It was summer 1966, July 14 to be precise, I was in a big 707 flying to New York City. I was so excited. The whole aircraft was full of British students that belonged to a club which chartered planes for cheap travel to North America.
I was sitting in the aisle seat reading a book when two other passengers started talking about art. The guy in the window seat was pompous and opinionated and pretty much running down any artists after Michelangelo. The guy in the middle seat, looked a little older than us 20-somethings and was more reserved and measured in his comments. I looked up from my book and said that I liked a lot of modern art, even if I didn't understand it on a technical basis. And then I shut up and the two of them went on.
A little later, the guy in the middle seat who name was Marc, quietly asked me what sort of modern Art did I like? I said that Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol were among my favourites. Quietly, Marc said to me, " Would you like to meet Andy?"
Would I?!
Do you know him I asked? Marc told me that he had just completed his Masters in Fine Arts at the University of York, and had been spending summers in New York City for a couple of years, and he had met Andy many times. He was pretty sure that he was going to see him again; he just didn’t know when exactly. As I was going to be in New York for a week or so, he gave me his phone number, where he would be staying in Manhattan, and told me to call him.
I did call Marc, and he told me which day and what time he would be going to Andy Warhol's studio and I should join him there. I was beyond excited!
The studio was the famous 'Factory' where Andy did much of his creative work. The 'Factory' was located on the Fifth Floor of a building at 231 East 47th Street in Manhattan. It was a wonderfully bright sunny Saturday afternoon and the place was buzzing with people, clearly quite a few of them were hanger-ons, just like me.
That was how I got to spend an afternoon with Andy Warhol while he was editing, with a lot of enthusiasm, a film that he was working on.
The man I met on the plane was Marc Lancaster, that I have since discovered became a famous art critic in New York.
It was an amazing summer to be in America.
I know that I belong to the 99% group of the population.
But in old age, looking back on my life, I realize I had a pretty unique and privileged life, all be it, a very definitely middle class one. Just not the typical middle-class expected from someone growing up and being educated in a London suburb.
One of the unusual aspects of my childhood was that when I was about 12 my parents got a daily newspaper delivered to the house just for me; by that, I mean a newspaper of my choice. In the 21st-century in North America it is difficult to appreciate how literate the British population is. All classes, working class to landed gentry, read daily papers and were well served by a huge choice.
My parents choice of newspaper was the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, I chose the Daily Mirror, for the very 12-year-old reason that I liked their comic pages. (It was usually considered as a paper for the working classes. It supported the Labour Party in its political outlook.) Although, to its credit, the Daily Mirror had a terrific political correspondent who wrote under the pen name Cassandra. ( Look it up! ) I came to appreciate his analysis more when I was older.
My dad would wake me up with a cuppa tea and a paper. Now if that isn’t the epitome of privilege I don’t know what is.
One of my most striking memories a good 61 years ago was of February 4 1959, when I woke up to the daily mirrors headline reporting on the death of Buddy holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper.
The day the music died. As Don Maclean sang in American Pie.
One of the joys of being a teenage music fan for me, was the excitement of visiting the Record Store on a Saturday morning to check out the new releases, which in those days in Britain, were issued on Fridays.
However, before that, the music in our home was usually bought by my Mother and were big, clumsy, breakable 78 RPM records.
I do remember buying my first 7-inch vinyl single and it was a particularly momentous choice; one which has gone on to become a rarity: Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel on HMV, not RCA.
History of singles, (thank you Wikipedia.)
By about 1910, the 10-inch 78-rpm shellac disc had become the most commonly-used format.
The advent of the new system was not unveiled suddenly one day at a "Press Conference".
There was plenty of information 'leaked' to the public about the new 45 rpm system through front-page articles in Billboard magazine on 4 December 1948 and again on 8 January 1949. RCA was trying to blunt the lead Columbia had established in releasing their 33 1⁄3 LP system back in June 1948.
The 7-inch 45 rpm record was released 31 March 1949 by RCA Victor as a smaller, more durable and higher-fidelity replacement for the 78 RPM shellac discs.
