“Let me remind you lot what our mantra is here—what it is we do.” Then he would yank his shabby army surplus bag open and lift out several old vinyl albums. “This is the pinnacle. This is the White Cliffs of Dover we jump from. This is where we start. We are a pub rock band; we do not play fucking jazz.”
The albums were Booker T and the MG’s Greatest Hits, Jimmy Reed at Carnegie Hall, The Everly Brothers Greatest Hits (two albums), a white label collection of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates’ singles, The Best of Little Walter on Chess Records, and Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. Crow wanted to control where they were supposed to be heading with their music, not merely to exert influence. Somehow, after sitting for several hours in moody silence while Crow made the band members, and anyone else who was creatively involved, listen to each album or set in turn, the band would knuckle down. As soon as they began to play, one got the impression of a large old American car with a V8 engine always spitting nearly a quarter of a gallon of wasted gasoline from its exhaust pipes onto the asphalt before it finally got rolling ruthlessly toward you blowing out blue smoke.
On bass guitar was Steve Hanson. Hanson, as he liked to be called, was the exception to the pub rock rule in Walter and His Stand.
“We get it, Crow,” he would say. “No jazz.” He would rub the side of his nose slowly and deliberately, aping Walter’s quirk, both teasing him and getting a conspiratorial smile from him in return: Crow was too serious, that was their message to each other.
Hanson was tall and very heavily built and possibly even a little overweight. But he was regarded by everyone as a gentle giant. The truth is he could have been a fighter if he’d wished, but was too laid-back to bother. His gray-blond hair was long and slightly thin on top, often pulled back in a ponytail. He usually wore light-colored clothes, safari jackets, and sometimes even those Australian hats that seem too big and should come with corks hanging down, like Crocodile Dundee. In winter he always wore a raincoat that nearly touched the ground. He didn’t care if he looked unfashionable.
If he had not been on bass, more of his extraordinary musicianship might have been manifested. Indeed, it was a measure of his musicianship that he was both able and content to serve as bass player, and to do so without any ostentation whatsoever. He never played an unnecessary or superfluous note. And yet he was a gifted pianist and classical organist, and when Crow allowed, Hanson would move to the Hammond organ (always played straight, without the whirling Leslie speaker sound so loved by most rock keyboardists) and covered the simple bass patterns required for Walter’s music with his feet and the organ pedals.
“When you play a Hammond solo can you just play the fucking notes and not twiddle that underwater thingie,” Crow would command and grin menacingly, but Hanson understood. No whirling Leslie speaker.
“Keep your effing wig on.” Hanson held his own with Crow, never raising his voice. “I get it. We need to be more “Green Onions,” more early Booker T than Billy Preston. But fuck it, Crow, both those guys are geniuses.”
“But you’re not,” Crow would retort. “Keep your Grade Seven shit out of this band.”
Hanson often quietly took Walter aside and made him sit and listen to the experimental orchestral recordings of György Ligeti and the advanced and anarchic piano jazz of Bud Powell. The intention was never to try to broaden what they did in the band, nor to challenge it, merely to acknowledge that crazy music was out there, and that what they were doing was providing a kind of deeply rooted backbone, a link to the very guts of popular radio music most appropriate to listen to while driving down a long straight road.
On drums was Hanson’s wife, Patty. Patty was—like her husband—a musical dark horse. She too had studied at the Royal Academy, and could play viola, most of the instruments in the baroque viol family, and she could do OK on cello. She could play double bass too if the band ever wanted to take their music down a tone and evoke the early Nashville Hank Williams Trio sound that Crow occasionally permitted. Patty also had an extraordinary and versatile voice that was mostly wasted in the band. She could read music, of course, and could sing opera if she wished. She could also emulate and imitate almost any female singer under the sun. She did wonderful, funny impressions of Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, Nina Simone, and even singers with quite unique voices like Ella Fitzgerald. What made her so great as a pub rock drummer was that it sometimes seemed she could barely play. Despite her extraordinary body, statuesque and curvaceous, but also graceful and strong—a body that had already passed into legend among her fans—she didn’t appear to have the strength or coordination to be a powerful rock drummer, and so she played very little, but very well, and very tightly. This was precisely what made the sound of the band so distinctive. Because they were so tight they seemed louder than in fact they were.
It might be useful here to speak about Walter strictly with respect to his work and role in the band. As a musician Walter was disciplined and devoted. He felt supremely lucky to do what he did, and not to have to follow the career path laid out for him after college, slaving in some commercial garden-center-cum-blue-rinse-lady’s day out like Wisley, pruning roses all day. His songwriting was always impulsive, he rarely thought deeply about what he would put down on paper and usually left the music to Crow to polish off. Walter could play both the guitar and the piano pretty well, and did so on the demo recordings he made in his little home studio, but unlike Crow he was not averse to experimenting with effects boxes on his harmonicas to create new rhythms and complex and interesting sounds.
Walter’s wife Siobhan, like me, had great ambitions for him, but of a different nature. As Walter had told me that night when he suddenly turned up at my flat, she felt he could be a poet. In my view, had he not chosen Dingwalls as his primary performance venue, Walter might have made a half-decent poet. The fact is, few people know what a poet really is, or what a good poem should be, whether it should be spoken or sung, or rapped out in street slang. Walter had a fairly good way with words. It was his immense good fortune that Crow had absolutely no interest in taking any credit for helping Walter to complete his very basic home demo recordings. The fact that Crow helped Walter tighten up his songs but wanted no share in the writing royalties meant that neither of the other two members felt they could demand a share. Walter didn’t think about this very much; he made about three times as much money as the rest of the band members, but they sold plenty of CDs, the proceeds of which they all shared, and they all lived well enough.
It must be said that, although Crow felt sure neither he nor Walter would ever leave pub rock behind, Steve and Patty Hanson wanted to be famous and rich. This was not about amassing money. It was because they knew that sooner or later they would begin to feel trapped by the sheer simplicity of what they played in the band. Being rich would allow them to diversify, and maybe to do so in a medium less commercially safe than pub rock. They saw Big Walter and His Stand and their residency at Dingwalls as a stepping-stone. Walter and Crow were both aware of the Hansons’ ambitions, but it was also very clear that Crow for one had no conception of what they might have in mind. Crow had deliberately confined and limited his musical language in order to give it nozzle power. He might have understood that the Hansons might want to write symphonies, but he would have had great difficulty allowing the idea to stay in his mind long enough for him to start worrying about it as a reality. It would be like someone sitting down to enjoy a meal consisting of a perfect steak, salad, and fries longing instead for foie gras and mixed olives. It simply wasn’t conceivable; it was not in his vocabulary.