From Steve Phillips in Vancouver
Hi Myles:
I am really enjoying the music sidebars on ANR, and you can count me in the camp that enjoys the commentary from other readers.
Having comments edited so that what ends up being posted are posted because they are intelligent and have something to say give a much more interesting discussion than the abuse and idiotic comments that appear on so many internet blogs and forums. I realize this gives you more to do by way of reading and editing.
As you say, Myles, the internet makes it possible for people from Vancouver, Bellingham, Chicago, New York, all over the U.K., Finland, Kenya, India, Brazil, in short, all over the world to get together and discuss things of common interest. Two of the things that the world shares a love for are music and football. So I am really enjoying the music pieces and everyone’s discussion of David Bowie and Marc Bolan.
When I was a lad playing in bar bands around Vancouver, I worked in a record shop.
The chap who was in charge of the record shop was a dandy who looked the spitting image of Freddie Mercury. He always showed up late for work in a taxi looking like he’d been out all night and he’d swoosh in with stylish aplomb. When Bowie released Hunky Dory, he went over the moon and started playing it endlessly in the shop. When I said how much I was digging this music but had never heard of this Bowie fellow, he pulled the plastic wrap off a copy, handed it to me, and told me to take it home and listen to the lyrics. Hunky Dory is still my favourite Bowie album.
Later, when I was living in London and trotting down to the Nashville Room to see a young Elvis Costello sing “Alison”, Bowie released Heroes and it became the theme music of my time in London.
I ran into Elvis a year or so ago in the Produce section of the Whole Foods Market in West Vancouver (he has a house there with his Canadian wife, Diana Krall).
He saw the glint of recognition in my eye. I said: “We haven’t been this close together since the Nashville Room, London, 1977.” He grinned, gave a sort of grunt, and tossed a cucumber into his basket.
Myles replies:
Small world.
I was there with Jan at the Nashville in ’77.
Being a BA stewardess, my girlfriend missed a lot of gigs but she saw that one.
One night I took her to a punk gig at the 100 Club and she was absolutely appalled by some of the people who said “hello” to me.
Once interviewed George Hamilton IV at the Nashville, where the BBC filmed a series of country shows. What a pro !
The Attractions ran onstage, I recall. Nobody does that.
I had not seen a group run onstage since the Small Faces at Manchester University circa 1966. I remember talking to the Small Faces tour manager in the Green Room before the gig. He was a street-smart vagabond in a scuzzy, furry Afghan jacket, like a character from a Dickens novel. He looked and sounded as if he hadn’t been home for a month, and probably hadn’t. We were grammar school boys, so we didn’t encounter roughie-toughies like him.
Elvis’s manager Jake Riviera and Kosmo Vinyl, their mouthy publicist, made a lot of enemies. Jake always dressed like a bouncer at a strip club in Stoke-on-Trent. I say that as someone who has never been to Stoke. I knew producer Nick Lowe from years before. A hip guy with a lovely sense of humour.