John, Paul, George and…Jimmie? It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, does it? But for ten days in 1964, Jimmie Nicol was one of The Fab Four, drafted in to replace Ringo Starr on The Beatles first world tour.

Starr had collapsed with tonsillitis, and rather than cancel the tour, producer George Martin decided to call in a temporary replacement - Jimmie Nicol, an experienced session musician, who had played with Georgie Fame and jazz musician, Johnny Dankworth, amongst others. Lennon and McCartney were fine with the idea, but Harrison was a bit shirty, and at one point threatened to walk off, telling Martin and Brian Epstein: “If Ringo’s not going, then neither am I - you can find two replacements.” It was soon resolved and within 24-hours of the initial ‘phonecall, Nicol was playing drums with the Fab Three in Copenhagen. He later recalled:

“That night I couldn’t sleep a wink. I was a fucking Beatle!”

The next leg of the tour was Australia and Hong Kong, and Nicol soon found himself at the heart of Beatlemania. Fans screamed his name, his photograph was sent around the globe, and he was interviewed as one of the band by the world’s press. Nicol later reflected:

“The day before I was a Beatle, girls weren’t interested in me at all. The day after, with the suit and the Beatle cut, riding in the back of the limo with John and Paul, they were dying to get a touch of me. It was very strange and quite scary.”

He also gave an inkling into The Beatles’ life on the road was like:

“I thought I could drink and lay women with the best of them until I caught up with these guys.”

Ten days into the tour, Ringo had recovered and quickly reclaimed his place. Nicol was paid off by Epstein at Melbourne airport, given a cheque for $1,000 and a gold Eterna-matic wrist watch inscribed: “From The Beatles and Brian Epstein to Jimmy - with appreciation and gratitude.” It was like a retirement present. Within a year Nicol was bankrupt, owing debts of over $70,000, and all but forgotten. So much for his 15 minutes of fame.

“Standing in for Ringo was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Until then I was quite happy earning thirty or forty pounds a week. After the headlines died, I began dying too.”

Nicol went on to play with Swedish guitar band, The Spotnicks, but by the late sixties he quit pop music and relocated to Mexico. It was later claimed he had died, but as the Daily Mail explained in 2005, this was false:

At 66, his square-jawed looks have given way to grey jowls, the smile oblieterated by missing teeth. Anything that might remain of his Beatle haircut is tied back in a scruffy ponytail. But he still has his principles. Despite the lucrative rewards of today’s Beatlemania industry, he staunchly refuses to cash in….

It has even been reported that he died in 1988. This week, however, after a difficult search, I confirmed reports of his death are greatly exaggerated. One morning he could be foind visiting a building society, eating breakfast in a modest cafe, then returning silently to his London home. At this flat you could see sheet music through one window but no sign of any drums. He didn’t answer the door when I rang. If he got my messages about the new book, he didn’t reply.

When I eventually made contact, the conversation was predictably brief: “I’m not interested in all that now,” he said. “I don’t want to know, man.”

Here is footage of The Beatles’ tour of Australia and Jimmie Nicol’s time as the fifth Beatle - the Beatle who never was..
 

 
Rare clips of The Beatles on tour, plus Jimmie Nicol interview, after the jump…
 

 
A tantalizing teaser for a truly rare (as in I can’t find the complete thing on the innerweb) 1971 doc about husband and wife free-improv duo Paul and Limpe Fuchs (and their two small children) d.b.a Anima Sound. The Fuchs’ toured greater Europa in a most odd fashion: in a caravan pulled by a tractor going 20 kilometers an hour with the purpose of bringing their primitive musical expressionism to remote, uncultured public places. Looks utterly fascinating. Evidently this film did a tour of college film festivals last year. Won’t some kind soul in possession of a copy put the whole thing for us all (OK, a handful of weirdos) to view ?
 

Anima Sound: Europa Tournee Mit 20km/h TRAILER from naomi no umi on Vimeo.

 
More Limpe Fuchs after the jump…

 
From the press release:

In Honor of the late great Captain Beefheart, San Francisco based producer Al Lover presents his latest work ‘Safe as Milk Replica’, a distorted reworking on the amazing first LP by Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band. With each track sampled from a different song from the original record, Al Lover has created something all his own, a dusty, psychedelic, boom-bap journey into the past.

You can download all the tracks over at Safe as Milk Replica by Al Lover.

 
Joni Mitchell and Mary Travers (of Peter, Paul & Mary) guest on The Mama Cass Television Show TV special in 1969, singing a lovely version of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” with Cass Elliot.
 

Via PCL Link Dump

 
In the mid-1960s, Billy Connolly formed a folk group with Tam Harvey called The Humblebums. Connolly sang, played guitar and banjo, while Harvey was accomplished Bluegrass guitarist. The duo made a name for themselves playing venues and bars around Glasgow, most notably The Old Scotia, the famous home to Scottish folk music, where Connolly would introduce each song with a humorous preamble, something that became his trademark, and later his career.

