Part 2 of the extract from Had Me A Real Good
Time, Andy Neill’s biography of The
Faces, detailing Mac’s early career and his arrival in The Small Faces.
Like many British
R&B groups of the period, the Muleskinners were given the unexpected but
nerve-racking opportunity to back several of their heroes. In September ’64 a
visiting blues package was brought over featuring Sonny Boy Williamson and
Little Walter. As well as these two greats, the Muleskinners also backed
Howlin’ Wolf. “We played with the Wolf [in December ‘64] at the Ricky Tick,
Reading, Corn Exchange, Chelmsford and an all-nighter at the Club Noreik in
Tottenham. He was such a sweet man. [Howlin’ Wolf’s guitarist] Hubert Sumlin
told me in recent years, ‘The Wolf loved you. He wanted to take you guys back
to Chicago’.”
The
Muleskinners recorded some further demos including Howlin Wolf’s ‘Back Door
Man’. “I think we recorded at the same studio, Southern Music,” says Mac. “An
Irish guy called Terry got us in there and he kind of produced the session.” A
tough, Pretty Things-style re-recording of ‘Back Door Man’ (featuring Mac’s
Hohner Cembalet) was released on Fontana in January ’65. However, with a
plethora of similar-sounding R&B groups around the country, the record
quickly vanished.
This setback was further compounded by
the absence of Dave Pether who became hospitalised following a road accident. “We had to keep finding guitarists to
cover for him,” McLagan explains.
Ever since hearing Booker T &
The MGs seminal ‘Green Onions’, Mac had been seduced by the warm, sexy and
soulful sound Booker T. Jones got out of the Hammond L100. “With piano you had
to learn a lot of clever stuff but with a Hammond you only have to put your
hand on it and it stays, you don’t have to keep hitting it.”
Thanks to a Boosey & Hawkes
trade advertisement in Melody Maker that caught Mac’s eye, a trial
Hammond L101 was delivered to the McLagan home on Taunton Avenue. After winning
his parents round to the idea, Alec was again pressed into signing HP forms for
a Hammond L102 and Leslie cabinet. In a Beat Instrumental profile (dated
April 1966), McLagan said, “I changed on to the Hammond last April. What a
jump! At first I was completely lost. I felt like a little man with a big machine.
The controls were a problem after the simple working electric piano. I learned
something different every time I played it.”
Through Jack Barrie, of Marquee
Artists, McLagan left the Muleskinners around June ‘65 to join an outfit Barrie
was managing from Kings Lynn, Norfolk, Boz & The Boz People, formerly known
as Boz & The Teatime Four.
Ian McLagan: “Boz wanted to sing
jazz so I had to learn jazz chords and I wasn’t happy with it. We were playing
all these kind of jazzy R&B things.* One night we
played a US army base and we had to do three of these hour-long sets. After the
first the bass player came over to me in the dressing room and said, ‘Do you
fancy a smoke?’ I’d smelt dope before but never actually smoked it… the next
set was just another world and I was so deep into it, I was turned right on,
the sound was bigger, deeper and wider and the songs went on forever.”
McLagan was alarmed to discover that
the Boz People displayed even less professionalism than the Muleskinners. “Boz
was always a bit of a rascal and he wasn’t taking it as seriously as I wanted.
We had these dates in Scotland booked and we broke down on the Friday somewhere
north of London and Boz just laughed, ‘Ha ha, we broke down, oh well, what the
fuck, we can’t get there’. So the van got fixed and on Saturday we set off
again. We got as far as the North Circular as I recall and it broke down again.
It was like the Russian flyers in A Night At The Opera, you know, ‘Well
we got halfway there, we ran out of gas so we went back home.’ Sure enough Boz
started giggling, so I said, ‘That’s it, I quit’. I got my case and I thumbed a
lift back home.”
Now out of a gig and feeling
despondent, McLagan was ready to quit the business. “My earnings were getting
smaller and smaller each week and I was sick of all the travelling and having
to lug my gear about.” It was then that fate intervened.
“I went to see my girlfriend Irene
as I didn’t have anything to do Saturday night and I came back on the tube, she
was in Manor House, I was in Hounslow. Completely wrong end of the bloody line.
On the way back, I met a pal of mine, Phil Weatherburn, who was actually Gill’s
cousin. He said, ‘Hello Mac, how’s the band?’ I said ‘I just quit’ and he said,
‘You should join the Small Faces’ and I went, ‘Yeah, very funny, Phil’. I’d
actually already seen the Small Faces on Ready, Steady, Go! doing
‘Whatcha Gonna Do About It’. My dad had called me downstairs to watch them and
I thought they were great especially Steve’s voice and the way they looked.
“On the Monday
morning, November 1, about nine o’clock, the phone rang and it was Don Arden
saying, ‘Can you come up to the office this afternoon? I’ve got a job for you’.
I didn’t know what it was for. I thought it might have been for a recording
session. While I was waiting in the outer office I looked at the photographs on
the wall of all the bands Arden handled - the Nashville Teens, the Animals, the
Clayton Squares, the Small Faces and I thought it couldn’t be the Small Faces,
the Nashville Teens or the Animals, so it had to be the Clayton Squares who I’d
never heard of.
“When he finally got me in, Arden
said, ‘How much are you earning?’ and I lied and told him the figure that my
dad was earning as a foreman in an engineering works which was £20 a week. I’d
actually been on £5 a week with Boz & The Boz People and I was living at
home. Arden said, ‘You start at £30, you’ll be on probation for a month and
after a month if the guys like you and they want to keep you on, you’ll get an
even split’. And I said, ‘What guys?’ He said ‘The Small Faces’ and I smiled to
myself. I thought, ‘Fucking great!’
“Don said, ‘Come
back at six o’clock’. I think it was probably around five or 5:30 and I walked
to the Ship, the pub next to the Marquee. I wasn’t allowed to tell anybody, it
was all top secret, mainly because I think Jimmy Winston didn’t know he’d been
fired at that point, and also his girlfriend was the secretary in the outer
office but I didn’t know that. So after a couple of pints I called my dad who’d
just got home from work. I said, ‘Look, dad, I can’t tell you what’s going on
but I’ve got a job with a band and I’m going away, it’s really exciting’. And
bless his heart he guessed who it was. It was him who turned me on to the Small
Faces in the first place.
“So I went back to
Don’s office and I was two pints down on an empty stomach, I hadn’t eaten since
breakfast. He invited me into his office again. Then the door opened and the
three of them came in. Steve looked at me and just grabbed me. They picked me
up off the ground and we all started laughing ‘cause we were all the same
size.”
As a postscript,
after a period of time had passed, Mac enquired as to whether he’d passed the
audition. “Ronnie said ‘whaddya mean?’ so I told him about me being on
probation. Ronnie said, ‘Did you hear that, Steve? Let’s get this sorted now’.
So we went up to the office and Ronnie points at me and says, ‘Listen Don, we
like this guy. Mac’s one of us now, fuck this probation bullshit’. That’s when
my money dropped down to £20 a week!”
*
The Boz People recorded four singles for EMI’s Columbia label in 1965-66 but
McLagan cannot recall if he played on any of them during his brief tenure in
the band.
No comments:
Post a Comment