An Odd Boy - Volume Three

An Odd Boy - Volume Three

An Odd Boy - Volume Three

an odd boy

volume three

Doc Togden

2014

Aro Books

worldwide

, PO Box 111, 5 Court Close, Cardiff, Wales, CF14 1JR

© 2014 by Doc Togden

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First Edition 2014

ISBN: 978-1-898185-31-4 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-898185-33-8 (ePub)

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odd dedications

To my wife Caroline Togden; to my son Robert E Lee Togden and my daughter Ræchel Renate Tresise Togden; to my mother Renate, father Jesse, and brother Græham.

To the lads: Steve Bruce; Ron Larkin; Jack Hackman.

Also to John and Pauline Trevelyan; Rodney Stillwell Love; Clive and Betty Bruce; Ernest Preece; Michael and Sandra Blenkinsopp; John Morris; Dereck and Susan Crowe; and all my marvellous mentors.

To all my comrades-in-arms and guitars; to the heroines of Art who have flittered—like fairies or valkyries—through my life, to show me the shine on the passing moment.

odd acknowledgements

Everlasting thanks to my dear and wonderful wife Caroline for unending patience with an odd husband who lived in a parallel reality whilst writing an odd boy. She joined me on planet odd boy on many evenings – reading chapters, in order that I could hear the voice in which the book was speaking. I needed to make sure the voice was congruous with the texture of memory. She let me know when I’d given too much information about guitar technicalities and Blues history.

The accuracy of date references vis-à-vis music in an odd boy are all due to gZa’tsal – the incomparable cowgirl and heroine who researched them. She ironed out many anomalies with regard to where I was and when. This was not easy – because I had contradictory memories of where and when I might have been. That however, was her smallest contribution. The major work she undertook was an exceptional feat of architectural editing. She took a morass of riotously random information and turned it inside out. The original 170,000 word essay on the Arts—on which this book was based—was an idiosyncratic stream-of-consciousness informational harangue. It was peppered with hilarity, bizarre incidents, haphazard anecdotes, and whimsical personal accounts – and few would have had the patience to read it. gZa’tsal took this misbegotten mangrove of miscellanies and defined its narrative skeleton. She connected dem bones, dem dry bones and provided copious advice as to how the viscera could be appended.

The ‘Lady of Literary Creation’ prompted her ersatz Ezekiel as to where the various vital organs should be placed – and ensured that veins and arteries of dialogue connected them. Finally she made sure that the nervous system—my ideas about Art—developed in such a way as to enable the corpus literati to move as a living entity. The result is far more handsome than Frankenstein’s monster – and far more affable. A person could well be delighted to meet this unlikely assemblage on a dark night, or in a Blues Club in Montana…. Thanks also to Missin’ Dixie Dé-zér—the other incomparable cowgirl and heroine—who contributed vastly to the musical references – as well as teaching me some mighty fine bass riffs. She and gZa’tsal are now majorly involved in producing the Savage Cabbage album that never was.

Without gZa’tsal’s assistance an odd boy would have been a less frequented ward of Bedlam. She persistently questioned my extravagantly oblique references and interminable asides. She thus enabled me to breathe life into the vague personalities who populate my tale. She encouraged me to increase the dialogue and to deepen its resonance with those I remembered. My keyboard thus became a Ouija board – summoning up a gaggle of apparitions, all talking turkey. Streams of conversation re-emerged—out of nowhere—and for a while I lived partially within that other time.

Thanks to Big Mamma Métsal for her assiduous proofreading—many valuable suggestions—and for being an exemplary Blues vocal student. One day she’s likely to be second only to Bessie Smith. Thanks also to Nor’dzin and ’ö-Dzin for final proofing of the text and for pushing this extravaganza forward into the domain of published reality.

Thanks to Don Young of

National ResoPhonic

Guitars for friendship, enthusiasm, lively correspondence concerning subjects too wide to enumerate, wonderful instruments, and for building me the 12-string

ResoPhonic

guitars about which I previously only dreamt.

Thanks to Lindsay Berry née Goolding—my old school friend—who graciously provided suggestions, valuable insights into the historical odd boy, and information on events and dates pertaining to Netherfield School. She pressed me for further chapters and provided frequent encouragement. To Elaine Pierce for kindly availing me of thirty odd songs I’d written between 1966 and 1972. I’d not seen these songs since October 1972 – when I discarded my own copies.