The first regular production 45 rpm record pressed was "PeeWee the Piccolo" RCA Victor 47-0146 pressed 7 December 1948 at the Sherman Avenue plant in Indianapolis.
So began an era where these 7-inch discs were the basis of so many great parties enjoyed by the young baby boomers, moving through their school and college days. Of course, that included me!
I may have been very young, but I have been endowed with a good memory. Certain events are like tattoos on the inside of my eyelids; I can close my eyes and see these events happening in front of me right now.
One of my strongest childhood memories is from 1951. We were living in Calcutta and my grandmother had gone to visit her daughter (my aunt), in Florida and she returned just before Christmas with a thrilling gift for me: it was a View-master. I’m sure many of you listeners know what a view-master is, with its exciting 3-D pictures.
One of the View-master reels my grandmother brought back for me that Christmas was the story of Rudolph the red nose reindeer. The song was written by Gene Autry and remains a staple of radio playlists for the Christmas season. There is also a television broadcast using stop-action models which tells the story with little (wooden?) figures. Every year when I see it, my View-Master reel comes flooding back into my memory-bank!
Bridget Riley is one of the British artists that came to prominence in the sixties with Pop Art & its influence spilling into the music world and our everyday environment.
She has an exhibition currently open to the public in late 2019. The quote below is from the Guardian's art critic. I think it is so eloquent:
A fourth colour appears in the next version: dull turquoise – and yet the day brightens. The painting has its own weather. This is a marvel considering all you’re looking at is an array of drab discs on white paint;
I love that sentence, The painting has its own weather.
I fell in love with her work from her early days. She is forever as much a part of my 1960’s experience as Andy Warhol was. My friends & I were eager to “grow up” & experience adult things... she was one of those things!
My early exposure to music was pretty unusual and radical for a six-year-old. It was the American forces network radio and BBC overseas programming !
So my childhood memories are songs such as Les Paul and Mary Ford's The World is Waiting for the Sunrise and Hank Williams' Hey, Good Looking and the giants of the immediate post-war music scene, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Andrew Sisters, Eddy Arnold, Glen Miller, you get the picture!
However the first album I acquired reflected a peculiar fascination for a preteen with the big band sounds of the 1930's. That first album was a recording of Benny Goodman and his band's radio performances of the late 30's. They were issued in the mid-1950's. If I am correct in my thinking, a neighbour had a copy and I heard them there. With my early Calcutta immersion into the sound anyway, these recordings struck a chord with me. (To coin a corny phrase.) I went on to acquire many other Benny Goodman albums and they are still with me down in the storage room of our Condo.
Like most of us when we are young, our frame of reference is obviously the environment around us and our family and you think that what you are experiencing is the norm.
However looking back over my life, especially as young Michael, I am very appreciative of how special were the experiences I had early on in my life.
I was going back into hospital in late 1959 when a family friend, who was an ex pat Brit from our days in Calcutta returned to England and he came to visit us in London. He showed me this newfangled device that he had. He bought it at the duty-free stop en route, which I no longer remember it was Aden or if he came back the long way from Calcutta heading east, and picked up the "toy" in Hong Kong. What it was, was an early transistor radio. It was the size of a current cell phone, had a plastic body and for protection it had a lovely real leather case.
He gave it to me so that I could listen to the radio when I was in the hospital. He knew how much our family loved music.
I remember well listening to that little transistor radio, which in England in those days we called the "tranny." Probably not politically correct these days as the term does not refer to portable radios anymore but refers to one’s gender identity.
However, I spent hours and hours listening to my little transistor radio; hunkered down under my bed coverings. I was in the children’s ward, so it was lights out at 9 pm and hello good morning at 5 am!
It was the height of the Trad Jazz fad in the UK so the BBC regularly had shows on Dixieland music which the trad jazz genre constantly referenced. Of course I listened to the 'BBC Light Program' for a miserable few hours of popular music back then. But I fell in love with Dream Lover by Bobby Darin much of Paul Anka’s many hit tunes, especially, I liked Lonely Boy which was prominently featured in late 1959 and so much Buddy Holly.
Even though it was only an AM frequency Radio (for which Halifax is poorly serviced) I still miss my little transistor radio.
