A Stray Cat Struts

by Slim Jim Phantom

  “What is all this?” she asked us both in that peeved tone that comes naturally to the French.

  I was standing there in drainpipes tucked into black silver-tipped cowboy boots, smiley pocket western shirt, a Hollywood fleck jacket, bandana tied around my neck, with a greasy mop on my head. The whole outfit was dirty from sleeping in it, and I’m sure I looked hungry and tired.

  “We’re in the best band in the world. We’re from New York. We have no money, nowhere to live. We’re stuck in London but don’t want to go home.”

  “What’s the name of the band?” she asked while looking me up and down and at her watch.

  “We don’t really have one,” I stammered.

  “Where’s your demo tape?”

  “We don’t have one.”

  “Where are you playing?”

  “We don’t have any gigs.” I was drowning on dry land.

  Something must have intrigued her enough to tell me to come back the next day with the others. Maybe she thought I was some insane street urchin and wanted to get rid of me, maybe she just thought I’d never turn up again—but I did turn up the next day, and I had the other two with me.

  The Cats always did cut quite a striking figure. We looked young and innocent, slightly hollow from mild hunger but with a leery rock-and-roll dangerousness honed by a month of very rough living. Tattooed children who seemed a bit dodgy and lost with an undeniable obnoxious charm. We had the complete Three Stooges–meets–A Hard Day’s Night act down. We answered each other’s questions, had our own lingo, did impersonations of everyone we met, and generally mocked and made fun of everything and everyone. We were a version of the Bowery Boys meets the Beatles. Without really trying, we owned this part of the act. The Frenchwoman was Claudine Martinet-Riley, and the boss was Keith Altham. Without playing one note of music, we had genuinely interested these veteran music biz insiders. They said they would rent us a little rehearsal room and watch us play.

  The next day we went back with the guitar, bass, and drum, and they walked us to a studio around the corner. We hadn’t played in over a month but had been woodshedding at the bars for more than a year, and this was all we needed. This was the first chance to do what we knew we could. We launched straight into the act: Lee slapping and spinning the bass, me standing behind and on top of the drums, Brian playing on his knees and behind his head, singing perfectly in tune as we ran around this little room, crashing into each other while not missing a beat. We did two or three numbers, ending with me jumping off the drum, hitting my head on the low ceiling, falling, and knocking the drums over. We were very good at it, and they knew it. We had some much-appreciated lunch and beer at a nearby pub. The first and most important part of the plan had happened: we had found someone to help us get a gig. I assume they made a few calls and arranged a couple of gigs at the rock pubs on the London circuit.

  We needed a name. In New York, we’d been the Tomcats. We liked Cats in the name. A few different ideas were batted around, and then Lee came up with Stray Cats. We were cats like Elvis, we had nowhere to live—the logic was undeniable. We now had a name. Coming up with a good name can be the hardest part of the whole thing, and now we had that part, too.

  There was a buzz about the first gig. We had managed to meet a lot of people while bumming around. It’s the type of thing that could happen in London in 1980. A few faces and word of mouth around a few clubs had turned our first couple of shows into must-see events. If nothing else, everyone wanted to see what we could do. We talked the talk; now we had to walk the walk. The audience at the first two shows was a who’s who of London at the time: Lemmy Kilmister; Chrissie Hynde and true tragic pals Pete Farndon and Jimmy Honeyman-Scott of the Pretenders; Glen Matlock and Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols; Joe Strummer and Topper Headon from the Clash; Jerry Dammers from the Specials; Chris Foreman from Madness; and the London chapter of the Hells Angels. A number of these people are still my friends to this day.