Lastly—and by no means leastly—thanks to: Græham and Jill Smith for hospitality, humanity and hilarity in times of adversity; Melissa Troupe for accomplishing the almost impossible task of teaching me to canter; Linda Donegan for antiquarian Western-wear; Craig Donegan for profound Telecaster advice and many a jam session; Richard—Mad Dog—Simon for backing harp on many past and future vocals; Mad Og—the Trappist—Sinister Minister of Tympani, for percussion, and introducing me to the wonders of wah-wah bagpipes; Bronco Sally Yon supreme couturier and tailor-in-chief of my burgeoning personal wardrobe; Big Mamma Yeshé for unwithheld enthusiasm for my ‘Speaking with Ravens’ paintings; Small Mamma A’dze for her sheer vocal flair on many a night at the Blues Barn; Shoe-Shine Shardröl for tinkling the ivories; to Ralzhig and David Chapman for reading the entire text of an odd boy aloud on several occasions; to ‘Killer’ Carl Grundberg and Ngakma Zér-mé, and finally to Seng-gé Dorje ‘the Cholesterol Kid’ for guitar enthusiasm.

I’ve been a poet and text writer – so narrative and dialogue were previously not my forté. I’ve come to love the métier however – and can only wonder what I shall do once an odd boy has been put to bed. I can hardly write another such book – unless I tackle some other part of my life. My Life as a Camel Driver in the Gobi Desert? A Street Sweeper in Ely Tells All? Fear and Loathing in Littlehampton? Maybe not. Maybe I might venture into the Himalayas… who can tell.

immersed in prisms: an odd preface

They say ‘If you remember the ’60s – you weren’t there.’ So… maybe… I wasn’t there? Maybe, like many autobiographical exploits, this book cannot help being fictional: an imaginary menagerie of memories.

Volume Three of an odd boy doesn’t concern the ’60s as a chronological period. It begins in a small English country town in September 1970. In this quaint backwoods of the counter-culture however, the ’60s still flourished and continued to burgeon as far as ’72. No one had told us the ’60s were over. Well… they had – but we weren’t of a mind to listen to cynical lugubriants and purveyors of pessimism – Farnham Art School was a world apart and we were perched on the precipice of unlikely adventures.

This wasn’t ‘hippie’ as it’s conventionally understood. Illicit substances weren’t unknown – but neither were they mainstream amongst the students at Hatch Mill. The culture I knew was one in which people took joy in being widely read. It was an educated ethos. Discussions were rich and sophisticated – but without intellectual snobbery. Everyone was simply avid to learn anything about anything – especially if it was strange.

In 2005 I read Bob Dylan’s book ‘Chronicles: Volume One’. It was a time machine. Bob Dylan’s 1960s weren’t my 1960s – but the feeling of his portrayal was a mirror.

I’d been there – even though I only set foot in the East Village in 1989. Elmer Keith—that legendary master of the six gun—entitled his autobiography ‘Hell, I was there!’ That’s how it seemed.

This is a montage of images which portray what it was like to live in a time when the Arts pervaded popular culture – and where everyone within the coterie of chaos was a poet and philosopher. This narrative is a roman à thèse¹ because I have an idea to present. Everyone is an innate Artist. It’s a roman à clef² without an outrage to disguise. It’s a glossary of bohemian glamour which seeks to make marvel of everyday surrealism.

Volume Three of an odd boy is a tale of infatuation with Art, Artists, and the Art of Life. As my recollections multiplied—through writing in every spare moment—I found myself explaining other people who were both commendable and culpable. I was happy enough speaking of my family and my curious relationship with a severe father – but what of the others? What of those who may yet live? What do I say of those who were not easy to appreciate? What of those who appeared seriously or even ridiculously unpleasant? I dwelt on this question and concluded that I have no right to define others too critically. However, because everyone’s history is woven into the annals of others – I couldn’t avoid revealing aspects of those interconnected lives. To praise everyone would make tedious reading – and the narrative would be impoverished if I omitted those I didn’t enjoy as human beings.

There was only one way out of this dilemma. Personal names would have to be changed – apart from the Artists. Where highly censorious judgements were impossible to avoid, the venues and events had to be disguised – but in such a way as to remain true to the human colour and texture of the time.

