Dancing With Myself

by Billy Idol

  —JIM MORRISON

  CHAPTER THREE

  ROCK ’N’ ROLL HIGH SCHOOL: LONG HAIR, FLARES, AND HASH TOBACCO CIGARETTES

  Worthing, South East England

  WORTHING HIGH SCHOOL SEEMED A bit boring at first. There was an old school headmaster who was very strict and wouldn’t allow any deviations from the school uniform, blazer, cap, and all. He retired after my first year, and the deputy, who was a pushover where the rules were concerned, took over. Fashion exploded, and we all started wearing flares and knee-high boots that zipped on the side to school. The coolest were those who had the boots that zipped up to the knee, covered by one’s trousers until they were hiked up and the full glory revealed. We all started growing our hair way beyond what was allowed by the school’s regulations. The whole school started sporting their own fashion choices, while the few skinheads enrolled boasted their No. 1 crops and cherry-red Dr. Martens kicking boots.

  After the first year, I was put in the C-stream, which mainly comprised kids who were clever but didn’t want to try too hard. If you were in A or B, you were too dull to hang with us, and if you were in D, too slow. In truth, I was pretty useless at school. History was the only subject that held my interest, and I was naturally proficient at religious instruction for some inexplicable reason that probably only God knows. I didn’t like science or math much, and I couldn’t really draw, so art was out after the second year. No one wanted to get stuck in music class with some old fuddy-duddy teacher who was serious about the pathetic music he liked. After all, more of us were getting into the rock ’n’ roll sounds that were being developed at a very fast rate during this period.

  On a scout summer camping trip in Devon, while we were setting up camp I can remember still that a radio played “Whiter Shade of Pale.” Wherever I was, my ears were always attuned to the radio. We would slag off school and go to a record shop to listen to the new records, squeezing into a listening booth until we were thrown out.

  Nineteen sixty-seven was a wild year in terms of music, with the release of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” and Are You Experienced. After reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, I began writing some fantasy stories, in which I could blend my love of history and fable to create an epic world of battles, kings, and armies defeating evil. I also made up titles for imaginary record albums, such as Blurry Vision, a high-concept record where all the songs related to what you might see with your third eye, a takeoff on my own shitty eyesight.

  One day, my notebook full of stories and album ideas disappeared, only to end up in the deputy head’s room, where I had to see him to retrieve it. I was a bit worried about getting it back, mainly out of childish embarrassment, as I had never shown these private thoughts or fantasies about music to anyone, other than mentioning some of those ideas to my mum. But the deputy headmaster was actually quite complimentary to me and, rather than laughing at me, discussed with me some of the ideas found in my notebook.

  My parents still didn’t see how committed to the new music I was and made me take violin lessons! At this point, I was already teaching myself to play a cheap £ 5.00 guitar. Why can’t I have guitar lessons? I wondered. But it was not to be. I had to go to violin lessons twice a week, one on Wednesday, and, God forbid, the other on Saturday morning. I was mortified at the thought of anyone seeing me with the violin, as they’d think I wanted to play it by choice, so I cycled to my lessons by some completely roundabout route so that nobody would see me. Eventually, I was spotted and word got out, but at that point, I told my parents quite categorically that I didn’t want to play the violin, but the guitar. I refused to practice, in order to prevent them from getting me to do what they wanted.

  School became much more fun during the second term. I remember one kid, one of the hipper and more grown-up in the class, always taking something that seemed to pep him up. I asked what he was doing and he replied that he’d take the medicine-soaked cotton leaf out of a Benzedrex inhaler and eat it, which produced speed-like effects. He gave me one, and it did indeed pep me up.

  I began making friends with some of the kids in the year above me, as many of them had long hair and flares and carried record albums with them. I began to hang out with one boy, Laurence Satchel—Lol to me—and his mates, smoking at the back of the open gym and talking music. They knew all about John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Hendrix, Clapton, and Cream. Rock was starting to take off at this time: the years 1967 through 1970 were a giant leap-off point in modern music. I was still just a kid, but boy, what a great music/life education I was getting, so fuck school. I couldn’t help feeling like that, as the new musical horizon coming into focus was so huge, varied, and wide in scope. Like a big bang, perhaps the rock music explosion, if it kept on happening, would see the world itself explode and erupt across the space-time continuum. What the older lads, schoolmates and fellow lovers of this new-world rock, seemed to offer was, somehow, a viable solution to the complete boredom and utter futility of the mundane, nine-to-five daily grind that existed for many people then and still does today.

