get the mics all tested out...
and we just did Stormy Monday Blues.
And then we did some other things, and then a couple of months later...
I saw this come out under Little Joe Cook and I thought...
they never told me it was gonna be under Little Joe Cook...
they never did in those days it was just it, you know.
The eagle flies on a Friday
And on Saturday
I go out to play
The eagle flies on Friday
And on Saturday I go out to play
And then Vicki Wickham got a hold of it with Ready, Steady, Go...
and she got in touch with the office the Rick Gunn office...
and said: "We'd like to book Little Joe Cook for Ready Steady Go"...
and they said: He's not available", and they said: "Why not?
We can't get in touch with him".
And then, they got in touch with Island Records and said...
"We want this guy on". But when I said it was Chris Farlowe...
you couldn't have your Joe Cook 'cause it's a pseudonym for Chris Farlowe...
they didn't believe it, they said: Come on, come on, don't be silly.
And it was us, me and Albert and the band.
'Cause I like to sing the blues
I also like to sing the rock 'n rolls
Let's hear some guitar playing in here.
And I was in America a little while ago, last year...
and I was introduced to a guy, a black blues musician...
forgot his name now.
Well known.
The guy said: "I'd like to introduce you to an English singer"...
he said: "Yeah? What's his name?" He said: "Chris Farlowe."
He said: "Chris Farlowe?"Damn, I know two Chris Farlowes".
And I looked at him, I said: "Two Chris Farlowes?"
He said: "Yeah, you're Chris Farlowe and I know another Chris Farlowe...
he sang Stormy Monday Blues".
And I said: "That's me."
And he looks at me and he went: "No, no, this guy's black".
And wherever round I'm gonna do They call it Stormy Monday Blues
So this has been a very important record for me and...
I think for all of us...
'cause it's regarded as one of the great blues records ever made in England.
You know, I started with a cheap acoustic...
I played a year borrowing guitars from friends...
whatever I could get my hands on, you know...
but then, the first decent guitar was 1958, I think...
Christmas of '58 my folks bought me a Höfner Archtop guitar.
About eleven, twelve...
with a two string guitar, I couldn't afford the other strings.
But it was a shop made guitar, which is good...
hard to believe when you looked at it, but it was.
I took up the guitar when I was about nine.
I had... I guess I would have had a Höfner Senator... Höfner Senator.
It was an acoustic, but acoustic guitar, we used to stick microphones behind it.
And then put that through sometimes a homemade amplifier.
I started off on ukulele...
because the action on my father's guitar was so high...
you needed a pair of pliers to press the strings down, you know, so.
So ukulele was what I started off with...
the George Formby do-it-yourself method.
I bought my first guitar, a Spanish guitar with steel strings on them...
got the bridge off.
Somebody brought me back to his house and played me some Lonnie Johnson.
I thought it was the best thing I ever heard.
I think the first electric guitar I had was a Höfner.
And then I bought myself a solid with three pick-ups and a tremolo...
and I thought it was the same guitar that Buddy Holly played...
turned out it was a cheap imitation, it was a Grazioso or something.
When I went in the army and was in Korea...
I bought a twelve... a six string guitar, and I had the bottom two strings.
Harmony.
I had a couple of Harmonys...
one was a semi-acoustic one, and one was more of a solid.
Eric Clapton brought the Gibson...
into me anyway. It was a Les Paul.
There was a Gretch Eddie Cochran, what did he play...
Eddie Cochran it was a Gretsch, it was Gretsch or maybe a Gibson...
it was a Gretsch.
I mean, you couldn't get a hold of American instruments at that time...
you just got... you bought what you could, you know.
It was an actual finish color and they called it cherry...
the color was cherry, but it used to fade...
and it'd look like there was a lot of finish actually involved in that guitar.
There were some other odd kind of European makes which...
sometimes if you if you cranked that through an amp...
you actually got quite an interesting sound.
We only had an old Vox amplifier, it was a lovely old thing.
A great big light on it, like an ignition light.
Scotty Moore's Guitar playing on "Trying to get to you"...
Leiber and Stoller, you know "My Baby Left Me".
I loved Scotty Moore's guitar playing...
I'd have liked... if I was a blues person, nothing else, I really would try...
and take it up with Scotty Moore somehow.
The first time I heard it that way was with Freddie King...
and I had or a friend had "Hideaway", on the single...
but the single had the other B side of "Hideaway" was "I Loved the Woman"...
with a guitar solo in it that was single note...
and bend lots of bending things and...
but and almost kind of rhapsodic in its composition.
It was perfect, and that became the new Holy Grail, you know, for me.
You would hear these records doing all these bends...
and you would say how are they doing that?
Then we eventually figured out they had, you know, they had very light strings.