Give thy thoughts no tongue. Nor any unproportioned thought his act. Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar. William Shakespeare—Hamlet—Act I—Scene iii—circa 1600

It was through Bob Dylan’s book that I realised it was possible to write autobiographically – without writing an autobiography. An odd boy is autobiographical in nature – but the theme is: the Arts as I’ve known them. I write of memories which relate to the Arts – but my notion of what constitutes the Arts may seem perplexingly broad. Life itself is Art. The ethos of time and place is Art – if you happen to be touched by it. I do not pretend to be representative of the ’60s—I’m not presenting carbon-dated fact—I simply describe the epoch that rings in my mind. Bob Dylan said ‘I accept chaos. I’m not sure whether it accepts me.’

Literally ‘novel with a thesis’ – a novel expounding a solution to a political, moral, or philosophical problem.↩︎

Literally ‘novel with a key’ – a biography or autobiography disguised as a novel, i.e. in which actual people or events appear under disguise.↩︎

part four – when you got a good friend

september 1970 – september 1972

Seems like everybody could play some kind of instrument – and there were so many fellers playing in the jukes ’round Clarksdale, I can’t remember them all. But the best we had, to my idea, was Son House. He used to have a neck of a bottle over his little finger. He’d touch the strings with that and make them sing. That’s where I got the idea from. Muddy Waters

If I had a million dollars, I just wouldn’t just completely sit back. I’d have to get out there and show my face to all these good people who like me. I have to get out there and show my face. The only thing that would set me back if I get sick—or something—or pass away. That’s all you can do about that, you know. But as long as I got my health going pretty good, I’ll show up around here. Muddy Waters

Muddy Waters—McKinley Morganfield (1913–1983)—the Father of Chicago Blues was one of the greatest Bluesmen of the 20th Century – and the major inspiration of the British Blues Boom of the 1960s.

1 – tell it like it is

september 1970 – october 1970

Ah, I had a dream, I had a dream one rainy night, / I went out and I found my baby—ah—she told me: Daddy everything’s gonna be all right. Elmore James—The Sun is Shining—1969

Hatch Mill was just outside Farnham, on the banks of the River Wey – a narrow shallow gravelly river that flows through the town. There were willows down by the river and a foot path leading along and over a bridge into the town. There were crawdads¹ in that river and small swarms of minnows. There were outbuildings around Hatch Mill – and a geodesic dome à la Buckminster Fuller² situated in the trees. By road, Hatch Mill lay two-thirds the way along the Farnham bypass in the direction of the railway station. It had the feel of being in the countryside because the bypass was quite new at that time – and it had been carved through fields and woodland. Across the bypass was a thick woodland grove – and there were trees all round Hatch Mill and on the other side of the River Wey; so, pretty much the Hobbiton of JRR Tolkien’s Shire – as exemplified by the Frodos and Bilbos who parked themselves in most of the pubs.

Hatch Mill was all white paint, wooden beams, and old furniture: an environment that would be prohibitively expensive to recreate.³ In 1962 it was a Civil Defence⁴ centre which my father attended. That accounted for my acquisition of his rather fine dark blue Civil Defence greatcoat. Fortunately my mother had not cut it short for him—my father was only 5 foot two in height—and so I was able to unpick what she’d turned up inside. Being that my father was almost as broad as he was tall – the coat was extra-large and so it draped nicely to the ankle.

In 1966 Hatch Mill became the Foundation Annexe of Farnham Art School – and in September 1970 I arrived. I loved the place then – and love its memory still. Hatch Mill was where the Farnham Art School ‘Foundation Year’ students were located, the main Art School being in West Street – in a lovely elegant Georgian building where we sometimes went for painting and life-drawing.

Art students moved from one pub to another trying to establish a venue to meet with friends. The problem was that publicans didn’t want their establishments to become known as extensions of the Art School. Every time we settled in, we’d be told to move on. They didn’t welcome long-haired colourful types. Codes of dress and coiffure were duly instituted.

It was a pub called The William Cobbett⁵ where we were finally able to rest and establish the Folk and Poetry Club.

That seemed poetically appropriate because William Cobbett was a ‘friend of freedom’ and an outspoken opponent of Moloch. His book ‘Rural Rides’ depicts the vanishing agricultural society of England. He saw the last days of British culture as it was before the Industrial Revolution reared its ugly head in the 1780s – although its full effects were not suffered ’til the late 1830s and 1840s. He saw the beginning of the decay of Jane Austen’s England and said what he could to give people a sense of what they might be losing. I realise that the Industrial Revolution eventually gave us the electric guitar and wah-wah pedal – but I believe I’d rather forgo those pleasures than live under the totalitarian regime of Moloch. In Jane Austen’s England people made their own music in their own homes and whether rich or poor there was a culture which made sense. To be a gentleman or gentlewoman was to think of the welfare of others and to improve one’s mind through education and culture. We still have the rich of course – but I wonder how many are cultured, or how many think of the welfare of others.

