Rathbone's Ramblin'

[rathbone]

(Yesterday I had intended to credit Dave Byron and David Valentine for their contributions in piecing together the Who gig. Thanks guys!)


McGoos rapidly settled down to be the best venue in town. My whole focus was now centred on the weekend again.

From a DJ perspective it was a continuation of what had been going on at the Top Storey, mostly soul, but in addition to the Motown and Atlantic stuff there was now a lot of Stax. It was definitely still a Mod focus. But the DJ (whose name I can’t remember) was more enterprising than that and tracked down lots of obscure, non-chart material. Imported record's from the States were virtually unheard of in those day's so it was really something. Over a decade later this approach would form the basis of Northern Soul.

Mr. Crolla had a knack for doing the right thing. Just one example was introducing a rubber stamp on the back of your hand so that you could go out to buy chips at the chippie just past the Tron. It didn’t occur to us that he owned the chip shop as well.

The resident group at McGoos was the Moonrakers. Gordon Taylor (drums) John Wykes (vocalist) Davy Wilson (rhythm guitar) Derek McDonald (bass guitar) and Graeme ‘Grum’ Taylor (lead guitar). The Moonies had a black van which they used to park up in the High Street while they unloaded their gear. It became a tradition that girls would scrawl their names over the van in lipstick.

While The Moonrakers were the resident band, it was Three's A Crowd who ruled McGoos. I had never paid much attention to them when they played at the Top Storey as The Jury, but now ‘Smiggy’ Smith and ‘Toto’ McNaughton had joined them, they had a new name, a new sound and a new attitude. ‘Toto’ McNaughton had turned into a really great drummer and Linnie Paterson, their vocalist, had become totally uninhibited. They caught the spirit of the place.

[rathbone]

One night I was standing on the balcony watching ‘Toto’ beating hell out of his drums when there was a hand on my shoulder and a familiar voice in my ear.

“ Hi Rathers. Didnae ken you came here.”

It was Chris from primary school. He was there with my former next door neighbour, John, and a third boy.

“This is Paul,” He said.

Paul nodded. I introduced Neil. After a bit of shouting at each other over the noise of the music, we got our hands stamped and went out the front on to the High Street for a smoke and a chat.

It was interesting seeing Chris socially again. There was a bit of catching up to do. Chris had got most of his O-Grades and was staying on for his Highers. I already knew that from school. John had left school and was working in a factory in Fountainbridge which made paint brushes. It turned out that the younger lad’s full name was Paul G.

“Do you know Dorothy G.?” I asked.

“Aye, she’s married tae my brother.”

“Dorothy’s a friend of my mother. Small world, isn’t it ?”

He just nodded. We checked how much money we had between us and decided to go back inside and buy a packet of twenty to share.

[rathbone]

At the Top Storey there had undoubtedly been a drug trade in the background, but we had never really been aware of it. At McGoos it was right up front, a natural consequence of staying up all night dancing.

At that time the term for being ‘on’ something was being ‘blocked’. I was blocked quite a lot of the time. French Blues, Black Bombers, Purple Hearts. A bit of speed. I embraced them all.

The dealers would hang out in the cafe on the balcony and sold you the pills in pre-sealed envelopes. We mostly bought from a guy called Simon who was a biology student. You could buy in packets of five, ten, twenty or fifty.

French Blues were light blue with a line down the middle and cost a shilling (five pence). Black Bombers were more expensive, about 2/- each. Purple Hearts were called that because they were shaped like a triangle and purply-blue in colour. Intended to combat anxiety they made you euphoric. They cost 6d each. Purple Hearts became so popular as an illicit drug that the company that manufactured them were asked by the Government to stop and they disappeared from the scene. They were replaced by Dexies which were yellow and cost a shilling. Dexies were amphetamines which meant that they made you active and chatty and able to keep running well past midnight, but the come-down was very unpleasant with muscle and joint pain which lasted for days. One problem with taking pills was you lost track of how many you had taken and in what combinations, which tended to make the come-downs worse.

I was never aware of the Police ever coming to McGoos, but rumours of the police meant that from time to time the dance floor became covered in pills dropped down from the balcony.

[rathbone]

Most weekends when I got home I was still blocked. While my mother might not have noticed any change in my behaviour, my Dad certainly did.

He began to have a go until eventually one night we had a real humdinger of a fight where I stood my ground while he shouted. Sunnyporty, Epykat and my Mum cried and Mr. Lawrie from upstairs came down to arbitrate.

It was a watershed. For some reason Dad backed off and after that I was basically free to do what I liked.

On the run up to Christmas McGoos held a series of ‘All-nighters’. The all-nighters at McGoos were really something. For a start they were all-dayers because the licence wouldn’t let them go through the night.

So they would start at eight on a Sunday morning and go through to midnight. The line up was usually a breathtaking roster of scottish bands from Edinburgh and Glasgow.  The Moonrakers, The Beachcombers, Three's A Crowd, The Stoics, Scots of St James, The Chris McClure Section, The Beatstalkers, The Poets, The Pathfinders, Jimmy James and the Vagabonds and finishing off the night, Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band.

[rathbone]

The main thing that McGoos had brought me, however, was sex.

Quite suddenly, at the age of sixteen I finally learned how to make contact with girls. Neil and I became quite good at making up foursomes.

After the dancing and chips, passionate moments were spent in the closes which ran down the hill on either side of the club. If you went down Tweeddale Court it took you to another close called New Skinner’s Close and from there you could get into the churchyard behind the big church on the Cowgate.

One Saturday night I went down Tweeddale Court with a girl called Jackie and, rather clumsily, lost my virginity.

[rathbone]

Most Saturday nights Neil and I would romance young ladies on the balcony at McGoos, move on to the dance floor and then back to the balcony for some serious smooching.

“To the Batpoles!” was the signal that it was time to head down the closes to consummate the evening. You could usually tell from the girl whether this was just going to be a quickie or not. If it was then you would get the back of your hand stamped so that you could come back in for another go. "POW!", "BAM!", "ZONK!"

Batman had become all the rage. It’s campness and imagery fell right in with the Mod culture.

