Crossroads

Mark Radcliffe

Description

Standing at the crossroads - the Mississippi crossroads of Robert Johnson and the devil's infamous meeting - Mark Radcliffe found himself facing his own personal juncture. Aged sixty, he had just mourned the death of his father, only to be diagnosed with mouth and throat cancer. Together these events led Radcliffe to think about pivotal tracks in music and how the musicians who wrote and performed them had reached the crossroads that led to such epoch-changing music. Crossroads is a warm, intimate account of music and its power to transform our lives, as Radcliffe takes a personal journey through these key tracks.

Sujets

• Music

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 05 septembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786898166
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Mark Radcliffe is: a broadcaster, writer, musician, father of three, grandfather of two, husband of one, cavapoo owner, art appreciator, Manchester City Fan, Knutsford dweller and Builder's Arms regular. He is the author of three works of non-fiction: Showbusiness , Thank You For the Days and Reelin’ in the Years ; and one work of fiction, Northern Sky . He lives in Cheshire. @themarkrad
Also by Mark Radcliffe

Non-fiction
Reelin in the Years
Thank You for the Days
Showbusiness
Fiction
Northern Sky



The paperback edition published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2020by Canongate Books
First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada
canongate.co.uk
Copyright © Mark Radcliffe, 2019
The right of Mark Radcliffe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance withthe Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtaintheir permission for the use of copyright material. The publisherapologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful ifnotified of any corrections that should be incorporated infuture reprints or editions of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 817 3 eISBN 978 1 78689 816 6
For Bella, in sickness and in health
Contents
Introduction
1. I Went Down to the Crossroads
2. The Gates of Hell Opening
3. Disco Sucks!
4. I Hear a New World
5. The Writing on the Wall
6. An Original Soundtrack
7. Talking Real Fast
8. Against Your Better Judgement
9. House Party
10. To the Manor Born
11. The Single Life
12. The Time of Your Life
13. Culture Clash
14. Ride That Train
15. From the Laboratory to the Dancefloor
16. Trouble in Motor City
17. The Voice of Protest
18. It s Got to Be Perfect
19. The Concept
20. Lady of the Canyon
21. Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll!
22. The Open Road
23. Background Music
24. The Red, White and Blue
25. The Beginning is the End
Acknowledgements
Introduction
F or me, 2018 was an eventful year. I turned sixty. My dad died. So did my faithful companion, Toto the cocker spaniel. Big changes were forced on me at work. And to top it all I was diagnosed with cancer of the tongue and throat, from which, mercifully, I am in remission.
Some good stuff happened too, of course. I had a great sixtieth birthday in Uz s. One of my daughters got engaged, another got into her first-choice university and the third did brilliantly well in her GCSEs. Nice one, girls.
Another highlight was a trip to the USA with two old friends who d also reached the same significant birthday. During this trip I found myself standing at a famous crossroads, which I ll tell you all about in Chapter 1. It felt like a serendipitous place to be as I was already experiencing something of a crossroads year myself, and it called to mind something someone had once said to me.
Years ago, when making a programme about the incendiary and hugely influential Canvey Island rhythm and blues band Dr Feelgood, I talked to the veteran music journalist Charles Shaar Murray about the group. He opined that they had found themselves at a crossroads in British music where a lot of interesting things fed in and a lot of equally interesting things, not least punk, headed out. That idea had always stayed with me and, as I found myself at a turning point - both literally and metaphorically - I got to thinking about how many musicians had reached crossroads moments of their own where everything changed for them personally, but more crucially how these events reverberated beyond the personal, shifting the course of music and influencing generations of artists to come.
With this in mind, I ve interpreted the concept of the crossroads in several different ways. There are intersections of cultural movements, times when artists experienced a major change in their own lives, where society s mores took a sudden lurch or where a seemingly random turn in musical experimentation created something almost by accident, which would come to be seen as a key moment in the development of popular music.
So, in this book I ve charted a course through some of those moments - although I should say that I don t consider what s contained here as a definitive list. You might well think of plenty of others as you read it. It s not intended to be a textbook. Everything here is true as far as I ve been reasonably able to check, but I haven t got bogged down in historical detail. Rather, I wanted to take the bones of each story and understand the feelings and emotions that resulted in the creation of records which, when released, changed things for ever. And, perhaps, in some way better to understand the crossroads that I found myself at last year.