  This was all we’d been waiting for—a chance to play at a bar with a decent PA for half an hour in front of a bunch of rock stars and journalists with all the marbles on the line? No problem. This was where we could have a little control over our own fates. We slaughtered it. The other two are incredible natural musicians, and we could impress anyone, anywhere. We never doubted this for a second. This exact act had never been seen before; the lineup and stagecraft was genuinely different. No one had put the drums in the front with the singer in one line across the front of the stage before. There were about ten to twelve legendary venues around London that all the bands played; the Fulham Greyhound, the Golden Lion, Thomas A Becket, Woolwich Tramshed, Dingwalls, the Marquee on Wardour Street, and Bridge House in Canning Town were the main ones. We were the opening act on quite a few, and we blew the headliners away. With each show, there were more journalists and photographers. Allan Jones from Melody Maker did a feature; that was a big one. Adrian Thrills did a cover story for New Musical Express with Anton Corbijn taking the pictures. We shared the cover of The Daily Mirror with Lady Diana. All of this happened without a record deal, on the strength of the live shows around London.

  We had graduated from the floor of the squat to the floor of the office at 57 Old Compton Street. We slept on the floor of Pete Farndon’s house in Tufnell Park. We had all this notoriety and street cred but no money. Our actual situation hadn’t changed too much. Lee turned nineteen in August; he had caught up with me again. We were still unsigned and unknown to anyone outside London. We were also still very broke, hungry at times, and homeless, floor surfing and relying on the kindness of strangers. I still loved every minute of it.

  We continued to play two or three shows every week around town. The guest lists were an A-list of the London music and social scene of the time: the presidents and A&R heads of every major label, a few scattered rock stars, the grooviest scenesters looking for the new thing of the moment, and genuine music fans who had found out about us, mixed in with young double-barreled-last-name Chelsea types who wanted be in the know—all made for a very eclectic crowd. We had unknowingly filled the gap of the next big thing after the end of punk rock.

  We played the Marquee, the Venue again, a few shows at Dingwalls both as headliner and opening act, Thomas A Becket pub in the Old Kent Road, the Bridge House in Canning Town, and a few others, I’m sure. One night we did two shows in two different places, an early set at a pub and then we put all the gear in a van and set up all over again to play a late set at Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues, a fantastic once-a-week club put on by Gaz Mayall in cobblestoned, neon-lit old Soho. It was in a tiny old burlesque basement club down an alley. The whole place had a 1970s-disco-meets-red-light-district vibe. Gaz, always dressed in a ’40s-style suit, big fedora, and wing tips, also deejayed. He played all ’40s and ’50s jump blues, and we all liked him. He introduced me to Sarah-Jane Owen from the Bodysnatchers, who would become a girlfriend. This club hosted the hipster crowd that made up the early Stray Cats audience, and it would later become a very trendy popular hangout for all sorts of celebs, tourists, and kids digging rocking blues and roots music in a nightclub setting. We were the first band to do a live gig there.

  There was a gig booked as the opening act at the Venue in Victoria. The Rolling Stones came to the show and loved it. Now it was really game on. After the show at the Venue that the Stones attended, things moved very quickly. When the Stones came, it changed the game. Paparazzi pictures taken by Richard Young made the national newspapers. Anyone could tell that this was more than a photo op. Those guys genuinely got it and loved it. We weren’t English guys playing ’50s rock and roll; we were young Americans doing it for real, and it came across in those pictures from that night. We had been in a few of the music magazines, but this was The Daily Mirror, and it changed the deal. Who were these kids playing rockabilly in a London club, and why were the Stones there partying and really digging it? It must have been good if those guys were into it.

  Mick and Keith wanted to meet us and discu
ss our being on their label. We met with Mick first at the famed Stones office on Munro Terrace. Maybe they sent a car; I can’t remember how we would have ever found the address or gotten there in the first place. We may have had on the same clothes from the gig. The office was in one of those old Georgian row houses by the river that had been converted to serve as offices. We were let in and waited to be led farther in, which meant up more stairs—creaky, narrow stairs that were covered in slightly moldy, well-worn, brightly colored carpeting. I steadied myself on an old carved wooden banister. There was a big desk on the landing with a secretary behind it who seemed to have the final say of who saw and spoke to Mick. We were told to go into another room.