Most Saturdays at McGoos I would get together with Jackie. I never saw her as my girlfriend. I wasn’t in love with her, nor she with me. There wasn’t even the adolescent infatuation which I had had for Helen from the library.

Jackie shared a flat with two other girls in Causewayside. She came from Stirling and was studying at the Art College. Her big sister lived in London.

[rathbone]

John, my old next door neighbour was now living in a flat now with his girlfriend, Kate. It was in Cadiz Street, at the back of Salamander Street, near the entrance to the docks.

Neil, Jackie, Chris and I would often go there on Sundays to listen to records or to Stuart Henry on 242.

There was one week that Kate had bought some new records - Sha La La La Lee by the Small Faces, Midnight To Six Man by the Pretty Things and records by Lee Dorsey and Fontella Bass.

Jackie didn’t like them.

“So what do you like?”, Chris asked in his usual aggressive tone.

“Crispian St. Peters”, she replied.

Chris laughed and said her taste was terrible. She got quite upset.

Buying records was getting more expensive. After years of price fixing, those restrictions were lifted and the cost of a single shot up to 7/3d and an LP to £1 12/6d

That spring there was a regular succession of headlining groups at McGoos: The Kinks, the Troggs, the Alan Price Set and the Spencer Davis Group.

[rathbone]

By this time Neil and I had worked out how to deal with underage drinking. I was 17 but Neil was now 19 and looked older. So we would go into pubs, I would slink away into a corner and he would go to the bar and buy two pints of heavy. Our regular pub became The Forest Hill Bar in Forest Road, which everybody called Sandy Bell’s.

Sandy Bell's had become the mecca for folk musicians from far and near. It was a place to learn and swap tunes. Well known faces on the folk scene such as the fiddler Aly Bain, banjoist Billy Connolly, and vocalist Barbara Dickson regularly frequented it. The big sensations now, though, were Robin Williamson and Clive Palmer who had teamed up with the guitarist from the Saracens, Mike Heron, to form The Incredible String Band. The music they made was completely new. The songs were still firmly in the folk tradition, but the arrangements and the interplay of the instruments was unique.

[rathbone]

was quite settled into the routine of working at the Tower Amusements in the evening and Lipton’s on Saturdays.

At Lipton’s I would normally spend the morning down in the basement sorting out the stock. The basement went out under the High Street and you could literally feel the buses and lorries when they passed overhead. The stock was kept in big wooden racks down either side and one double one up the middle. All of the deliveries had to come through the shop and down the stairs at the back. They were piled up at the back of the basement.

It was my job on Saturday morning to move, lets say, the boxes of baked beans off the racks and replace them with the new boxes which had come in that week. The boxes I had taken off the rack were then opened and the tins stacked at the front of the rack, ready for the girls to take upstairs to keep the display shelves stocked.

This was in the days before supermarkets were common. Lipton was a grocer that liked to think it was up to date, but that didn’t yet stretch to self service.

Then I would make up the orders and stack them on the trolley in the lane at the back. In the afternoon I would push the trolley up and down Portobello delivering the boxes of shopping.

[rathbone]

Apart from the manager, there were three girls who worked in the shop. One of those girls was Jennifer. Her big brother was in the Rugby team.

Jenny and I got quite close. She started coming down to the Amusement arcade at night. Every couple of hours I was allowed a quarter of an hour break from the money booth. We would go down on to the beach.

In 1966 the sand was about eight feet lower than it is today and there was a steep concrete incline down from the promenade to the beach. It was ideal for lying on. So we would lie there in the semi-darkness and have a snog.

One night we were doing just that when suddenly all this sand started raining down on us.

“That’ll teach ye”, Neil laughed.

I went to get up and my arm swung back on to the concrete. It smashed the glass on my watch. I was pissed off at him for at least a week.

[rathbone]

That spring Jackie asked me if I would pose for her because she needed some portraits for her portfolio. She would come down to the arcade as well, and while I was working in the booth she would do charcoal sketches of me. I used to have a couple of those, but they have long since disappeared.

As well as Crispian St. Peters, Jackie also had a thing for Scott Walker. When the Walker Brothers played at the Regal later that month, all of us just had to go along. Me, Neil, Chris, John, Kate, Jennie, Jackie and her flatmates all in a row in the balcony singing along to The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More.

That Easter weekend was spent at John flat. From the street the tenements looked as though they had pitched roofs, but it was only a false mansard. Behind it the roofs were flat. You could get up on to the roof from a ladder through the skylight at the top of the stair well.

Once up there you could walk round the whole block, along Cadiz Street, down Elbe Street, along Salamander Street and back to John’s flat. We would have races to see who could get round the fastest.

That Easter there was a cold east wind and it was freezing on the roof but Jackie insisted that we all climbed up there because she wanted to take some photographs for her portfolio.

She kept getting us to pose this way and that, and never took a shot. It had to be just right. Eventually Chris lost his temper, called her a pretentious bitch and disappeared down the ladder.

[rathbone]

The relationship with Jenny was never serious and by the end of March I had taken up with another girl called Isabel who came from Newington and went to Mary Erskine’s. We met through the Inter Schools Debating Society.

Our first date was a dance in the Newcraighall Miner’s Institute where I used to go to the Boys’ Brigade meetings. And we went to the pictures a couple of times. Then I made a big mistake. I took her to McGoos to see the Kinks.

From her reaction Isabel had never been in this kind of atmosphere before. Firstly the house was packed. You couldn’t really move down on the dance floor. Secondly the volume was so high that it was impossible to speak to each other. When we went up on to the balcony Neil disappeared trying to chat up girls. Chris and Paul G were moving from dealer to dealer trying to score dexies. All in all, while the Kinks were great, the evening wasn’t. She didn’t want to go out with me again.

[rathbone]

On Friday 20 May Neil and I stood in the queue slowly shuffling into the Regal in Lothian Road. This was it, probably the biggest gig of our lives. At least half my year from school was there. There were loads of people from McGoos mingling with regulars from Sandy Bell’s. In the foyer I bought the programme and eagerly opened it as we went up the stairs to the balcony. There, on page five, it said: “ It is not possible to print a list of songs Bob Dylan is to perform as he invariably makes up his programme shortly before the performance, sometimes during the course of it. This space has therefore been left to enable the programme holder to list the songs Bob Dylan sings.” The rest of the page was blank.

