Ain't Bad for a Pink Read online

  Pete “Snakey Jake” Johnson

  Pete Johnson is a musician with a long career in blues music, specialising in the country blues of the Twenties and Thirties. He is also an acknowledged connoisseur of vintage guitars and an innovator in the field of sound systems.

  Sandra Gibson

  Sandra Gibson is a writer with a special interest in art and music. She has written promotional material for art exhibitions and reviews for Art Of England, The Nerve and Circa magazines. She also writes poetry and fiction and is currently completing a novel.

  AIN’T BAD FOR A PINK!

  The life of bluesman Pete 'Snakey Jake' Johnson

  Grey-dawn motorways and yachts on silver seas; whisky with Peter Green and slide guitar with Son House; coffins riding the flood waters of Albany and moonlight on the railway line: the life of bluesman Pete “Snakey Jake” Johnson.

  Sandra Gibson

  Written from conversations with Pete Johnson and friends.

  Copyright © 2011 Sandra Gibson

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  Matador

  5 Weir Road

  Kibworth Beauchamp

  Leicester LE8 0LQ, UK

  Tel: (+44) 116 279 2299

  Fax: (+44) 116 279 2277

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  ISBN 978 1780889 689

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Typeset in 12pt Palatino by Troubador Publishing Ltd, Leicester, UK

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  Contents

  prologue

  SECTION ONE

  The Influence Of Affluence

  SECTION TWO

  Skunking

  SECTION THREE

  Bully For Me

  SECTION FOUR

  That Old Sweet Song

  SECTION FIVE

  Hand Over Fist

  SECTION SIX

  Shop Stories

  SECTION SEVEN

  Up Yours

  Acknowledgements

  This book is dedicated to Dobro

  Dobro is the name given to the type of resonator guitar I so admire. It’s a contraction of Dopyera Brothers coined when their company was set up in 1928. I named my dog Dobro and one day recently he was a bit lively and I kept having to call him to me. I soon noticed that people passing by were smiling and acknowledging me. I later discovered that “Dzien dobry” is a Polish greeting and “Dobry den” is a Czech greeting – hence my popularity with the local immigrants!

  So the dedication has three aspects.

  Prologue

  On Thursday 12th March 1998, at Whippoorwill Studios, Smyrna, Georgia, I recorded a CD of country blues songs: the pinnacle in a long career as a musician and a tribute to the bluesmen I admire. It was all finished in four hours on my mother’s birthday and this convergence of important event and significant date created the pivotal moment at which I started to assess my life.

  This book is about a lad from Crewe who loved the blues. And it’s about those about me and the times we had and it’s about the music. That’s it, really.

  SECTION ONE

  From Bridget’s Barn To The Brunswick:

  A Tug Of Love

  My early years were mauled by powerfully emotional experiences propelling me towards the inevitable. I was like a rugby player running with the ball, temporarily slowed down by counter forces but certain of reaching the touchline.

  The Influence Of Affluence

  I was born in Crewe in 1949, within the echoes of World War II and within the sounds of the steam trains giving the town its heavy metallic life. There was a moment in my infancy that caught the social and economic change I would inherit: my earliest memory, aged two, is of a vast, unrecognizable object that blinded me with its whiteness. My mother, my father and their three sons were gazing in awe at that powerful symbol of affluence and renewal, only understandable, only remarkable, in the context of the Fifties.

  A bath. A bath in its own room.

  I had been born into an era of state welfare and educational and economic opportunity which was to transform the lives of ordinary people. My hands, now sticky with Farley’s Rusks, would soon dance across a guitar and within two decades steer my first yacht.

  Bibles And Brakes

  Personal memories of my grandparents are vivid though few. Grandma Sophia Johnson had been abandoned by her husband in the 1920s – this was never spoken about – and was supported at all levels by the Christadelphian Church. I remember her in two modes: as part of the nineteenth century – old and frail, her mass of grey hair down her back and coiling out of the bed, reading, according to Christadelphian tradition, seventeen chapters – why seventeen? – from the Bible every day, or part of the twentieth century – screaming about with me in my Turner Climax to visit her sister in Timbrell Avenue for tea and cakes.

  I still have Sophia’s recipe for pickled eggs.

  If Sophia was from Dickens, granddad Rafe Billington was from The Wind in the Willows. What they shared was a love of speed. He was a Class 1 train driver who broke more than a time record for travelling from Carlisle to Crewe: all the crockery on the train smashed, so fiercely were the brakes applied on arrival. Ralph’s vehicular prowess extended to the road. He had an open Austin Seven: a yellow model he drove like a train. His handlebar moustache flapping in the breeze, he’d be honking the horn, expecting everyone to get out of the way. Two of his fingers were missing – lost when some machinery backfired at the site of a rail crash. He used the stump of one of them to pack his pipe down, even when it was lit! I inherited my grandfather’s liking for fast cars but also something far more serious. He had Dupuytren’s Contracture, a syndrome inherited from the Vikings from which I also suffer. It causes the tendons in the hand to contract so that it looks arthritic and clawlike, I remember my grandfather’s hands looking this way. Dupuytren’s Contracture has severe implications for a musician as we shall see.

