It started as they always do, with this phone call;
`Alright mate, do you buy old records?…well I’ve got a few…how many?..I dunno..nah, I dunno what they are…they’re in an old tea chest in the loft…’
So far, this was the call I have received several times a day, every day of the year, including Christmas Day, for the last 20 years. What I don’t usually hear was this;
`Where did I get `em?..off of one of the Stones…’
That was how I found myself driving to west London to meet Ronnie Wood’s builder.
It was a Sunday morning, 11AM. Outside it was grey, wet and 2003. Inside it was Saturday night in 1972, backstage wiv Keef. Ronnie Wood’s builder had that thing you often find with the children of the sixties: it was the greatest time of their life, they didn’t want it to end, so they just didn’t stop.
Ronnie Wood’s builder was drinking Bells and smoking roll-ups in grey trackie bottoms and thick greasy lensed specs when he opened the door and showed me in.
The place was in chaos, but I know that’s standard for a builder’s house.
`Yeah mate’… he told me..`I had to redo Ron’s garridge after the boiler burst… all the water went into his record collection…’
I started to feel very sick.
`…so when I’d done the job he let me have `em. That’s them there, take what you like…’
Ronnie Wood’s builder gestured to two watermarked tea chests, and left me to it.
It was a tribute to Ron’s taste but not his housekeeping that these records were one of the greatest collections I have ever seen in terms of taste, and also in the worst condition imaginable. The records appeared to have been poured into the chests by a troup of argumentative gibbons using a dumptruck, who had then taken them out of their sleeves, mixed them up, torn up the sleeves, stubbed out their fags on the vinyl, and pissed on the lot, 30 years ago. But what records they were; classic Stax soul, country blues, cool bebop, jump RnB, funk..; Rev Gary Davis, Little Willie John, Howlin’ Wolf, Otis, ‘retha Franklin, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Ann Peebles…I unearthed hundreds of superb pieces of vinyl, each one was so mullered that even though I personally wanted to keep each one…forget the money!..that I couldn’t find anything that I would have had a hope of being able to listen to, let alone sell. However, I am a professional optimist, so I dug deep to the bottom of the crates.
That was how I found the four blank acetates.
4 test pressings; aluminium records with an acetate veneer cut in the studio so the artist and producer can hear different versions and mixes prior to finalizing one for release. 4 unique items that had belonged to a Rolling Stone thirty years ago. The acetates were totally blank apart from one which had a label. It read `Apple Recording Company’.
This was the record dealing equivalent of finding the grail in Indiana Jones 3.
I reached for my wallet and decided on the truth,
`This is a brilliant collection…but it’s totally knackered. I can’t do anything with it. I’d just like to buy these, they are damaged too, but they look interesting, I’ll give you £…
to be continued…
- the protagonist suffers musical outrages and sexual confusion near Milton Keynes…
Age 10.
Parents LP collection…partial remembrance due to trauma…Elkie Brooks, Elton John, Barbara Dickson, James Taylor and worse…Hand of Fate intervenes via inexplicable presence of a Steely Dan LP and the White album…
…Dad tries to spend what I now know to be Quality Time with me by taking me to see massive Queen gig at Milton Keynes Bowl…a blasted heath filled with seventies metal fans…to see the acts, I stand on an orange and white plastic cool box Dad has thoughtfully brought packed lunches in…This elevates me above a sea of hair and denim cutoffs…lineup is Heart…unspeakable…the Teardrop Explodes…Copey is bottled off…bottles contain a yellow liquid…who booked this lineup?..Queen arrive by helicopter…why did we bother having Punk Rock if this was going to happen afterwards?…despite the influence of Freddie Mercury live and exposure to the Flash Gordon soundtrack I grow to be a heterosexual with a hatred of stadium rock…Dad continues trying and gets me my first record…INTERMISSION…
…as you can see I bare my soul in this blog…so I can reveal it was Cold as Ice by Foreigner, not a Captain Beefheart bootleg or the first Burning Spear LP…
…of course this is a shocking single but it does alert me to the 10p bargain record bin in Woolworths…a formative influence…Destiny?…
…Dad redeems himself from the Freddie Mercury grooming incident by taking me to a proper gig…the Passions at Oxford Poly…we are the youngest and oldest people there respectively…not a great band but the gamine, intelligent girl singer and the really cool Echoplex guitar sound stir something up the creek of my psyche…
- in which our hero begins to relate a murky saga variously featuring records, girls, gigs, vinyl, drums and love –
Born.
