There’s an old joke that’s been doing the rounds for decades. You’ve probably heard it:
“If you can remember the sixties,” it goes, “then you can’t have been there.” Or words to that effect. It’s often attributed to Robin Williams, but was in fact first coined in a stand-up routine by the American actor/comedian Charlie Fleischer in the early ‘80s. And it’s been used so often by so many others since then that a lot of people actually believe it’s true. But it’s not. It’s a joke. Quite a funny joke I suppose, but just that. A joke.
I lived through the sixties and I can remember quite a lot about them. It surprises me that I can, because I gave myself plenty of reasons to not be able to remember them. But remember them I do, and they were an amazing time. An unforgettable time, you might say. And it was remembering them that made me want to write Motorbird, because it was an era that deserves to be written about.
Of all the places to go and hear live music in London in the late ‘60s, the Marquee Club in Soho was my favourite, even though it didn’t serve alcohol and there was nowhere comfortable to sit. It was all about the music. Seven nights a week. And it was affordable.
The Marquee had started out in a basement on Oxford Street in the spring of 1958. At first it featured jazz, but it soon became known as the birth place of the British blues scene, introducing the world to such London luminaries as Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, and The Cyril Davies Allstars. Then came The Graham Bond Organisation and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, later with Eric Clapton. The Rolling Stones played their first ever gig there in the summer of 1962. Visiting dignitaries from America like Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson and T-Bone Walker would play there when they were passing through town.
In 1964 the club moved out of the basement and into a larger premises on Wardour Street in Soho, just in time to catch the tidal wave of young English bands who were looking for somewhere to play.
My first visit there was in late September of 1967 to see theJeff Beck Group. Jeff on guitar, Micky Waller on drums, Ronnie Wood on bass and Rod Stewart on vocals. Not a bad little combo. A few years later Rod Stewart had become a huge megastar, but back then he was Rod the Mod, and could belt out a song as well as anyone.
A couple of weeks later I caught Chicken Shack for the first time, Stan Webb’s group with Christine Perfect on piano. Great band.
Ten days after that I was back to see Jimi Hendrix.
Jimi Hendrix at the Marquee
At that time Jimi was in the early stages of becoming a huge international star. His incendiary performance at Monterrey Pop a few months earlier had brought him world-wide attention, and he was about to embark on a series of gruelling stadium tours, playing to tens of thousands of people in places all over the world, including Woodstock.
But he still found the time to come and play for us at the Marquee.
It was a memorable evening, to say the least. I took a pretty girl called Maryon who I’d known for some time. When we got to Wardour Street there was a long line of people winding down the street for several blocks, but I wasn’t bothered. I’d arranged to meet my friend Malcolm at the door, and he knew the manager. Apparently he could get us in for free. And sure enough, the two of them were standing there when we walked up, and beckoned us in. It was brilliant—not only did we get in free, but we were among the first few people to get into the hall, and were able to grab a spot just a few feet from the stage. The doors opened, and within minutes the place was jam-packed. There must have been a thousand people there, in a room meant to hold six or seven hundred. It was very hot and sweaty. And just throbbing with anticipation.
The opening act was The Nice, a band I’d never heard of. They were a four-piece, featuring a young Keith Emerson on Hammond organ. He’d later go on to form Emerson, Lake and Palmer, who did quite well. The Nice were pretty good, as far as I can remember, but what really stood out was Emerson’s solo spot. Under a single spotlight he jumped up and started sticking long knives into the keyboard to hold down chords. Then he rocked the whole unit back and forth and lashed it with a rhino whip until it wheezed and whined and howled like a tortured animal.
We barely had time to recover before The Jimi Hendrix Experience strode onto the stage. They launched into Purple Haze and the place went completely nuts. Jimi had a split cord going from his Strat into two Marshall stacks: four hundred watts blasting through sixteen twelve-inch speakers. Maryon, Malcolm and I were no more than ten feet from him, and within seconds we’d learned the true meaning of the word loud. I was immediately blown away by Jimi’s playing, and by the chemistry between him and drummer Mitch Mitchell. The way they played off each other was magical. The sound pressure level hit overdrive and it felt like the whole ceiling was going to get blown off.
The three of us remained front and centre for an hour of the most amazing guitar virtuosity that anyone has ever, or could ever experience. Words cannot describe it.
My hearing wasn’t too good as we walked back to the tube after the concert. My eardrums had taken an almighty pounding. But I didn’t mind. I got better.
In November I went and saw Cream there, another supergroup who were well on the way to becoming major headliners in stadiums around the world. But they too came and played the Marquee one more time. Malcolm didn’t go to that one, so I had to pay, and ended up much further from the stage. But it didn’t matter—Jack, Eric and Ginger put on a breath-taking show, and I left with my eardrums ringing once again.
