You want the story of Rock Music? You got it!
I was lamenting with my good roadie friend Mike that we missed out on so many seminal moments in the history of Rock Music. What we would have paid to see the Beatles in Hamburg or at the Cavern, the Stones and Yardbirds in Richmond, Little Richard tearing up the little Southern clubs, Howlin’ Wolf in a sweaty Chicago club. If we could only get a time machine to go back to see Elvis and Scotty ripping it up, to see Hendrix when he first arrived in England, or the Doors at the Whiskey. The list was endless.
It didn’t matter how many great bands we had seen there were always the ones that got away.
But I did have a time machine. It was in my skull. I had run a History of Rock Music class and written books on it. I knew it all. I had seen some amazing gigs, Pink Floyd with Syd, Doors at the Roundhouse, Stones in the Park, Led Zep at the Toby Jug, Zappa, Cream, Hendrix and a thousand more. I’ve been immersed in Rock ever since I was a kid.
I invented a musician character and took him back to the very beginning. He was my vehicle to present the whole history of Rock Music as a novel. Where I couldn’t be he was. Right there with James Brown, Hank Williams, Buddy Holly and Robert Johnson.
This is the history of Rock Music in a novel – as it’s never been told! Sit back then jump up and dance! We’re off on a journey! From Son House to White Stripes! It’s all here!
Excerpt – The Blues Muse –Chicago
I’d really dug those days of busking but if the truth was told I’d had enough. I’d reached a plateau with my music. I was good but there was no way that I could compete with the best and although I got by and had my times I could see that it was a road that was going to end in misery.
I figured it was time to get in out of the weather; to get a room that I could call mine and settle down. Besides, times were changing fast. The South was becoming a different place. The old ways were dying out.
When slavery had been abolished we’d thought we were all free but it hadn’t worked out that way. We might have been free in name but in practice we worked the fields just the same and worked for the boss-man. We lived in the same huts and scratched the same living. We shopped the same stores and drank from our own water fountains, rode in our own parts of the buses and had our own eating places. We were out in those fields early, never educated, never voted and knew our place. If anyone made too much fuss or got above themselves they were quickly put in their place. The Klu Klux Klan saw to that.
There might not have been as many lynchings but that didn’t mean there weren’t any murders. It was easy to lose a body or two in those muddy bayous, especially when nobody asked too many questions. If a pastor got too big then it was always good for a church getting torched. With the Klan’s hooves pounding past your door, the yells and glow of those fiery torches lighting up your room, and the burning cross stuck in front of your door as a warning, it took a brave man to speak his mind. When the men who carried out the terror and tied the weights round the bodies were the same who did the investigating it took an exceptional person to defy the odds.
That is why you don’t find too much Blues with a political message. There was no protest in the words; the protest was heavy in the notes. Even to record a mild rebuke put you at risk.
There was that change coming but it was still a way off.
But for me it wasn’t the racism and politics that drove me out so much as the other changes. The old days were being swept aside by the new world. Machines were replacing men. The days of a big man, like ‘The Wolf’, Chester Burnett, running a team of oxen to plough those fields were going. There were tractors that could do a better job in a tenth of the time. The labour gangs were being replaced by machines that dug, sowed and harvested as good as any gang. The need for a workforce was melting in the heat of the future.
A man could do two things: he could kick his heels and grumble, get mean and ornery and starve; or he could uproot and take himself off to those northern cities where they had a need for labour. The huge car plants of Detroit and Chicago were calling out for fuel for their machines; they wanted hands to keep the wheels turning. Right now, in the South, there were idle hands in need of bucks while in the North there were plenty of greenbacks to be harvested.
There was a black tide flowing in one direction – out of the fields and into the factories, out of the heat and into the ice of winter, out of fields and into the concrete canyons of the city.
I was part of that mass migration. I was about to swap my hominy grits and greasy greens for hamburgers, hotdogs and French fries.
Besides, the days of the acoustic Blues were over. These were the days of electricity. The kids wanted something new that they could dance to, something with a beat. After the war it was as if the old world was washed away on a huge wave of energy. The radio rocked. The clubs rolled and those northern cities shook to the new world.
I hitched into Memphis and straight through with hardly a pause. I worked the street corners and clubs to get my fare together and proudly bought my ticket. I wanted to hit Chicago standing on my own feet.