…ten years is wasted…I don’t go to see any of the classic acts of the Seventies as I am in primary school…anyway, on with the formative years with their clearly marked clues as to what I would become…
No early memories of music being played around the house. Mum is musical..but it’s church related…bells – big and small…singing…
Sister and I are allowed to linger in the attic (sounds cruel but it was big and basically derelict) and play parents’ 45s…all were stored in a plastic concertina folder I still have…majority of awful sixties pop crap but…Kismet…lots of Beatles, some Stones and a Dylan 45 as well as the only good thing Cliff ever did; Move It b/w Dynamite…45s are played by a stacking phonograph which drops the 7”s and plays them in sequence… to get bass you shut the lid…
…our attention is concentrated on these records as we are not allowed to listen to pop music on the radio and I don’t think we were allowed to watch ITV either…
I was crossing the Goldhawk Road the other night to do a CD buy and saw a beautiful, sixties Rover saloon. In its window was a sticker illustrated with the picture of an old HMV logo-style gramophone. The sticker text read,` 78rpm. The right speed for me.’
Now I’m not really a Top Gear man, but all the girls at home are, although they mainly just watch the races and crashes. TG just did a feature on eco driving. You go slower, save fuel, stay alive etc. I suppose it was in the interests of balance…
…fellow vinyl enthusiasts and well informed Rat cognescenti…stay with me while I put all this together…
We’re all listening to music in the car, where the format is irrelevant, right?… radio, CD, mp3 thingy, phones…I’ve got cassettes! Who’s going to break my window and nick them? I’ve even got Superfly on original cassette, and the Antipodean psych/punk compilation tape I made at school… You understand. Anyway, we’re all hunting down these interesting records; at different speeds and different sizes, with funny covers, pressing etc when we should be at work or having an adult relationship. Then we get into the car where we spend a lot of our music listening time and all we care about is the bass, not the format.
It’s a major contradiction.
Contradictions cause awkward questions.
Who wants to answer awkward questions about their own behaviour? Especially about records.
Not me.
Now, you see the two problems. Eco driving and the format contradiction. But I have a (partial) solution…
REVOLUTION SPEED DRIVING/DRIVING SPEED REVOLUTIONS.
Check it out, but don’t use it as your band name. On the motorway? In a hurry but don’t want a fine and 3 points: 78 rpm, I mean mph. Clever isn’t it? See where I’m going now… you’re in a 50 or 60 limit: 45 rpm/mph. Genius, you can’t be nicked for speeding, and you can put it in 5th and save on diesel. OK you are annoying the other drivers but your stereo sounds better because there’s less road noise…In town, 33.3 mph – yes, yes. Not really illegal but you’re getting from A to B. Superb.
You could even… MATCH THE MUSIC YOUR LISTENING TO TO MUSIC THAT PLAYS BACK AT THE SPEED YOU’RE DRIVING AT. OR DID ORIGINALLY. Like, a 45 rpm reggae singles comp CD, then a classic album (33.3), woah, the M4, a 78 rpm blues comp! Nice.
I think that should answer all your questions, except…Checking out women at 33.3 mph? Tesco car park at 33.3mph? Police car following at 33.3mph in a 30? Past your kids’ Primary school when they all burst out on microscooters and skateboards at 3.30, at 33.3 MPH! No, No, No. We have a problem. We are going too fast.
All the good Freudians amongst you know that answers can be found with reference to one’s own childhood….
When I was 7, I was allowed to listen to old singles (45 RPM) on a gramophone that had a lid and built in speakers. Sounded great, - loads of compression and you shut the lid for extra bass. It was really old and had been my Dads’. You set the speed with a slider switch. It would play records at 78 RPM, 45 RPM, 33.3 RPM….AND 16.66 RPM.
Wiki/Google it. 16 RPM records. It’s true.