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EXTRACTS:
from 'A Dysfunctional Success (The Wreckless Eric Manual)' by Eric Goulden
 I
got my first real guitar when I was fourteen, a three-quarter scale Japanese
acoustic. Before that I’d had several unsuccessful attempts at making
one. They were strung up with fuse wire and were usually unplayable.
My sister was learning
folk guitar with the TV series, Hold Down A Chord. The back page of the
tutor book had diagrams of all the chord shapes. When she lost interest
and went to university I tore the back page off and learned all the chords
on it – dominant, sub-dominant, tonic and minor. I didn’t know
what any of that meant but I could soon do it in all twelve key signatures.
A couple of boys in my class were forming a folk group. They asked me
to join. I didn’t really want to play folk music but it was a start.
Two acoustic guitars and a boy on the electric bass whose dad was a Baptist
minister. The boy looked like a Baptist minister too – he even had
the haircut – but he was delusional enough to see himself as a Noel
Redding figure, a titan of the bass guitar. He tried to persuade me to
take up the drums, then the other boy would have to get an electric guitar
and we could be a proper rock group.
The other boy really
wanted to play folk music and I didn’t want to be a drummer so we
learned to play Colours by Donovan and fizzled out in the wake of a couple
of Gordon Lightfoot and Tom Paxton tunes. The Baptist minister’s
son got himself a white Hofner Galaxy that looked a bit like Jimi’s
Strat, the other boy grew up and started playing in folk clubs, and I
was the confused kid trying to write songs that bridged the gap between
John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and Pink Floyd.
Muddy
Waters
Willie Dixon
Howlin’ Wolf
John Lee Hooker (I’d seen him doing Boom Boom on Ready Steady Go.
Now I had a Chess EP: Love Blues)
T-Bone Walker
Chuck Berry
Elmore James
Strictly Personal – Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band (found
in the bargain rack
in Woolworths)
I got a full-size
Eko acoustic guitar and electrified it by sticking the earpieces from
a pair of army surplus headphones to the body. I plugged it into a homemade
ten-watt amplifier given to me by a local TV repair man that I met at
a jazz club. All the heavy-duty musicians were into jazz – it said
they were in the Melody Maker, so I went to a local jazz club at a pub
in Peacehaven called the Gay Highlander.
I had some difficulty
reconciling Monty Sunshine & His Jazz Men with Jack Bruce talking
about something called bebop, and I couldn’t imagine how Captain
Beefheart could have been influenced by this, but I was prepared to give
it a try. I went home confused – my head ringing with trumpets, trombones,
clarinets and banjos.
It was a hideous racket
but I persevered. A guitar player didn’t show up one night so they
gave me some chord sheets and sat me at the back where I played chunk
chunk chunk chunk chunk chunk chunk all night, with a chord change at
the beginning of every bar. Soon I was playing trad jazz at the Pier Hotel
opposite the Palace Pier in Brighton.
The Pier Hotel was
rough. I saw loads of fights in there. It was what you might call bohemian,
which is another way of saying it was full of low-life beatnik scum. It
was refurbished in the late ’70s and renamed the Buccaneer. Then
it turned into the Escape Club. They don’t have jazz there any more.
I bought an Ornette
Colman record – The Art Of The Improvisers. I was gong to buy Hot
Buttered Soul by Isaac Hayes but they’d sold out so I bought the
Ornette Colman album instead. At last I understood. I couldn’t begin
to play this stuff and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to but I started
to understand something about freedom in music. I was done with trad jazz.
When I was fifteen the school
I turned
into a mixed comprehensive. Lewes County Grammar School For Boys no longer
existed. Neither did the Girls Grammar School or the Secondary Modern.
We were all together now under one banner – Priory Comprehensive.
I didn’t give a damn about comprehensive – what interested me
was girls, and suddenly there were loads of them.
At the end of the fourth year the old regime was still in place –
apartheid for boys and girls. The train home was divided in half –
we had two carriages each – girls in the front, boys in the back.
Prefects patrolled the train to make sure there were no transgressions.
When the train arrived in Newhaven we were allowed to talk to girls as
we walked to the bus stop but once we got there we had to queue separately.
There was a system in place – one week the girls queued at the front,
the next week the boys. It didn’t make any difference who queued
where really because when the bus came that was segregated too –
girls downstairs, boys on top. When it rained the prefects waited in the
bus shelter but we had to stand two abreast in the wet. There weren’t
any members of the public to consider because the bus stop was halfway
along a deserted and wind-blasted stretch of road outside the Bevan Funnel
reproduction furniture factory. Nobody in their right mind would wait
for a bus there.
On the journey to
school none of these rules applied – it was beyond the bounds of
possibility that we could get sexually aroused at quarter past eight in
the morning. But care was taken nonetheless – the girls’ summer
school uniform, ’60s coat dresses with buttons all the way down the
front, had to be redesigned because the temptation could prove too much
for the boys – we might find ourselves unbuttoning them in an unsegregated
moment.
At the beginning of
the fifth year this regime was abolished. The senior biology master gave
us boys a bit of fatherly advice and counselling – he explained how
babies were made:
The man supports his weight on his elbows, inserts his erect penis into
the lady’s vagina and stimulates himself by means of vigorous thrusting
movements until he achieves ejaculation. This fertilises the female egg,
which hatches out into a baby nine months later. If that happens the man
has a responsibility, so he must be very careful.
And that’s why,
in a darkened field at a pop concert with the lights flashing and music
pulsating, so many young lives are ruined.
It crossed my mind
that a man of his age should really know about wearing a johnny. But it
sounded fabulous – I could hardly wait, and I’d promise to be
careful. I was hoping to try some marijuana too.
Click
for article by Eric Goulden on Writing 'A Dysfuctional Success'
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