|
The
Original Outrageous Inspirators
| Keith
Moon was a little disappointed that night at Wembley to
find that Nicky Hopkins and Bernie Watson, as rumoured,
had left the Savages
to take up a residency with Cliff Bennett and the Rebel
Rousers in Hamburg, although Keith couldn't blame them: he
would have jumped at the chance himself to get out of
London and play in a foreign country. No, what really got
his back up was that the new guitarist was even younger
that Watson, a Middlesex boy by the name of Ritchie
Blackmore whose devastating runs up and down the guitar
were leaving people gasping for breath (he was eventually
asked to join the Savages from May to October 1962 whilst
Watson and Hopkins were in Germany, and Andy Wren was back
too). Keith Moon thought he could hear his life ticking
away above the noise. He turned back to checking Carlo.
All the budding musicians were down the front at a show
like this, monitoring the movements, studying for tips.
Somehow, despite his own lack of any real musical talent,
Sutch always managed to surround himself with the best
musicians. |
|
|
 Keith
Moon
|
|
Eric
Clapton:
"The
band, then, we were all trying to sound like...was it The
Wild Ones?...What were they called...with Carlo Little and
Nicky Hopkins? The Savages...that's it, yeah. They
were the band of the day, they were the band to emulate,
because they used to do, you know, before Lord Sutch came
on, they were like...a little blues set...and there was
that fantastic Andy Rand [sic, Wren], who was a
keyboard player, who would sing 'Worried Life Blues".
It was astounding...that was our hero at the
time...yeah...Carlo Little with the leopard skin drum kit.
(laughter)".
From an interview in British Blues Review, August 1988
 If
you wanted to be a guitarist, Ritchie was your man (or boy);
if you were learning the bass, you turned to Ricky Brown; if
you were striving to be a singer, you didn't look to Sutch
for vocal excellence but you could certainly learn a lot
about working the crowd.  And if you were planning on
becoming a drummer, well there was really no one to compare.
During 'Good Golly Miss Molly' Carlo would stand on his
motorbike crash helmet to take a solo. And somewhere towards
the end of the set, his playing would get louder and louder,
like an express train, until the other members would stop
what they were doing to look at him quizzically, at which
Carlo would go off on this solo for five or ten minutes that
sounded like he's just escaped from the funny farm. The
applause at the end of it convinced Keith he'd been right
not to go after the guitar or bass like everyone else: you could
make it as great an impression on the drums.
After
the show, the Savages were to be found holding court in the
changing room, trying to get their breath back. There
wasn't much chance. As always seemed to be the case, they
were surrounded by potential apostles, those budding
musicians who had been down the front and were desperate for
pearls of wisdom to fall from their spiritual leaders' lips
that they could take back to their own cover bands (these
included from time to time various members of bands who
later became The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, Led Zepplin,
etc.) Most of these hopefuls, however, would never
successfully emulate their heroes because they didn't have
the guts, as the Savages did, to turn their backs on the
Shadows' instrumentals, the neatly tailored suits and
carefully choreographed stage moves of the day and let rip
into real rock 'n' roll, with all the blood, sweat and tears
demanded of it.
But
that night Keith Moon walked backstage with his friend, waited for
the right moment, and then approached Carlo Little, eight years his
senior, twice his size, and the best drummer he had ever seen in the
flesh. He introduced himself. And then he asked Carlo Little for
drum lessons. Carlo looked down on this kid with the 'bumfreezer'
brown jacket and greasy hair that sat incongruously atop such a
cherubic face. The kid didn't look strong enough to hold a pair of
drum sticks. "I'm not a teacher, mate," he said
eventually. "I'm self-taught. I could probably do with some
lessons meself." "No," said the boy, "You're
fantastic. You really are. Me and my friend come and see you all the
time. The way you hit the bass drum..." Carlo thought about it
for a minute. "Where do you live?" he asked the boy.
"Chaplin Road." That wasn't far from his own place at
Sudbury at the end of the Harrow Road. Carlo thought about it some
more. He wouldn't have minded having someone teach him when he was
the boy's age. Every penny came in handy when you were devoting
yourself to something as unstable as rock'n'roll. "I can only
teach you what I know," he said by way of agreeing. "Ten
bob for thirty minutes. Wednesday at seven. Here's the
address."
|
 Gerry
Evans never ceased to be amazed at his friend's audacity. He could
never have dared ask the great Carlo Little for lessons, even though
he dealt with so many famous drummers at Paramount on a daily basis.
