Marc Tracy and the descent into decadence

Phil had gone home, somewhat disillusioned and financially fucked. Geoff had got himself a job as a grill chef in Quaglinos - mucho kudos! I was grinding to a halt in the Hammersmith Labour Exchange, and the flat at Earls Court had been infiltrated by an Australian called Brian who brought along his American girlfriend and Geoff's new love interest, Maria Vega - a New-Yorker who was dark, Hispanic and beautiful. Then gradually things started going downhill. People would ask to crash and then become resident - A guy who styled himself "The Joker" (pain in the arse relic from the beatnic era who would exclaim at random intervals "Hatha Yoga" and adopt a suitable meditative position); a fat girl called Josie who stayed alive by begging for cigarettes and spare change; a junkie friend of Geoff's who stole our food and squirted the detritus of his syringes onto the bathroom mirror, and finally, another American who claimed to have been the drummer for "Joey Dee and the Starlighters", a Yank band who'd had a hit record some years earlier with a song called "The Peppermint Twist". He didn't play any more, on account of his addiction.



Maria had to go back to the States, and Geoff and I took the opportunity to quietly leave what had become little more than a flop-house - a home for the wasted.



We got ourselves a bed-sit in Bayswater and I began writing a book called "Irving Glottenheimer Gets His Man", while Geoff managed to get romantically involved with the then American Ambassador's daughter. Things came to a head when she stayed at our place for two straight days and her father reported her to the police as missing. This led to an early morning knock on the door courtesy of the Met's finest. We were summarily quizzed while the young lady in question was bundled into a limo and whisked away to the safety of the embassy.



All this activity attracted the attention of a guy who had a room on the opposite side of the hall from us. After the police had left, he knocked on our door and introduced himself.



Marc Tracy had to be seen to be believed. He was strikingly good looking in a Freddie Mercury kind of way and wore a frock coat with a wing collar shirt and flaired pin-stripe trousers. In one hand he carried a jewelled cane, and in the other a large joint. He invited us into his rooms for a smoke and introduced us to his flat-mate, Cliff, who played guitar.



Cliff and I hit it off immediately, as did Geoff and Marc, who were both people of the peacock variety.



Marc was into all kinds of money-making schemes, but his financial mainstay was a young prostitute who was deeply in love with him. She would turn tricks (mainly rich old guys), and shower gifts on Marc - new shirts, expensive meals, tickets for the best gigs etc.



A couple of weeks after we met him, Marc found accomodation in Sloane Square - an up-market area not far from the King's Road. A short time later I finally caved in and quit the Labour Exchange job. It was a spur of the moment fuck-this kind of thing but the end result was me not being able to come up with my share of the rent money, and Geoff and I having to quit the Bayswater scene and crash at Marc's place.



Geoff loved it. Every Saturday he and Marc would cruise the King's Road and pick up girls who they would bring back and fornicate with. In the meantime Cliff and I would rehearse songs for a band we were planning to put together. It was 1967, the summer of love, and all things seemed possible. My own sexual activities concentrated on frequent liasons with an Indian girl who had been my supervisor during my Hammersmith gig. Try as I may however, I could not get her involved in the Chelsea scene. She had a conservative aspect to her personality that made her deeply suspicious of the whole hippy thing.



A drummer friend of mine called Allan Price appeared on the scene and crashed at Marc's as well. Looking back, it was beginning to look like a replay of the Earl's Court debacle. Tempers got frayed. Marc's pet whore gave Allan a fiver prompting Marc to yell at him (when she'd left!) - "You can't ponce off her because I'm poncing off her!"



By now Allan and I had got a little jazz trio together with Iain Hines on keyboards. We played Hatchett's, a very cool and popular club just off Picadilly a few times, and then got a series of gigs playing at American air-force bases throughout England. It was during this time that Iain introduced me to the likes of Oscar Peterson and the Modern Jazz Quartet which offered up an entirely new musical landscape to explore.



