2006-05-17T14:57:00.000-07:00

This is my life!

Here I am at 65 still happy! Gulp! Tempting the Goddess of Fortune? Birthday is June 6th btw!!

Beginnings.

I remember getting my first guitar in 1957, what a dog! At £2 it was a snip(!) A Spanish acoustic with strings half-an-inch off the fretboard! The blood, the blood! Guitarists will understand that bit! Not a clue as to how to play it! No tutors; tutorials; play-along tapes---not even music score. Trying to finger basic chords!! Yikes! What are these things?? It hurts!
...to be continued...you have been warned! :)

Merseybeat.

What still amazes and confounds me even up to this day, is why on earth did hundreds and hundreds of young men become infected, all within weeks of each other, (well perhaps, months in retrospect) with a lemming-like desire to begin playing rock ‘n roll, whether by guitar or percussion??? I mean it was unanimous! It was like some super flu virus thing, really! I can’t describe it any better! One day, nothing, the next after seeing your best mate get a geetar, you had to have one!!

Looking back of course, certainly a major influence was the phenomenon being broadcast to us each evening by Radio Luxemburg. Rock music. All of a sudden 3 chords became king. And, without a shadow of doubt, that was the key to the treasure!

Now the more simplistic music, long part of the American culture, changing the perceptions of the youths of the UK and eventually of Europe, was eminently within the grasp of un-musicians!! Like me! Like Ted Taylor; Lennon; McCartney; Big Jim Sullivan(to be); Colin Manley and all of the rest! Absolute MAGIC!

America, of course, has always had a guitar culture. I am certainly not denigrating it’s historical musical roots in other instruments by saying that. It’s my opinion that the vast size of the States and its huge area’s of, what Australians would call ‘outback’, the hills of East Tennessee, for example, obviously led to a portable instrument as being the driving force behind entertainment for the widely spread small towns and villages; the fiddle; the guitar. By the middle 50’s, American virtuosos of the guitar abounded. The quality was unsurpassable. Whether it was country music, as it most certainly started off as in the white communities, or the negro blues and spirituals in the black population, apparent simplicity was in actual fact incredibly sophisticated stylistic playing ability.

Let me give you a couple of examples of what I am trying to get across to you. In the early 50’s, me being only 12, 13, 14, I was unknowingly privileged by accidentally hearing clips on the radio of American musicans playing boogie. Jimmy Briant and Speedy West even!! These wonders later backed many artistes such as Bing Crosby; Tennesee Ernie Ford (Shotgun Boogie’, my god!)Wow! Unassailable! I actually had a Grundig recorder on which I taped some of their stuff---not dreaming of ever playing the guitar in my wildest dreams, but because it just ‘blew me away’ as we say today! Les Paul, was sensational and I still have recordings of his prior to his adopting his multitrack style of music! What a marvellous musician. You see the quality was light years ahead of anything this side of the pond had even envisaged; with the exception of one or two special individuals of the classic world, Segovia et al. Perhaps there were more, but as radio was the only means of access to global music I can’t really say more to get my point across. So when Bill Haley and the Comets recorded ‘Rock around the Clock’, which probably kick-started the lemmings, at least in the mind to dimly imagine that this was perhaps something within our reach musically, it has to be realised that the Comets were all professional, wonderful musicians; session guys; jazz exponents; and it would be many, many years before the UK could compete with musical giants of the ilk of Franny Beecher;and the rest. BUT!!! Basically it was 3 chords! Not that this song used just 3 chords understand, because it didn’t with the incidental chordings of a jazzy line-up, but at rock bottom (pun intended!) it was accessible to us! But not just then; 1956, except for a few far sighted and perhaps more gifted lads. (Colin Manley? Jim Sullivan?)

I mean Elvis was not part of this scene for us UK-ians until much later and even then the stuff Scotty Moore was doing was just too clever. His licks??!! Wow, and the Phillips sound! Not until the Sun records appeared here did Elvis’s contribution to what was to become Merseybeat, become noticeable. And it was an incorporation rather than a pioneering element to us.

The final ingredient to the super-virus, in my opinion, that was to grow into Mersybeat was Buddy Holly. His music was inescapably 3 chord mayhem; solid rock and, believe it or not denigrated initially by his fellow Americans---did you know that Buddy was the first guitarist ever known to strum an entire song with just a down stroke? It was such a step back in musical terms for the Yanks! The musicians apparently were appalled! Listen to ‘Peggy Sue’. It’s frenetic style is produced by employing no up-strokes at all! Wonderful to me! I could do that! I didn’t have to coordinate my hands to play alternate up AND down strokes! Woo! Totally rough and raw; basic as all hell! The remaining factor, noted by all, was that his was a 3-piece band!! Now Merseybeat could get going! A No.1 song with a playable score! Listen to the bass line---absolutely, totally, two note stuff! Drums played on a cardboard box! What?? Buddy Holly’s sprouted up everywhere! OK, very few could play the Holly licks, which he did and his later addition to his band did….don’t forget the Americans were still light years ahead of us, but no matter the lyrics were simps and so was the instrumental backdrop!

Holly, combined with the advent of Skiffle, very important due to, again, its simplicity, formed the basis of Merseybeat. Bloody hell we couldn’t help but produce a rough, I mean rough sound! We didn’t know any better! No tutors don’t forget! The only way to play this new music for us was to sit hunched around the 78 rpm turntable and listen, and listen and listen and playback and playback; get the chords down; the structure; the lyrics; if possible, the guitar licks…or a close simulation….sometimes not even close!

When Buddy appeared on TV over here the guitarists were enthralled; what is he doing with his fingers? he appeared to be dampening the strings with his little finger in a sort of up and down movement. Oh why were videos not invented earlier!! This little finger business, in my opinion, caught on later with the coming of Chuck Berry, whose style so influenced the Mersybeat sound. The rhythmic thump was finessed; embraced and moulded into the sound that changed the direction of music and ended with the mop-tops conquering of the world!

Dave Kent