S IT UAT IO N situaton
A short story
by Bill Mensema
Rock Ink
je ff be ck
s i t uatio n
SITUATION a short story by Bill Mensema r o ck in k | 2013
Š 2013 All rights reserved Text: Bill Mensema (www.billmensema.com) Design: Ebel Kuipers (www.ebelkuipers.nl) Typefaces: Bery Tuscan and Quadraat by Fred Smeijers Photo’s Inside cover: sinistersaladmusikal.wordpress.com Page 6/7: www.flickr.com/photos/neontommy Page 10/11: www.flickr.com/photos/eljay Page 14/15: www.flickr.com/photos/markhillary
F From the wings I could see the people in the stadium. It was filled to the brim. Thousands of people in the huge arena of Indianapolis, one of the immense cities of America. Undoubtedly a myriad of cars would be parked around the building. Elongated, rectangular sedans, as they were yet – in the early 1970s – everywhere to be seen. There. In America. Then. In America.
He tapped me on the shoulder. The man himself. The skinny guitarist who once had played in the legendary Yardbirds. The guitarist who once had taken the place 5
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of Eric Clapton in that band for a while. Everyone expected the guitarist next to me – with his slick, black hair, his angular nose and his sunken eyelids – to become at least as legendary as Clapton and Jimmy Page, who also had been a member of the Yardbirds in those days. Me as well. I would put money on it without a thought. –– How is your voice? the guitarist asked. –– It’s well, I replied. –– Good.
He lit a new cigarette using the smoldering remains of another. –– We have to go on stage anytime now, he said. –– Yes, I nodded.
The guitarist looked awfully tense. Ashen-gray. His eyes flitting back and forth. I’d never seen him this way. The other guys joined us. Including Max, our keyboard player. I liked Max a lot. Firstly because of his name. ‘Max’. It’s truly a beautiful name. There is something endearing in that name. If parents have so much confidence in their newborn son to give him such a name, then that’s a great start of life. 6
c Max had a fitting face. It was round, with bulbing cheeks, a round nose, a coiled beard, black hair that he never washed. Funny eyelets with below them deep pockets, just like the guitarist. One approving glance of Max and my day – any day – would be okay. Then the vision narrowed.
Suddenly I was in the Starship Enterprise. We all were. All of a sudden the five of us were on the deck of the gigantic spaceship from the TV series Star Trek. However, before us lay not the black-colored Cosmos spinning out infinitely, but the stadium that was still filling up with people. Again I felt a shudder on my back. Could I do this? Would I be able to pull this off ? As a singer I played a supporting role in the band. That was fine by me. Everything in our band centered around the guitarist anyway, with all the wonderful sounds he was able to extract out of his instrument. But still, the singer is often the first eye-catcher on stage. I wasn’t sure I could be that. I wasn’t sure I could really be that person. All the self-confidence that I so painstakingly had scraped together the last couple of weeks disappeared. Like a soap bubble. 7
aR –– Don’t worry, Max said whilst putting his arm around my shoulder, all these people in the stadium primarily want to see Led Zeppelin. And for us as support act, they are mainly interested in Jeff.
The image grew flatter. And then it turned black and white. ***
40 years later I can still hear it back in the song ‘Situation’ by the Jeff Beck Group. Everything that so 8
aR hugely boosted my faith in Rock at that time. But the American arenas at the beginning of the 1970s are now a thing of the past. These days I live in a village that’s well outside the limits of the city. There was a time that I could not even imagine ever living out in the country, but after so many years one day I was just fed up with big city life and moved away. Still, in all this time – before, during and after – I would always play ‘Situation’. On my record player, on my c d player, on my m p3 player. For me this song is one of the cornerstones of my sense of Rock. There are many more songs that have determined my taste, such as ‘Sweet Jane’ by Lou Reed and ‘Rebel, 9
ED rebel’ by David Bowie. There was a lot of Bowie anyway. Black music came later. Soul. Funk. And, of course, the Pied Piper.
But the song ‘Situation’ was definitely one of the fundamental cornerstones.