In 1969, The Humblebums released their first album First Collection of Merry Melodies, it was soon after this that Gerry Rafferty joined the band. Rafferty had previously played with The Fifth Column, which also featured his future Stealer’s Wheel partner, Joe Egan, and had scored a minor hit “Benjamin Day” with the group. Rafferty’s arrival into The Humblebums changed the band’s direction and Harvey soon left.

The New Humblebums, or Humblebums as most still called the pairing of Connolly and Rafferty, began to achieve far greater success with their mix of Rafferty’s plaintive vocals and melodies and Connolly’s upbeat tunes and fine guitar playing. That same year, the duo released their first record together and band’s second album, The New Humblebums. The album was a major-hit in Glasgow and was well-received nationally. Amongst its most notable tracks were Rafferty’s “Look Over the Hill & Far Away”, “Rick Rack”, “Her Father Didn’t Like Me Anyway” (later covered by Shane MacGowan and The Popes), “Patrick” and “Coconut Tree”. While Connolly contributed the single “Saturday Round About Sunday”, “Everyone Knows” and “Joe Dempsey”. The album’s famous cover painting was by fake “faux-naïf” painter Patrick, aka legendary playwright John Byrne, author of The Slab Boys, and subject of Rafferty’s song “Patrick”..

The Humbelbums’ success was compounded with the release of their next album, Open Up the Door, in 1970.  Here was Rafferty’s “Steamboat Row” (later covered by Stealer’s Wheel), “I Can’t Stop Now”, “Shoeshine Boy”, “Keep It To Yourself” and “My Singing Bird”; along with Connolly’s “Open Up the Door”, “Mother”, “Oh No” and “Cruisin’”.

If this had been a Hollywood film, the next part of the story would be international success and world domination, but this was Glasgow, and Connolly and Rafferty wanted different things. Rafferty wanted to concentrate on the music, while Connolly was finding he was more interested in talking to the audience and being funny than performing as a folk-singer. A split was inevitable. Rafferty went to form Stealer’s Wheel with Joe Egan; while Connolly started his career as a comedian.

In today’s press, Connolly is quoted as saying of his friend and former bandmate:

“Gerry Rafferty was a hugely talented songwriter and singer who will be greatly missed.

“I was privileged to have spent my formative years working with Gerry and there remained a strong bond of friendship between us that lasted until his untimely death.

“Gerry had extraordinary gifts and his premature passing deprives the world of a true genius.”

 
“Rick Rack” - The Humblebums
 

 
Pioneering American singer and slide blues guitarist, Eddie James “Son” House recorded in the 1930s and again in the 1040s for Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress, but he retired from music to work for the New York Railroad. The legend of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil for his guitar prowess is alleged to have started with Son House. House was an obscure figure before a renewed interest in the blues saw a career revival in the 1960s and performances before audiences worldwide.

A Son House performance in Leicester, England, was described by Bob Groom in in Blues World magazine in 1967:

It is difficult to describe the transformation that took place as this smiling, friendly man hunched over his guitar and launched himself, bodily it seemed, into his music. The blues possessed him like a ‘lowdown shaking chill’ and the spellbound audience saw the very incarnation of the blues as, head thrown back, he hollered and groaned the disturbing lyrics and flailed the guitar, snapping the strings back against the fingerboard to accentuate the agonized rhythm. Son’s music is the centre of the blues experience and when he performs it is a corporeal thing, audience and singer become as one.

Ill health sidelined Son House again in the early 70s and he died, at the age of 86 in 1988. In recent years, Jack White’s advocacy for his music—the White Stripes recorded a cover of “Death Letter” and performed it on the Grammy Awards—has led a new generation of listeners to his work.
 

 
After the jump. Son House explains the B-L-U-S-E…

 
A Dallas Def Leppard tribute band, Pyromania, is looking for a one-armed drummer. No prosthetics!  Authenticity is key in the no-bullshit world of tribute bands.

“Must have flame retardant kit & stick.”

Check out Pyromania’s website here.
 
Via Exile On Moan Street

 
Scottish singer/songwriter Gerry Rafferty has died at the age of 63. Rafferty was best known for “Stuck In The Middle With You,” a 1972 hit for his band Stealer’s Wheel and later for his solo smash “Baker Street,” which made him a millionaire overnight.

The Beatleesque “Stuck In The Middle With You” was used to hilarious effect in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. And the haunting sax riff of “Baker Street” is an indelible part of 70s rock and roll. A great hook.

Through the 80’s and 90s, Rafferty continued to write and record critically well-received albums, but health problems related to alcoholism got in the way of any sustained success.

Drink drove him into fits of depression and he’d disappear for periods of time. Angry, garrulous and unpredictable, Rafferty sabotaged his musical career until it simply didn’t exist anymore.

He died of suspected liver damage.

