Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

[2.] THE NERVOUS SYSTEM 

By the end of 1966 the suits suddenly began to smell of mothballs, the collars chafed & the music sounded scratchy & thin.  DB, our beatnik roadie, had introduced some of us to the kind of hand-rolled cigarettes that hitherto I had only read about in jazz biographies.  And via what passed for the hip music press came tales of new sounds from San Francisco. The revolution, it seemed, was at hand.

At the hipster’s West End music mecca, One Stop Record in South Moulton Street, I diverted shirt & suit money towards three imported LPs: the first albums from The Doors & Love on Elektra (those box-quality cardboard sleeves!) & Safe As Milk by Captain Beefheart on Buddha.

Conversion was instant & comprehensive. Like Toad of Toad Hall, my rapture for the new order was total & I wanted jangling 12-strings, screaming feedback, wacky lyrics & psychedelia (whatever that was) in spades.  Nearly all of the Bismark’s crew ran for cover in the face of such wild-eyed zeal leaving Pete & I to press on undaunted.  We formed a new band & went in search of the New Jersusalem.

MARTIN FRY, DAVE FRENCH, MARTIN FIELDHOUSE, DICK JONES, PETE CURRIE

After spending a fortnight arguing about an appropriately outrageous name (The Flesh Knot, The Sperm Bank & Pete’s favourite, Disastrous Partridge & The Seven Year Whistle), we ended up with The Nervous System & began to sort out who was going to play what. Pete knew several more chords than I did & could barre all of them without getting finger cramp so I moved from guitar to bass.  After a few rehearsals with others of equal incompetence, an initial line-up stabilised & we shambled out onto the mile-high stage of the Knight’s Youth Club, Brockley for our debut gig. 

Jingling like lost sheep & peering myopically through our regulation Jim McGuinn dark glasses at an incredulous audience, we proceeded to demonstrate our complete lack of understanding both of stage dynamics & basic electronics. With amp fuses blowing & the interminable tuning of guitars, we managed to lurch through three numbers – one original & two Byrds b-sides – before an apologetic vicar asked us ever so nicely to desist.

Hubris without foundation is a great asset & we persevered in the face of derision & indifference. And our time came. Suddenly the South-East London hotspots went beads & kaftans & the search was on for native folk rock & psychedelia. Instant experts, prophets honoured in their own time, we were in demand & a brief but intensive period of hard gigging grew us up fast.

Through a combination of simply being in exactly the right place at precisely the right time & Pete’s shameless hustling, we soon found ourselves doing the rounds of the nascent underground clubs, always trailing in the wake of the heavyweights, present & clearly future.  From our humble corner we watched Syd Barrett being lifted bodily onto stage at Alexandra Palace, his guitar hanging around his neck like the albatross. We were approached at Middle Earth in Covent Garden by Fairport Convention, fascinated that we were using a traditional folk song in an electric format.  At the same club, we gathered up a shy & unrecognised John Peel at 3 am & bought him a steak pie in the busy market, surrounded by bemused porters at early breakfast. At Chiselhurst Caves Eric Burdon roared so mightily into the two mics we lent him in quick succession that we had to bin them & buy new ones.

The summer of 1967 seemed to go on forever. We began it as The Nervous System, a college band that got lucky, & we closed the year as Tintagel, thoroughly gigged, half-competent & twice as arrogant (although, of course, in a loving & peaceful sort of way.)

(Continued)

.o0o.

One of the most engaging aspects of bloggery is the way in which it provides for a mixture of private meditation & public grandstanding. At whim, the blogger can share sober reflection or indulge immoderate ranting. S/he can offer modest advice & tentative wisdom or reminisce interminably & flash a wallet-load of family snaps with all the tact & grace of a public bar drunk. And there’s no editor at the business end to spike the story. Perfect...

I’ve been meaning to inflict the following on my vast international readership for a while now.  I have dropped hints over time about an illustrious musical past, posting the odd pic & anecdote. Now in all their faded glory, I give you...