I was twelve years old when I first heard it, on a threepart compilation album which was called ‘Welcome to the rock people’. I bought it together with my brother Jack in a record store in Delfzijl, that small port in the north of the Netherlands, where the Ems River flows into the North Sea. That little town where we grew up. Together we had just a bit more than 20 guilders to spend. Jack wanted to buy the Sergeant Pepper album by The Beatles, but I convinced him to purchase the compilation album with our common savings. –– Then we have three records instead of one, I said. –– But The Beatles album is amazing according to the guys at school, responded my ten year old brother. –– A whopping three, Jack! For the price of one. Three for the price of one! That was not entirely true. Normally an lp in the early 1970s would cost about 18 guilders. The three10
D piece compilation album was priced 22 guilders instead. I didn’t mind and my brother hardly protested. Or maybe he did, but I didn’t pay attention. Once at home, Jack would barely listen to it. Which didn’t matter to me, because now I could always play all three records in succession on my Aristona pickup in the attic. There were a lot of songs on the compilation album. It masterfully begins with the song ‘Go down gambling’ by the Canadian band Blood, Sweat & Tears. That song is also one of the building blocks of my personal Tower of Rock. But unlike ‘Situation’ I hardly play it anymore. Occasionally I hear it on the radio and when that happens I can still sing along perfectly to the tune. When I was a kid, that song also made such an enormous impact on me, that now it is interwoven with my genes, with my d n a , with my blood. With my soul. ***
–– I cannot do this, I said in the black and white view that gave us a glance of the full-to-bursting arena of Indianapolis. –– You surely can, Max said reassuringly, Jeff knows it, I know it, the other two as well. Don’t worry, 11
SH mate. Do what you must do. And the rest will roll by itself. ***
He was a solid guy, Max was. Never thought that 40 years down the line I would be even fatter than Max already was at that time. I reckon I’ve always had this tendency to expand, but it surely wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t pushed all that stuff into my mouth.
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H ‘Situation’ is a song that runs like a river. It never bores me. Not even after 40 years of listening to it. If only for the beginning. The first thing you hear is a solo guitar riff. Two bars empty, just the riff with only the hi-hat accompanying it. It sounds very thin. Thin like reggae guitars (which I had never heard before in the early 1970s). In the next two bars there is that riff again, but now with the whole band joining in, with a striking role for the round, heavy, pumping bass. It is the swelling force of water. Then it flows out, also in four bars. It isn’t very complicated. Nevertheless it is a wonderful song, in which 13
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Jeff Beck plays magic on his instrument, with all these beautiful, mostly brief guitar solos. Always within the beat, so the music continues to flow. There are jazzlike breaks by the drummer. Certainly there is some jazz when Max plays his piano and Hammond organ, especially in the latter part of the song, in which he joyfully searches for and ultimately finds the riff on which everything is built. There is also this watery notion in the vocals. Seldom have I sung so impassioned, so soulful as in this song ‘Situation’. The lyrics, like the music written by Jeff, tell of beauty and happiness. Later on, in the years that follow, music that centers around a heavy guitar will be accompanied by increasingly violent lyricism that just pops like the testosterone in the body of a young man. The words will get darker and darker. Even black. And so it probably should be. But in the early 1970s this was happily not yet the case. ***
–– This is beautiful, I sang that Sunday night in Indianapolis.
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T And that felt right. However, I realized that there was something wrong. In panic I looked at Max and I saw the same fear in his eyes. ***
In the song everything falls back to the riff, from which it is then build up again, in couplets and choruses, in solos of guitar or organ. When you hear ‘Situation’ the way we cut it on vinyl back in 1971, you’ll notice the underlying fun within the band. Because it sounds so organic. Because it’s so fluent. Because it flows. This is simply the result of long jam sessions that stretched on for hours. It is what happens when people have real and true contact with each other. That special feeling when every member of the band – in our case the five of us – play a song that suddenly jumps to life. When not the musician is creating the song but the song creates the musician. When you are in harmony with each other. When the song is in harmony. When everything is in harmony. Like water. ***
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L –– This is beautiful!
