CHICAGO BREAKDOWN

Alan blows in from
 the Windy City

Since the mid-1970’s, ‘Beatle Conventions’ have been held regularly in cities throughout Europe and North America. While ex-Beatles have proffered saleable artifacts for charity auctions at these events, none - bar Pete Best — has ever attended one. Instead, ‘special guests’ have been drawn from old colleagues, former employees —and, scraping the barrel maybe, authors of Beatle biographies. As the writer of both The Quiet One — a life of George Harrison — and, more recently, Ringo Starr: Straight Man Or Joker , my turn came in August 1992 when I was invited to speak at a Beatlefest in Chicago’s plush Hiatt Regency O’Hare hotel. 

Coming directly from a tranquil fortnight in North Devon, the Windy City was like a Desperate Dan cartoon — a contradiction of familiar mystery. A Woolworth’s reared up in North Clark Street - scene of the St Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Coca-Cola tastes just the same and pizza is the area’s answer to fish and chips. Yet the sights and sounds in the street are so diverting that you could be hours ambling just a mile to some chosen destination — say 2120, South Michigan Avenue (title of a 1964 Rolling Stones instrumental) where the renowned Chess Studios had once stood. 

Chicago Blues lives largely in the performance of buskers - whether some scruff lilting an unaccompanied and never—ending ‘Stormy Monday’ or a sharp—suited gentleman called ‘Bobby C’ who, complete with generator, P.A. and programmed synthesiser, balances gutbucket hollers with Luther Vandross ‘lurve man’ burbliflgs as if hopeful of imminent sexual congress, possibly on the very pavement.

A frequent companion on my wanderings, Sam Leach has been an unsung hero of Merseybeat when compared to the Brian Epsteins and Bill Harrys of this world. However, as perhaps the era’s most adventurous promoter — the one responsible for John, Paul, George and Pete’s ill-fated 1961 booking in Aldershot - Sam cut a popular figure at the Convention. Though his memoir, ‘Follow The Merseybeat Road’, has lately been reissued, the customers couldn’t get enough of him retelling anecdotes from the old days in his lush wacker dialect, and presenting well-argued theories about the Liverpool beat explosion and its aftermath, whether on the podium, in the ballroom. or whilst signing books and posters at his stall in a memorabilia fleamarket that dwarfed any I’ve ever experienced in Britain.

In the next room to me at the hotel was a later Beatles insider, Harry Nilsson. He was there for a question—and-answer session on stage where he also entertained with a couple of his smashes — an unusual strategy for one well—known for never singing in public. My acquaintance with him got off to a bad start when I telephoned the front desk to request them to request him and his two children to turn down their bloody video as I was trying to sleep off jet lag. However, when formally introduced he and I got on well probably because I’d never been impressed with many of his records. This meant that I wasn’t gushing over him like everyone else. During a chat on songwriting methodology, he gave me some demo tapes and an open invitation to visit his place in California.  In exchange, I presented him with a Clayson L.P. and a tape of ‘The Lone Skater’, Dave Berry’s recording of a number I’d composed with Jim McCarty of the Yardbirds.  (all this name-dropping)!   We discussed too the possibilities of me penning his biography.

 Some say he’s an inconsistent genius, while others dismiss him as a tiresome "bon viveur" but, despite a lot of what I’d heard (and written) about him, Nilsson turned out to be a regular guy if rather careworn by an unquiet half-century that included a leading role in John Lennon’s ‘Lost Weekend’. Now dried out,’ Harry’s proposed 1993 album contains a huge helping of comic songs and a revival of the Platters’ ‘Only You’ (a rediscovered duet with the late Lennon). A comeback is not entirely out of the question - though, as he told me, ‘I’m not so sure of my tomorrows as I once was’.

 Triggered by John’s slaughter, Nilsson is an active supporter of the ‘Coalition To Stop Gun Violence’, one of the weekend’s running charities, and rewarded the two couples who donated the most with an invitation to a meal. I offered an evening watching television -  but the joke backfired when a mother and daughter shelled out 200 dollars to the fund on the understanding that I had to have dinner with them.

 It appeared that the Americans were as overwhelmed by me as I was by them — for, when my time came, I discarded carefully-prepared lecture notes the second the compere — local disc jockey Terrri Hemmert — spoke my name; and plunged into a talk straight off the top of my head.

These Yanks are crazy. Even when not trying to be funny, I was getting belters - and Terri Hemmert proclaimed me ‘the John Coltrane of the monologue’. Obviously, I missed my vocation. Nevertheless, art provoked commerce and there followed a sell-out of all two hundred Ringo books and, yes, the dozen copies I’d brought of my ‘What A Difference A Decade Made’ album. Presumably they thought they were buying a comedy record. Suddenly, I couldn’t cross a road. without girls gasping ‘It’s Alaaaaaan!’ and being accosted for autographs and photos with complete strangers draping their arms around me. As "The Surprise Hit Of The Chicago Beatlefest", I was invited back to another Convention in New York in March - and there were also murmurs of me going to Kansas City - and Tokyo, for gawd’s sake!

 All this sounds terribly immodest but I haven’t made any of it up. Ask Sam Leach. It was a bit like being one of the Fab Four myself - though the Beatles were never my fave raves. Nor were they for certain others there. Items by all manner of other 1960’s acts were moving fast in the flea market, and two Dave Clark Five fans explained to me that the Beatlefest was the nearest thing to a Five event.

 The Beatle-worshipping majority embraced pensioners and babes-in-arms but mostly young marrieds disenfranchised by 1990s pop - and older individuals who might once have been part of a screaming mass as amorphous as frogspawn at this or that stop on a Beatles U.S. tour. When She Loves You’ spins in 1992, these become swinging sixties teenagers once again, lovestruck and irresponsible.

Along a single corridor, you’d pass a Cynthia Lennon lookalike, a high-buttoned mop-top and a Sgt Pepper bandsmen, off to the auditorium to catch groups like The Beetle Brothers, Imagine and Cavern Club, whose raisons d’etre are centred solely on impersonating an incarnation of the Beatles. There were also forums for fans to reveal ‘My Beatle Experiences’ as well as trivia quizzes, showings of ancient film footage, soundalike contests and perpetual community singing in the foyer to acoustic guitars. Lifesize displays of LP covers enabled you to be ‘photographed with the boys’, and a mock up of Abbey Road plus forty pre-recorded xeroxes of Beatle backing tracks catered for less tangible fantasies.

Soon after I stumbled through the door on arrival back home, I might have crossed back to reality when telephoned by one of Poachers Pocket - a celidh outfit with whom I currently play for an engagement that same evening. However, on the makeshift stage at a barn dance a few hours later, I was still like a man in a wild dream.

reproduced from "The Beat Goes On" issue 22 April 1992

copyright Alan Clayson