DICK JONES – THE ROCK-&-ROLL YEARS
























The physical creaks & cracks of advancing age notwithstanding, it’s clear that a heart has grown old when its owner accepts that the dreams & visions of childhood & youth will never be fulfilled.

Some of us, however, never attain that level of sober maturity & we remain uncertain into dotage as to what we’re going to be when we grow up. I still hanker occasionally for a life on the footplate of a speeding steam locomotive, or at the controls of a Spitfire sweeping low over the White Cliffs of Dover.

But my one great undiminished ambition, nurtured from early youth, was always to play music for money. ‘Fun & profit’ was the rallying cry through successive bands. Let this be what pays the bills.

So I became a teacher.  The weight of bourgeois expectation, the assumptions of a middle class upbringing in post-war Britain, the simple practical need to put food on the table for the family & pay the mortgage dictated the sensible course.  While others struggled up & down the motorways crammed between drum kit & PA in a Ford Transit belching smoke, I knocked off work at 4.00 & returned home to mark books.

Well, actually, not quite.  Lacking the strength of mind, or plain unselfishness, to slip the bass guitar under the bed, I continued to pursue the dream as if what happened between 9.00 & 4.00 was itself the fantasy.  And, with the wisdom of hindsight, there’s little doubt that, over the years, home & family paid the price.

Between 1965 & 1990 I ricocheted from one musical venture to another, driven by the urgent need to locate musical territories largely unoccupied by others. The search was always for the unexplored genre, or at the least a degree of authenticity lacking in those already exploring it.

[1.] BISMARK’S IMPERIAL JASS/JUG WIZARDS

1965 was a strange year for the jeunesse d’oree at the cutting edge of fashion. The Beatles & Stones had been in place for a couple of years. Other groups had moved onto the block & were challenging their supremacy. The world of commerce was now taking an active interest in street culture & couture. The mod minority was now the catalogue-&-chain-store majority.

Mal & I were Drama students at Goldsmiths’ College in South-East London. We were cocky, arrogant & pissed off that in our tonik suits & tab-collar shirts we were pretty much indistinguishable from any 50 other mardy lads who considered themselves at the cutting edge.  So we took to spending our Saturday mornings sifting through the contents of the battered barrows that lined the single street that was Deptford Market. 

This was the era of the drip-dry shirt & off-the-peg suit & it was also only a decade since the first wave of West Indian immigrants had arrived on the Empire Windrush.  The Market barrows were elbow deep in pre-war striped cotton shirts & boxes full of the stiff, starched collars that attached to them.  Hanging from hangers beneath the canopies were rows of blue, brown & grey pin- & chalk-striped double-breasted suits, the jackets full skirted & the trousers high-backed & front-pleated, the legs flapping like sails from their deep pockets down to their one-inch turn-ups.  And fluttering alongside them like exotic birds were the massive spatulate ties, big as trowels, of the Jamaicans & Trinidadians – the height of fashion in Kingston & Port-of-Spain, but dumped in a rush in favour of attire more acceptable to conservative & largely prejudiced employers.

At 2/6d a shirt & 10 shillings a suit (12.5 & 50 pence respectively), there was still enough left in our student grants to ensure fags & beer. So Mal & I abandoned our Fred Perry shirts & our knuckle cord hipsters for three-piece demob suits, Edwardian shirts & collars & technicolor ties depicting sinuous naked ladies, tropical flowers & parrots in full cry.

All that we lacked was a context.  Sitting amongst our fellow students in the refectory we simply looked like extras from central casting on a coffee break. We needed a setting, a platform for our costumery. 

Cometh the hour, cometh the band. Word reached us that at the Tiger’s Head in Catford – a brash ‘30s pub with a function room – a wild & surreal art school outfit called the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band was appearing every Friday night.  Fronted by the debonair (& now legendary) Vivian Stanshall, they played a beguiling mixture of between-the-wars novelty numbers & self-written material, these played on the standard instruments of the dance band & interjected & interspersed with dada-cum-cabaret-cum-vaudeville routines. And all the members of the band wore impeccable swing-time tailoring.