Well, they were bending strings, you know, way back in the...
Johnny Otis and the...
you know Johnny Otis...
what everyone...
and right in the middle of it he goes...
well, I thought: "That's it! That's what I want to do for the rest of my life".
Milk Cow blues and I don't know who wrote that or recorded that...
because Eddie Cochran was the first guy I heard it...
and he had a kind of T-Bone Walker introduction on guitar.
And I thought: "That's real blues guitar playing".
You could tell that there was something going on there... it wasn't...
it was...
a major sort of minor major bend.
I would take the guitar every time I pick it up and trill my hand.
A lot of the kids think I push up and down...
but I don't, I just trill like that.
Everybody knows I'm here
Now, knows I'm here, man
Everybody knows I'm here
And then when Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies...
kinda kicked off the thing at the Marquee...
mainly an experimental type of situation...
really in the trad-dominated club world.
When Alexis formed the new "Blues Incorporated"...
he took Graham Bond, Dick Heckstall-Smith...
Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce with him...
and they were all part of the regular Friday night jam session, jazz group...
at the Flamingo club.
And it was that thing of seeing a guy, an English guy playing electric...
the first English guy I saw playing the electric guitar was when Alexis...
I picked up the "Melody Maker" one day and the headline was, you know...
Alexis brings amps into... into the club...
and you know this deafening noise...
which in actual fact was probably one Marshall amplifier.
I'm gonna make you pretty women
Lead me by my hand
Till the world will know
The hoochie coochie man
- And he had a Kay and I got a Kay... - Right.
And covered it in Fablon cause I didn't like, black Fablon...
because I didn't like the, the color.
When Eric Clapton came in the band...
of course that revolutionized the whole thing...
because he was a person who knew the music thoroughly...
and knew the feel of it, had the right touch...
that nobody else seemed to have at that time.
I thought Clapton was a great blues player.
I didn't think he was God, despite what people wrote on walls.
But "Clapton is God", they used to write.
I don't know what God thought about it, but...
he was a very good blues player.
I had a little following from a band called the Yardbirds, you know...
and I left in a very public way, you know...
sort of threw my toys out of the pram...
because they wanted a hit and...
and I was very conscious of having a mission, like a blues mission.
And so I kinda said: "Well, I'm quitting. You know? I'm out".
And then John asked me to join.
I had a 3 week period or a month where I wasn't sure what I was gonna do...
- and then John called me. - Where had the mission come from?
Interesting, I don't know. I don't know.
I felt like...
I was convinced that some point in my teens...
that if I didn't do it no one would...
or that someone had to do it and I was, I'd been chosen, you know?
- Really? - Yeah.
- You were so passionate about it? - Yeah! And arrogant, too...
I was like the self-appointed ambassador of blues music to this country...
and was very judgmental about anybody who wasn't doing it...
the way I thought it should be done.
The early sixties there was absolutely no acceptance...
of any other kind of music...
I mean I know now people get degrees in jazz and all other kinds of things.
But in the early sixties, I distinctly remember being asked at music college...
what kind of music I liked...
and so I said: Well, I do like Paul Hindemith and lgor Stravinsky...
but I also like Fats Domino and Ray Charles...
and the teacher said...
"Well you've got a choice: Either forget about that or go".
We arrived at Birmingham University to play at one of these university dances...
one of our first gigs outside of London, I think...
and we're carrying the gear upstairs to get to the place where we're playing...
and there was a band onstage already, and it was The Spencer Davis Group...
and Steve was singing "Georgia on My Mind".
And I'll never forget it the sound of that voice and his delivery.
Georgia, yeah
Oh, Georgia
A song of love
Comes as sweet and clear
As the moonlight through the pines
As a musician, let's say, and probably as a piano player as well...
having learned harmony and playing e-flat and all that kind of stuff...
I was really more interested in the music...
rather than the whole social change...
which that was the massive thing really.
Black cloud crossed my mind
Blue mist round my soul
Feel so suicidal
Even hate my rock and roll
I wanna yeah
I wanna die
If I ain't dead Already
Oh girl, you know the reason why
The Beatles was doing what they called rock 'n' roll...
a different type of thing, but I could still feel...
and hear blues in what they were doing.
I think the Beatles had a lot of influence on...
encouraging people who didn't know how to read or write music...
they could pick up an instrument, make some music and actually be accepted.
And all it took was for them to get to the top of the charts...
"It is possible! We'll have a go!"
The Beatles were a little more sophisticated, I guess...
and they were writing their own material, based on American culture.
But the way they took it back to America...
with its innocent charm, if you like, and its freshness, was an eye opener...
and that took that music into mainstream America...
whereas before it had been kinda the lid had been kept on.
The Beatles did in the early days sing few blues and so on...
but on the whole they were very inventive.