This was the first British tour since Dylan went electric. The first half was the acoustic set. Dylan came on with just his guitar and his harmonica around his neck. He started playing She Belongs To Me, but stopped because there was something wrong with the harmonica. Quick as a flash someone from the audience passed up a harmonica from the stalls. Dylan started She Belongs To Me again, then Fourth Time Around; Visions of Johanna; It’s All Over Now Baby Blue; Desolation Row; Just Like A Woman and Mr. Tambourine Man. He passed the borrowed harmonica back down to the stalls.

It was at the interval that things started to heat up. Everybody knew that the second half was going to be the electric one. There were already people saying that he was a traitor to real folk music. I thought, if that was the case, what were they doing there? Somebody said that they had been at the Glasgow concert the night before. When the audience had shouted:

“We want the real Dylan”

Dylan had replied “That Dylan got sick backstage. I’m here to take his place.”

The lights went down and then the stage lights came up on The Hawks (which The Band still called themselves at the time). Then Dylan walked on and launched straight into Tell Me Momma. The sound was unbelievable. It was so loud. The pro-electric and anti-electric factions competed to see who could out-shout the other. Dylan played on regardless. I Don’t Believe You; Baby Let Me Follow You Down; Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues; Leopardskin Pill Box Hat; One Too Many Mornings; Ballad Of A Thin Man, then Like A Rolling Stone. Because of the reports in NME we all knew by now that Like A Rolling Stone was always the final song.

People were already heading for the exits before the house lights came up. Neil and I were caught up in the surge, clattering down the fire escape stairs and out into Morrison Street. There was a gang of guys already chasing a limousine across the junction with Lothian Road. We joined the chase. It wasn’t a long run. Dylan was staying at the Caley Hotel at the bottom of the hill. The car turned into the back entrance and the gates shut.
We carried on to Princes Street and then along to The Milk Bar for old times sake. We hadn’t been there for months.

[rathbone]

I now come to a rather delicate juncture.

Up till now the people I have been referring to in this meander down memory lane haven’t minded, but around this point in the story I was paying more and more attention to the girl who made the scenery for the school drama productions. She’s been in touch to say: “ I hope you are not going to refer to us in that thing.”

Of course I am! I’ve reached the age where I don’t give a scooby. She, however, now considers herself a respectable, upstanding member of the Portobello community and has no desire to be accosted in Scotmid with cries of “I didnae ken you did illegal substances.” So, to spare her blushes and preserve her reputation I will now adopt the old eighteenth century convention of the initial and dash...... and hope I don’t give too much away.

L__ had long dark hair and wore black framed glasses which she thought made her look intellectual. She lived in a bungalow in Milton Crescent, just across the park from Bingham, where Donny used to stay. Her mum had divorced her Dad, but had recently married again. Her stepfather was Polish. L__ ‘s bedroom was up in the loft space, with a dormer window through which you could see the teaching block of the school. She had a little terrier dog called B__. I started walking her home after school. Then she started coming down to the Amusement arcade in the evenings. On Sundays she and I would take B__ long walks along the beach.

L__ considered herself to be the height of fashion. Mini skirts had now moved 4” above the knee. The big fashion statement was brightly coloured make-up. Mary Quant had introduced a range of coloured gels, tints and glosses. Quant’s dresses were what every girl was now aspiring to. To meet the demand Marks and Spencer began mass producing similar designs and were demonstrating that cheap didn’t necessarily mean nasty. Soon the other high street stores were doing the same. Now clothes were cheap enough to be bought, worn and then discarded in a few weeks time. Whereas two years before it had been the boys who had been fashion conscious, now it was the girls. Skinny was in, with this stick-like girl,Twiggy, appearing in every other fashion shoot.

My first serious date with L__ was to see the Troggs at McGoos, and then the following Friday it was back to McGoos for The Hipple People.

[rathbone]

At the weekends Saturday had settled down again to our regular pattern of L__ and I meeting Neil at Sandy Bell’s and then going on to McGoos. The big noise at Sandy Bell’s was that Robin Williamson and Licky McKechnie had come back from Morocco having run out of money. Robin had teamed up again with Mike Heron to reform the Incredible String Band. That was exciting news.

For weeks my mother’s excitement had also been rising and finally, on 2 December, she and I went off to Tiffany's in St. Stephen’s Street to see her musical hero Little Richard.

Tiffany’s was an old dance hall which, from the outside looked like a railway station. This was the second night of a whole weekend residency that Little Richard was playing at the club. The place was full of middle aged people like my mother. Mostly women, but a fair few aging rockers as well. It was actually a really good concert, a peculiar mixture of his old rock numbers like Tutti Frutti and the more gospel things he had been doing recently.

[rathbone]

Neil was supposed to meet up with L__ and me on Saturday night as usual. We waited around outside Sandy Bell’s for about an hour but he didn’t show up, so we set off down the High Street assuming that he would be at McGoos, but he wasn’t there either. No-one had seen him all night.

Sunday lunchtime I walked along the prom to Kings Road and then up to Craigentinny. Neil’s brother John opened the door.

“Is Neil in?”, I asked.

“You’d better come in”, he said, and held the door open.

Neil’s mum and dad were in the living room with a couple of people I didn’t know. Neil wasn’t there.

“You’d better sit down”, John said.

I sat on the arm of the couch.

“Neil’s dead”, he said.”He’s been in an accident.”

“When?” I asked.

It had been on the Friday night when Mum and I had been at the Little Richard concert. Neil and his cousin were coming back from Neil’s aunt’s in South Queensferry on his cousin’s motorbike. They had gone into the back of a car which had stopped on the Maybury roundabout. Neil and his cousin had both been killed instantly.

I couldn’t say anything. I just looked at them all. There were all sorts of things going round in my head, but nothing would come out.

“Aye, it’s a shock, son”, the woman sitting on the couch next to me said and instinctively put her hand on mine. “John”, she said, “go and put the kettle on.”

This turned out to be Neil’s aunt.