  Ralph’s wife Minnie – my maternal grandmother – is associated in my mind with a cosy kitchen in Ruskin Road, Crewe, redolent of hot pot. Being profoundly deaf didn’t stop her lipreading six conversations simultaneously.

  In Tandem

  I’ve often wondered why my grandfather John Johnson left his family: was he traumatised by the Great War or by the aftermath? What made him unable to cope with family life? I don’t know what became of him but poverty filled the gap he left. Nevertheless, partly because of the kindness of the Church, his family lived a respectable and religious life.

  Looking at the evidence, I don’t think that cowardice was much of a motif in the Johnson family. My father Norman Johnson was conscripted in 1940 and went to fight in Africa, Italy and Europe. His brother Mont had a different kind of courage: he was a conscientious objector and went to prison for his beliefs. My father always felt disappointed that he had lacked what he regarded as Mont’s superior courage yet after his death I discovered he was probably the most decorated and longest serving private in the Second World War, resisting promotion at all costs so that his decisions could not affect many lives. He always shrugged off his role
(1) in the war, saying, “I was just a surveyor.” But what did this mean? It meant he did a dangerously exposed front line job gauging enemy fire. He was unimpressed by the trinkets of glory; my mother picked up his medals and he gave them to his first son Ralph to swap for cigarette cards. Being a painter and decorator in civilian life with an interest in buildings and art, he valued far more a set of unsent architectural postcards from every place he passed through. The only other statement he made about his army service was: “The army taught me to smoke.” He described a room with a false floor: the officers were above the floor, the men beneath. They were planning manoeuvres. The men were instructed to blow smoke through allocated gaps in the floor to represent gun emplacements – a ludicrous activity worthy of Spike Milligan.

  I would describe my father as an intelligent man whose lack of education wasn’t his fault. It was to be the next generation that would benefit from universal education regardless of class or wealth. I feel I inherited strength, determination and courage from my father but I didn’t absorb his religious beliefs and to be fair I wasn’t pressurised to do so. Ideological clashes between us did occur but this was later when I reached adolescence determined to be a rock musician. In view of his impoverished early life, it was understandable that my father would want economic stability and respectability for his three sons. We forget how shocking my ambition was – being in a rock ‘n’ roll band was like being an outlaw. Parents in the post-war era became increasingly alarmed at the emergence of a youth culture with its own views on music, politics and – worst of all – sex.

  My mother, Albina Betsy Boswell Billington, came from a more economically sound background than my father and was privately educated. She was a resourceful, energetic woman who bought her own house – the basis of her hairdressing business – whilst her husband was in the army. A wartime photograph shows her looking like Vera Lynn, upwardly mobile in a fur coat without fear of censure or failure. She was certainly no ordinary housewife; both she and my father had been racing cyclists of some repute. Their common interest had neutralised the social differences between them and people said they were made for each other. This was a modern relationship: they never argued; they discussed things. I inherited my mother’s business acumen and resilience – I ran my own business and owned a house at an early age as she did – and I was also influenced by her feminism in my choice of women.

  But my mother dominated my life in a more profound sense. When I was three and a half my childhood ended. I watched an ambulance drive away – my mother had collapsed in the street – and although my infant’s mind was probably as interested in the vehicle as it was distressed by the event, that was the beginning of twelve years of anguished uncertainty and the feeling of death hovering over everything. From the point when the ambulance disappeared with my mother – and my childhood – I had to learn to be self-reliant.

  In spite of bouts of illness caused by heart problems, my mother was fabulous – full of positivity, pulling her business together every time she came out of hospital. Sometimes, I would help by shampooing hair and I often created chaos in this feminine world. During my travels I caught a grass snake; I drank the milk from my flask and put it in, cycled home, handed the flask to my mother for rinsing and out it slithered in a flash of caught light. You can imagine her reaction!

  I’ve always been a practical joker; it’s a good safety valve and became part of my entertainer’s resources. I developed a few of these survival techniques negotiating the precisely defined territories of Crewe. You had to run like hell when you saw the Black Backs Gang – their coarse kneelength trousers exposing red-raw fighting knees. If you were cornered the best technique was to create a spectacular and noisy diversion; I’ve spent my life fighting The Black Backs Gang in one guise or another.