  * * *

  I STARTED TO GO TO rock concerts with the older kids. On our way to a Juicy Lucy/Hawkwind gig, we saw John Lennon performing “Instant Karma!” on Top of the Pops through a shop window. Yoko Ono performed alongside him, knitting while blindfolded, occasionally holding up cue cards with one-word statements: SMILE, PEACE, HOPE, LOVE, BREATHE. Hawkwind were on the Hurry on Sundown tour for their first album at the time. One of my friends passed out from the effects of their white-noise machine, which created the rushing wind integral to their sound.

  On Saturday and Sunday mornings, I used to caddie at my dad’s golf club for pocket money, and every penny went to music. We started to go regularly to Worthing Town Hall to see all the up-and-coming bands on their way to Brighton or London. We saw Black Sabbath one month before their debut album came out, and I was right in front of Ozzy, his long-tassled jacket practically touching me. We knew many of the songs from John Peel playing them on his BBC radio show. They started with “Black Sabbath,” playing the whole of the first album, and it seemed as if the very bowels of hell were opening up (in the most fun way, naturally). This truly represented a step forward in rock at the time, and to be alive and witnessing it firsthand, played by blokes who weren’t that much older than me, was exciting and, to me, inspirational.

  Lol and I saw Deep Purple with Ian Gillan, who had the biggest flares and showed them off by placing one foot on a monitor as he screamed the tortured ending to “Child in Time.” Medicine Head, Uriah Heep, the Edgar Broughton Band, the Soft Machine, the Nice . . . the list went on and on.

  In those hippie, heady days, everyone sat cross-legged on the floor for the concerts. Music appreciation was taken very seriously by that generation. What did the band have to say? What was their stance on life? Was it taking us forward into a freer age, or were we being trapped? Fans noted musicianship and skills, digging certain singers, guitarists, or drummers. Some guys and chicks were freaking out, silhouetted by the stage lights, twisting, wobbling, and contorting themselves in a strange dance that had a lot to do with Joe Cocker’s stage movements during “With a Little Help from My Friends.”

  The crowd was mostly students or cool, groovy “heads,” people who sold and took drugs. Hash rolled into tobacco cigarettes was smoked to enhance the music, with a piece of cardboard at the end to create a filter. To disguise it, kids claimed to be smoking herbal cigarettes, as most adults in England at the time didn’t really know what burning pot smelled like. Of course, I wanted to try; hadn’t the Beatles and Stones smoked pot and dropped acid? What was that really like? It was intriguing for a twelve- or thirteen-year-old kid sitting in the same room.

  Those were the days, my friends. “I’d love to turn you on” was the mantra. Long hair, patchouli oil, burning joss sticks, and kaftans—stoners taking a ride into a positive future, or so it seemed. Coming up with a new way to live or a
unique view of the world was our quest. Why waste time on normal life, a nine-to-five grind with a weary approach that seemed to bode nothing too exciting? Why give in to your parents’ beliefs and fears about the future, which they’d inherited from World War II or the Depression? Why subscribe to a political system that looked down on you even as you became society’s biggest consumers, providing them with the money to persecute you?

  We would hang at different people’s houses and listen to music ad infinitum, discussing it, partying to it, playing air guitar along to the break in Free’s “All Right Now.” I thought they were a really interesting band, as they were all very young and already at the top of the charts, with Paul Rodgers singing like he was an old soul bluesman and Paul Kossoff leaning back against the amp, his right leg bent at the knee held up near his guitar neck while he tortured his Les Paul into obeying his command to bend notes into screaming walls of blues pain. The bass player, Andy Fraser, played funk licks that were so innovative, I thought he was the best bassist since Paul McCartney. And Simon Kirke was an incredible drummer whose timekeeping was impeccable. He had a spare style of playing soulful and sexy, leaving plenty of space for the other musicians to work their particular brand of magic. He didn’t play long, extended solos, which went against the grain of every other drummer who tried to outdo Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham—which was pointless, since he owned that territory. Music was progressing fast.