Financially things were hard. At one point with no job and hardly any gigs coming in, I found myself surviving for a week on two chocolate bars a day which I bought from the machine in the Sloane Square tube station. Shortly afterwards I got a job as an invoice clerk at T.J. Poupart's, a fruiterer in Covent Garden. It wasn't such a bad gig. The canteen was subsidised and the food was not only cheap but good. The other guys who worked there were weird - they seemed to spend most of their time winding each other up and trying to arrange fights during the dinner hour. Apart from that, I discovered that downstairs where the fruit was checked and processed, the inspectors would condemn a whole tray of peaches or apples if just one of them was rotten. They were then available for the staff to buy at something like sixpence (2 and a half pence) the lot. We ate a lot of fruit while the job lasted.



Geoff had by this time left Marc's place and moved in with somebody he had met at work. Cliff had gone back to Watford and the landlord was knocking on Marc's door for unpaid rent.



I switched jobs for a position as porter in a branch of Boots the Chemist in Victoria. All money was being shamelessly spent on gigs (the Marquee being a favourite venue) drugs and good times. When times were really hard I would purloin bars of diabetic chocolate from the storeroom. I struck up a lustful relationship with one of the girls who worked there - she would make an excuse to visit the basement storerooms when I was working there and we would engage in frantic five-minute copulation sessions. Very risky, and very exciting.



It was during my brief tenure at Boots that I witnessed something of an epoch making event.


It was my lunch hour, and I strolled around to the local sandwich bar and treated myself to a cream-cheese, ham and honey combo - at least, that's what I remember it being. I ate it walking back to the shop, then sat down on a bench and took in the sights of London in the summer of 67. Across the street a crowd had gathered outside a record store. I was curious. Why were they there? What was going on? Suddenly the street was full of music, and the crowd just gazed with rapt attention at the two hi-fi speakers placed strategically above the shop doorway.


I, and all the others, were listening to the brand new Beatles album - Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band. I didn't go back to work. The universe had suddenly achieved a spiritual cohesion hithertofore unknown to me and I intended to thoroughly immerse myself in the experience.

Earl's Court

We arrive in Earl's Court. Geoff, Phil and myself. The plan is that the other two are the spearhead. They find a flat while I return home, sell the van and join them later. We walk out into Earls Court Road. Intoxicating. Many people from "the Colonies" - i.e. Australia, Canada, South Africa. The whole scene is busy but friendly, more or less as I had imagined it. Burger in a Wimpy Bar. We check out the advertisements for accommodation. Come up with something that looks good - No1, Earls Court Square. Make the telephone call and arrange to meet the landlord the next day, a.m. This means sleeping in the van for the night, so we walk around for a while taking in the sights, and then head back to the van. Great optimism and enthusiasm.
We get back to the van to find that it has been broken into and all Geoff and Phil's stuff has been taken. All they have are the clothes that they're wearing.
Downer.
Next morning, they check out the flat. It is a huge overall room with the bedrooms located on a big balcony. This is called, I think, a mezzanine set-up. We have enough money to secure the place and feel somewhat encouraged. They ring home to get some funding from their respective parents for new clothes etc., while I head back to Wales to tie up my loose ends.
Two weeks later, I arrive back in London to take up residence. Within a couple of days I manage to get myself a job at the Labour Exchange in Hammersmith where I meet a guy called Iain Hines. Iain is a piano player who did the whole Hamburg thing around about the time the Beatles were doing the circuit there. His tales of that time are fascinating and we strike up a friendship.
We start writing some music together and he introduces me to his brother, Fraser. Fraser is an actor, and has currently secured a gig in "Doctor Who". He is a wannabe bass player, so I show him a few licks and we become friends.
The job at the Labour Exchange is wearing thin. I am shown how to enter a "Derog" notice on the files of ex jailbirds (Derog stands for derogatory, which means their access to certain jobs is restricted). Also, I get paid monthly, which takes some getting used to - I managed to blow most of my wages in the space of two weeks the first time I got paid. I got by on spaghetti and butter until the next pay check.
I get to visit the Dr.Who set on an invite from Fraser. Me and Iain wandering around checking out the Cybermen and the various sets. One of the sets is an intricate model of a scientific station situated in the arctic. Lots of "snow" and desolate wastes. It covers a table measuring about six foot by four. Iain and I find some plasticine and make a very small father Christmas, which we place next to the door of the model arctic station. We wander off onto the Simon Dee set, and watch the rehearsals during which good ol' Simon does a fake introduction for Jack Warner (Dixon of Dock Green!). "And now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Jack Warner - King of the Queers!". Jack's dead now, and the last I heard of Simon, he was driving a London bus. C'est la vie.
We got back to the Dr. Who set to find that they had already finished shooting, and the model arctic station would be shown to the nation complete with a plasticine Santa standing next to the front door. Incredibly, no one had noticed him.