The Stones less so, weren't they?
Some people used to call it the Thames valley cotton fields.
I don't want 'Cause I'm sad and blue
I just want to make love to you, Baby
Love to you, baby Sweet love to you, baby
Love to you
The Stones were a straight-ahead blues band, basically.
Jagger had a genuine feeling for it and so did Richards and...
their early music I think is pretty powerful...
and definitely black influenced...
but it doesn't sound like it, not imitative quite.
And there was a few comments when they went to America from black artists...
"It's fine, white boys playing this stuff...
more people going to listen to us", which is probably true.
I'm gonna get high
Sure
Wait no more
Stick by my riffle
I ain't gonna be messing around With no cocaine
British blues were John Mayall...
I think he's the master of it.
He's about the first that I can think that really brought it out.
But then I started hearing many others.
When Cream came that was it.
I had met Jack and Ginger on and off around the Ealing club and the Marquee.
But, I mean, I admired these guys tremendously, and...
for start because they were kind of a generation before me.
And they were onstage when I was in the audience at the Marquee.
So these were the real thing, I mean, it was like back to that again.
And even in the band, when it came into fruition...
I was still, I kinda stayed in that place, I was in the audience really...
for most of their shenanigans.
By then all the whole blues, rock blues thing...
was in full swing on a worldwide basis.
In other words, several years before when not many people knew about it.
Now it was the music. You know, it dominated everything.
Well I'm going down to Rosedale
Take my rider by my side
Going down to Rosedale
Take my rider by my side
You can still barrelhouse, baby On the riverside
Cream were enormous in America.
And thanks to Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker...
and that band in particular...
who drew from a very blues influence between them, and jazz...
they went out and played it live to American audiences.
Early 1968, I first went to America with Traffic as a three piece...
with Jim Capaldi and Chris Wood.
And so, of course, I think the idea there is...
I really wanted to stop...
trying to, trying to copy this music.
We're taken into the depths of Chicago...
these little white guys, you know.
Mike Vernon, who was in charge of our label, Blue Horizon...
arranged for us to go record at the Chess studios...
and Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy was there...
J.T. Brown, the horn player from Elmore James...
and Shakey Horton.
Been in Stax/Volt recording sessions...
watching Otis Redding record "Daytripper"...
Sam and Dave cut "Hold on, I'm Coming"...
playing with an interracial band, a white black band.
When Jeremy playing with J.T. Brown during the bass section...
it was like living out the wildest fantasies that you could possibly want.
Peter had a confidence about what he played...
and felt that he could play...
but he was... We're all thrilled.
I had a woman, Lord
Who was always around
But when I lost all my money
You know she put me down
Talking bout hard times
You know about hard times
And who knows
Better than I?
Yeah, Lord
You know better
One of these days
There'll be no more sorrow
When I pass away
Talking bout hard times
I said no more hard times
And who knows
Better than I?
As long as you sounded real...
they didn't mind if you were white or you know, whatever...
as long as it was real, and then I thought that's great because...
I thought I might have gotten a bit of um flack...
with singing some of the tunes, you know, and being white.
To be blunt, for us to play their music...
in studios that they recorded those songs in...
could have gone horribly wrong.
It truly didn't.
But there was a moment when there was a testing of our situation.
I do remember that.
And then suddenly and I hope it, in fact I feel it had something to with that...
they were blown away...
as to how this little group of English kids could sound and...
J.T. Brown turned around and I know genuinely was saying...
"That's pretty damn cool", you know.
Because it was so heartfelt from us bunch.
When they would do tunes that had been recorded by...
shall we say, Big Boy Crudup, Muddy Waters, and so on...
whoever wrote the tune, man, ought have been glad...
because it became a hit...
and it was sold to many more people then they were ever able to sell it to.
That was the beginning of those fantastic bills where...
you get the Freddie Kings, you know, playing with Richie Havens...
and Fleetwood Mac and Janis Joplin.
And I noticed then that white America started paying attention to blues.
And so it started to opening a lot of doors that had been closed to us.
Like Albert King said he was, was staggered...
by the Fillmore was packed just had no concept of...
how it could be that what he was playing...
could be appreciated by so many people, you know.
And white people, you know? Where did they come from?
And we were having fun, we had a lot of fun.
But musically I kept stepping back and going...
this isn't it, this isn't really what I want to do...
or this isn't what I hold up.
This isn't working to the principles that I've been following all this time.
And consequently when I heard music from Big Pink...
I thought: Well, this is a contemporary band...
that is approaching where the blues can be taken".
And
You put the load right on me
And it doesn't have to be like that...
because what we're doing is starting to become a bit of a circus.