“My Alec was a careful laddie. It was just an accident.”

Neil’s mum didn’t say anything. She and Neil’s dad just sat there and stared at me. I stared back. I wasn’t really looking at them. I wasn’t looking at anything.

Eventually I sort of said “He was supposed to be meeting me and my girlfriend last night, so I thought I’d come along and see where he was.”

John came through with a mug of tea.

“Drink that,” Neil’s aunt said. “It’ll make you feel better.”

I took the tea, but just sat cradling the mug in my hands. I couldn’t quite grasp this.

“He was supposed to be meeting me”, I said again.

John crouched down beside me. “Drink yir tea”, he said. “Like Auntie Cath says, it’ll make ye feel better.”

I took a few sips of the tea and then stood up.

“I’m really sorry”, I said, “but I’ve got tae go.”

Auntie Cath took my hand again.

“You come back again tomorrow”, she said. “We should know what’s happening about the funeral then.”

I stood for a wee while not knowing what to do and then made for the door. John came out on to the landing with me.

“You alright?” he asked.

I nodded.

“You come back the morra, understand?”

I nodded again and went down the stairs. The walk along Fillyside Road to Seafield was like a dream. I found myself at the beach, sitting on the tarmac behind the bus garage crying. It took a while to realise that I was crying.

[rathbone]

I went back along to Craigentinny after school the following day. There was only John and Neil’s mum. We talked about Neil. She got out photographs and we looked at them. She asked if Neil had ever said what he wanted if he died. Somehow it didn’t seem like a strange question. I said no. The funeral was being arranged for that Friday. If it was left any later then it couldn’t be held until after Christmas.

On the Friday I took the time off school. L__ didn’t want to come because it would make her upset. I walked along the prom to Seafield and the crematorium. Chris was there, and quite a few of the crowd from McGoos. I hadn’t been expecting that. I sat with them. The service was quite short and after it Neil’s family went off in the cars and I never saw them again.

That night I went to work in the Tower Amusements as usual. People who knew what had happened came up to the booth and said how sorry they were, but it didn’t mean anything. I was numb.

A few weeks after Christmas I got a note in the post from Neil’s mum thanking me for being Neil’s friend and saying that his ashes had been scattered on the garden of remembrance at Seafield if I ever wanted to go and visit him. I never did. In fact it was a quarter of a century later before I ventured into Seafield Crematorium again. That was for my father’s funeral.

[rathbone]

After that there was just nothingness. The nothingness went on for some time. I would go to school,come home and go to my room. Go to the Amusement arcade, come home and go to my room. Go up to L__’s house, walk B__ and come home to my room. People just let me get on with it, some probably out of consideration, most because it didn’t occur to them to say or do anything about it.

I wasn’t depressed after Neil died. I didn’t come to the conclusion that life wasn’t worth living, or that there was no meaning in what I was doing. For a while I felt guilty that I hadn’t asked him to come to see Little Richard, as that would have meant that he wouldn’t have been on the back of Alec’s bike. I felt guilty that by paying so much attention to L__ I had somehow cut him out of my life. I was angry that I hadn’t had any opportunity to say goodbye. Above everything else I felt profoundly lonely. After working in the Amusement arcade I would go walking along the beach to Seafield, in the dark, on my own.

[rathbone]

I was in the art cupboard one Friday afternoon looking for a sheet of linoleum to make a print when Les came in and closed the door behind him.

“D’you want to talk about it?”, he asked.

I nodded.

“Come up to mine then. Sunday? We don’t need to talk if you don’t want to. I’ve got a new Miles Davis L.P.”

He went out again. I got the linoleum and went back into the classroom. We were working on designs for the next edition of the school magazine, The Tower. Les, Ian and I were in charge of the art work. Nothing else was said for the rest of the afternoon.

Les was the most talented painter in Ian McRobbie’s class and intended going on to Art College. His dad had recently died. When he hadn’t come home one night, Les had gone to his work looking for him and found him slumped behind the boiler. Les understood what I was going through.

I told L__ that I would not be coming up to her house on Sunday. Instead, in the early afternoon, I went downstairs, across the street to buy some hot rolls and a bottle of irn-bru from Rudge’s, and then back across the street to Les’ house. He was in on his own. His mother went out on Sunday afternoons to do things at the church.

“ Where’s that new Miles’ record then?” I asked, opening the irn-bru and buttering the rolls.

He handed over this orange cover. Miles Smiles by the Miles Davis Quintet. While I had been building up a hefty collection of pop and folk records, Les had been doing the same with jazz. Like Iain, he got quite a lot of his records mail order from America. Apart from Miles Davis, his collection included John Coltrane and Archie Shepp.

After the Miles Davis L.P. finished, he put on another record.

“What the hell is that?”, I said.

He handed over the sleeve to that one as well. This showed three men standing in a wood in the snow. The Ornette Coleman Trio At The Golden Circle Stockholm. Volume two.

“Different, eh?” Les smiled knowingly.

It certainly was different. We sat and listened in silence to the end of the first side and then I asked him to put it on again. Somehow the music took me off to a place where I felt comforted. To be more specific, it was that first track ‘Snowflakes and Sunshine’ which did it. Unlike the suggestion in the title, this was neither cool nor graceful music. It was brutal. Coleman had put aside his usual saxophone playing, and was attempting to play violin and trumpet, instruments he hadn’t played before. His technique on both was crude, but he managed to communicate something to me which seemed to fit. I played it over and over.

“Are you okay with this?” I asked. “If it’s getting on your nerves, just tell me to stop”.

“No, you’re alright”, Les replied. “If it helps.”

Then I told him that I felt as though I had lost my big brother and began to cry. He didn’t stop me or ever say anything about it afterwards.

For the next few weeks I went up to Les’ flat every Sunday to listen to his records. I didn’t feel that I needed to talk to him about Neil much. Les empathised and that was all I really needed. L__ was different. She didn’t want to talk about Neil because it upset her. She just wanted to shut the feelings out. That irritated me and I told her so.

[rathbone]

Towards the end of January I was crossing the courtyard from the Tower Block to the House Block when Chris came up beside me.