  Mick was standing in the center of the room. He looked every inch the spectacular rock star that he was and is. When you have an audience with a guy of that reputation, you expect a certain regal formality to it, and this scene had it all. It was in the middle of the day, and he was wearing a long white silk embroidered bathrobe. He had his back to the window that looked south over the river, so he was aglow in the filtered sunlight coming through the big window on this, the top floor. The whole scene was a kind of summoning to a mythic figure. He was holding an antique hand mirror with big pile of coke on it. He had a silver straw and was doing little whiffs as he asked us to sit down. It was exactly what you would want that moment to be. The three of us sat crowded together on a couch, and Mick sat across from us in a chair. He put the mirror down on a table that separated us and invited us to help ourselves. Still nervous and trying to soak up the whole scene while looking cool, we said, “No, thanks.” He shrugged and starting talking.

  We talked about rockabilly and the first American rock-and-roll stars and how it had affected the early Stones records. We talked about the best ways to record this music and get the old sound and still have a new twist. The audiences had reacted to the new songs, too. We instinctively knew this, and it was good to hear it reinforced by a guy this successful and in the know. We had figured since we first started playing that the current flavor, recording technique, and lyrics blended with classic elements would work best. As much as we liked them, we knew we couldn’t sound like an old record. The Stones had done this with a Buddy Holly song on “Not Fade Away” and a lot of other blues numbers. They had made it their own and made it attractive to young people. I don’t recall talking too much business, though I didn’t really know what business talk sounded like. It was like it was taken for granted that we would be on their label and that they would produce us.

  I remember being engaged in the conversation and him being very smart, but I was drifting. It was probably a little bit from slight hunger, and I was also reminding myself that we were sitting in London, talking about rock and roll, as an equal, with Mick Jagger when about six weeks earlier we had been playing a bar in Massapequa. This was the first time we had ever met anyone famous, let alone the most famous person of all, and not only had we met him but we had met because he wanted to meet us after seeing our gig. The last few months had been bewildering, but we stayed in the moment. We wanted to make a record before this moment in time passed. We were enjoying the attention, but we knew that we still needed somewhere to live.

  There was a knock on the door, and a secretary came in and told Mick that so-and-so was on the phone and he needed to take the call. He excused himself and said he’d be right back.

  We sat in silence; we gave each other the nod. I’m not sure who moved first, but within ten seconds we had all grabbed the silver straw and done a big bump off the antique mirror. The last one tried to leave a little and tidy it up into a much smaller pile to make it seem like we hadn’t done all of it. We all wiped our noses and tried to look innocent.

  Mick came back in a minute later and started talking again. We all listened very attentively now. At some point he must have looked down at the table and saw the much diminished pile of powder. We all knew that he noticed it, and we tensed up a little, waiting for something to give. To his credit and the reason I’ll always think he’s a cool guy, he never said a word.

  We let loose now, all of us chirping away and being funny. Someone found a record player, and we played some albums and were there for a while longer. The secretary had brought beers in by now, and it was a really fun afternoon spent with rock royalty. We talked about getting together again after we met with Keith. We must have left at some point, probably taking the subway back to Maida Vale, where we slept, one on the floor, one on the box spring, and the big winner, by turns, on the mattress. At least we weren’t so hungry that night.

  3

  A Little Time with the Rolling Stones

  The first time I saw the Rolling Stones play live was when we opened a show for them at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta in 1981. They were, of course, the world’s most famous band, but I was too young and broke to have seen them play on the tours in the 1970s. We had had a few encounters with them in the early days in London but did not sign with their label with them as producers. It was very hard to get Mick and Keith in the same room at the same time. They wanted to coproduce the album, but there was a lot more urgency on our side. We had momentum and needed to seize it. Fate intervened, and we met Dave Edmunds, who turned out to be the right producer. Since then, I had become very friendly with Bill Wyman, who had first come to see us in Nice, in the South of France, at an amphitheater built on the ruins of a Roman theater. It was a local show for him, as he lived nearby. He was our champion in the Stones camp, and I think that Bill was instrumental in securing the opening-act slots we wound up doing on the 1981 USA Tattoo You tour later that year. We hadn’t signed with their label, but I suppose they were happy enough for us when it all turned out okay. We were invited up to Mick’s hotel suite during the daytime. The show at the Fox was the smallest, most intimate one on that tour. It was a perfect one for the Cats, as we had played all the theaters in Europe by that point and were very comfortable in that setting. He was very gracious, and we met Jerry Hall, who looked amazing and acted the perfect rock-and-roll hostess. The Cats played great, and it really went down well. We were always confident that we could deliver the goods in a live situation; we were still hungry for success, especially in the USA, so we welcomed the high-pressure opportunities. An added bonus of the whole day was watching the Stones’ set from the roped-off orchestra pit, which we pretty much had to ourselves.