I meant it on the studio recording and I meant it on stage in that huge arena somewhere in the suburbs of Indianapolis, close to that geographical point where all US highways cross each other for just a moment. But whilst beating my tambourine on the side I clearly saw what was wrong. Max knew it all the time though. But not now. Instead he went deep into his game. Sometimes you just have to bite the apple, even if the taste is very sour. ***
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E Nowadays you can sometimes hear a song by Jeff Beck on the radio, but it is always ‘Hi-ho silver lining’, just another insignificant ditty from the sixties. Personally I think it is crap, but I always hum along since it’s Jeff. Jeff who still plays guitar. Jeff whose divine heavy guitar sound inspired Jimmy Page – his former band mate from The Yardbirds – to the hard rock that made Led Zeppelin so popular. But also Jeff who would already in the mid-1970s slowly disappear. The more he went into jazz rock, the less we would hear from him.
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s By that time I myself was already way out of the picture. ***
In the arena we were all really scared this evening. None of us knew how to transform the pleasure we normally had playing together to the stage. Maybe because outsiders – like the audience this evening on the field and in the stands of the stadium – were watching us too closely. Whatever it was, it affected our self-confidence. We dared no longer play in the fashion that we were accustomed to. Suddenly we were no longer that organic unit in the rehearsal room or in the studio, but rather mechanical robots. None of us really dared to stand out in the spotlight, to search for that tipping point and pull the rest of the band over. I could certainly not be that guy. It wasn’t my task within the Jeff Beck Group anyway. But Jeff himself could not muster it as well. In all that he played this night, in everything that usually sounded so wonderful from his guitar, he remained on the backside of the stage near his boxes. Most of the times he turned his back to the audience completely. Maybe this was the moment for me to take the spotlight, but I was just a black student from Boston, Massachusetts, who by a magical stroke of luck was selected to sing in this group, just an ordinary kid 18
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who by sheer chance had reached this humongous platform, this stage that was actually intended for real rock legends such as Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin who within an hour would appear, right here, on this stage. Those guys really knew how to play arenas, demanding the attention of thousands and thousands, so self aware and at the same time – under that enormous pressure – always managing to perform phenomenally. Perhaps the only one who could do it in our little unit, the only one of us who wasn’t a complete fool on stage, was Max. But Max sat safely behind his organ in the corner. He was scared shitless as well. No.
All in all, we were just five ordinary guys who were destined for the studio, but never – not really – for the stage. This was the situation in which we found ourselves this night and it was far from pretty. –– This is not beautiful at all.
The waves you can sometimes see flowing between performer and audience – as was so often the case
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with bona fide bands like Led Zeppelin – would never reach our shore. Color was already black and white. And black and white eventually became black. *** –– You were never a black student from Boston, my brother Jack says on the phone. –– Are you sure? I question him confused. –– You are just a John Cock from the northern part of the Netherlands. In addition, you have a terrible voice. You can’t sing at all.
Bill Mensema
Rock kor t ver ha alInk | ro ck i n k
Rock Ink
Ralph Molina
Rock Ink
A short story by Bill Mensema
Check out these Rock Ink publications also at www.issuu.com/rockink: – Bluebird – The death of Jeffrey Lee Pierce – Ralph Molina Rock Ink is a cooperation between novelist Bill Mensema (Haren Gn) and graphic designer Ebel Kuipers (Sappemeer). On a regular basis we publish e-booklets about random facets of Rock, composed, written and designed as we see fit. The e-booklets are free, but if you want to, you can order a printed version for a reasonable price. Our aim is free distribution of our work all around the world, especially Finland.
In this clever mix of reality and fiction Bill Mensema shows us how his earliest listening experiences dictate his present musical preferences and that being a brilliant musician does not equal being a great performer or band leader …
Rock Ink Bill Mensema (*1960, Delfzijl, The Netherlands) has been travelling to the u sa and Australia regularly since 1980. There he has layed the foundation for his subsequent authorship. Music has always played an important role in his life. In the 1980s he was the lead singer of the band Crimes of Nature, that performed all over Europe and released one album: Buddha (1987). So far Bill Mensema has published three novels in Dutch: – Doem Dada (Doom Dada – 2008), – Fietsen met Bob Dylan (Bicycling with Bob Dylan – 2009) and – Captain Liefie (Captain Sweety – 2011).