In The William Cobbett we were in the backroom upstairs away from the regular customers – and that was thought an acceptable distance. It was a bleak old room that nobody else wanted. They sometimes held wedding receptions there and filled it full of trestle tables, chairs, and drapes to hide the cracked plaster. Drinks could be obtained up there and we created our own atmosphere with poetry, music, and ebullience. We’d light candles – and almost any place looks admirable by candlelight.

The Folk and Poetry Club at The William Cobbett was a twice weekly affair that I attended twice weekly. I either played or recited poetry or both. Often I’d have the

Debil

over my lap when I read poetry as it provided a lap top table for the text.

Everything was hand written then and photocopiers were in some special domain that made them relatively inaccessible. If we wanted each other’s poetry we had to write it down. I’d sometimes type mine and make carbon copies – but it was an arduous process and the copies looked like hell.

Singing Blues at the Folk and Poetry Club was sometimes met with hostility from some of the hard-core elderly Folkies who showed up. They were of the uninformed type who held that ‘Blues is American Pop music’. I tried—occasionally—to point out that Blues went back to Africa and that people had been playing this music at the end of the 1800s – but they persevered in writing off my explanations with erudite platitudes. I didn’t know why these people came – when they didn’t like much of what they heard.

Hatch Mill is a three-storey red brick building with a lunette door at one end. The adjoining mill house dates from the 18th century.

Hatch Mill was built on the site of a 1231 fulling mill.⁶ Some of the Folk singers at the Folk and Poetry Club used to sing Scottish waulking songs – and I quite liked them. They were women’s songs – full of tra-la-lees, deedle-die—deely-die-does, and other more esoteric repetitive sounds that imitated the sounds of washing woollen cloth. After washing the cloth—to prevent shrinkage—it was stretched on frames called tenters and held onto those frames by tenterhooks. This is where the expression ‘being on tenterhooks’ comes from. I was always fascinated with word derivations and often explored words as part of the process of writing poetry.

I wrote a song called ‘Tenterhook Blues’ when I was at Hatch Mill, concerning a young lady who seemed unsure of whether she was moving in my direction or the direction of a fellow who had a suede-finish Mini Cooper S. The Mini Cooper S won out.

I’m on tenterhooks mamma – ’cause you got some fella’s mini on your brain, Y’know I got some’at better of my own – if you’d just ’llow me to explain. The Author—Tenterhook Blues—1971

Her father was a hypnotist who tried to help me with my stammer. I think that I’m immune to hypnotism. I’d lie there not feeling any different from any other time I’d ever sat in a comfortable chair with my eyes closed. He used the swinging watch number. I liked it in a curious way – but had no sense I’d gone anywhere different. When the Mini won, the hypnotherapy came to an end.

When I hear that big black whistle they blow, I feel inside that it’s time for me to be going / Fortunately baby I’d already gone before. Jack Bruce—Never Tell Your Mother She’s Out of Tune—Songs for a Tailor—1969

I decided to consider the stammer had improved as I left the final session and announced The Leith Police dismisseth us.⁷ An elderly lady at a bus smiled at me, so I continued with another vocal challenge Betty Botter bought a bit of butter…⁸ The elderly lady applauded and I informed her that I’d just been receiving professional help with my stammer. Good to see such perseverance she said. I thanked her—wished her well—mounted the pixie chariot and never returned to Tilford.

Hatch Mill in 1970 had a relaxed, lively, and fundamentally curious atmosphere. We arrived on the first day and apprehended each other as if we’d all come from some other planet. We’d all been oddballs from schools across the Home Counties⁹ – and there we were amongst our own kind at last. It was exciting and bemusedly exhilarating. We were introduced to the place. I stared at everything in rapt wonder. I thought I could have stayed there for the rest of my life – and in fact, that became my plan. I was going to become a Foundation Year Art School teacher – then I’d never have to deal with Moloch again.