We were simultaneously seduced & inspired & from a synthesis of our sartorial indulgences & a shared love of pre-war musical forms, we formed Bismark’s Imperial Jass (later jug) Wizards.  Lacking both the instrumentation & the expertise of the Bonzos, we went in the direction of the jug & skiffle bands of the ‘20s & ‘30s & our set included breakneck versions of such classics as Digging My Potatoes, Stealing & I’m Satisfied With My Gal.

Mal & I drafted in a guitarist & a banjo-player & then relied on a core of kazoo-blowing & washboard-bashing fellow drama students who made up in energetic self-promotion what they lacked in musical aptitude.  We got ourselves a Sunday lunchtime residency in the college pub of preference, the New Cross House, & enjoyed to the limit our slightly prolonged 15 minutes of local fame.  Our zenith (which preceded by only one Sunday our demise) was undoubtedly the moment when, at the conclusion of our barnstorming version of Blind Blake’s Black Dog, an enormous black Labrador burst through the double doors of the saloon bar & proceeded to ravage our washboard player.

L/ to R.
Mal Griffin, Pete Currie, Sam Hodgson, Dick Hughes, Colin Oliver, Jon Richards, Dick Jones

(Continued)

.o0o.

CHILDREN'S SCIENCE EXAM ANSWERS.

These are real answers given by children in various science exams set in a private school. Allegedly.

Q: Name the four seasons.  A: Salt, pepper, mustard and vinegar.

Q: Explain one of the processes by which water can be made safe to drink.  A: Flirtation makes water safe to drink because it removes large  pollutants  like grit, sand, dead sheep and canoeists.

Q: How is dew formed?  A: The sun shines down on the leaves and makes them perspire.

Q: How can you delay milk turning sour?  A: Keep it in the cow.

Q: What causes the tides in the oceans?  A: The tides are a fight between the Earth and the Moon. All water tends  to flow towards the moon, because there is no water on the moon, and nature  hates a vacuum. I forget where the sun joins in this fight.

Q: What are steroids?  A: Things for keeping carpets still on the stairs.

Q: What happens to your body as you age?  A: When you get old, so do your bowels and you get intercontinental.

Q What happens to a boy when he reaches puberty?  A: He says good-bye to his boyhood and looks forward to his adultery.

Q: Name a major disease associated with cigarettes.  A: Premature death.

Q: What is artificial insemination?  A: When the farmer does it to the bull instead of the cow.

Q: How are the main parts of the body categorized? (e. g. , abdomen).  A: The body is consisted into three parts -- the brainium, the borax and  the  abdominal cavity. The brainium contains the brain; the borax contains the  heart and lungs, and the abdominal cavity contains the five bowels, A, E,  I, O, and U.

Q: What is the fibula?  A: A small lie.

Q: What does "varicose" mean?  A: Nearby.

Q: Give the meaning of the term "Caesarian Section"  A: The Caesarian Section is a district in Rome.

Q: What does the word "benign" mean?  A: Benign is what you will be after you are eight.

THE SUN HOTEL, DEDHAM, 1992

A single bell
tells the hours
of their passing.

I wake on
the hour in
the canopied bed

we share, the
bed that floated
my dreams forty

years before in
the same bay-
windowed, steep-floored

room I crossed
as a child
drawn by careening

bells one morning,
sunlight muzzled in
mist and the

ancient centuries abroad
in the street.
Now, as then,

the continuum prevails;
history persists, sidereal,
not linear. Here

are no ghosts,
no hauntings: this
world is circular.

Rain drifts in
a long wind
up the Stour.

Grey morning light
sketches the summer
mist of forty

years ago. An
abundance of being
and doing trails

me; now dust
silts up my
going. But I

rise & cross
the floor again,
stoop at the

mullioned window, watch
the silent church
hunkered in the

rain. No bells
in concert, just
the timebound tenor

on the hour
and the ticking
of the rain.