My Favourite Gig etc.

I wrote this to a friend and he said you should get that published; well here it is copied and pasted.
I saw lots of the British groups in the 60s - I think I saw all of them except for The Who I had nothing against The Who - or The Big Three now I think of it - I just never had the opportunity; I saw groups - or bands as they started to call them - that I have totally forgotten. I saw The Undertakers, Vince Eager, Dickie Pride, Marty Wilde, Adam Faith, Mickey Most and even Jim Dale who turned out to be a decent actor. All of this when I was under sixteen or so and when I became of age I started to go to dance halls for the girls and the drink.
I would go on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays and a lot of famous groups appeared in some of those places.
When I first started going the groups were trying to be like The Shadows who used to back Cliff Richard who was Britain's answer to Elvis so things were really ripe for The Beatles when they came along; it's strange that it all happened at once - people up north liked The Beatles and people down south liked the Stones all discovering rhythm and blues at the same time. Up to that time, apart from Cliff Richard, songs were written by professional song writers who would put them on the flip side of a covered song from America and we had people like Craig Douglas, Frankie Vaughan and Danny Rivers who would cover songs such as the ones sung by Gene McDaniels (whom I also saw) and Andy Williams,
I was always a collector of records and would buy as many as I could - one of the dance halls I would go to was The Ritz in Birmingham who featured top line groups. In those days groups like Brian Poole and the Tremolos would come along with a million dollars worth of equipment and you could hear every little tiny little bit of noise, tic and hic cup.
I saw everybody but really wanted to see Elvis; some groups I ignored like The Kinks - I think I liked them but if there was the chance of scoring with a girl you couldn't let a group get in the way.
There was a TV show called Thank Your Lucky Stars which would go out on ITV on a Saturday evening and it would be a show where New Bands and acts with hits would come and lip sync to their song; miming we called it. One week The Beatles came on; they had one little hit with Love Me Do, which we mostly ignored, but when they sang Please Please Me! on Thank your Lucky Stars that night it was like a bomb going off.
I was a really great Buddy Holly fan and the tune reminded me of a Holly song and the way Lennon stood there, strumming his guitar with his legs open like Elvis, looked great and rebellious and guess what - the next week they had been booked to appear at The Ritz; so when we got there the place was pretty full with blokes - not many girls - so when they played we could hear every word.
They were not like Brian Poole with their sophisticated equipment but had Lennon singing into one microphone and the other two harmonizing into another so the sound was better than having two mikes with different levels; they were heavily influenced by American black girl groups and I remember at the time Tony Orlando had a version of "Beautiful Dreamer" on record and The Beatles sang it using his same phrasing - after they had finished their act we went down to the bar and The Beatles came down too - my brother walked down with Ringo (his hair was combed back in those days like on their first LP) and whilst we weren't exactly with The Beatles we all had a laugh but one thing I do know is that there was something about them - you knew they had the bull by the horns and somehow, even then, you knew they were going to change the world; and they did.
I saw The Stones too - at the same place only this time we wandered into their dressing room and met them all; I chatted with Charlie and Bill for about half an hour; Mick was absolutely exhausted lying back on the couch and Brian Jones had about 3 girls around him; I can't remember Keith.
I found out that Bill and Charlie seemed to have the same taste as me; they liked Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. I was never much of a Stones fan as they covered songs by Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and The Beatles with their first three singles but I liked them as people very much and liked their attitude although they were never as funny as The Beatles. Over the years I liked one or two of their singles and once I worked with Chris Jagger, Mick's brother, for about six to eight weeks on a film at Elstree Studios - he was a nice guy but looked so much like Mick that he would never really have an identity of his own; he spoke a lot about Marlon Brando whom he knew so there I was within a few degrees of the most famous people in the world.
I saw The Beatles again after that but it was never the same; I saw them in a theatre when they were a supporting act - half the audience went home when they finished their set - and I saw them back at the Ritz where the noise of the girls and everybody singing every song with them made it impossible for us to hear them even though they were only 10 yards away.
I read a review on the Internet recently of Jerry Lee Lewis's Birmingham Town Hall concert in 1963: just a small review from the time and it mentioned that he sang ten songs altogether that night and that the police surrounded him when he left the stage for his own protection and when they took him out he couldn't remember the name of his hotel - so the cops had to drive him around till he came to one that looked familiar; some people from the audience, apparently, thought he'd been arrested.
I was at that concert; it brought lots of memories flooding back from the "good old days." And they were the good old days especially if you liked rock'n'roll; someone said to me recently that we had the best and didn't leave anything for the kids today except mediocre copies of true talent; maybe that's why they're so pissed, we took it all, the best music, the best movies, the best drugs... and they got nothing; I don't agree with all that but it's not without truth.
I didn't get any of the drugs but I experienced the best music; as I said I saw everybody except for The Who and Jimy Hendrix now I come to think of it but the best of all was Jerry Lee Lewis and the best evening was that concert in May of 1963; the first time I saw him.
Jerry Lee had been to England before and was, more or less, drummed out of the country; he came with a barely teenaged bride, Myra, and that kind of thing couldn't be tolerated then; might not be tolerated these days to be honest.
So we sat and waited for him to appear on that dark evening long ago.
Most of the people in the audience were male and most of them looked like bank clerks, office workers and the like; a lot of them would be what we would describe these days as nerds or geeks.
If I remember correctly he was backed by the group Sounds Inc who backed many of the American stars who came over to England. There were other acts, I'm sure, but I can't remember them; I think there was a Canadian comedian who was a kind of compare and I think it was Frank Berry as he was in Dr Strangelove.
The first song Jerry Lee Lewis sang was an up paced country song which he went straight into as he came onto the stage; he was wearing some light coloured cavalry twill trousers, brown boots, a dark jacket and a white shirt.
The microphone was placed on a floor stand half way along the key board so he had to keep putting his hand around it as he played the treble - a trick he has always done - and when he finished that first song he got a tremendous amount of applause; and then it started.
The next song burst the old building into life; it was an up tempo number, maybe Great Balls of Fire or High School Confidential but whatever it was, at the first instrumental break the audience went wild; I have never heard such rhythm in my life either before or since. On the middle piano notes he hammered away - chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung - conservatively dressed bank clerks rose slowly out of their seats - chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung - people with mouths full of bad teeth smiled broadly as they never had before - chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung - the bank clerks started to move awkwardly with weird looks on their faces - chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung chung - suddenly he put his hand around the microphone stand and started to play the high notes - clink clink clink clink clink clink clink clink clink clink clink clink clink clink clink clink - then his jacket came off, he kicked the piano stool away and stood up and drew up to the climax of the song and the end.
The applause was deafening, everybody was on their feet waiting for the next one: the bank clerks, the office workers, the warehousemen - we stood there like a thousand clapping clitorises waiting to be caressed and caress us he did.
Straight into another song with just as much an exciting rhythm and it started all over again; at one time he was standing on the piano, jumping from it and he eventually ran off the stage to the cops. It was over. He was gone.