  Speaking of Led Zeppelin, of course I loved their first two records. What an incredible leap forward in musicianship and songwriting. With their powerful riffs, wailing singer, and possibly the heaviest drummer of all time, they outdid the Who at their own game. Jimmy Page had the guitar chops, production skills, and hair to get exactly what it was he was looking for. Led Zeppelin proved to everyone that musicians knew just as much as any producer or record label. The scope and sweep of their power blues went well beyond even what Sabbath was doing. Robert Plant had incredible vocal range, impossible for mortal men to match, plus he looked like the visual embodiment of the Norse/Tolkien beauty he sang about in his lyrics. Sex appeal certainly played into their magnetism.

  Led Zeppelin hardly played in England; after debuting under the name the New Yardbirds at the Marquee on October 18, 1968, the UK music press complained they were too loud. The lads took their rock press slagging and immediately vanished to the States, assuming a new name, Led Zeppelin, only returning later to play huge gigs like Knebworth. For the moment, Zeppelin ruled, and power blues-rock was fresh and new. What could possibly disturb these new hopes and dreams? The answer loomed in some shitty economic decisions by the government, which brought on another depression; but for a moment, like a ship of fools, we basked in the days of peace, love, and rock ’n’ roll.

  Jimi Hendrix’s career blossomed in public thanks to television and a blessing from the Beatles. I used to cycle to the house of a mate who had Are You Experienced and Axis: Bold as Love, which we listened to nonstop. I thought Hendrix’s singing was great, though he apparently didn’t think much of it himself. He sang with so much personality, who cared if he was actually speaking the words? Anyway, his guitar did the singing.

  * * *

  I CAN STILL RECALL HUMMING along to the Who’s “The Seeker” on my transistor radio one afternoon after school as I rode on my bicycle, with its cow-horn handlebars, to a girls’ school, where Lol knew some of the students. They were all a year older than me, with budding breasts and bodies, their sexual drives way ahead of ours, as girls tend to mature so much faster than guys. I actually remember my first wet dream when I was nine. I woke up one morning to find my pajama pants stuck to me around my genitals, which was a bit disconcerting, but it didn’t bother me too much. Soon after, I started wanking regularly.

  I went out with a girl named Linda, who was part of the group we all hung with, and had my first grope of female anatomy. Back then in England, chicks didn’t give blow jobs, but they didn’t mind wanking you off. I had a skinhead friend in my class, Gaz Kingston, who knew all these skinhead girls who would wank you off at the drop of a hat, just for kicks. It was usually a group wank-off, as the skin chicks would jerk each of us off at the same time in some alleyway, where we would go to smoke and hide from adults, family, and teachers alike.

  Gaz was actually a fantastic bloke who didn’t seem to care too much that my friends and I had long hair and were ostensibly hippies in training, while he and his mates had their short hair in a No. 1 crop taken nearly down to the scalp, along with their de rigueur style accoutrements, including Ben Sherman shirts with skintight Levi’s rolled up to display the tops of their high, laced-up, cherry-red Doc Martens. Gaz would cadge cigarettes off me sometimes at school, and as I offered them to him, he would say, “Good matesmanship, Bill,” a phrase I use to this day when someone does me a favor.

  Lol, a bunch of our mates, and I used to go to a bowling alley in Worthing just off the main street on weekends or school holidays. We would walk a few streets away to a subterranean coffee bar, which was tunnellike, small, and smoky, where the heads hung out. Jimi Hendrix’s “Long Hot Summer Night” was on the jukebox along with Cream’s “White Room,” with Clapton’s wah-wah, and “Badge,” with its wobbly, Beatles-esque, vari-speed guitar as its centerpiece, all playing constantly.

  The skinheads were everywhere in those days, seeing us, with our long hair and flares, as the enemy, forced to kick our heads in. They listened to Jamaican ska and reggae, both huge in England, while we listened primarily to rock. The skinheads also hated Jamaican immigrants and black people, which raised the question, how can you enjoy the music but despise the people who play it? One Saturday, as the strains of “Whole Lotta Love” blasted out from every shop doorway, we were strolling along the high street on our way to the coffee bar when, horror upon horrors, we ran right into a group of about thirty big tough skins, who immediately walked up to us intent on doing us harm. Showering us with verbal abuse, they were just about to get physical—and give us some “aggro” (slang for a good kicking), when from out of their midst, lo and behold, Gaz Kingston appeared and vouched for me as his mate. Thank God I let him cadge those ciggies off me. Guess good matesmanship pays off after all, as my mates and I got away without being fucked up horribly and ending in a hospital instead of hanging at the coffee bar that afternoon.

