(Guest starring John Hammond & Martin Carthy, with Joe Jackson in a walk-on)
I was standing by the bar after playing my first set as opening act that evening at a folk club called the Speakeasy, in Greenwich Village, and a fellow I guessed to be from the Middle East walked up to me and asked in accented English for an autograph.
“Oh, no,” I replied immediately, waving a hand, “you don’t want my autograph.”
The booker for the club, Tom, was standing nearby and gave me a frown. I made a but-he-can’t-mean-me face at him, a this-guy’s-crazy face.
Tom frowned a don’t-be-an-asshole frown, and said, “Go on.”
The man assured me that he did want my autograph, so with a brief twinge of vertigo, and a voice in the back of my head protesting—this is wrong! I’m not a star!—I wrote my name on the piece of paper he gave me.
The moment was over, and I was left with a mix of embarrassment and surprise. Embarrassment because I was convinced my ‘fan’ had no clue how insignificant I was in the scheme of things. Surprise because someone, anyone, had asked me for an autograph.
Autographs, I thought, are for famous people. And I’m not famous.
John Hammond, now, he was famous. He was the headliner, he was a Name, with several real record albums under his belt. Of the two of us playing that night, he was one to ask for an autograph.
Growing up in a small New England town, I never met anyone I would’ve asked for an autograph. We didn’t have much access to Stars.
I had learned from TV shows like “The Brady Bunch” that Stars were different from the rest of us. They were removed from our lives, and were very, very busy being famous, and didn’t have time to be or consort with regular people. If you were a pretty blond girl on a major TV show like, say, “The Brady Bunch,” and you wrote a really sincere letter asking a Star—say, Davy Jones—to perform at your prom and that Star happened by amazing coincidence to have an album to plug, he might just agree to fit you into his busy schedule.
But in my case, Stars were remote. The only person in my circle who qualified as a Star was more a Former Star, a friend of my Grandmother’s named Walter Abel, a former contract player in Hollywood who had starred with Bing Crosby in “Holiday Inn.” And I never even met the man.
When I finally did meet someone I considered a Star, I was a teenager, and the Star in question was a giant of English folk music whom you may very well never have heard of: Martin Carthy.
He first emerged in the 60s, recording and performing as a duo with fiddler Dave Swarbrick. In those days, he taught a folksong called “Scarborough Fair” to a young American expatriate named Paul Simon, who was about to be called back to the States to capitalize on a hit single by the duo he’d quit.
Carthy’s guitarplaying style is truly distinctive—his thumb taps a heavy beat while plucking the lower strings, while his fingers pick out modal melodies, often in harmony with his gloriously nasal baritone. I had become aware of him when my Dad started buying albums of the folk-rock troops like Steeleye Span and the Albion Country Band. He also produced wonderful solo albums. Carthy’s influence in folk music is profound.
I was buzzing with excitement as my Dad drove us to Boston. It was a church concert, a large room with folding chairs facing a small stage, nice and intimate. I was only yards from the stage.
I started chatting with an audience member seated to my right. I’m gonna see a real Star! He asked if I played guitar, to which I replied enthusiastically in the affirmative. Being polite, I asked if he was a musician too. He said that he was. In fact, he’d been in a rock group in the sixties, a group that had a big hit.
“Really?” I said doubtfully.
Oh yes, he said, and named the song. I didn’t know the song or his band. He gave a good-natured nod, as if he wasn’t all that surprised, and the conversation died.
At this point I felt slightly embarrassed, as it was somehow rude not to know of this fellow’s claim to fame. Which begged a larger question—was this fellow a Star, or not? If I knew his hit song, I probably would’ve been impressed to meet him, but since I hadn’t, he was just another guy in the audience to me. He certainly didn’t fit into the Brady-Bunch+Star=Fame equation.
Luckily, the concert started.
And there he was, The Martin Carthy, playing his guitar and singing alone and with the vocal group The Watersons, which included his wife Norma. Wow! I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He was in good voice, and seemed in a fine humor, at one point joking with his wife when about to start a duet, “What key should we sing it in?”
“I don’t know,” fluttering her hands, “surprise me.”
A devlish grin, “What, here?”
