Saturday 10 December 2016

# 44: COUNTRY & WEST END: Great Hanks I have met, if briefly








My list of great Hanks is a short one. I eliminated Tom Hanks early on, much as I like his acting, on grounds of irreversibility, (and also, on grounds of cheating, I deleted Hank Christian Andersen, Han Ki Moon and countless discarded Handkerchiefs), which leaves just two and a bit. The bit was Hank Williams who I virtually met in North Wales, in Llanberis, which lies in the shadow of 'Snowdon', which I never tire of telling people is not a mountain: it is one peak out of five, forming the mountainous ridge of the Snowdon horseshoe. It is distinguished by being the middle one, the highest, the most well-known, and the only one served by a mountain railway, terminating next to the highest cafe in the U.K. (this cafe used to be scruffy and a bit sordid, but has been replaced with a new one: no reviews available). 'Snowdon' is really Yr Wyddfa.

Llanberis is not known for its saloon bars, sheriffs or banjo duels. Nevertheless, ducking into a misty cafe, sheltering from the occasional rain, I found a juke-box full to overflowing with Country & Western records, including the legendary Hank Williams, Marty Robbins and the young Tammy Wynette.  Why? Perhaps the Welsh shepherds see themselves as the UK's cowboys, pitting themselves against the elements, attached to their flocks and dogs by an invisible bond, and getting kinda lonesome up in them there hills. But this does not explain a similar enthusiasm for country music in parts of the West Midlands, the North East and urban Glasgow. He does indeed move in mysterious ways...

This did not signal an enthusiasm for the music in me. I liked the guitar and banjo accompaniment and felt a particular resonance with the steel guitar and its plaintive anguish, but the lyrics were syrupy and maudlin and often too religious for my agnosticism. Maybe Hank Williams planted a seed, though, the kind that takes about 50 years to germinate in the Rich Soil of Life.

A little earlier (1958/9) I had become a rock fan, along with everybody else in my age-group. Elvis, Buddy Holly and The Everlys were spearheading the revolution in the States, while our home-grown versions did their best to ape them. Larry Parnes had a 'stable' of rock singers, all named after mood-states to varying degrees:  Billy Fury, Marty Wilde, and the more sedated Vince Eager. My own favourite was Cliff Richard (though not now), who had clearly spent most of his adolescence in front of the bathroom mirror, practising the Presley lip-curl. His backing group were The Shadows: Hank B. Marvin (you get my drift), Jet Harris (possibly not his given name), Bruce Welch and Tony Meehan. They were decent musicians and Hank was rather a good lead guitar, at a time when playing more than three chords was considered over-elaborate and a bit flash. Hank was better than that; and his glasses were reminiscent of Buddy Holly's (my favourite amongst the Americans), and his face had been a martyr to acne, which was something else I could identify with.

Like every other teenager in the UK, I desperately wanted to play guitar, and started a PR campaign with my parents to get one. The lowest rung on the stairway to stardom was an acoustic guitar, soon to be electrified with an add-on pick-up, amplified by a cheap kit you could get mail-order out of Exchange and Mart. William X, the handyman from my father's business built a case so strong and heavy that it could be dropped from the top of Yr Wyddfa, without damage. Being a teenager and having no taste, I covered it in highly 'contemporary' Fablon, which was a travesty of justice to the fine carpentry it concealed.

Soon three friends and I formed a 'group' which would now be called a garage band, except that our practice room was the back of dress shop owned by one of the parents. Naked mannequins were our audience and groupies. Every now and then we would ride the Piccadilly Line up to the West End, and window-shop for the guitars we would buy when we were rich and famous. Tin Pan Alley (aka Denmark Street) was a particular Mecca, having two shops which specialised in American electric guitars. We looked at the walls festooned with Fender Stratocasters, Gibson Les Paul Specials, and Gretsch Country Gentlemen (with the revolutionary Bigsby tremolo arm) with palpable lust. Occasionally we actually went in the shops, affecting a studied cool which said 'We may look as though we're only just out of short trousers, but in fact we're an about to-be-discovered supergroup who may actually buy some of these beauties, honest'.

The assistants were not fooled but they were also aspiring musicians, and understood the allure, and tolerated us. But one time they were more frosty and edgy: I soon worked out why – in the back of the shop, there were Hank and Jet, road-testing a black Stratocaster and a Fender Precision Bass. Jet looked at us (and our school uniforms) with something less than admiration. Hank, however, looked up with a half-smile and said "Alright, lads?", although said in a way that did not demand a reply, and carried a gentle but firm warning that this was the first and last communication there would be from him. We were dumbstruck, so that our relationship with him was over in seconds. Shock and awe doesn't adequately describe our reaction. It was like going to the supermarket checkout queue and finding yourself standing behind The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh: "You're not supposed to be here, you're too famous, you don't do things like ordinary mortals in ordinary places. I'm dreaming."

It's possible that this encounter has stayed more clearly in my mind than Hank's, but then again maybe it struck a chord with him from his own days of waiting to be discovered, and he cherishes the memory, to keep his feet on the ground through his superstardom: The Ordinary Fan who buys my records and so buys my flash car. It's possible.