In his 1978 Rolling Stone review of Rafferty’s album “City To City,” Ken Emerson wrote what might serve as a fitting eulogy for Rafferty’s career and life:

Even in his mother’s womb, Gerry Rafferty must have expected the worst. This Scotsman entitled his melancholy 1971 solo album Can I Have My Money Back? (the answer was “No!”). And when Stealers Wheel, the group he subsequently formed with Joe Egan, became an overnight success with the hit single “Stuck in the Middle with You,” only to lapse into morning-after obscurity, he probably said, “I told you so.” On City to City, his first LP in three years, Rafferty sticks grimly to his guns. Not only does he use the same producer (Hugh Murphy) and several of the same musicians, but a similar un-self-pitying fatalism pervades the record.

However, there is a slight but significant change for the better that makes City to City as eloquently consoling as the spirituals Rafferty echoes in “Whatever’s Written in Your Heart.” Indeed, there’s a prayerful quality to the entire LP, a quality reminiscent of the dim dawn after a dark night of the soul. “The Ark” begins as a Highland death march, complete with doleful bagpipes, but swells into a stirring hymn to love. And, after etching a relationship stalemated by the inability of two lovers to express their feelings, the somber “Whatever’s Written in Your Heart” (whose only instruments are a piano and a hushed sythesizer) concludes with a coda of vocal harmonies that sing of sublime forgiveness.

Hope, in almost all these songs, lurks on the horizon. And when it springs fully into view—as on “City to City,” with its rollicking train tempo, and on the jaunty “Mattie’s Rag”—the music almost burbles with anticipation.

Gerry Rafferty still writes with the sweet melodiousness of Paul McCartney and sings with John Lennon’s weary huskiness, and his synthesis of American country music, British folk and transatlantic rock is as smooth as ever. But his orchestrations have acquired a stately sweep. For all their rhythmic variety—from the suave Latin lilt of “Right down the Line” to the thump of “Home and Dry”—these are uniformly majestic songs. The instrumental refrain on one of the best of them, “Baker Street,” is breathtaking: between verses describing a dreamer’s self-deceptions, Rapheal Ravenscroft’s saxophone ballons with aspirations only to have a sythesizer wrench it back to earth with an almost sickening tug. If City to City doesn’t rise to the top of the charts, its commercial failure will be equally dismaying. And our loss will be greater even than Rafferty’s. After all, when was the last time you bought an album boasting more than fifty minutes of music? And great music at that.”

- Ken Emerson, Rolling Stone, 1-15-78.
 

 
This weekend for two nights (Sat/Sun) at the intimate Steve Allen Theater, Ann Magnuson and backing band, the Star Whackers From Mars (Kristian Hoffman, Jonathan Lea, Joe Berardi, Kristi Callanand, Miiko Watanabe, plus guest performer Michael Des Barres), will present a special evening of David Bowie songs in honor of the Thin White Duke’s 64th birthday (which is January 8).

La Magnuson told the LA Weekly: “I’m not impersonating Bowie so much as rekindling the ecstasy of a teenager who is singing and dancing along to those records in the basement of the house she grew up in back in West Virginia. I feel all the radiant joy those songs brought me then - with all the attendant hormones and unbridled excitement over the endless possibilities that lay ahead. In short, I feel what Bowie was bringing to the world- permission to step out of the black & white mundanity of a Kansas farm house and enter the wild, wonderful Technicolor world of Oz! And since Bowie isn’t performing at all anymore, someone has got to sing these songs live on stage!”

As another teenaged Bowie fanatic from the hills of West Virginia, I add a “+1” to what Ann says. The shows are nearly sold out, but standing room tickets will still be sold on the night of the performances. And so you know, a “little birdie” (okay, Ann via email this morning) told me that like the Spiders from Mars’s last stand at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1973, this will probably be her last show for quite some time—and she’ll be doing her “infamous” Jobriath medley (not performed since 1997)—so be warned. You snooze, you’re gonna lose, got that?

The Steve Allen Theater at the Center for Inquiry-West, 4773 Hollywood Blvd. L.A., CA 90027 (323) 666-4268. Get Tickets here

More Ann Magnuson on Dangerous Minds

 
In 1977 Stiff Records put together the infamous Live Stiffs tour which was comprised of some their better selling acts at the time: Elvis Costello and The Attractions, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Wreckless Eric and The New Rockets, Nick Lowe’s Last Chicken in the Shop and Larry Wallis’s Psychedelic Rowdies. There were 18 musicians in total, some doing double duty by playing in more than one band. Imagine a punk rock Rolling Thunder Revue with no budget but with a shitload of booze.

The tour was a financial bust but, by all accounts, a rollicking good time. Though, Costello later satirized the tour in his song “Pump It Up.’

Here’s the entire Live Stiffs tour film featuring all the bands on some battered video tape. It’s rare. If you find a better copy somewhere, please send it to me. This version is like experiencing ancient punk rock field recordings or the Motel 6 version of Cocksucker Blues. Rough but fun.

“If it ain’t stiff, it ain’t worth a fuck.”