“John was wondering if ye’d like to come up tae his one night.”

I hadn’t really been planning to go to John’s. I didn’t really want to go anywhere, but I reluctantly agreed to go along to Cadiz Street after I finished at the Amusement arcade the following night.

It was dark and there was a cold wind off the sea as I walked along the beach and then up the embankment at Seafield. As soon as I got to the Whisky Bonds at Salamander Street, the high sides of the warehouses cut the wind off suddenly and it almost felt cosy. In Cadiz Street John, Kate, Chris and Jackie were all huddled up together on the couch watching the television with the sound down. The Who’s ‘A Quick One’ L.P. was on the record player. There was a strange smell.

“Good tae see ye”, John said. “Awright?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Getting there. You know.”

The problem was I don’t think that he did know. I don’t think that any of them knew. On the table in front of them was a copy of the Beach Boys Pet Sounds. I wished they’d put that on instead of the Who. I had been going to buy Neil the Who LP for his Christmas.

Instead John picked up the Pet Sounds cover and put it on his knee. He then took some cigarette papers off the table and stuck them together, and put some rolling tobacco on them. Chris then handed him a piece of silver paper and John flicked his lighter and held the silver paper over the flame. The strange smell got stronger. After a moment or two he switched off the lighter and took this brown stuff out of the silver paper and crumbled it on top of the tobacco. I must have been staring.

“Never seen a joint before?” Chris asked.

I shrugged.

“Simon’s selling it now.”

In the month since I had last been at McGoos cannabis had appeared on the scene. Up to now this was something that I had only read about in articles about jazz musicians and the beat scene in America. Chris explained that Simon and the other dealers were now selling it in the clubs. You could get small amounts of hash, that was cannabis resin, wrapped in silver foil or grass, the dried leaves, in sealed bags. John finished making the joint, lit it and passed it across to me. I took a quick drag on it and passed it back. John then passed it to Chris, who passed it to Kate, who passed it to Jackie, who passed it back to me. There was clearly a little ritual going on here. Eventually we had smoked the whole thing. Apart from being a little light-headed, I didn’t think that it had done much.

“I think I’ll stick to the pills”, I said.

The rest of them started laughing. John made another joint. Nobody talked about Neil.

On the walk back to Portobello I decided that I didn’t want to go back to John’s again. Nor did I want to go to McGoos. I was beginning to understand how L__ felt. Part of me associated these places with me ignoring Neil and that made me feel bad.

[rathbone]

L__ and I would spend Saturday nights either at her house or just hanging around Portobello, usually in Arcari’s ice-cream parlour. I accepted her position on Neil now and didn’t push it. Besides she was now gearing up for her Highers and didn’t need any additional pressure from me.
The exams came and went. The focus was now on applying for University. Les and I both applied to Edinburgh College of Art. It soon emerged in the common room that Derek had also applied to the Art College. He had kept that quiet.

With the pressure off, L__ suggested that we start going back to the clubs, but I still didn’t feel up to that. Instead we began going ice skating at Haymarket ice rink. L__ was a really good skater. I was rubbish. Most of our sessions involved her picking me up off the ice. When it wasn’t falling about on the ice it was supporting her at the succession of table tennis matches she had that spring. Eventually she won the senior girls title in the first ever Edinburgh Schools’ Table Tennis Championships.

[rathbone]

It was the Small Faces who tempted me back to McGoos. I regretted having missed them at the Regal. They were the archetypal Mod band and were at the point of changing from their early R&B style to happy psychedelia. My Mind’s Eye had just been released.

But it was with really mixed feelings that I walked down the High Street from the Tron. Once inside McGoos it all came flooding back. This is where I wanted to be. This was where I felt I belonged. Even when people started coming up to us and saying how sorry they had been when Neil died, the feeling of contentment didn’t disappear.

The place was packed. We forced our way down the stairs onto the dance floor. Dancing was going to be impossible. The atmosphere was the same as it had been for The Who. As soon as the band come on stage it was obvious it was going to be one of those occasions when the band and the audience become one unit. The treble was turned right up on the guitars, making them screech. Plonk Lane was slapping away at his bass. And it was true, Steve Marriott did sing with his finger in his ear, like Ewan MacColl. The set was a mixture of the old R&B numbers like Jump Back and Baby Please Don’t Go, and their hits like All Or Nothing. Marriott started encouraging the audience to join in.
“Come on”, he shouted and the whole house sang along to Sha La La La Lee and What You Gonna Do About It.
They were not playing to us, but playing with us.

[rathbone]

It brought me back to myself. The following bank holiday weekend, Iain and I got the overnight coach down to London. We had seen an advertisement in International Times for something called the "14-Hour Technicolour Dream" at Alexandra Palace. What made us decide to go was that the advert said The Mothers of Invention would be playing.
Neither of us had never been to London before and it was a real adventure. Having arrived at Victoria bus station, our first problem was to get to Alexandra Palace. We didn’t have a clue where that was. Both of us knew about the Tube, though obviously neither of us had ever been on it. We spent ages studying the map of the underground, but we couldn’t find Alexandra Palace anywhere. Eventually we went to the ticket booth at Victoria train station and asked. We had to get a tube train to Kings Cross and then get an overground train to Alexandra Palace.
We had all day before the gig so we walked from Victoria to Kings Cross using the little map in the back of Iain’s diary to guide us. The gig was supposed to start at eight o’clock. We got to Alexandra Palace at six. Neither of us had tickets, but we did have the £1 each that they cost. There was a big coloured guy on the door. He asked for our tickets. We said we didn’t have any, but we did have the money. We took our pound notes out of our pockets and flashed them. He waved us through.
Once inside it was like being in a different world. The hall was enormous and at the far end there was a big organ enclosed in scaffolding. People were climbing all over it. Someone on a loudspeaker kept telling them to come down. Huge screens which looked like they were made from sheets hung from the balconies on either side of the hall and a continuous film of moving coloured shapes was projected on to them. This was Mark Boyle’s ‘light show’. Strobe lights flashed on and off. There were people inside transparent inflatable bubbles. There was a fairground slide. There were four stages and when the gig got underway there was a band playing on each of them. The hall was so large you could wander from one stage to the next and the sound would change as you went. It was weird.
For a while we just wandered around. That’s what most people seemed to be doing. I had been expecting a lot of hippies, but most people were just like us, slightly faded mods. It didn’t take long before people were coming up and asking if we wanted to get ‘stoned’. It took a minute or two before we realised they meant get blocked. We bought some dexies and set in for the night, waiting for the Mothers of Invention. To fill in the time, on one stage was a group called the Social Deviants. A few years later I found myself living in the flat below their lead singer, Mick Farren. On another stage was Tomorrow, on another Alexis Korner, on the fourth the Graham Bond Organization. Suddenly this guy with his head on fire appeared. Arthur Brown was something else. Then there were the Pretty Things, Soft Machine, The Who, The Move. The Mothers of Invention never did turn up. It didn’t matter.
It was now about two o’clock in the morning when I spotted Yoko Ono and John Lennon. At the time I was more excited by her than by him. She was a real live Fluxus artist. Pink Floyd appeared right at the end of the show, just as the sun was beginning to rise at around five o'clock in the morning. Just like Merseybeat back in 1963, it felt like everything in the world had changed.