Here is Apache, still their best-known track, which went to the top of the hit parade in 1960 and stayed there for six weeks and was voted the best instrumental ever. Incidentally it was also the first song our group ever played in public, with adequate technique, but more soul than The Shads managed.






It took another five decades to meet another Hank, for rather longer: Hank Wangford, the premier exponent of Alternative Country Music in this country, a man who writes and performs great songs, mostly his own, with a gentle, dry sense of humour that runs through the music and the patter in between.

I remember once seeing Hank at some kind of benefit concert I think, though before I was able to appreciate that alt-Country was a delicious mixture of down-home country&western, affectionate satire and sometimes social commentary, though with a light touch. I didn't know at that time that his day-job was in medicine, a doctor, no less; in fact a gynaecologist. What must his patients have thought if he he ever hung a cowboy outfit on the back of his consulting room door, prior to a gig? This is not an area of medicine where cowboys are necessarily welcome.

Hank's family background was singular: singularly Communist. His father was on the Central Committee of the British Communist Party, and Chief Sub-Editor on the Daily Worker, before it was re-branded as the Morning Star (nobody was fooled). His mother worked as a language teacher at the Soviet Embassy. Sadly, their marriage was not very - how shall I say, 'collective' - and they wished to divorce, but The Party stepped in and forbade them to do so; it would reflect badly on the British Communist Party to have such prominent comrades disgraced - for in the 1950s, being a divorcee was almost as bad as being a ....Communist.  I remember that atmosphere, at the height of the Cold War. My mother, from a staunch Labour background actually said to me "I'd rather be dead than Red'. Possibly this was in response to the fact that I was flirting with the idea of joining the Young Communists. However, being a practical person, I judged that selling 'the paper' outside Southgate tube, in a constituency with a 34,000 Tory majority was at best a kind of retail suicide, and at worst provoke a lynch-mob.

Anyway, Hank's mother solved her side of the marital dilemma by having affairs (Hank talks about this quite openly, with a hint of pride in his voice). One was with an official at the Embassy, which produced a sister for Hank, and the other with a colleague of her husband's at 'the paper', contributing a brother. This splendid example of Anglo-Soviet co-operation nevertheless produced a family in a state of flux, well-illustrated by the words, "Now Hank, this is your uncle Pyotr". Hank took refuge in the portrait of Joseph Stalin on the living room wall. The artist had transformed him into a kindly, avuncular figure, who seemed to offer kindness, comfort and constancy, and is commemorated in one of Hank's songs. In his patter around his songs he has never disclosed his own political allegiance now, but I'm going to venture a guess that he doesn't do benefits for UKIP. He did, on his own initiative, do a Christmas concert for the inmates of Strangeways prison (shades of Johnny Cash in Folsom). In a lighter vein:




He's a great live performer and irrespective of whether you like country music, he'll give you a hugely enjoyable night out.  You'll say "Thanks, Hank".


There are many different strands to Country music from Hill-billy to alt-Country. Many rock stars have been tempted to record country music albums,  notably Dylan's Nashville Skyline' and Elvis Costello's 'Almost Blue'. Country music often figures in film soundtracks in order to convey the authentic American atmosphere. It is seldom centre stage, though everyone recalls the duelling banjos sequence from Deliverance, and it's worth another hearing.




At the other end of the C&W spectrum is the social commentary of some alt-Country, and here is the anarchic Kinky Friedman, who advertised himself as 'New York's only Texan Jewish cowboy' and his band as the Texas Jewboys. While continuing his music career, he went on to become a candidate for Texas State Governor, and a very successful crime writer.














That itch you just can't scratch; but could the cowboy do it without the industrial strength Velcro?




An occasional series of momentary supergroups












The keynote of country music is the human condition which is Misery. Country music is about fifty shades of misery, misery in love, lust, leaving home, leaving a family, loss, death, injury, unemployment, poverty, and life generally. From the moment that slide guitar eases into the melody and gets a hold on your stomach and the hairs on your neck and spine, you know that your emotions have been hi-jacked and will now play into, and echo, the collective misery of the species. Yes, there will be happy times in happy songs, laughter and jokes, comedy and good-feeling, and sometimes these will only make the misery more poignant and more anguished when it returns, by contrast. But through it all the genuine emotion is always tempered by a degree of self-mocking, of self-parody, that rescues it from the seriously maudlin. Misery loves company so Country is immensely popular.






Cliff Richard.

You started out as a reasonable impersonation of a rocker,
and finished up as an old ladies' crooner, visually a Peter Pan, though possibly with a little surgical assistance . And you have been 'economical with the truth'. In 1959 you gave an interview to the New Musical Express, and claimed to own four dozen pairs of fluorescent pink socks. My friend and I cycled down to your mansion in Winchmore Hill, knocked out a knot in your fence and surveyed your washing-line. There were many items of theatrical apparel and some unidentifiable things (to 13 year olds in the 1950s) which we supposed were for fancy dress parties, or possibly walking a dog. But not a plethora of pinks socks, not a pair, not a one. Maybe they were waiting for a Pink Wash. We decided otherwise, and resolved to find a pop idol with greater moral fibre, for example Alice Cooper.  Off you go .....







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