The next glorious event on the horizon after two short weeks at the Art School, was a residential weekend. I’d attended a residential week in Betws-y-Coed, North Wales, whilst at Virginia Water – it was a geography field-research programme that had been part of my aborted studies of A Level Geography.

It had been fascinating – and certainly the most enjoyable part of the geography course. The effects of glaciation were highly intriguing to me – as were three lovely ladies from St Albans who kept me company. It was good to have their company without any possibility of romance. The three were friends and so I had female company to distract me from maundering thoughts about Lindie—the lost love of my 6th form school years—without actually being confronted by the fact that other ladies were out there waiting in the wings.

The residential weekend for Art School was held at the end of the first two weeks’ introduction in which we engaged with everything as micro-projects.

It was organised for the Foundation Year students as a way of getting us to cohere as a group – and was held at Moor Park, a short way south of Farnham. There are a mass of small country roads to the south of Farnham that lead to a variety of obscure clusters of houses – not even villages. You could get lost in that area in those days and end up in the village of the damned¹⁰ or something. The residential was held in the grand Moor Park Manor – an old house with fine grounds. There was an immense tree that required a steel crutch to maintain a massive lower branch and I was impressed by the kindness of that act. That people could think to assist a tree in that way made me feel some confidence about humanity.

The free times on the Moor Park weekend were excellent opportunities to take a walk with anyone with whom you’d fallen into conversation over breakfast, lunch, or dinner. I got talking to Marianne Stourbridge at breakfast on the Saturday morning. She was extremely interested in all kinds of things that I’d never thought about before – and so I plied her with questions. She knew a great deal about wildlife in Britain and could name almost everything she saw.

She knew what was growing in hedgerows and the names of every tree we passed on our walk. It was intriguing listening to her and I got the sense she’d really learnt how to be a native of England. It had nothing to do with society or culture – but with the place itself. She was there along with all these trees and bushes and every creature that made its home amongst them.

Just look! she exclaimed Omphalotus Olearius—Jack O’Lanterns—they’re quite rare in England. They glow in the dark you know… They’re poisonous. Probably wouldn’t kill you – but they cause horrible gastro-intestinal pain. They have a pleasant smell though – and that fools some people.

I gazed at the mushroom and it was an astonishing sight. It was a deep orange yellow colour I can see how you’d want to eat them I replied.

She wasn’t just scientifically obsessed with what she knew. She wrote poetry about what she saw and how she felt about what she saw. It wasn’t delicate idyllic poetry but severe and strange – as if she knew what went on in the minds of plants. Her poetry had a narrative line – but the tales they told were never linear. Things happened and connected but there was never any sense in which you could understand where the narrative had gone.

A vole leaves its hole and observes the dew on the grass. The observation of the colour of the grass takes up most of the piece and then the vole looks at the sky and catches sight of a shape it cannot understand. The shape turns out to be on owl who’d failed to roost at dawn. And there it ends. You don’t know whether the owl ate the vole or whether the vole escaped. The owl emerges in the last few words and there the poetry ceases. She numbered these pieces and so there’d be no indication even from the title as to what was going to occur. I loved the way she absolutely avoided linear meaning.

I showed her some of my poetry and she enjoyed it for being almost entirely different. We agreed that we could both learn a lot from how the other handled language. Marianne Stourbridge vanished after that weekend. I thought for a while that we were just in different areas of the Art School – but after a month I found out she’d left. No one knew why.

After the breakfast break Jean-Luc Godard’s film ‘Weekend’ was screened.¹¹ ‘Weekend’ was made in 1967 and portrays a bourgeois—fashionably jaded—French couple, Roland and Corinne. They take off for her parents’ house in the country to secure her inheritance – by murdering her father, if it proves necessary. They find themselves on a chaotically picaresque journey through countryside peopled by increasingly bizarre characters from history and literature. Corinne and Roland eventually arrive at her parents’ house several days late. Her father is dead. Her mother refuses to share the inheritance. They kill her in a matter-of-fact sort of way and drive off – only to be waylaid by a tribe of fanatical hippie cannibals. The End. I cannot remember whether I enjoyed the film or not. I would guess that I did not. I have never enjoyed films where I have no sympathy with any of the characters.

Gillian Reynolds who’d sat next to me during the film turned to me with a grin The Maoist cannibals were a gas. It’s good to see someone dealing with the disintegration of capitalism. I think there are comparisons one could make to Luis Buñuel’s view of the middle-classes as the enemy of humanity.

"Yes… I’ve