[rathbone]

After that L__ and I began going back to McGoos every weekend. Three’s a Crowd were still the main men, but, apart from them and the Hipple People, all of the other bands were beginning to disintegrate. Partly it was people growing up and doing other things, partly it was the whole music scene changing and bands finding it difficult to adapt. Even the Waldman brothers, who had set up Bungy’s, The Place and so many other Edinburgh outlets had moved back to London, opened a club called Middle Earth and set up a record label with the same name.

There was a completely new sound, new style, new drugs and new attitude. The music was rapidly changing to a psychedelic sound. That change had started the previous year with Revolver and Pet Sounds, but had accelerated rapidly after The Beatles released Strawberry Fields Forever in February. More and more people were starting to dress like Stuart Henry and Chris had been right; Simon and the other dealers were now selling cannabis as well as the pills. If you were really lucky and had the money you could also buy a sugar cube soaked with this new drug from America called LSD, wrapped up in greaseproof paper, which everybody described as ‘acid’.

Three’s a Crowd succumbed eventually. In 1968 they changed their name again, to Writing On The Wall and took up prog. rock. It turned out that they were very good at it. They played radio sessions for John Peel and recorded for the Waldmans’ record label. Their first LP was called ‘Power of the Picts’. They finally folded in 1973 when Smiggy Smith left to become the recording engineer for the Grateful Dead.

[rathbone]

Just like 1963, things on the scene moved at breakneck speed. The May edition of Oz had a spectacular gold cover with a design by someone called Hapshash and the Coloured Coat. Inside there were full page adverts for things called ‘head’ shops. There were articles on astrology and tarot, how to have a hippy wedding and living in sin. There was a cartoon strip by Martin Sharp called Norman Normal. Apparently the next Beatles’ LP was going to be called Sgt. Nasser’s Lonely Heartbreak Band. Cream’s new single was to be Tales Of Brave Ulysses.
You could tell that the Establishment were getting worried. Just like they had been when Mods first arrived, the papers were full of horror stories, this time about Hippies and people jumping off buildings because they were high on pot and LSD. Important people started being arrested on drugs charges. Mick Jagger and Keith Richard. Then John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Then Steve Marriott and Chrissie Shrimpton. Out on the streets literally hundreds of young people were being regularly picked up and charged with drugs offences daily. The ‘underground’ set up an organisation called Release to provide advice and arrange legal representation for them.

(By the way, thanks Megadom for the seventies blog, I'm enjoying it ..... )

[rathbone]

We were now in the last weeks of school life. I didn’t feel any regrets,I just wanted to get away and start at art college.

The last little ritual was the prize giving. We all sat there looking neat and shiny in our school uniforms for the last time, taking it all very seriously. Up on the platform the ceremonies were being overseen by Norrie Chalmers because Mr. Houston, the headmaster, was in hospital having an eye operation. The prizes were being handed out by the Lord Provost. Up I went for the English Literature Prize and gracefully accepted my volumes of Penguin Poets. Then it was the big one, the Dux prize. It transpired that both John and I had tied for the Dux, but the school tradition said that there could only be one winner. They had decided to give it to John. I was given a special award called Proxime Accessit. Partly because I wanted it and partly because I knew that it would be mildly embarrassing to the school, I had chosen Joyce’s Ulysses as my prize book. When I went up to collect it from the Lord Provost I discovered that it had been wrapped up so that no-one could see the cover. I enjoyed that.

Just like primary school, we all said goodbye to each other after the ceremony, then promptly met up again in Ben’s house for a party. After that we did genuinely split apart. Some people, like Raymond, I never saw again. Others, like Iain, I saw on and off over the summer and then, when he went to University, he faded out of my life. Chris was always there at the clubs and Les, Derek and I were all now off to Art College. I could hardly wait.

[rathbone]

I finally gave up working at the Amusement Arcade and Lipton’s and got a summer job working as an assistant paramedic on the ambulances.

I was teamed up with Charlie. Charlie was going through a bad time. He had developed erectile dysfunction.

“It’s jist like tryin’ tae push a marshmallow intae a piggy bank.” was his description.

So all through the three months I was working with him I got a running commentary on his visits to the doctor and the state of his penis. By the end of the summer I was considering changing from art college to urology.

When we weren’t discussing Charlie’s erections we were talking about boxing. It turned out that when he was younger Charlie used to go to Victoria AAC. When I was a lad my Uncle George used to take me to Victoria regularly. Charlie and I both had a fondness for the boxer Bill Sutherley and thought that Jimmy Davis was a great coach. Because the Corporation were redeveloping the Kirkgate and the Kinnaird Hall was being demolished, the club had been forced out and was now looking for somewhere else to set up a gym.

My real boxing enthusiasm now was for Ken Buchanan. Buchanan had been a pupil at Portobello High. In 1965 he had become the ABA featherweight champion and now he had turned professional. In January he had made his scottish debut, defeating John McMillan over ten rounds.

“Aye”, Charlie said, “The lad’s no bad. But he’s Sparta, no Victoria.”