Playing in places where all the audience was stoned...
you know, doing tours of America, the Fillmore and the Fillmore East...
and all kinds of places where you know that we encouraged...
to get to do just silly things rambling, meaningless...
self-indulgent music, really.
I wanted to take it seriously.
I wanted. My music was a very serious thing to me...
and I felt like I was starting to betray myself.
Tell me how long
Oh baby how long
Has that evening
Has that evening train been gone
How long
Has that evening
Train been gone
My definition of it would be that it was someone making music...
purely for themselves in a way...
and without any conscious effort to be communicative.
A branch of folk music...
that is to say, it's a rather natural expression rather than a contrived one.
It's an uplifting music.
I wouldn't necessarily say it's happy but up...
it's definitely uplifting, energizing...
all those kind of things that you come away from it saying...
- "That was great". - Tell me how long
Has that evening
Train been gone
Well, the blues is so many things...
but basically speaking it's developed into a 12 by format...
with fairly simple chord progressions in the first place...
which could have been extended, you know, as jazz has got more modern.
What it really means is the singer or player...
is actually playing from his heart. It's like he's singing the truth.
It's simple, anybody can play it.
It has the magical structure of three chords...
which you can tie into earth, sun, moon, man, woman, God.
Life. Life as we live it today.
Life as we lived it in the past...
and life as I believe we'll live it in the future.
Has to do with people.
I think that's one of the reasons that kids picks it.
It has to do with people, places, and things.
It's kind of like religion, really blues music.
I've recently, only recently sort of got the...
started to get the hang of it, you know?
What it means...
because it's a story when you say Bill Broonzy...
it's his words, it's his lyrics or you're listening to the guitar player...
and someone who doesn't play guitar or listen to the words...
they might get it right like that and sort of understand what it is.
It's two lines which are the same.
First line more or less repeated...
and then the third one which completes the sense.
But I think it's more a feeling.
I guess it's a feel, isn't it? It's an emotion.
We didn't even know the words.
We couldn't understand a lot of lyrics...
of what these guys were singing.
But the whole feel...
Yeah, there's no black no white.
It's got to, it has to do with the truth. Blues is the truth.
I think it's a kind of a plea, it's a musical plea for something.
It's a way of expressing a need or a want.
It could and almost should be a part of all music and...
if it isn't, then I feel that the music is somehow lacking.
We're still sitting here talking about something that's so real, so alive...
just when you think it's off the radar.
I don't think it ever will be, because of the absolute power that it has.
It brings a tear
Into my eyes
When I begin
To realize
I've cried so much
Since you've been gone
I'm absolutely sure that, if you asked a black blues musician...
whether his life was enhanced, I think they'd say, yeah.
I mean, that would probably be the better person to ask.
I don't know for myself how further the ripple has spread...
but Robert Johnson is a household name now.
I just sit and cry
Just like a child
The United States suddenly started paying tribute to a wonderful legacy...
of the roots of rock 'n' roll and blues...
and by this reverse of triggering mechanism...
that came from all those things in England the bands going back.
And hey, you see the Rolling Stones, when they first landed...
they're all talking about Muddy Waters and people...
and people are going like "Who the hell is he?"
That you gonna be home soon
It's alright
I believe I'm gonna
Drown
In my own tears
The Brits took what the Americans...
culturally threw into the trash bin.
There was a definite move to trash that culture...
and keep it away from white kids.
Oh some rain
I know some rain is gonna pour
There's probably a feeling in the early days of blues, English blues...
of wanting to bring this music to people's attention...
to show them what a interesting, wonderful form it was.
That it just keeps raining
Raining, raining, raining, raining
More and more
Why don't you Come on home
Without it, I don't think American black musicians and black blues players...
would have really made it to the extent they have...
because if you talk to any of them...
they'll say well these English guys they came over...
and they spread the word about us...
and, you know, they made a larger awareness on the world scale.
'Cause if you don't think
That you gonna be home soon
It's alright
I believe I'm gonna
Drown in my own tears
It gave people a chance to play and to be somebody...
and to do something with their music.
People who were disregarded and worth nothing at the time over there.
As the jazz revival had.
It gave people, you know, Americans something to feel...
they've done something to be important, for the music to be important.
Drown in my own tears
Yes, I'm gonna
Drown in my own tears
Black American culture if you want to call it, which it is...
the greatest art form that came out of America really, modern America.
Sing a song tonight
If it wasn't for the British musicians...
a lot of us black musicians in America...
would still be catching the hell that we caught long before.
So thanks to them, thanks to all you guys...
you opened doors that I don't think would have been opened in my lifetime.
Thank you very much.
My own
Tears
Good God Almighty
That was alright except for that last little bit...
that I did not give any indication on.
That was quite beautiful, yeah.
- Let's do... - Listen, can we get that bar?