  The other shows were in giant enormo-domes in Midwest American cities that held fifty thousand people. The stages were much bigger than we had ever played on before, and our setup looked even smaller than usual. The stage was a series of platforms on sloping angles. We had to nail my little drum platform to the floor to keep it from sliding into the crowd. We had complete access backstage and roamed freely before, during, and after the shows. Backstage, we played pinball and Ping-Pong with John McEnroe, ate like kings, and just enjoyed being working guests on the biggest rock-and-roll tour in history. Every crew member was superfriendly, and we fit right in. We were low maintenance, so that made it even easier for everyone to like us.

  The Stones had a fantastic cast of characters around them; some of them have become rock-and-roll folk legends themselves. Big Jim Callaghan was the burly, good-natured, but truly tough head of security. Nobody came anywhere near those guys without Big Jim knowing about it and approving it. He always liked us, and in later years, I could always turn up at any Stones show, ask for Big Jim, and be welcomed backstage to say hello to the guys.

  Bill Wyman wore a Stray Cats pin on his lapel and came into our dressing room every night to hang out and talk before we went on. One night he was in there chatting away when Mick came in wearing his stage outfit from that tour. It consisted of bright-yellow American football pants complete with knee pads, a number 21 jersey, and white dancing shoes with long socks. He topped it off with a giant cape made from an American and a British flag sewn together.

  “’Allo, boys! ’ow are we doin’ tonight in Cedar Rapids, I-O-W-A?” he asked in that famous combina
tion accent that’s half-Cockney and half–Texas drawl.

  “Hi, Mick.”

  “Great, man.”

  “Yeah, cool.”

  We all answered quietly at the same time. It was still a big deal when he blew into a room.

  Bill had gotten a little quiet, as Mick had interrupted his talk with us, and he stood off to the side puffing on his cigarette. Mick seemed to notice Bill’s annoyance and walked over to him. He reached out as if to ask for his hand in dance and started to do a mock waltz with Bill as his reluctant partner. Bill brushed him off and gently pushed him away. We all stared at this very spontaneous, very rock-and-roll moment happening in our unadorned dressing room with most of what we owned in the suitcases on the floor. Outside the door was the circus that accompanied a big rock show that was about to go on.

  “C’mon, Bill, lighten up,” Mick chided him. “Why did you come all the way to Cedar Rapids, I-O-W-A?”

  “Certainly not to dance with you!” Bill answered in his very cool, relaxed South London accent. It was great stuff.

  Mick went on to tell us to use the whole stage as much as we could and to say the name of the town as many times as we could squeeze it in. He had just demonstrated this to us in the dressing room. Maybe he was practicing a little while reminding himself of where the show was that night.

  We hadn’t seen too much of Keith or Ronnie in a few days. On one night, Keith looked a bit wobbly as he was being led up the stage stairs, one step at a time. I remember thinking, He’s not gonna make it. What are they gonna do? None of the other guys in his band seemed concerned as they walked up the gangplank and put their instruments on. Charlie spun his sticks, and Mick jumped up and down, getting the blood flowing. The lights came down, and the big cheer happened. That might be the best part of any show. Whether I’m playing or watching, it’s my favorite moment. When Keith hit the stage and his roadie strapped his guitar on him, he came to life and stormed into the first number. They opened that tour with “Under My Thumb”; Keith would go over to the drum riser and exaggerate the downbeats with his guitar as he and Charlie would hang on the opening riff until they all got steady on the rhythm.