Which was true.

[rathbone]

“Listen to this” I said to L__ one night in July, “and just look at the cover.”
I put the new Incredible String Band LP on the record player in her bedroom. The little folk band who had entertained us in Sandy Bell’s just a year ago had now produced what, for me, remains the best LP of 1967. That mixture of instruments they had debuted on their first LP was now a whole tapestry of weird and wonderful things. This was genuinely psychedelic folk. It went to the top of the charts. Paul McCartney said it was his favourite record of the year. And there, moodily avoiding our gaze on the back cover was Robin Williamson who I’d first seen mooching around Portobello all those years ago and now he had a No.1 album. It felt like someone really close was now at the centre of everything that mattered.

The front cover of 5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion had a huge impact on everyone we knew. Painted by someone who was just called The Fool, it was like nothing any of us had seen before on an LP sleeve. It was colourful, complicated, even spiritual. Bands started painting their drum kits and guitars to match. Some of them managed it quite well, some of them didn’t. The lead singers began to wear paisley patterned shirts.

As OZ put it:” The British Empire spent 200 years unloading beads on the natives around the world. In nine months we got them all back again.” The Paperback bookshop was still going. Its stock was slowly beginning to move towards what became known as new age - works on the age of Aquarius, ley lines, tarot cards and esoterica.

From my own personal experience love, peace and the hippy ideal was really only a pleasant fakery for most young people.

I didn’t have a paisley patterned shirt, but I did have a paisley pajama top.

“You’re not going to wear that”, my mother protested after I dyed it yellow with a packet of Dylon. “And you better not have damaged that soup pot.”

“It’s fine”, I replied. “And yeah, I am going to wear it on Sunday.”

“Well I think it looks stupid”, she responded.

In fact it had come out quite well. The dye had turned the red and blue paisley pattern to orange and green.

[rathbone]

On Sunday I put on one of my new blue t-shirts, the denims with the multi-coloured leather belt, blue socks and my old Adidas trainers with the white stripes. Over the top of the t-shirt I put on the dyed pajama top. I walked up Duddingston Park to Milton Road and could see that people were looking at me.

“Good”, I thought.

“That looks interesting”, L__’s mother said.

“That looks stupid you mean”, her stepfather commented.

We got the bus up to Princes Street, walked up the Bridges and down the High Street to McGoos. There were lots of kids like us heading down the Royal Mile in home made psychedelia. On the wall of the British Linen Bank on the corner of Niddry Street someone had scrawled ‘Clapton is God’ in chalk.

It was another night when the place was packed. Three’s A Crowd were already playing when we got there, so we stayed up in the balcony. Linnie Patterson was on especially good form, and so was Smiggy on guitar. You’d think they were the headliners tonight, instead of just the warm up band. Behind them were huge black speaker stacks stenciled with Cream in white.

After they had finished there was a break while Ginger Baker set up his drum kit. There was a momentary intake of breath. One of the bass drums was painted with what looked like a big cream whip, but the other was just like the cover of 5,000 Spirits. Then Eric Clapton was on the stage as well and his guitar was also painted like the Incredible String Band cover. Jack Bruce’s bass was a comparative disappointment, just being plain red.

Ginger was taking his time setting up and, without any warning, Clapton just stepped off the stage, took the hand of this girl with long blonde hair, and started coming up the stairs to the balcony. The girl was familiar. It was Charlotte Martin. She had been the girl sitting between Paul McCartney and John Lennon on the TV broadcast of All You Need Is Love the month before. People stepped back against the wall to let them pass. Everybody stopped talking. They made their way up and over to the coffee bar and Clapton casually asked for two coffees. People hurriedly got up from a table so they could sit down. It was like Jesus had walked into McGoos. And this Jesus had huge permed hair and was wearing a kaftan!

The performance was incredible, but it wasn’t like the Small Faces gig. This was new music of a type we hadn’t heard before. It was definitely a case of having to listen and learn, no singing along this time round.

[rathbone]

The next week we were back for the regular session. As usual we were up on the balcony when Paul and Chris came running up the stairs.

“It’s a’ kicking off down there.” Paul said.

“No”, Chris confirmed. “It really is kicking off. Best tae get oot,”

We could now hear the noise from down below. Girls were screaming. This wasn’t the usual spat between two guys with their mates joining in, but an all out battle.

“Come on”, Chris said.

Everybody on the balcony, including us, made a hasty exit out on to the High Street. Eventually the police turned up and the crowd pulled back over to the other side of the road. The police piled into the club. We stood about for a while but there was no obvious action, so everyone started to drift away. The four of us walked up past the cathedral to Victoria Street and spent the rest of the night in The Place.

McGoos closed after that. The official story was that a Fire Brigade spot check had deemed the club unsafe. Everybody knew that wasn’t true. Compared to The Place, McGoos was the safest place on earth. Eventually it began to emerge that the battle that night had been between Mr. Crolla’s security and ‘gangsters’ who were trying to take over ‘protection’. Crolla had decided that rather than get tangled up in the criminal underworld, he would return to his chip shops and ice-cream parlours. McGoos never re-opened.

[rathbone]

Three songs were everywhere that summer:

The radio played Procol Harum’s ‘Whiter Shade Of Pale’ to death.

The second was Keith West’s ‘Excerpt From A Teenage Opera’ :

“Grocer Jack, grocer Jack,
is it true what mummy says

You won't come back, oh no no.”

Unfortunately this rubbish was a favourite of my godmother, Auntie Iris and her mate Denise, who played it over and over.

Auntie Iris had emigrated to Rhodesia a decade before and this was her first visit home. She and Denise would argue with My cousin Kathryn and I about the way that coloured people were treated by the British in Africa. As far as they were concerned the Africans wouldn’t be able to survive without the British. Kathryn and I thought that was rubbish.

One day I realised that Denise was flirting with me. Then it became a little more than flirting. Then she was definitely trying to seduce me. She was quite an attractive woman in her thirties. I tried to tell her that despite appearances, I wasn’t a naive innocent. That only made her come on more. Eventually she overplayed her hand, other people noticed what was happening and she was asked to go and visit her relations in England.

