Maracas

In among the jumble of china and Toby jugs that festooned the cluttered surfaces of the house, there was, inexplicably, a pair of hand painted wooden maracas. They lay silent on a shelf, a souvenir from sunny Spain, someone's forgotten summer holiday. Even the working classes could now go abroad, and never have to speak a word of Spanish. There was English beer and fish and chips, no risk of eating foreign food, and yet it was overseas, you could get twisted and blistered and show your titties on the beach and the sangria flowed and you'd be back home in two weeks with a lovely tan and a wide selection of exotic gifts - ashtrays, straw hats, castanets, maracas.

One Spring evening in 1963, another new rock and roll band appeared on the small black and white screen of our recently acquired television set. We were the last on our street to get a TV, and I had spent the previous several months discussing episodes of Popeye and Wagon Train that I had not actually seen, since I was too embarrassed to admit to my schoolmates that we didn't own a set. Those days of fabrication were over now. There was only really one weekly program that addressed the interests of modern youth, a frantic half hour entitled Ready Steady Go, which showcased pop groups and singers lip- synching to their latest hits.

This group onscreen tonight radiated a fetid, unwashed aura, and their lead singer, a surly poser with long hair and great blubbery lips, shook a pair of maracas in time to the beat as he spat out the words;
"I'm gonna tell yer how it's gonna be/
yo gonna give your love to me
am gunna love you night and dayeee
love is real not fade away...

Something in both the music and the singer's performance moved me deeply, while unleashing an uncontrollable fury in my father, usually a mild- mannered kind of dad;
"Look at 'im, like a bloody woman, disgustin it is..."
But the screaming little girls in the audience understood, and I understood too, that these strange longings, this physical hammering in the chest and groin that this music churned within me, coupled with strange new concepts like 'loving someone, night and day', were all somehow connected, aspects of a larger picture, still unfocused, of a new world that existed somewhere outside the narrow sphere of this little town. The singer's message had cut through the suburban ether loud and clear. At the end of the show I picked up the maracas and hurried upstairs for my first session with the mirror.

The following Saturday, I purchased the record in the town center, biked home at high speed and slipped the small black disc onto the spindle of the dansette record player for which I had paid my sister Julie two shillings for a two hour rental. Leaving the arm up for automatic replay, I locked the door, turned up the volume, leered into the glass and pursed my lips, shaking the maracas in time to the hypnotic beat.

After a few weeks of this secret practice I felt ready to perform. My showbiz connection was Vic Quambro, leader of a local group, the Legends, who specialized in pop covers and Chicago blues. He was also the band's manager and chief roadie. I approached Quam with a plan for my assault on the world of entertainment. In return for loading and unloading the band's equipment at their next engagement, he would let me play the maracas on the most recent addition to their repertoire, Not Fade Away, which was now number seven on the charts. My stage name would be Shakin' Jack.

Quam readily agreed to my terms, and on the evening of the following Friday I singlehandedly hauled the drums and amplifiers up a long flight of concrete stairs and into the musty confines of the Conservative Club on Old London Road, an odd choice of venue for rock and roll.

The band members stood at the bar, downing pints of bitter, relishing their temporary status as professional musicians, and obviously intending to make me earn my brief spot. The Legends were the only band on the bill, in fact, there wasn't a bill, they just showed up there and the bartender, Quam's brother-in-law, would let them play a short set, before and after bingo. I ran the song through my head a few hundred times;
Chung chukka chukka chung chung chung chung
I'm gonna tell you how it's gonna be
yo gonna give yo love to me...
yes, I had it. In fact by this time I could even sing it in French;
Je vais te dire comme il ira
tu vas me donner ton amour
je vais t'aimer jour et nuit
oui, ca c'est comment its gonna be
After I had set up the instruments I took a seat among the pensioners, Conservatives all, sighing out their last declining years on the faded red plush banquettes, sipping tentatively at their half pints, deaf aids disconnected in anticipation of cacophony and clamor, waiting patiently for the bingo to begin to supplement their meager incomes with an extra shilling or two. In the meantime they simply sat, feeding birdlike on the peanuts furnished by a provident landlord, uttering the occasional shrill remark, communicating mostly by nods and grimaces and odd chirruping sounds, punctuated by the dull report of random flatulence.

Seated among these relics as the band ploughed through its first number, I was a jittery percussionist, already working on my second pint, gleaming runnels of sweat effusing from my nose and upper lip, soaking darkly through the underarms of the brand new beige corduroy Levi's shirt with pearl snaps which was also making its first public appearance.

It was the band that was making me nervous. When I played along with the Stones in my bedroom I thought we sounded pretty damn good, but on this night at the Conservative Club, something was missing.

Our drummer was a pasty-faced youth with little dress sense, who had been hired chiefly because he owned a full size drum kit. The bass player's bovine looks were tempered by an interesting haircut, but he didn't seem destined for stardom either. Quam was handsome in a shanty Irish kind of way, and fairly proficient on lead guitar, but he didn't have Mick's dance moves, his thick lips, lewd slobbering tongue.

The band moved sluggishly through two more standards, then I saw Quam look in my direction and mention something over the crackling p.a. about Shakin' Jack or Jack Shakey. I recognised the plangent opening chords of my song and I was up there. Quam had assured me a hundred times that once I got up on stage I would just start rocking and forget everything else, but that didn't happen. I was acutely aware of the pensioners' stares, blank yet malicious, as I gazed down at them and then at my Beatle boots, feebly tapping the worn boards of the stage as I tried to pick up the beat.
Shuk chukka chukka chuk chuk oops
shukka chukkat whup chukka chuk chuk damn!
Quam's eyebrows rose steadily toward his hairline as I misfired again, the beads rattling tunelessly around their wooden shell, chittering like maddened insects.

The lords of the dance were resisting my blandishments, the spirit of music refused to take up residence within me, my smile freezing in place, spine rigid, incapable of the sinuous curvatures this music required. The guitars clanged discordantly, the backbeat made no sense.

Where was that jaca chang chang rhythm that made my hips swivel in the mirror so sexy, that sluttish drive, suicide slide rock me baby till my back ain't got no bone type of riffing that I could conjure so well in the privacy of my own bedroom?

It did not inhabit me that night, on that shabby stage, frozen like a rabbit in the glare of a fifty watt spotlight, in front of these slightly stunned white people who were not yet ready for rock and roll.

The song ground slowly to its conclusion. Quam gave me a curt gesture of dismissal and I stepped off the stage, back into private life. There was a complete absence of applause from the tiny audience. No-one asked for my autograph. There were no groupies, either in or outside the club. It was just me and my maracas.

The Legends were obviously not planning to invite me back up on stage even though they went on to play several bluesy numbers, seemed in fact to find a certain primitive groove, indeed I noticed one or two octogenarians' heads twitching slightly along with the music. Music that I had practiced for long weeks, in conditions of great secrecy. The slow sibilant shake of 'Born under a bad sign." for which I had worked up some special shimmery effects.....shhhhhshhhhhhaa, a silken hiss that that would have perfectly overlaid Quammy's pungent lead. When they segued into "Dimples" I could have wept. I knew it so well, four staccato shakes on every eighth beat, oh I could really have laced into that track, but instead I sat there, foot tapping selfconsciously, deeply moved by sound and yet not moving, my ear a clean pink instrument, absorbing the music and yet unable to make the synaptic leap that would launch my body clean out of my seat, to bop and frolic among these dessicated bingo players, to brandish the flag of smoothskinned erectile youth, to worship in the church of the swollen electric lovebucket, in a word, to get down. I sat and tapped my foot and applauded politely at the end of the set.