Cream at the Marquee
By then I’d become a regular at the Marquee, and throughout 1968 I continued to frequent the place. There was a circle of bands that I would go and see most often: Chicken Shack; Ainsley Dunbar’s Retaliation; the Savoy Brown Blues Band; the Bluesbreakers; Taste, with Rory Gallagher, and Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, who I particularly liked. Few people could play and sing the blues with as much feeling as Peter Green, and he remains one of my favourites to this day.
The Marquee Club, London, from the Ian Anderson Archive.
If Ian took this shot before one of Jethro Tull’s shows, then there’s a good chance I was in the crowd that day.
New bands kept on showing up. Jethro Tull played there quite often early in the year, and you could tell right away that they had something special. I saw them four or five times. Free had a residency for a few months, and I caught them a couple of times. I was there to hear the Band of Joy, featuring Robert Plant and John Bonham a few short months before they joined Led Zeppelin. Led Zep played there too, much later in the year, but I missed that one.
Not long after that I went off traveling, and then packed up and moved away from England for good. The Marquee remained on Wardour Street until 1988, and then continued to run at several different locations until well into the twenty-first century.
Looking back on those days now, I realise how incredibly lucky I was to have been there. We had no idea that so many of the bands and musicians we were going to see would end up becoming legends. We’d just hop the tube to Piccadilly Circus, walk a few blocks up to Wardour Street, pay a few bob at the door, and there they were.
There were a lot of pubs in England when I was growing up. It seemed like there were two or three on every corner, with at least one more halfway down the street. Consequently, there were always a few that were so short of customers that they’d turn a blind eye if some of their patrons hadn’t quite reached the legal drinking age. It wasn’t difficult to find out which ones they were, and I began drinking in them when I was in my mid-teens.
They were usually pretty dull and gloomy old places, to be honest, and it took a while to develop a taste for beer. But that wasn’t the point: it was illegal, so it was cool.
I remember going to one such pub with a couple of friends one evening in the mid-sixties. We got pints from the bar and sat around a table, drinking and smoking, chatting and goofing around like fifteen-year-olds do. There was an old guy in a tatty brown overcoat sitting at the next table, scowling at us over his pint. After a while he got up to leave, and stopped on his way past.
“Pah—you kids these days, you don’t know nuffing,” he said. “When I was your age I had to live through a bleedin’ war!” Then out he went, muttering to himself.
It wasn’t uncommon to be on the receiving end of sentiments like that. In fact, when I was younger, if I misbehaved I’d often be chastised for not appreciating the sacrifices my parents had made for me during the war. That was something I was not allowed to forget. And as I grew older, it felt like bit of a rift began to form between the generations—an Us and Them scenario. It became known as The Generation Gap. And sometimes—as happened with the old guy in the pub—there was a degree of resentment involved, as if it was our fault.
The old guy was right, of course. We didn’t know nuffing. We hadn’t lived through a war like he and our parents had. We’d never been woken up by sirens in the middle of the night and had to rush off and hide in shelters or tube stations as an endless barrage of bombs showered down on the buildings above. Neither had we experienced the horrors of the battlefield with bullets flying and comrades falling, nor had to pilot planes full of bombs through clouds of flak in the dead of night.
We’d been spared all that. But our parents hadn’t. They’d had five of the best years of their lives torn from them, and had indeed made immense sacrifices in the name of peace. And they’d been successful. They’d defeated the enemy, and now they were exhausted. Drained. All they wanted was a quiet, peaceful world where they could live simple lives and bring up their children, listen to Vera Lynn and do a spot of gardening.
And we—the children—did, for the most part appreciate the peaceful world they’d created for us, even if it did seem a bit boring. It wasn’t hard to get a sense of what they’d had to live through. Bombed-out buildings were a common sight—it took the country years to get them all cleaned up; there were still thousands of pillboxes everywhere, those squat little concrete bunkers that had been built all along the coast and up and down every river, as our last line of defence in the event of invasion; and it was strictly forbidden to ever touch anything metal you might find washed up on the beach. We appreciated the sacrifices they’d made for us, but we also felt that their new world was a little stodgy, and needed a bit of livening up. So someone invented rock ’n’ roll, the Beatles came along, and the world burst from black and white into glorious colour.
And at the same time, as an added motivation, the Cold War was casting a dark shadow over us—the threat of nuclear annihilation. We grew up in constant fear that some idiot in Washington or Moscow could at any moment push the button and blow us all off the face of the Earth. We had to make the most of our time. So we partied harder, and this seemed to annoy our parents even more. They didn’t like our celebrations, said they were too noisy, said we were being too disrespectful and immoral, and the gap between us widened.
And that was it, really. The Generation Gap. A direct result of War.
Many years later, when I had children of my own, I wondered if they’d be rebellious like me when they reached their teens. I hoped they would. But what would I say to them?
“Pah—you kids these days, you don’t know nuffing. When I was your age I had to live through the sixties. All those Love-ins. All that acid. . .”