  Girls, rock ’n’ roll, revolution, clash of youth cultures: emerging teenagedom was in full flight for me, and I was loving it. It made school seem more and more irrelevant, except for the few subjects I enjoyed. In terms of the onward flow of my life, I was having a great time.

  Lol was going out with the hottest girl in our clique, but she was a randy soul and was working her way through all of us. She seemed more mature than the rest of us and was throwing her nubile body at everyone. After Lol, it was my turn; in truth, we started out kissing behind his back. Soon he found out, and we had a falling-out. I put my finger on her tits and in her pussy, a hot first for someone my age. But not before she and I kissed in full view of the adults at a weekend summer Scout fair. It was an official function, but I was so turned on by her and not mentally giving a shit anymore about the Scouts, I necked with her without thinking of the consequences. The very next day, I was officially expelled from the Scouts. I didn’t care, but Mum cried. And while it troubled me to see her cry, music and this new world I was on the brink of meant more to me at the time than her emotions. I’d done my time in the Scouts and had gotten all I was going to get out of it. Time to move on, Mum, I thought. I’m not a little kid anymore. But I knew I’d hurt her, and that felt just awful. Of course, the chick soon dumped me for someone else, and Lol and I laughed about both of us being duped. Good mates somehow survive birds!

  Summer approached, and there was a small local faux Woodstock held one weekend on the outskirts of Worthing, called “Phun City.” It had all the hallmarks of the hippie festival: good vibes, children cavorting at the side of the stage, people learning yoga, a guy blowing bubbles, tents with tie-dyed clothing
or drug paraphernalia—all the stuff of hippie dreams on sale.

  We camped out on the site, and now my scouting skills came into play, as I was the only one who really knew how to put up a canvas tent with ropes and stakes. This minifest was magical. The Hells Angels were there, turning up on their choppers and walking around swinging baseball bats. The audience consisted of full-on longhairs sitting on the grass or blankets to “groove.” Some danced or freaked out to the music. Peter Green had just left Fleetwood Mac and played along with a number of second-string bands, but then, suddenly, like a bolt out of the blue, came the MC5. Fuck, they were great! They seemed to be playing with a verve and commitment I hadn’t quite seen in any of the other bands that day. The guitarists, in spangled clothes standing at either side of the singer, at certain points in the show would suddenly jump in the air and spin around while the vocalist, with an Afro, exhorted the crowd to wake itself up and “kick out the jams, motherfucker!” They were great, an alternative to the incense-burning, meditation-practicing, patchouli-oiled, kaftan-wearing, peace-and-love hippies. I didn’t realize it then, but at fourteen years old, I had just witnessed the future of rock.

  An amusing aside to this was when the compere/MC/DJ tried to provide info about first aid over the PA, in the event someone had a bum acid trip. Midway through the first afternoon of Phun City, he said, “Someone’s been naughty and stolen the red-and-white-striped first-aid tent. Could you give it back, please?” A little while later, he announced that someone had been really naughty and stolen a Hells Angels chopper bike! As he spoke, around from back of the stage came a group of Angels, led by a very angry redheaded bloke who proceeded to wade right through the middle of the seated hippie audience, swinging his wooden baseball bat at the heads of all and sundry, creating a mass panic, and since the peace-and-love crowd were so densely packed, there really was nowhere to go. A few broken heads were added to the acid freak-outs in the St. John’s Ambulance first-aid section. Luckily, my friends and I were not seated in the middle of that. Actually, by the second day, the festival was declared free through pressure from the Hells Angels and the hippies who couldn’t get in. It was like a small-scale Isle of Wight, as that festival ended up being declared free the very next year. It was a sign of the times that people really believed in the freedom of the music and the lifestyle, the freedom to take drugs and, in some ways, to create chaos. Even though everything was declared to be “for the people,” mayhem was too often the result.