  People ask about my musical genes: my mother was a reasonable pianist but I can’t find any other musical aptitude in previous generations. From my infancy I was encouraged to enter talent contests in Rhyl, winning prizes for my singing. My mother had a freer, more liberal attitude than my father had; for her it was about achieving what you wanted to do – even being a musician! She didn’t actively oppose my father – they were totally in love – but her influence at a more subtle level modified the tension between father and son, and she was always fully behind my ambitions.

  But in spite of the many good times, my mother’s illness gnawed at my childhood years. She was in and out of hospital for more than a decade but I can recall no one specific occasion. All visits were one generic visit: or, rather, a feeling, an overwhelming feeling, of the impossibility of communication, such was the dominating force of the hospital and the emotional power of unspoken thoughts. Out of hospital my mother was unstoppable – demanding that I push her up the bank at Queen’s Park. Quite a challenge for a child.

  Albina Betsy Boswell Billington, my mother, was the first woman in the UK to have open heart surgery. She had two problems which had to be dealt with sequentially. Stenosis is the narrowing of the artery so this had to be opened up in order to fix a breech in the mitral valve. This was when I was about eleven. The first operation was not successful; the periods in hospital got longer until she was permanently there. The journeys – an hour each way – to the hospital in Wythenshaw were horrendous and made worse by other events. My father had knocked a child over and although it was not his fault, he never got over it and wouldn’t drive a car. So we went by scooter. In addition to this my eldest brother Ralph had been seriously injured in a motorcycle accident and was simultaneously in hospital in Oswestry. The memory of the danger and glacial misery of those winter visits: my father’s worry about his wife and son, my lack of clothing and the ill-fitting crash helmet I borrowed, the icy conditions when we would repeatedly fall off, still makes me cry. One night it was so cold I couldn’t hold the coins when we stopped at a petrol station for fuel we couldn’t afford.

  Layin’ On A Coolin’ Board (2)

  My mother died when I was fifteen. She died on the operating table during her second heart operation. I was in bed; Ralph told me. Although we had lived with the possibility of her death for so long, that was and still is the worst, emptiest, moment in my life. Your mind can’t accept the finality of death. My father had such an unreserved faith in medicine that his optimism must have given me hope. Besides: she had survived other operations and this one might have changed things for the better.

  When I saw my mother at the mortuary I didn’t want to touch her. I knew her organs had been removed – even her eyes would have gone to research – and the mortician had created false colour in her face and an unnatural smile. I was offended because she looked too happy and because it was a con. My mother was an eyeless, hollow carcass. How could she smile?

  I became a recluse, playing guitar in my bedroom so the empty feeling wouldn’t kick in. I’d played a guitar since the age of eight; it was like meditation. People – relatives – came and offered help. We hadn’t seen them in ages then they sat there smoking in that way people do when they don’t know what to do or say. I have no visual memories of the funeral; I was very emotionally disturbed and that was the time I stopped singing hymns. If you’re not religious the service holds no meaning for you and no comfort. My mother wasn’t a poor sinner needing forgiveness; she hadn’t slipped away into the next room; we wouldn’t meet again in any bright land.

  She had gone.

  Socks And Hymns

  They told me off after the funeral for going to my bedroom to play guitar but I carried on. Mum used to love it. The blues became my bereavement counsellor – I needed one. I was fifteen years old, falling out with my father – we were both on short fuses, neither of us mentioning my mother or her death – and in trouble at school for not singing hymns and wearing odd socks. Oh – and a few other things like being disruptive and not doing enough work. The elitist grammar school I attended had no interest in my emotional state. I wasn’t being eccentric or difficult; we weren’t too poor to own socks but no-one
considered sock pairing in our mourning household. I told my teachers that if I ever met God I’d headbutt him and then ask the questions – their hymns had no comfort for me and neither had they. I sank my fury into playing music I could most identify with as my only means of expression.

  So, I would sit in my bedroom: eleven and a half stone, muscular, needing to shave, my mousey hair growing longer than school allowed, wearing blue jeans, a loose sweater and Cuban heeled shoes, playing an almost unplayable twelve string. The action was very hard. Linda bought it because I thought it was a Martin and therefore a bargain. Wrong. I’d never seen one, of course, or any other quality guitar and there had been no musical advice forthcoming from the blonde salesgirl from Bossons and Doig either. They sold tellies and all sorts of stuff as well as instruments.

  Or I would plug in a budget priced Broadway into a Watkins Dominator: early Sixties blue and cream, with flecks in the blue and gold bars. There was a V front with angled speakers for a better spread of sound. Classic, rare and collectible these days. Or I would haul my gear onto the handlebars of my bike and cycle to Wrinehill to rehearse my band. Or I would thump any kid who spoke badly about his mother. That was how I survived.

  The blonde bombshell who sold me the twelve string eventually specialised in music: she went to sell records in Breeden and Middleton: from Hightown to High Street.