God could he play! He thumped his strings and sang his songs, cursing a couple of times when he made a mistake, which shocked me (Stars say “shit”?). Everything shocked me at that point—I’d never watched a performer I knew from his own albums. All in all a thrill.
As my father and I made our way out after the set, I looked down a hallway and saw that Carthy had retreated to a room behind the stage, and was talking with people there. I pointed this out to my dad, who agreed to go back with me. We walked back and I paced up to my hero just as he finished talking with someone. He looked at me expectantly.
For an awful moment, I was completely frozen. Here I was, in front of this Star, and I was awestruck.
Mute.
Speechless.
Until finally, my Brady Bunch training kicked in.
“C-could I have your autograph?” I asked, on automatic pilot. This was the proper question for a Star.
“Sure,” he said, and sat down with the program I handed him.
I wanted to tell him something, anything, about what his music meant to me, about how I played guitar, about how great his playing was, but I couldn’t speak. I felt air-less, empty, and slightly light-headed. My father sensed my distress, and said helpfully, “My son is a big fan of your music.”
Carthy looked up with a smile and pointed the pen at my dad. “You’re English.”
“Well, yes, I was,” my dad replied, and Carthy chuckled. They chatted for a minute or two as I gazed on, almost as if I was watching from behind glass. I thought my Dad very brave to be able to speak to a Star.
I went home and pinned that autograph to the corkboard in my bedroom. Where it remained for years. After a while, it seemed an oddly pointless memento of such a wonderful evening.
A couple of years later, I walked right by the singer Joe Jackson.
He was standing at the corner of 8th Street and 5th Avenue in New York City, and I walking by him on the way to a class. I glanced at him and realized he looked familiar. Then it suddenly dawned on me: Hey, that’s Joe Jackson! Mr. Steppin-Out!
And then he saw that I’d recognized him, because he seemed to brace himself as I drew near—almost winced, in fact. But I didn’t stop, I kept walking.
As I walked by the arch of Washington Square, I asked myself what I might have said to him. Ask for an autograph?. No, I decided, if anything I would’ve liked to say “Hey, Joe, I think ‘Look Sharp’ is one of the best singles I ever heard,” and left it at that.
No swooning, no autographs, no Marcia meets Davy Jones. I had moved on.
So autographs were the last thing on my mind when Tom gave me the booking to be opening act on a Friday night. A weekend booking was the best one could hope for, those were the best attended gigs, and they had the biggest names.
“Who will I be opening for?” I asked.
“John Hammond.”
“Say what?” I replied, taken aback. “John Hammond? The guy who signed Dylan and Aretha to Columbia Records?”
“No, no! His son, John Hammond Junior. Go do your homework.”
By which he meant, you really should know about this guy. So I walked over to Tower Records on Fourth Street and walked up two flights of stairs to find the modest “Folk” section. There he was: John Hammond. (I was later told he HATED being referred to as a Junior.) I bought one and took it home.
Hammond sang and played acoustic guitar and harmonica in a style known as “country blues,” which refers to Mississippi Delta blues guys like Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Tommy Johnson. I was impressed, though more because he had albums out than by his playing, which was spirited.
When it came time to meet him before the show, I was a bit nervous. I may’ve met a Star or two by then, but I’d never played my music before one. He immediately put me at ease, though. A tall sandy-haired fellow with a big grin, he was extremely personable, not at all aloof or pretentious. We sat in the tiny manager’s office and chatted, and I mentioned that I’d seen a writeup about him in the NY Times.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, laughing and rolling his eyes. “Those guys, still writing that racist crap about me not being a real blues player because I’m white.”
This floored me. I had never heard a white guy call another white guy a bigot for saying he wasn’t black enough.
Well, I played my opening set, and both Tom and Hammond watched from the back of the club, I saw them watching me and chatting, occasionally nodding to each other, which made me feel good. I realized that, although I played some blues tunes, my style was introverted compared to Hammond’s extroverted throw-it-down style. The audience, which included my sister and girlfriend, were extremely nice and attentive.
Afterwards, Hammond gave me a big grin and said, “That was great, Geoff!” I really glowed from that compliment, and as he stepped up to start his set I lingered back by the bar, when a certain person asked me for my autograph.
“Oh no,” I said with a wave of my hand, “you wouldn’t want my….”
copyright 2006 G. Welchman.
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