Got Live If You Want It

I’ve just been listening again to the album which was one of the crucial inspirations for First Time I Met The Blues: Five Live Yardbirds.

I’m not sure if it was actually the first LP of British blues I heard (the Rolling Stones’ debut may have nipped in ahead of it), but Five Live Yardbirds was definitely the one that proved, beyond all reasonable doubt, that boys from the suburbs of London could play r’n’b that was every bit as raw and exciting as the Chicago blues I was learning to love.

Listening to it again now, it is, if anything, even more astonishing. After an eccentric on-stage introduction by the band’s manager’s assistant, they go from 0-60 in about five seconds in a manic assault on Chuck Berry’s ‘Too Much Monkey Business’, complete with furious soloing by Eric Clapton. The next song, ‘Got Love If You Want It’, features equally expert blues harp solos by lead singer Keith Relf, over a Bo-Diddlesque beat.

That sets the pattern for the rest of the set: fast songs attacked with gusto, and (slightly) slower ones which generally rise to a succession of crescendos. The primitive-sounding recording – this was one of the first live LPs, and the equipment wasn’t really up to it – only makes it even more exciting, as do the enthusiastic reactions of the audience, crammed into a sweltering Marquee club one night in March 1964.

In the book I place one of my three lead characters, Des, in that audience. It’s this experience that inspires him to form a blues band, in the hope of emulating his new hero, Eric Clapton. It’s the resulting live LP he plays his bandmates when he wants to show them what is possible. And it’s the Yardbirds’ arrangement of ‘Good morning little schoolgirl’ that is one of the first songs they learn – and when their new acquaintance Trevor realises that they haven’t got a blues harp player to imitate Relf’s riffing, he sees his chance to join the band…

It’s not a harmonica

Well, obviously it is – the object in the picture that illustrates this blog, I mean – but you don’t call it that if you’re serious about the blues. ‘Mouth organ’ is a little better, but only a little; ‘blues harp’ or ‘mouth harp’ will get you more respect; and if you really want to show off, you can call it a ‘Mississippi saxophone’.

It’s funny how all the slang terms for this simple little device compare it to other, more complex musical instruments. Perhaps people are embarrassed by its very simplicity. They think of a harmonica as something you give your nephew or niece for Christmas, so they can learn to play ‘Oh, when the saints go marchin’ in’ (following the instructions provided, assuming they’ve bought a Hohner Marine Band, which most people do) before discarding it a couple of days later.

If that’s what you think too, I suggest you listen to a bit of Sonny Boy Williamson (I or II, they’re both good), or James Cotton, or Charlie Musselwhite, or the greatest of them all, Little Walter. Acoustic or amplified, the mouth harp is one of the essential blues instruments, to the point where I don’t really consider a blues band worthy of the name if it doesn’t include someone who can play it.

It’s also the instrument that Trevor, one of the three main protagonists of my novel, learns to play in order to audition for his new friends’ band – and the instrument I tried to teach myself when I was 18 or so. Having discovered rock and blues music, and realising that by the time I’d learnt to play something complicated like guitar or piano I’d be too old, I homed in on the blues harp as my one chance to join a band. (This was all purely theoretical, you understand. I didn’t actually know anyone who was in a blues band, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have had the nerve to approach them.)

So I went to Hammond’s Music Shop in Watford (just as Trevor does in the novel) and bought myself a Marine Band and a book on how to play blues harp. And sure enough, with a bit of practice, I taught myself to play the tunes and solos in the book – bent notes, vibrato and all.

The trouble was, as soon as I ventured away from the book I was lost. Even with something as simple as blues harp, you need to understand a bit of musical theory to play it properly, and that’s always been a mystery to me. I just don’t understand how you know which note to play next if you’re not following it in a book.

I persevered on and off for a couple of years, but eventually the penny dropped: I wasn’t destined to be a blues harp maestro. It was only years later, when the idea for First Time I Met The Blues was germinating in my mind, that I realised I could indulge in a bit of wish fulfilment through one of my characters…