And that's why, as Wednesday approached and Keith suggested that
Evans come along with him, Gerry balked. Carlo was a frightening
bloke. He looked like a gypsy. Who knew what he was going to do once
he got him in his lair? And besides, Gerry could already play the
drums. It was Keith who needed the lessons. Keith,
who had such a terrible problem holding on to the £4 wages he was
earning at Ultra Electronics every week that the 10 shillings for
the lesson had started to look expensive, then had another idea.
"He said, 'Tell you what,' " recalled Gerry. " 'I'll
go in and have the lesson, then I'll come out and tell you all about
it and you give me half a crown.' That way I was getting the lesson,
second hand, for half a crown, and Keith actually got the lesson for
seven and six." Carlo Little never knew there was another
potential student hanging round outside his house on the Harrow
Road. He just set up his kit in the front room - "I didn't care
about the neighbours, they just got used to it" - and when the
doorbell rang, he opened it to find one diminutive, somewhat shy boy
at his doorstep. "Here's
your money," Keith said before he was half way in. Carlo
mumbled something again about not being a teacher. He felt guilty
about taking ten shillings from a 15-year-old but then again, he
didn't play for free. He sat the boy down at the kit and struggled
to contain a laugh. The lad would have been small for any kit, but
framed by Carlo's drums - a 24" bass instead of the standard
20", a 14" snare rather than a 12", and two equally
over-sized tom-toms - he was almost invisible.
 Carlo
asked Keith to show him what he could do. It wasn't very impressive.
"He was just a lad fumbling, trying to play. I said,
'Right, this is what you should be doing. I can only show you, mind,
I can't do it for you. You go home, remember what you've been shown,
practise and practise and come back next week and I'll show you some
more.' " While Carlo tried to explain, in layman's terms, which
were all he knew, what a paradiddle was, how it enabled a marching
drummer to lift alternate arms at the top of the beat despite
maintaining a continuous roll, Gerry Evans paced up and down the
Sudbury section of the Harrow Road. He should have come on the
scooter he'd bought when he'd turned 16 earlier in the year, then he
could have gone home for a while, he thought...At least it was
summer, and warm outside. The lesson was taking a while, though. It
had been almost an hour. What was Carlo doing to his
friend? Eventually
Keith emerged from Carlo's house ecstatic. "I've got it!"
he exclaimed, as if he'd been given the holy grail itself, and the
pair of them ran back to Chaplin Road so Keith could show Gerry
everything he'd learned before he might forget it. Up in his room,
Keith sat himself at his blue Premier kit -  which looked awful small
all of a sudden - and started to play for Gerry. You didn't just tap
the bass gingerly on the beat like they'd been previously been
doing, he explained. You hit it double time - and double hard - on
the beat, and then off the beat again, and then here again, and
there again...It was the rudiments of syncopation married with the
energy of hard rock, and as he tried to emulate their hero, Keith
fell off the beat completely. He hit the snare extra loud in
frustration and almost tore the skin. He didn't have it yet. But the
roots had been sown. "That was what put Keith on the right
road," said Gerry almost 35 years later. "He realised that
if he could put the bass drum together, it would be the whole
foundation of any band he would be in, because all the other
drummers were hardly tapping the bass drum. That was the turning
point, and that was for ten shillings." Or six or seven,
counting Gerry's contribution.
Keith
went back to Carlo for lessons several more times. "He was keen
and eager," recalls Carlo. "I remember he came back
one week and he'd got off what I'd shown him. So he was obviously
listening to what I was telling him." The usually irrepressible
Keith was unusually intimidated by his teacher, who remembers him
being polite and ordinary - and focused. "When we talked it
wasn't for more than a few minutes, and it was always about the
drums." Carlo was glad to see his one and only student coming
along, but compared to the standards that Carlo had set himself, he
remained unimpressed by the boy's skills. "I thought nothing
more of it, just a young lad called Keith." (Much
of this section of text was reproduced from Tony Fletcher's book 'Dear
Boy: The Life of Keith Moon')
 |
For
the rest of 1962 The Savages made a few more novelty records
produced by Joe Meek (see Discography),
but mostly continued to spend their time creating havoc
wherever they played...
|
L-R:
Bernie Watson, Carlo Little, Rick Brown, Lord Sutch, Nicky
Hopkins
|
|
L-R:
Sutch, Nicky Hopkins, Carlo Little, Bernie Watson, Rick
Brown
|
|
|
HELP NEEDED:
if anyone has any information on the whereabouts of guitarist
Bernie Watson or knows what became of him after leaving the
Bluesbreakers, please email
us!
Click
here to sign a petition to induct Nicky Hopkins into the Rock
& Roll Hall Of Fame
Back
Up
Links
Back
Up
|
