JUST BACKDATED EXTRACT 3

It is the December 1975. In October, after a three-month break in the UK, I resumed my role as Melody Maker’s US Editor, just in time to chase Bob Dylan around New England on his Rolling Thunder Review. Over the next couple of months, I interviewed Nona Hendryx, Paul Simon, Patti Smith, Randy Brecker and Bobby Womack, among others, and also met up with my friends Slade who had just moved to New York on their doomed attempt to conquer America. I vaguely remember a party at the Upper East Side apartment occupied by Jim and Louise Lea and Dave and Janice Hill where their tour manager Graham ‘Swin’ Swinnerton passed around a joint the size of a Cuban cigar. That’s not in the book but what follows is… 

I ended 1975 by interviewing John Hammond, the legendary Columbia A&R man who’d signed many jazz greats to the label, then moved into the rock era by signing Bob Dylan – “Hammond’s Folly”, as he was known at first – and later Bruce Springsteen, among a score of others. A man of wealth and taste, he was a scion of the fabulously wealthy Vanderbilt family that built America’s railroads, and he was as well known for his support of African Americans as he was for his work in music. Back in the 1930s he’d contributed a New York news column to Melody Maker, writing about Duke Ellington and Count Basie. I felt privileged to have followed in his footsteps. 

        For the first time in my life I was alone on a Christmas Day, spending most of it in bed recovering from a seriously late party the night before at my friend Ashley Pandell’s apartment where among the guests was Harry Nilsson who was swigging heartily from a bottle of sake, the Japanese rice wine usually drunk warm. On Boxing Day, which Americans don’t celebrate, I was up bright and early and decided that since no one had bought me any Christmas presents I’d buy one for myself.

      I walked through Central Park, past the Latinos selling loose joints, all the way down to West 48th Street which, like Denmark Street in London, is wall-to-wall guitar shops. I’d already visited Manny’s, the famous music shop where the big acts bought their gear, and even done an MM feature on the place, but I found what I was looking for a few doors down in a shop called We Buy Guitars: a used small-scale Gibson LG1 acoustic, circa 1960, so I paid the asking price of $165 + $13 tax and slipped the receipt into the accessory compartment in its case where it has stayed ever since. Elvis played one just like it in Loving You, his second movie. Two weeks later I enrolled at the Guitar Study Centre, a Manhattan music school run by Eddie Simon, Paul’s younger brother, and over the next few months painstakingly learned how to finger pick. I wrote an MM feature about Eddie’s music school too. 

The receipt for my Gibson guitar, front and back. 

        As 1975 became 1976 there was a nagging doubt in my mind as to what I would do after Melody Maker. This life I was leading wouldn’t last forever. I was still checking out CBGBs, heading down to the Bowery in the scruffiest clothes I had lest someone mug me for the few dollars I had with me. I saw many of the bands that played there, reviewing most of them, the hits and the misses. I saw The Voidoids with Richard Hell in his torn t-shirt before Malcolm McLaren dressed some London lads the same way and that original punk ‘Handsome’ Dick Manitoba with The Dictators. The first time I saw the Ramones their songs were so short – some lasting no more than 30 seconds – that I thought they were a novelty act, but I loved them all the same. I somehow knew Talking Heads were destined for great things, as were Blondie and Television. 

        I also saw Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers at CBGBs but thought they were out of place there. They weren’t a punk band like The Ramones, or a power pop outfit like Blondie, or new wavers like Talking Heads. But they weren’t hard rock either, more a traditional rock band whose music was built on the blues and fifties rock’n’roll, like the early Beatles, Stones and Who. Also, there was none of the slightly under-rehearsed amateurishness about them that – not necessarily in a bad way – characterised groups like The Voidoids, Television and the Patti Smith Group, and they didn’t dress or wear their hair in ways that knowingly contrasted with established rock performers. Equally importantly, they knew their chops, especially guitarist Mike Campbell, and had plenty of drive. I thought they were from the same disciplined domain as Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band or Bob Seger’s crew from Detroit. Then again, Tom’s high voice sounded a bit like Roger McGuinn of The Byrds which, coupled with his Rickenbacker guitar, gave them an added string to their bow. Nowadays it’s called “heartland” music which implies a common bond with the blue-collar American working man and a tendency not to stray too far away from their rudimentary roots.

One night in early 1976 Debbie Harry called and asked me to meet her and Chris Stein in the upstairs bar at Max’s Kansas City. I remember that night very well, not least because just as we began to talk The Who’s ‘I Can See For Miles’ came over the in-house PA system, mighty loud too. Debbie and Chris told me they needed a manager for their new group Blondie. Would I be up for it? I was astounded, incredibly flattered, but had to decline. I didn’t think I knew enough about managing groups and wasn’t up to the job. In any case, there would have been a conflict of interest – how could I write for a music paper and manage a band at the same time? – and, besides, my presence in New York was contingent on my working for MM. My visa precluded doing anything else. Also, there was the same dilemma that discouraged me from forming steady relationships with girlfriends: I could be called back to London at short notice, thereby faced with a very tricky dilemma. 

        I wish now I’d said yes. I wish I’d chucked in the MM job, thrown myself in at the deep end and taken the chance. I think Debbie and Chris thought it would be cool to have a British music writer as their manager, and they were probably right, but I wasn’t ready to make this jump, not yet anyway. Still, Debbie and Chris had given me an idea about life after MM.