Next time, the one and only Marc Tracy steps into our lives; the flat in Earl's Court is lost, and Belgravia beckons.

Way Back When..

I was born in 1947 in a place called Nantyglo in South Wales during the biggest blizzard to ever hit Britain. The snow was so high it came up to the bedroom windows. My brother and my father had to dig a tunnel so that the midwife could gain access to our house.
I was a sickly kid. I caught more than my fair share of childhood diseases - chicken pox, measles, mumps, whooping cough. At the age of five I had my tonsils removed and, from then on, things started looking up. When I got home from the hospital, my mother had bought me a cowboy outfit to ease the boredom of recuperation. I wore it consistently for weeks. I started school a year late.
My mother thought I looked cute with long curly hair, which she kept out of my eyes by the liberal use of hair clips. On my first day at school the other kids roared with laughter and began a vicious whispering campaign that I was, in fact, a girl. At lunchtime, in the school urinals, the other boys in my class were incredibly interested in whether or not I actually had a penis. When they discovered that I had, they were slightly disappointed, so much so, that Russell Powis urinated over me. I left school early to get cleaned up at home.
When my brother, who hadn't begun to hate me yet, heard about my tribulations, he remonstrated with my mother about the length of my hair and persuaded her to cut it to an acceptable length. This was my first brush with conformity - later in life, I, and millions of others decided to grow our hair down to our asses to show our contempt for the norm. Inevitably, we became the norm.
1947 was indeed a fortunate year to be born in, because it meant that I was twenty in 1967, and able to participate fully in the optimism, hope and eventual collapse of the so-called "hippy" era - "the summer of love" etc. etc. Luckily enough, I managed to disguise myself as a punk in the following decade, and to infiltrate the whole "new wave" thing.
I guess I'm jumping ahead here.
A little more background perhaps.
When I was ten, and smitten with the likes of Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Freddie Cannon and Fats Domino, I made a guitar out of an old piece of wood, with nails hammered in at either end to which I attached elastic bands. I would strum the elastic bands and pose in front of the mirror in my bedroom, my imagination allowing me to convince myself that fame was imminent - just a matter of time. At fourteen, my mother bought me my first guitar for Christmas. It was an ice-blue Selmer Futurama. My brother, now grown-up and married, and my father, at home a dour and sometimes violent alcoholic, disapproved. I think they saw my guitar as the first step on the road to decadence. Looking back, I guess they were probably right. I practised diligently, and learned some Shadows' songs with a friend of mine, a more advanced guitarist who lived in Blaina. I knew no chords so he would let me play the lead lines to "Apache", and other stuff like "Wonderful Land", and every couple of days, he would teach me some simple chord shapes.
I progressed, and formed a band with some school friends, initially as a singer, and then as "rhythm" guitarist. However, I just wasn't up to the job, as my knowledge of chords wasn't great and the lead guitar post was already taken by a better player. Eventually I was told that if I wanted to stay in the band, I would have to play bass, as bass players were thin on the ground and the other guys had met a guitarist who was a much better player than me, and who was eager to join.
I was miffed. But Paul McCartney played bass, so I figured that it wasn't such a bad deal.
I got a bass, the band got to be quite good and we played under the name of "Randolf's Party", taken from the title of a short story in John Lennon's book "In His Own Write".
Then, after a broken romance (bitch!) and a boring year spent as a trainee journalist, I went to the pub with a friend of mine and, over a pint, suggested that we should live in London, where everything was wonderful. The guy sitting at the next table overheard our conversation and said, "I'll come too, we can get a flat together!".
He turned out to have gone to Walthamstow art college a year earlier, and knew London quite well.
So, aged 19, in the Autumn of 1966, the three of us headed for London with our stuff and ourselves crammed into an antiquated Ford Thames van.

Next time: The Road to World Conquest