Mark Radcliffe. Not at an actual crossroads but in a cul-de-sac in Cheshire. Halloween 2018.
1
I Went Down to the Crossroads
So, have you guys been laid?
W e ve all had interesting conversations with taxi drivers in our time but as an opening gambit this still came as a something of a surprise. The cabbie in question was a generously proportioned African American gentleman, memorably kitted out in a white and gold velour track suit, oversized and unlaced Timberland boots and a leather fedora. It s not often you feel under-dressed when being picked up in a minicab, but this was certainly one of those rare occasions.
On the morning in question this voluble, lavishly attired rou was collecting me and my travelling companions Jamie and Phil from a hotel in downtown Memphis, where North Front Street crosses Jefferson Avenue, to take us out to Graceland as per the itinerary for our collective sixtieth birthday road trip. I checked the schedule again just to confirm that getting laid hadn t been slipped in there as an optional extra by our travel agent Shannon. It seemed unlikely even though they do always tell you to read through all documentation, but there didn t appear to be any brothel vouchers in our travel pack.
It was rainy that day in Memphis. The Mississippi river, which in my mind was going to be a glistening mile-wide ribbon peppered with chugging paddle steamers from the decks of which distant straw-hatted relations of Tom Sawyer dispensed cheery waves, was a Lowry-esque Salfordian smudge of turgid grey traversed by weary goods locomotives hauling their endless chains of rusting containers all the way to Arkansas.
Being practical souls, the three of us had dressed for the weather and were sitting in the taxi in our firmly zipped and poppered cagoules, while our charmer of a chauffeur indulged in several minutes of sexually infused badinage and innuendo with the ample receptionist. Once he took the wheel you would have thought that one look at us would have told him that the answer to his question was only ever going to be in the negative. People in Memphis to get laid probably don t pack cagoules, do they? On reflection it occurred to me that his enquiry wasn t actually restricted to the immediate locale. Perhaps he glanced at us and wondered whether we d been laid ever. Again, the way we looked that day, a response in the affirmative was by no means a foregone conclusion.
As longtime buddies since university days, and music nuts our whole lives, Phil, Jamie and I had always planned a trip to some of the key historical sights of the birth of rock and roll and R B. Memphis has not only Graceland, but also the Sun and Stax studios and the blues joints of Beale Street with their neon hoardings and promise of honest sweaty bands and cheap liquor. Nashville has a similar strip for the cream of country bar bands on Broadway, the Grand Ole Opry and the Country Music Hall of Fame. For the journey between the two cities we d opted to take a scenic route called the Natchez Trace Parkway which rolls through endless miles of woodland, dipping into Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi and stopping amongst other places at Elvis s birthplace in Tupelo where the shotgun shack he was born in still stands on its original footings.
Before heading on the parkway to Tupelo, though, we detoured to Clarksdale, Mississippi. In many ways it is such a classic American small town that at first you wonder if you haven t strayed onto a film set. Naturally the streets are on a grid pattern and none of the buildings are above two or three storeys high. Cars park diagonally into the curb, every store and house has a bench on the stoop and puffs of dancing dust swirl with every rare breath of breeze. The walls are painted in bright oranges, pinks and turquoises, or at least they are colours that were bright once. Chipped, faded and heat ravaged, it looks like there hasn t been a reliable painter and decorator in town since the mid-Sixties.
But there is history here. There are clues in some of the shops. In a settlement this size in the UK you might expect to find a mini-mart, a pub, a grocer s or butcher s, maybe a newsagent s, a scented candle and mindfulness parlour, artisan beard waxer and, if you re very lucky, a Post Office. You wouldn t happen upon a saxophone outlet very often. But there s one in Clarksdale. It s painted puce with various bluesmen caricatured on the frontage and is called Deak s Mississippi Saxophones and Blues Emporium. The sign on the pavement outside advertises harmonica lessons, sales and service, live music, folk art, open harp surgery and cold beer . Top man Deak. Which shopping experience isn t enriched by the offer of cold beer except for perhaps test-driving a new sports car or motorbike? Or buying a gun perhaps. None of these items seemed to be readily available in Clarksdale although there were two other musical instrument suppliers, several more purveyors of folk art a