Rock'n'roll

Tuesday, 3 April 2007

My life is not very rock’n’roll, and it never has been. I don’t drink or do much drugs, and I have a monogamous relation. I have been in a lot of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll situations, but somehow almost always as an outsider. While trying to think of one of my most rock’n’roll moments, I remembered a situation that perfectly describes my place in Life.
It was a birthday party of the girlfriend of a guy I was in a band with. He had promised her that we would play a few songs. The place turned out to be rat hole on the outside of town. And all the other people at the party were hard core punks, so I felt it was a very bad idea to play some rockabilly music there.
The evening was hilarious. When I entered the place a huge guy dressed in black leather came up to me and shook hands. “Want some of these?”, he asked, and opened a hand full of assorted pills. “What are that?” I asked in return. “I don’t know”, he said. “Well, thanks for the offer, but I don’t eat pills.” He shook his head and threw the whole collection in his mouth. He pulled a bottle of whiskey out of his pocket and used that to wash away the pills. Want some of this then?” He asked with a smile, holding the bottle up. “No thanks, I don’t drink either.” I felt totally misplaced, but to my surprise he ended the conversation with a remark that I cannot remember exactly, but it was something like ”Wow, man, I wish I had your life style.”
Everybody was beyond drunk by the time we played our songs, but the few people that were still able to stand up, even did some dancing. Considering the other times that our band played, this was actually one of the highlights. But I felt like an alien dumped on the wrong planet, and not at all like the person that I probably looked like if somebody had made a video of that party.
For today I choose one of my ultimate rock’n’roll records: Love me by The Phantom I first heard it on the LP Rockabilly psychosis (Big Beat), that I bought in 1984. The artwork is pretty poor, but it is a hell of a compilation. Love me is the opening track of side A and it has been my anthem of rockabilly ever since. On the back of the sleeve it reads that Jerry Lott (his real name) was a self confessed accidental bigamist, and he wrote the song in 10 minutes in 1958. Later the song showed up on several other compilations, and I even had an LP by The Phantom for a few days. It was an LP that he shared with another artist, whose name I cannot remember. I was so disappointed by the rest of the repertoire of my hero, that I got rid of the record immediately. For a while Love me had lost a bit of its magic, but slowly it regained its original impact.
Please don’t send me any information, pictures or music of The Phantom, unless it is more rock’n’roll than this.

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