With a Number Six clamped between his teeth, Maggot beats his fists on the café table in time to Chicago’s ‘I’m a Man’. Coffee cups rattle in their Pyrex saucers. The tribe lets out a cheer with a high content of jeer. ‘You’re a man, are you Maggot?’
He pounds his fists all the harder, jerking his head back and forward as he bellows along with the chorus: I’m a man, yes I am …
Maggot wears a grubby denim jacket with a metal BSA badge on the collar, BSA being the make of his motorcycle parked outside. He works in a garage, and engine oil had seeped so thoroughly into his every pore that he has a slightly dirty look about him even when fresh out of the bath. This, together with the grim line of his mouth and judging eyes, gives an impression of ferocity that compensates for his lack of height (at fourteen I am taller than Maggot, although he is five years older). Maggot has none of the fey, hippyish characteristics affected by other male members of this tribe I seem to have joined. Maggot is not a hairy, as such; more of a biker. And, of course, according to his echoed words of affirmation, a man. Not a boy, like me.
We’re in the Royal Café in Queens Road, just off Southend High Street, because that’s where everybody in the tribe goes on a Saturday. It’s rammed. Outside in the street, a head named Mick Keller—black-bearded, rangy-looking, handsome—is tying some girl to a lamppost with her scarf. It’s a very long scarf, and she has a very short skirt. She doesn’t seem to mind being tied to the lamppost by Mick, in fact she’s smiling at him. Mick smiles too, though more wolfishly. Having secured the girl he does this weird, cat-like half-dance around her, hands extended like a stage mesmerist. It’s sort of hysterical, but there is a Jaggeresque grace to his movements that is, actually, quite mesmerising. The girl’s laughter, I think, has a slightly nervous edge.
This scene draws further cheers from the tribe, who have torn themselves away from watching Maggot to press themselves against the steamed-up window of the Royal. There’s no jeer in these cheers. That’s a man, they seem to say.
As the record on the Royal’s jukebox changes to The Witch’s Promise by Jethro Tull, I look around for Maggot. Alone at his table now, he scowls and stubs out his cigarette.
It was in a more down-at-heel café close to Chalkwell Park that I first heard about the Royal on Saturdays, the source of the information being a park-football friend named Tony Galvin. Tony is several years older than me, as are all the tribe members; though it doesn’t seem to be a problem if you have long hair, are into the right sort of music and like aimless discussions about what is wrong with the world. Tony said I should go there, that I’d enjoy it—and it was while we were having this conversation, drinking milky coffee out of glass cups in this other, slightly crappier café, that Maggot came and slumped down in the seat opposite us. As he did so, there came the high-pitched whine of a moped from the road outside. ‘I’ll catch him up in a minute,’ said Maggot, nonchalantly thumbing a cigarette from its packet.
Tony made an introduction and Maggot gave me a wary look.
Unnerved by his air of hostility, but feeling that some attempt at conversation was required, I blurted out the stock question among my age group: ‘what school do you go to?’.
With a bitter laugh, Maggot looked off towards the direction in which the moped had vanished.
It was September by the time I finally plucked up the courage to visit the Royal. Tony had gone back to university. I was kicking myself: now I would have to go alone. There would probably be no-one there I recognised: worse, they might not be as friendly as Tony without him there. They might ignore me—or rip the piss. As I rounded the corner into Queens Road I’d more or less decided just to put my head around the door and have a look then go away again. Just to see what all the fuss was about. But when I walked in I realised at once with huge relief that Maggot was in there. With a surly nod of recognition, he licensed me to join him and his friends at their table.
That day I met Mick Keller and a head called Richard and a whole load of other heads. Later there was an all-night party where I met two female heads, Beverley and Gail, who were kind and spent a lot of time talking to me as I was ‘safer’ than the older male heads who kept trying to grope them.
It still seems strange that these older, cooler people would accept me, and I work hard at looking the part, wearing the tribal garb of loon pants and bumpers. From the Army Surplus Store I acquire a greatcoat and a bush hat that I wear everywhere (one Saturday I go into town without the bush hat and nobody recognises me).
An important aspect of looking the part is to have the right albums to carry around under your arm. Usually, given my lack of cash, these are borrowed: King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King was a favourite for a long time because its cover—a garishly painted face screaming in horror—made an impact even from across the street. Today, however, is a chance to change that: I’ve saved up enough pocket money to actually buy an album of my own to carry around (and maybe occasionally listen to). The only trouble is, I’m not sure which one.
Once Maggot has stomped off in a huff and Mick has concluded his mesmerisation activities by getting a phone number from the girl he tied up, I broach the matter with him and Richard. I’ve sort of had my eye on the new Led Zeppelin album, Led Zeppelin III, but having read a rather sniffy review in Melody Maker I’m not sure if their new, more folky direction, is not a false path—and if indeed they haven’t maybe peaked all together. A version of the opening track from their previous album, Whole Lotta Love, is now the theme tune of Top of the Pops, and you can’t get much more peaked than that. Going mainstream is a false path. Have Led Zeppelin sold out? Would it do me more harm than good to be carrying their latest album around?