The other song was Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’. At the Festival it always seemed to be playing before the performances. By the end of the Festival I knew the words off by heart.

[rathbone]

I finished my last shift with Charlie on the ambulances one Friday night and just made it to St. Andrews Square in time to catch the overnight coach to London. Iain was waiting anxiously outside the bus station. We were on our way to do what we hadn’t done the last time: see The Mothers of Invention.

This time we were a bit more organised. We had decided what we wanted to do during the day, which was go to the Tate Gallery. We had also looked up maps as to how to get there and then how to get to the Albert Hall. The Mothers were everything we had expected them to be. Firstly, they looked absurd. Then there was the music. Some of it we knew, because it had been on their new LP, ‘Absolutely Free’. Most of it was completely new. They had a real orchestra with them . They used the mighty and majestic Albert Hall pipe organ to play ‘Louie Louie’. It was irreverent and it was magnificent.

On the coach back we talked about what we thought we would be doing when we went to University and College. Just like with Donnie, we promised each other that we would keep in touch, which we did for a little while and then the gaps between meeting got longer and longer until we stopped seeing each other altogether.

[rathbone]

“You’ll be late”, my mother said.

“Plenty of time”, I replied, glancing at the clock and listening to the radio through the earpiece.

“You’ll have to get changed, though,” she insisted.

I tried to tell her that nobody at the Art College would be wearing a suit, but she wasn’t having it.

“You get changed”, she insisted. “You need to look smart on your first day.”

I got the bus up to Forrest Road and walked along past George Herriot’s to the Art College in Lauriston Place. Les and Derek were already standing outside the gates. I felt a bit prominent in my blue suit. Apart from anything else, it was now so out of date. Neither of them said anything, but I could sense that they were dying to. They were both wearing jeans.

We went into the big red sandstone college, not sure what we were supposed to be doing. Somebody said up the stairs. In front of us was a grand staircase with plaster casts on the landing. We joined the shuffle along a corridor to the room where we were to register. Fortunately there were a couple of other people in suits so I didn’t feel quite so conspicuous. At least my suit was blue, not the conventional grey stripe ones they were wearing.

There was one really long queue. In the queue it was obvious who were the new intake. All the others were chatting to each other and seemed to know what they were doing. Once we got through the door into the room it turned out to be a library. There was a desk at one end where people were taking your details. We continued to shuffle along at a snail’s pace. I scrutinised the people who weren’t talking to anyone else. These were the ones that I was probably going to spend the next few years of my life with.

When we got to the desk I discovered what was causing things to go so slowly. “Form”, the first man at the table said.

“What form?” I asked.

“This form”, he replied wearily, holding up a sheet of green paper.

“I didn’t know I had to fill in a form”, I said.

“Table as you came in downstairs.”

Like every other new entrant I had walked right past the table downstairs.

“Here,” he said, passing a blank paper across the desk to me. “Fill it in now.”

That needed a pen, so there was a bit of fussing about until I got a pen. The form was the usual name, address, academic achievement sort of thing, all information that they had had a dozen times before.

“Passport photographs?”

I handed over the photographs. They were handed to the next person on the table, who had a little machine. One of the photographs was put in it, he did something and a card emerged from the other end. He handed it to me together with an envelope containing my grant cheque and said:

“Welcome to Edinburgh College of Art.”

[rathbone]

We were ejected back out into the corridor with our matriculation cards in our hands and instructions to gather in the first year studios. Les was still in the queue. We filled him in on the process and then said that we would see him in the Kenilworth in Rose Street for a pint. Then we made our way back down stairs to find these studios. A janitor at the entrance to the college pointed us down a corridor beside a big internal courtyard. Then, at the end of that corridor another, smaller janitor pointed us to the stairs and said:

“Yir in the basement.”

After some dilly dallying we found ourself right at the very bottom of the stairs, facing a blank wall. There was a door to the left and one to the right. I opened the one to the left. It just led to another corridor with a blank wall at the end. Derek opened the one to the right and we found ourselves staring into a space with about ten other guys in it. We looked at each other and then stepped in.

The guys stood around in ones and twos. Only the odd couple were talking to each other. The rest just stared at us. Derek and I stared back and then started discussing the others in hushed tones. There was a tall guy who looked he might be the member of a street gang talking to a smaller guy who seemed to be clinging to him for protection. Then there was a spivy little chap in a natty shirt and jacket and a nice line in pencil thin mustaches. He seemed well suited to the guy he was talking to, who was also rather dapper and had a matching mustache.

The door opened and three girls came in. Then another and another. Not a bad batting average. Which reminded me that at some point I would have to go looking for Jackie. More guys came in and the batting average became less favourable. Eventually there were about forty of us crammed into the room.

We stood around eyeing each other up. Then the door opened and someone who looked as if he might have a bit of authority squeezed in.

“Can I have your attention please,” he said. “My name is Bob Smart. Unfortunately Alex MacGregor, who will be your tutor for this year is detained in America and consequently Mr. Sax Shaw will be taking you until Mr. MacGregor gets back. Can you please all come back here at two o’clock.”

He went out again. This was going to be interesting. I knew Sax Shaw. He was a friend of Hector and Mary MacIver. I had met him a couple of times before. He was one of Britain’s greatest tapestry weavers and he taught stained glass design at the college. All at once everybody started to file out of the door again.

[rathbone]

Derek and I went looking for Les. As we were going back up the stairs we met this guy in slacks and a blue blazer coming down. We were about to pass him, but his face was vaguely familiar from the matriculation queue. We hesitated, so he stopped.

“I say, you chaps”, he said, “Are you First Year?”

We nodded a yes, so he held out his hand.

“Jas. P. ”, he said with a nonchalant air.

It was our first direct contact with this new world.

“We’re going for a pint”, Derek said. “Do you want to come along?”

“That’s very civil of you”, Jas. P. replied. “I don’t mind if I do.”

We went out the college, down Lady Lawson Street to Kings Stables Road, across the gardens and up to Rose Street. Les was already there. Over a liquid lunch Jas. P. told us that he came from Trinity. His passion was boats and sailing. We filled him in on Portobello and the delights of Arcari’s.