So we had the last laugh as far as ‘Here Come The Judge’ went. Unfortunately Dad had the laugh after that. The song’s place in the history of popular music has been reassessed, and it’s now sometimes described as the first rap record. Oh God. It’s official. Dad was ahead of his time, while I was barely keeping up with mine.
When for example a record like Dave and Ansell Collins’ ‘Double Barrel’ made an appearance on Top of the Pops, I was sincerely mystified, waiting for an actual song to appear, something properly equipped with verses and chorus. Lyrics too, please. It didn’t occur to me that a groove might be enough in itself, more than enough — but now I’ve redoubled the fogey factor just when I was trying to make it go away. I should just punch the Gieseking button on the juke-box one more time, and give my rocking chair a stately nudge.
The counterculture embraced sleaziness pretty much whole-heartedly, but there were things in it that helped me just the same. Tim was more adventurous than me, a little more than can be accounted for simply by the twenty-month age difference. He had been given tickets to a preview of Flesh while queuing with a girlfriend to see Klute. Flesh! Girlfriend! Klute! He was seizing the day, seizing both the day and the night.
He also kept various underground magazines in the little chest of drawers between our beds in the attic of the Gray’s Inn flat, through which I would guiltily rummage. In one of them there was a strip cartoon of two men in bed together. They weren’t getting up to anything, except amusing each other by reading aloud from Dr David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, published in 1969.
I knew about this book without having read it, making paranoiac use of my peripheral vision, flickering towards a headline and flinching away (still perhaps the perceptual mode of the closeted teenager, unless the Internet has made it obsolete) to absorb its dismal message from the attendant newspaper coverage. David Reuben was a doctor, and if he said that public sex was the supreme expression of attraction between men, and that quarrels between cohabiting men had a bitchiness beyond anything known in the normal world, who was I to doubt it?
I absolutely did not want to explore my sexuality, even before Dr Reuben told me that it was a territory of undifferentiated debasement.
The men in the cartoon, though, with their long hair and narrow chests, had a different reaction. When they had reached their favourite bit (‘homosexual encounters are always about the penis, never the person’), the biggest joke in the whole hilarious book, they laid it aside and moved into a tender embrace. That stayed with me as an image, bigotry refuted with a smooch.
I wonder if the echo of Dante’s Paolo and Francesca was intentional, with the morality reversed. Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante. That day we read no more … In Paolo and Francesca’s case a book inflamed adulterous desire, but for Mike and Ralph (to give them names) a single kiss was enough to quench the calumny of print.
I hadn’t actually read Dante, but was familiar with the passage by way of an eccentric source. Tim and I got a kick out of reading The Plain Truth, an eccentric religious magazine to which Dad subscribed. Possibly ‘subscribed’ is too active a verb, failing to convey his helpless struggles to escape the flypaper of a fantastically adhesive mailing list.
The Plain Truth once ran an article deploring sexual explicitness in literature, in which Canto V of the Inferno was cited as an example of good practice. No specifics of the adulterous act, something more along the lines of three tactful dots on the page or a cinematic fade, with no detail to pass on arousal by contagion. Hard to see, all the same, how this particular strategy, however admirable in its tact, could be rolled out across modern culture, displacing The Godfather and any number of other books from their places on the shelf.
There was particular pleasure, for disaffected sons leafing through their father’s copies of The Plain Truth, in reading the columns written by its founder’s son, Garner Ted Armstrong. What a toady to follow in the moralizing trudge of his father’s footsteps! Except that as time went by there was trouble in televangelist heaven, with Garner Ted described by his father as being ‘in the bonds of Satan’ and relieved of his role in the church. There were allegations of adultery, gambling, even assaulting the stewardess of his personal plane.
Dad didn’t have a radio station or a magazine to promote his views, but he didn’t go short of lionizing. The only accolade a judge is unlikely to receive in court is an actual ovation. Dad hungered for that, and luckily there were opportunities to put himself in applause’s way. He had been playing the guitar since his teens, and sometime in the 1930s had made a non-commercial recording, with a band, of a tune he had written himself (‘Fellow Take the Floor’). He sang as well as played. The 78-rpm record was still in his possession, though his tenor voice, surprising light in his young days before his vocal cords developed the authority necessary to command a court, hardly made its way through the surface noise and scratches.
Twice during the 1970s he put on a show in Gray’s Inn Hall after dinner, to an audience that included students as well as his fellow benchers. The programme was announced as ‘Master Mars-Jones Makes Music’, and Dad played a handful of pieces by Sor and Tárrega. He put in a certain amount of practice before the show. A certain amount, but perhaps not enough.
The drawback about having a career in a hierarchical profession (and actually living in its parochial stronghold), in terms of self-awareness, is that the hierarchical element, being constant, becomes invisible. It was never on the cards that he would be booed or slow-handclapped by the company of colleagues, but an acute ear for the timbre of applause might have detected something perfunctory and even resentful about it. Sheila to her sorrow, inconspicuous in the audience, saw and heard a student give a little shake of the head and murmur to a neighbour, ‘power mad’.
The concert was successful enough for Dad to repeat it the following year, but on this occasion the response was more perfunctory, the rapture very moderate. Dad was presenting himself, after all, not as a guitarist among others but as a guitar-playing judge. This was essentially a novelty act, and novelty dare not risk repeating itself. He would have needed to raise the stakes somehow, to swap his Spanish guitar for a more crowd-pleasing instrument, assaulting the crowd with shards of feedback or pouring lighter fuel, to cries of alarm, onto his beloved vintage Gibson, which though not electrified from birth had been fitted with a pick-up in its early adulthood.
On the bench, the unstuffiness of an amateur guitarist was a more dependable weapon. One of Dad’s proudest moments presented itself during a case involving some Hendrix tapes that had been remastered for posthumous release. I think the original bassist and drummer (who would be Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell) were suing for a share of royalties on the basis that they had been part of the recorded performance, co-creators who couldn’t be cut out of the financial side of things just because a later decision had been taken to get other musicians to redo their parts. At one point a barrister started to explain to him the function of a particular piece of kit, and Dad (mindful of the ubiquitous myth of the judge as being all at sea in the modern world) was able to interrupt him with a plausibly tetchy ‘I know perfectly well what a wah-wah pedal is!’ It was no bluff — he had bought one for Matthew the previous Christmas.
It wasn’t clear that Dad admired Hendrix’s playing. He didn’t have much time for gadgetry or electronics. Hendrix would certainly never depose Django Reinhardt, let alone Segovia, in his personal pantheon. He admired the way Django overcame the disadvantage (to put it mildly) of having two fingers paralysed as a result of a caravan fire when he was eighteen.