We discuss other people’s albums for a while before I bring up Led Zeppelin III—casually, neutrally; watching carefully to see what their reaction will be. They’re the cool guys, after all; they should know if it’s still all right to like Led Zeppelin.
To my surprise, neither of them seems to have any fixed opinion. ‘Why don’t we go and listen to a few tracks, Man?’ says Mick. ‘Yeah,’ says Richard, mentioning the name of a record shop in the High Street that has booths in its basement. Though I know of this shop, it has never occurred to me before that I would be allowed to use one of these booths. ‘And you’d … come with me?’
‘Of course.’
Draining our coffees we saunter out into the High Street. Pretty soon the two older guys run into people they know and we stop to chat. The band Yes are booked to play at the Tech college tonight, but there are rumours circulating that they might not turn up. ‘They’re blowing it out, Man,’ says one of them, a bearded head in a rather smelly Afghan coat; ‘I heard it from the roadies.’
‘What would the roadies know?’ I chime in; ‘They just hang around and give them blowjobs backstage.’
‘You’re thinking of groupies,’ says Mick.
‘—Which is a shame,’ continued the Afghan coat, ‘because they’ve got this hot new guitarist, Steve … Watt, or something.’
‘Howe,’ says Richard.
‘Does the bass player still dress in a Superman costume?’ someone else says.
We carry on down the High Street, which is gradually being pedestrianised. At the point where the pedestrianisation runs out and traffic reasserts itself, I remember running into a friend of my own age on this spot a few weeks earlier, his face grave, but flushed with excitement over some news he had to share. ‘Hendrix is dead,’ he said.
‘Who’s Hendrix?’ I replied.
The basement of the record shop smells of patchouli oil and damp Afghan coats. It’s too warm, and thick with a fug of fag smoke. The booths themselves are, if anything, fuggier. And all full. We have to wait a while for our turn before Richard, Mick and I can cram together into one of them, sit down, and wait for the guy behind the counter upstairs to drop the needle on Led Zeppelin III. Oh, the anticipation.
Side one, track one. The Immigrant Song starts and it is reassuringly riffy, and not folky at all, in fact. Immediately our heads start nodding in time. Richard’s hands beat a rhythm against his denimed knees. Track two starts with an acoustic 12-string guitar and some sort of tabla drums, but when Plant starts wailing away and the cinematic stereo strings power in you can’t argue this isn’t classic Led Zeppelin. There’s even some Moog-ish wah synthesizer on the ending, segueing us into the next track, Celebration Day, which is to my mind, great. But what do I know? In peripheral vision I watch anxiously for signs of approbation or disapproval; the imperial thumbs-up or thumbs-down from these two Caesars of cool.
We’re about 16 bars into the next track, the slow blues Since I’ve Been Loving You, when Richard says, ‘I’d buy it.’
On the bus home, I sit on the top deck and examine the album’s gatefold sleeve. It’s a fancy and intricate thing with images that show up through holes punched in the sleeve, on an inner wheel that you rotate with your thumb. Such value.
I listen to the album on the record player in my bedroom, more or less secure in my choice now, and decide that Jimmy Page is a far better guitarist than Eric Clapton. Clapton was a false path. I remove the poster of Eric Clapton from the wall then, slowing the record player down from 33⅓ to 18 (almost half speed) put the needle down on the slow blues track, Since I’ve Been Loving You, and pick up my guitar. Painfully, note by note, I try to replicate what I hear. My respect for Jimmy Page’s dexterity increases bar by bar. My attempts at emulation, however, are not even close.
Later that evening I get a bus to the Tech and hand in at the door the ticket I have purchased with the change left over from buying Led Zeppelin III. Yes have not cancelled the gig, and it goes ahead with me watching, slightly distracted by the psychedelic light show, which includes a projected graphic of a couple having sex in various positions. The bass player does not wear a Superman suit, and none of the tribe turns up, despite all of them having said they were going to. The new guitarist Steve Howe plays blindingly fast—although not mindlessly, repetitively fast like Alvin Lee of Ten Years After or numbingly fast like Eric Clapton in his Cream years; there’s a lot of clever stuff in there like country picking and harmonics and classical stuff and God knows what else. A bit tooclever, perhaps. He is not my new guitar hero.
My new guitar hero is not Steve Howe or Clapton or even Jimmy Page, or Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac, but someone who was already dead when I first heard his name in the High Street a few weeks earlier. Burned into my memory is the jaw-slackening moment when I first played the single Voodoo Child (Slight Return), with its funereally black sleeve, purchased on the day that Tony Coppin told me he was dead.
I don’t listen to Hendrix at 16 RPM and pick out the notes he is playing. What would be the point? He isn’t playing any notes, so far as I can hear. What he’s doing is making sounds: sounds like weather, sounds like traffic, like gunfire; the sound of your own blood throbbing in your head, of a baby crying in the night, a maltreated dog whining in pain, machinery churning, thunder rumbling, a wind that whispers then howls, blowing sheets of stinging rain in your face; screams, farts, burps; the groaning and sighing of all humanity wishing for a better world and not getting it. No other guitarist comes close, no other guitarist is even trying to do the thing that Hendrix does (or did, now that he is dead). What a musician: what a human being. What a man.