B-BOMB

ADAPTED FROM A CHAPTER IN MY BOOK ‘BLACK VINYL WHITE POWDER’, PUBLISHED IN 2002 BY EBURY BOOKS

In 1956, just 17 and recently out of school, I was working round London as a semi-pro musician – an East End wedding on a Saturday night or a rock ’n’ roll session in a pub. Mostly, these jobs were found by going to Archer Street in Soho where musicians hung out.

Soho was changing. There was a strange mixture of people – teddy boys mixing uneasily with a younger crowd who wore jeans and bright-coloured sweaters. Teenagers strummed guitars while prostitutes watched from doorways and local policemen strolled around openly picking up small bribes. Many of the old cafés had given way to espresso coffee bars which blared rock ’n’ roll from their jukeboxes.

Although I preferred jazz and played the trumpet I used to sit around Soho coffee bars with kids who played guitars and took amphetamine. They told me, ‘It’s great. You want to shout and move and dance. You feel so confident.’ But for me the reverse was true. When I tried it, instead of feeling confident I felt nervous and jittery and didn’t sleep properly for five days. Still, I often pretended to join in.

In the mid-50s, prescription-free amphetamine was stopped, but at chemist shops you could still buy the famous B-Bomb. This was a Benzedrine inhaler intended for asthma sufferers. Inside was a soggy wad of cottonwool containing 60 times more amphetamine than was found in a single tablet. For hard-up kids, one of these shared around to be dunked in cups of Cappuccino could keep the party going all night. You didn’t need a prescription but you had to persuade the chemist your chest was habitually wheezy.

For aspiring rock ’n’ roll stars, bursting open a B-bomb was hardly glamorous; the real goal was to have enough money to freak out big-time like the American stars. Young musicians back from Hamburg would recount stories told to them by Gene Vincent which gave a real insight into rock ’n’ roll lifestyle in the USA. Vincent was a speed freak, as were most of the major figures in American rock ’n’ roll. One of these was Little Richard, with a $1000 a day cocaine habit, who liked to pay ‘a guy with a big penis to have sex with the ladies so I could watch and masturbate while someone was eating my titties’.

These sort of things were never revealed to the general public but all the young musicians around Soho knew what their rock ’n’ roll heroes were up to. To get a taste of that sort of lifestyle many of them headed for Hamburg, an all-night port with rock ’n’ roll bars full of hookers and pills, but I didn’t go with them. I was more drawn to jazz, so I went to America instead – well. Canada actually.

After six months of odd jobs in Toronto, I ended up with a gig in a dockside pub in Montreal. We worked from 8pm to 3am, twenty minutes on, twenty minutes off, seven days a week. To keep his staff going night after night, the manager kept a box of bennies in his office. In return for 25c being knocked off their weekly money, anyone could take one whenever they wanted.

Seamen would arrive straight off a newly docked boat after ten weeks at sea with a thousand dollars in their pocket. Our job was to help them spend it all in the very first place they went into. Mostly we played pop songs, four of us – bass, drums, trumpet and piano, sitting cramped up on a tiny stage at the front of a pub filled with tables and chairs. The hits of the moment were songs like Blueberry Hill, Splish Splash, Mack the Knife and All the Way, but we’d play anything they wanted. Most of the clientele were sailors and the rest were prostitutes; the waiters were part-time professional wrestlers.

The toilets were in front of the bandstand to the right. Between 1am and 2am every night they overflowed and ran past the front of the bandstand. To go to them, every drunk in the pub would pass directly in front of us. As they came out again, Pierre, the French Canadian pianist, solicited them for a song request. He knew every tune that ever existed and would play whatever they asked for provided they put a minimum of two dollars in the glass tumbler on the piano lid. At the end of the evening Pierre took half the proceeds and the rest of us split the other half.

If someone came in with a knife and started fighting, or with a gun and started shooting, we had strict instructions to keep playing. It happened often, but the waiters were good. In seconds, a badly behaved customer could have his facial features obliterated, smashed against the huge oak door that led to the kitchen.

There was an ancient whore who always sat in front of the band stand. She was in her mid-fifties with no teeth and no knickers and kept her dress pulled high enough for us to inspect the goods. One night as we played and watched, she snogged a drunken sailor who vomited in mid-kiss but continued to hold her mouth tightly to his. She allowed him to do so but simultaneously slid her hand into his trouser pocket and removed his wallet. Afterwards she simply wiped her lips and went looking for the next customer.

Another night an Irish seaman requested ‘Rose Of Tralee’ eleven times, putting a $20 bill into the tumbler on each occasion. When he realised he’d spent all his money he came back looking for a refund. Pierre always pocketed the tips when they reached more than $100, so the tumbler was empty. The Irishman pulled out his pockets to show he was now broke and asked if we could play ‘Rose Of Tralee’ again. Having already received $200 from him Pierre obliged. As he sung, the good-humoured Irishman put his hands round Pierre’s throat and jokingly pretended to strangle him. Or so we thought, because before Pierre could reach the second chorus he’d turned blue and fallen off the piano stool. That night we finished early and the next night we had a new pianist. It was that sort of place.

Later, when British rock musicians told stories about their experiences in Hamburg there was a familiar ring to them.